The Crusades, 2025 Edition

A liberal society

In 2025, the conventional wisdom of liberal America is that we as a society need to have empathy for others not like us, fight discrimination, achieve equality and justice for vulnerable minorities, level the playing field, and represent the rich diversity of our country in the workplace, media, and elsewhere. This is good news and represents the evolution of a compassionate and interconnected society. 

Even many conservatives agree with the principles above, with exceptions starting to appear as you get into the specific culture wars of the moment.

So mainstream American society has, at least publicly, become more tolerant, compassionate, and sensitive to discrimination and inequality. This is true progress from the days of overt racism and hate going unchecked, despite the perception by some that nothing has changed. I'm not a social scientist and don't have statistics in front of me, but I would venture that most most metrics on overt racism, homophobia, and discrimination are down. Yes there is much work to do, but the notion that it's no better today than 1965 or 1920 or 1885 is nonsense.

So what's the problem?

The mindset of those on the frontlines of liberal activism today -- progressives -- has grown increasingly brittle and supportive of a zero sum mode of politics. That is to say that the Left has become a bastion of culture warriors combating the culture warriors of the Right, each side channeling morality itself in order to save humanity. Infused with such purpose, culture warriors have calcified their views into cult-like ideologies that are immune to logic, dialogue, nuance, and compromise. For the progressive standard bearers, there is simply good and bad, black and white, woke and conservative, oppressor and victim. They respond to each new outrage enthusiastically, driving the two sides further and further apart (just as their MAGA counterparts do).

To be clear, I am a lifelong liberal Democrat. I share many of the values of the Left and am equally disgusted by the overreaches of Trump and the Right. But today's progressives have become a caricature: self-righteous, small-minded, and easily offended enforcers of language and thought that might differ from their worldview. While they do not currently hold political power, they hold sway over many of our cultural institutions (media, entertainment, academia, education, unions, etc.), which have gradually radicalized their staffs in order to virtue signal and remain relevant in industries dominated by guilt-ridden, privileged whites. The influence of today's Left, through these institutions, is just as dangerous to our society as Trump's nihilist dismantling of our democracy. 

Why is it dangerous?

Because, when a group believes -- absolutely -- that it is on the side of truth and justice, its facts become indisputable and its adherents have no interest in subtlety or alternate views. They are crusaders for justice; and those who stand in the way of progress are bullied publicly and risk losing their jobs, reputations, and social standing. 

What's the result?

• A conversation about immigration that is utterly unnuanced and alienates millions of non-racist Americans (including immigrants) who would like sensible immigration reform
• Smart people who assert that we aren't allowed to discuss transgender science or mental health because even having the conservation would be akin to violence against a vulnerable group
• A culture that shames people for not using correct pronouns
• Reducing all Americans to their intersectional categories -- from persecuted, always blameless victims on one side to privileged oppressors on the other, no matter the actual facts on the ground for each individual or group
• Alienating tens of millions of potential allies (and voters) who don't accept the categories or fit into the narrow identities provided (including large numbers of working class whites, Asian-Americans, Latinos, Blacks, Jews, LGBT+ and others)
• People who abhor discrimination of any kind who nevertheless justify rampant discrimination against Jews, who are cast -- as they've been for centuries -- as fair targets for society's hatreds because of their otherness or relative success (the current false flag argument is "we don't hate Jews, we hate Zionists," a category that represents the majority of the world's Jews, who believe in Israel's right to exist)
• The imposition of a binary, black and white worldview onto other countries, regardless of their realities or unique histories (with the current, hugely disproportionate obsession being Israel)

I will never become a reactionary conservative, but the progressives have ceded any moral high ground and will never capture the majority of the American body politic. The result will be the ongoing splintering of the Democratic party, allowing MAGA assholes to continue to be the electable alternative.

You're welcome

In ancient times, they hated us because we would not assimilate and go away

In Christian times, they feared us because we were stubbornly different

In the Middle Ages, they blamed us for any calamity they could not explain 

In enlightened times, they resented us for excelling in the few jobs we were allowed to hold

In modernity, they despised the success of our elites and blamed us for society's ills

In Israel, they smeared us as settler colonists who interrupted the dominion of Islam over the region

In 2025, they branded us as the all-powerful, privileged, white, racist, genocidal, child-killing agents of the West

We have always been the convenient other, 

the foil, 

the scapegoat, 

onto which the cynical and ignorant can project their frustrations, 

absolving the majority of blame

The Mamdani Mess

Why Zohran Mamdani's Primary Wins Sucks

Putting aside all the political details for now (obviously Andrew Cuomo is a deeply flawed candidate; the Democratic establishment is a mess; voters went for flash and identity over the experience of a truly capable progressive like Brad Lander; Trump is a fascist POS who is making everything bananas), Zohran Mamdani represents the normalization of extremism and hate within the Democratic party and our political discourse. But he's not a hater or extremist, you might respond. Well, that's just not what the record shows.

Mamdani has made Palestinian rights central to his political identity (which is fine — I support Palestinian rights, self-determination, and security; I want two secure and peaceful states side by side; I want Israel to leave the West Bank; Netanyahu is an asshole), but he goes far beyond criticizing Israeli policy or actions. 

He is part of a growing and increasingly normalized trend of delegitimizing Israel and refusing to acknowledge its right to exist (imagine criticizing another state in that manner — "Turkey has mistreated its Kurdish minority; the state must cede all land to the Kurds and cease to exist!"); disproportionately focusing on Israeli actions, exponentially more than any other nation, even those that commit horrible atrocities; supporting the BDS movement (boycott, divest and sanction), which nominally seeks to pressure Israel through economic and cultural boycotts but actually amounts to the aggressive censorship and harassment of Israelis (and Jews) of any persuasion, and has as part of its platform the dismantling of the state of Israel; accusing Israel of genocide regardless of facts on the ground and without similar accusations about Hamas or others; and refusing to back away from the slogan "globalize the intifada," a non-theoretical call for "resistance" and violence against Jews everywhere. 

For him to say, explicitly, Jews YES and Israel NO, is to say "I like Jews so long as they're the right kind of Jew." And the majority of Jews in NYC, the US, and the world who support Israel's right to exist are therefore the wrong kind of Jew. That is simply racism, antisemitism, hate, bigotry — whatever you want to call it.

All of this rhetoric has cumulatively led to a very real climate of hate and violence against Jews — not just the recent cases in the news — but ongoing harassment, vandalism, and attacks all over the place. Jews are, not coincidentally, per capita victims of hate crimes far more than any other group in the US.

So, in the most Jewish city in the world, it feels alarming that we'll have a mayor who is proudly crossing the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and demonization of Jewish people. 

Zionism, despite all of the hype in the media, is simply the liberation movement of the Jewish people, who have never known real security for long (despite the relative comfort of the US in 2025). There is no part of mainstream Zionism that seeks to disenfranchise or harm Palestinians. It is precisely the extremism of the Mamdanis of the world — coupled with the actions of Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and other bad faith actors in the region — that has driven the Israelis to extremes not previously possible. I would like a world where haters on both sides would shut up, support peace, and help us return to actual compromise that benefits both Palestinians and Jews.

Armchair pundits

The Age of Information?

I imagine a time before modern technology, when news took days to reach our communities, letters through the post brought important updates from weeks earlier, and our ability to understand events far away was slow and limited.

Technology, which is neither inherently good nor bad, has shrunk the world in a million ways, connecting us to locations near and far, delivering news and information (whether reliable or not) instantly, and allowing us to respond, interact, and influence others outside of our bubbles. We may read about the results of Taiwan's election before we hear about the fatal car accident two blocks from our home in Texas, a phenomenon that profoundly changes our perspectives and priorities.

There are many positives to our age of connectivity: transparency; the democratization of information; human connection and community; support and resources for those on the margins; shared knowledge in furtherance of science, health, diplomacy, commerce, human rights; and so on. 

There are many negatives, too: heaps of false or misleading information, often impossible to distinguish from truth; the illusion of proximity or understanding; virtual connection replacing real life connection; the belief in technology itself as a means to an end -- and the answer to all of our problems -- rather than understanding it as an imperfect tool; idleness and adverse health effects; and so on.

In 2025, the reality is that social media (with its influencers, trolls, news delivered through headlines and memes, propaganda and misinformation, opinion conflated with reporting) is replacing traditional, objective journalism and fact-based expertise as the primary source of knowledge for so many people, especially among younger generations. 

This is a big problem.

Humans are not wired to resist such a compelling and ubiquitous drug as social media. With ongoing consumption, our critical faculties decrease and, with them, our ability to discern fact from fiction. We conflate online community for real world community. We make assumptions that go unchallenged. We confirm our biases and worldviews again and again, aided by algorithms that feed us what we are looking for in order to grow their audiences and sell ads.

In this siloed and broken system, each person may not recognize the extent of their bubble and may feel that they are objectively informed about any given issue. As such, they feel less need for traditional experts who used to inform us about complicated topics (journalists, scientists, academics, legislators, writers, etc) and, gradually, experts become superfluous or worse. Without any rigor in establishing authenticity, building knowledge, or sourcing information, facts become subjective and change depending on your bias. 

Enter the armchair pundit

Armed with strong opinions and powerful emotions fueled by social media, the armchair pundit is an expert on every issue and not afraid to share their findings. They may even feel it's their duty to weigh in on random topics -- to virtue signal -- and that their audience is awaiting their opinion on the latest news. 

In this broken system, the armchair pundit readily conflates engagement with expertise -- the illusion of knowledge. These are regular people, activists, influencers, politicos, and anyone else who is a creature of the internet. They are now leading the culture wars (on both the right and left) and reshaping our societies. Make no mistake: there are difficult challenges in our society that need to be addressed: poverty, racism, sexism, greed, homophobia, and so on. But the current armchair activism is unproductive and tone deaf and, instead of yielding progress, is simply driving each side farther apart, into greater extremes, and empowering dumb, extremist ideologies -- like MAGA, corporate impunity, climate denialism, censorship and policing of language, anti-Israel hysteria, and performative DEI. Among the many flavors of armchair activism today, I am most familiar with the progressive version of this phenomenon -- the social justice warrior -- so I will break down the most common types that I have observed.

Five common types of social justice warrior

Rutterless whites: Many white people (and others as well) feel unsettled and guilty about their privilege, and many are not connected to their ethnic, spiritual, or cultural roots. They often feel confused or unsatisfied by their sense of identity in our society and, as a result, seek out authenticity, meaning, connection, and approval from those seen as the standard bearers of authenticity, justice, cool, wisdom, etc. (it start innocently for many in school, as they copy the speech and cool of Black kids and align themselves with their worldviews). Over time, these rutterless (mostly) white folks create a new identity to align themselves with their values. This identity can become exaggerated and brittle and, over time, transforms into an ideology -- a belief system -- that paves over their past identity or roots. These are white saviors, allies, and activists compensating for their lack of bona fides. 

Intersectionalists: In efforts to understand and address real injustice against marginalized groups, many activists have turned to pseudo-scientific theories of race, power, and oppression, with no small debt to Marxist critical theory. Especially in the US, this movement, growing since the 1960s but gaining prominence in the last 10 years, asserts that all people fall into the spectrum of victim or perpetrator, with each group's place depending on its degree of marginalization or privilege. In this absolutist and binary construct, all whites are privileged and guilty and all people of color and LGBT folks are victims. World events, near and far, are interpreted through this lens, often resulting in a profound distortion of context and reality.

Pathological empaths: Other people of any ethnicity or background find their way to activism after personally experiencing trauma, anger, sadness, or other forms of loss and redirecting those struggles toward social justice. The intense energy that comes from trauma is then channeled through the lens of activism. It becomes calcified and unyielding, and seeks outlets everywhere. They look for -- and find -- outrage, which confirms their positions again and again. In such a worldview, facts and identities are binary -- good and bad, black and white, perpetrators and victims -- and it is up to these warriors to fight for what is right. Their need to fight become tangled up with real feelings of compassion toward those marginalized, producing a sort of pathological empathy that trumps critical analysis or situational awareness. 

Veteran activists: There are others, generally older, who came of age during the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, or during the era of beatniks and hippies -- all meaningful protests and reactions to problematic systems around them. These veteran activists developed a mindset that was necessarily anti-establishment and populist. But, as situations changed over the decades and politics became far more complex, many of these activists failed to update their playbook, and developed a simplistic, knee-jerk response to all perceived power dynamics and injustices.

The Che crowd: Others are influenced by socialism, liberation theory, or revolutionary movements where the need to right an actual wrong (i.e., Cuban robber barons, the Russian czar, the Contras in Nicaragua) led to wholesale coups or revolutions that eventually created new systems of repression to replace the previous ones. These people inherited the zeal and desire for change born of these movements without updating their manuals to account for the profound flaws inherent to most revolutions.

And any combination of the above is possible. I do believe that much of this simplistic, binary thinking stems from a very old, Western, Christian mythology pitting reformers against traditionalists, crusaders against infidels, Protestants against Catholics, revolutionaries against monarchs, and so on. We are reproducing the self-righteous passion and anger from these struggles in each subsequent struggle, without considering whether there are other paradigms.

The danger is that these are all extreme or radical approaches that -- coupled with their counterparts on the right -- are driving our country further into intractable divides and culture wars.

Who is a Jew and can you dislike Israel and still be a proud Jew?

Who's a Jew?

First off, one of the benefits of Judaism is that there is no central authority governing rules, membership, or definitions. While each denomination, jurisdiction, or governing body has rules, those rules are not universal. Even the traditional definition of "you're Jewish if your mother is Jewish" is not universal; it's a practical custom, accepted by some, that applies less and less in the current era.

I have evolved a lot over the years on this topic. When there is no definitive rulebook, anyone who truly identifies as Jewish can theoretically be Jewish. That's to say, you can be Jewish by faith, by ethnicity, by culture, or by choice. You can be of mixed heritage and still be Jewish. If you're half Jewish but feel Jewish, you're Jewish. And the converse is that, if you are ethnically Jewish but don't identify, you're still technically Jewish, but the next generations will be less and less so (and your right to speak for the community is dicey at best). 

Frankly, if you say, "I am Jewish," no one can tell you that you're wrong. We have no pope or president to say otherwise.

And what do Jews look like? Many Jews are truly observant but most today are not. Many Jews are ethnically and culturally Jewish (whether Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Ethiopian, mixed, or otherwise). Many Jews are connected to the Jewish community in some form, but many are not. For some, the Holocaust and persecution are the main connections. For others, it is Israel. For me, it's a combination of culture (especially Yiddish culture and history) and Israel in all of its profound diversity (Middle Eastern, Ashkenazi, Jewish, Arabic, Druze, African, history, food, music, synagogues, mosques, and on and on).

So, if Jewish peoplehood is so diverse and inclusive, can't a Jew be a proud Jew and still not recognize Israel as the Jewish home? 

I think the answer is yes, though I passionately disagree. Our historical, cultural, ethnic, and religious connections to Israel are profound; our need for security is equally so. But some people simply aren't connected to Israel and don't have the firsthand experience that convinces them that it is important. I'll accept that those people can act in good faith, and that their political views on Israel/Palestine are simply political views and not about their Jewish identity.

However, many take it further. Many non-Zionists actively crusade against Israel's right to exist (beyond criticizing its policies or actions) and become anti-Zionists. These people are activists who have generally adopted an extreme progressive narrative about Israel and the "nakba," and who place Palestinian liberation above any Jewish needs. It is difficult for me to accept that those who support self-determination for another tribe but not for their own are truly proud of their identity.

There is yet another group that is even more common among those I know in my life: those progressive Jews who identify (often proudly) as Jewish, are not connected to Israel, and who turn a blind eye to racism against their own people because of their misgivings about Israel or their own identity. They may not be activists like the group above, but they will readily support Palestinian rights before their own and rarely comment on hatred leveled against Jews. At best, they are ignorant; at worst, they are ashamed of their own identity.

My conclusion about each of these groups is that, whatever the source of their identity-crisis, they are on the margins of the Jewish community and do not get to speak for the whole. And those who begin a sentence with "As a Jew..." in order to distance themselves from the mainstream Jewish community are simply part of the problem.

Self-haters? Or just rutterless?

During the ongoing conflict in Israel and Gaza, there is so much ignorance, delusion, gaslighting, bias, confusion, and actual hate in the media and social media that it's often hard to parse the truth. Unfortunately, that has not stopped the multitudes from weighing in, often to the detriment of peace and dialogue.

As a proud Jew, one group that gives me great stress is the self-hating American Jew. Okay, that term is not charitable and will shut down discussion right away, so let's instead say "the Jews of privilege" or just "confused Jews." Here is the logical progression that I've observed from this group:

I am a Jewish American

I identify with being Jewish (even if I'm only partly Jewish or didn't grow up in the community)

I am not especially observant, at least not traditionally, but I may have a strong connection to Jewish rituals like Passover, the high holidays, and shabbat -- and I like Tikkun Olam

I have a connection to nostalgic Jewish culture -- e.g., bagels, pastrami, and klezmer music -- but it's not a part of my daily life

I have grown up in the relative privilege of America, where I am safe from the hardships of previous generations, from direct hatred and violence, from existential insecurity

I am middle class, upper middle class, or wealthy, attended private schools or universities, and have been buffered from the immediate struggles that poorer Americans face (and, even if I grew up poor, my connection to those without means is now a conscious, political choice rather than an everyday reality)

I am ashamed of my privilege and feel guilty for my association with those perceived to be on the wrong side of social justice

I compensate by downplaying my own identity -- if I have any -- and seek to fill that void with something else: social justice, progressive politics, activism

My desire to fit into the progressive community -- and to signal my virtue, authenticity, allyship to the "others" -- becomes my central identity

I defer to the extreme progressive narrative about Jews, Israel, Palestine, privilege, right, wrong, race, colonialism, and history, even when it's false, simplistic, binary or imposes American political ideas onto a complex history

My own peoplehood is irrelevant

Jewish security and self-determination are meaningless

The millennia of Jewish connection to Israel are moot

Israel is evil and should not exist

Israelis and Jews are complicit if they are not actively fighting to free Palestine

From the river to the sea...

While this group is a minority of the whole (though a much greater subset of the cultural elite), their positions help justify similar confusion among non-Jews, all of whom together help continue the cycle of misinformation, propaganda, and support for outright bad actors supporting violence and death for Jews and Israelis.

Maspeth, Queens

Like Ridgewood (previous entry), neighboring Maspeth is an immigrant world of Poles and Latinos, both American-born and first generation. But, for all Ridgewood's pleasantness, Maspeth is equally bland and uninviting. The many blocks of non-descript duplexes are also frequently -- and dramatically -- interrupted by desolate industrial boulevards and vast tracts of manufacturing.