As war and antisemitism continue to rage around us, I thought we could all use a break from the big, life-threatening issues. So, here’s a list of random, minor annoyances that are amusing in their triviality and yet are nevertheless exasperating. With a little help from friends on social media.
People who watch videos on their smartphones in public places without wearing headphones. (This was repeated by so many people that I had to place it in the top spot.) Other phone frustrations: individuals who conduct loud – and often intimate – conversations on their phones in public.
People who jaywalk while talking on their phones. Even worse: cars that try to pass me when I’m stopped to let someone (talking on his or her phone) cross and they nearly run over said pedestrian.
Drivers not using their blinkers. (Do they teach Israelis that flipping on the turn signal drains the battery?)
Treating the lines designating a parking spot as a suggestion. Parking on the sidewalk.
We have a cleaner who comes once a week. He consistently swaps the location of my wife’s and my towels in the bathroom. I’d complain but he understands very little English.
When I’m at the hospital for cancer treatments, the lovely volunteers from Ezer m’Zion come around in the morning with free snacks, which I always look forward to. But everything they offer is so unhealthy: sugary drinks, crunchy Bisli, store-bought cakes, cheap chocolate. Fortunately, then comes my favorite: the Aldo ice cream truck that pops by periodically.
People who don’t lock the door to a public restroom. Without the “red” indicator that the stall is busy, I will invariably try pushing it open only to be yelled at by the occupant.
After getting wet in the shower, discovering there are only two tiny slivers of soap left.
Downward Dog. Why are yoga teachers so in love with this position? Give us more Extended Child’s Pose, please!
Israel: Restaurants that don’t bring the bill until you’re forced to ask. U.S.: restaurants that bring the bill before you’ve even finished eating.
Just as you’re about to nod off to sleep, hearing a mosquito buzzing around your head.
People who pop gum or chew loudly with their mouths open.
With most Israeli post offices no longer offering pick up, your package gets sent to a mini-market on the other side of town. You get there and it’s a form letter that could have just as easily been sent by email.
Tele-marketers who call and then immediately ask, “Can you hold for a moment?” Goodbye.
People who don’t clean up after their dogs. That raises a theological question: If your dog poops in the bushes at night and you can’t see it, is it batel b’shishim – the Jewish Law concept that if you drop some milk in the chicken soup, it’s OK as long as it’s only 1/60th of the total liquid – and therefore you don’t have to go on a mad search in the dark for it?
Unsubscribe buttons that don’t do anything to unsubscribe you.
People who talk during movies. Corollary: People who text during movies. (The glowing light drives me nuts.)
You’re so excited that the seat in front of you at an event is free – and then a very tall person – wearing a hat – sits in it.
Cars that insist on hogging the left lane on the highway while driving at a snail’s pace. People who stand on the left when riding an escalator. Parking on the sidewalk.
People who ask on online foodie groups for restaurants “with a good hechsher” (kosher certification).
Construction – it’s everywhere and never-ending. Does anyone still respect “quiet hours?” (Maybe this one isn’t so minor after all.)
The recorded music that blasts from the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem to announce the start of Shabbat. Just bring back the old-fashioned siren. (Is that too triggering now post Oct. 7?) Or play some Ehud Banai or Idan Raichal!
Ghosting, whether that’s a potential romantic partner who’s just gone radio silent or a writer waiting for an answer from an editor who could send a quick “not interested” message but instead just vanishes.
Getting to the bottom of the pita and discovering there’s just tehina and vegetables but no more falafel balls.
Restaurants that blast music so loud you can’t have a conversation. You ask them to turn it down. They humor you for a few minutes, then it’s back to the previous level.
People who ask you something they could have just as quickly looked up on Google.
Masseuses who don’t listen but just do what they want.
Dings – was that my phone or yours? Was it WhatsApp, an incoming email, a Duolingo reminder? Is it coming from the laptop? The iPad?
Showing up to the house of an immunosuppressed cancer sufferer like me when you have a cough or runny nose and saying, “It’s probably just allergies.”
Deodorant – or rather the lack thereof.
Every gas station in Israel seems to have a different interface. Do you swipe your credit card first or only after inserting the nozzle? And how about some instructions in English?
The “please confirm” text messages when you have an appointment. It promotes efficiency, for sure, but do I need to get the same message by email, WhatsApp, SMS and then an automated voice reminder?
And per Alanis Morisette: Rain on your wedding day. Or a free ride, when you’ve already paid.
War is hell, not just on the battlefield but in the bedroom.
The ongoing hostilities between Israel and its jihadist neighbors are forcing couples to rethink familiar patterns of intimacy. When partners are consumed or paralyzed by the news, it’s hard to keep one’s mind clear for romance.
It gets even more complicated when lovers have different ways of relating to said news. One partner may be proactive, fast to get out of the house and volunteer, while the other curls up on the couch, avoiding anything that might be traumatizing.
“We didn’t have sex at all during the first week of the war,” Sigal from Ramat Gan told Dana Spector in an article for Ynet. “It was all such a shock. We’d sit there from morning until 3:00 am, each of us glued to our own phones. We couldn’t even talk to each other.” On the outside, she says, “I was the same woman, but I was completely disconnected. I couldn’t feel anything at all. My libido dropped to zero.”
Indeed, with the war still raging and the remaining hostages unaccounted for, “Sex is the first thing to give up on,” Michal Nir, who coordinates the sex therapy program at Bar-Ilan University, toldHaaretz. “You have to eat, sleep and breathe. You don’t have to have sex.”
“There’s also ‘survivors’ guilt’ – people taking on the guilt of what happened to women who’ve been kidnapped and punishing themselves as a form of ‘moral duty,’” comments Keren Gilat, who heads the School for Holistic Psychotherapy at Reidman College. “If they can’t experience pleasure, how can I?”
But there’s also the risk that the emotional distancing will translate into long-term issues with intimacy.
Sigal knows this, too. “It’s not healthy going so long without,” she laments.
Survival mode doesn’t necessarily mean sex is off the table entirely. People had sex in the concentration camps. People with cancer still desire sex.
For women, the impact has been particularly difficult.
A senior high-tech manager, who finds she suddenly has to hold down her job while simultaneously handling all the household and childcare responsibilities as her husband is away fighting, toldYnet, “I pray that he’ll get hit by shrapnel and that he’ll come home. These past weeks have broken us.”
That brokenness stems in part from what nearly all Israelis are suffering from today: “secondary trauma.”
Secondary trauma, or “compassion fatigue,” refers to distress that’s experienced indirectly by hearing details,or witnessing the aftermath, of trauma experienced by another person.
Secondary trauma shares many of the same symptoms as full-on PTSD: intrusive thoughts, avoidance of everyday activities (going to the supermarket, taking kids to the park), irritability and mood swings, negative thoughts (“what is there to live for, anyway?”).
“In reserve duty, I saw some very disturbing videos,” explains a soldier in the Ynet article. “True, I wasn’t there, but I’m inside it. I’ve been traumatized ever since.”
Secondary trauma has entered my household, too.
A few nights ago, I found myself yelling at my wife, Jody, for something ridiculous: She hadn’t read a WhatsApp I’d sent to her. We defused the situation quickly, but that’s not me – I don’t scream at my spouse.
Secondary trauma in the bedroom means that getting into a sexy situation can be scary because there might be a siren. That kind of excessive arousal (and I don’t mean the “good” kind) makes it “hard to be in a pleasant, intimate situation,” notes clinical psychologist Gilad Horowitz.
Talli Rosenbaum, cohost of the Intimate Judaism podcast and coauthor of a new research paper on intimacy in times of war, points out that “we are now wired in a way that’s not meant to be the default way of being in life. We’re wired in a hyper-aroused or hypo-aroused state, as if we’re numb.”
This state of hypervigilance, she explains, is “dissonant with intimacy.”
Rosenbaum wants us to remember that “one of the most important tools for maintaining marital harmony is self-awareness. ‘Am I going into a stress response?’ ‘How do I calm that stress response?’ ‘How do I regulate myself emotionally so that I can go into my more cognitive, logical, rational space?’”
The study Rosenbaum helped compile revealed that nearly half of respondents reported watching disturbing videos from the Hamas attacks several hours per day. “They were almost addicted to watching war-oriented content,” notes Aryeh Lazar, who coauthored the study with Rosenbaum and Ateret Gewirtz-Meydan, an associate professor in the school of Social Work at the University of Haifa. “The amount of viewing time correlated with a self-reported decrease in sexual desire, arousal and orgasm.”
For those who do want to restore intimacy, even in the midst of war, what can they do to make things better?
It might seem obvious, but patience is the new state of play. “You mustn’t pressure someone who just can’t think about sex right now,” says sex therapist Shelly Varod. “You need to let them heal emotionally.”
Now is the time for baby steps. Look for something small – bird song outside your window or some favorite music playing in the background – to ground you in the reality that existed before Oct. 7. Crack open a bottle of wine. Watch TV together with your partner – just not the news.
Finally, “don’t give up on your grief – not for a moment,” stresses psychologist Ruth Ben-Asher. “It doesn’t mean that you’ve forgotten or you’re abandoning all those who lost loved ones or were actually hurt. [But when] you renew your connection with your spouse and make yourself stronger, you can get on with your grief much better…and not from a place of trauma.”
Yochi Rappeport is not someone I would expect to see handing out campaign flyers on Jerusalem’s Emek Refaim Street. And certainly not with the messaging screaming from the page she handed me as I was doing my Friday morning shopping.
Rappeport is the executive director of Women of the Wall, the feminist group that meets monthly at the kotel(the Western Wall). But the flyer had emblazoned on it photographs of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Aryeh King and Avi Maoz, three of the most right-wing and, in the case of King and Maoz, virulently homophobic politicians on the scene today.
These three henchmen of the liberal apocalypse would be among the first to protest the Women of the Wall. So, why was Rappeport promoting them?
“Oh my!” she exclaimed when my face fell. “You’re looking at the wrong side!”
And there, on the flip side of the flyer, were the politicians Rappeport supported – members of the new Jerusalem Union list for city council. Their shining, pluralistic punems were meant to counter the scowling hate from the back of the same flyer. The warning (in Hebrew): “It’s time to choose: A messianic Jerusalem or an Israeli Jerusalem?”
I met Rappeport in the run-up to the original date for municipal elections in 2023 (before they were delayed due to the war with Hamas). Since then, the Jerusalem Union’s messaging has been updated; it now asks, “Do you want a liberal, Israeli Jerusalem or an ultra-Orthodox one?”
That’s led some critics to question if that argument is still appropriate after October 7 when “unity” has become the national watchword. Given the continued divisive politicking by members of Knesset – in particular, the anger at the haredim after funding for yeshivot was increased despite wartime budget cuts along with frustration that the ultra-Orthodox are still pushing for a blanket exemption from IDF service while, at the same time, a proposal is being discussed to lengthen service requirements for non-haredi soldiers – the Jerusalem Union’s position, sadly, remains relevant.
Rappeport is not simply a campaign worker; she’s no. 9 on the list which was formed through the merging of four different parties – Yossi Havilio, the list’s candidate for mayor, is a long-time Jerusalem activist and head of the “Saving Jerusalem” list; Laura Wharton, of “Democratic Jerusalem,” was Meretz’s representative on the Jerusalem city council; Ye’ala Bitton de Langa joined the Jerusalem Union on behalf of Yesh Atid; and Eran Ben-Yehuda did the same, from the Labor Party. Tomer Mintz, from the anti-judicial coup movement A New Contract, is also on the list.
It’s not just the candidates. The Jerusalem Union’s talking points speak to me.
“For 30 years, the elected mayors have insisted on basing their coalition on the local versions of Maoz, Ben-Gvir, and [Yitzhak] Goldknopf [current head of the United Torah Judaism party in the Knesset],” Havilio toldThe Jerusalem Post. “I pledge that after I am elected mayor, I will form a coalition that will be based first and foremost on the liberal factions.”
None of this is to say that I’m necessarily displeased with how the current – and most likely returning – mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Lion, has managed the city. He promised to clean up our streets and stuck to his word. He promised to build far and wide and – like it or not – he’s doing that, too. Many of us were afraid he’d be too beholden to his religious coalition members, but he’s worked hard to be (mostly) fair to all sectors of Jerusalem’s delicate mosaic.
At the same time, the majority of the 30 seats on the current Jerusalem city council are in the hands of the haredi parties which, just doing the math, never mind specific policies, doesn’t bode well for pluralism. A counterbalance was – and still is – desperately needed.
Havilio wants to cancel the automatic property tax deductions for homes where there is “unemployment by choice” (code for “studying full-time in yeshiva or Kollel”); he believes state and state-religious schools should not be closed even if enrollment drops; and he emphasizes that only schools that teach the core studies of math, science and English should be opened in non-Orthodox neighborhoods.
Does all that make the Jerusalem Union an anti-religious party?
“I’m religious myself,” Rappeport stressed to me in our Emek Refaim chat before adding that, despite the fact she wouldn’t use public transportation or eat in a restaurant on Shabbat, those options should nevertheless be kept available.
I’m not so naïve as to believe that SuperBus will soon be operating an officially-sanctioned line to ferry paying passengers to the beach on the Sabbath. But I appreciate Havilio’s and the Jerusalem Union’s fighting spirit.
When it comes to the environment, Havilio says all the right things, too: that new construction will not be approved in green areas and that the pace of work on the light rail will be accelerated (although I’m not sure he has any real control there).
If elected mayor – a long-shot to be sure – Havilio insists that in any coalition he leads, “I will make a U-turn from the poor, extreme, and non-Zionist direction in which the city is moving…I will take this city away from deterioration into the abyss of chronic poverty, extremism, bigotry, and racism.”
Laura Wharton adds, “We united to change the equation in Jerusalem and free the city council from the fanatics and extremists who are trying to take control of it. The time has come to take back the reins.”
To that, I say, “Get out and vote!”
Municipal elections will be held this coming Tuesday, February 27, in Jerusalem and all across Israel.
The Jerusalem Post’s Bini Ashkenazi reported earlier this month on an alarming document that began circulating at the Israeli Justice Ministry. It warned that, if war breaks out against Hezbollah, employees should prepare for several days of electricity blackout.
A separate warning, from the National Emergency Authority, meanwhile, suggested that at least 60% of Israel’s population would face a 24-to-48-hour electricity cutoff, with the possibility of it “lasting up to 72 hours in some areas.” Israelis should prepare an emergency stock of food and water and have a radio receiver with a battery and a first-aid kit on hand.
All this is in keeping with what our military and political leaders are keen to remind us: that, compared to the infrastructure, training, tens of thousands of missiles (many with precision guidance systems) and, yes, another “underground metro” of tunnels Hezbollah has built in Lebanon, Hamas is like mere kindergartners. The big fight with the Iranian proxy to our north will be like nothing this country has ever experienced before.
Where is Marjorie Taylor Greene when you need her?
The conspiracy theorist and QAnon-enamored U.S. Representative scandalously quipped in 2018 that California’s devastating wildfires that year were caused by some kind of “space laser” that set parts of the state ablaze.
While Taylor Greene didn’t call them “Jewish” space lasers, her dog whistle pinning the financing of this alternative reality on, among others, “Rothschild, Inc.” leaves no doubt who she believes is behind these deadly new weapons.
But here’s the thing: I need those Jewish space lasers to be real. Because if Israel goes to war with Lebanon using the same methods we used in Gaza – or, frankly, operational plans common to any conventional war – we will be shattered. We need something new, something surprising, something never before seen, that will deliver an unexpected and devastating blow – without endangering our own troops and minimizing civilian casualties.
It turns out we Israelis have been working on just that kind of weapon.
Our Jewish laser is a bit more mundane – it doesn’t fire from space but from more terrestrial locations – and is meant to complement the existing Iron Dome which knocks enemy rockets out of the air but requires expensive projectiles ($50,000 each), of which we must ensure a steady supply from overseas.
At the Abu Dhabi International Defense Exhibition in 2022, the Rafael defense contractor debuted a full-scale version of its “Iron Beam” laser system.
“We can focus the beam to the diameter of a coin in a 10-kilometer range,” explained Ran Gozali, executive vice president of Rafael’s land and naval division. By using a laser instead of traditional kinetic interceptors, the Iron Beam has an unlimited magazine, a low cost-per-shot and creates minimal collateral damage, according to Rafael, which has signed an agreement with Lockheed Martin to jointly develop a laser system for use in the United States.
The Iron Beam is a more limited solution compared with what U.S. President Ronald Reagan proposed in 1983: a full-on “Star Wars”-like defense system. (The formal name was the “The Strategic Defense Initiative.”)
Reagan’s Star Wars never got off the ground – in 1987, the American Physical Society concluded that at least another decade of research was required to know whether such a system was even possible – and the plan was ultimately scrapped until 2019, when space-based interceptor development resumed under the Trump administration.
While recent years have seen the incremental deployment of more powerful bombs, anti-ordinance protection systems for tanks, and autonomous drones, we simply haven’t had any kind of truly game-changing jump in war technology, well, since the nuclear bomb (which, despite some idiot Israeli MK spouting his mouth off, Israel is not planning to use…not that we have one anyway).
At the same time, I’m aware that my longing for a weapon like this is a kind of magical thinking.
Or to put it in a more Jewish context – am I becoming a messianic Zionist?
Zionism – regular plain Zionism, not even its religious variant – essentially marketed to the Jews of the Diaspora the possibility that all their problems could all be solved.
Pogroms in Europe? Move to Israel.
Antisemitism on campuses? Zionism will keep the Jewish people safe.
And not just safe – we’ll shine with innovation, creativity, and new Sabra soldiers who are more fulfilled defending the homeland than protecting the walls of the yeshiva.
Messianic Zionism is everywhere these days.
The battle cries – “We will utterly defeat Hamas,” “We will get back all the hostages,” “United we will win” – are essentially messianic.
Rebuild the settlements in Gush Katif? Capture Hamas terrorist leaders Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif and put them on trial for the actual crime of genocide? Flood the tunnels and end the war in one fell swoop?
All magical thinking, something to grasp onto in our desperation.
The only problem is that, as our texts so often suggest, Messiahs take their time. They tarry. Too often, they turn out to be false.
What if I can’t have my magic Messiah? What if my Zionism needs to be ratcheted down a rung, from “Messianic” to “realistic?” How do we continue to function as Jews in the Holy Land if Zionism can only keep our people “relatively secure” but not entirely safe in a world where, as it has become crystal clear, there is no love lost, to reverse paraphrase author Dara Horn’s latest book title, between the antisemites among us and living, breathing, fighting Jews.
Shalom Hanoch’s hit song from 1985 declares that, not only is the Messiah not coming, he’s not even picking up the phone.
Anyone have Marjorie Taylor Green’s number? It seems we may need those Jewish space lasers now more than ever.
I first shared my thoughts on Jewish space lasers in The Jerusalem Post.
Image of MTG: House Creative Services, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Israeli music student, Jonathan Telsin, a 21-year-old trumpet player from Tel Aviv, has been living in New York City since the fall where he’s studying jazz at The New School in a joint program with the Tel-Aviv-based Israel Conservatory of Music.
Jonathan was looking forward to an amazing opportunity: Getting to learn from top teachers and students; performing at world-renowned jazz clubs and sitting in at jam sessions around town; the excitement of being at the epicenter of the jazz world.
Then October 7 happened, and nothing has been the same.
Following the devastating attack on Israel by Hamas on that “Black Sabbath,” other New York City universities – Columbia, NYU and Cooper Union in particular – have been in the spotlight for antisemitic and anti-Israel activism. Reports of threats, intimidation and physical and verbal violence against Jewish students have been logged on campuses across the country, culminating in the Congressional farce where the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn could not state clearly that calling for the genocide of a minority group violated their schools’ codes of conduct.
But things have been just as horrific for Israeli and Zionist students at The New School.
Jonathan has been compiling images and videos of what’s been happening on campus since October 7. Among the clips – which Jonathan explains is just a small sample:
— Posters plastered around campus including those screaming, “Zionists f-off.”
— Several videos of masked pro-Hamas protesters inside The New School’s front gates – on private property, not on the street where it could be argued they’re within their right to free speech – holding signs accusing Israel of “genocide” and “Intifada until victory.”
— At the same rally, protesters chanted, “Is it right to rebel? Israel, go to hell.” To paraphrase a skit from Eretz Nehederet (the Israeli equivalent to Saturday Night Live), “If it rhymes, it must be true.”
— The New School’s Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards published a letter saying that blocking school entrances was against The New School’s policies. Antisemites annotated that letter to read, “F- all the Zionists that go to this school [and who are] taking pics of us. Sincerely, go to hell.” Well, at least they were sincere.
— More F-bombs: A video of a man outside The New School with a megaphone shouting “F-you Israel” and “F-you bitch.”
— In the ninth-floor girls’ bathroom: “Abolish the settler state.” In a boy’s bathroom: “Zionism is terrorism.”
— A group dubbed “the socialist revolution” makes clear the anti-Western bias of many of the protesters as they promote an event that “will cut across the imperialist lies and provide the communistic perspective for Palestinian liberation.”
— Perhaps most egregiously for Jonathan, protesters barred the entrances to three separate New School buildings with large Palestinian flags. In one video, a woman pleads off camera, “Let me in, I have class.” A protester flashes a sign at her that reads, “Support decolonization.” Or else what, you can’t study?
Inside the walls of the campus buildings, things were not much better as Jonathan shared a video of Amin Husain, a professor at NYU who has built a reputation for spreading hate speech in his lectures. In the video, Husain was invited into a New School classroom where he claimed that all the atrocities Hamas meticulously documented – the murders, rapes, mutilations, and beheadings – were all “fake news” and “Zionist propaganda.”
Jonathan pointed out that Husain was once a member of the Palestinian group Fatah (the PLO) who proudly proclaimed his participation in “resistance” activities during the first Intifada in Israel including throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails.
The irony of the antisemitic activity happening at The New School is that the institution was originally founded in 1919 by progressive educators who were frustrated by quotas that kept Jews and other minorities out of elite universities. In 1917, for example, Columbia imposed a “loyalty oath” related to World War I upon the entire faculty and student body. Professors Charles A Beard and James Harvey Robinson subsequently resigned from Columbia to join the faculty of The New School, which had adopted a deliberate color- and race-blind admission policy.
Jonathan saved some of his most strident vitriol for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) which he says is not some innocent home-grown pro-Palestinian group. He pointed to a 2020 study by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy that revealed “a direct correlation between donations to universities by the country of Qatar and other Gulf States and the presence of SJP groups on campus.”
According to a report by Gabriel Diamond, a political science major at Yale, in The Hill, following the 9/11 terror attacks, Qatar began pumping money – some $4.7 billion over two decades – into American universities. “It naturally follows that university administrations sitting on cash piles from Qatar would take a hands-off approach to SJP,” Diamond writes.
Note, too, that Hatem Bazian, a co- founder of SJP and now a lecturer in the department of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, also founded American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), which is linked with the shuttered Holy Land Foundation which sent millions of dollars directly to Hamas before it was declared a terrorist organization by the U.S. in 2008.
While the Holy Land Foundation no longer operates, AMP is still going strong and shares “a striking resemblance to the Hamas charities that were dismantled here more than a decade ago,” according to Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The New School administration attempted at one point to bring in a mediator for the Israeli students – an American rabbinical student, Louisa Solomon. While she seemed supportive during the meeting, Jonathan reported, he later saw her at a rally to denounce Israel.
Solomon also boasted on her Instagram page about being “proud to be arrested [in October 2023] demanding a ceasefire to prevent genocide in Gaza.” In separate social media posts, she described herself as “an anti-Zionist future rabbi” and claimed that stating that most Jews might feel similarly on a topic – for example, support of Israel following the most horrific massacre since the Holocaust – is in itself an “expression of antisemitism.”
Was this really the best representative The New School could come up with?
Has Jonathan felt personally threatened? While he hasn’t physically been punched or hit, one protester thrust a megaphone up to his ear and began yelling. “I tried to move but he just went to the other side.”
The climate of hate against Jews and Israelis at The New School is so pervasive, he relates, that one Israeli student said she didn’t feel safe coming to campus for weeks after the antisemitic protests started. “She was afraid for her life.”
Another Israeli student in the drama department at The New School was “canceled” from a play she was supposed to star in after she confronted a pro-Hamas student tearing down posters of kidnapped babies.
“You’re no longer welcome due to your political views,” she was told just days before her final performance – one which she needed to pass the course.
Political commentator and editor Andrew Sullivan lays the blame on the West’s obsession with seeing the world in binary terms.
“If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech,” says Sullivan on his Substack, The Dishcast. “That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take.”
Back at The New School, Students for Justice in Palestine published a list of “demands” of the university including ending the partnership between The New School and the Conservatory of Music in Israel, along with a “public acknowledgment” that Israel is a “settler colony” that must be denounced “for apartheid in Palestine and genocide in Gaza.”
SJP ends its letter with the threat that, if the group doesn’t receive a response by its so-called “deadline,” we will “assume that this university is willingly invested in the genocide of the Palestinian people, and we will respond accordingly and by any means necessary.” (Emphasis is the writer’s.)
Of all the twisted language and epithets that have arisen after October 7, “to find yourself accused of genocide after undergoing a kind of mini-genocidal experience is so profoundly disorienting that I don’t know what world I’m living in anymore,” notes Israeli author Yossi Klein Halevi on the Shalom Hartman Institute podcast For Heaven’s Sake.
Evoking genocide is the ultimate dehumanization, he said, even before South Africa began making those claims at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It’s the reason why people are tearing down posters of kidnapped Israelis, Klein Halevi explains. “The notion that Israel has any humanity opens up the possibility that maybe we have a case. And so, to see pictures of kidnapped babies is a threat to a worldview in which there can be no space for Israel’s legitimacy.”
What does Jonathan want from The New School?
“We want to be protected. We ask the school to take measures against students who violate their code of conduct, to not give an opportunity for students in an academic institution to call for the elimination of an entire population or community.”
Jonathan said he’s been attending “up to three meetings a day” with The New School administration – to no avail. “They crossed the line long ago. When a student says to another student, ‘I wish you had been in Israel on October 7 so you would have been raped, too,’ or ‘I hope you get stabbed on the street,’ the meaning does not rely on understanding the ‘context.’ Someone has to stop that student and let him know there will be consequences.”
Instead, a New School administrator told Jonathan to “get out of here, leave the building, it’s too dangerous for you now.’ I said, ‘if you think it’s dangerous for me, why don’t you do anything?’ He just gave me a blank look.”
That jives with what Shai Davidai, an Israeli professor at Columbia, has been saying in videos and articles that have gone viral since October 7. “Jewish students are encouraged to stay in hiding while those who celebrate Hamas are allowed to hold their events,” he notes.
Does Jonathan regret choosing to come to The New School? No, he says. “I came here to study music. It was a legitimate choice. But now I’m spending all this time in meetings. Tomorrow, I have an exam. I have so many papers to write and projects to do. But it’s our obligation to fight, for ourselves and for other students – and not just the Israeli and Jewish students – because they will be next.”
I first wrote about antisemitism at The New School for The Jerusalem Post.
All images were provided by Jonathan Telsin, including links to Louisa Solomon’s Instagram posts.
Update: Since I wrote this article, Amin Husain has been suspended by NYU for denying the October 7 atrocities.