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Why 2025 Was an Annus Horribilis

[additional-authors]
January 1, 2026
Richard Hamilton Smith/Getty Images

A verdict with which no friend of Jews can quibble is:
2025 should be regarded as an annus most horrendously horribilis,
anti-semitism in it having most horrendously polluted
what previously had, as anti-Zionism that’s so politically correct, been disputed.

Whereas the Shoah led to anti-antisemitism and the State of Israel, the disownment
of both after October 7 are two politically polluting antidotes of their atonement.
The state of the State of Israel may be better than that of the diaspora’s most great Jewish city,
whose global jihad-generating skipper, Mamdani, most certainly will disagree with my most mournful ditty.

I composed this poem, thinking of Yom Kippur on a Christmas day less white
than was Irving Berlin, a Jew who was more white than leftwingman or right.


Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.

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