April 9, 2025

It’s happening again. People who deviate from the unofficial script written for them by their political side are becoming scapegoats for all that is wrong in America.

It’s nothing new. In 2020 after the death of George Floyd people mobilized against brutality against Black people in a big way. There was solidarity in the fight against something that reasonable people agree is bad: racism. It was exhilarating to witness the way people came together so quickly for what seemed like the greater good.

But many of the people protesting had a fierce need for everyone to recite the same mantras and slogans, to read the same books (“White Fragility,” anyone?), and to commit to the same ideologies—even if they had nothing to do with racism—without question. Once the pandemic started, for example, even an ardent supporter of the BLM movement could not raise the possibility that the COVID virus was developed in a lab without facing complete ostracization and even bullying. If you subscribed to one progressive view, you must faithfully subscribe to all of them or risk being kicked out of the club.

I know how this works because it happened to me. At an implicit bias session for parents at my son’s school, I asked a question about antisemitism that upset some families in the school so much I’m lucky I wasn’t beaten in the schoolyard after dark. But it didn’t deter me. It caused me to dig my heels in deeper and to look for the truth even when it didn’t line up with the liberal and progressive agendas I had previous followed. I no longer accept as truth everything my favorite media outlets tell me. I now believe that viewpoint diversity is just as important as racial and cultural diversity.

It was painful, but it was the wakeup call I needed.

As more people started to reject some of the premises put forward by the left as representative of liberalism, it became more acceptable to question the script we were all supposed to follow. Public intellectuals—many of whom identify as politically liberal—like John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, and Kmele Foster began to challenge the race narratives hoisted on us by opportunists like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. Anyone with a shred of honesty had to admit, at the very least, that these guys—all of whom are Black—had a point.

Things started to get easier for those of us who suddenly felt politically homeless. Why? Because we had a community.

But now that Trump’s back, it feels like all bets are off. Many people who are otherwise thoughtful have reverted to extreme rhetoric. “If you voted for Trump or if you support anything Trump is doing then unfriend me now,” wrote one friend on Facebook. And he wasn’t the only one. It’s back to all or nothing. Trump is bad, and therefore everything he does is bad—even if it’s good. One dare not suggest that tariffs may ultimately be good for the American economy or that undocumented immigrants who commit violent crimes should be deported. Doing so makes you the enemy even if you check all of the other “right” boxes.

Look no further than the way media outlets ignored the Abraham Accords during Trump’s first term for an example of how this broken clock will never be correct once let alone twice. Trump is the lightning rod of our time, and it’s hard to imagine anyone overtaking him for that title.

I don’t agree with all of Trump’s policies. But there are also policies I do support. The previous two lines will likely stir up some anger among some of my friends. I’ll probably lose at least a couple of them for suggesting that I don’t disagree with everything Trump does. And this is one of the greatest tragedies of this political moment: If I identify as politically liberal agreeing with Trump is off limits even if his policies are more in line with the liberalism and concern for working Americans than what we see on the left.

The case of Mahmoud Khalil crystalizes this issue. Even those who recognize the exponential increase in antisemitism—especially on university campuses and within the “pro-Palestine” movement—and denounce it have become hysterical over the question of whether Khalil should be deported for actions that may have violated his visa agreement. If you’re not protesting in support of him, then you are a fascist who does not believe in free speech.

It may turn out that the rights of Khalil, who is represented by 19 high-power attorneys, were violated. It also may turn out that Khalil did in fact act in ways that blatantly support terrorism and should be deported. But because the Trump Administration is responsible for his arrest, we are all expected to speak out on behalf of Khalil’s innocence even though none of us know whether he is innocent or guilty. We are expected to scream and protest the ongoing deportations as a new chapter in the fascist turn of our country even though to date there were more quiet deportations under President Obama than any other administration. But few people got worked up about that. Even President Biden’s track record is not clean when it comes to deportations. Where were the outcries?

We are blinded by our political and ideological allegiances. We have trained ourselves to hate anyone who opposes our political beliefs. We can no longer see the forest for the trees.

We are blinded by our political and ideological allegiances. We have trained ourselves to hate anyone who opposes our political beliefs. We can no longer see the forest for the trees.

Even some of the most intelligent people I know have fallen prey to the power of the binary. But the good news is that more and more voices that complicate this imagined binary are emerging—people who don’t allow us to place them staunchly in one category or another. This is where we can find clarity and truth.

Trans activist Brianna Wu, for example, advocates for trans healthcare, but is also highly critical of many trans activists who “are alienating women and feminists.” She’s drawn important distinctions between biological males who present as women (through clothing, makeup, etc.) and trans people who have had gender reassignment surgery when it comes to who should and should not be allowed in bathrooms and locker rooms. She understands nuance and demands that we see it too. She has fought for representation of women in the gaming industry, but she also says that DEI initiatives have “gone way too far.” She is a staunch progressive but is also a fierce supporter of Israel.

Wu makes a lot of people mad because she can’t be forced into one category. She isn’t reading from the script. And for every person that is angered by her refusal to fall into line, there are two more that find her compelling and invigorating.

Similarly, “MAGA leftist” Batya Ungar-Sargon recently caused heads to explode when she articulated that she hasn’t ceased to be a leftist because she supports Trump. In fact, it’s the “pro-worker, anti-war, socially moderate America First agenda” of the Trump Administration that is more in line with what were historically seen as the goals of the Democrats.

And Palestinian activist Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has emerged as a compelling voice of clarity when it comes to Israel and Gaza. He has been taken to task by the left for his anti-Hamas and pro-peace stance. He lost multiple family members in IDF strikes in Gaza, but still advocates fiercely for the return of Israeli hostages. He refuses to let the complexities of the situation be suppressed by simple, either-or thinking.

If you’re looking for truth rather than propaganda, then I have some advice for you: Follow the ones who are willing to go off-script, who are willing to criticize their own party, and who will tell the truth no matter the cost.

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Monica Osborne is Editor at Large at The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.

It’s hard to respond to a sigh dressed in sage sorrow at man’s perfidy. The Jews, lamenters say, failed to draw the right lesson from their sufferings in the Holocaust. Having been the victims of one genocide, they hastened to wage their own on another hapless people, the Palestinians. Even more perverse, these observers grieve, the Jews brandish their torments in the Holocaust as a sort of all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card — a carte blanche for carnage, which the Jews expect the world to observe forever.  

Even more perverse, these observers grieve, the Jews brandish their torments in the Holocaust as a sort of all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card — a carte blanche for carnage, which the Jews expect the world to observe forever. 

It sounds so virtuous, and especially poignant when it comes from a Jew. These men and women often invoke their Jewish day schools and summer camps and trips to Israel, or even their Israeli citizenship, to give their sadness extra heft. Peter Beinart is probably the most prominent of this sort, but there are many others. I have no reason to think they are deliberately insincere. It’s just curious what an eager reception exists for these Jews’ damning charges against their own people.

The latest in the endless Jews-as-genocidal-maniacs effluvium is found in the New York Review of Books (NYRB), where the bien-pensants go for intellectual cleansing. I remember it fondly as a journal guaranteed to make me feel smarter, rather than where I learn with sinking heart that yet another of my favorite writers hates the Jews. 

I didn’t know of Omer Bartov, the author of the recent NYRB piece “Infinite License,” but he has impeccable credentials for the I-don’t-hate-Jews-I-only-hate-Zionists crowd: He was born in Israel to Jews of Polish background, and is a historian of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. When Bartov says Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians, it sounds tremendously authoritative. Yet it really should occur to someone, not least a historian, that Israel has been impugned as latter-day Nazis, intent on turning another people into the defenseless Jew, at least since the Six-Day War in 1967. In fact, I suspect that no sooner were the last starved Jews released from Auschwitz than fevered minds already speculated that they’d try to exploit their suffering for their malignant advantage. 

Nothing shakes Bartov’s suggestion that the Palestinians are all innocents, monstrously assailed by a wantonly marauding Israel. He writes that Israel saw the Hamas attack of Oct. 7 “as confirmation that the militant group was utterly savage and barbaric;” that since Oct. 7 “many Jews — not just in Israel but in the Diaspora — feel that they live under genocidal threat;” and that “Hamas militants are seen as modern-day Nazis,” but never wonders whether a person might have good reason, based on gruesome facts, to think and feel these things. There’s scant mention of Palestinian terrorism, and none of Israel’s vulnerability to its vastly more numerous Arab neighbors; the Palestinians’ longstanding refusal to accept a state in return for recognizing Israel; or Gazans’ well-documented support for genocidal antisemitism. In his view of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the only autonomous actors are the Jews, and the things they do to make others hate them.

“The memory of the Holocaust has, perversely, been enlisted to justify both the eradication of Gaza and the extraordinary silence with which that violence has been met,” Bartov writes. At least concerning the latter part of this sentence, he’s quite right. Aside from the huge marches howling for intifada; the flood of denunciations by the U.N., International Criminal Court accusers and powerful NGOs; the condemnatory newspaper editorials and nonstop anti-Israel coverage; the spike in physical attacks on Jews; the swastikas popping up like mushrooms on Jewish establishments; the pious Hollywood speeches and red-hand pins; the campus encampments; the protesters yanking Sabra hummus off supermarket shelves; and a zillion or so indictments on social media, there’s hardly been a peep about Israel’s war in Gaza. 

But it’s Bartov’s central claim that the memory of the Holocaust has been “enlisted” to justify the unjustifiable that is so insidious, particularly coming from a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Then again, there’s a tipoff to Bartov’s perspective in his academic title. Not so long ago, the Nazis’ attempt to murder all the Jews was considered worthy of its own discipline, and “Holocaust Studies” was born. Soon, however, a squeamishness set in. Why, some asked, should the Jews get so much attention for their particular suffering? What about the world’s many other genocides, the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans, the enslaved and murdered Africans, the brutal carnage carried out under colonialism? Although it’s hard to imagine, say, an African-American Studies Department being chided that their purview must include the Uighurs, because they too experience slavery today, it wasn’t hard to convince academia that Jewish suffering only merits attention if it sheds light on that of other peoples. “Holocaust and Genocide Studies” was born.

As Alvin H. Rosenfeld writes in his insightful and disturbing book “The End of the Holocaust,” the aim of using the Nazi genocide for “programs that will derive some good from all that bad” may be commendable. But, he suggests, ineluctably “the overwhelmingly destructive history of the Holocaust” is steadily eroded as a focus of concern. This decentering is part of a broader assault on Holocaust memory. Critics either attack the Holocaust outright as a supposed fabrication; or they claim the Jews exaggerate the numbers killed; or they allege that Jews died of disease or the natural consequences of war rather than a deliberate program of extermination; or they charge that the Zionists were the Nazis’ collaborators so the real villains; or they minimize it by saying it wasn’t any worse than other holocausts suffered by other people. The accumulated force of these tendencies, Rosenfeld writes, may bring about “the end of Auschwitz”: the end of any meaningful memory of the Holocaust, and its appropriation and distortion to use against its victims.

This is what Bartov, historian of the Holocaust, is contributing to. Academia is, of course, where the recognition of material reality goes to die. But it should occur to anyone with a passing knowledge of history that the Holocaust established at least two things: first, that it is possible for a modern political movement to envision and pursue the aim of murdering every last Jew; and second, that the continued survival of the Jews mandates they have a state, as other people have a state. Saying this isn’t “exploiting the memory of the Holocaust”; it’s learning from it. Instead we have the steady drip-drip of those intent on drawing other lessons from this horrific chapter in history, silencing its victims and turning the indictment on a new generation.

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Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”

Power, in its most dangerous form, rarely announces itself. It arrives in the guise of protection, clarity, strength. This is a meditation on how such power takes hold — not just in governments, but in homes, in institutions, in the quiet corners of the human psyche. Names change, banners change, but the pattern remains. If this piece stirs thoughts of a particular time or figure, that is the reader’s to carry. My aim is something broader, older and perhaps more urgent: to understand how we yield, why we follow and what it might take to move forward — with grace, with vision, and with an open, unflinching heart.

How does it happen?

How does a single human being — two lungs, two eyes, one fragile and finite body, like the rest of us — rise to such a height that millions come to bend to his will? How does someone who was once a helpless baby in his mother’s arms become a figure whose words alter destinies, whose whims reconfigure nations, whose moods can tilt the world toward war or peace? How does a single soul, enclothed in a body no different from our own — subject to common colds, frightened by loud noises just as we are—find his way to such outsized, unimaginable power?

It’s not a new question.

We’ve asked it of emperors and warlords, of presidents and prime ministers (some great, some terrible), of messianic cult leaders, terrorist leaders and mob bosses. We’ve asked it of men whose names we remember too well — Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Sinwar — and those we forget.

We ask it again in every era.

This is not just about politics. Or if it is, it is about the politics beneath politics: the primal theater where power is sought, maintained, and often abused. It can also play out in smaller ways — in personal relationships, in the workplace, in religious and academic institutions and in families.

It begins, I think, with a wound.

Somewhere in the life of every tyrant is a moment — or a series of moments — where love was withheld or warped, where fear first took root. The tyrant is, at his core, a frightened person. He may appear strong, composed, even radiant. But look closer and you will see someone perpetually on edge, a self that cannot bear contradiction, that requires constant reinforcement to keep from collapsing. A person whose malevolence was born of love denied.

The need for control becomes absolute. Chaos must be subdued. Rivals eliminated. Truth made flexible. Attention secured.

It’s a fragile architecture, a house of cards — often built on the willingness to do what others would never think of doing.

This is the secret of how power becomes tyranny: the one who rises in this negative sense is simply more willing to use violence than everyone else. Not just physical violence — though that, too; even murder and torture when deemed necessary — but psychological, emotional, legislative, spiritual violence. Where others hesitate, he advances. Where others reflect, he attacks. Where others are bound by decency, he is bound only by desperate, destructive need.

This is the critical edge. The advantage of extremity.

Most people are, in their hearts, unwilling to harm. They do not want to destroy, humiliate, or terrorize. They want to be left alone. They want to get through the day. They want to be good — or at least, not bad. And so when someone appears who is willing to cross every line, to say the unsayable, to threaten what should not be threatened, many instinctively step aside.

And with each step aside, the path widens for the tyrant.

Tyranny — of any sort, in any sphere — is never built in a day. It is a slow construction—brick by brick, fear by fear. It is rarely obvious at first. It comes cloaked in charm, in confidence, in nostalgia, in calls for aggressive order. It appeals to what is wounded in the collective and the personal.

It says: You are in danger. I will protect you. But first, I must be obeyed.

The press is pressured. The courts are questioned. The enemies multiply. The truth becomes malleable. The entire framework is so gaslit it bursts into flames! And eventually, the system itself is reshaped —  subtly, then forcefully — to accommodate the tyrant’s will.

But the tyrant cannot do this alone. He needs accomplices. He needs the enablers, the rationalizers, the ones who say, “Yes, perhaps he’s gone too far — but look how strong he is.” He needs the public voice who praises him, the functionary who fears irrelevance, the citizen who shrugs and says, “What can one person do?”

He thrives in the silence of the decent.

And he needs, above all, people who have grown weary of truth, wary of nuance, of his own hunger for clarity — even if that clarity is a lie. The “decent” person needs slogans, memes, tropes — also soothing words, saccharine suggestions. His brain, suffused with cortisol, no longer has patience for more than that.

It has happened in so many places and arenas. In so many eras. Yet, the dynamic remains: fear, flattery and the careful dismantling of constraint.

It can happen anywhere.

Even in societies with long-standing traditions. Even in nations with well-drafted constitutions. Even in families whose lives behind closed doors look nothing like what is presented to their neighbors. The mistake is to assume that the system itself will hold — that norms will enforce themselves, that laws will not be bent, that those in power will act in good faith — and if not that, at least act in ways believed to benefit what we think is best for our particular set of mercurial values or immediate desires.

But a just society of any kind is not a machine. It is a living agreement. It requires participation. It requires memory. It requires consensus.

More than anything, it demands courage.

John Adams once wrote that the American Constitution was made for “a moral and religious people” and is “wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” What he meant, I think, is that laws alone cannot save us.

They require character.

They require a populace willing to govern not just others, but themselves.

What happens when that self-governance erodes?

What happens when lies are broadcast with the same force as truth — and sometimes more effectively? What happens when people lose the ability to say what is plainly visible? What happens when entire narratives are constructed not to reflect reality but to overwrite it?

We see it in ways that that are both subtle and overt — not just in the overwrought proclamations of public figures, but in the quiet compliance of institutions. In the hesitant, craven way truth is spoken. In the calculated ways reality is denied.

And yet — and this may be the most important turn — if it is true that a single person, through charisma or cruelty, can lead a society (or a family) to the brink of ruin, isn’t it also possible that a single person can pull it back?

If darkness can be multiplied by one will, why not light?

Yes. I’m aware, this is a kind of messianic wish.

Perhaps it is naïve.

Perhaps it is sacred.

Perhaps it is our only hope.

We know that evil can be enacted by a single determined figure. History has proved this many times. But what if goodness — clear-eyed, courageous, uncompromising goodness — can do the same?

What if the same fragile human frame that carried so much destruction — the two lungs, the one heart — could also carry healing?

This is not about waiting for a hero.

It is about rejecting the lie that goodness is inherently weak, or that wanton violence is the only path to change. It is about recognizing that our capacity to imagine better — to hold fast to morality, as Adams suggested, even when it’s inconvenient — might be the truest form of power there is.

The tyrannical person, after all, is not powerful because he is strong.

He is powerful because others allow him to be.

And just as that allowance can be given, it can also be revoked.

This is where we find our agency — not in grand gestures, but in the refusal to look away, in the insistence on clarity, in the daily courage to speak the truth even when it costs something. Indeed for some, it has cost their lives.

Yes, one person can change the course of history for the worse.

But one person — even just one — might also change it for the good.

And maybe that person is not a politician or a prophet.

Maybe it’s you.

Maybe it’s me.

Maybe it’s anyone who, seeing the shadow, decides to light a lamp and hold it up against the encroaching dark.

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Peter Himmelman is a Grammy and Emmy nominated rock and roll performer, songwriter, film composer, visual artist and award-winning author. He has been profiled in Time Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, Tablet, and NPR. His newest book is: “Suspended By No String: A Songwriter’s Refections On Faith, Aliveness, and Wonder” (Regalo Press/Simon and Schuster)