shmadsy

FYI: “Nakba” is the Arabic word for “Six armies declared and attempted to wage a genocidal WAR on the newly formed State of Israel literally 5 minutes after she was born and are still pissed that they lost that war to a bunch of scrappy refugees and farmers.”

The New York Times really looked at “Israel trains dogs to r*pe prisoners” and said yes, this sounds like rigorous journalism and not a medieval blood libel with a Canva rebrand. The alarming part is that enough educated people there read it and thought: publish immediately.

I know this hatred isn’t new. But there is still something deeply human about grieving the moment you realize someone’s warmth toward you was conditional the entire time. Conditional on you not being a Jew.

Truthfully, I understand using your money to reflect your values. But he did not learn my politics. He did not learn my beliefs. He learned nothing about my character. He only learned I am Jewish. And somehow, that was enough to pull his fiancée away from something she loved.

Something happened at work last week that unsettled me more deeply than I expected. What surprised me even more was how long the hurt has lasted. I like to think I’m strong. That I don’t care what hateful people think. But maybe strength and hurt are not opposites after all.

Nothing says “humanitarian mission” quite like livestreaming your moral superiority from a boat full of people who would never survive one day under the regime they romanticize. The flotilla is performance art for people addicted to hating Jews.

Yesterday, a newly formed independent Druze political party officially launched in Israel. They’ll campaign freely, run in democratic elections, and potentially win seats in parliament. Damn. Apartheid really isn’t what it used to be.

Two Jews were stabbed outside a synagogue in London today. This didn’t start with a knife. It started with a narrative. Teach the world that Jews are uniquely evil, repeat it until it feels true, and someone will decide violence is justified. This is how permission is built.

I cannot stress this enough: Jews are an ethnoreligious tribe. You can practice nothing. Believe nothing. You are still a Jew. Antisemitism is not a policy disagreement. No one checks your views before targeting you. This isn’t politics. It’s hatred of a people.

You can always tell it’s antisemitism by how hard everyone works to rename it as anything but. At this point it’s not even hypocrisy. It’s just their favorite hobby.

Tell me why I can’t even watch a Reel about flower arrangements from Trader Joe’s without seeing the comment section devolve into a rant about Israel. Not everything is about us, but somehow, for you, it always is. That’s not awareness. That’s fixation.

I’m not here to explain it for you. But I will ask the obvious question: If identity can be sustained there, what exactly is stopping us here?

So now you’re left holding two truths at once: They have less freedom. And yet, in some ways, more visible, more structured Jewish life.

I learned something mildly destabilizing at one of the Passover seders we attended in Istanbul: There are more kosher eateries in Tehran than there are in Dallas, Texas.