When Rep. Ilhan Omar was squirted with a liquid by an assailant, the story was not the act itself. The story was the atmosphere. Readers were immediately given Minnesota ICE protests, Trump’s rhetoric, the temperature of MAGA politics, and speculative motive pathways pointing firmly rightward. Political attribution preceded investigative certainty. Context did the work and assigned blame.
Yet when Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s home was attacked by arson in April, context vanished.
There was no mention of the documented surge in antisemitic incidents. No reference to months of anti-Israel rhetoric saturating elite politics. No discussion of the “No Genocide Josh” campaign. No acknowledgment that the attack occurred during Passover—a fact ordinarily noted when violence intersects with religious or communal significance, but here omitted entirely. No exploration of whether sustained accusations of genocide, ethnic-cleansing chants, or the casual demonization of Jews in power might have contributed to a permissive climate. Investigative caution preceded any discussion of political backdrop.
This was not restraint. It was a choice.
The same media institutions that insist “words have consequences” suddenly treat words as irrelevant when the victim is Jewish and the potential inciters sit on the progressive side of the aisle. Context, once treated as morally essential, becomes editorially radioactive.
The pattern is no longer subtle. When violence – staining a shirt – touches a left-wing Muslim lawmaker, identity and ideology are framed as explanatory forces. When violence – arson and attempted murder of an entire family – touches a Jewish, pro-Israel official, identity is scrubbed clean and politics are declared off-limits. One story expands outward into meaning. The other … nothing.
The issue is not what motivated the attacker. The issue is why certain motivations are never even permitted to be discussed.
To contextualize the attack on Shapiro would require acknowledging uncomfortable truths: that anti-Israel rhetoric frequently curdles into antisemitism; that political incitement is not confined to one end of the spectrum; that portraying Jews as uniquely malevolent actors has consequences beyond protest slogans and campus chants. Easier, then, to say nothing.
The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle had no issue clearly identifying the “Pro-Palestinian arsonist” and the support for targeting the Jewish governor, something liberal media scrubbed clean. The Steel City Food Not Bombs group is associated with the Socialist Rifle Associationwhich seeks “to combat the toxic, right-wing, and exclusionary firearm culture in place today.”
But silence is not passive. It is editorial.
For Ilhan Omar, context was everything. For Josh Shapiro, context was invisible.
If context is essential when violence can be plausibly traced to the right, it must be highlighted when violence engulfs Jews as well. Anything else is antisemitic choreography.
Antisemitism came bursting onto the American scene these last years. Jews were murdered. Synagogues were attacked. Jewish students were stalked, doxxed, and targeted by name. Schools and workplaces became hostile terrain.
And at that moment—when antisemitism crossed unmistakably from speech into violence—Jewish New York Congressman Jerry Nadler responded with the Antisemitism Response and Prevention Act.
ARPA was framed as action. In reality, it was an exercise in evasion. While Jews were being assaulted and killed, Nadler urged Congress to study, track, and administratively manage antisemitism—while carefully avoiding the standards already designed to confront it.
The United States already had a playbook, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition, adopted precisely because it reflects how antisemitism functions in the modern world. IHRA recognizes what recent victims already knew: antisemitism today often arrives wrapped in ideological language—through demonization of Israel, denial of Jewish self-determination, and collective punishment of Jews for the actions of the Jewish state.
That clarity made IHRA inconvenient to some. It required institutions to draw lines. ARPA was drafted to move in the opposite direction.
“this bill [H.Res 1449 to use IHRA definition of antisemitism] threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech.” – Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY)
Instead of reinforcing enforcement under existing civil-rights law and a recognized definition, ARPA handed discretion to federal agencies. Antisemitism would be assessed holistically. Guidance would follow. Coordination would improve. Standards would remain flexible.
But flexibility is a luxury for bystanders, not for targets.
“the IHRA definition is plainly unconstitutionally vague.” – Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)
Mainstream Jewish organizations understood the consequence immediately. Ambiguity does not restrain institutions that already fail to act. Universities that tolerated harassment would gain new procedural defenses. Administrators could claim compliance while Jewish students were chased from quads and classrooms. The more antisemitism intensified, the slower the response would become.
That is why opposition to ARPA came from the center of Jewish communal life, groups like Jewish Federations and the AJC. Their message was blunt and grounded in reality: Jews were being attacked under existing law. The failure was enforcement, not definition. Weakening standards while violence increased was not caution—it was retreat.
Support for ARPA came largely from groups more concerned with preserving far-left wing ideological space around anti-Israel activism than with confronting antisemitism as it actually manifested. In their calculus, the risk of over-enforcement mattered more than the fact that Jews were being targeted, assaulted, and killed. The alt-left preferred to cast their lot with CAIR in falsely labeling the IHRA definition as a gag order.
Congress eventually pivoted—toward strengthening Title VI enforcement and reaffirming IHRA—quietly conceding the obvious. When antisemitism turns violent, clarity protects lives. Process protects institutions.
“I share the concerns of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, Bend the Arc, B’Tselem, Amnesty International, and the ACLU that the IHRA definition of antisemitism will be used to stifle dissent and chill free speech, especially Palestinian human rights advocacy. The resolution also does not recognize that the fight against antisemitism is connected to our fight against Islamophobia, racism, white nationalism, and all other forms of hate.” – Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
ARPA will stand as a reminder of a grim truth: at a moment when antisemitism demanded resolve, left-wing Jews chose ambiguity and cozying to antisemites, rather than defense.
The blood libel begins with how the Book of Exodus is misremembered. Exodus is a story of Jewish liberation, yet antisemites preserve it as a story of punishment. That inversion is not confusion but tradition. Every generation dresses the libel in new language, while the structure never changes.
The plagues were directed at dismantling Egyptian authority with precision. The opening strike hit the Nile—Egypt’s god, economy, and source of life—and exposed a crime already committed there. Egypt had drowned Israelite infants in that river to erase a future it feared. The first plague named that bloodshed and stripped Egypt of moral order.
What followed was escalation with restraint. Egypt lost land, productivity, and cosmic claims. Darkness collapsed Pharaoh’s divine authority. What remained was the empire’s final refuge: the belief that continuity would return, that tomorrow would repair what today exposed.
The final plague took it. The death of the firstborn judged a state that had already made children expendable. It revoked Egypt’s claim on the future. Regimes that destroy children forfeit moral legitimacy. Measure followed measure.
The Israelites did not celebrate death. They marked their doors, stayed inside, and departed at dawn. Their defining act was escape from bloodlust, not indulgence in it. Freedom—not punishment—was the center of the story.
Antisemitism begins by erasing that fact.
Across centuries, Jews were remembered not as a people who fled violence but as a people who embodied it. Divine judgment on a tyrannical state was detached from context and reassigned as a permanent Jewish trait. Victims became perpetrators. Liberation became threat. From this inversion, the blood libel followed naturally, and not surprisingly, during Jewish celebrations of Passover when they left Egypt.
The charge did more than justify violence; it recoded Jews as a permanent danger. If society believes Jews possess bloodlust, then Jews must be watched, monitored, restricted, and scrutinized. They become an unwanted risk. Suspicion overwhelms citizenship. Surveillance replaces equality. In this logic, it is only a matter of time before Jews are assumed to act—and preemptive punishment becomes rationalized as self-defense.
This is how the libel works. It marks Jews forever as dangerous rather than as people who long for freedom. It recasts victims as villains and turns survival itself into evidence of guilt. The blood libel means that Jews are never trusted as equals, and never accepted as free.
That inheritance governs today’s rhetoric. Calling Jews “baby killers” is not a factual claim; it is the inherited reflex of a culture that never accepted Jewish freedom. The accusation is identity-based, not evidence-based. It exists to keep Jews outside the circle of legitimate humanity and to deny the moral standing of Jewish self-defense before it is even asserted.
Turkey fans the blood libel in Hamas’s latest war to destroy Israel
This mindset survives because it is passed down, laundered through new vocabulary, and presented as moral concern. But it is the same lie. It refuses to see Jews as a people who escaped societies that murdered their children and insists instead on seeing Jews as the source of murder itself.
The story that antisemitism started when Pharoah forgot Joseph and became worried about the growing number and power of Jews was the fear of a monarch. Antisemitism was instilled in the masses when the Exodus story was flipped that Jews had a bloodlust and didn’t deserve equality. Every society that accepted the libel eventually convinced itself that Jewish freedom was intolerable—and acted accordingly.
Capitalism disciplines hatred only where it can still touch it. Where contracts exist, behavior can be checked. Where they don’t, mobs rule.
Kanye West (Ye) didn’t begin by attacking Jews. He began by denigrating Black people—calling slavery a “choice,” sneering at collective memory, mocking historical suffering. The reaction was outrage softened by indulgence. He was criticized, contextualized, excused. His Black identity functioned as camouflage. The lesson was clear: you could insult your own people and still be protected.
So Ye escalated. Antisemitism offered a bigger payoff—more visibility, more fear, more leverage. It worked until money intervened.
When Adidas cut him loose, the spell broke. Capitalism finally touched him and apologies followed—not from moral awakening, but because the incentive structure flipped.
This is often cited as proof that “the system works.” It doesn’t—at least not anymore.
Ye performing
Capitalism disciplines behavior only where value is concentrated. Ye had a centralized choke point: Adidas. Today’s antisemitism largely does not. It thrives where contracts don’t exist, boards don’t answer, and outrage itself is the reward.
That vacuum has produced a new Ye-like template: antizionist Jews who denigrate Jews. They celebrate October 7. They call Israelis “Nazis.” They launder moral inversion through identity—and are absolved because of it. Jewishness becomes armor, converting bigotry into “bravery,” hatred into “critique,” massacre into “context.” The uglier the claim, the louder the ovation.
Poorly named “Jewish Voice for Peace” partners with terrorist-supporting group Samidoun
The center of gravity is social media—especially TikTok—where attention replaces contracts, outrage outperforms restraint, and individuals have nothing material to lose. There is no Adidas-scale counterparty. Condemnation becomes fuel. Challenge confirms righteousness.
This is where the political story locks in and takes flight.
For years, the far left has discredited institutions under the banner of “corporate Democrats.” At the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2025 convention, a delegate said it plainly: the movement should organize people “that the corporate Democrats and Republicans have abandoned for dead.” In this frame, institutions aren’t imperfect—they’re illegitimate. Friction isn’t restraint—it’s oppression.
On the ground, the rhetoric sharpens. New York councilmember Alexa Avilés urged activists to “root out ‘corporate Democrats’ backed by AIPAC,” recasting pro-Israel Democrats as bought and disposable. Structural critique becomes moral license. Identity becomes proof. Mobs become “the people.”
DSA’s Alexa Aviles
Far-left media and politicians amplify the message—outlets like The Young Turks and figures such as Jamaal Bowman. They know that institutions impose friction > Friction slows mobs > Mobs hate friction. So the institutions must be delegitimized—and the most extreme voices elevated.
The Young Turks coin a term and come for “Corporate Democrats”
This is sold as empowerment. In reality, it is power to the algorithm. Algorithms reward the loudest, angriest, least accountable claims. In that environment, antisemitism doesn’t just survive; it thrives. Jews are too small a minority to outvote a mob optimized for rage.
The reality is that capitalism was never the moral engine here, but it was sometimes a brake. Contracts could snap shut and money could impose limits. When those limits vanish—when speech floats free of consequence and identity shields cruelty—nothing restrains the mob.
Ye was stopped because capitalism still touched him when he crossed from trashing Blacks to bashing Jews.
The antizionist Jewish influencers celebrating October 7 are not stopped because nothing touches them. In People Capitalism, attention is the asset, outrage is the yield, and antisemitism is rewarded, and boosted on a litter—especially when Jews attack Jews.
Every such system needs a moral absolver.
That role is played by Bernie Sanders—the mob’s messiah. He doesn’t organize the mob; he legitimizes it by claiming it isn’t radical, reframing rage as righteousness by declaring institutions corrupt, restraint oppressive, and “corporate Democrats” illegitimate. His function isn’t governance. It’s permission to come for mainstream Democrats and other Jews.
Sen. Bernie Sanders swears in DSA’s Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City
This is the final logic of People Capitalism:
markets once imposed limits; crowds impose none.
institutions once punished bigotry; mobs reward it.
The most consequential move in the New York Times coverage was quiet. It described Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s response to pro-Hamas chants as an effort to avoid inflaming “tensions on either side of the Israel–Gaza war.” The language sounded responsible. It also erased the central reality.
The New York Times is attempting to allay fears of Jewish New Yorkers but softening image of extremist mayor Zohran Mamdani on January 17, 2026
There were no equivalent sides involved. One group openly chanted support for Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization responsible for mass murder, rape, kidnapping, and calls for genocide. The other side was a Jewish community standing outside its own synagogue, defending it from terrorist sympathizers.
That location matters. This did not unfold at City Hall or on a random street corner. It took place in front of a synagogue. For Jews, synagogues are communal sanctuaries, not neutral backdrops for geopolitical theater. Geography conveys intent. Bringing terror slogans to a Jewish house of worship transforms speech into targeting.
The New York Times chose to smooth this away. By framing the episode as “tension on either side,” it recast explicit support for Hamas as a legitimate pole of community expression. The chant was softened. The targeting dissolved into abstraction. Readers were reassured that calm was being preserved with statements such as “Mr. Mamdani’s team repeatedly debated the wording and fairness of the language,” as if a group chanting for the genocide of Jews required “fairness.”
This is how extremism gets normalized. When terror advocacy demands careful calibration rather than moral clarity, the boundary quietly shifts. Such framing would collapse instantly if crowds praised ISIS outside a mosque or neo-Nazis gathered at a Black church.
Protesters understand what editors seem determined to whitewash: location is the message. No amount of “Palestine-washing” can absolve the antisemitism in the Times coverage.
Reassurance purchased at the cost of truth carries consequences. It teaches extremists that intimidation can be reframed as passion and that targeted terror speech will be treated as just another civic grievance. That does not cool tensions. It redraws the line of what is acceptable.
The near-term ramifications of Hamas’s war against Israel are being crystalized. Hamas’s leadership is decimated and Gaza is in ruins. The political-terrorist group’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen have been dealt severe blows, perhaps fatal for some. Hamas’s cheerleaders in the Global North are the only ones to have gathered momentum, particularly in Australia and the United States where hunting season for Jews has a seemingly open permit.
To gain insight for the next tactical steps, world leaders are looking at the current situation and polls since October 7, 2023 and have drafted proposals and taken initial actions: The United Kingdom and Canada recognized a Palestinian State. The U.S.’s Trump administration put forward a plan for Gaza which would include a new governing entity. The West hopes that the targeted assaults and murder of Jews will peter out along with the end of war. And the United Nations keeps playing the same tune about supporting UNRWA.
These are bad decisions and conclusions, made on faulty assumptions.
There is an organization that has been polling Palestinian Arabs for decades, called the Palestinian Center for POLICY and SURVEY RESEARCH (PCPSR). It conducted a poll of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, just before the Hamas-led war, from September 28 to October 8, 2023. Because of the war, the results did not get published until June 26, 2024, and the world was too focused on the war to pay it any attention. It is deeply unfortunate, and it is required reading to help chart a better future for the region.
To start with the poll’s conclusions:
A large percentage of Palestinian Arabs have wanted to leave Gaza and the West Bank for years, not from the current destruction
Arabs are fed up with their own government – Hamas and the Palestinian Authority – much more than Israeli “occupation”
Canada is viewed much like Qatar for Gazans, a sympathetic haven
Palestinian Arabs Wanted to Emigrate Before the War
According to PCPSR, whether in October 2023 or November 2021, roughly 33% of Gazans and 20% of West Bank Arabs wanted to leave the region.
Men below age 30 make up the vast majority of those seeking to emigrate. As opposed to Gaza where both educated and uneducated people want to leave, it is the educated West Bank population that wants to move away. Among those wishing to leave, many would not vote in Palestinian elections, or if they would, they would sooner vote for third parties over Fatah or Hamas.
Palestinian Leadership is the Curse, More than Israel
The number one reason for wanting to leave was economic conditions by a far margin. Reasons two and three were political reasons and educational opportunities. “Security reasons” came in fourth, with only 7% of Gazans focused on security; 12% overall. Corruption, religious reasons and to reunite with family rounded out the poll.
Canada as a Beacon
Turkey and Germany were the two most favorite destinations, especially for Gazans. Very few Gazans (3%) considered the United States, while West Bank Arabs put it as the number one choice (17%), likely seeking advanced degrees at left-wing universities. What is remarkable, is more of the Stateless Arabs (SAPs) would prefer going to Canada (11%) than Qatar (9%), the wealthy Muslim Arab nation that is a main sponsor of Hamas.
Honest Takeaways
These pre-war results leads to some basic and critical conclusions.
Complete Overhaul of Palestinian leadership, not just in Gaza
The desire of Arabs to leave was evident across both Gaza and the West Bank for many years. This was not a reaction to bombing or siege; it was a verdict on governance.
Hamas in Gaza rules through repression, diversion of aid, and religious militarism. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank offers corruption, authoritarianism, and political stagnation. Together they have produced a society with no credible economic horizon, no accountable leadership, and no peaceful mechanism for change.
While a new entity is needed to administer Gaza, that role should be akin to a Chief Operating Officer overseeing construction. The Palestinian Authority itself needs to be gutted and rebuilt as it is a corrupt, unpopular and ineffective entity.
The United Nations Must Withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank
In its desire to create a Palestinian state, the U.N. has stripped the titular heads of Palestine of any responsibility. The UN protects Hamas despite its savagery. It props up the Palestinian Authority despite its rampant corruption. Palestinian leadership is a bed of paper scorpions.
The UN must withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank and allow local authorities to build a functioning leadership team.
The West Should Rescind Recognition of Palestine
There is no functioning Palestinian government and therefore no basic standard to recognize a Palestinian State. The United Kingdom, Australia and others should withdraw their recognition and make it conditional on building governing institutions that can lead and make peace with the Jewish State next door.
Reeducation in the West
The massacre did not arise from a sudden spike in pressure. It emerged from long-standing internal failure. Hamas chose atrocity because it couldn’t commit a complete genocide of Jews so exploited its own population to be fodder for Israel.
Western audiences were then handed a familiar script, complete with pictures. But the data taken just before the massacre tells a different story—one far more consequential. What is being taught in western public schools is divorced from reality and feeds global and local antisemitism.
Oh No, Canada
While the fears of antisemitism are focused on the United States and Australia because of recent attacks on Jews, Canada is in the hearts and minds of Palestinian Arabs seeking a warm diaspora community. Perhaps it started a decade ago under Justin Trudeau who followed U.S.’s President Barack Obama to embrace the Palestinian cause and Iranian regime over Israel. Perhaps it is because of the welcome mat for extremists groups like Samidoun. Or perhaps it is the perception that the heckler’s veto is fair game, and can run Jewish families off Canadian streets.
Whatever the inspiration, Canada is widely perceived as permissive, ideologically indulgent, and administratively porous—an attractive environment for “political activism” untethered from civic responsibility. It is a ticking time bomb.
The poll of Palestinian Arabs on the eve of the October 7 war reveals deeper truths than surface shots of leveled homes. The PCPSR findings point to a single truth: the Palestinian problem is fundamentally internal.
Ending Israeli control over territory without dismantling corrupt and extremist institutions will not deliver prosperity or peace. Statehood layered on top of dysfunction will harden it. And exporting populations shaped by jihadist rule into permissive Western societies without serious screening and integration, risks importing instability rather than relieving it.
Every time antisemitism is called out on the left, the same dodge appears on cue: “It’s just free speech.”
That response is not a defense. It is a red herring.
No one is arguing that anti-Israel speech is illegal. Under American law, almost nothing is. You can shout racist slogans. You can be misogynistic. You can mock religions. You can hold a Draw Muhammad contest outside a mosque. You can call for the destruction of a country. You can deny a people’s history.
All of that is protected speech. That has never been the question.
The question is what that speech is.
And much of what now passes as “anti-Israel discourse” is not political critique at all. It is hate speech, clearly, historically, and deliberately so.
Calling for the destruction of the Jewish State is not foreign policy analysis. Denying Jewish history in the Land of Israel is not academic debate. Declaring that Jews alone have no right to national self-determination is not progressive politics. Passing a law that Jews cannot live somewhere and cannot pray at their holiest location is not a free exchange of ideas.
It is the application of a single moral standard to one people — and only one people — that says: you do not belong anywhere.
It is naked antisemitism.
Organizations like Democratic Socialists of America, Students for Justice in Palestine, Within Our Lifetime and Palestine Youth Movement are not tolerating this rhetoric. They are chanting it,platforming it, amplifying it, and treating it as virtuous. They deny Jewish peoplehood, erase Jewish indigeneity, excuse violence against Jewish civilians, and then insist this is nothing more than robust debate.
It is not.
It is hate speech — even if the Constitution protects the right to utter it.
And then there is Zohran Mamdani, who embodies the selective blindness at the heart of this moment. No serious person believes he would tolerate a mass of protesters outside mosques depicting Muhammad as a terrorist, screaming at Muslims as they enter prayer. That would be — correctly — labeled Islamophobia, regardless of whether it was technically legal.
When Jewish institutions are targeted, when synagogues are surrounded, when Jewish national identity is declared illegitimate, the alt-left response suddenly becomes procedural: free speech.
Free speech does not launder bigotry. The First Amendment protects the right to speak; it does not cleanse the moral content of what is said. When people accuse Mamdani and the DSA of promoting Jew-hatred, they are not confused about constitutional law. They are describing the reality of ingrained Jew hatred.
“Most Americans are familiar with the classic Western flavors of anti-Semitism: the Christian, European, white-supremacist and Communist types. But little attention has been paid to the special case of Muslim anti-Semitism. That is a pity because today it is anti-Semitism’s most zealous, most potent and most underestimated form.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, July 2019
Invoking free speech is an evasion. A way to avoid responsibility while continuing to normalize ideas that would be instantly condemned if aimed at any other minority.
The tragedy – and fear – is that liberals understand this perfectly well in every other context. They simply refuse to apply it to Jews. Or at least, when uttered by a community of preference, Muslims.
Free speech is not on trial, do not be confused by the misdirection. Antisemitism is, and it is winning.
In the legends of Prague, the Golem came into being when civic order failed Jews in predictable ways. Blood libels circulated, crowds gathered, and authorities hesitated at the decisive moment. Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal (c.1512-1609), recognized the pattern. He shaped a human form from the mud of the Vltava River—from the city itself—and animated it with sacred words. The choice of material mattered. The defender of Jews was made from the ground beneath their feet. Even if the city’s leaders would not protect Jews, the city itself would.
The Golem patrolled the Jewish quarter, broke the rhythm of violence, and restored deterrence. When the danger passed, it was deactivated and laid to rest in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, the Altneuschul. The legend recorded a hard truth: when the state falters, protection is improvised; when the state recovers, emergency power sleeps.
Altneuschul in Prague (photo: First One Through)
That memory traveled.
The melody of Hatikvah, the national anthem of the Jewish State of Israel, traces back through the musical world of that same Prague river Vltava, famously shaped by Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884). Exile and return share a river. The Golem embodies survival within exile; Zionism embodies the resolve to end exile. One guards a community where it stands, the other builds sovereignty so guarding becomes policy.
Yet the Golem never disappears. It waits for the moment when trust in authority thins again.
New York, Upper East Side
New York City holds one of the world’s largest and most visible Jewish populations. Jewish life here is open and proud. Synagogues, schools, and community institutions operate in public view, anchored by the assumption that their protection is a foundational duty of government.
That assumption has been tested.
On the Upper East Side in November 2025, an anti-Israel crowd swarmed a synagogue hosting a pro–Land of Israel event. The scene echoed an old shape: shouting at the doors of a Jewish house of worship, intimidation in a public park, the expectation that Jews would need to justify gathering openly as Jews. Instead of drawing a clear perimeter around the synagogue and condemning the mob, Zohran Mamdani, the incoming mayor of New York City, scolded the shul for holding a Zionist event, shifting the burden of restraint onto the Jewish institution.
For Jews who carry history close, the signal was unmistakable. Cities fail their minorities first through language, then through hesitation, and only later through force. When the synagogue itself surrounded by an angry crowd is framed as the problem, safety has become conditional.
Conditional safety never endures.
How the Modern Golem Forms
The Golem of New York does not rise from clay. It forms from memory.
Private guards appear where confidence once lived. Volunteer patrols lengthen into the evening. Parents coordinate entrances and exits. Institutions harden quietly, without ceremony.
These are the incremental steps of adaptation. Communities organize when clarity blurs. Parallel systems take shape when weak reassurance yields to experience.
Other minority groups get municipal funding and public declarations of support while Jews are only lumped into a general “other” category, as in White Plains, the capital of Westchester County just north of New York City. Jews learn that they must fend for themselves, because their basic protection offends many. Frighteningly, even for local politicians.
On the Upper East Side, a growing and proudly Zionist congregation bears a name heavy with inheritance: Altneu Synagogue. Old–New. It is a spin-off of the Park East Synagogue where the anti-Israel mob harassed and intimidated Jews. The echo of Prague’s Altneuschul may also prove prescient. Old dangers return wearing contemporary language. Rivers change. Cities change. But the logic persists.
Natan Sharansky, a famous Russian “refusenik” who was jailed for years before being allowed to leave to Israel, knows the dangers of antisemitic regimes. He came to Washington, D.C. in November 2023 to address 300,000 people about the need to fight back: “We, together, will fight against those who try to give legitimacy to Hamas. We will fight for Israel. We will fight for every Jew. We will fight against antisemitism. We will fight for the values and against corruption of those values which are at the center of our Jewish identity and American identity.”
For the moment, things may be OK. Mamdani appointed Jessica Tisch as police commissioner, a role she has had for several years. She is Jewish and no-nonsense leader, widely supported by the city’s Jewish community. If she can do her job without anti-Zionist and antisemitic politicians limiting her mandate, Jews will be fine. Otherwise, a new golem will rise in the New World, hundreds of years after the Golem of Prague went to sleep in the attic of the Altneuschul.
The conservative group Turning Point USA held its four day AmericaFest conference this week with a lineup of political commentators – and Nicki Minaj (1:13:00). Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire sent the conference in a new direction, coming to speak early and attacking several of the speakers due to come on – including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly – for trafficking in antisemitism and platforming wild conspiracy theories and theorists.
The media lit up that there is a rupture inside the conservative movement. Vice President JD Vance said at the conference, seemingly in response to Shapiro’s line of attacks, that “we have far more important work to do than cancelling each other.”
While the majority of people at Turning Point agree with Shapiro about Israel according to polls, the question of how to engage with people with whom you strongly disagree or want to persuade is an important question about tactics.
Consider the biblical figure Joseph.
When he first dreamed, Joseph placed himself at the center of the story and delivered the message directly to those who would one day bow before him. His brothers did not merely hear a vision of the future; they heard a declaration of hierarchy. The dream named winners and losers, elevation and humiliation.
Truthful or not, it was combustible.
Joseph learned—at extraordinary cost—that telling people they will submit to you does not hasten destiny. It creates enemies who delay it. Fate may be fixed, but its route is not.
Years later, standing before Pharaoh, Joseph applies that hard lesson with precision.
Joseph tells Pharaoh that his dream came in two forms because God has decided to do it—and to do it soon (Genesis 41:25-32). This is a striking claim, because Joseph himself had two dreams many years earlier, and nothing happened quickly.
Joseph is not contradicting himself. He is revealing what he has learned.
As a boy, Joseph assumed repetition meant imminence. Life taught him otherwise. His dreams were doubled, yet delayed for decades. They passed through betrayal, silence, and obscurity before fulfillment.
So why does Joseph now speak with certainty?
Because he ultimately understood something he did not then: the meaning of repetition depends on where the dream is aimed and who holds agency.
Joseph’s youthful dreams were aimed directly at people—at his brothers, at his parents, at their submission to him. They provoked resistance. Those who felt targeted fought the message, and history slowed.
Pharaoh’s dreams are different—not because they are truer, but because Joseph presents them differently.
Joseph does not tell Pharaoh that HIS reign will collapse or that HIS legacy will be erased. He does not aim the dream at Pharaoh’s ego. He does not place Pharaoh at the center of decline and does not elevate himself as the savior.
Instead, Joseph shifts the focus outward—to the land, to the people, to the coming conditions. Egypt will suffer. The famine will devastate the country. The threat is environmental and collective, not personal.
By doing so, Joseph removes both himself and Pharaoh from the line of fire.
Joseph learned an important lesson: when a dream threatens reality rather than pride, it accelerates history.
His own dreams were delayed because they challenged people directly. Pharaoh’s dreams moved quickly because they challenge circumstances instead.
Joseph’s greatness is not merely interpretive; it is strategic. He transforms a divine warning into a solvable problem.
He gives Pharaoh a way forward—storage, planning, delegation, foresight. Pharaoh is no longer defending his status; he is protecting his people.
Joseph learned the difference between telling people what will happen to them and showing them what will happen around them.
The first creates enemies. The second creates leaders.
Truth, But Approach
Joseph did not abandon truth. He learned how to deliver it. Ben Shapiro also spoke about serious matters honestly, but perhaps poorly. He imagined himself as the true shepherd of the conservative movement and sought to de-platform others.
When you aim at people, they shield themselves. When you aim at conditions, people mobilize.
If you want history to move, do not take aim at the audience. Give them the map—and let them walk into the future themselves.
In October 2002, in a case before the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia did something characteristically disarming. In the middle of a commercial case—a dispute about representations, intent, and liability—he reached for an example so blunt that no one in the courtroom could miss the point.
“let’s assume that there is a Federal statute that makes discrimination because of, or failure to hire someone, or let’s say, let’s say killing someone solely because of his race a crime, a separate crime. And someone, let’s assume he kills someone who is Jewish, and he said, well, I didn’t kill him solely because he was Jewish; I killed him because I disagree with the policies of Israel. Does that get him out of the statute?” – Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia on October 8, 2002
The question was not theatrical. It was instructional.
Scalia was making a narrow, lawyerly point about intent laundering—the habit of rebranding a harmful act with a more palatable explanation after the fact. In commercial law, courts reject that move every day. You cannot sell a defective product and escape responsibility by calling the defect innovation. You cannot mislead customers and then claim a higher purpose. Labels don’t change outcomes; explanations don’t erase harm.
He chose that example because everyone understood it immediately. Not because it was exotic, but because it was familiar. People do, in fact, come for Jews with reasons. They always have. The reasons change; the target does not. That is why the hypothetical worked even in a commercial case. It required no ideological scaffolding, no speech doctrine, no moral hedging. The room got it.
Scalia wasn’t talking about protest or expression. He was reminding the Court that post-hoc justification does not transform reality. A Jew selected as a Jew remains a Jew, regardless of the banner the attacker waves. You cannot launder murder through geopolitics any more than you can launder fraud through branding.
What makes the moment unsettling two decades later is not that Scalia saw this clearly in 2002. It’s that today, society now pretends not to.
Today, the very maneuver Scalia identified is routinely indulged. Violence against Jews is reframed as politics. Targeting Jews is explained as resistance. The word “Israel” is treated as a solvent capable of dissolving antisemitism on contact. The act is dissected until the victim disappears into the explanation.
Scalia understood that this maneuver was not new. In the Middle Ages, it was radical preachers who performed the laundering. On Easter, from pulpits across Europe, Jews were accused of killing Christ, poisoning wells, murdering Christian babies. The charge was always moral, never personal. The violence that followed—pogroms, expulsions, massacres—was framed not as hatred, but as righteous response. The excuse sanctified the act. The victim was still Jewish.
“The crimes you are committing in Palestine by desecrating the sanctity of the holy sites – foremost among them the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque – you should expect reactions, not only from the Muslims, but rather from the entire world.” – Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs and Islamic Relations Mahmoud Al-Habbash on December 15, 2025 about the massacre of Jews in Sydney, Australia
The vocabulary has changed. The mechanism has not.
Today the laundering is done in different robes—through left-wing media narratives, academic language, teacher-union resolutions, and activist slogans. The Jewish state is branded unholy, colonial, imperial. Zionism is recast as original sin. Once that premise is accepted, Jews everywhere become legitimate stand-ins—symbols of something larger, targets by proxy. “Globalize the intifada” is not poetry. It is a call that travels, and it always knows where to land.
The laundering does not stop on the left. Figures like Candace Owens have vilified Jews across time itself—casting them as architects of the slave trade two centuries ago, as hidden hands behind modern social decay, as a people uniquely responsible for nearly every ill that can be stitched into a narrative. The effect is not historical inquiry; it is moral conditioning. When Jews are blamed for everything, they become appropriate targets for anything. The excuse differs. The permission is the same.
This is why Scalia’s example mattered—and why he chose it so plainly. He knew that people come for Jews with reasons. He knew those reasons are never the point. And he assumed, reasonably at the time, that everyone else could still see the difference between explanation and absolution.
Decades later, that clarity is treated as controversial. Motives are said to cleanse acts. Ideology is said to transform targets. Murder is said to become discourse if the language is fashionable enough.
You can change the sermon. You can update the slogans. You can trade Easter blood libels for postcolonial theory.
First One Through 