Hi, I'm EJ (they/them/theirs)! I'm neurodivergent and queer, with a bit of a Tolkien obsession. I'm a fandom-loving artist whose art is currently creatively tagged under "myart" or "ejarts". I'm a Jew now (former-Xtian Dominionist and now-survivor), which takes up the rest of my blog.
"The revival of Hebrew is killing other Jewish languages! embracing the diaspora is important for Jewish languages!" WRONG. why can we not have both? why can we not revive our ancient language as a modern spoken one (that is literally not that different from the ancient one) while also preserving Jewish languages of the diaspora? why do we need to remain in exile and separation from one another in order to carry on unique and diverse traditions of our people? are we really so different that we must only speak yiddish and be unable to speak to our Sephardic and Mizrahi family? must we reject the strength and beauty found in a diverse and unified Jewish community? must we define ourselves by the conditions of our oppression and displacement? by the labels given to us by those who oppressed and displaced us? why do you believe that a unified Jewish community is unable to contain multitudes?
Jewish languages are a central part of our culture and they absolutely can and should coexist. do you know of other languages that exist? do you only know of yiddish and Hebrew, perhaps ladino? do you know of Juhuri, a language of the Mountain Jews? do you know about the Jewish dialects of Marathi and Malayalam? The Bukharian language? How about Haketía, a North African variant of Ladino that incorporated Judeo-Arabic? do you know about Judeo-Arabic? all the variants of Judeo-Persian languages? Jewish sign languages??? Jewish dialects of English or of Latin American Spanish????? None of these languages would exist without Hebrew. It truly is a mother tongue.
Further, can you understand why some Jews of older generations saw their diaspora languages as a painful reminder of the oppression they faced? can you try, just once, to actually put yourself in the shoes of your ancestors?
In my experience of researching the hatred of Jews, something that comes up again and again is the fear around Jews forming communities with one another. we were banned from building new synagogues. laws were established to prevent us from "praying too loud". we were forced to assimilate and to speak other people's languages. we were forcibly converted to Christianity or Islam. we were banned from working certain jobs and banned from holding political power. we were forced to wear identifying clothing or badges as early as the 7th century when the caliphates invaded. In medieval Europe, we were accused of starting the plague as it was much less common in areas with Jewish communities (because we had better standards for cleanliness). the nazis would very often speak or write about "Jewish plots" wherein Jews building community and having any power in society was declared to be some sort of conspiracy to ruin society and subject everyone else. their remedy to this was to kill a whole bunch of us. the world has shown again and again that we cannot rely on others to protect us.
what I mean to say is: they laugh at us for being weak and punish us for being strong. and there is strength in community.
language is such a central part of Jewish history and culture. Hebrew has never "died", even if it got close. we preserved it through our music, our poetry, our prayers, and most notably in my opinion, through our connections to other Jews. when a Jew from Poland met a Jew from Spain, they would speak Hebrew. this holds true to this day, despite the Jews of Spain and Poland being expelled multiple times. (also, compare modern Hebrew to ancient Hebrew and then Shakespeare's modern English to today's modern English. it's kind of incredible how similar Hebrew is. also, modern Hebrew incorporates MANY words from diasporic Jewish languages. super cool.)
in short: language is one of the most important and foundational aspects of the larger Jewish community and ALL Jewish languages should be embraced and preserved alongside modern Hebrew as they are all important parts of Jewish culture, solidarity, and history.
go browse or support the Jewish Language Project: Jewish Languages
I hate to tell you this, but they don't care. This ship is going down, and those soldiers, my brothers, are willing to die and take you and me along with them.
You're a good soldier Rex. So is every one of those men down there. They may be willing to die, but I am not the one who is going to kill them.
I have, at Haviv Rettig Gur’s advice, begun reading the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, and it’s about as intellectually honest as I expected it to be. Main points in the first few chapters:
- He compares 1910s Palestinians to 1910s Sinn Fein in Ireland, which is a very anachronistic projection through history, because Sinn Fein was supporting the Zionist Mule Corps (and vice versa) as a decolonization project in Palestine at the time.
- He frames 1936-1939 as a Zionist plot to wrest military control of the land from the Arabs to the Jews, which is in my mind a way of doing history backwards. The Zionists are bad -> anything that we ourselves have done that benefitted the Zionists was secretly orchestrated by them behind the scenes -> the failed Arab revolt against the British was a Jewish plot from the beginning. He doesn’t elaborate on how the White Paper (which banned Jewish refugees entrance to Palestine during the Holocaust) was a result of this revolt, which is a glaring omission, because:
- There is almost no mention of the Holocaust in this book. To the point where it almost feels like a form of revisionism; there is absolutely no way of explaining the current conflict without understanding the role that the Holocaust played in it, and, moreover, the role that Arabs and Palestinians specifically played in it. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, very famously collaborated with the Nazis and spent the 1940s in Nazi Germany trying to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. He is mentioned once, offhandedly. This is probably my biggest problem with the Palestinian narrative generally: 1/4 of the IDF in 1948 were Holocaust survivors, fighting against people who had collaborated with the Nazis, people who had sworn to drive them into the sea in an attempted war of extermination, and they won against all odds. The Nakba is an injustice, but it would indisputably be a greater injustice if the Jews had lost, and the Palestinian response to this is (in English) to ignore it, and (in Arabic) to wish the destruction of the Jews had occurred. Khalidi neglects to engage with any of this, and cherry-picks the worst of Herzl and Jabotinsky’s writing to portray them as akin to the French invading Algeria and the British invading Kenya. So far, this is the most dishonest thing he has done — and I do find it striking, the role that Herzl holds in the Palestinian consciousness, when his specific ideas never held significant weight in Zionist spaces during his lifetime (Jabotinsky is another matter entirely, but even Khalidi has to admit that he was an incredibly fringe case).
- I’m just getting to the 1967 war, but what is notable is that we skip immediately from 1948 to 1967, without acknowledging the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries in the interim. I have to concur with Haviv Rettig Gur that Palestinians have a serious and convincing story, but they undermine it by cherry-picking their history and refusing to look at the ugly or complicated parts. It would be a stronger history if they were able to acknowledge any Palestinian agency — for instance, the Nebi Musa riot of 1921 and the Hebron pogrom of 1929, in which Arabs ethnically cleansed Jews from places they’d lived for thousands of years, are never mentioned — but as he puts it, Palestine is merely being acted upon and Zionists are exclusively malicious actors. It’s convincing because it’s been flattened into a linear, righteous narrative, but history never works that way. If Palestinian historians were to seriously grapple with the specific ways their forms of leadership have harmed or benefitted their people, and if they were to come to terms with the history of the Jews beyond just projecting Mohammad back in time 1500 years, their narrative would be the stronger for it. As it stands, it is perfect for TikTok, and complete anathema to the fields of history, sociology and anthropology.
- This book claims the Kennedys (bafflingly) had Palestinian-leaning sympathies pre-JFK’s assassination, and doesn’t mention Bobby Kennedy at all. “Why were American-Palestinian relations strained during the 60s-80s? Could it be because the PLO assassinated the brother of a man whose own assassination was one of the greatest cultural traumas of American history? No, it’s the Jews who are to blame.”
- An absurd number of citations here amount to “my dad told me this” or “trust me I heard this as a child.” Most maddening are the ones related to the 1967 war; we could take the word of the numerous records and transcripts made by Israeli and American diplomats at the time, or we could trust Khalidi and his dad by word of mouth. It’s bad history.
- That Egypt, Syria, and Jordan weren’t planning an attack in 67 is taken as a given, and any allusions to the contrary are framed as Zionist propaganda, or, in Khalidi’s words “Israeli myth.” The fact that both Egypt and Syria were blockading Israel and rallying troops at the border is neglected entirely.
- “The hard-line Zionists defined their success on the replacement of Palestine by Israel… for them, if Palestine existed, Israel could not.” Maddening sentence written by a man who has spent the past 116 pages arguing that if Palestine were to exist, Israel wouldn’t. If his goal is to prove the hard-line Zionists wrong, he is failing on every front.
- Beyond ignoring the agency of Palestinians, Khalidi goes out of his way to minimize the agency of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
- The claim that Egypt and Jordan, from the beginning, “welcomed mediation with Israel” and were willing to acknowledge its sovereignty is such an egregious form of historical revisionism that I’m amazed anyone takes this book seriously. If your understanding of Egyptian-Israeli relations is that Egypt was open to recognizing Israel and Israel “ungratefully” refused to accept their recognition (what???? On what grounds?) you have absolutely no business writing on 1967 at all.
- Finally we get a mention of Syrian agency! According to Khalidi, Syria’s primary role thus far has been to “sabotage” the PLO by “sponsoring nihilistic terrorist groups” (unlike the PLO itself, of course) which “killed Israelis and Jews indiscriminately,” (again, also unlike the PLO, of course).
- We’ve reached the Israel-Lebanon war, and I’ve come to the conclusion that Khalidi should have written an autobiography instead of a history. We’ve moved beyond “my father told me,” to “let me tell you what I experienced in the war,” which would be fine, it would be a very interesting first-hand account in an autobiography, but it has no business taking up nearly a tenth of what is meant to be the foundational text of Palestinian history.
- One thing I find interesting is that there isn’t discussion about competing political ideas within Israeli or Palestinian spaces. Khalidi frames it always as a zero-sum game: all Israelis want to kill all Palestinians, and as a result, all Palestinians want to kill all Israelis. Another thing that I’ve noticed is that whenever the overarching goal is framed as noble and just, all actions towards that goal are framed as being supported by all Palestinians. When anything happens that is harmful to Palestinians, it’s framed as the fault of specifically Arafat, specifically Abbas, specifically individuals or outside forces. In this way, Palestine cannot be held responsible for any Palestinian action that causes harm, nor is there room for debate on the best strategy or course of action for Palestinians.
- It’s really interesting reading this after reading Rabin’s biography. Khalidi portrays the American/Israeli relationship as being strong from the beginning, whereas actual Israeli and American documents and records recount serious animosity and frustration between their diplomats even throughout the 1970s.
- There is no mention of Israel’s offer to return Gaza to Egypt along with the Sinai — actually, I’m surprised that he didn’t talk about Israeli control of the Sinai as proof of them trying to build a “Greater Israel.” Probably too difficult to square that with them giving it back.
- These people always tell on themselves by blaming AIPAC instead of CUFI for American policy.
- We completely skip: the Munich Massacre, ALL OF 1973?? HOW????, Rabin’s assassination, the Ramallah lynchings, Israel withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, and only one off-hand sentence is devoted to all of Black September. At this point this isn’t just revisionism of Jewish history, but Palestinian history as well.
- I was hoping for more of an explanation on the Second Intifada. From an Israeli perspective, it doesn’t make any sense: they were offering Palestinians the right to sovereignty and self-governance they’d wanted, and as they were about to sign the treaty, Palestinians set off over a hundred suicide bombings and said that they would reject all terms of statehood and fight to the death. Mosab Yousef Hussain explains this by saying that Arafat realized he would be richer through aid money and didn’t want to commit to the hard work of building a functional state; this makes logical sense. By Khalidi’s account, the Second Intifada just kind of happened one day, as if it were predestined and unstoppable. Khalidi is exceptionally good at describing Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood, but he completely falls apart trying to justify WHY any of this is happening. Anything Palestinians do is righteous and justified. Why are they doing it? Israel, don’t worry about it.
- “Such considerations [negative consequences] were undoubtedly far from the minds of the men (and a few women) who planned and carried out these suicide bombings.” I love this sentence. I’m obsessed with it. Women can commit ill-conceived suicide bombings too! This is feminism.
- According to Khalidi, American media focused exclusively on rockets that hit Israel in the 2014 war, and neglected any coverage of Israeli missiles hitting Gaza. I find this very hard to believe, considering both the past two years, and my own memories of 2014.
- And we end the book with a BDS call to arms! I’m incredibly disappointed that this is considered the standard of Palestinian history; I had hoped for a more thoughtful development of ideas and introspection, or at the very least commitment to the actual events that occurred. My only consolation is that this explains an awful lot of English-speaking antizionists’ gaps in history, and historical revisionism. There are a lot of strong cases to be made for Palestinian statehood; in my opinion, this book undermines its own argument with consistent dishonesty and omission.
Thank you for putting your own eyeballs and brain on the line to bring us this summary. From this, it sounds like he relies a lot on “I heard it once from a guy” and not on, you know, the actual Palestinian and Arab histories which survive. 
The issue is not in Butler’s work, like the work of the others mentioned, but that people, once supporting someone's work, think they must be right on other issues. Which is their intellectual immaturity, not a problem with the work
No, I actually have huge problems with parts of Butler's work - I'm just not willing to call all of it garbage because I think the concept of performative gender is important.
Butler's "work" on Jews, Jewish identity, Zionism, and Israel is pure @#&$ing excrement:
It's intellectually dishonest, academically anemic, and blatantly contradicts Butler's prior work on identity with a shameless reversal of their own theory for the purpose of condemning Jews who disagree with Butler's own fringe take on Jewish identity.
Why "Parting Ways" Parts Ways with Jewish Reality
Judith Butler made their name by challenging the idea that identity is fixed. In Gender Trouble, Butler asked us to think of gender not as a biological destiny, but as a performance - fluid, constructed, always in flux. That core idea reshaped entire fields, from queer theory to feminism to pop culture.
But when it comes to Jewish identity - especially Jewish identity in relation to Israel - Butler suddenly trades nuance for rigidity.
In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, (get your copy here at no charge) they argue that "true" Jewishness is universalist, diasporic, and ethically obligated to oppose the State of Israel.
Butler says that Jews are not just required to critique Israel - but to reject its very legitimacy and existence. According to Butler, Zionism is a betrayal of true Jewish ethics and Zionists are doing Judaism wrong. In short, Butler is saying that if you believe in Israel's right to exist, you're a bad Jew.
That's not just a bold or controversial claim. It's historically, ethically, and logically nonsensical - yet people take Butler seriously on this topic.
Judith Butler isn't an outlier, they're one of the most influential voices shaping how the academic left (and by extension, much of progressive activism) understands Jews - and Butler doesn’t just misrepresent Judaism, Jewishness, and Israel. Butler erases the lived experience of millions of Jews.
Butler's Deliberate Misrepresentation of Judaism and Jewish Ethics
Judith Butler argues that Jewish ethics demand a rejection of nationalism - and therefore, of Zionism. They lean on figures like Levinas, Arendt, and Benjamin to claim that Judaism carries a moral duty to stand with the stateless, the exiled, the outsider.
There's a kernel of truth in that. Jewish tradition does emphasize care for the stranger and caution around power. But turning that into a blanket rejection of Jewish nationalism is a selective reading pretending to be principle. It's like claiming Buddhism forbids self-defense because it values compassion - technically clever, morally incoherent, contextually blind, and wholly false.
That's how Butler presents their performance of Jewishness, by presenting selected works of selected Jewish thinkers, putting words in their mouths about Jewish national self-determination, then pretending that no other views exist within Jewish thought.
Bizarrely, this makes Butler's performance of Jewishness more restrictive, narrow, and intellectually dishonest than literally any I've ever encountered.
Butler preaches "Jewish tradition" like they can define it in a syllabus, telling their class what real Jewishness is.
Butler not only pretends this vast body of literature doesn't exist, but pretends that the texts they prefer are the sole source of Jewish identity and ethics.
Contrary to Butler's syllabus, Jewish ethics are much more than Levinas and Arendt. They're also Maimonides, Heschel, Soloveitchik, Spinoza, and Buber - not to mention Talmud. Jewish ethics is a diverse, often contradictory canon full of arguments about community, power, land, survival, and sovereignty.
Jewish ethics and identity don't live in books, but in people. The overwhelming majority of Jews - across denominations, geographies, and politics- regard support for the Jewish state as an expression of their Jewish ethics. Safety after slaughter. Dignity after diaspora. Responsibility after ruin. Never again.
Butler doesn't just critique Israel, Butler claims Israel violates Judaism itself
...as if Judaism were a TED Talk on borderless cosmopolitanism instead of a 3,000-year conversation shaped by exile, return, law, myth, trauma, and survival.
Butler's erasure of Jewish history is antisemitic.
Caricaturing Zionism and Erasing History
Let's define Zionism clearly, since Butler doesn't.
Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people - like all peoples - have a right to national self-determination in a portion of their indigenous homeland. That's it.
To hear Butler describe it, Zionism is a colonial project - an unjust seizure of land, an inherently violent ideology, and a corruption of Jewish values.
If you know Jewish history, that reading collapses immediately, and that's no accident. Butler relies on the reader being ignorant of that history.
Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel. Our liturgy, language, and law all trace back to it. The diaspora happened because we were violently expelled from our homeland, not because we left voluntarily. When the modern Zionist movement emerged in the 19th century, it did so in response to relentless persecution - not a craving for empire.
Butler erases that history. There's no mention of the pogroms that shaped early modern Zionist thought. There's no engagement with the Holocaust survivors who built Israel's institutions. There's no space for Mizrahi Jews who fled state-sponsored antisemitism across the Middle East and found refuge in Israel (and now make up the majority of Israeli Jews). There's no acknowledgment that the Jewish return wasn't a settler-colonial endeavor, but a survival imperative. It was, as Haviv Retiig Gur puts it, a refugee and rescue operation.
Butler only permits Israel to be seen through their preferred lens of power - ignoring that it was born in weakness, under siege, and remains the only country in the world whose right to exist is regularly debated on moral terms.
Erasing Arab Agency, Legitimizing Terrorism
When discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Butler never confronts the fact that Hamas - a genocidal, explicitly antisemitic organization - governs Gaza. There's no mention of how many peace offers Israel has made. There's no mention of how Israelis (of all religion and ethnicities) live with the trauma of intifadas, bombings, kidnappings, and rockets.
In fact, Butler has worked hard to legitimize Hamas.
For Butler, Israel is a villain by default - and Zionism becomes a heresy against Judaism.
That's not academic analysis, it's just dogma. And it isn't even Jewish dogma.
The Identity Double Standard
Here's where Butler's nose is crammed most thoroughly up their own posterior.
Judith Butler has spent decades showing how identity categories are socially constructed, context-dependent, and always in motion. Gender, in Butler’s framework, is not what you are, but what you do - and how others interpret it. Right?
But when it comes to Jewish identity, Butler suddenly reverses course.
Suddenly, Jewishness is a fixed thing - and only Jews who perform it in a particular, Butler-approved, anti-Zionist way are doing it "right." Everyone else, 90% of Jews, are heretics and apostates.
Jewishness, in Butler's view, is historically and ethically defined by its diasporic condition, which entails living among non-Jews. This means that "the Jew can never be fully separated from the question of how to live among those who are not Jewish."
Despite arguing that they're claiming to be using Jewish ethics to make a Jewish case against Jewish national self-determination...this argument hinges partly on Edward Said, partly on falsehoods, and partly on pure bullshit:
It came as a surprise to me, and also a gift, to read one of Edward Said’s last books, Freud and the Non-European, not only because of the lively reengagement with the figure of Moses it contains, but because Moses becomes for him an opportunity to articulate two theses that are, in my view, worth considering. The first is that Moses, an Egyptian, is the founder of the Jewish people, which means that Judaism is not possible without this defining implication in what is Arab. Such a formulation challenges hegemonic Ashkenazi definitions of Jewishness. But it also implies a more diasporic origin for Judaism, which suggests that a fundamental status is accorded the condition by which the Jew cannot be defined without a relation to the non-Jew. It is not only that, in diaspora, Jews must and do live with non-Jews,and must reflect on how precisely to conduct a life in the midst of religious and cultural heterogeneity, but also that the Jew can never be fully separated from the question of how to live among those who are not Jewish. The figure of Moses, however, makes an even more emphatic point, namely, that, for some, Jew and Arab are not finally separable categories, since they are lived and embodied together in the life of the Arab Jew.
Just to scratch the surface of Butler's bullshittery here:
Moses, in Exodus, is not by any stretch of the imagination Egyptian.
The Egyptians of that era were not Arabs.
If Jewish identity is dependent on relation to Arabs, how did Jews define themselves for thousands of years before the Arab conquest reached the Levant in ~630 CE?
The only Ashkenazim I'm aware of who sought hegemonic definitions of Jewishness were the antizionist Bundists like Butler.
The assertion that seeing Moses as Egyptian says something about Ashkenazic conceptions of Jewishness is such a non-sequitur that it boggles the mind how an editor approved this being published.
Falsely asserting that the Moses of Exodus was Egyptian does not in any way imply a "more diasporic origin of Judaism", even if we took it to be true...which it isn't.
Butler actually asserts, despite scriptural, archeological, textual, historical, and anthropological evidence, that there were no non-Jews living among or near the Jews of ancient Israel. If this assertion was honest, we'd be appalled by the depth of her ignorance of Exodus and history.
And that's what's most infuriating about it: it's clearly, knowingly dishonest.
Butler is not just completely full of shit, but making an argument they know damn well is intellectually dishonest and unsupportable. Butler started this book from a conclusion that Zionism is evil and worked backwards to find Jewish sources to distort into supporting that view, erasing or vandalizing 3,000 years of history, practice and belief. This book is perhaps the most shameful piece of bullshittery I've ever seen.
We haven't even gotten to Butler's most and hypocritical, self-contradicting rhetoric.
If you're a Jew who believes in the dignity of diaspora, Butler says you're authentic.
If you're a Jew who believes in the dignity of sovereignty? Butler says you're morally suspect.
This is a total betrayal of the intellectual commitments on which Butler's career was built.
You can't defend gender self-determination, nuance, and fluidity while denying Jews the right to define their own individual and collective identity.
You can't champion multiplicity for everyone else and then enforce ideological purity tests on Jews.
You can't build a theory of liberation that demands Jews stay stateless.
Butler's issue isn't really one of Jewish identity. Butler's problem is with Jewish agency.
Why This Matters
This isn't just a philosophical dispute.
Butler's framework from this piece of shit book has spread far beyond the academy. It shows up in campus politics, activist circles, and social media discourse where Jews who support Israel - even critically - are cast as oppressors, collaborators, or frauds. Butler provides the justification.
It shapes a generation of progressives who have been taught that antizionism is the ethical Jewish position and that Jews who disagree are colonialist oppressors. It turns lived Jewish identity into a problem Butler solved by rehashing pieces of Bundism and Soviet antisemitism - but the Jews are a people to be understood and enfranchised as other peoples are: in all their complexity, fluidity, and nuance.
Butler creates moral cover for antisemitism. When an LGBTQ+ Jewish student is told they're "white" and "colonial" for supporting Israel's existence, that’s Butler's legacy at work. When a progressive space demands Jews check their Zionism at the door, that's Parting Ways in action.
We can - and should - critique Israeli policy.
Butler isn’t offering critique - Butler is offering disqualification, an erasure, a distortion, and an eliminationist perspective which is nakedly antisemitic on its face.
Parting Thoughts on Parting Ways
I'm a Jew. I come from a community that has survived exile, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, the Holocaust, and 2,000 years of statelessness. Zionism is not a political ideology to me or the vast majority of the world's Jews who identify as Zionists. It's a lifeline.
It's the belief that Jews - like all peoples - deserve to exist, to belong, to build, to falter, to argue, and to thrive in a place of our own, the place which birthed our civilization.
I don't need Judith Butler to validate that - but I do need to call out the intellectual dishonesty of a conveniently inconsistent theory that makes room for every identity - except that of Jews.
The moment Jews demand dignity on our own terms, as Butler says other people should demand dignity on theirs, Butler parts ways.
I'm not discarding everything Butler has written or said (I haven't read everything they've written), but every bit of their "work" on Jewish identity is excrement which deserves contempt and derision. It is bad faith, sloppy, pseudo-intellectual polemics of the very worst sort.
Butler is performing an inauthentic, fringe sort of Jewishness in order to insist that the 90% of the world's Jews who don't share Butler's view that Israel must he destroyed...aren't truly Jewish.
This is immediately discernible as bullshit to any Jew who knows anything about their own heritage.
Further Reading:
In her book Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Judith Butler argues for three main theses. Her first thesis amounts to a
The cultural theorist Judith Butler has written what she intends as a critique of Zionism derived from Jewish sources. Her argument: the dia
How the queer theorist went from celebrating ironic distance and deconstructing drag shows to straight-faced gender totalitarianism
Judith Butler
"Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that only through a consideration of Palestinia
Columbia University Pre
Thank you @unsolicited-opinions! Existing as a queer Jew in relation to Butler is a continual rotation of "yes gender is a performance!" and "I'm sorry, how the fuck was Moses Arab?!"
The Tel Aviv Institute founder breaks down dueling investigations — and what they reveal about the paper of record's Middle East coverage.
On May 11, as the Eurovision Song Contest was opening its 2026 edition in Vienna, The New York Times published two major pieces about Israel in a single day. The first, a page A1 investigation headlined “In Eurovision, Israel Used Soft Power to Burnish Its Ailing Image,” alleged that the Israeli government had spent over $1 million coordinating a campaign to influence Eurovision voting.
It was a finding the paper’s own reporting ultimately undermined, however as the piece acknowledged no rules had been broken, no bots deployed, no votes manipulated. The online headline was, “How Israel ‘Co-opted’ Eurovision — and Nearly Broke the World’s Biggest Song Contest.” That was quietly changed to “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool.”
The second piece, an opinion column by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof, was harder to dismiss as a slow news day. Headlined “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” it alleged a pattern of systematic sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners by Israeli soldiers, settlers and prison guards — including the claim, sourced to an advocacy group, Euro-Med Monitor, whose leadership has been criticized for being sympathetic to Hamas’ aims — that Israeli guards had trained dogs to rape detainees.
Kristof acknowledged in the piece that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” Following its publication, the Israeli Foreign Ministry called it “one of the worst blood libels ever to appear in the modern press” and former U.S. Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt asked publicly whether the Times had “no sense of decency and journalistic responsibility.” The paper has stood by Kristof and its comms team issued a statement saying there was “no truth” to the idea that the column would be retracted.
Both pieces landed the same day a 300-page report — “Silenced No More” — was released documenting Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7, based on 430 interviews and more than 10,000 photographs and videos. The Times did not cover it.
Hen Mazzig is an Israeli author, activist and founder of the Tel Aviv Institute, which tracks antisemitism and anti-Israel disinformation. He spoke with The Hollywood Reporter the day the pieces published.
The Eurovision investigation ran on the front page of the Times and its website. What did you make of it?
They had to soften the title. I think that’s the story, really, because papers don’t change headlines on pieces they’re fully confident in. And if you read the piece itself, you see that throughout, they’re trying to find any evidence of Israel violating the rules and they can’t find any. There wasn’t any evidence of bots. Even the head of Eurovision himself, Martin Green, said that Israel’s campaign was a bit excessive but that no rules were violated.
The piece found Israel spent about $1 million promoting its entries over several years. That’s the big number they lead with. Does that strike you as scandalous?
Every country uses Eurovision for exactly that. Sweden is doing it. France is doing it. The UK has spent millions of dollars on Eurovision. Ukraine, especially in 2022, invested so much. It’s only when Israel is doing it that there must be something shady. And the Times itself, even in the article, mentions that Malta and Greece and Albania and Poland and France all ran similar campaigns — with no scrutiny. So what really was the goal here? I think many readers were left dumbfounded, not understanding why this was a front page article.
The word “hasbara” appears in the piece, described as a euphemism for overseas propaganda. How does that land?
Hasbara just means a public relations campaign that Israel is doing — just like every other country, like the U.S. and France and Qatar. So many countries are investing in it. The fixation is really bizarre.
Both pieces ran the same day. Do you think that’s a coincidence?
I don’t want to use the term media bias, especially when speaking to other members of the media, because I think there is justified scrutiny and Israel should be held to account when it does things that are wrong. But it’s extremely bizarre to see the Eurovision article and then the Kristof article alleging that Israel sponsored mass rape of Palestinian prisoners — both coming out a day before Israel releases a report about sexual assaults on Israelis on October 7th that is actually based on evidence, on testimonies, on medical examinations, on facts. It leaves me with questions. The New York Times really needs to conduct some serious reckoning.
On the Kristof piece — does it hold water?
Were there cases of sexual assaults of Palestinian prisoners? I’m pretty confident there were, and I think that’s something everyone in Israel is probably aware of. But there wasn’t any institutionalized order to conduct rapes. And if you read the article itself, it’s based on testimonies from a Hamas-affiliated European organization. From someone like Kristof, who is a serious journalist, who has won Pulitzer Prizes and conducted incredible investigative reports — to see his article, I couldn’t find any evidence other than that Hamas-affiliated organization. And then there was this bizarre claim about dogs being trained to rape prisoners, which is medically and scientifically not possible.
The Times has defended Kristof and his piece. Is that the last they will address this? And if so, what now?
The Times has very rarely apologized for Israel coverage. The institutional pattern is quite resistant to correction. They changed the headline on the Eurovision piece — they didn’t apologize. It doesn’t seem like they’re going to retract the Kristof piece either, partly because it was filed under opinion, so there’s much more freedom there.
But the damage is already done. I know that if they want to restore their credibility — and Jewish readers have been a big and loyal part of this newspaper for generations, and it’s really heartbreaking — the Times needs to ask itself this question: Do they want to do something to restore their standing, or just give up? Because right now it’s not heading anywhere good.
In 2017 the New York Times decided social media would be its watchdog. This week we found out what that means.
In 2014, the New York Times had a Public Editor. Her name was Margaret Sullivan. When it emerged that Nicholas Kristof had spent years platforming a fabricator named Somaly Mam, Sullivan wrote that Kristof “owes it to his readers to explain, to the best of his ability and at length, what happened and why.” Kristof did. He wrote a column titled “When Sources May Have Lied.” Editor’s notes were added to old work. The mechanism worked.
In 2017, the Times eliminated the Public Editor role. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. announced that “readers and social media followers collectively serve as a modern watchdog.” Liz Spayd was the last to hold the job.
This week, Kristof published a column accusing Israel’s security forces of systematic sexual violence, sourced from a man who celebrated October 7, an NGO whose chairman was designated by Israel as a Hamas operative in 2013, and a fourteen-person account that grows more lurid each time it migrates to a larger platform. The Times defended the column with a statement from a spokesperson named Charlie Stadtlander, citing Kristof’s two Pulitzers. There is no Margaret Sullivan inside the building anymore. There is only Charlie.
That is the story I want to tell. Not the column. The column has been dissected by a dozen outlets in 36 hours. The story is what the column reveals about the institution that printed it, and about the decision the institution made nine years ago that produced this moment.
Yesterday I wrote about the sources
The piece is The New York Times Has a Source Problem. The short version: two of Kristof’s primary sources are a man who left UCLA after a 17-year-old said he sent her unsolicited photos, and an NGO whose chairman publicly mourned a senior Hamas commander as “our great commander” earlier this year. The same NGO has officially called Hamas’s sexual violence on October 7 a “propaganda tool.” Its board chair endorsed 9/11 inside-job conspiracies.
I asked yesterday how the Times missed any of this when two Google searches would have surfaced all of it.
Today I want to ask why nobody inside the paper is allowed to ask that question on the record.
The Mam parallel
Kristof has been here before.
Somaly Mam was a Cambodian woman who became globally famous on the strength of a story she told about her own childhood in sex slavery, and on the strength of the brothel rescues she said she conducted. Kristof made her career. He called her a “hero” in column after column. He live-tweeted her brothel raids to over a million followers. He featured her in his documentary Half the Sky.
In 2014, Newsweek published a piece by Simon Marks showing that Mam had auditioned girls to lie on camera. Her own backstory was fabricated. The “rescues” were sometimes police raids that generated headlines more than they helped victims. Mam resigned. The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple called for Kristof to audit his entire Cambodia archive. Kristof wrote that he wished he had never written about her, said he had been “hoodwinked,” and added editor’s notes to old columns.
His response when Margaret Sullivan and Erik Wemple pressed him was telling. He said it was hard to verify facts in Cambodia. He said he was “reluctant to be an arbiter” of Mam’s backstory. He said he didn’t know what to think.
This week, asked whether Palestinians might fabricate accusations to defame Israel, Kristof wrote that “to me that seems far-fetched.” That is the same credulity, twelve years older, applied to a higher-stakes accusation on a larger platform.
The Times has watched this reporter make this mistake before. In 2014 there was an internal voice with the authority to push him to answer for it. There is no such voice now.
Shifting stories
The pattern that broke Somaly Mam was that the details grew with the platform. Each new outlet got a more dramatic version. The same pattern is in this column, and it is documentable on the two named sources.
Issa Amro's account, as published in the Washington Post in February 2024 and in the Times in May 2026, contradicts itself between those outlets. In February 2024, the Washington Post reported he was threatened with sexual assault during a ten-hour detention. In May 2026, the Times reported the threat as the act.
Worth noting what else the Times left out about Amro. He has EU and UN human rights awards and a Human Rights Watch fellowship, and the column names them. He was also convicted in Israeli military court in 2021 of six counts, including assault, with a three-month suspended sentence and two years’ probation. The column does not name those. Both are true. The paper printed one and omitted the other. That is an editorial choice, and it tells you which version of Amro the editors wanted the reader to meet.
Sami al-Sai gave testimony about his prison detention to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem about a year before Kristof’s column. Some details lined up. Al-Sai told B’Tselem that prison guards inserted an object into his anus, causing bleeding. Other details appeared only in the Times account: the object identified as a carrot, a female guard grabbing his genitals, the vomit and blood and broken teeth on his skin from previous detainees. It makes sense for survivors of deeply traumatic experiences to recover and recount details in different ways across years and across interviewers. What gives me pause is the reporter. Kristof has a documented history of not pushing back when the details around him keep escalating. That is the failure mode that collapsed his Cambodia work in 2014. The institution that caught it then no longer exists to catch it now.
The verification stack
American prisons logged more than sixteen thousand complaints of sexual abuse by guards in 2020. Only a small fraction were substantiated on investigation. The Times does not publish columns declaring the American prison system to operate sexual torture as standard operating procedure. No reporter there does. The verification stack for that kind of claim, applied to an American institution, requires named perpetrators, medical records, court filings, contemporaneous documentation, named victims willing to be named, or some combination.
Consider how the Kristof column handles a single allegation. A Palestinian woman is described as raped by Israelis. No witness. No complaint. No medical evidence. No prison name. No charge. No date. There is no journalistic content in that account that would permit an investigation, a defense, or a correction. There is only the accusation, and the request that the reader believe it.
That is the standard a Times opinion column applied to a sovereign state’s security forces. The same paper applies a different standard to the country it operates in. There is no longer anyone inside the building whose job it is to flag the asymmetry.
What I am not saying
I am not saying no Israeli has ever sexually abused a Palestinian prisoner. Cases have been investigated. Reservist guards were arrested last year for the alleged sexual abuse of a Gazan detainee at Sde Teiman. The charges were dropped earlier this year, which is itself an accountability problem in Israel. It is not the accountability problem Kristof reported.
I am not denying that dogs may have been used in ways detainees reasonably described as sexual violence. If guards are using dogs for invasive, repetitive searches of people already in custody, and the detainees experience that as sexual violation, that is torture regardless of the specific physical act. Survivors get to name their own experience. Anyone who accepted Amit Sousanna’s testimony about her captivity in Gaza without demanding she narrate the physical acts cannot turn around and police what Palestinian witnesses call rape. That is the standard or it is no standard at all.
What I am saying is that Kristof’s column does not advance accountability for any real case. It poisons it.
When you blend documented prosecutions with anonymous testimony from a man who celebrated October 7, sourced through an NGO run by an Israeli-designated Hamas operative, decorated with details that escalated between outlets, you have not exposed Israeli wrongdoing. You have given every defender of Israel a reason to dismiss the harder claims along with the easy ones. The victims of real abuse, if there are real victims here, are the ones who lose. Their accounts will now sit alongside the impossible ones in every reader’s mind.
That is the practical cost of what the Times printed Monday.
The defense
This afternoon a Times spokesman released a statement defending Kristof. The operative line:
“There is no truth to this at all. Nicholas Kristof is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has reported on sexual violence for decades.”
The fuller statement credits Kristof for traveling to the region and says his article collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by “independent studies.” It does not name the studies.
Read it twice if you need to. Notice what it does not say. It does not address Euro-Med’s Hamas affiliation. It does not address Sami al-Sai’s October 8 Facebook post celebrating the massacre. It does not address Amro’s shifting account between the Washington Post and the Times. It does not address the absence of corroborating evidence in the column’s most explosive cases. It does not say what the “independent studies” are.
It says Kristof has Pulitzers and the Times stands behind him.
In 2014, the same paper produced a Public Editor’s column titled “When Mr. Kristof’s Sources Are Questioned” and an internal reckoning. In 2026, the same paper produces a press release.
Deborah Lipstadt, until recently the United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, asked the Times publicly whether it had any sense of decency. Lipstadt is the world’s leading historian of Holocaust denial. She knows what a blood libel looks like. When she names one out loud, the line has been crossed.
The other story
On the same Monday, the same paper published an investigation titled “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool.” The headline number was one million dollars in Israeli government spending, accumulated over years of contests across an entire continent. A single thirty-second Super Bowl ad costs seven million. The Times portrayed a budget smaller than one American television commercial as a coordinated influence operation.
Buried in the text: no evidence of bots or covert manipulation. Eurovision’s director quoted saying the outcome was true and fair. No rules broken. The headline framed it as a successful soft-power operation anyway. Within twenty-four hours, the Times softened the headline.
Two stories on one Monday. Both admit, in the text, that they have no evidence for the accusation in the headline. Both publish the accusation anyway. One survived the day with a quiet headline edit. The other got a statement defending its author’s Pulitzers.
This is not coincidence. It is a pattern, and the pattern has a name.
Two documents
Two documents on sexual violence in this conflict were published in the last twenty-four hours.
One is a three-hundred-page evidentiary record built over two years. More than four hundred and thirty interviews. More than ten thousand photographs and video segments. Eighteen hundred hours of visual analysis. Victims mapped across fifty-two nationalities. Led by Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a 2024 Israel Prize laureate and expert in international law, with the Hon. Irwin Cotler as principal contributor and David Crane, founding chief prosecutor of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, among the distinguished contributors. Endorsed by Aharon Barak, former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, by Alice Wairimu Nderitu, former UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, and by Mukesh Kapila, former Special Adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, among others. Designed for international tribunals.
The other is the Kristof column.
One of these will be cited in court filings, in academic literature, in international tribunals. The other will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as a press controversy.
The New York Times spent the day before Silenced No More dropped burying one with the other.
Hela
My grandmother Hela left Iraq because she watched what happens to Jews when the dominant cultural authority decides Jews are the kind of people about whom anything can be said. She was not a public figure and did not have a paper of record on her side. She had a small life in Baghdad that became impossible because the air around her filled with stories about what Jews do, and about what Jews are.
Those stories had a shape. They were depraved and sexual, and they involved children or captives. The victims in the stories were always the people who, in the actual political situation, were the aggressors. The accusations were unfalsifiable because they belonged to the realm of the unspeakable, where respectable people do not want to look.
The Kristof column has that shape in 2026 form. The Times printed it. The Times defended it today.
I am not arguing that Nicholas Kristof is an antisemite or that the New York Times has decided to harm Jews. I am arguing something more dangerous because it is more boring. The editorial standards of the world’s most important paper have drifted, and the institution dismantled the internal voice that used to flag the drift. The defense statement issued today is what accountability looks like in a building where Margaret Sullivan no longer exists.
When my grandmother’s neighbors decided Jews could be accused of anything, they did not know they had decided it. They thought they were reading the news.
What now
The Times will probably not retract, but the conversation has started. Longtime contacts of media reporter David Shuster told him this afternoon there are discussions up the masthead. We will see.
What moves the needle is the accumulated record. The Somaly Mam parallel. The shifting Amro and al-Sai accounts. The verification asymmetry between American prisons and Israeli ones. The headline change on the Eurovision piece. The Silenced No More report. Lipstadt’s question. Yesterday’s piece and this one. Every citation builds the file.
That file is what real accountability requires. The Times made that file harder to build in 2017, and we are watching what that decision produced.
If you subscribe to the New York Times, you are paying for this. You should know what you are paying for.
This is your semi-regular reminder that the datedness of the meme references is the point.
What if child soldiers and evil magic space princesses 10k years in the grim darkness of the far future were unknowingly making references to Miette because their empire speaks a language and uses a register artificially in stasis, undead like the planets they live on, utterly referential to one millennial man in STEM who never went to therapy?
(What if you clung onto inanities and crystallised your sense of self around the vestiges of the man you were 10,000 years ago, because how does a human mind fathom being an eldritch entity, worshipped as a god, consumed by vengeance and the fear of being fundamentally unforgivable?)
And what if calling attention to the artificial dichotomy was the point with Blood of Eden! What if Wake forced John to quote Shakespeare and the national anthem of his own abandoned home in his own abandoned tongue and a rap song from 2002 in the same long breath partly as a way to emphasize that it was ALL a tragedy to lose. That it was ALL human culture. That whether it's 'classical' or 'historically significant' or 'pop culture', however society perceives it, whatever your own feelings on a given work, there's always inherent value in creation, in writing and poetry and music and language and arts.
What if you rocked up to the guy who crystallized the entire universe in time and reminded him of EVERYTHING from the home he can never return to that he DIDN'T bother to preserve? Everything he erased on purpose in the name of unity, only for the universe to end up in so many ways worse than the one he destroyed?
Saw a Threads post like "Jews what's your most heretical take" and everyone was giving really boring baseline Reform stuff like "patrilineal Jews are Jews" or "you don't need to keep kosher"
Had to come here to ask jumblr for the unhinged takes. Mine is that men shouldn't be rabbis because it makes a shul too much like the Beis HaMikdash
Objectively my most heretical take is that God is just the universe and the universe doesn't care if you do mitzvot; those are just for community building (and reminding the individual that God exists a la Maimonides).
So...standard reform stuff (I think), nothing exciting to jumblr, and even a bit mystical for my atheistic family, but if my 17th century Sephardic Jewish ancestors from Amsterdam could see me now, they'd cancel me.
@freegazafromhamas I'm not a Reconstructionist Jew. I've looked into the movement, and while there are things that I like about it, I find that it's largely based in American anti-intellectualism concerning the rest of the world.
@la-cosmonauta-extraterrestre I'd love to hear your thoughts on the "American anti-intellectualism concerning the rest of the world." (I'm also not a Recon Jew)
My favorite headcannon I have going for LOTR right now is that the elves that are still around by the time Frodo gets on the scene are the elvish equivalent of doomsday preppers.
I forget where I read it, but I'm pretty sure that at some point there were millions of elves on Middle-earth, and by the end of the third age, it's down to a few thousand, aka a very small portion. These are the elves that got told way back in the first age, "Hey, just so you guys know, you're totally welcome to come back and live in heaven now without any worries" and responded, "No thanks, we're good!" and then proceeded to not only hold to that but survived the next 7.000 years of bullshit including but not limited to:
Multiple continents sinking into the sea
orcs
dragons
balrogs
multiple wars with Sauron, a literal divine being
The rise and fall of several human empires
more orcs
wargs
a bunch of their territory being overtaken and burned to the ground
And all of their loved ones either dying or sailing, even though we know that grief can and will kill an elf
Like, you can't tell me that third age elves start showing up in the undying lands, where everyone has spent the last few thousand years basking in the magical equivilant of free therapy and probably have as many defence measures as a suburban coldesac, and aren't viewed as the most feral, twitchy, paranoid mother fuckers; held together by suspicion, stubornness, and at least 25 contingencies for every situation they've collectively encountered during their time in Middle-earth.
My favorite examples of feral, hyper-vigilant behavior include:
Elrond: Security clearance; sure, Turgon may have threatened to kill anyone who tried to leave his hidden city, but he also took an entire army out of and back to the city at once, and then also didn't realize that his own nephew snitched on where the city was. His security protocols sucked. Meanwhile, Elrond had hundreds of strangers coming in and out of Rivendell for over 3,000 years, at one point completely surrounded by enemies and full of nothing but a bunch of refugees, and Sauron still never found it. You can't tell me that he didn't have at least 25 security checkpoints on the way into his city(sorry, house-that means it's private property, right?), even if you didn't know they were there.
Galadriel: Paranoia; This woman was magically keeping track of everyone she knew and even did it often enought that she knew what to look for of those she couldn't directly track (gandalf) and looking into their minds and testing them. All while having Sauron constantly clawing at the walls of her mind, at least for a few years
Thranduil: Spite; it was basically only his sheer audacity holding his nuclear bunker- cough cough- sorry, I meant vast underground halls together, while his next-door neighbor was some cursed ruins, a dragon-infested dwarf kingdom, and evil, man-eating, car-sized spiders on his front lawn.
Haldir: he blindfolded the fellowship when they tried to enter his city (super secret hideout), need I say more?
Multiple examples of groups of elves jumping out of trees fully armed and ambushing anyone who wanders into their territory. And while the characters seem surprised to be ambushed, they don't seem surprised that elves ambush people in general, leading me to believe this is normal behavior.
In summary, while the elves in the LOTR and the Hobbit seem all chill and fun, I like to imagine them as the crazy raccoons of the elvish family trees that wandered in 5 hours late.
