Episode Details

A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza.

This Friday’s Zoom call will be at 1 PM Eastern, our usual time. Our guest will be the Palestinian journalist and activist Ahmed Abu Artema, a co-organizer of Gaza’s 2018 Great March of Return. In October 2023, Israel killed his eldest son, Abdullah. A few weeks ago, he left Gaza for the Netherlands. He wrote about his departure in the Dutch newspaper, De Correspondent. I’ll ask what it’s like to survive a genocide and live with the memory of those who did not.

Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane and attorney Shayana Kadidal discuss new US sanctions on Palestinian human rights groups.

In The Guardian, David Adler details his reasons for joining the flotilla to Gaza.

Kyle’s mom from South Park confronts Benjamin Netanyahu.

See you on Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

So, at the heart of this period in the Jewish year, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, what we call the Yamim Noraim, is the basic idea that human beings are judged, that we don’t know how that judgment manifests itself in the world, but there’s a faith, a fundamental belief that there is some kind of accounting, there is some kind of reckoning, ultimately. And that notion fills me this year with a sense of really tremendous fear because I know that I have been inadequate to the monstrous evil of this period: the genocide in Gaza and the destruction of liberal democracy in the United States.

There are so many times when I’ve just decided to turn away because it was easier to not look at the images, or to not participate in actions of protest that I could have done, just because I had other things that I wanted to do more, that were easier for me, that were more fun for me, so I really tremble at my own accountability for this. But I guess I also take some kind of comfort in the notion that there may be some collective accounting, some collective reckoning.

Again, many of the prayers that we say during these High Holidays are in the plural. And when I think about collectively, in the Jewish community, and more generally in the United States, I do take some kind of comfort in the sense that there will be some kind of accounting, because the level of cowardice that we see around us is just beyond my wildest imagination. It’s beyond my wildest imagination.

I mean, Donald Trump is a fundamentally kind of deranged and deformed person, someone who just doesn’t seem, I think, to really, really understand very basic ideas like the rule of law, right? But many, many other people around him do. I mean, we know this because many of the people who are his most fanatical supporters now—J.D. Vance, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio—they said earlier on, when they weren’t so afraid of him, they said, this man is a pathological liar, this man wants to be a dictator. We know that they believe these things. We know that they can see these things. These things are