An Open Letter to My Fellow Comedian Hannah Einbinder

Oh Hannah, you remind me of my dear dead brother, or as I refer to him now, my soul brother. Ari Gold was the most precious, beautiful, beloved soul. Not just a champion for queer rights, but as Rolling Stone called him, “a trailblazer.”On his zoom shiva during COVID, all of his closest friends — RuPaul, Colman Domingo, Laverne Cox and his ex-boyfriend, Billy Porter — were lauding him for being the first gay singer/songwriter to use male pronouns and sing songs about loving another

At the intersection of two marginalized groups, it was a natural inclination for Ari to always side with oppressed minorities. As such, in the oppressed vs. oppressor paradigm, he chose the Palestinians, not realizing it’s the Jews who are the David in the sea of Arab Goliaths and that while the Palestinians are in fact oppressed, it is by their own leadership. (See; Iran. North Korea, any country that had an Arab spring…) I have a joke in my act: “Israel isn’t in the oppression business, there’s no money in it.” It gets a laugh because it plays into the Jewish money stereotype, but it speaks to a truth about Israel that most, like my brother, couldn’t see. Ari was so passionate about liberal causes, he went with the progressive flow, not realizing how illiberal this one is. 

He passed away of leukemia four years ago and didn’t live to bear witness to the atrocities of Oct. 7. But over a decade ago he began to realize that the very people he was advocating for would throw him off a building for being gay and then drag his body around Gaza for being Jewish. 

He WOKE up.

It’s now your turn Hannah. I used to love having you and your then boyfriend, Alex Edelman (who I mentored since he was 12), for Shabbat dinners. We laughed and discussed worthy causes and issues that we cared about. I saw your heart and your compassion. Like most progressives, you’re desperate to be on the right side of humanity.

But there is no nobility in the anti-Israel cause. 

You recently used a Human Rights Campaign award speech to demonize and vilify Israel, a country that is fighting for its life and to save western civilization. There is no bravery in standing at a podium lamenting societal woes and the toll of war. It’s safe and easy to virtue-signal at a Hollywood awards show, or on a college campus. You know what isn’t a safe space? Gaza. Not for you and not for any of the Gazan civilians living under Hamas occupation. 

“As a queer person, as a Jewish person,” you say, “I am horrified by the Israeli government’s massacre and mass murder of well over sixty-five thousand Palestinians in Gaza.”

You are quoting Hamas’ unverified numbers that include terrorists. These numbers have been debunked as the biggest lie since the first day of the war when Israel was blamed for the hospital bombing and “slaughter of 500,” when in fact it was an errant Palestinian Jihad missile in the parking lot and the casualty count was closer to 5 than 500.  

“Israel’s actions continue to endanger Jews around the world” you say? I’m pretty sure the world has been unsafe for Jews for millennia. In fact I’m positive that nobody was blaming the actions of Israel for the Crusades, Inquisition, pogroms and the Holocaust, because the state of Israel didn’t exist. But why didn’t it exist if the land and people of Israel are thousands of years old, you ask? Because the indigenous Jewish people of Israel were ethnically cleansed out of their land repeatedly by the same evil forces that folks like you refuse to recognize as THE problem. Rather, you lend your voice to the pro-Jihad side who are echoing the modern day blood libel that Israel is committing genocide, when in fact it is preventing one.

The genocide of the Jews living in the land of Israel predates the modern state. What happened in the 1929 Hebron Massacre and what happened on Oct. 7 are the same, only now we have useful idiots calling mini-Holocausts, “resistance.” Or “justified” because of occupation. But the Jews (of Israel) have been subjected to genocide long before there was an occupation. Not to mention that Oct. 7 happened a decade after the Gaza “Occupation” ended.

Please stop reading this right now and ask Chat GPT what groups of people invaded and conquered Israel LONG before the modern state existed and hundreds of years before the term “Free Palestine” was ever uttered. (Note: That phrase was coined by the Jews living under British colonizers as a call for the independence of a Jewish state in the ancestral Jewish homeland). It is a list of 14 invaders who committed actual genocide and ethnic cleansing: Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Muslims, Crusaders … ending in 1948 with Israel’s independence. I’m sure there’d be protests calling for the Mamluks in 1260 C.E. to “resist by any means necessary!”

This is just the current iteration of murderous thugs trying to expel Jews out of their land. Or out of any land for that matter as was the case for the one million Jews cleansed out of every Arab country and forced to return to their homeland. 

Hannah, I know you have a heart and a high-functioning brain, because I got to know you over the years and truly respected and admired you. And I’m grateful that you at least acknowledged the 1200 massacred, burned, raped Israelis and the hostages currently being held. I’m also aware that you are as against war as I am and as any other peace-loving person should be. But sometimes war is a necessity. Sometimes thousands of tragic casualties of war prevent millions of casualties. Like the 50 million murdered under Stalin. Or the 20 million murdered under Hitler. Would you rather the allied forces NOT bomb Germany to end the genocide of 6 million Jews? The Nazis did miss a few, like my grandfather. They got his two brothers, his two sisters, his mother and his father, but they didn’t finish the job and now I’m here to tell you that what you are doing is social injustice. 

You’re inflating and conflating the number of innocents that die with the concept of right or wrong. Good and evil. An enormous number of civilians have been killed on both sides, but this isn’t a competition where the winner of ‘most dead’ is the virtuous one. During WWII would you have posted “All Eyes On Dresden”? The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem would have. He personally met with Hitler to discuss the “Jewish problem.”

Every casualty of war is a tragedy. The last thing Israel wants to do is be at war. The first thing Israel must do is to protect its multicultural, diverse, open and free society of Jews, Druze, Muslims, Christians, atheists and any of its pluralistic citizens. 

Israel is on the front lines of a global Jihad and is fighting for its existence. It faces an enemy that seeks its destruction on seven fronts. As they did in 1948, 67, 73… Instead of demonizing Israel, thank them. You can call for an end to the war as we all want. But not before Hamas is eradicated, the hostages are freed and Israelis and Palestinians can feel safe. What you are putting out into the world is making Jews so much less safe than anything the Israeli government is doing. YOU are promulgating the big lie of the Jewish state as the bad guy that indiscriminately kills innocents, when we all know that the real bad guy is the one who would kill you, me and my brother if they could. 

Well, he’s safe right now and forever. You and I are not.