Daniel Arovas

@elongilad Will your book, "The Secret History of Judaism," have an English language edition?

1/7 Lag BaOmer is one of the strangest holidays in Judaism. Bonfires. No haircuts. A mountain pilgrimage. Bar Kokhba. A rabbi's death. None of these belong together. They don't.

@JDBunkis Whining is pathetic. You had a great team but they lost this time. Go find something more productive to do.

Biggest fluke in sports history. Congrats to the Americans. Never beat Sid when it counted and needed a 3-on-3 bounce

@josephluria @Saul_Sadka

@Saul_Sadka There are historical depictions of a straight-branched Menorah. For example, the Douro-Europos synagogue in Syria (ca. 3rd century) depicts a straight-branched Menorah. This predates Rambam by nearly a millennium.

For those who want to understand the mindset of ultra-Orthodox Jews in general, and Chabad—an amazing and open group—in particular, almost nothing could be more enlightening than the discussion sparked by this naked rage-bait post from the official Chabad account. An anthropological window has been cracked open here. The Menorah in the Temple had curved branches. We know this from a large number of carvings and depicitons—by Jews and Gentiles—spanning over five centuries. Medieval rabbis, however, who had never seen the Menorah and were separated from the Temple by a thousand years or more, had to reconstruct its appearance from texts alone. Some got it wrong—such as Maimonides, who assumed straight branches—and others, like Ibn Ezra, got it right. But since the top rabbi of Chabad preferred the first, incorrect view, Chabad will forevermore be devoted to purveying the wrong—and objectively extremely ugly—shape. They view their religion as something not just detached from mere reality, but above reality. And at the core of their religion is the veneration of rabbinic writings and lore. So the very obviously historically inaccurate Chabad-style Menorah—deriving from the views of rabbis who never saw the Menorah, in life or in art—becomes a perfect symbol of their theology. By waving their Menorah, they say to the world: “We follow the rabbinic tradition, nothing else.” They know the Menorah had curved branches, we know they know the Menorah had curved branches, and they know we know they know the Menorah had curved branches. The point of the exercise is creed: “My rabbi, right or wrong.” It is a public declaration that they will never be torn from their tradition. Logic and science will be bent to faith and tradition—never the other way around. That is the message they are putting out here. They are willing to be metaphorically whipped by nationalists over this as it proves the depth of their faith. People think that Jews and the Chabad movement are trying to control the world, but in fact, they are simply more interested in arguing about things like this.

@BeckettUnite There was a ceasefire on Oct 6, 2023.

Francesca Albanese tells the world there has not been a single day of ‘ceasefire’ in Gaza 🇵🇸: ‘There is no ceasefire for Palestinians 🇵🇸’ ‘Ceasefire’ is a word for people to remain indifferent to the suffering’ ‘We won’t let them remain in their comfort zone’ Free Palestine 🇵🇸

@RealCandaceO Everything Candace Owens says is laughable.

🚨 URGENT Two days ago I was contacted by a high-ranking employee of the French Government. After determining this person’s position and proximity to the French couple, I have deemed the information they gave me to be credible enough to share publicly in the event that something happens. In short, this person claims that the Macrons have executed upon and paid for my assassination. Yes, you read that correctly. More specifically, that the green light was given to a small team in National Gendamarie Intervention Group. I am told there is one Israeli that is on this assasination squad and the plans were formalized. Again, this person provided concrete proof that they are well placed within the French government apparatus. Further to this point, this person claims that Charlie Kirk’s assassin trained with the French legion 13th brigade with multi-state involvement. Journalist Xavier Poussard’s life is also at risk. This is deadly serious. The head of state of France apparently wants us both dead and has authorized professional units to carry this out. I ask that every person RETWEET and share this. I do not know who in the American government can be trusted, since this source claims our leaders are aware. But I have more specific information which is definitively verifiable, should they care to reach out to me. To the brave official in France who did this because they were so moved by the evil of Charlie’s public execution to risk their own life— May God bless you. Truly. Let all be revealed.

@ASE Congratulations Gal Gadot!

@academic_la @michaeldickson “Islamists not welcome.”

@michaeldickson Zionism is an ideology. The others are not. This is not complicated. You are not stupid. Stop pretending you are.

Now replace “Zionists” with “Blacks”, “Asians”, “Gays” or any other group, Chief Superintendent Joyce. Same judgement?

@KevinRobertsTX Resign

Leadership requires owning the moments where we fall short, then using them to reset, refocus, and recommit. Here is what we are focused on moving forward. Join us. Let’s go win!

@Heritage Resign

Onward and upward. 🇺🇸

@Heritage @KevinRobertsTX Roberts speaks out of both sides of his mouth. He should resign.

Remarks from @KevinRobertsTX at a Monday night speech at Hillsdale College on antisemitism and cancel culture.

@AdlerYonatan Thank you Professor Adler!

Free to download for two weeks only! Starting today, you can download for free my new book: Between Yahwism and Judaism: Judean Cult and Culture during the Early Hellenistic Period (332–175 BCE) Download it now, and read it later. And of course, please share and spread the word. cambridge.org/core/elements/…

@WOLPalestine nypost.com/2025/10/28/us-…

📣🇵🇸TAKE ACTION: SIGN Tarek’s mitigation letter before his sentencing TOMORROW and share WIDELY with everyone you know. Let’s get one more push to uplift the call for time served & show his judge the outpouring of community behind him! tinyurl.com/freetarekbazro…

@chier578563 @dlouapre @terrence_tao This person is an idiot.

@dlouapre @terrence_tao @terrence_tao and Scott Aaronson are in a crusade to convince the world that their mediocrity is the only way to do math. Nobody will remember them 100 years from now. Absolutely nobody.

LLMs are becoming creative partners in scientific discovery. We've seen Scott Aaronson, @terrence_tao , and many more using them to unlock pathways to proofs : not just for IMO-style competition problems, but for actual research questions ! While LLMs can't yet solve conjectures autonomously, they're proving to be valuable co-authors in mathematics and science. Interesting take on this in Nature...Physics (because apparently there's no Nature Mathematics yet!).

@vueling antisemitism jpost.com/diaspora/artic…

@PeterDClack This is dumb. CO2 is IR-active unlike O2, N2, and Ar. H2O falls out of the atmosphere as rain.

Why CO₂ does not control earth's climate. CO₂ is 0.042% (1 molecule in 2,500 or 420 parts per million); argon 0.93% (9,340 ppm), water vapour 0.4% (40,000 ppm), oxygen 21% (209,460 ppm), & nitrogen 78% (780,840 ppm). This is the concentration of each gas by volume in dry air.

@Osint613 youtube.com/watch?v=j4SRsG…

MUST WATCH 🔴 Houthis: “Palestine is a part of Yemen, and your aggression increases our determination to support Gaza.”

@atensnut Fake news

HOLY MOLY!!! That’s frightening. I’m not vaxxed but have family and friends who are.

@havivrettiggur Here’s what a normal civilian baseline should roughly look like:

The full list of Gazans killed in the war has been released in Gaza. Possibly. At the very least, as Israeli analysts are now finding, there aren't duplicate ID numbers or other tells one finds in obviously manipulated data sets. But here's another reason to trust the data: It shows just how much Israel's warfighting tried to separate combatant from civilian. It seems unlikely that a faked Gazan data set would show such a result. The graph in the first tweet of this thread shows male to female deaths. If female deaths are assumed to be a civilian baseline (the age distribution is roughly the general Gazan population's age distribution), then the enormous spike of the blue line, right in the area of the graph that represents fighting-age men, is the best likely measure of combatant deaths. According to this analyst, the gap comes to over 16,000 dead, or almost exactly a third of total deaths. That's a Gazan data set, not an Israeli one. And it's the most complete one so far, the only one that claims to give all the names of all the dead, the one most likely to be an honest recording of the actual dead. And according to this data set, the death toll in Gaza is two civilians to each combatant, well in line with the highest standards of modern democratic armies. To be clear - this caveat is obvious, but it's important enough to say it explicitly nonetheless - the debate isn't over whether children died in Gaza or crimes were committed. The answer to both is yes. There were definitely and unquestionably war crimes committed in Gaza, air strikes that should not have been carried out. And there are thousands of dead children in this data set. The debate is over the extent, whether these are at a level consistent with the inevitable costs of even the most legitimate kind of war, which will always be horrible, or whether the best data we have shows wanton Israeli killing and disregard for moral rules and international laws. Israel's haters will tweet pictures of dead children in response. If they did that for every war, I'd take them seriously and sympathetically. But the vast majority of them don't. They don't care about dead children, only about destroying Israel. And so they can't actually tell us anything about whether our army, broadly speaking, has fought morally. But this data set can. All war is evil, all war is hell, all war is a kind of civilizational failure. But war is sometimes nevertheless legitimate and inevitable. International humanitarian law came about not to end war, because ending war is impossible, but to mitigate its evils. If this data set is correct - again, a data set released from Gaza and not at all intended to validate any Israeli argument about its battlefield standards - then the costs imposed on Gaza by Israeli warfighting methods are consistent with what is generally considered in the West to be moral and legitimate. It is a comparable ratio to the 2016 Battle of Mosul in which Iraq, the Kurds and America drove ISIS out of the city. War is bad. I respect people who vehemently oppose this one, who question the Israeli political leadership's decisions, who use the war to debate the larger question of Palestinian independence and statehood. These are all legitimate responses to the suffering of Gazans. As is the argument I personally agree with that this war was the only path available to us to rid ourselves and Gaza of the neverending and endlessly destructive scourge of Hamas. But it nevertheless matters - indeed, it may be the most important thing over the long term - that this war's civilian casualties were not worse than other comparable wars, and that even Gazan data sets show that to be the case.