I always knew growing up half-Jewish meant hiding. I figured out early on that it wasn’t something you were supposed to be. My mother isn’t Jewish and, if anything, has never been a fan of Jews — especially now. It’s just the kind of thing you know growing up, even if you don’t talk much about it.
Hollywood rarely presented Jewish people to American audiences, even if Hollywood was run by Jews. That left me wondering why not. Did I look Jewish? Was that bad? As a young woman, I knew it meant I didn’t fit either place. I didn’t fit in the Jewish community, and I didn’t fit outside of it.
But somehow I just knew the shame that came with being born half-Jewish, or Jewish enough for the camps. A boyfriend once said, “They have to have done something…” Meaning: why were they so hated and persecuted? I can’t say I ever knew the answer, because I never knew the history.
I didn’t think about it much because my heroes, many of whom were Jewish, also didn’t talk much about it — Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Leonard Cohen, or the Coen brothers. Steven Spielberg would finally address it in Schindler’s List, and that movie would help keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. But that was 1993. A lifetime ago.
How is it that it could be 2026 and we’d be living through a moment in history where they have turned “Zionist” into a slur? Was it always? And how easy it is now to see the word “Jew” hurled on social media as an insult so casually.
How could it be that Tucker Carlson, like so many others, could be so soft on Hitler now? He assumed, wrongly, that it was not Hitler’s fault we went to war.
With Jacob Reese-Mogg:
Here is Victor Davis Hanson:
It was so ignorant and dangerous of Tucker to spread these lies about Hitler that even Poland’s embassy in Washington had to issue a statement.
And every time I post about this, I know I will lose subscribers, especially paid ones, because Tucker Carlson has about 5.8 million subscribers on YouTube, not quite 6 million but getting there. And me, well, let’s just say I don’t have that many.
Undeniable tension is building within the MAGA movement as we head into the midterms. There are so many angry people on the Right, resentful that we bombed Iran “for Israel.” Foreign wars quickly became Israel’s war. Then it became about the money sent to Israel. But now, it’s anger at Trump for siding with the Jews.
I tried to stay neutral on the war in Gaza and have not talked much about what is happening on the Left and the Right. But it is getting too big to ignore. We are at a dramatic inflection point where the word “genocide” is hurled as both a weapon and a struggle session. SAY THE WORD, say it! Say it’s genocide!
It’s the last worst word. The rest of the words have been tossed on the scrap heap: fascism, Nazi, dictator, racist, rapist, bigot, sexist, homophobe, transphobe. What do words even mean anymore? They’ve been twisted, co-opted, and reshaped to control how we think about ourselves in the world and how we define what we believe.
If you say “it’s a genocide,” then you are in. If you deny it, you’re one of the bad people. They say it on the Left as emotional blackmail. They say it on the Right to imply intent. Those evil Jews just want to kill Palestinians when everyone knows the opposite is true.
Genocide
Every day, images flood social media of what Gaza looks like now after it was bombed by Israel. That’s proof of genocide, they said. How can it not be genocide? But the word they are looking for is war. That is what losing a war looks like. It is also what winning a war looks like.
World War II was beyond anything most people alive today could ever imagine. They can’t remember, and no one will tell them what war looks like. But here is what it looks like.
The Allies bombing Berlin into rubble.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki after getting nuked:
Is that “genocide”? No, that’s war. Genocide is the attempt to kill a whole people based on their ethnicity or their religion. That’s not what the Allies did in World War II, and it’s not what Israel has done now.
If anything, the opposite is true. Hamas, like much of the Islamic world, wants not just to kill Jews but to wipe them off the map. That’s genocide. They just don’t have the wealth or the weaponry to carry it out.
Here is Bill Maher:
Trump hit Iran to castrate a genocidal regime before it could nuke Israel, yes, but also other countries too. Death is nothing to jihadists. They have no problem using children as tools of propaganda and weapons of war as long as it serves a higher purpose.
October 7th was meant to be so bad that Israel had to respond, and then they would have their holy war to turn hearts and minds against Israel all over the world.
The footage from the war is their proof to the world that Jews are the bad ones, the Nazis, and Israel therefore must be destroyed. From the River to the Sea…
Antisemitism is nothing compared to genocide
For a time, it was bad to be antisemitic. Now, it feels like yet another word that has no power. Anyone who is charged with antisemitism can deflect it much more easily than being called a rapist or a racist. It’s a way out for Jews who do not wish to be hated or shunned for being Jewish but not a Zionist, or Jewish but not approving of what Israel has done, Jewish but not really.
But the problem is that Israel is the only place left where Jews could reclaim their homeland. As Jeremy Boreing said so eloquently, they have nowhere else to go. The war against them has lasted thousands of years. It won’t stop any time soon.
I can see the fight now, too. It’s not Left or Right. It’s not blue or red. It’s a fight for Western civilization. Israel represents not just democracy but civilization in an uncivilized part of the world.
Forcing women to cover their faces and bodies, marrying 9-year-olds, throwing gay people off rooftops, and stoning women to death is not civilized, and no amount of woke ideology will change that.
It is not civilized to fly airplanes into buildings and mass murder thousands of Americans. It’s not civilized to wear a suicide vest and blow up a building. It’s not civilized to paraglide into the Nova music festival and rape, torture, and murder Israelis for Allah.
We are fighting a war here, too. It’s a war for the truth. We’ll have politicians winning elections now who will push the lies, some in office already do. And they will try to distort and co-opt October 7th.
The woke white liberals desperately want this to be a story about white supremacy and oppressed brown people, but at some point, there is no saving the entire world. There is saving civilization.
This Claude AI video beautifully illustrating Western civilization went viral last week, and nothing has put things into perspective better than this.
So here are some hard truths:
War isn’t exactly civilized either. It’s the worst thing human beings can do to each other, but we’ve been doing it almost as long as we’ve been around. But if someone starts a war, they’d best be prepared to fight to the death. One side or the other will win. And one side will lose.
Hitler would not have stopped. He had to be stopped. Hamas will not stop, and they have to be stopped. Gaza looks that way not because of genocide, but because of war. Hamas can surrender any time. That would not be true if this were a genocide.
If Israel walks away from finishing the job, they will lose the war, and Hamas will win. They are fighting for the civilized world they built. So are we. We will lose our country if we do not understand that.
I would fight for Israel’s right to keep its home even if I weren’t half-Jewish. It isn’t my home. But it is theirs.
My father was Jewish and went to Hebrew school. I wasn’t raised with any faith at all, except for the times I spent at my grandmother’s house, where she would celebrate the traditional holidays, both Christmas and Chanukah. She died a long time ago.
I think of her now, what she would think of me, what she would want me to fight for, what she would want me to stand for. She kept her portrait of Bill Clinton taped to her kitchen wall until the day she died. She was a lifelong FDR Democrat. How proud she must have been to have a president who knew what a monster Hitler was and moved mountains to stop him.
I can’t imagine what she’d think of today’s Democratic Party, who have no courage left to fight for people like her and have lost their perspective because none of them know the meaning of words. They are afraid of their own voters and they have no spine. So they allow Abdul El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani, and Hasan Piker to take over the party and tell them what to think and say.
I could probably do much better, make more money, be more popular on the Left and the Right if I just said two words: “Free Palestine.” But I can’t do that. My grandma would expect more from me. A little bit of courage 80 years after a real genocide that killed off much of her family is not too much to ask.
