The KIDS Act, ostensibly aimed at protecting children, will raise the risk for journalists, dissidents, and whistleblowers.
Contact your representatives, US folx. Yes, even if you're scared. Yes, even if you think it doesn't matter, even if you think they won't listen. Write an email if you can't make a call. Call after hours and leave a message. Call during office hours if you feel up to it, but do something. Call every day. Email every day. Fucking bother your rep. They work for you, not the other way around.
Your single call is not the point. The point is the aggregate of calls and emails. The point is that even "safe" Republicans don't feel really safe right now. The point is that "safe" Democrats are feeling pressure from the left due to the success of DSA candidates. You think they won't listen, and they'll probably try to make you think they're not, but they do, in the aggregate. The midterms have them running scared right now, and now is the time to shut this shit down.
Yes, again. Sorry it's not over. The people who really, really want to criminalize dissent are going to make us keep fighting this one. Sorry about that, but keep fighting.
Melat Kiros has made Israel a wedge issue in her campaign. Polls show the strategy is working.
State Sen. Julie Gonzales, state Rep. Yara Zokaie and David Seligman, a candidate for attorney general, said this week when contacted by The
I am a liberal rabbi. I have been deeply critical of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. I have protested alongsi
I am a liberal rabbi. Every Shabbat, I lead my congregation in prayers for safety and healing for both Israelis and Palestinians. I have been deeply critical of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. I have protested alongside hundreds of thousands of liberal Israelis in the streets of Tel Aviv.
I donate to organizations dedicated to coexistence and have shared tea in the home of Palestinian peace activists in the West Bank. Last month, 12 fellows from the Task Force on Arab Citizens of Israel visited my congregation, and we listened with deep empathy to their personal stories and struggles.
My views and my activism have sometimes earned me criticism within my community. Some have feared that crying out for the pain and suffering of Palestinians somehow undermines my desperate cries for the peace, safety, and security of Israelis. But I do not believe that is the case.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is extraordinarily difficult. Holding compassion for both peoples should not be difficult. To me, this is not a departure from my religious and progressive values; it is the essence of them. The belief that every person’s humanity matters. The belief that suffering deserves empathy. The belief that justice requires us to expand our moral concern, and that Israelis and Palestinians both deserve dignity, security, and self-determination.
For most of my life, I assumed those values were widely shared by the people and movements I considered my political home. Lately, I am not so sure.
What has shaken me over the last two years is not criticism of Israel. It is how noble critiques of Israeli policy have swiftly turned into radicalized calls for Israel’s elimination — a sentiment we never apply to other democratic nations. This obsessive fixation within leftist political discourse has created real fear in many Jews. And yet, when Jews talk about these fears, people in my own political camp stop listening.
That is why I have found myself deeply troubled by the campaign of congressional candidate Melat Kiros.
Over the past year, I have repeatedly found myself wondering whether she understands the fear she creates in Jews like me.
In a column she published on Medium in 2023, Kiros condemned the existence of Israel, effectively calling for the elimination of the only Jewish state.
She has called the atrocities of October 7, 2023, both “resistance” and “inevitable.”
Just this week, in an interview with Kyle Clark on 9News, she refused to call the 2025 firebombing attack on Jews in Boulder antisemitic. She said it was an attack on innocent people marching for the release of hostages, but said of the man accused of murder, “I don’t know. I don’t know what was in his heart.”
When she can’t even name the antisemitism Jews in Colorado are experiencing every day, how can we believe that she will work for our safety? I have deep concerns that the “just” world she claims to want to create does not include Jews like me and my community. She considers Israel an illegitimate, colonialist state and appears to have closed her mind to all other opinions and, indeed, to the human consequences of her rhetoric.
Over the past year, Denver’s Jewish community has repeatedly tried to engage Melat Kiros. We have shared our fears and concerns. Yet time and again, we have been met with dismissal, indifference, or silence.
My fears were amplified by Kiros’s recent decision to organize a rally featuring Hasan Piker and elevate him as a prominent voice in her campaign.
To many people, Piker is simply a provocative political commentator. To me, he represents a growing tendency on the left to speak passionately about empathy and justice while showing remarkably little of either when Jews are involved. He is profoundly dangerous.
I recently watched a video in which Piker laughed as a woman described her fears about rising antisemitism in America. Piker has repeatedly said that he would vote for Hamas over Israel “every time.” Together with a guest, he characterized the firebombing attack in Boulder as similar to anti-Nazi resistance. He also calls Hamas and Houthi attacks “resistance,” denounces many who express positive feelings about Israel, and describes liberal Zionists as liberal Nazis.
Sick. Absurd. Infuriating. When Piker equates most mainstream Jews with the barbaric people who murdered our families, he is flipping the narrative and building validation for Jewish-hate and violence here in America and beyond.
By choosing to elevate Piker and share a platform with him, Kiras made a clear statement. She signaled that this kind of rhetoric is acceptable within her political coalition. For most Jews, including folks like me who advocate tirelessly for peace, coexistence, and for Palestinian dignity and self-determination, that message is terrifying.
When people on the right use antisemitic tropes, those of us on the left are quick to point fingers. Yet when antisemitic discourse comes from within our party, many just shrug and ignore it.
In the past month alone, students in Boulder issued a statement praising the fatal Boulder firebomb attack as an act of “resistance.” (I bet they listen to Piker.) Denver Jewish Day School was forced to cancel summer camp after receiving threats. The ADL filed a civil rights complaint alleging severe antisemitic harassment in Boulder schools. And one of my congregants left his middle-school baseball team because the antisemitic hate speech was unbearable. These are just a handful of examples of what we are facing every day.
When Kiros speaks about dignity and justice for all people, I want to believe she means it. But dignity that excludes Jews and denies the safety of Israelis is not universal dignity. And a politics that embraces voices that mock Jewish fears or demonize Jewish identity does not make my community safer — it makes us more vulnerable.
I will continue to advocate for all who are marginalized and insecure in our society, because that is what my religion and my humanity demand of me. I do not believe Milat Kiros has shown the curiosity, humility, and empathy necessary to represent my community as a political leader.
From a luxury campaign to a UN report read aloud to toddlers, the oldest hatred still picks the prettiest channels.
Last week, Prada named the musician Saint Levant one of its global ambassadors. He is gifted, the campaign is gorgeous, and a fashion house is free to choose any face it likes. But in much of the campaign’s imagery, a gold pendant rests on his chest in the shape of the land from the river to the sea, the whole of it, with no Israel anywhere inside the outline. It is a map of a country drawn directly over the living country it means to replace.
Saint Levant did not stumble into that pendant. In November 2024, days after gangs in Amsterdam ran Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer fans down with cars and chased others through the streets with knives, in what the city’s own officials called a pogrom, he stood on a stage there holding a Palestinian flag and thanked the people who did it. He sent a shoutout to his “Moroccan brothers” for “taking care of business,” and told his fans that Israelis had come to “a land that’s not theirs.” Saint Laurent built a campaign around him anyway. Now Prada has handed him an ambassadorship. The necklace is the courteous version of what he says with a microphone in his hand.
The same photograph reversed tells the story. An Israeli model, same Prada lighting, wearing a gold map of that same strip of earth with no Palestine inside it and no Gaza, the outline filled to its edges with a single Star of David. That campaign would not last the afternoon. The pendant would be called genocidal and supremacist, the model would be dropped by sundown, and every outlet that is silent today would find its voice. In this hypothetical, the shape is identical and the erasure is identical, but the verdict flips. The metal did not change between the two photographs. The neck did. And it is not only a hypothetical. The Israeli actress Noa Tishby, who lives in Los Angeles, has worn a pendant in the shape of that same land, and pro-Palestinian activists have attacked it as a symbol of supremacy and genocide.
That inversion explains the rest of the week.
On to Rachel Accurso, the children’s educator whom the internet calls Ms Rachel. This week, she posted a tearful video(s) about the children of Gaza, anchored on a report she called undisputable evidence that Israel deliberately targets them. Her tenderness toward children is real, and her fans are right about that much. The death of a child in Gaza is a horror and not a point to debate.
The trouble is that the word “undisputable” is sitting on top of a document that almost nobody who shared it has read past the headline. The report comes from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry. As the name suggests the United Nations itself handed down a verdict. The media coverage, including CNN and BBC, were careful enough to add they “do not speak for the UN.” What it actually describes is a standing panel of three appointed commissioners, set up by the Human Rights Council, holding a distinction no other inquiry in the body’s history has: an open mandate with no expiration date and exactly one permanent subject: Israel. Its finding of genocide is the finding of those three. It has never been the finding of a court.
That gap is the whole story, and it is the part Ms Rachel’s audience is never given. No court has found Israel guilty of genocide. The case that uses the word, South Africa’s, sits at the International Court of Justice, which has issued interim orders and said in plain language that it has reached no conclusion that genocide occurred, with a judgment on the merits still years away. The other court, the International Criminal Court, is no ally of Israel. It indicted the sitting prime minister. And when its prosecutor drew up the charges, he left genocide off the list entirely. The gravest accusation in international law is being narrated to millions of parents and children as a closed question, and the only institutions treating it as closed are the ones built to reach that answer.
Her video is constructed to prevent one question. But that question is not whether children in Gaza suffer, which we know is true and which is terrible. The question underneath is why this report, and why this war which ended, of all the wars killing children on earth right now. In Sudan, the United Nations has verified more than four thousand children killed or maimed. UNICEF says outright that the world has looked away, and the appeal to keep those children alive is funded at sixteen percent. There is no studio lighting for them, and no tearful video. The grief is selective, and it keeps arriving at the same address.
We know why the people who built this report aim it where they aim it. The open question is whether the woman handing it her face and her enormous audience understands what she has been folded into. At her own press event, she gave the microphone to one of the three commissioners himself. Maybe she has never wondered who he is, or why a panel with a single country in its sights would be so grateful for her reach. I wonder if she has.
Which brings me to a state senator in San Francisco named Scott Wiener.
Wiener is Jewish. For years, he held a careful liberal-Zionist line, hard on Netanyahu and unwilling to use the word genocide. In January, the activists in his own primary cornered him on it at a candidates’ forum, his rivals lifted their YES placards, and the room jeered him as a sellout. Within days, he folded. He posted the video and said the word, and he paid for it by resigning as co-chair of the California Jewish Caucus while his own community’s organizations put out statements against him. He spent the most expensive thing a Jewish politician owns. Last week, a man filmed himself looming over Wiener at a bar, calling him a Zionist and ordering him out of the neighborhood, pounding the wall behind his head for half an hour. The word he paid for bought him nothing.
Just today, another video showed Wiener being accosted at a Pride event. His attempts to leave are thwarted as he is surrounded and screeched at.
Side by side, the three show the same pattern. A map that erases a country reads as heritage on one neck and as hate speech on another. A politicized panel’s verdict counts as indisputable when it indicts a Jewish state and turns invisible when the dead children are Sudanese. The label built to describe a foreign policy becomes a mark of shame that no amount of compliance can scrub off, the instant it is pinned to a Jew. In every case, the symbol holds still, and the meaning swings, and the thing that moves it is the same thing each time. Whose hand is on it? Whether he is one of us or one of them.
None of this began with Prada. The practice of carrying hatred of Jews on a culture’s most admired channels is old, and it is deliberate, because beauty and warmth travel where a pamphlet cannot. They reach the young and the many before an argument can begin.
I grew up the grandson of Jews who were pushed out of the Arab world, out of the very map Saint Levant now wears as jewelry, and I have spent my adult life being told that my existence is the provocation. So I know the pattern when I watch it work. The necklace, the report, and the name belong to one story, and this week it ran in the open while most people applauded the parts of it they found beautiful.
Coco Chanel is the cleanest case fashion has. Under the occupation, she lived at the Ritz alongside German officers and took an Abwehr officer as her lover. In May 1941, she wrote to Nazi authorities to seize full control of her perfume house from the Wertheimers, the Jewish brothers who had bankrolled it, on the argument that Jews had forfeited the right to own it. Declassified French files name her as an agent. The house came through all of it, and the name still sells. The glamour did what glamour is for, which was to make the woman behind it impossible to picture as a villain.
The same logic walked straight into the nursery. Julius Streicher, later hanged at Nuremberg, ran Der Stürmer for grown men and also published a children’s picture book called The Poisonous Mushroom, bright and simple, teaching small Germans to spot a Jew the way a parent teaches a child to spot a toadstool in the grass. The aim was reach. A boy raised on a friendly cartoon needs no argument for his hatred years later. It becomes as instinctual as washing his hands, brushing his teeth, and looking before crossing the street.
No one is calling a musician or a children’s educator a Nazi. What I am writing about is much older than Nazism. Antisemitism has always understood distribution better than the people it targets do, and it picks the runway and the playroom on purpose, the channels that arrive without tripping the alarm, because an idea wrapped in style or in tenderness is already past the gate before anyone thinks to name it. We have watched this story before, and we know how it ends. The only open question is whether we name it faster this time.
Leftie "antizionists" who get their knickers in a twist whenever they see Hebrew or a Magen David remind me so, so much of right wing Islamophobes who do the exact same thing when they see Arabic or anything remotely Muslim. They don't see they have become the very thing they despise.
You know what? Fuck it I'm adding more context. Sesame Street has talked about the topic of death more than once and it's done with such gentle carefulness without watering down or censoring the heaviness of the situations. It treats heavy subject matter with respect and dignity and has been for DECADES.
From the early 1980s:
To 2025:
Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.
They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.
Whenever I see people censoring words because it "might offend" someone or the big ad companies that are currently trying to run everything? I just want to say to them: "What? Is Sesame Street too mature for you?" Because really...what the hell are we doing.
I'm back with even more examples! Sesame Street once again to this day is out here handling extremely difficult subject matter with incredible care and respect. "We can't let kids learn about uncomfortable things!" Oh, really now? Even though they're things that happen in everyday life that they'll face one day at some point anyway? Interesting. Let's see what else this show has covered that people (for some reason) think should be avoided and hidden. Here's more on death of loved ones and greif:
Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?
Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?
Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!
Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!
They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.
Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.
There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.
It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)
When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.
Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.
Don't fall for it, always side with Sesame Street.
Remember when Trump talked about "Shylocks and bad [bankers]" in a speech and people on the right were arguing that he didn't mean Jews, he was just making a Shakespeare reference because he's so cultured, and we all saw how stupid and willfully blind that was?
Yeah, that's exactly how everyone defending Mamdani for saying "AIPAC uses dark money to sow discord" sounds right now.
no one is entitled to the sacred art, tools, or costumes of another culture (save members of the culture itself) and nonsacred reproductions will serve just as well for the purposes of education and appreciation
having museums full of reproductions would be even cooler than having museums full of sacred artifacts because when modern craftspeople are able to replicate those artifacts, it’s usually because they still make the same items the same way today
this means that you could have description tags emphasizing that such-and-such item has been made by these people in almost the same way for hundreds of years
having museums full of beautiful reproductions takes the emphasis off of Things and places it on the People who make them, which is really as it should be
Plus, using reproductions drastically increases the types of exhibits you can have.
There are some things you’d prefer to only be displayed, even if they are replicas, but others might be really well suited for interactive exhibits if you don’t have to worry about damaging sacred and/or ancient artifacts. And if you’re actually working with members of the culture, you can consult them to make sure you aren’t doing anything offensive.
blaming “zionists” for antisemitism is still blaming jews for antisemitism. jews who believe in an innately jewish political system regardless of how you feel about it are both victims of antisemitism and deeply committed to defending jews from it
one of the most important things, perhaps the most important thing I have learned in my life is that nice people can fuck each other up in monstrous ways. people can be bone deep kind and loving and self reflective and still lash out under pressure. people can be earnestly neighbourly and charitable and hospitable and generous and still find themselves in situations where they become selfish. people can be well meaning and easygoing and gregarious and hold deep seated opinions that turn them into vicious little bullies under the right conditions. nobody is just one thing, and nobody stays one way. every person is a kaleidoscope and they will surprise you. you will surprise yourself. it's not a warning and it's not a judgement and it's not an excuse, and it's certainly not a reason to stop trying or to stop trusting. it is just a fact.
“it is antisemitic to automatically assume a jew is a zionist”
it is antisemitic to automatically assume that being a zionist — defined as the belief that jews have a right to self determination in their ancestral homeland — makes someone a bad nasty evil genocidal bloodthirsty killer actually
hope this helps
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