Forgiven Isn’t Fixed

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At the center of Achrei Mot, on Yom Kippur, two goats stand side by side. Both identical and indistinguishable. Then, a lottery is cast.

If all you wanted was forgiveness for sins, one goat would be enough. Yet the Torah insists on two.

Forgiveness is easy. Change is not.

We like to believe wrongdoing is a series of isolated acts. You did something wrong, you regret it, you fix it, you move on. Clean, contained, manageable. It is how legal systems work and how people prefer to understand themselves.

It is also incomplete.

Most failure is not a moment. It is a pattern. It accumulates, settles in, becomes familiar, then invisible.

The altar can address the act. It cannot address the drift.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik drew a distinction that cuts through the ritual with precision. There is kapparah, atonement, and there is taharah, purification. A person can be forgiven and still remain unchanged. The ledger is cleared, but the self is not.

The first goat is about repair. Something was broken and must be restored. There is acknowledgment, cost, and a return toward the center. Without that, nothing holds.

But even after the offering, something remains unresolved. What about the part of you that made the act possible in the first place? What about the force that will bring you back to the same place again?

The second goat answers without pretending to solve. It is not elevated nor transformed. It is taken and removed, sent beyond the camp into a space outside structure and control. The Torah does something more honest than erasure. It refuses to let that force sit at the center.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks drew the line just as sharply. The Torah distinguishes between what you did and who you are. The act can be real, heavy, even defining in its moment, and still not be allowed to define you going forward.

That distinction is fragile. Without it, people fall into two familiar traps. One is denial, the instinct to send everything away, to blame, to project, to say the problem lives somewhere else. The other is paralysis, the belief that failure is permanent, that the stain cannot be lifted, that there is no meaningful way forward.

Two goats, not one, because one would allow the situation to settle in a bad place.

The first says you are responsible. The second says you are not reducible to what you did. Hold only the first and you collapse under your past. Hold only the second and you lose accountability.

Together they force something far less comfortable.

You are forgiven, but the forces that led you there still exist.

There is no promise here that the internal engine disappears. No claim that a single day resets human nature. The ritual does not erase memory or capacity. It offers something more restrained and more demanding. The sin is acknowledged, gathered, and pushed to the margins. No longer central, no longer defining, but not imaginary either.

You walk forward without it at your core. You do not pretend it was never there.

Two goats, identical at the start, divided by fate. One ascends, one disappears, and between them stands a person who has to live with both truths at once.

You can be restored. You are still capable of returning.

In a world where scapegoats have become the rage, let us all relearn and teach the world that the just path forward requires both atonement and purification of self.

NYC, Now It’s at Your Front Door

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It looked like a technical vote. In New York City, a proposed buffer zone around houses of worship. A few feet of space so people could enter synagogues, churches, and mosques without confrontation.

And the Democratic Socialists of America bloc on the City Council voted no.

Shahana Hanif (District 39), Alexa Avilés (District 38), Tiffany Cabán (District 22), Chi Ossé (District 36), and Kayla Santosuosso (District 47) held the same line. Protect protest at all costs. Treat any restriction as a threat to speech. Keep the sidewalks open, no matter what is happening on them.

Shahana Hanif (District 39)

On paper, that sounds principled. In practice, it lands somewhere else entirely.

Because in this city, right now, protests are not showing up randomly. They are showing up outside synagogues in growing numbers. The line between Israel and the Jew has been erased, and the synagogue has become a stand-in.

This is where ideology stops being abstract.

For years, the DSA has defined itself through opposition to Israel. That posture has moved from foreign policy into local reality. When Zionism is framed as uniquely illegitimate, and most Jews see it as part of who they are, the translation is inevitable. The target shifts.

No manifesto is needed. The pattern speaks for itself.

Vote against a resolution recognizing hatred against Jews. Argue about the sponsors instead of the substance. Reject a minimal buffer around houses of worship at a moment when Jewish institutions in New York are under visible pressure.

That movement is no longer adjacent to power in New York City; it has the power. With Zohran Mamdani as the city’s new mayor, the worldview is moving from activist circles into the city’s governing core.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a member of the DSA

And the expansion is already underway.

On Tuesday April 28’s special primary day, Mamdani has backed Lindsey Boylan, a member of the DSA to take another seat on the City Council. Jewish City Council Speaker Julie Menin has endorsed Carl Wilson in an effort to stop the radical left gaining even more power in New York.

In the June primaries, NYC-DSA is backing a coordinated slate:

  • Darializa Avila Chevalier (Upper Manhattan/Bronx)
  • Claire Valdez (Brooklyn/Queens)
  • David Orkin (Queens)
  • Diana Moreno

—alongside a broader Assembly slate backed by the same network.

Endorsements from figures like Jamaal Bowman and Mamdani for radical anti-capitalists, anti-west, anti-Israel DSA members like Aber Kawas reinforce the same ideological through-line—where opposition to Israel is no longer one issue among many, but a defining filter.

Aber Kawas has long supported the dismantling of the Jewish State, now running as part of the DSA to gain a seat in the New York State Senate. She is backed by Zohran Mamdani and Jamaal Bowman

This is how local elections stop being local.

When protests move from slogans to synagogue doors in Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, who holds the line?

Will NYPD treat intimidation outside Jewish institutions as a line to be enforced—or a situation to be managed?

Power shapes behavior. When activists see their worldview reflected in City Hall and Albany, boundaries loosen. What once felt marginal begins to feel sanctioned. The distance between protest and confrontation narrows.

The question is no longer what DSA believes about Israel where they believe every man, woman and child is a fair target for violence. The question for New York voters is what they are comfortable normalizing here.

On sidewalks outside synagogues. At the doors of people trying to pray. In the space between protest and intimidation.

The City Council vote on buffer zones answered part of that question.

The rest will be answered this coming Tuesday and in June—at the ballot box, and on the sidewalks outside your door.

ACTION ITEM

Support Carl Wilson in the primary on April 28.

Support opponents to the DSA candidates in the June elections.

Related:

Protecting Synagogues Like Abortion Clinics

The Thomas Friedman Theory of Everything

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A video shows officers from the New York City Police Department attack an unarmed man. That kind of footage demands scrutiny—what happened, what justified it, and what didn’t.

The video is clear; the surrounding facts with each side’s narrative needs to be heard, filtered and assessed.

But such steps are not needed if someone is so sure of his sense of right-and-wrong, and smarter than everyone else. Able to discern motivation, backdrop and situation even sitting comfortably and smugly many miles away.

Especially if named Thomas Friedman.

You see, Thomas Friedman is so so so much smarter than all of you. He knows that everything bad in the world stems from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe occasionally Donald Trump, but his beat is the Middle East so he prefers to haul Netanyahu’s name before his reader base more frequently.

You see, “Israel Lost its Way,” according to the Great Sage Friedman, because Netanyahu has infiltrated Israeli society so deeply. Bibi’s love of Jews and hatred of non-Jews in Friedman’s worldview, has permeated everything in Israel today. So much so, that a soldier fighting in Lebanon who never met Netanyahu in his life, knows that the right thing to do is assert Jewish superiority, even outside of Israeli borders.

Thomas Friedman points to Israeli soldier destroying a statue as attributable to Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.”

Somehow, a rogue soldier – one of thousands exhausted by a multiyear, multifront war – who destroys a religious icon is a perfect encapsulation of Netanyahu’s “geopolitical strategy.” It’s such an absurd comment, that only someone so full of himself would have the chutzpah to place it in the opening paragraph of an opinion piece in The New York Times.

Would Friedman argue that the two NYPD officers were acting under the political strategy of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani? Of course not. Friedman would write that the officers were rogue and acted against Mamdani’s wishes. But Friedman is convinced that Israelis under Netanyahu have all become lunatics. They are not fighting defensive wars that they never wanted; they are engaged in ethnic cleansing in a raw campaign of Jewish superiority.

Friedman mentioned another picture from the anti-Netanyahu Israeli paper Haaretz, the Israeli version of the NY Times. He referred to “right-wing Israeli ministers” celebrating a new community being built that allows Jews – counter to the stated goal of the Palestinian Authority and the United Nations – to live in the area east of the 1949 Armistice Lines.

To add a little punch to the piece, Friedman added that this was “just another day of the Netanyahu government playing President Trump for a fool” to rile up Americans against Israel.

Friedman has been telling readers this for years: Netanyahu is an evil puppet-master. If that sounds like an antisemitic trope, he won’t apologize. He will double-down.

Cartoon in the international edition of The New York Times shows Netanyahu leading a blind Donald Trump around

Because this is the theory that explains everything. Jews are now the jihadists.

Now, every action is merely an expression of someone else’s “climate.” Responsibility floats upward until it becomes untethered from behavior itself. The soldier, the new “settlers”, the police officers no longer matter. Only the chosen author of the “atmosphere” matters.

The New York Times has inverted victim and villain in the Middle East, and Thomas Friedman is all too eager to say “I told you so,” with whatever irrelevant recent media he can find.

A Culture of Building and a Culture of Destruction

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Two words sit on the same date and define the cultures of the respective people.

Yom Ha’atzmaut – Independence Day in Hebrew – marks the moment a dispersed people executed a long-planned return to sovereignty. The modern engine was Zionism, but the impulse runs far deeper. A people with an ancient memory chose to translate that memory into institutions, borders, and power. The declaration in 1948 was the culmination of a project that built governing bodies, an economy, and a military before the flag went up. It was construction with intent.

Across the same date sits Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic. The word is used to describe a collapse that followed a war. In 1947, the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine offered a fork in the road: two states, side by side. Jewish leadership accepted a constrained map and moved to build. Arab leadership rejected the partition and moved to prevent a Jewish state from coming into existence in “any part of Palestine.” Local forces and surrounding Arab states chose war at the point of birth.

This is the hinge that still carries the weight.

One side organized for sovereignty and then defended it. The other side organized to block that sovereignty and then defined its politics around that goal. The result was not an abstract failure. It was a battlefield outcome with lasting consequences.

The pattern did not end in 1948. It hardened into a language and culture of rejection—of undoing the Jewish state rather than existing alongside it—reappears across decades, sometimes dressed in diplomacy, often in violence. When you look at public opinion at key moments, you see the persistence of that horizon. In surveys like those conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in June 2023 (before the October 7 massacre), the majority of Arabs in West Bank and Gaza expressed confidence that Israel would not endure to its centennial and endorsed continued “resistance” (violence) as the path forward. The expectation is not coexistence after compromise. It is reversal over time.

A standard question in Palestinian quarterly polls like the one above (Q67) asked whether people supported “armed attacks against Israeli civilians.” In Gaza, the percentage was 76.7%

This is where the narratives diverge in a way that matters for the future.

The Israeli story is anchored in a completed act of construction that must be maintained. It argues from existence. It invests in capacity—military, economic, technological—because survival depends on it. It measures success in what stands and functions.

The dominant current in Palestinian politics has been anchored in an unfinished act of negation. It argues from a horizon in which Israel is temporary. It invests in leverage—diplomatic pressure, internationalization, and violence—because the objective is to change the end state rather than to consolidate its own future alongside it.

You can trace every failed negotiation back to that split. Offers are read through different endgames. Concessions are weighed against different destinations. One side asks what it takes to secure a state that already exists. The other asks what it takes to transform the map.

There is a moral discomfort here that people try to smooth over with softer language. It doesn’t hold. History keeps intruding with hard edges. A decision to reject partition and wage war in 1948 set a trajectory. Repeated bets on pressure and violence to force a different outcome have reinforced it. Each round that ends without destroying Israel strengthens the very state the strategy set out to undo.

A century is a long time in politics and a short time in memory. The Jewish project marked its independence by building a country that persists. The opposing project has too often measured progress by how close it can get to erasing that country. That is a strategy that has not delivered a state.

The calendar will keep bringing the same day back. One side will celebrate a construction that proved durable. The other will revisit a war whose objective still shapes its politics. The future will turn on whether the goal shifts from ending a state to building one of its own.

Three Multinational Antisemitic Arcs, And World Jewry

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Over the past century, pressure on Jews has scaled, shifting from borders to regions to institutions, changing form while carrying a familiar direction.

The story begins in Europe 1938 with the Anschluss. Persecution inside Germany extends outward as Austria is absorbed and its Jewish population is pulled into the same system. Expansion of antisemitic forces follows conquest. Poland, France, Hungary, the Netherlands become extensions of a single design as control spreads across the continent.

An den Fenstern j¸discher Geschfte werden von Nationalsozialisten Plakate mit der Aufforderung “Deutsche, wehrt euch, kauft nicht bei Juden” angebracht.

Policy matures into infrastructure. Collaboration, coercion, and indifference form a landscape in which Jewish survival is unlikely. At the Wannsee Conference, extermination is organized across borders, ministries, and railways. The Holocaust becomes a continental system aligned toward a single end: the genocide of Jews.

That system collapses with the war’s end but the pattern carries forward, reshaped and redirected.

After 1948, pressure reappears across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Jewish communities rooted for centuries in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Morocco and elsewhere begin to unravel with striking speed.

Baghdad Iraq’s 1941 slaughter of Jews

Each country follows its own path. Laws restrict, property is seized, pressure builds, departures accelerate. In Iraq, the Farhud foreshadows a collapse that soon becomes mass departure. In Yemen, Operation Magic Carpet lifts an entire community into exile. In Egypt, the Suez Crisis accelerates expulsions. Across North Africa, uncertainty and nationalism press communities toward exit. By the 1970s, nearly one million Jews leave and a regional Jewish presence that endured for centuries nearly vanishes completely.

By the 1970s, the arena shifts again. The contest moves from territory into legitimacy itself.

In 1975, the United Nations adopts United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, recasting Jewish self-determination as a moral offense within the central forum of international diplomacy.

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan reversing the Zionism is Racism resolution

The repeal arrives in 1991 through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/86, yet the framing travels beyond formal votes. It resurfaces at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 and diffuses through NGOs, campuses, and international forums, where evolving language carries forward an enduring challenge to Jewish sovereignty.

From there, the argument migrates into the civic fabric of Western democracies. In the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, vile ideas become chants in universities, media, and politics.

The mechanisms differ from earlier eras, yet the effects shape daily life. Jewish institutions increase security. Synagogues that once stood open now operate behind layers of protection. Public expressions of Jewish identity carry new calculations. Debates about Israel expand into broader judgments about Jews, blurring lines that once held more clearly.

Across these shifts, the effect becomes visible in the map of Jewish life.

President Joe Biden’s Jewish liaison person suggests that Jews should hide their religious symbols in 2021

A century ago, Jewish communities spanned continents, anchored in Europe and present across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Americas. The destruction of European Jewry removed the largest center. The unraveling of communities across the Middle East and North Africa compressed what remained. Many moved to Israel. Others built new lives in the United States.

Today, roughly 85 percent of the world’s Jews live in those two countries. There are only seventeen countries with more than 25,000 Jews when there used to be dozens just a century ago.

That concentration follows a century in which environments that sustained Jewish life across dozens of countries collapsed, expelled, or eroded. Dispersion gave way to consolidation. Geography followed pressure.

The forces shaping that consolidation continue to evolve. As legitimacy is contested in broader arenas, communities orient toward places able to sustain security, identity, and continuity. The gravitational pull toward Israel strengthens under those conditions, even as the United States remains a central pillar of Jewish life.

While Yom Ha’atzmaut marks Israel’s independence, it also marks the emergence of a center of gravity forged through history rather than theory. Across a century, shifting forms of pressure reshaped where Jews could live, how they gathered, and where they anchored their future.

Three arcs across a century redrew the Jewish map. As the narrative arc is still underway, Israel’s percentage of world Jewry will likely become a majority from a plurality, in just a few years.

Pain Wrapped in Love, A Wound That Does Not Close

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There’s a fundamental difference between Yom HaZikaron and how most countries remember their fallen. In many places—think of Memorial Day in the U.S.—remembrance exists alongside distance. Time has passed, wars feel historical, and public life has moved on. The rituals are real, but they share space with long weekends, travel, sales, and barbecues.

In Israel, there is no distance.

Israel is small. Military service is near universal. Loss is not abstract or inherited from history books—it is current, personal, and interconnected. The name read on television is rarely just a name. It is a classmate. A neighbor’s child. A cousin of a colleague. And beyond the battlefield, the victims of terrorism—on buses, in cafés, in homes—collapse any illusion that war lives somewhere else.

There is no clean line between soldier and civilian. The same people who argue politics, build companies, and raise families are the ones who serve, and sometimes die, in uniform. The same streets that carry ordinary life have carried violence. So when the siren sounds, it is not symbolic; it is recognition. The cost of survival has been paid by people just like you—often people you actually knew.

Other countries observe remembrance days. Israel mourns.

In a synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, far from the sirens of Israel, that truth took human form.

At Temple Emanu-El in New York City, before an audience of more than a thousand people, Rachel Goldberg-Polin sat in conversation with Dan Senor. The setting was the diaspora. The subject was the same wound.

Temple Emanu-El in NYC for talk with Dan Senor and Rachel Goldberg-Polin on April 20, 2026 (photo: FirstOneThrough)

Her son, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, had been injured during the October 7 Palestinian Arab attacks, taken hostage into Gaza, and held for more than a year before being killed in the tunnels. She had come to speak about a book she wrote in response to a question people kept asking her: how are you doing?

The answer was not linear. It was not hopeful in the way people expect hope to sound. It was precise.

Pain wrapped in love. Love wrapped in pain.

She described her life now in three periods: before October 7, the time of her son’s captivity, and the period after his death. Not stages of healing. Not steps toward closure. Distinct worlds, separated by something irreversible.

And then she said something that lands differently once you understand Yom HaZikaron.

She does not believe things should get better with time. She does not understand why much of the world holds that as aspiration. The wound is there. Permanent. The task is not to erase it, or soften it, or move beyond it. The task is to carry it—together with the love that created it—in full.

Forever.

That is not just a mother speaking. It is the emotional grammar of a country.

Yom HaZikaron is not designed to heal. It is designed to remember without dilution. To hold loss and love in the same space and refuse to let either fade. To insist that what was lost remains present, not as history, but as part of the living fabric.

In other places, remembrance days ask for reflection. In Israel, and for those bound to it, the day asks for something harder: to accept that some wounds are not meant to close.

A siren sounds. A country stops. And what fills the silence is not only memory.

It is love that refuses to let go, and pain that refuses to fade.

Bring Israel Into NATO’s Orbit

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Wars do not simply end; they force institutions to confront whether they still address the world they are meant to secure.

As the regional war against Israel recedes from its most intense phase, one conclusion is increasingly difficult to ignore: Israel has been operating inside the West’s security perimeter while remaining formally outside the principal institution designed to defend it.

That institution is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO.

This gap is structural—and increasingly consequential.

When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz, crippling access to one-fifth of the global oil supply, the countries inside of NATO barely budged. Spain went so far as to send the United States a big middle finger.

Only Israel worked together with the U.S. in managing this global threat.

Israel already maintains deep bilateral ties with key NATO members, particularly the United States. Intelligence sharing, joint exercises, and technological collaboration are well established. The problem is that this cooperation remains fragmented, dependent on individual relationships rather than embedded within NATO’s institutional framework. In an era defined by interconnected threats, fragmentation is a liability.

Those threats no longer arrive neatly organized by geography. For more than two decades, Europe has experienced the effects of Islamist extremism within its own borders. Attacks tied to networks such as ISIS in Paris, Brussels, and Berlin were not isolated events. They reflected a broader system—ideological, financial, and operational—that crosses borders with ease. That same ecosystem includes actors such as Hamas, whose attacks triggered the current war.

These are not separate challenges. They are different manifestations of two networks confronting the western world: the jihadi axis of Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and Houthis, as well as the national threats from Russia, China and Iran.

Israel has been confronting the jihadi network as a whole—mapping it, disrupting it, and adapting to it in real time. Europe, by contrast, has often encountered it in fragments.

Memorial for people killed from jihadi bombing at Ariana Grande concert

The two confrontational axis are linked by Iran. A NATO established to be a defense against Russia and communism must adapt to the new reality that the Russia-China-Iran alliance is buttressing jihadi regimes and terrorist groups to destabilize the west.

NATO, as currently structured, is positioned to respond to effects—naval patrols, sanctions, diplomatic signaling—but lacks a formal mechanism to integrate with the actor most deeply engaged in countering the source.

Israel is not a peripheral partner. It is a central node of capability.

Its missile defense systems operate under continuous pressure. Its counter-drone technologies are refined in live environments. Its intelligence capabilities integrate multiple theaters into a single operational picture. Its cyber operations are embedded directly into conflict environments that NATO is still working to fully integrate.

This is a partner NATO needs.

Geography reinforces the argument. NATO’s traditional focus on its eastern flank remains essential, particularly in relation to Russia. But the critical infrastructure of modern security—energy routes, maritime corridors, and digital networks—runs through the Eastern Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Gulf. Stability in these regions is now directly tied to European and transatlantic security.

Israel sits at that intersection with capability, proximity, and alignment.

At the same time, pressures within the alliance itself are becoming more visible. U.S. political leaders—most notably Donald Trump—have underscored a structural imbalance: the United States continues to underwrite a disproportionate share of European defense while facing expanding global demands. That pressure reflects a broader need for NATO to adapt—both in burden sharing and in how it structures partnerships to address evolving threats.

Parallel to this, U.S. policy has begun to shift in the Middle East. Efforts to draw regional actors, including emerging leadership in Syria, away from Russian influence and toward Western engagement signal a changing geopolitical landscape. The region is no longer peripheral to transatlantic security. It is central to it.

Against that backdrop, integrating Israel into NATO’s partnership structure is not an isolated step. It is part of a broader realignment responding to the growing influence of Russia and Iran across multiple theaters.

This does not mean that Israel should join NATO as a full member with Article 5 protections. This proposal refers to formal integration within NATO’s Enhanced Opportunities Partner framework. It does not create automatic military obligations, nor does it commit NATO forces to regional conflicts.

It creates structure where there is currently fragmentation.

NATO should take three immediate steps.

  • First, designate Israel as an Enhanced Opportunities Partner, formalizing its integration into NATO planning, intelligence, and interoperability frameworks.
  • Second, establish a standing NATO–Israel coordination mechanism focused on counter-drone warfare, missile defense, cyber operations, and maritime security.
  • Third, integrate Israel into NATO’s southern and maritime operational planning, particularly in relation to the Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea, and Gulf energy corridors.

These steps would not expand NATO’s defense obligations. They would enhance its operational effectiveness.

Wars clarify.

This one has clarified that European security is shaped by forces operating far beyond its borders and that the countries are not up to the task of dealing with their own security needs. That terrorism, energy coercion, and hybrid warfare now form a single continuum. That regional boundaries no longer define strategic risk.

And that Israel is already operating at the center of that reality.

NATO was built to defend the system. It now needs to include those already defending it.

No Hashtag for Khartoum or Mogadishu

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Before October 7 reordered the world’s attention, a war in Sudan had already begun killing at scale. April 15 marked the three year anniversary of the latest incarnation of war. It has since produced one of the largest humanitarian crises on earth—millions displaced, famine conditions spreading, entire cities shattered. Over 2,000 healthcare workers killed. And yet it has generated almost none of the global mobilization that defines our era of outrage.

No encampments. No slogans. No sustained moral urgency that travels.

Two forces—the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—fight for control. Civilians are not incidental to the conflict; they are its terrain. Hospitals are looted, neighborhoods erased, aid convoys blocked. Darfur, a name once synonymous with “never again,” has quietly returned to the same vocabulary of mass killing.

The scale should compel attention. It doesn’t.

For years, much of the global discourse—across media, universities, and international institutions—has sorted conflict through a particular lens: Global North and Global South. The North is cast as inherently evil, colonial and imperial. The South as perpetual victim.

Sudan does not fit neatly inside such lens. There is no clear external oppressor to anchor outrage, no simple narrative that translates easily into the moral shorthand of our time. The violence is internal, complex, resistant to reduction. And so the system hesitates. Attention drifts. Outrage never organizes.

Look at the response architecture. The United Nations convenes, issues appeals, and struggles to convert urgency into action. Funding remains short of need. Access remains constrained. The gap between rhetoric and relief is not marginal—it is structural. Mechanisms that elsewhere become focal points of accountability have not galvanized comparable pressure here. Even institutions like the International Court of Justice sit far from the center of global attention on Sudan, not because the crimes are lesser, but because the political energy that drives action is missing.

Attention follows narrative. Narrative follows familiarity. Sudan offers neither.

The victims do not map cleanly onto categories that travel well. There is no easy compression into a slogan or a symbol. And in a world that increasingly organizes around moral shorthand, what cannot be simplified is often ignored.

This is not only about Sudan. Or Somalia where war has also ravaged the landscape. It is about how the past is taught—and how its lessons travel.

Holocaust education stands as a cornerstone of moral instruction across much of the Global North. Its lessons are intended to be universal. But when it is absorbed as a contained European tragedy, rather than a case study in how societies turn inward, weaponize identity, and destroy their own, its warning loses portability. It becomes history, not instruction. The Global South doesn’t bother to listen to the lesson, and the Global North is focused elsewhere.

In Sudan, mass violence is just statistics without racism and a colonial script. Here is a catastrophe that should activate every alarm built in the twentieth century—and does not. An estimated 400,000 killed in Sudan. Over 500,000 killed in nearby Somalia.

Reducing these to “internal conflicts” explains nothing. It does something worse. It lowers the urgency. It signals, quietly, that this is a tragedy the world can observe rather than confront.

Universities that mobilize rapidly around conflicts that fit prevailing frameworks struggle to sustain engagement here. Media cycles that can fixate for months elsewhere let Sudan and Somalia slip into the margins. International bodies calibrated to respond to pressure find little of it applied.

Sudan is a statistic. Somalia is a statistic. Yet Gaza has a narrative.

Victims should not need a more compelling narrative. They need corridors that function, aid that arrives, and accountability that does not wait for a more convenient story. They need a world capable of responding to human suffering even when it does not fit the frameworks that dominate discourse.

Gazans who launched a genocidal jihadi war never deserved particular sympathy. Especially compared to nearly a million killed in Sudan and Somalia.

Centuries of Kashrut, Now in Question

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The laws in Parshat Shemini do something unusual. They take holiness out of the abstract and force it into the body. This is permitted; that is not. Eat this; reject that. The categories are exact, and they carry consequences.

Kashrut is not belief. It is execution.

It depends on classification, preparation, and one decisive act: a method of slaughter. Remove any part of that sequence and the system collapses into theory.

For centuries, it did not collapse. It moved intact into daily life, into kitchens and markets, into habits that required no defense because they were simply practiced. By the 19th century, that system was functioning inside modern Europe. Jews in Frankfurt, Vienna, and Budapest were citizens, participants, integrated—and still able to keep kosher.

The paintings of Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and Isidor Kaufmann quietly confirm that reality. They show a world where nothing needs to be argued. The system works. The meal appears. The law reaches the plate.

Oppenheim’s Friday Evening Blessing (1867)

That is the baseline: not tolerance of identity, but permission of practice.

The modern shift begins where the system is most exposed—at the knife.

Kosher meat depends on shechita, a method of slaughter that prohibits pre-stunning. Increasingly, that is where democratic states have drawn a line. Across Europe, bans or effective prohibitions have taken hold:

  • Belgium
  • Denmark
  • Sweden
  • Norway
  • Iceland
  • Switzerland
  • New Zealand

Others—Germany, France, Netherlands—permit it only through narrowing exemptions.

The language used is procedural. They argue that animal welfare requires stunning the animal before slaughter. It sounds neutral but it ends kashrut.

That pressure has forced a new response. Not abandonment, but adaptation. Across Europe and Israel, efforts are underway to reconcile halachic requirements with regulatory demands:

  • Post-cut stunning, applied immediately after the kosher slaughter
  • Reversible stunning technologies, designed to preserve the animal’s halachic status at the moment of the cut
  • Greater integration of veterinary oversight with rabbinic supervision

None of this is settled. Many rabbinic authorities resist any modification that risks invalidating the historic process. Regulators resist exceptions that fragment uniform standards. The space for compromise is narrow and technical.

But the direction is unmistakable. The debate has moved from theology to engineering.

Liberal democracies pride themselves on protecting religious freedom. Yet during ritual slaughter for kosher meat, they are testing a boundary: whether they will protect belief while constraining the mechanisms required to live it.

Storming Words, Not Mosques

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The jihadi war begins in the headline: “Israeli colonists storm Al-Aqsa Mosque under police protection.” Before a single fact appears, the verdict is already written—by the Palestinian Authority’s media outlet—in words designed to inflame.

  • Colonists erases history, recasting Jews as foreign intruders with no connection to the Temple Mount. 
  • Storm supplies violence whether any occurred or not. 
  • Al-Aqsa Mosque collapses the entire compound into the most sensitive Islamic structure to heighten the sense of desecration. 
  • Under police protection reframes standard security by the Israel Police, coordinated with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, as state-backed aggression.

Then the language tightens. “Talmudic and provocative rituals.” “Frequent Israeli provocations, including repeated raids.” These aren’t descriptions. They’re verdicts. Quiet presence becomes intent. Routine visits become raids. Silent prayer becomes something suspect.

And then the omission that completes the frame. The site is only described as Islam’s third holiest. It is never described as Judaism’s holiest. The reader is left with a single conclusion: sanctity on one side, violation on the other.

This is narrative design. Islamic Supremacy.

Strip legitimacy. Recast presence as desecration. Elevate exclusive holiness. Repeat it daily through a state-backed outlet overseen by the Palestinian Authority.

That is how a holy war is narrated into existence. By the “moderate” Palestinian Authority.