Temple Beth Sholom (Topeka), Co-chair of Kansas Holocaust Commission. Published: Times of Israel, Kansas City Star, etc. Inquiries: [email protected]
Topeka, KS
Joined April 2022
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I was honored to sign this letter, and speak unambiguously to the world that IAGS’s resolution does not reflect reality. Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza.
The number of signatures on the letter debunking the IAGS statement claiming Israel is committing genocide now stands at 424. That’s four times the number of anonymous signatories with unknown credentials on the IAGS resolution.
Every one of these 424 have signed openly, under their real names. The list includes some true stars. Yet not a single major outlet outside Israel has reported it.
This silence is precisely why so many people who only skim mainstream headlines believe “pretty much everyone agrees” there is genocide in Gaza. The misleading of the public is staggering.
Huge thanks to @ElliotMalin for launching and seeing this through. We now know there is a strong scholarly and professional consensus that the genocide accusations against Israel don’t stand up to scrutiny.
Samuel Stern retweeted
I know it can seem kind of doomer, but the majority of the engagement on weird socialist tweets like this are botted or just forced by leftist communities via Discord brigades or through other coordinated mediums. The amount of money that Hasan’s community raised for other candidates this cycle was embarrassingly small (1/4th the amount my community alone raised) and his online footprint is made to be much larger than it actually is.
Moderates took the night yesterday, and people like Schumer should feel unbelievably vindicated. Don’t let these weirdo Marxist types try and force you to believe their illusions about the world.
Samuel Stern retweeted
Lapid wants to take Israel in a different direction than Netanyahu. Lander antagonizes him to set the ground for more extreme anti-Israel policy, since there's nothing the opposition to Netanyahu in Israel can do to satisfy anti-Israel critics and their useful idiots.
Samuel Stern retweeted
Scott Weiner hates Israel. But these people will call him “Netanyahu” simply cause he doesn’t want to arm Hamas.
That’s the thing here. None of these leftists want less American involvement in the Middle East. Guys like Abdul El-Sayed don’t want American disengagement, they want America to be in the Middle East pressuring and fighting their enemies (Israel) for them.
Samuel Stern retweeted
The phrase "spiritually Israeli" is absolutely antisemitic. It's the idea that Israeli Jewish identity and culture are inauthentic, rootless, greedy and predatory.
It's the Jew across a millennium of Christian imagination, repurposed for online progressive banter.
No, it's not because Israel, with its universal health care, public universities and 14 weeks paid maternity leave, is "hyper-capitalist."
Nor is it because a country whose calendar and daily slang and history curriculum and pop music and legal system and even its relationship to its geography all draw from a 2,500-year-old bookshelf is by some mysterious measure an "inauthentic culture." Whatever the hell that means.
"Spiritually Israeli" is a projection of American progressive cultural emptiness onto a Jewish target it's become moral and necessary to hate -- which was the function of antisemitism always and everywhere.
I don’t doubt there’s some antisemitism happening, but the phrase “spiritually Israeli” is not antisemitic, it is slang for corny or cheugy. It’s the evolution of “spiritually Dubai”: it’s a long running meme where people call anything that seems to pro-corporation “spiritually Israeli/spiritually Dubai” bc both of those places are seen as hyper capitalist and lacking grassroots/authentic culture. They’re basically saying your event is matcha Labubu crumbl cookie coded.
Samuel Stern retweeted
A decade ago, antisemitism this brazen from an MP would have sparked outrage. Today, it barely raises an eyebrow. The Overton window has shifted frighteningly fast. It is imperative that this continues to be called out for what it is.
Samuel Stern retweeted
Joe Rogan just passes on any ol' lie he finds in the deepest holes of the internet, even when the lie is raw hate from beginning to end.
Israel allows genetic testing. Almost all clinical tests and prenatal tests are actually covered under our national health insurance.
And you absolutely can get ancestry testing in Israel. 23AndMe specifically, which Joe mentions as outlawed in Israel, ships to Israel. Go to their international website and try it before you spread this dumb, mean lie. Also FamilyTreeDNA and some others.
And once you get your raw DNA information through 23AndMe and others, you can upload it to every other ancestry website for analysis.
In fact, Ashkenazi Jews, including Israeli Ashkenazim, are some of the most genetically studied populations on the fucking planet, you racist dolts. (Oops, just realized I'm kinda pissed.)
There are even Israeli studies by Israeli researchers of Israeli Jewish genetics. Nature has published studies using Israeli genetics databases. Here, for example: nature.com/articles/nature09…
So what does Israel actually restrict, and why is it so severe about it?
Two words: Parentage and obsessive privacy rules.
Parentage tests are as tightly controlled as heroin.
The reason is peculiar to our tradition and may be hard for outsiders to understand. In Jewish religious law, a "mamzer," someone born of the mother's adultery or from incest, lives a restricted life in some ways, including limits on who they can marry under traditional laws. And their religious status is heritable. These are ancient laws, but they matter in a basically conservative and religious society.
To protect children from ever becoming saddled with this status, parentage tests require a family court order, even if both parents consent to the test. Because the child has to be protected. Rabbinical courts have often forbidden testing almost across the board, including in divorce cases. In one case I once read about, the rabbinical court quashed the father's genetic test and demanded that he adopt the child to avoid any doubt. This was to protect the child in that particular case. The court refused to release the father from responsibility for the child and refused to examine evidence into the child's actual parentage.
Is this a weird cultural artifact born from a specific feature of the Jewish tradition? Yes. Feel free to make fun of it over in the secular West. I make fun of it myself over here. But inasmuch as old traditional rules are an unavoidable part of our big-family, tightly-knit society, I'll take this weirdness, and the never-ending effort to cleverly circumvent the damaging parts of the old traditions, over what's happening in your neck of the woods.
Is it all an attempt to hide the 2000 years we spent in Europe? No, you dolt. What the hell is wrong with you?
And then there's privacy. Pay attention to this one, because you'll wish you had some of our rules in your own country.
This is the only real limit on ancestry kits.
Your genetic information is totally, utterly private. Your employer and your insurance company can never discriminate against you based on your genetics. Even just attempting to get their hands on your genetic information is a felony. Labs and genetic counselors are closely regulated.
In the age of AI, even just the leaking of a *relative's* genetic information can hurt your employability and your insurance premiums. And it's not some crazy fear. Ancestry kit companies are bought and sold by commercial investors all the time, and they're the owners of customers' data. A data breach of 23AndMe in 2023 put the genetic information of millions on the internet. You're telling me insurance companies didn't scoop it up? Israelis are more protected from that dystopian new reality than most of the rest of you.
And importantly, the law's prohibitions are on the commercial companies, not on the customer. Giving someone your own genetic information isn't a crime. The company buying and selling it commercially within the jurisdiction of Israeli law is committing the crime.
That's why the one company that's actually hampered in any meaningful way from testing Israelis is MyHeritage, which is Israeli. To bypass Israeli jurisdiction and that massive privacy regime, Israelis just order a kit from a company in Texas.
So why do literally hundreds of millions of people believe the lie that Israel has a blanket restriction on genetic testing to avoid anyone ever finding out that Ashkenazi Jews come from Europe?
At its core, at its most basic: because they want to create the permission structure to destroy Israel. They want to declare Israel a colonialist, imperialist interloper doomed to be felled by the noble indigenous Arab of the land.
So they declare that Israel is hiding this great, terrible secret that nobody has ever hidden and nobody could ever hide -- that it doesn't actually belong here.
Never mind the fact that every study of Ashkenazi Jews shows that they have origins in the Levant -- isn't it a bit odd that this argument never grapples with the millions of Israeli Jews who spent the past 1,800 years in places like Iraq and Yemen, Jews who were expelled and fled to the last man, woman and child to Israel, and who make up half of Israeli society today?
You'd think if this was actually about Israeli "genetics," that would be part of this conversation. But it isn't about any kind of reality, it's a bigoted, genocidal fantasy. So the millions of Jews who don't even come from Europe magically disappear from this conversation.
I don't think Joe Rogan dreams of our annihilation. I think Joe picks up garbage floating in the juices at the bottom of the internet's deepest garbage bins and launders it happily for clicks.
New: Joe Rogan reveals to comedian Sam Tallent that the real reason Israel restricts DNA ancestry testing is because most of the people over there aren’t Semites and are actually just European Jews:
ROGAN: “The real Semites are the Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu’s family is from Poland.”
CONTEXT: Israel does have restrictions on DNA testing.
According to Israel's Ministry of Health, paternity and family-relationship DNA tests generally require a COURT ORDER, even when everyone involved consents.
And there's an especially surprising detail.
MyHeritage, an ancestry-testing company HEADQUARTERED IN ISRAEL that offers DNA kits internationally, explicitly lists ISRAEL among the countries where its consumer ancestry tests are unavailable.
But that does NOT establish Rogan's allegation about WHY these restrictions exist.
Israel's genetic-information laws address matters including consent, family relationships, privacy, and potential consequences for children.
There is no substantiated evidence that the restrictions were created to conceal the ethnic origins of Israel's Jewish population.
And when Rogan brings up Netanyahu's Polish family roots, he's referencing something with a documented historical basis.
Netanyahu's father, Benzion Netanyahu, was born in WARSAW in 1910, before his family immigrated to what was then British Mandatory Palestine.
But European family history doesn't automatically mean someone has no ancient Middle Eastern ancestry.
In fact, scientific research reveals a much more complicated story.
IMPORTANT NOTES: A major genetic study published in NATURE in 2010 found evidence connecting many Jewish diaspora communities to shared ancestral origins in the LEVANT.
And a 2020 study published in CELL examined ancient DNA from Bronze Age populations in the region.
Researchers found substantial genetic continuity between ancient Levantine populations and multiple populations living in the region today, including Jewish and Arab communities.
In other words, the evidence points to a history of shared regional ancestry, migrations, and intermixing. It’s not a simple genetic division between two populations.
Then Rogan takes the discussion even further.
He questions whether the term ANTISEMITISM should instead be called “anti-Jewish,” arguing that Palestinians have a stronger claim to being called Semites.
But there's another important historical distinction.
“Semitic” originally refers to a LANGUAGE FAMILY that includes Hebrew and Arabic, not a scientifically defined genetic race.
And the word “antisemitism,” despite its linguistic roots, has historically referred specifically to hostility or prejudice toward JEWISH PEOPLE.
Samuel Stern retweeted
New American Jewish Committee (AJC) statement: "There are also individuals elected whose records, rhetoric, and positions are deeply troubling, including candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and others, who have made hostility toward Israel and the Jewish community or conspiratorial antisemitism central to their politics.
We will confront these threats whenever and wherever we need to. When elected officials on either side of the aisle traffic in antisemitism, seek to marginalize the Jewish community, demonize Israel, or fuel extremism, we will call it out, confront it, and hold them accountable."
Samuel Stern retweeted
You are a hero and the Jewish community will never forget what you did for us.
Samuel Stern retweeted
Senator El-Sayed engages in Goebbels-level propaganda here, claiming that the destruction of Israel and what will be a resulting genocide - the goal of Arabs in the wars of 1948, 1967, 1973, etc., etc. - is "love."
This is a declaration of a “right of return” for “Palestinian kids” to the “land of their forefathers” in modern day Israel. As I’ve documented at @FoxNews Digital, “Free Palestine” means the “right of return” of diaspora Palestinians to modern day Israel and a demographic overthrow of the nation by Muslims over Jews in Israel to rename it “Palestine.” It’s a “one-state solution.”
Samuel Stern retweeted
This is probably the worst result of the night.
Newly elected Democratic congressman Adam Hamawy was a close associate of Omar Abdel Rahman - the “Blind Sheikh” sentenced to life in prison for his role inspiring the 1993 Wold Trade Center bombing.
Abdel-Rahman issued a fatwa in the US that declared it lawful to rob banks and kill Jews in the US. His sermons condemned Americans as the "descendants of apes and pigs'' and called on Muslims to assail the West, ''kill them on the sea, air, or land.''
Adam Hamawy travelled with the Blind Sheikh to a conference in Detroit in 1991 titled "Towards a Global Islamic Economy.” He ultimately testified in court for the Blind Sheikh to try defend him.
A secret FBI informant said that Hamawy discussed making bombs with the Blind Sheikh and "conquering the land of the infidels.”
Samuel Stern retweeted
No more military sales says Khanna. So Israel should be defenseless. The goalposts will keep shifting for as long as there is an independent Jewish state.
Samuel Stern retweeted
Go on, make a fuss.
I wrote about one of the lessons for Jews from the elections: self-respect is obligatory--and sometimes it's even effective politics commentary.org/seth-mandel/s…
Samuel Stern retweeted
I guess Saudi and Qatar (Hamas leadership home base) is ok but 3.5% for the Jewish state isn’t?
Samuel Stern retweeted
Completely flew under the radar, but Josh Shapiro won re-election, beating his opponent by 22 points. Twenty-two. In the single biggest purple state in America.
All that chatter about 2028 always seems to miss the biggest contenders
Samuel Stern retweeted
"Here in Canada we have no AIPAC equivalent, and our funding to Israel is insignificant. The hatred is worse."
Samuel Stern retweeted
Public opinion about Israel is extremely malleable because most voters are low-information about it and consider the Israel-Palestine conflict low salience.
The reason Israel seems like a top issue right now is because there is a huge amount of propaganda targeting Jews and Israel right now, and blaming Israel for high gas prices. Once the war ends and gas prices go down, people will stop thinking about Israel.
What is a problem is that the coalition taking over DC right now is really weird, even if some of the people at the head of it seem normal — the 30 to 45 Dem staffer class are woke activists and nonbinary gender weirdos, and the under-30s idolize Islamist terrorists. It is really scary because behind every Joe Biden-type there is a swarm of Sam Brintons and Hasan Pikers.
The goal of the Republicans is to make sure these freaks are front and center in front of America so they remember in 2028 what they voted against in 2024, while also articulating a positive Republican vision for the future, which should be a regulatory environment that enables unprecedented economic growth through rapid technological advancement.
One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
Samuel Stern retweeted
Antizionist measures are usually the first sign your city has fallen to Islamists.
Samuel Stern retweeted
AIPAC congratulates the hundreds of pro-Israel Democrats and Republicans who won their elections last night. More than 234 candidates supported by AIPAC members have already won, with many additional races still too close to call. We congratulate Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on the resounding victories for their caucuses.
AIPAC members are determined to expand their political activism in the cycles ahead. Our community will increase its support for Democrats and Republicans who recognize that a strong partnership with Israel helps keep both countries secure, advances peace and stability, promotes democratic values, and grows our economy through trade and innovation.
Samuel Stern retweeted
This is just my humble opinion but I’m not fully pessimistic nor ecstatic about last night’s mid-terms results. My biggest takeaway is American Jews’ cannot expect to be a force to be heard or listened to if they have no defined red lines.
Yes, the gaslighting from democrats about how it’s life or death to vote for Abdul El-Sayed was shameful, to say the least, but none of it would have worked if information was widely available and community leaders across various areas of Jewish life were united in narrative and direction. It’s not enough to say things are problematic if things are also acceptable.
I don’t see the same level of scrutiny regarding party loyalty (even for a single candidate), forced so aggressively on any other minority. If anything, what I’ve seen is sympathy and understanding why Jews should be thrown under the bus to protected others or “the greater cause”.
This may be the direction American Jews want to take, and that is their choice to make. But I wouldn’t assume that we live in the same America of the early 2000’s or the 90’s. The political landscape has changed globally. Europe does not look the same, and neither does the Middle East or Asia. I’m no expert at analysis of global affairs but I do know a bit about history - which tends to suggest we’re at a point of escalation in populism. Neither left or right controlled has ever been a comfy spot to be Jewish under.
I spent much of the last decade foreseeing the rise of antisemitism we’re experiencing now and I’d like to be dead wrong for the next because the off-ramp is nowhere in sight.