love peace and chase after peace.

stay strong. survive. 💛 🧡 ✡️ 🪬 this is a sideblog run by Jewish women with disparate backgrounds.🪬✡️ jumblr and allied friends, we love you 💙 am yisrael chai

[palominojacoby]

Cara Drook, Reclaiming La Belle Juive, (2022 –).

'"La belle Juive" translates to "the beautiful Jewess." It is an archetype of Jewish women that is repeatedly shown in paintings and media throughout history. "La belle Juive" is rooted in antisemitism and misogyny. My goal with this collection is to have Jewish women take control of their narrative and reclaim "La belle Juive." I want to return dignity to the subjects and show what truly makes Jewish women beautiful.'

[starlightomatic]

i think that when people call israeli bomb shelters “bunkers” it’s intentionally to conjure up associations of “wealthy privileged people being cowardly and hiding from the consequences of their harming The People” (bc that is what they believe) instead of “civilians taking shelter from war”

[starlightomatic]

but they’ll call them bomb shelters again when it’s time to spin a different narrative. for example, “the israelis aren’t letting indian migrant workers into bomb shelters, so they’re sleeping in the train station!! they’re all white supremacists/jewish supremacists!!”

when, actually:

- anyone is allowed in any public bomb shelter

- the train stations are bomb shelters

- lots of white jewish israelis were sleeping there too

[starlightomatic]

it’s part of a concerted effort to paint israeli civilians as the equivalent of american billionaires in the mind of americans

so when they encounter people they really cannot fit into that framework, they have to shift it, to keep israeli civilians as villains

[starlightomatic]

and similarly, i think a lot of people look at october 7th as basically fyre festival (a group of wealthy privileged people getting their just desserts)

[nimrochan]

Can we talk about the lack of critical thought in these claims?

You have 15-90 seconds to make it to a bomb shelter once you receive an alert. Some people run there in nothing but a towel because they were in the middle of a shower.

What are the logistics of banning certain people? Is there an Israeli bouncer?

Are they at the door like

Bitch please.

What about the vast majority of Jews being Mizrahi (as in, their families have never set foot outside the Middle East?) Do they check IDs on people who are too brown for their liking?

What an amazing feat to filter out hundreds of people in 15-90 seconds!

And they complain about 50K+ Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, yet never point out that Hamas won’t let civilians into shelters? They’d rather complain that *checks notes* Israel does?

It reminds me also of the claims that Israel has a space laser that vaporizes entire human bodies, but that Israel also harvests human organs from killed Palestinians.

So the magical space laser vaporizes everything, but leaves the organs intact?

Antisemites are so fucking stupid I stg.

[hiddurmitzvah]

Beyond the Golem & the Dybbuk lies a forgotten world of Jewish magic and folklore myths!

After many preparation we are launching a 50-page, fully illustrated zine exploring the hidden creatures, spirits, and myths of Eastern European Ashkenazi folklore. If you love dark, whimsical lore and handmade art, check it out!

You can grab a digital copy, a premium physical zine, or limited-edition art prints.

Please reblog and support the campaign here:

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Beyond the Golem and the Dybukk lies a forgotten world of jewish magic. This 50 page, fully illustrated zine unearths the lesser-known creat

[chutzpahchesed]

On July 9th, after a rocky relationship with Jewish writing since 10/7 (to put it mildly), PEN America actually decided to interview Jewish and Israeli writers and put together a relatively thoughtful piece about it. It included Jewish and Israeli writers noting that publishers have told them it is not the right time to publish Jewish stories, insisting a name be changed from Yael to Sue, and other pretty damning evidence that the industry has become openly hostile to all Jewishness.

If you read the Instagram comments, it's a hellscape. Poet Mohammad el-Kurd, who in January 2024 said "we must normalize massacres as the status quo" wrote "boo hoo." More upsetting to me was Molly Crabapple (writer of a recent bestseller glorifying the Labor Bund as a reasonable path forward for contemporary Jews) who basically commented that her success as a Jew in the writing world proves the discrimination is bogus. But of course what she fails to note is that you can only succeed in the Jewish writing world right now if your writing is *explicitly anti Zionist.* and I don't mean just an antizionist writer, but a book that forwards antizionism as an argument. Several of the interviewed Jewish and Israeli writers weren't writing about Zionism at all. They simply weren't writing about *antizionism specifically* which is the only way to publish Jewish writing right now.

To make matters worse, the article, for the crime or suggesting that cultural boycotts that treat Israelis as inhuman are bad actually, was so heinous apparently, that Pen America's President, Dinaw Mengestu, immediately resigned, outraged that it was published at all.

Writer Elissa Wald, who is quoted in the PEN article even notes that they didn't publish much of her actual criticism that would surely have further angered readers:

"They left out the part where I said I thought PEN America's capitulation to antizionists -- by which I mean, among other things, their surrender to cultural boycotts, their amplication of the genocide libel, their shift in focus to issues like "free speech on campus" which are outside the scope of their (literary- based) mission, and the intense internal pressure on Suzanne Nossel to step down as leader of their organization was contemptible and pathetic, especially since their primary purpose is to defend freedom of expression." She wrote on Facebook.

The fact that a relatively sanitized "refusing to publish Israelis and Jews based on their nationality and ethnicity is bad actually" has caused this kind of uproar is unsurprising but another reminder that the writing world is rapidly closing itself off to Jews. Who knows, maybe we'll invent a new art form again like we did with comic books last time.

from here

‘A Silent Moratorium’ 

Interviews with Israeli and Jewish writers who report facing rising isolation and exclusion.

Jerusalem-based literary agent Deborah Harris represents dozens of leading voices of Israeli literature, from established titans to debut authors of “literary gems.” Her agency typically sells five to 10 literary novels a year into the United States. Since Oct. 7, 2023, they have not sold a single one. 

Harris told PEN America that editors with whom she has worked for years simply don’t respond to her submissions, or reject them outright. She has been asked by some editors not to submit Israeli authors in the future. 

“The standard line is, ‘I wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now,’” she said in an interview with PEN America. “Right now, we’re completely in this place where no one will even look. No one believes they can get a book that they love through an editorial meeting.”

In interviews with PEN America, more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals described a widening cultural isolation since the attacks of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza. Many spoke of rising hostility and exclusion both domestically and internationally that has taken a heavy and worsening toll. 

The horrors of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks and the devastation of Israel’s war and what human rights organizations and experts have determined to be genocide in Gaza, have had catastrophic human costs. The political and cultural debates around the war have fractured communities and families and spurred conflict in institutions worldwide, from corporations and cultural organizations to campuses.

The war has also had serious repercussions for free expression globally, including in the United States, as PEN America has documented and spoken about extensively. Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers, artists, and activists have faced dire consequences for their expression including arrests, harassment and threats, deportation attempts, and detention, in addition to cancellations and exclusion in the literary and cultural spheres; Israeli and Jewish writers and artists on all sides of the conflict have been silenced and faced a range of threats and repercussions. 

In this piece, we share the stories of Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views. They describe an environment that has impacted their reputations and livelihoods, led people to self-censor, and created an overall chilling of their ability to write and create freely. This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all.

Rising Isolation and Exclusion 

Writers and others in the Israeli and Jewish literary community, in interviews with PEN America, reported event disinvitations and cancellations, and new and growing barriers to publication. They also recounted being harassed on social media, review-bombed on Goodreads, and subjected to online calls not to be read, platformed, or engaged with if they had ever shown support for Israel or Zionism. Some writers described being ignored by agents, publishers, literary journals, and magazines. Many requested anonymity to protect their safety and careers.  

It is difficult to assess how much of what the writers PEN America spoke to are experiencing stems from cultural boycotts and broader efforts to protest the war; how much from anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or antisemitic sentiment; and how much reflects matters of business or taste, which are also shaped by geopolitics.

But the writers’ accounts revealed the blatant hostility, discrimination, and hate that some Jewish and Israeli authors are facing, and the impact on their freedom of expression. Writers PEN America interviewed shared that they have been told by their agents to remove Jewish characters and references to Israel from their novels, or downplay Jewish identity because it won’t sell. They related stories of publicists having to be replaced because they refused to work with Israeli writers. “I do think that we have essentially been hounded out of literary life,” one author said.

One example writers cited of this hostility is a spreadsheet that circulated online in May 2024, titled “Is your fav author a zionist???” which included authors to be boycotted, based on whether they had expressed “Zionist” views and whether they had sufficiently criticized Israel. The list included a wide range of Israeli, Jewish, and non-Jewish writers. Authors were included on the list for a host of reasons, for example, based on a single Instagram post, attendance at literary events, posting “both sides” statements, objecting to boycotts, visiting Israel, or writing about an Israeli fictional character.

Two years ago, the Jewish Book Council opened a hotline for reporting “anti­se­mit­ic lit­er­ary-relat­ed inci­dents.” They define antisemitism as “prej­u­dice against or hatred of Jew­ish peo­ple,” which “can take many forms, such as ver­bal or writ­ten lan­guage, in-per­son or online harass­ment, van­dal­ism, and vio­lence direct­ed at a per­son or insti­tu­tion because they are Jew­ish.”  The Council told PEN America they received about 350 self-reports by July 2026, including incidents related to boycotts, literary events, submission guidelines, cancellations, and social media.  “I can tell you unequivocally, I am surrounded by writers who are telling me that (they are being fired by) their editor, their publisher, their agent, their publicist,” said the writer Elissa Wald, who created a book club called Never Alone and two other substack magazines for the Jewish community. “Often they’re being dropped not because of any Israel stands or any Zionism. They’re being told it’s not the right time for a Jewish book.”

For agent Deborah Harris, the hardest part is having remarkable Israeli writers denied a chance to make a mark in world literature, and having readers denied books that reflect important perspectives.

“Literature is what breaks down the walls,” Harris said. “Only literature can do that.” 

A Chilling Effect on Israeli Writers

For many Israeli writers and translators, the loss of opportunities has been devastating. One translator who has been involved with trying to bring 20 to 30 Hebrew-language projects to international markets said he did not know of a single project that sold. 

“It was the international market that gave them some hope for some recognition beyond the borders of a very small state,” he said. Harris, who has sold foreign rights for her Israeli clients for four decades, explained that books that can’t find a U.S. publisher are unlikely to sell in other countries. 

U.S. publishers have, unquestionably, released some books by Israelis, including prominent post-Oct. 7 memoirs Hostage, by Eli Sharabi and When We See You Again, by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. But the agents and writers PEN America interviewed said fiction is another story. The chilling effect on the market for fiction titles might not be immediately obvious because only a handful of Israeli authors are published in the U.S. each year, and contracts are typically signed years in advance and confidential. 

William Kolbrener, an English professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said his creative writing students feel hopeless. “All of our students feel right now, what am I going to do with my manuscript? It’s not even that our students are getting rejected. There’s just nobody out there” who is interested in reading their submissions, he said. 

A creative writing PhD student at Bar-Ilan, Ronit Eitan, said she finished a novel two years ago, but has not tried to submit it. “I held it back for the past year and a half because nobody wants to hear my voice,” she said. Eitan has attended protests and demonstrations against the government and fits what she has long considered the markers of a liberal worldview. “But what I found out is it doesn’t matter how I define myself. It’s not up to me. I’m a Jew first for everyone else,” she said. 

In March 2024, the literary quarterly Guernica retracted an essay by Israeli writer Joanna Chen after several staffers resigned in protest of its publication, with one editor saying the piece – about Chen’s experience driving Palestinian children for medical care – made the magazine “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.”

In an interview with PEN America, Chen said although the criticism felt personal, she quickly realized it wasn’t about her. According to her, the bigger issue is the extreme polarization of public opinion. “You can be pro-Palestinian, or pro-Israel, or whatever, you can’t be somewhere in the middle, and I am somebody who tries very hard as a human being to at least acknowledge the narrative of people who are not exactly like me,” she said.

The award-winning Israeli writer Etgar Keret describes himself as having “this unique status of being boycotted both in Israel and overseas.” After he signed a petition urging Israel not to starve civilians in Gaza and calling on soldiers to refuse immoral orders, a right-wing TV channel called for a boycott of the petition’s signatories. Municipal leaders in Beersheba, where he has taught at Ben Gurion University and volunteered for years, barred all signatories from speaking in municipal venues. He said both he and his wife have faced death threats and found an X marked on their door. 

Outside of Israel, Keret had planned a live interview in Australia with Ira Glass about Keret’s mother, a Holocaust survivor. Amid warnings of protests and threats, Keret and Glass, in agreement with their hosts, decided to decline. And Keret recounts festivals where organizers told him that other writers would resign or refuse to share a stage if he appeared. Some of the writers, he said, insisted that they had no issue with him or his positions but feared that “outside the hall, everyone will know that we sat with the Israeli writer.” 

The very phrase “cultural boycott,” Keret insists, is an oxymoron—“two words that shouldn’t be together,” like “military intelligence”—and argues that when artists and institutions police which texts can be read or which writers can be heard, they echo the very traditions of censorship they claim to oppose. 

Keret warned of a world in which every writer is sorted as “your artist or my artist,” and where cultural boycotts become a way to avoid the risk of being changed by what one reads. “Literature is not there to fortify your ideas,” he said. “Literature is there to confuse you. And if you don’t have the courage to be confused, then don’t talk to me about culture or cultural boycotts.” 

Several writers interviewed by PEN America said they’d been discouraged from writing about Israel by agents or editors. They noticed other writers de-Israelified their books by not mentioning their country of origin on the book jacket, for example. They said there seemed to be an appetite for only a certain kind of Israeli story.

“There’s basically a silent moratorium, or at least it seems like that, about Jewish material that’s not explicitly anti-Israel,” one author said. Harris said because she has been unable to sell literary fiction, she has focused on nonfiction for now. She has big books coming out about bats and the brain and the alphabet – all of which have nothing to do with Israel, though they are written by Israeli authors. But she says even nonfiction books aren’t immune from pushback. “I have had nonfiction books where the team of publicists and marketing had to keep being replaced because people would not work on those books, because they were written by an Israeli writer,” she said.

Two Israeli writers for U.S. general interest magazines said articles they submit are put through a series of ideological checks, such as whether they use the word genocide. One said he gave up journalism as a result. “It’s not worth being punched in the face for that. I left the conversation.”

Yossi Klein Halevi, a U.S.-born Israeli author and journalist, is among those who signed a letterorganized by the Creative Committee for Peace opposing the boycott of literary and cultural institutions. Halevi, who has written for years for leading U.S.-based opinion outlets, said he now prefers to write for Jewish publications. 

“I’ve always written for mostly liberal left-of-center publications. And I no longer felt that I could trust the readership. …I didn’t want to write for people who thought that Israel had become Nazi Germany. ”

In interviews with PEN America, Israeli and Jewish writers described a climate where Zionism is treated as a slur. While there remains no popular agreement on what it means to be a Zionist, recent survey data suggests that one-third of American Jews self-identify as Zionist and nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Calls to exclude Zionists from publishing could therefore mean excluding people with a wide range of voices and views. “There’s a lot of lack of clarity of what Zionism even means,” one author said.  

Some voices within Israel have expressed dismay that the boycotts in literature, film, and other arts will hamper the ability to tell stories critical of the current Israeli government, at a time when the Israeli government is also restricting the space for dissent. In early 2026, the culture ministry under Miki Zohar canceled dozens of annual arts prizes and grants that support independent writers and artists. Zohar at first cited budget cuts, but later said that the awards were biased toward the left “while clearly ignoring artists whose views represent the majority of the public.” 

Many of the writers interviewed by PEN America who spoke about feeling blacklisted by the industry have publicly criticized Israel, signed petitions, and protested against the Israeli government. Several writers expressed frustration that those who are being silenced are people like Chen who have worked towards coexistence and peace. 

Broader Impact on Jewish Writers Outside Israel 

No organized boycott has called for targeting writers solely because they are Jewish. But in writers’ groups and online forums, Jewish authors outside of Israel have described losing agents, publishers, and book events since Oct. 7, because they are Jewish, they identify as Zionist, or they are sympathetic to Israel.

The spreadsheet of authors who were labeled as Zionist that circulated online in 2024 shook the Jewish community. It went viral on X and listed authors who had been published in Israel, posted pro-Israel content on social media, or had any connection to Israel, however indirect. One novelist was listed for creating a social media post expressing concern for Jewish friends after Oct. 7 and failing to mention Palestine. Another was listed for giving a talk to Hadassah, a Jewish women’s group, and including a character in her novel who the spreadsheet describes as “also zionist lowkey.” 

Kathleen Schmidt, a publishing veteran who blogs at Publishing Confidential, criticized the list and those who would punish authors over the actions of the Israeli government. “Singling out Jewish authors and telling others to boycott them is antisemitic. If you don’t believe in book bans, you shouldn’t be okay with boycotting authors for being Jewish,” she wrote.

Some Jewish writers we interviewed said that what they felt were worthy books that cater to Jewish readership have failed to find publishers since Oct. 7, for reasons they can’t explain. Even established authors are hard pressed to prove the reason their book was not picked up or did not get reviews or sufficient marketing attention, as some say has happened to recent Israeli and Jewish-interest novels. 

“No one is getting a rejection that’s delivered like, ‘We’re not going to publish this because you’re a filthy Zionist,’” one writer said. And yet, “even from a purely mercenary sales perspective, these things should have found homes.”

Zibby Owens, founder and CEO of Zibby Media, has stated publicly that she has “been told directly that select authors wouldn’t come on my podcast and certain bookstores wouldn’t stock the books I publish due to my public support of Israel and the Jewish people.”

Many Jewish authors who do not consider themselves Zionist or support Israel have been affected, according to PEN America’s interviews. But the chill is especially profound for Jewish authors who write about their identity or about Israel. 

There’s a feeling that is very hard to pin down, that the cultural and publishing world, and to some extent the art world and the academic world, divide Jews into what in effect are ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews.’ The good Jews are anti-Zionist, and the bad Jews are Zionist,” said a prominent Jewish author who has written on a broad range of topics including antisemitism. “If your work puts you in the category of Zionist, you feel a chill in the air in your dealings with publishers.”

At the same time, some Jewish writers have expressed concern about their exclusion from Jewish literary spaces for their pro-Palestine advocacy or criticism of Israel. Other Jewish publishing professionals and Israeli writers and artists have joined in endorsing a cultural boycott as a tool to force the Israeli government to end the war and change its policies. Judith Gurewich, publisher of Other Press, believes it’s appropriate for publishers to be responsible for the ideas they publish. She said opposition in publishing is not about identity, it’s about the message. “If you have an Israeli that takes an anti-Zionist stand, they’ll be picked up immediately. You can send them to me,” she said. Yehudit Singer-Freud, who specializes in book publicity for Jewish-interest authors, said clients have had trouble getting their work reviewed and planning events for their books. It is hard to know whether the lack of promotion is targeted. At the same time, she said, “There have been people in these writing groups who have said that their editors have told them to remove certain characters or to not mention the Jewish identity or to play that down because it won’t sell.”

The author Meg Keene received multiple offers from agents on her romance novel with Jewish themes. One agent told her that in order to sell, she would need to strip all Jewish references from the book. “The best friend character was named Yael, and she said we cannot sell a book with a character named Yael, we need to rename her, like Sue. And I didn’t do those things, and the book didn’t sell,” she told Canadian Jewish News.

Another writer told PEN America that their agent advised them not to write about antisemitism, explaining that no one wants to acquire a book about Jewish victimhood. “He wasn’t endorsing the situation. He wants me to get a good deal,” the writer said.

Several Jewish writers have reported being dropped by their agents. Lee Kofman, author of an upcoming biography of Golda Meir, said she and other writers have heard the same phrase: that the agent “cannot champion your career.” Harris, the literary agent in Jerusalem, said she gets requests every week from Jewish writers in the United States who are seeking new representation because of perceived bias from their U.S. agents. 

Hate and Harassment Online

A number of writers described facing intimidation and harassment on social media platforms. Zibby Owens and other Jewish writers have reported being “review bombed” on Goodreads. Once More with Chutzpah, a young adult novel about a high school senior’s trip to Israel, was inundated with dozens of one-star ratings a year before it came out.

“I saw members of the book community act like my debut getting attacked online was something I deserved because I was said to have done things or shared sentiments that are, in reality, directly opposed to how I feel — comments like, ‘This book supports genocide,’ assumptions about the context and content of my story,” the book’s author, Haley Neil, told Kveller.

Jewish-American author Lisa Barr said her novel Woman on Fire received 450 one-star reviews as a result of an organized review bombing. At its peak, she received up to 50 hostile messages a day, including “Die Jew” and threats that her daughter should be raped. 

Jewish authors we spoke to said part of the problem is the silence of allies who may be afraid of being targeted themselves on social media. The result is that many Jewish authors feel excluded from conversations in the literary community.

When children’s author K. Marcus posted a Facebook ad for her new picture book, Frankenstein’s Matzah: A Passover Parody, it was targeted with comments accusing Jews of supporting genocide. Marcus is American and the book is about a child who brings passover matzah to life. “I’m pro Jewish joy. You know, I’m a children’s book writer,” she said. 

Some Jewish writers told us the intensity of online discourse had led them to stop posting, or to delete their social media accounts altogether. Author Susan Shapiro said she stopped posting political statements that might be considered polarizing on social media. “Some of my agents, editors, and bosses basically begged me to not post the kinds of things that I used to write,” she said. 

Others said they’d self-censored in deciding what to write about, or what outlets to pitch.

“I know that I and other people have tried to figure out, what does it mean to continue to participate in the literary public sphere with integrity?” one author said. “For those who haven’t been frozen out, the cost of staying in is one of giving in to censorship as the price of inclusion.” 

To counter these headwinds, there has been a concerted effort to create spaces for Jewish writing. Author Alison Hammer gathered writers into a group chat that eventually expanded into The Artists Against Antisemitism. New outlets for Jewish writers include Owens’ On Being Jewish Now, Wald’s Never Alone Book Club community and substacks, and Kolbrener and Eitan’s Writing on the Wall. The Jewish Book Council established marketing grants that Jewish authors can bring to publishers to help get books acquired. Singer-Freud created a digital platform, Jewishbookvillage.com, to help Jewish authors promote their books. 

Celina Spiegel, publisher of Spiegel & Grau, said it’s especially important to stand up for a diversity of stories as books are being banned in the U.S. at rates not seen in our lifetimes. “It is painful sometimes to allow opinions that you don’t like hearing to get airtime. But I think that encouraging debate and conversation is the only way to move forward,” she said. “You can’t be selective in which books are okay to have available or not. And it’s a very dangerous line if you’re going to draw one.”

Chen, the writer whose Guernica piece was taken down, still sees herself, and all of literature, as a bridge. She wants to understand great authors, including those who signed on to the boycott. “I don’t have to agree with it. I think people today have these ever-widening blind spots,” she said. “I think literature requires us to stay in the room, all of us. To stay in the room and continue the discourse.”

Head of PEN America, a free expression group, quits because it’s against Israel boycott

* * *

A Free-Speech Meltdown

PEN America’s president resigned over an article detailing the isolation and exclusion that many Israeli and Jewish writers feel after Octob

archive link

[…] From their perspective, the leader of their organization was arguing that merely reporting on the stifling of one group’s free expression amounted to suppressing the rights of another.

Some PEN staffers came away feeling that his worry about the free speech of pro-Palestinian protestors and student activists foreclosed any defense of Israeli and Jewish writers—even writers, such as the Israeli novelist Etgar Keret, who have condemned the war in Gaza and have suffered consequences both outside and inside Israel. (It should go without saying, though maybe it needs to be said, that it would be meaningless to have free-speech organizations if they defended only speech they agreed with.) These staffers also expressed sadness that even a small effort to fulfill PEN’s mission by describing the experiences of writers under political stress was met with such a dramatic gesture of rejection, seemingly because of those authors’ identity.

[…] PEN does not muse that the removal of a Toni Morrison novel might be a matter of taste,” Allison Lee, the former head of PEN America’s Los Angeles office, told me, referencing the group’s many reports that have condemned book bans over the years. “Only one group of writers, it seems, must have the case for their suppression respectfully contextualized before the harm done to them can be acknowledged—and even then, only provisionally.”

Most discussion of Israel and Palestine has devolved into a zero-sum game. The simple act of drawing attention to what Israelis and Jews might be experiencing was always going to be read as a position statement for the organization. “The blog post was brave and right,” Andrew Solomon, a former PEN America president and current honorary board member, told me. He opposes the current Israeli government, but he does not see why that should preclude him from defending Israeli writers. He has also done work in Ukraine—he risked his life to deliver vehicles to Kharkiv earlier this month—and said he would still speak up against the mistreatment of Russian writers, regardless of what Vladimir Putin does.

“Why would anyone complain of acknowledging the suffering of anyone else?” he asked. “Is the lie that some people’s suffering matters more than that of others the role of an organization dedicated to free speech and truth? I don’t deny Palestinian suffering and don’t see that acknowledging and representing it means I cannot acknowledge suffering in Israel too.”

Solomon’s position is shared by others on the board, a fact reflected in the decision of the organization’s leadership to stand by the article. But Mengestu was named president in order to solve a serious problem at PEN America, one that this new crisis threatens to expose again.

In 2024, PEN America went through something like an internal revolt after a large number of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, and Lorrie Moore, issued a series of letters making escalating demands that the group take a harder line on Israel, and specifically that it characterize the war in Gaza as a genocide. (The new article uses the word—but among Mengestu’s objections is that the designation was attributed to “experts” and other organizations.) A group of writers attacked the then-CEO, Suzanne Nossel, calling for her resignation. In one of their letters, they describe Nossel as having “longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East.” So many writers pulled out of the 2024 World Voices Festival and that year’s literary awards that both events were canceled, and the annual gala was nearly called off too. (Nossel, who ran the organization for more than a decade and left in October 2024 partly in response to the protests, had grown PEN America’s membership and influence as well its revenue, which increased fivefold.)

An organization that had prided itself since its creation in 1922 on protecting free speech and the defense of writers—no matter who they were—was thus overtaken by a passionate and sizable contingent that demanded the group become vocal advocates on behalf of Palestinians and in opposition to Israel. One of this constituency’s central demands (they called themselves Writers Against War on Gaza, or WAWOG) was that PEN America be more accepting of BDS and not condemn writers who joined calls for a blanket cultural boycott.

When Mengestu assumed office, WAWOG announced in an Instagram postthat it had achieved “VICTORY AGAINST PEN AMERICA” (the same group today offered a “salute” to Mengestu’s “principled decision” to resign). But in one early interview, the new president promised to “mend and rebuild.” Since then, PEN America has focused considerable attention and resources on Gaza. In addition to its extensive Gaza report last fall, the organization has spent as much as $500,000 dollars, according to several insiders, on helping Palestinian writers and artists.

Besides helping Palestinians artists, PEN America has made other efforts to keep the protesters inside the tent. In January, the group released a statement condemning the cancellation of performances by the incendiary Israeli comedian Guy Hochman—in keeping with its general stance against “ideological litmus tests”—but later withdrew it in response to backlash. At this year’s World Voices Festival, which included more than 140 writers from more than 40 countries, not a single Israeli was part of the program.

In light of these shifts, last week’s article came as a genuine surprise, including perhaps to Mengestu. The PEN America board does not have any editorial control over the work of the staff. But after the release of the report on the cultural destruction of Gaza, the organization decided to share potentially controversial publications in advance with board members. They saw the article two days before it was published, and a number of them decided to meet to discuss it. I could not confirm whether Mengestu was part of these conversations. When I asked him about it, he didn’t respond to the question. Board members are held to confidentiality about their internal discussions. (Among these members is the Atlantic staff writer George Packer.) Mengestu delivered his judgement on the article and decision to resign in emails to the board.

The next president of PEN America will decide the group's course—and that course is hard for anyone to predict. The decision by Lopez and Shariyf to publish the article was described to me by many people I spoke with as an act of “courage.” (I should acknowledge that others, who declined to speak with me, might feel very differently.) And yet they expressed no desire to return to the tumult that the organization experienced in 2024. The younger members of the staff who, according to Mengestu, were upset by the article’s appearance, and the hundreds of writers who have signed petitions opposing PEN America in the past, cannot be ignored without imperiling the organization’s future.

Maybe the most revealing aspect of this eruption, though, is just how little it took to set it off. Thursday’s article nodded to the curtailed freedoms of Israeli and Jewish writers without taking any ideological side. It was far from a battle cry or a shift in priorities. It was just a way of acknowledging, in the measured but principled language common to PEN America, that the past three years of discourse have had an effect on a large group of writers. For anyone who has spoken to Israeli or Jewish artists—as I have—this is undeniable; you hear it everywhere. This reality does not neutralize the cause of pro-Palestinian writers or the suffering in Gaza and elsewhere. The fact that the article was perceived that way, and that it led to the resignation of a president, tells us all a great deal about the hair-trigger moment we live in, and about the precarity of the liberal principles on which PEN America was founded.

[sexton-crikey]

Wife just got called a "zio" at the grocery store by some pink-haired little shitass while wearing a magen necklace and earrings.

Leftism, clean up your fucking house.

[infiniteglitterfall]

No it's okaaaaaay, the shitass just hated her on sight and called her a slur popularized by the KKK because they assumed she was a Zionist!

It's Legitimate Criticism of Israel, not an obvious bias against Jews! Don't worrrrry about it! 🤗

[short-wooloo]

The pro pallie party line is "once US aid to Israel is cut off it'll disintegrate in weeks! Months tops!"

It's stupid conceptually, but do you know who proves it wrong?

Ukraine 🇺🇦

Since the turd got back in office aid to Ukraine has been slashed

And in the last few months Ukraine has made russia its bitch

Ukraine did not collapse as trump his cronies and putin bet it would, they adapted, they found new partners, relied on their own know how, embraced the fact that no US aid means less leverage and more freedom to strike russia as they please

This is exactly what would happen with Israel if aid were cut off, except Israel is starting out wealthier, better equipped, and with weaker enemies

[zaprowsdower27]

The most likely scenario is that without iron dome help or American easily targeted smartbombs for cheap, Israel starts attacking threats even more proactively with even less care for civilian casualties on the other side, and such becomes the new status quo for decades. Far more innocent Palestinians and Lebanese who committed no crime or violence and heck probably other neighbors too once they get the war bug again die and Israel stays exactly where it is.

But human lives never entered into the equation, only Keeping Our Souls Pure, so the ones advocating for more Palestinians being killed "in the name of Palestine" don't care.

[heya-im-thea]

Prev got it exactly. Israel is so small geographically that they have no choice but to be proactive, and the iron dome allows them to be more measured in their strikes. Get rid of the iron dome, and suddenly Israel can’t afford to be as careful.

[maimonideznuts]

Thinking about the kid I was in upper primary school with (so a 12 year old), who truly believed that Jews came from Mars and had a war with Atlantis. Not a cool sci-fi/fantasy story he was writing, he believed it was world history.

Also that there is a spaceship buried beneath the Great Sphynx in Egypt.

He also had shuriken in his pencil case.

[maimonideznuts]

CW: femicide, murder, drug use/abuse, murder with a bladed weapon

Hey, so... That conspiracy theory obsessed kid from my childhood ended up being a Conspiracy Theorist Podcaster and was just convicted of murdering his girlfriend. The podcast is still running just without him. This is all horrific and I honestly don't know how to feel right now.

IMO the deciding factor is that she was leaving him.

There are a lot of people out there abusing methyl amphetamines, and they don't murder anyone. He created a scenario for himself in his mind where murder was a justifiable response to his Fiancée breaking off the engagement. This is femicide, with notes of conspiracy theory justification, where the murderer was high.

There's a lot of focus on how this murder was "meth fuelled", but I really think there should be more focus on how conspiratorial thinking warps the mind.

I want to write my condolences to the family but I don't know how to contact them.

Conspiracy theorist podcaster jailed for stabbing girlfriend to death with dagger

Tobias Nuttall is sentenced to at least 18 years behind bars for murdering his girlfriend with a 25-centimetre dagger in a "vicious" attack

[jewish-vents]

i have started just treating all anti zionists as conspiracy theorists and its made it significantly easier to deal with them. them saying "zios" are running the country, controlling everything, pedophiles, monsters etc becomes a lot less headache inducing when you realize these people are on the same level (if not worse than) flat earthers or antivaxxers...

.

[chutzpahchesed]

flat earthers and antivaxxers tend to also be fervently antisemitic, so that’s appropriate.

[mariacallous]

[maimonideznuts]

Vetting: he has a nazi tattoo

Appropriate Outcome: disqualified

-

Women shouldn't have had to have their personal unpleasant and traumatic experiences with him paraded and judged publicly for him to be considered an inappropriate candidate. Because, HE HAD A NAZI TATTOO! and that should have been enough.

[mariacallous]

[ferrousferrule]

Where's the "holocaust was about gay people first" when it comes to nazi tattoos? Fucking nowhere, because it was never about defending gays, it was about dehumanizing jews.

[chutzpahchesed]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/magazine/goy-antisemitic-youth-slang.html

Last week I interviewed a teenager about his use of the word “goyslop.” That’s a term for cruddy, low-quality food — as coined, or at least popularized, by far-right antisemites. This teenager was absolutely not a far-right antisemite; he just happened to attend a New Jersey high school where students, Jewish and Christian and otherwise, said “goyslop” all the time. “If your friend goes and gets McDonald’s, and gets two burgers and a shake,” he explained, “like, ‘Oh, my god, that’s so goyslop, that’s goy.’”

If you enjoy Philip Roth, you might be interested to hear that this school sits not far from where Alexander Portnoy, of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” was chastised by his mother for eating hamburgers and other chazerai — junk — while his constipated father drank “not whiskey like a goy, but mineral oil and milk of magnesia.” That’s one typical use of “goy,” or the plural “goyim”: to refer to those who aren’t Jewish. The Hebrew “goy” just means a people; Bibles routinely translate it as “nation.” But it also came, in Hebrew and Yiddish, to describe the peoples that Jews lived among — say, the ones Portnoy calls “goyim with golden hair and silver tongues,” the ones whose company will never actually promote his father, only treat him to the occasional weekend away in a “fancy goyischehotel.”

All of this is really normal. The world is full of names for “not us”: haole, gaijin, Englischer, allochtoon. They can be totally neutral, or deeply unkind, or just about anywhere in between. Many Jews would tell you “goy” is like, say, “foreigner” — neutral, but certainly capable of becoming an insult if the speaker wants it to.

The abnormal part, in this case, begins with the distressing number of people who imagine that the world is controlled by secretive Jewish cabals, and that the very existence of “goy” is airtight proof of their supremacist plot. For years now, antisemitic extremists have engaged in a trollish embrace of the word — creating, among other things, a neo-Nazi group called the Goyim Defense League and a fringe crowdfunding platform called GoyFundMe.

Some of these people felt vindicated by the release of documents concerning Jeffrey Epstein. Never mind the exploitation of children: Here in his inbox were wealthy Jewish men, writing one another sardonic emails about the goyim! The way Epstein used “goy” was often pretty similar to how gentiles might joke about WASPs, and his sourer uses just feel like a famously loathsome guy being loathsome, but still: Soon we had the far-right pundit Candace Owens treating this as proof of a bigotry fundamental to the faith. “This is, for them, a religious philosophy, a racist perspective that we are goyim, meaning cattle, that are meant to be herded and ruled over,” she told podcast listeners. That “cattle” idea traces back through literal Nazi propaganda to antisemitic sources like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; if Owens really believes it to be true, she differs from other Catholics in her understanding of Scripture, which would have God promising Abraham that “I will make of you a great cow.”

“Goyslop” has its roots in people who think this way starting to agree with Portnoy’s mother about the chazerai. But they imagine sinister Jewish elites purposefully feeding the masses cheap, enfeebling swill — a notion they express, for the most part, not on podcasts but in flippant internet postings about the pliant “goycattle” being herded to their troughs. And it’s that version of “goy” that ended up leaching into high school.

My source — 15, Jewish, a colleague’s son, resident of a racially and religiously diverse suburb — estimates that at least 70 percent of the students in his school would be familiar with “goyslop.” (Another student, who feels less firm on the exact meaning, puts the number at just under half.) He is fully aware that it arose via an “antisemitic thing about Jews trying to kind of poison the minds of the people through food and stuff.” But this is not, in his experience, remotely how it operates among his peers, who see it as criticizing, if anything, corporations. “It’s not really a thing like that anymore,” he says. “Like, everyone says it.”

This may be a wild journey for a word to take, but it’s not an unusual one. The internet is full of fringe jargon that breaks containment and seeps, mostly shorn of its original politics, into the way ordinary young people talk. How? One analogy might be the way that, in conversation, you can use a silly voice to playact as another type of speaker — say, pushing up your glasses and doing a “nerd” voice when correcting somebody. Online, people do this by parodying other posters’ vocabulary or typing habits — including, sometimes, the language the fringes are constantly bombarding everyone else with. It gets toyed with at an amused and dismissive arm’s length, then passes from arm’s length to arm’s length until it is miles from where it began, operating as a kind of 6-7ish in-joke that many young people will tell you is not nearly as deep or serious as whatever alarming origins you’re worried about.

For them, it simply means something else. Does that make “goy” an epic failure for antisemites, who feared the eye-rolling of a few million Jews and now have even gentiles using the word? There are times when a trip through this pipeline does seem to deflate extremist thinking; there are others when it feels as if incredibly unpleasant ideas are worming into the mainstream via glib, uninterrogated jokes. I cannot tell you which cases are which. Most everyone who says “goyslop” is, on some level, kidding. But given the history of the ideas behind it, you might be forgiven for worrying that the joke had spun out of control.

[chocoholicbec]

@slyandthefamilybook's tags: #we're so fucked#innocent usage of a dogwhistle is just as bad as malicious usage because it provides cover for bad actors#that's kind of the whole point of a dogwhistle and why it pisses me off when people say “okay but not everyone who says that is a Nazi!”#I know that. that's why it works in the first place#if “SS Officer” became the hit new Halloween costume it would become impossible to tell who was a real Nazi very fast#(and more than a few people who did it “as a joke” would start to fall down the pipeline as a result)#you can't let shit like this propagate. you have to nip it in the bud

[chutzpahchesed]

^^^

directly related to what was happening here:

Opinion: Jewish Redditors got an antisemitic video game taken down. It’s a drop in the bucket

'Goyslop' only lasted four days online—but other, equally harmful games remain.

normalizing this unfortunately doesn’t reduce its danger, it just provides it cover.

[chutzpahchesed]

TDSB high school reprints yearbooks after coded antisemitic messages slip past review

Cryptic statements linked to Holocaust denial have surfaced in yearbooks at several schools across Canada and the U.S.

A Toronto District School Board high school is reprinting and revising yearbooks after cryptic remarks tied to antisemitic internet culture were published in its 2025-26 yearbook, prompting an apology from the school and renewed questions about whether schools are prepared to recognize coded hate speech.

In a June letter to students, parents and guardians, Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute’s principal, Lorraine Sutherns, said the school had recently learned that “unacceptable remarks” were included in this year’s yearbook.

“What first appeared to be innocuous comments to the students and staff who reviewed the content, has since been identified as antisemitic language,” Sutherns wrote. “There is absolutely no room in our school for hate or discrimination of any kind, and it will not be tolerated.”

TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird said in a statement that the phrases themselves were not overt slurs, which is precisely why they escaped notice.

Based on the images The CJN saw, one published phrase read: “One baker can only bake so many cookies.” A second appeared as: “Most likely to receive 7 thousand dollars.”

Bird said the phrases did not immediately register as hateful to reviewers. “It wasn’t like blatant hate that someone skimmed by or anything like that,” he said. “Someone had to explain it to me.”

The “baker” line appears to be a variation on a Holocaust-denial meme sometimes framed around “cookies.” The Anti-Defamation League has documented the “six million cookies” phrase as a dog whistle in which extremists use “cookies” as a stand-in for Jews and cast doubt on the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The ADL says the phrase has circulated in extremist spaces for years and was popularized on far-right internet forums.

One student familiar with the references, who chose to remain anonymous, explained the logic of the Holocaust-distorting analogy. “If you have a factory and the factory can only churn out this many cookies a day, then how could it be six million cookies?” He described it as “a form of Holocaust denial veiled in like weird internet slang.”

The second Lawrence Park phrase — “Most likely to receive 7 thousand dollars” — is more context-dependent. Bird said he had been told it appeared to refer to allegations that the Israeli government had paid social media influencers to post positively about Israel. “Someone had to explain it to me,” Bird said, adding that, taken alone, he initially thought the interpretation was “a bit of a stretch,” but that “combined together” with the other phrase, it appeared the student was deliberate in his messaging.

There is a public record behind some recent online debate about Israeli government-backed influencer campaigns. U.S. foreign-agent filings and subsequent reporting have described a campaign involving Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Havas Media Group Germany and Bridges Partners, including influencer-related spending under the name “Esther Project”. Reporting by JTA and the Jerusalem Post said the campaign was designed to manage a U.S.-based influencer network, while Responsible Statecraft magazine reported that the spending amounted to an estimated US$7,000 per post. That figure, however, has been disputed by pro-Israel media watchdog HonestReporting, which argued the filings did not establish a fixed per-post payment and included broader production, travel, editing and management costs.

Although a reference to a foreign government’s public-relations campaign is not inherently antisemitic, when paired with a Holocaust-denial dog whistle, the “$7,000” phrase can be read differently, Bird told The CJN.

As one parent put it, the “$7,000 line is meant to convey the idea that Zionists are paying people to spread propaganda.”

Bird said Lawrence Park’s yearbook process involved a student yearbook committee and a staff member assigned to review the content before it was sent to the publisher. “This is something that [is] dealt with at the school level,” he said. “School staff would review the content prior to publishing, and then it would be sent off to the publisher to print.” But when the comments were seen, he said, they did not “trigger any concern at that time because it was not clear what it was referencing.”

The ambiguity of the phrases is a hallmark of modern extremist internet slang, experts on antisemitism say: phrases are crafted to be legible to insiders while remaining deniable to everyone else.

The school said it would reprint yearbooks that had not yet been distributed and provide revised copies at no additional cost to students or families who wanted to exchange copies they had already received. Students who had already collected signatures and personal messages could also bring in their yearbooks for revision so those messages could be preserved while the offending material was removed, according to the letter.

“We sincerely apologize that these comments were included and for their impact,” Sutherns wrote, adding that the school was taking “all necessary steps with regard to student discipline” and that social work supports were available to students.

The larger trend of coded Holocaust denial in yearbooks

The Lawrence Park case appears to be part of a wider pattern this spring in which Holocaust-denial references and other coded antisemitic messages have been printed in school yearbooks before adults recognized their meaning.

CBC News reported June 17 that graduating students at two Canadian high schools, including Lawrence Park, had submitted Holocaust-denial quotes in their yearbooks and that the quotes were published before the schools took action.

At West Bedford High School in Nova Scotia, a yearbook quote included the phrase “6 million? Nah, 271k,” according to a report by the National Post. The school asked students to return their yearbooks so they could be reprinted without what the principal described to parents as “antisemitic and polarizing content.”

The number “271k” is a Holocaust-denial code. The Anti-Defamation League says it refers to the false claim that only about 271,000 Jews died in the Holocaust, rather than the historical consensus that Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered approximately six million Jews. The Arolsen Archives in Germany, the largest archive on victims and survivors of Nazi persecution, whose records are frequently misused by Holocaust deniers, has said the document used to support the “271k” claim refers only to death certificates issued for some concentration-camp prisoners and excludes millions of Jews murdered in extermination camps, ghettos, mass shootings and other Nazi killing operations.

A similar incident was reported in Pennsylvania. CBS Pittsburgh reported June 9 that Franklin Regional School District faced backlash after an antisemitic quote was printed in a high school yearbook. District officials said a student faced discipline after the quote referenced a figure commonly associated with Holocaust conspiracy theories.

Another yearbook incident surfaced in New Jersey later in June, though it was less coded. East Brook Middle School in Paramus recalled yearbooks after a photo of Adolf Hitler as an infant was printed in a student baby-picture section. The school principal told families the image was “unacceptable” and that Hitler “represents hatred, antisemitism, and the horrors of the Holocaust,” according to local media reports.

Holocaust denial on the rise

The yearbook cases also fit into broader concerns about Holocaust denial, distortion and Nazi-related harassment in schools. A 2025 report commissioned by the Office of the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, based on a survey of 599 Jewish parents in Ontario, documented 781 antisemitic incidents in K-12 schools between October 2023 and January 2025. The report estimated those incidents were directly experienced by at least 10 per cent of Ontario’s roughly 30,000 Jewish school-age children.

The same report found that more than 40 per cent of reported antisemitic incidents involved Nazi salutes, claims that Hitler “should have finished the job” or similar anti-Jewish hate. It also found that 9.2 per cent of responses describing what made an incident antisemitic involved Holocaust denial, minimization of the Holocaust or claims that Jews use the Holocaust to justify their actions.

The problem is compounded by gaps in Holocaust knowledge. A 2018 Canadian Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey by the Azrieli Foundation and the Claims Conference found that 54 per cent of Canadians surveyed did not know six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Among millennials, 62 per cent did not know six million Jews were murdered, and 52 per cent could not name a concentration camp or ghetto.

Revised yearbooks

At Lawrence Park, efforts continue to reprint and repair yearbooks, despite the school being closed for the summer.

“We recognize that many students have already collected signatures and messages from friends. Students who have signed yearbooks may bring them in for revision so that personal messages and signatures can be preserved while the unacceptable content is removed,” Sutherns explained in the letter.

[chutzpahchesed]

here’s more information about that incident:

Hitler appears in the baby photos section of a New Jersey middle school yearbook - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

The incident at a Paramus school prompted condemnation from school officials and local Jewish leaders.

Adolf Hitler cropped up in the student baby photos section of a New Jersey middle school yearbook, prompting condemnation from school officials and local Jewish leaders.

In a letter sent last Thursday to the school community, East Brook Middle School Principal Ryan Aupperlee said that the school in Paramus had launched an investigation into the incident in “coordination with law enforcement.”

“Adolf Hitler represents hatred, antisemitism, and the horrors of the Holocaust, including the murder of six million Jews,” Aupperlee wrote in the letter obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “An image of him has no place in a yearbook created for our students. It does not reflect who we are or what East Brook stands for, and we condemn its inclusion without reservation.”

Sean Adams, the superintendent of Paramus Public Schools, told JTA in an emailed statement that the yearbooks were taken back from the students “the same day they were distributed, before the students left school for the day.”

“We are working with the yearbook company to develop a solution that will allow us to redistribute the yearbooks after removing the offensive content while still allowing students to retain the handwritten, personalized messages their classmates and teachers had already written in their yearbooks,” Adams said.

Adams said that an investigation into the incident was “ongoing,” and that “any details related to students must remain confidential.”

The incident comes amid a spate of allegations of antisemitism in New Jersey schools in recent years. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into Teaneck Public Schools after parents alleged the system had fostered an antisemitic climate since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacres in Israel. The same year, teachers at Fort Lee High School presented a lesson that described Hamas as a “Palestinian political party and armed resistance movement.”

A high school yearbook in East Brunswick, New Jersey, also drew condemnation and was recalled in 2024 after a photo of the “Jewish Student Association” was replaced with one of a Muslim student group.

Jason Shames, the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, said that the incident was “shocking people to the core.”

“I’m not rushing to judgment, but again, if I know that it’s a minor, I want consequences. If I know that’s an adult, I want consequences,” Shames said, adding that the Jewish community “demands” to see accountability.

On Friday, Paramus Mayor Chris DiPiazza condemned the incident in a post on Facebook, writing that, “Any examples, like yesterday’s, does not reflect Paramus.”

Shames said that while he felt the school “handled it right,” he was still looking to other state leaders for a statement condemning the incident.

“There should be global condemnation,” Shames said. “If the school has already done it, and the mayor’s already done it, where’s the uproar?”

He said the incident reflected a broader normalization of antisemitism.

“It’s infuriating that it’s come to this. There’s a bigger statement about the illness in American society today, and the antisemitism, and the hate that’s involved in this,” Shames said. “Even if it winds up being two middle school kids who thought it was funny, we have a problem now with people thinking Hitler and Nazi jokes are funny.”

Rabbi Arthur Weiner, the leader of the Conservative Congregation Beth Tikvah in Paramus, said that he was first alerted to the yearbook by a congregant whose child attends the school.

On Monday, Weiner sent a letter to congregants saying that he was “angered by this blatant antisemitic incident,” and had been in contact with the school district and local elected leaders about their response.

“Events like these are of great concern to us both personally and as a community,” Weiner wrote. “Incidents involving Nazi imagery or references to Hitler are not merely offensive. They touch deep historical wounds and remind us why vigilance remains so important.”

Weiner said that the local Jewish community could “take heart in the reaction of the authorities to this particular event.”

“We have not always seen that clear and unambiguous response from school districts when similar incidents of antisemitism and bias have occurred,” Weiner told JTA. “I think we’ve been very, very proud of the response.”

Rabbi Shmuel Goldstein of the Modern Orthodox Congregation Beth Tefillah in Paramus said that while many parents at his congregation had expressed “frustration,” “hurt,” and “concern” over the incident, they also felt “supported by the local government.”

Goldstein said that he nonetheless did “not feel that there’s nearly enough proactive measures in the local school systems.”

“These incidents don’t happen in a vacuum,” Goldstein said. “They happen because someone is taught at home on social media or informally amongst peers at schools, that it is okay to hurt Jewish people, that has to be made clear, that that is unacceptable.”

what gets me , and what @hidinginalaska was pointing out, is that it’s very obviously an old photograph, not one of a 2010s baby. you’d think someone could have reverse image searched it before printing it, at the very least.

this article is from 2024, and it’s only gotten worse:

Most likely to antagonize Jewish students this spring: High school yearbooks - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

School districts in New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota and Texas apologized and took action over yearbook material dealing with Israel and Oct.

[dynamicity-keysmash]

Sometimes I try to engage in political discussion on parts of the internet that aren't Jumblr and get violently reminded of the widely-held consensus that there is no antisemitism on the left.

[dynamicity-keysmash]

It makes me extremely frustrated and sad when talking about antisemitism that I've personally experienced is treated like a nefarious trick that I'm using to push some political goal. I've been told that I'm "weaponizing" being Jewish to "argue the point" that there's antisemitism on the left, when I'm literally just sharing the objective reality that I've experienced antisemitism from the left. The phases of grief I go through are like: I wish they believed me -> it's terrifying that they reflexively refuse to believe me -> I'm so furiously angry that they never believe me -> no other minority group would be treated with so much disrespect and indignity in these spaces -> god I'm tired.

[chutzpahchesed]

Roman Polanski and Woody Allen are both gross predators, but what the fuck is this

is it over sensitive that I unfollowed for this? is this not blatantly unhinged blood libel?

Ira Levin (a Jew) wrote Rosemary’s Baby, and said this in 2002: “I feel guilty that 'Rosemary's Baby' led to The Exorcist, The Omen. A whole generation has been exposed, has more belief in Satan. I don't believe in Satan. And I feel that the strong fundamentalism we have would not be as strong if there hadn't been so many of these books.”

[chutzpahchesed]

reading a post written by a woman who just went through the terrible experience of…meeting an Israeli and having them act like a human being, and she’s very distressed about it, and everyone in the comments is agreeing with her and talking about how they would have reacted negatively in the presence of an Israeli.

the op is also upset because the Israeli woman told her that her name sounded Hebrew when asking where she’s from. her name is Zarah.

people are beyond reason. interacting with Israelis or Jews and having to see them as ordinary people breaks their brains and the only way they know how to respond is to lock in to the bigotry that sustains their ideology.

if the Israeli woman in this anecdote had treated her badly or been racist towards her because she’s Muslim, or assumed she supported terrorism, that would also not be okay, but that’s not what happened. yet somehow profiling Israelis for existing in public is fine.

[indecisiveavocado]

i wonder if my goyish friends would understand the sheer dread in the pit of my stomach when i saw this.

how many jews have been killed now?

who else wants me dead?

how will people (who i once thought would be friends, who i marched alongside, who i trusted) justify my death?

when will i need to flee?

i wonder if i should explain it to them. i think they would trust me. (i hope they would trust me.) maybe i could help them not fall into the pit of hatred of jews (are they already in the pit? would they want me dead? my cousin who goes to camp in israel every year? my great aunt who made aliyah?) but i don't want to do that. it's tiring. it's exhausting. and it's even harder when it's not faceless icons on a screen, but people i care about, who i value.

i wonder if i knew any of the dead. if i knew someone who knew any of the dead. i wonder if there are any dead. i wonder if it's just someone saying there should be dead. i wonder when that became a "just". i wonder if i'll need to flee to israel. i wonder when i'll need to flee to israel. i wonder if i will flee to israel. i wonder how they'll go about killing us. i wonder if they'll use all the inventions of modernity, i wonder if there will be parking lots like there were at auschwitz. i wonder if there will be death camps or just pogroms. i wonder if we'll be allowed to call them pogroms, or if we'll be accused of exaggerating, of lying for secret jew purposes.

i wonder what those secret jew purposes would even be. survival? being able to pray in peace? what is our secret nefarious goal, our hidden aim?

having goyish friends understand the dread in the pit of our stomachs when we see that jumblr is trending?

[chutzpahchesed]

it is so embarrassing and demoralizing that the left cannot seem to dig up a candidate to endorse that isn’t either virulently antisemitic, virulently racist, virulently misogynistic, or a combination of all of the above. the way to combat the right is not by putting in representatives who are every bit as repugnant but in a different hat. racism dressed up in progressive trappings is still racism.