A social psychologist with a clinical background, Dr. Paresky serves as Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute, Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at New York University, Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute, and Associate at Harvard University. In addition to The Jewish Journal, her work appears in Psychology Today, The Guardian, Politico, Sapir, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She has taught at Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and the United States Air Force Academy, and writes the Habits of a Free Mind newsletter on Substack. Follow her on Twitter at @PamelaParesky
A society that maximizes belonging while severing it from standards produces conformity, not freedom. A society that encourages mattering divorced from truth produces fanaticism, not dignity. Life and liberty depend on holding the two together.
The IHRA definition does not target criticism of Israel. Nor does it criminalize or even censor anti-Israel speech.
Terrorists and budding terrorists are referred to as “survivors,” who, we’re told with no caveats, “blame Israel for their wounds.”
Jews across the world have the sense that the “universal collective” to which we thought we finally belonged has thrown us out and turned its back.
Where is the President who said, “As long as the United States stands — and we will stand forever — we will not let [Israel] ever be alone?”
There is no word in the psychological lexicon for what happened on Oct. 7 or the new world in which Israelis now live. But “shattered” comes closer than “trauma.”
With the help of animators, illustrators, and musicians, filmmakers at the Center for Peace Communication (CPC) are turning Gazans’ private whispers into publicly defiant cries.
The curriculum authors, who define Zionism as “a nationalist, colonial ideology,” claim that there is a “current apartheid in Israel” and that Israel’s “settler colonialism” has “pedagogical importance” and therefore must be included in California’s ethnic studies curriculum.
Modern versions of old antisemitic conspiracy theories are being circulated online while violent anti-Jewish demonstrations escalate in Europe and North America.
Defining Jews as either having or lacking “racial privilege” erases realities that are inconvenient to the critical ethnic studies narrative.