#liel leibovitz

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Liel Leibovitz

According to sources in and out of the U.S. government familiar with Fenzel’s reports and advocacy, nearly every claim presented by the USSC as fact seems to have been lifted directly, sometimes verbatim, from the websites of highly partisan pro-Palestinian organizations, including the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OCHA) and the far-left Israeli NGO B’Tselem, which accuses Israel of apartheid and receives vast support from European governments and from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

In the past 12 months, 13 Israelis were murdered by Palestinians in Jerusalem and 17 in the West Bank—not counting those slaughtered on Oct. 7, 2023—while doing nothing more provocative than driving home or stopping for gas. The number of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by Israelis under such conditions over the same time period is zero.

But the story the administration has been telling anyone who will listen is very different. By scrubbing any mention of the daily violence directed by Palestinian terror operatives against Jewish civilians living in the West Bank from his reports, Fenzel has eliminated the clear retaliatory motive for the vast majority of attacks by Israelis against West Bank Palestinians. Thinly laundered reports from expressly anti-Israel organizations, designed to support an illusion of innocent Palestinians being violently attacked by bloodthirsty Israelis, paint a picture of an Israeli equivalent to the Palestinian atrocities of Oct. 7, lending itself an easy “both-sides” posture meant to ease the way to creating a new Palestinian state in both the West Bank and Gaza. With an executive order now in place, the Biden administration has all the tools it needs to crack down on any form of Jewish life in Judea and Samaria, and on anyone, in Israel or stateside, who supports it.

[eretzyisrael]

by Liel Leibovitz

I’ve spent the last 12 hours speaking to Israelis who were at the Supernova music festival. Their testimonies, as you would imagine, are very emotional. At least one broke down mid-conversation and wasn’t able to continue his recollection.

The attack on the festival outside of Re’im began around 7 a.m. The party was at its peak by then—which meant that by then most people were inebriated. At first, partygoers heard a loud explosion, which they took to be another sporadic rocket attack on southern Israel. But then the explosions grew louder and constant, and kept going for about five minutes. The music stopped, and the police protecting the 4,000 or 5,000 ravers began pushing everyone to leave.

By then, the terrorists were approaching in pickup trucks bearing Hamas military markings.

Shooting began. Many were executed on the spot. 260 bodies have been found, so far, on the site of the rave.

Many of the young men and women started running in the flat expanse of the western Negev desert. Faced with the spectacle of kids fleeing for their lives on a largely flat surface, the terrorists began rounding up the rest of their victims.

Others were captured and bound and kidnapped. “I saw videos with a male getting held by a group of Arab kids. Like, they’re like 16, 17,” one survivor recalled. “They’re kids, but they’re they’re young men already, and they’re holding this guy, and he looks as his girlfriend is being mounted on a bike and driven away from him. God knows what she’s going to experience… Women have been raped at the area of the rave next to their friends bodies, dead bodies.”

Several of these rape victims appear to have been later executed. Others were taken to Gaza. In photographs released online, you can see several paraded through the city’s streets, blood gushing from between their legs.

One survivor who’d returned to the scene later in the day to look for his friends spoke, in a breaking voice, of what he’d seen. Of the bodies, mainly of young women, lying cold and mutilated. Of scantily clad corpses, many of whom appeared to have been shot at point blank. Of cars, perforated by bullets or blown up by grenades.

Some of the lucky ones ran to a nearby wadi, seeking shelter amid the shrubbery. “I felt like they were shooting right above our heads,” one survivor recalled. “I dove into a bush… It felt like the shooting was coming from 180 degrees, all around us. I understood we’re going to be there for at least a couple of hours. And I had nothing on me. And I was like, the only thing I want is a weapon. I want something to protect us.” Eventually, he and his friends, some of them barefoot, decided to risk it and try to reach safety, walking close enough to the road to see it but not so close so that they might be seen. “I said, if we see like army or police cars, we’re going to go to the road. Otherwise, we’re going to stay away. When we saw police and army cars, we knew that it’s a safe place.”

Later, when the gruesome attack was finally over and IDF soldiers managed to subdue the attackers, they searched these trucks and found RPG launchers, high-end communications devices, assorted AK-47s and other mostly Soviet-made weapons, along with numerous copies of the Quran.

[fakeoldmanfucker]

I was tagged by @pyrchance, thank you!!

rules: tag 9 people you want to get to know better

last song: 30/90 from Tick Tick Boom as performed by Andrew Garfield

last show: I honestly can't remember anything before The Social Network took over my life in December of 2022. I've been watching more movies than shows lately, but nothing really new since The Social Network.

currently watching: Succession! I'm on the season 1 finale right now and I love it so much.

currently reading: The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia (Stephanie Butnick, Liel Leibovitz, and Mark Oppenheimer) and Letters from Black America (edited by Pamela Newkirk)

current obsession: The Social Network (2010) dir. David Fincher script by Aaron Sorkin. I am, as all of my close (and not so close) friends will attest to, very much not normal about this movie.

no pressure tag: @bookjoyworm @reaux07 @bilvy @princewardo @ericbogosbian @4daysworthofwater @novatoure @www-nerd @fourteentrout and anyone else who wants to!

[cavenewstimes]

We need a post-October 7 Talmud: a conversation with Liel Leibovitz

It is November 10, 1938. It’s in a small city in Germany. It is the night after Kristalnacht, the night of broken glass that ushered in the mass roundups and the killings that would become the Holocaust, what we call the Shoah in Hebrew. There are a group of men shoved together in a cell. They are all of different ages. One of them turns to a much younger man, a rabbinical student who was no more…

[sutrala]

In the aftermath of Hamas' horrific attack on Israel last weekend, and the barbaric kidnappings, torture and slaughter of hundreds of civilians, Jews across the world are asking hard questions about who they can truly count on. Author and podcaster Liel Leibovitz penned a...

[ear-worthy]

Actor Joshua Malina Becomes New Co-Host Of Unorthodox Podcast

Host of the podcast PR After Hours, Alex Greenwood, recently penned an article called The Power Of Niche In Podcasting. 

In the article, Greenwood writes, "One of the remarkable aspects of niche podcasts is their ability to build vibrant communities around specialized interests. These shows bring together people with a shared passion, fostering discussions, debates, and connections among like-minded individuals."

 That's exactly what the podcast Unorthodox accomplishes. Niche doesn't necessarily mean small in number, but instead a specific community of listeners. Unorthodox bills itself as, "the universe’s leading Jewish podcast." That hyperbole aside, the podcast delivers on its boastand even delivers on its tagline that "you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy it."

Podcasting for a very specific audience does have its trap doors and moral conundrums. Consider how discovery material from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News uncovered how hosts didn't believe the propaganda about election fraud they pushed on their audience. In essence, Fox News decided to pander rather than risk exposing the truth and alienating its audience. 

Thankfully, Unorthodox is a thinking person's podcast. It doesn't want listeners to nod in mindless agreement. Instead, it would like listeners to scratch their heads and embrace complexity, ambiguity, and diversity of opinion. To prove that point, the podcast has a "gentile of the week" segment.

 To demonstrate that Unorthodox continues to grow and improve, Tablet Magazine has announced that Joshua Malina, whose breakout role was in the beloved presidential television drama The West Wing, will be joining the Jewish publication’s popular podcast, Unorthodox. He will join current hosts Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leibovitz. Malina’s first episode as co-host will be available to stream and download on May 25, wherever you get your podcasts, and on the Unorthodox website.

Unorthodox, which has been airing weekly since 2015, has a passionate audience of tens of thousands of listeners, who call themselves the J-Crew. Each episode features a segment called News of the Jews, as well as interviews with both a Jewish guest and Gentile of the Week. Previous guests have included actors Nick Kroll, Kathryn Hahn, David Duchovny, and Clive Owen; food personalities Molly Yeh, Jake Cohen, and Adeena Sussman; spiritual leaders Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Father James Martin, Swami Tyaganada; designers Jonathan Adler, Isaac Mizrahi, and Rebecca Minkoff; comedians Judy Gold, Alex Edelman, and Zarna Garg; writers Gabrielle Zevin, Nick Hornby, and Zibby Owens; elected officials including Joe Lieberman, Jared Polis, and Katie Porter. Over the years, Unorthodox has become required listening across diverse Jewish communities worldwide, and has also become assigned listening in rabbi-led conversion classes. Building on their reputation as conveners of thoughtful and fun Jewish conversation, the show’s co-hosts published a best-selling book in 2019, titled The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia: From Abraham to Zabar’s and Everything In Between. Responding to calls for high-quality Jewish audio content, the team behind Unorthodox launched Tablet Studios in 2020, producing such acclaimed podcasts as Dara Horn’s Adventures With Dead Jews; Radioactive: The Father Charles Coughlin Story, produced in association with WNET; and Gatecrashers, a podcast about the history of Jews in the Ivy League

  Upon graduation from Yale University with a B.A. degree in Theatre, Joshua Malina made his professional acting debut in the Broadway production of A Few Good Men, written by Aaron Sorkin. Joshua went on to star as Jeremy Goodwin in Sorkin’s critically-acclaimed television series Sports Night. He worked with Sorkin once again on The West Wing, joining the cast in the fourth season, as Will Bailey. On the big screen, he has appeared in Bulworth, In the Line of Fire, and A View from the Top, among others. More recently, Joshua starred as U.S. Attorney General David Rosen in ABC’s hit show Scandal, and President Siebert in The Big Bang Theory. This is not Malina’s first foray into podcasting: Together with Hrishikesh Hirway, he hosted the hit PRX show The West Wing Weekly. More recently, he was the co-host, with Rabbi Shira Stutman, of PRX’s Chutzpod! Co-host Stephanie Butnick is co-founder of Tablet Studios and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She is also the author, together with Liel Leibovitz and Mark Oppenheimer, of The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia: From Abraham to Zabar’s and Everything in Between. 

Co-host Liel Leibovitz is co-founder and editorial director of Tablet Studios as well as the host of Take One, a daily podcast about the Talmud. A contributor to a host of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Commentary and First Things, he’s the author of several books, including biographies of Leonard Cohen and Stan Lee, and, most recently, the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide. “There’s a term in linguistics called cooperative overlapping, which basically means excitedly interrupting each other,” said Butnick and Leibovitz. “It’s how Jews speak, and we very much look forward to cooperatively overlapping with Joshua Malina. We’ve been his fans for years, and think that his passion and commitment to being a loud and proud Jew will bring a new and joyful spirit to the show.” New episodes of Unorthodox are released every Thursday on all platforms where you listen to podcasts. You can learn more about Unorthodox and Tablet Magazine by visiting TabletMag.com.

Finally, in the course of doing this article, I listened to several episodes, and one of my recent favorites is episode # 358 in April with podcast expert Arielle Nissenblatt and Andrea Wakefield on Italian American cooking.  This episode combines two of my great passions -- podcasting and Italian food. 

In the interview, Nissenblatt -- who may not sleep since she's so busy -- mentions my favorite, underappreciated podcast, Mobituaries with Mo Rocca. Listeners should also check out Nissenblatt's podcast recommendation website, EarBuds Podcast Collective, and the Trailer Park podcast, where anyone can submit their podcast trailer for review.

The interview with Nissenblatt reveals how the tenor of the podcast reflects the culture of its listeners. While interviewing Nissenblatt, the co-hosts comment that a Jewish podcast always operates at a sped-up rate, with interruptions and people talking over each other.

And that's exactly what happened. While interviewing Nissenblatt about her fascinating journey in podcasting, there was fast talk, interruptions, and multiple people talking. Such sonic chaos would be corrected by any self-respecting podcasting trainer. Yet, miraculously, this cultural dissonance works and even sparkles.

Malina is a thoughtful, reflective man who will add to the depth of the podcast. He's not a vacuous, self-absorbed actor with little going on upstairs when he doesn't have lines to read. He will definitely add to the mishegoss (Yiddish for craziness). He joins the podcast on March 25th.

I also recommend Tablet Magazine. It's high-level journalism, and it doesn't matter what religion or ethnic background you are.

[universitybookstore]

New from Yale University Press in their marvelous Jewish Lives Series, Stan Lee: A Life in Comics, by Liel Leibovitz.

[arcticdementor]

In yet another sign of our tortured political moment, the most meaningful civic discussion currently raging is being waged not by our elected officials, spiritual leaders, novelists or celebrities, but by two writers engaged in what may appear to be an intramural intellectual quibble in niche publications.

It began last week when Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor of the New York Post, took to the journal First Things to point out what he believed was wrong much of American conservatism, a bundle of self-contradictory tics embodied, he argued, by National Review writer and dedicated Never Trumper David French. It didn’t take long for French to jab right back. A host of other pugilists, including New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, soon entered the arena, framing the argument in personal, sometimes quasi-slanderous terms.

…

Even worse, today’s social justice warriors, Ahmari continued, see any dissent from their dogmas as an inherent assault. “They say, in effect: For us to feel fully autonomous, you must positively affirm our sexual choices, our transgression, our power to disfigure our natural bodies and redefine what it means to be human,” Ahmari wrote, “lest your disapprobation make us feel less than fully autonomous.” This means that no real discussion is possible—the only thing a true conservative can do is, in Ahmari’s pithy phrase, “to fight the culture war with the aim of defeating the enemy and enjoying the spoils in the form of a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good.”

…

Almost immediately, French delivered his riposte. Ahmari’s call to arms, he wrote in his response, betrayed a deep misunderstanding of both our national moment and our national character. “America,” French wrote, “will always be a nation of competing worldviews and competing, deeply held values. We can forsake a commitment to liberty and launch the political version of the Battle of Verdun, seeking the ruin of our foes, or we can recommit to our shared citizenship and preserve a space for all American voices, even as we compete against those voices in politics and the marketplace of ideas.”

Which means that civility is not a secondary value but the main event, the measure of most, if not all, things. Bret Stephens agreed: In his column in The New York Times, he called Ahmari—who was born Muslim in Tehran and had found his path to Catholicism—“an ardent convert” and a “would-be theocrat” who, inflamed with dreams of the divine will, had failed to understand that it was precisely the becalmed civilities of “value-neutral liberalism” that has made his brave journey from Tehran to the New York Post possible.

…

You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.

The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”

To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.

…

Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue. Certainly, the Never Trumpers should have known better than to join in the massive publicity campaign around a “dossier” supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer rehashing third-hand hearsay and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can still find many faults with Donald Trump’s behavior in and out of office, including some cardinal enough perhaps to merit impeachment, without buying in to some moronic ghost story about an orange-hued traitor who seized the highest office in the land with the help of Vladimir Putin’s social media goons. All that should go without saying, especially for people who ostensibly devote their lives to elevating and enriching the tone of our public discourse.

…

It is true that French took care to sound unfailingly fair, a lone voice for reason in a political reality inflamed by lunatics left and right. The thing he was being reasonable about, however, was an FBI investigation that emerged out of a blatant politically motivated forgery. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that French was carrying on his arguments in good faith, even when overwhelming evidence to the contrary was always there for a slightly more curious or skeptical journalist to discover. What’s disturbing, from the public virtue standpoint, is that French has yet to admit his own failings, which are compounded by his less-than-courageous misrepresentations of what he actually wrote: In his reply to Ahmari, he strongly denied he had promoted the collusion story, a point of view that’s difficult to defend when your byline appears on stories like “There Is Now Evidence That Senior Trump Officials Attempted to Collude with Russia.”

French and the other self-appointed guardians of civility, then, should do us all a favor and drop the civic virtue act. They’re not disinterested guardians of our public institutions; they are actors, working in an industry that rewards them for dressing up in Roman Republican drag and reciting Cicero for the yokels. This is why Bill Kristol, another of the Never Trumpers, could raise money for his vanity website, The Bulwark, and why he could expect his new creation be lauded on CNN as “a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump,” even as the site was staffed by leftist millennials and dutifully followed progressive propaganda lines. Like anyone whose living depends on keeping on the right side of a leftist industry, they understood that there’s only so much you can say if you care about cashing a paycheck—especially when the president and leader of your own party won’t take your phone calls.

…

To tell an Iranian immigrant that he doesn’t understand the way American liberalism works because he ended up on the side of faith rather than on the side of deracinated cosmopolitan universalism isn’t just an impoverished reading of America’s foundations or a blatantly condescending comment; it’s also indicative of a mindset that seeks to immediately equate any disagreement with some inherent and irreparable character flaw.

…

So much for the cocktail party chatter. The larger problem here is that at no point do Stephens, French, et al. deliver a concrete explanation of how they propose conservatism go about opposing, to say nothing of reversing, the new social and moral order that the progressive left has been busily implementing in America for a decade or more. At best, they claim that there’s no real crisis after all.

…

Ahmari, not unlike the zealous left he opposes, has a very distinct idea of where he wants the country to go. He doesn’t want it to end up where objecting to lunatic theories, forged by crackpot academics and defying millennia of lived human experience, gets you called a bigot and fired from your job. He doesn’t want to try and engage in dialogue with people who believe that disagreeing with their opinions causes them some sort of harm and that speech must therefore be regulated by the government or large tech companies. He doesn’t want an America in which color of skin and religious affiliation and sexual preference trump or mute the content of your character. Looking at public schools and private universities, Hollywood and publishing, academia and social media, Ahmari sees the threat posed by progressive doctrine to established American norms and values as entirely real. That he wants to fight it doesn’t make him, as Stephens suggested, a Catholic mullah-in-waiting. It makes him a normal American.

Which is why American Jews, too—whether they identify as liberals or conservatives—would do well to take this squabble seriously. The liberalism that American Jews have defended so ardently, the reason so many of us ended up voting for the left and supporting organizations like the ACLU and cheering on firebrands like Bella Abzug, was geared to secure precisely the values and rights that Ahmari champions, without which it would have been impossible for us to survive, let alone thrive, as immigrants to a white, Christian-majority culture.

A religious minority cannot expect to last very long in a society, like the one the progressive left advocates, that is allergic to tradition and intolerant of dissent. Only in an America that takes faith seriously, that respects and empowers community, and that shudders at any attempt to censor wrong beliefs and incorrect thinking, can Jews hope to thrive.

[jdsquared]

Liel Leibovitz is a shonda

I will not take moral lessons from a fool who wants unvaccinated crowds together in synagogue and thinks rejecting medical guidance is like the Prophets who stood up to opposition. 

Torah commands that we keep G-d's laws that we "shall live by them." "Live by them and do not die by them," Talmud explains (Yoma 85b). Our obligation to preserve life, pikuach nefesh, supersedes any other obligation. Talmud specifically says to trust medical opinions when in doubt.

Torah commands building a fence around a roof to prevent falling, it forbids us to put ourselves at risk and just expect G-d to protect us, but this fool says we NEED to take risks and dares taunt us to be brave like Jews who prayed during the Holocaust!? He calls trying to create safe conditions "idolatry"! 

When I looked him up, I saw that he's the same Tablet columnist who advocated EMULATING Pharaoh's genocide of the newborn Jews so that we too would "deal wisely" with hostile Arab nations. 

I've truly enjoyed his daf yomi discussions until now, but how can I continue to take seriously Talmudic analysis from someone who so missed the point?

Anyone got a recommendation for a different day yomi podcast?

Shabbat shalom, everyone.

[eretzyisrael]

BY

LIEL LEIBOVITZ

I am writing this on Saturday, as news outlets report hundreds of Israeli dead, and dozens, if not hundreds, of soldiers and civilians kidnapped by Hamas terrorists and taken into Gaza.

It is never a good idea to write anything as events are still rapidly unfolding, especially as neither I nor anyone else can answer the only question that ultimately matters—namely, “what happens now?” But we can answer another, much more rudimentary and no less urgent question: Who’s at fault?

There will be plenty of time to pore over how a cataclysmic disaster of this magnitude could happen, and who—from Bibi down to the IDF chief of staff, head of intelligence, et al.—failed to protect the lives of Israelis. A lot of it will have to do with people who should have known better—including former prime ministers and former and current high-level security officials—abandoning the core commitment of defending Israel and instead entertaining themselves by cosplaying some game of Demokratia, complete with donning handmaid outfits and ululating about fascism. Hysterics about your political opponents being the enemies of democracy may be fun in Kalorama; in Sderot and Ofakim, and even in Tel Aviv, there’s a price to pay for abandoning the real world and indulging in fetish play.

But the bigger mistake on the part of the Israelis is that over the past few years they have gotten the power equation that governs their lives backward: Instead of understanding themselves to be citizens of a strong but beleaguered country whose first responsibility is to protect itself, they luxuriated in the fantasy that the United States was and always would be their protector—when in fact the ruling party in America has decided that Israel is a liability.

Watch this video. That’s a Hamas drone taking down an Israeli Merkava tank. A drone operated by an organization sponsored and trained by Iran applying both Iranian tactics and, most likely, Iranian hardware to attack Israel. This happened weeks after America sent Iran $6 billion, and one week after we learned that the American government had over the past years ceded whole parts of its own intelligence units to Iranian spies.

The stage for this attack was not set in or by Israel. It was set by the United States.

For the better part of the past decade, the United States has pursued a foreign policy designed to strengthen Iran and enable it to form a strong sphere of influence in the region. This is the idea behind what Tony Badran and Michael Doran called “the realignment,” a vision of a new world order in which America partners with Iran in order to “find a more stable balance of power that would make [the Middle East] less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” Those words aren’t Badran and Doran’s; they’re Robert Malley’s, Barack Obama’s lead negotiator on the Iran deal who, as Semafor reported this week, helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations. Biden himself, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, spoke of “an integrated Middle East,” using the phrase no less than three times to make clear that his administration was intent on pursuing his predecessor’s commitment to seeing Iran not as a U.S. foe but as our collaborator.

And the Biden administration wasn’t just talking the talk. It was also walking the walk, from unfreezing billions in assets to make it easier for Tehran to support its proxy Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon to sending huge cash infusions used primarily to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of unvetted “security personnel.” And while the previous administration halted all aid to the Palestinians—directly because of the “pay for slay” policies that support the families of those who slaughter Israelis—the Biden administration was quick to reverse the decision.

Lots of people argued that this was simply clear-minded realpolitik after decades of disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bullshit. Here’s how you know this policy was, and is, motivated not by what’s best for America but by what would kneecap the Jewish state: Because it extended to inside Israel’s borders.

The publication on July 16, 2023, of an article by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz calling for an end to U.S. aid to Israel opened a fresh debate over a topic dominated by outdated assumptions and emotional entreaties. To deepen the conversation, Tablet invited a group that includes a retired IDF general, U.S. senators and members of Congress, former Middle East diplomats, and writers from various political persuasions to offer their thoughts on the issue. Their articles, and more from Tablet's archive, are collected here.

In addition to creating the external circumstances for terror, the Biden administration did everything in its power to derail Israel’s democratically elected government and prevent it from being able to see an attack like today’s coming. That the Israelis let themselves fall for this was stupidity of criminal order. But the invisible hand here was America’s. Biden himself took to CNN to call Netanyahu’s government “the most extreme” he’s ever seen, and lost no opportunity to lecture his Israeli counterpart about democratic values. The former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, took the unprecedented step of intervening in the country’s domestic affairs, announcing ominously that he “think[s] most Israelis want the United States to be in their business.” And if words weren’t enough, the administration also sent American dollars to support the anti-Netanyahu NGOs organizing the protests that brought Israel to a halt for months. Netanyahu was famously denied an invite to the White House; his key opponent, opposition leader Benny Gantz, had no such problem.

One idea floating around my inbox this afternoon is that part of Israel’s complete military collapse today was caused by a massive Iranian cyber attack that hacked its systems and prevented it from seeing what ought to have been obvious. That this could not only be true but related to the U.S. having recently given a team of Iranian agents high-level access to U.S. intelligence, which could very well have included information about Israeli systems, is not nearly as far-fetched a scenario as many would like it to be. And to the extent that we ever find out the truth about any of this, it will be because of Elon Musk, without whom we’d only have access to state-approved propaganda.

It doesn’t matter what words Biden says today. When you champion Iran; when you send it and its proxies money; when you reward Palestinian violence; when you go out of your way to portray Bibi as a dangerous fascist; when you finance and champion his opponents, contributing to further instability and unrest; when you hand over U.S. intelligence keys to Iranian agents; when you have your spokespeople declare it “disinformation” for people to connect obvious dots; when you do all of this, you know what is going to happen. You mean for it to happen.

Here today, then, is the challenge for Israel’s leadership: Can you accept that this is what’s happening? Can you imagine a future for the Jewish state decoupled from America? Because you must.

For at least a decade now, we’ve been told that part of what makes Israel so mighty and so safe is its superior technology, developed in partnership with America. Who, went this line of argument, needs to worry about missiles when we have Iron Dome and F-35 stealth fighter planes as part of a $3 billion military aid package? Who cares about guns and grenades when we’ve developed high-level cybersecurity systems that can strike at will? The war of the future, we’ve been promised, will be waged on computer terminals, in cyberspace—not in dusty border towns.

And then came a gaggle of Gazans with Kevlar vests and pickup trucks and small arms that brought Israel to its knees. “Startup nation” has been ravaged by reality. It is clear that the dream Israel’s elites have entertained for the past decade—to become part of the global set of people who make all the money and all the decisions and have all the right opinions and fashionable friends—has soured into a nightmare.

And now it’s time to wake up. Stop prattling about the “cycle of violence,” about faults on both sides, about “the occupation,” about Bibi’s cabinet appointments, or any other distraction.

Reroot yourself in what you should never have forgotten—which is that we have enemies not because of what we did or didn’t do here or there, or on this day or that one, or because our hasbara isn’t good enough or because it is too good, or any other pointless argument. It is because we have vicious enemies, and they hate us. Instead of trying pathetically to curry favor with American overlords by scrubbing Judaism from your streets, pray to HaShem to fulfill the promise made to Isaiah and deliver vengeance. Reject, with great force and wrath, the death cult that has gripped so much of American political, public, and intellectual life and that sees virtue in propping up benighted regimes in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. We don’t need an integrated Middle East, because we don’t wish to integrate with the murderous mullahs and their packs of wild animals. We have our own interests, and if we’re smart—and if we wish to survive—we’ll never forget it again.

[jewishbookworld]

Stan Lee: A Life in Comics by Liel Leibovitz Few artists have had as much of an impact on American popular culture as Stan Lee. The characters he created—Spider-Man and Iron Man, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four—occupy Hollywood’s imagination and production schedules, generate billions at the box office, and come as close as anything we have to a shared American mythology.

[lacependragon]

[picture ID: two stacks of library books in a living room. The titles are listed after the ID as part of the post]

My current books out from the library. In order, left stack to right stack:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai

Torn by Rowena Miller

Queen of the Tiles by Hanna Alkaf

A Conspiracy of Truths by Alex Rowland

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

Survival of the Friendliest by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

We Could Be Heroes by Mike Chen

Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic by Paul Conti

Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore

The Blood Trials by N. E. Davenport

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia

Tired as F*ck by Caroline Dooner

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham

Blood Like Magic by Liselle Sambury

Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse

Realm Breaker by Victoria Aveyard

The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia by Stephania Butnick, Liel Leibovitz, and Mark Oppenheimer

Everything I've started is v good!

[settledthingsstrange]

[A]fter 225 long and fruitful years of this terminology, “right” and “left” are now empty categories, meaning little more than “the blue team” and “the green team” in your summer camp’s color war. You don’t get to be “against the rich” if the richest people in the country fund your party in order to preserve their government-sponsored monopolies. You are not “a supporter of free speech” if you oppose free speech for people who disagree with you. You are not “for the people” if you pit most of them against each other based on the color of their skin, or force them out of their jobs because of personal choices related to their bodies. You are not “serious about economic inequality” when you happily order from Amazon without caring much for the devastating impact your purchases have on the small businesses that increasingly are either subjugated by Jeff Bezos’ behemoth or crushed by it altogether. You are not “for science” if you refuse to consider hypotheses that don’t conform to your political convictions and then try to ban critical thought and inquiry from the internet. You are not an “anti-racist” if you label—and sort!—people by race. You are not “against conformism” when you scare people out of voicing dissenting opinions.

Liel Leibovitz, “The Turn”

[schraubd]

In Praise of Getting Out of the Way (If You're Not Going To Lead)

It's been noted by several sources that mainstream Democratic politicians have been considerably more vocal in calling out Israeli behavior during the latest round of hostilities to grip the holy land. This includes criticisms of Israeli conduct in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount, as well as in the ensuing conflict with Hamas in Gaza. We have nearly thirty Democratic Senators, led by Sen. Jon Ossoff, calling for a ceasefire to stop further loss of civilian life. A cadre of Jewish lawmakers, including some stalwarts like Jerry Nadler, specifically called out Israeli police violence as a precipitator of the conflict,  and condemned evictions as well as the "deepening occupation". This, in many respects, is a far more interesting development than the more predictable harsh condemnations emanating out of folks like Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, or AOC.

To be clear: there's been no meaningful hesitation among the bulk of Democrats to condemn Hamas or to stand with Israeli civilians under fire. But, far more than in years past, these statements are existing side-by-side with vocal declarations of Palestinian rights. It's getting to the point where folks have begun noticing just how far behind President Biden is from the bulk of the party. 

That's all very notable, but there's a particular angle I've noticed that I think is worth flagging specifically: as Democratic politicians have evinced this shift, there's been relatively little pushback against it from mainstream Jewish organizations. I've seen a bit a sniping at the rhetoric from the furthest-left, "squad"-aligned wing of the caucus, but by and large it's been pretty quiet. Liel Leibovitz  wrote a characteristically sophomoric hit job on Jamaal Bowman, but it got no traction. I haven't seen any serious recriminations against folks like Nadler, or Ossoff, or Raphael Warnock, or Jan Schakowsky, Steve Cohen, or Chris Van Hollen, or Ro Khanna, or any of the other folks who seem to be increasingly comfortable articulating the new Democratic Party line. Groups like the AJC and AIPAC are tweeting out generic messages thanking congressfolk for "standing with Israel" when they condemn Hamas rockets, but they aren't outwardly attacking members of Congress who pair those messages with ones strongly criticizing Israeli actions and insisting that a change is necessary.

Now, to be clear, these Jewish organizations are by no means leading on the subject. But at the very least, they're not standing in the way of those folks who are. I'd rather they lead, but if they're not going to do that I'll settle for them getting out of the way. 

If that seems like a low bar, maybe it is, but I think this actually matters a great deal for at least two reasons. Conceptually, it matters because it falsifies the notion that anyone who criticizes Israel in the slightest way will face the unbridled fury of the entirety of the Jewish Lobby. It turns out "the Jewish Lobby" seems relatively okay about criticism framed in this way, and the more that everyone internalizes that truth (both so criticisms of this sort become more standard parts of our politics, and so that we might finally rid ourselves of the self-pitying "calling me antisemitic because I said Israelis are the new Nazis is just another case of how any 'criticism of Israel' is forbidden" mewls) the happier we'll all be. And practically, the muted response signals that the sort of politics that's becoming the Democratic consensus is a viable one to hold -- it won't cause some deep intra-party crackup, it won't be the fodder for devastating attack ads, it won't make moderate Democrats vulnerable with either swing voters or middle-of-the-road Jewish voters. 

This politics can work -- which is good, because it should work and it must work. And we should take the time to notice that it is working.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/3tWEzlo