May 7, 2025

In 2016, the tv show “Stranger Things” introduced a world that looks much like our own, but where the forces of good are continually confounded. In the Upside Down, everything is the opposite of what it should be. Jews, especially after October 7, have often turned to this imagined hellscape to describe our world. Genocidal butchers and rapists are hailed by Ivy League students and professors, while the killers’ victims and opponents are called rapists and baby-killers. Virtue and vice, victim and villain: everything is turned inside-out. And the truly crazymaking thing is that only a few—those on the outside who witness the Upside Down—know that it’s upside down.

I have yet another sense of living in the Upside Down. In it, women and girls are routinely denied rights, opportunities and dignity, or be branded as bigots. Lesbians are bullied to accept men as sexual partners, in the name of progress. Young people describe doctors who encouraged them to remove healthy body parts when they were unhappy children—procedures they now bitterly regret—and are deluged with hate messages. Parents’ hearts are broken, their children estranged or their custody denied, the parents’ grief sneered at. Men, supported by many women, howl to murder, rape and decapitate feminists. Meanwhile the people responsible for this pain are celebrated in media, schools, progressive churches and synagogues, and a seemingly never-ending parade.

This is the Upside Down of “transgenderism.” It is so fully entrenched that I know many people will not be able to understand me, and that if I write about it too passionately, their hearts and minds will close. They are utterly convinced that “support trans rights” is the only attitude for a compassionate person to take, and that any discordant voice must be that of a bigot. So I present a recent state news story.  

On April 30, California senators considered a bill concerning “transwomen” serving their sentences in women’s prisons. Supporters of “trans rights” likely envision these inmates as something like Laverne Cox: a highly feminized, clearly harmless person who just wants to be treated like one of the girls. This is not the reality. For years, California has transferred inmates from men’s to women’s prisons who take no hormones and have had no surgery; their bodies are unambiguously male. Supporters of the policy say these inmates face terrible violence in men’s prisons, which is undoubtedly true. What isn’t clear is why making them safe must come by making women unsafe. 

The bill, SB 311, called to “establish a secure facility at each women’s prison to house transgender women, in order to protect the security needs of biological women.” The inmates could participate in the women’s work and recreational prison activities; they simply couldn’t share their sleeping quarters and showers. It also called to exclude inmates convicted of sexual offenses, including rape, child molestation and forced oral copulation, from being housed in women’s prison. 

In the hearing to consider the bill, the sponsoring senator, Shannon Grove, reported having received many letters from female inmates begging for help. Last August, one such letter arrived from an incarcerated woman saying a “transgender” inmate raped her and assaulted her friend. Enclosed was an object supplied by the state of California to help women respond to the inmate in the next bunk bed: a condom. 

Grove read from a stack of letters testifying to being punched, kicked and sexually assaulted by “transgender” inmates. The women reported being forced to share a tiny cell with large, fully intact males, making them, one wrote, “extremely fearful and depressed.” Eighty-five percent of incarcerated women experienced some form of sexual abuse in their prior lives. Now in prison, they experience the constant threat of it recurring.

Former California women’s prison inmates, including Amie Ichikawa, founder of advocacy group Woman II Woman, asked the committee to use their power to “extend human rights to the entire incarcerated female population.” Another former inmate, Tiasha Croslin, testified that in 2012 a “transgender” inmate convicted of rape, assault and electrocuting a mother and daughter was transferred to her prison, and immediately requested a job as an electrician. Croslin and her friends felt devastated, terrified and helpless. “Women’s lives are at stake, and just because they’re incarcerated, it doesn’t mean their lives don’t matter,” Croslin said. She urged the committee to vote yes.

The Democratic senators voted it down. Leading the opposition, Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco claimed that the majority of sexual violence in prison is committed by staff, and that the bill is part of “a national poll-tested culture war targeting trans people, dehumanizing them, falsely depicting them as predators and fakers.” Nationwide, opponents of trans rights are “trying to deny them access to healthcare, trying to deny them access to public spaces.” Trump’s election, Wiener continued, “poured lighter fluid” over this crusade against trans people—“this tiny population who’re just trying to live their lives and be who they are, and who are at extreme risk of violence in all aspects of society.” 

It sounds so compelling—much as “support the Palestinians” sounds righteous until you look below the surface. Because Wiener’s narrative—of a vulnerable community attacked for no reason but bigotry—doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Prejudice against people identifying as “trans” certainly exists, but—to take Wiener’s healthcare example—no laws are being passed to prevent them seeing a doctor for flu symptoms. What legislators are challenging is the wisdom and morality of prescribing irreversible cross-sex hormones and surgeries to teenagers. 

Similarly, no one is trying to “erase trans people” by denying them the right to participate in sports. What recent laws, including Trump’s executive orders, are trying to stop is the grotesque, ongoing spectacle of obviously-male swimmers and runners creaming their competitors in the women’s category. And for all the talk of “compassion,” where is it for such female athletes, or California’s incarcerated women? 

It’s necessary to say it, because it is true: The human species is comprised of two sexes, male and female. Only women can get pregnant, while men are almost invariably larger and stronger than women. There are countless ways of being a man or a woman, meaning our society offers plenty of latitude to dress, play, work and pursue romantic relationships as one wishes, but people cannot escape the sex they were born as—and certainly not by checking a box on a government form. Denying these obvious facts has had incredibly harmful repercussions to women and girls, lesbians and gays, loving parents, and the mostly-young people being offered a dangerous panacea for their pain. But ultimately it infects all society, because it orders us to lie about what we see with our own eyes.  

There are countless ways of being a man or a woman, meaning our society offers plenty of latitude to dress, play, work and pursue romantic relationships as one wishes, but people cannot escape the sex they were born as—and certainly not by checking a box on a government form. 

Those who call this a niche “culture war” issue couldn’t be more wrong. No reality is more fundamental than the distinction between men and women. We know it exists from the moment we emerge from our mothers’ wombs, continues to the first time we’re held in our fathers’ arms, and segues seamlessly to every human being we encounter. 

Overnight, invisible unelected priests imposed new orthodoxies—trans women are women, trans men are men—and we weren’t allowed to talk about it. Only a few courageous souls, like Abigail Shrier, did. Five years ago, in her book “Irreversible Damage,” Shrier exposed the harm “transgenderism” was doing to girls. She was vilified and partially canceled—although her book was a godsend to many.

The spell seems to be breaking at last, but as recent events show, there’s still a long way to go. For those of us who have been too quiet, now’s the time to speak up. For everyone else, it’s time to ask what kind of human rights campaign is built on claims you know to be untrue.

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

Our enemies in the communication war on Israel and the Jewish people have just initiated three game-changers and we’re still not waking up: 

1. Coachella, where they have infiltrated the music world. 

2. Michael Moore’s new documentary, where they have infiltrated Hollywood. 

3. Jewish comedian Hannah Einbinder’s speech accepting the Human Rights Award, where they have infiltrated our own people. 

These game-changers have shoved us into new territory. And we don’t have anything close to Waze or Google Maps to map a destination. 

What is that territory? Culture. Culture creates and defines the values of a generation. Culture leaders are the generation’s heroes. Our enemies have figured out how to invade culture, speaking convincingly through cultural icons to millions of a new generation, tomorrow’s decision-makers. 

The Coachella Music Festival is held annually outside of Palm Springs, California. It draws thousands every year and features both established and up-and-coming artists. This year, a group from Ireland, Kneecap, drew among the largest crowds. 

On April 18, the group closed their set by projecting a huge electronic billboard proclaiming: “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people, enabled by the U.S. government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes. F–k Israel; free Palestine.” They then led the thousands in the crowd to chant, “Free Palestine. Free Palestine. Free Palestine.” 

Then there’s Academy Award-winning Michael Moore, probably the most famous documentarian in the world, and his new film, “The Encampments,” released a month ago. It’s about last year’s pro-Palestinian encampments on university campuses. As one viewer of the film enthused: 

“Went to see THE ENCAMPMENTS in NYC — it blew me away. One of the best docs I’ve seen in years. It’s about the campus encampment movement last spring that ignited right here at Columbia University and spread like wildfire in campuses throughout the U.S. — with thousands upon thousands of students participating in our Democracy, in acts of civil disobedience, to stand against the GENOCIDE of the Palestinian people being funded with our tax dollars.”

Then there’s Hannah Einbinder, the famous young comedian and co-star of Emmy Award-winning show “Hacks.” Accepting the Human Rights Campaign Award last week, Einbinder opined: “As a queer person, as a Jewish person, and as an American I am horrified by the Israeli government’s massacre of well over 65,000 Palestinians.”

All this in one month. These three examples are only the beginning volleys of our enemies’ next strategy. 

And what is our response? I’ve been significantly involved in the morass of how we Jews are communicating to the world since Oct. 7. It’s a mess. 

While our enemies keep moving forward, we’re bogged down in research, research and more research dedicated to how we should respond. There are now millions of dollars being spent by at least 40 different Jewish groups in research. They don’t even collaborate or share with one another. I’ve had to sign NDA’s, participating in different research presentations — not because I may share the findings with our enemies, but because no one wants their findings shared with their fellow Jews outside their circles. Each group believes that their research has uncovered the absolute truths of how we need to proceed and the others have not. 

Jews in high places keep urging me to stop harping on collaboration, that Jews will never collaborate with one another. I refuse. Because I know, from my 50 years as a practitioner and professor of communication … our enemies are collaborating. And that is how they are winning. 

Dan Senor, one of the authors of The New York Times best seller “Startup Nation,” just interviewed Ari Shavit, Israeli journalist and author of The New York Times best seller,
“My Promised Land.” Shavit is now saying that the path forward if we are to survive and thrive is for Jews in Israel and the diaspora to start over, put aside our differences and begin working together. There will be other voices in this chorus. Accepting noncollaboration may be an old model. 

Another communication challenge we face is that every Jewish group out there is talking about leading from their research with branding, messaging and social media. Our enemies are leading with extraordinary creativity, pouring it into ideas that engage millions … .and then the messaging follows. We’ve got it backwards while they keep moving forward, forward and more forward. 

And then there are the hundreds if not thousands of Jewish/Israeli organizations, initiatives and social media mavens already enacting their own plans, competing with one another for followers, programs, volunteers and funding — duplicating actions, with each believing they alone possess the breakthrough weapon to win this battle. I’ve spoken to members of the Israeli government. They won’t even share or collaborate between their ministries. 

And then there are all the hundreds of beginning organizations and initiatives demanding proposals, decks, budgets, spec work, and then revision after revision to the proposals, decks, budgets, spec work, and revisions to the revisions of the revisions. 

All of this: prescription for disaster. 

Does anyone seriously believe that this is how our enemies are conducting their winning campaign? Does anyone realize the urgency of moving forward, now — that we are losing ground every day? 

People keep asking me what the solution is. We cannot talk solution until we talk process. Some may consider this unrealistic, but this I believe is the process: 

1. Hello, President of Israel Isaac Herzog. You have the stature, credibility and position.  If you call a meeting, people will attend. Demand collaboration. Explain why collaboration. The stakes are too high for this chaos to continue. 

2. Stop all the new research. We have enough. Explain to the research people what we have to lose if they don’t put their existing research on the table and share. Divide all this research into two sections. Section A: How are our enemies conducting their campaign? Section B: How we should be conducting our campaign. Then, select a group to go through all the research and pick out the 10 most important and valuable directions of each section. No more. I know from my years of marketing that more than that will paralyze creative thinking. 

3. Assemble a group of the Jewish people’s most creative individuals from strategy, marketing, media, film, writing, design, dance, fashion, tech, culinary, photography, art and other disciplines. We’re ultimately going to win this war on creativity — something the Jewish people do very well. Find the best facilitator. Lay down hard and fast rules of creative collaboration. Tell the group to leave their fame and prima donna creative egos outside the door, that no one of them has the answer and only together can they create it. Again, there is too much to lose. Give the group two days to organize themselves, to create a machine.  Pay them to be in a room for two weeks together, based on the decided 10 points of research, to create the powerful, big ideas that have never been thought of before, with no limits or boundaries, and have them build the campaign around them. 

4. There should be no client — no funders, no Jews in high places. They don’t know what to do. If they did, they would already have done it. Let the creative people lead and make the decisions. (That would be our internal Jewish organizational game changer.) 

5. Based on what they create, define a budget and find the funders. 

6. Go. Implement. Evaluate. 

Hey, fellow Jews and Zionists. Call me crazy and unrealistic. Right now, to begin winning this communication war, we need crazy and unrealistic. If two years ago, you had told people Israel was planning to blow up pagers, they would have thought you were nuts.

Gary Wexler was recently honored by the National Library of Israel with the creation of The Gary Wexler Archive, a 20-year history of Jewish life told through the advertising campaigns he created for Jewish organizations in the US, Canada and Israel. 

This May, streaming service Max launched a carousel of titles to mark Jewish American Heritage Month. Subtitled “Celebrating Jewish Stories, Creators and History,” it is prominently positioned on the landing page.  In an age of rising antisemitism, when many Jews have come to expect their heritage to be ignored or misrepresented, it is a meaningful gesture from a major streaming platform. I was grateful to see it.

Then I looked a little closer.

The carousel features 35 titles presumably drawn from Max’s existing inventory. At a glance, the content broadly breaks down into three broad categories: biography, comedy, and the Holocaust. There’s a Steven Spielberg doc, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “The Survivor, “a handful of Jewish stand-up specials, and a smattering of antisemitism-related content. One outlier is a French-dubbed comedy about a young female rabbi — a charming series, but not remotely about American Jewish heritage, unless that is synonymous with the somewhat comical existential angst of most Jews about most things.

Many of these titles reflect Jewish excellence, resilience and the vast cultural imprint of Jewish creators. Some are hilarious. Others are devastating. But if this collection is meant to represent Jewish American Heritage, we should ask what’s missing.

Where are the stories of how Jewish Americans live? Where are the myriad documentaries that Jews create about Jews, with all the nuance of what we believe, how we live, what makes us who we are?

Max deserves credit for recognizing Jewish American Heritage Month at all. Other major platforms don’t even offer search tools that make Jewish identity visible. On Amazon, I found AI tools to search for East Asian Comedy and Canadian Perspectives — but no traceable entry point for Jewish life or content

In the U.S., most people encounter Jewish identity for the first time through humor. “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “Seinfeld.” “Modern Family.” Among the top titles cited by non-Jews about how they learn about Jews.  Jewish comedy is a rich tradition — a coping mechanism, a mirror, a voice. But if your only reference to Jews is how Jews laugh about themselves the meaning is likely lost in translation. You can’t laugh with a culture if you don’t understand anything about that culture. 

I am a Holocaust educator and believe strongly in the need for films that help us all understand its complexity and trauma and insights better.  The Holocaust though is not Jewish heritage other than documenting the uninvited heritage of hate we are left with.

If the Max carousel is anything to go by, Jews appear to be famous, funny, or dead. Together, they risk creating a distorted view—one where being Jewish is either tragic, comedic, or synonymous with fame. Where are the everyday lives? The complicated identities? The joy that isn’t defiant, just ordinary?

So where does the problem lie?  It is not that Jews are not trying to tell their story.  In fact we are obsessed with storytelling in all its forms.  Organizations like Jewish Story Partners are trying too. They fund independent films that explore Jewish life in all its wonder and complexity — from religious practice to political activism to interfaith dialogue. But the work they support often struggles to find mainstream distribution. It seems a shame that Max did not see the value of investing in Jewish filmmakers telling Jewish stories for their inventory.  

That’s the opportunity here.

Streaming services that want to honor Jewish American Heritage Month shouldn’t stop at the easy wins. They should collaborate with the people doing the deeper work. There is a rich ecosystem of Jewish creators out there — historians, documentarians, storytellers — ready to help paint a fuller picture.

Jewish American heritage isn’t about persecution and punchlines, it is about a people, about how we live, what we value, what we carry. And what we hope to pass on.

Thanks, Max, for your recommendations.  I’m curious and grateful for the recognition afforded our small 7 million strong minority with several hundred years of heritage here. I will take what on offer though and binge my way through a bunch of new titles. At some point I will likely press pause and ask:

So what would it take to share the true wonder of the American Jewish story?

Stephen D. Smith is CEO of Memory Workers and Executive Director Emeritus of USC Shoah Foundation. 

On a normal day, I get about a dozen screeds like the one I’ve shared at the end of this essay.

I was asked recently — by someone less experienced than I in receiving blathering screeds — what the best response is to “antisemitism.” I won’t tell you everything I wrote to her, but I’ll start by reiterating my feelings about the word antisemitism. I try my best to use another term. It’s simple and far more direct: Jew-hater.

The term antisemitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to give the dislike of Jews a pseudoscientific gloss and to strip Jews of their unique identity — casting them instead as just another desert tribe. The man was not our friend. 

Secondly, to call someone an antisemite these days is not only toothless — given the term’s ubiquity — but it’s also become a badge of honor for many. Yes, some might say we needn’t quibble over words, but words are how we communicate. Their misuse, their erosion, is not merely inconvenient — it is dangerous. Look at what’s happened to the word genocide. It has lost both its meaning and its moral force.

Third — and I’ve been harping on this for years — when our attention is drawn constantly to those who hate us, when it’s directed at our foes (yes, foes are fair game; lines have been drawn), rather than to the traditions, customs, and singular strengths of our peoplehood, our unity falters.

It’s a simple fact of life: if we’re constantly alert to the negatives in our lives, we will be riven through with cortisol, unable to think, to love, to nurture, or to evince our humanity. Our task, among other things, is not to obsess over those who wish to destroy us, but to become more Jewish — to observe Shabbat and other traditions, to study from the vast, timeless treasury of wisdom passed down by our forefathers and foremothers.

Okay, I get it. You’re not religious. You’re a modern person, fully adapted to modernity, and you feel that ancient rites — and the generations upon generations of Einsteins — have nothing to teach you. But this is who you are. This is who your grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents were — going back 3,000 years. And these very things — Shabbat, Torah, prayer — are what they hoped for, prayed for, died for. They expected that you would care deeply about them, and pass them on to your children, and your children’s children.

I often ask myself: did people in 1525 think they were unquestionably modern too? Of course they did. Everyone who isn’t rooted in the past or thinking about the future lives in a kind of void space, a numbness — circumscribed by the prison of the present.

I’m not a mystic or a prophet — God knows, I can hardly remember where I last left my car keys — but I do have my eyes and ears open at least a little. I assume you do too. You see the times we’re living in … how should I put this … have become quite different from the way we assumed they would be when we were growing up — even from just a few years ago.

Our expectations for the future — a safe, peaceable time, free from the horrors of the 1930s — have, if not exploded, then at least had a match lit beneath them. The fuse is burning toward the bomb.

That is why I write about this subject so often.

Israel, Jews.

Israel, Jews!

Enough already — why doesn’t Himmelman shut up and go back to writing songs?

All good questions. They’re ones I ask myself. But the thing is, for me at least, the music business — such as it is — along with the very idea of living a carefree, creative life, is like sitting with perfect sangfroid on my living room couch while my bedroom is on fire.

It’s not possible.

So, back to my original premise: how do we respond to the hate, to the insanity, to the onslaught of vitriol?

1. Make sure you can protect yourself and your family.

2. Stay awake and aware.

3. Don’t engage directly with it. Don’t drive yourself crazy — as I have admittedly done — debating or responding to every vitriolic screed that comes your way.

4. Think instead about becoming more Jewish, in whatever way feels right for you. Most of all, don’t be afraid to speak out.

5. Imagine how your ancestors are looking at you right now.

6. Think about what it means to be proud. To be strong.

7. Our unity doesn’t come from shared oppression. It comes from shared values. That’s what makes us unique. We are a Tribe, a Peoplehood of 15 to 20 million. Not a lot for a religion. But it’s an amazing number for a tribe — a tribe with 15 million extraordinary members.

As promised, here is a section of the letter I recently received (author’s name omitted — why give this great moral thinker the publicity?):

“It’s odd that you want the world to rise up against Palestine but you shrug off the thousands of rapes and murders by Israel upon innocent civilians. For f—’s sake, they’re raping doctors to death … You would think history would make Israel less likely to commit their own holocaust, but it seems to be the opposite. It was never about Hamas. But it sure is a good recruitment tool …”

My response? You just read it.

Am Yisrael Chai.

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)