Joel S.

‘Dirty Work’ | Nathan Thrall The Israeli writer S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh portrays the violent reality of the Nakba. For decades it was part of the canon of Hebrew literature. That has changed.

"Denial, however, is a tricky thing. It is a form of simultaneously seeing and not seeing, knowing and not knowing." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

The US-Israel relationship is finally facing a reckoning. It doesn't need to slide into antisemitism | Joel Swanson Israel’s role in drawing the US into a war on Iran is attracting healthy scrutiny. It’s also creating a permission structure for antisemitism

ICYMI: I wrote about how legitimate and much needed criticism of Israel is becoming more common in the US than at any time in my life, and antisemitism is also on the rise, and the thorny question of how we sort through them: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Gut Shabbos, everyone.

Hard Feelings The Iranian diaspora is fracturing in real time, across dinner tables, on WhatsApp, and in the silence of blocked numbers.

"The question I keep returning to is whether you can hold the desire for a political system’s end and grief for its victims at the same time. I think you have to." nymag.com/intelligence...

“Working class people often do not graduate college and shiftless New England prep school failsons also often do not graduate college, I cannot tell the difference between these two things.”

How Germany’s unusual approach to fighting antisemitism is ensnaring Jews who are critical of Israel - Jewish Telegraphic Agency Jewish critics of the Israeli government say they will be punished by a proposed ban on pro-Palestinian slogans.

“What Germany is saying now is actually that Germany worked through its past, and now Germany can go back to business as usual... We were punished by the Allies, but now it’s over, we are good again, because the Jews forgave us.’ And the Jews, for them, that’s Israel.” www.jta.org/2026/03/04/g...

How Germany’s unusual approach to fighting antisemitism is ensnaring Jews who are critical of Israel - Jewish Telegraphic Agency Jewish critics of the Israeli government say they will be punished by a proposed ban on pro-Palestinian slogans.

"According to data compiled by Diaspora Alliance, Jews were involved in 25% of the performances, exhibits and artistic expressions canceled in 2023 for allegations of antisemitism — despite making up less than 1% of the country’s population." www.jta.org/2026/03/04/g...

Never having held elected office locally, for one. I'm not saying I would never vote for someone who had not held office before, but I think the bar for offering a rationale for a candidacy becomes higher.

I can guarantee I will never run.

I am in no way qualified to be a United States Senator and you should not vote for me for the Senate or for any other elected office. But I really don't see what would make me *less* qualified to be a Senator than Graham Platner.

I really think "Platner's team declined an opportunity to speak to Maine Jews and reassure them" deserves to be a larger part of the story of his campaign than it has been thus far.

It actually hurts other pro-Palestine politicians like Mamdani and Abughazaleh to lump Platner in with them and pretend like the bad-faith accusations of antisemitism lobbed at them are similarly bad-faith when lobbed at Platner. This is why someone like Platner can poison a progressive coalition.

If Platner had otherwise stellar achievements, I wouldn’t be okay with the tattoo but I’d at least get other people’s desire to explain it away as youthful stupidity or a dark period. But there’s not a single thing in his resume that makes me want to give him power. The whole thing is a dark period.

Very true but also there are a LOT of issues besides the Nazi tattoo! The Blackwater contractor thing, the fact that he played at being a war protester *before* joining the military to fight the same war, despite having many other choices as a rich kid, the tattoo is the tip of the iceberg.

"Slurs Filled a Chat Created by a Republican Party Official in Florida After the secretary of the Miami-Dade County Republican Party created the chat for college students, it devolved into slurs against Black and Jewish people."

"Slurs filled." "Devolved into." Even their coverage of blatant racism and antisemitism is done in the passive voice.

The US-Israel relationship is finally facing a reckoning. It doesn't need to slide into antisemitism | Joel Swanson Israel’s role in drawing the US into a war on Iran is attracting healthy scrutiny. It’s also creating a permission structure for antisemitism

"We must be willing to criticize Israel as though antisemitism does not exist, and we must be willing to name and fight antisemitism as though the state of Israel does not exist." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

If you truly believed Platner is not antisemitic, you would welcome the chance for him to speak to Maine Jews and prove that to them. The fact that his campaign staff declined an opportunity to do that is almost more damning than the Nazi tattoo and podcast themselves.

I did not know this, but this fact makes Platner look so much guiltier. bsky.app/profile/asfr...

I rarely say I *always* read what somebody writes on a subject in case I miss something they’ve published—but I will say I read Joel quite a lot and it is *consistently* really good stuff:

Thank you so much!

As far as I know, there has been no communication either way - no attempt by Maine Jews to issue statements, but also no attempt by his campaign to contact any Maine shuls or Jewish groups to do damage control. I find that all very surprising!

The fact his campaign manager is not sending him there suggests to me one of two explanations:
1. They do not think he could adequately reassure Jews of his lack of antisemitism.
2. They think his base would see even speaking to Jews in a shul as inherently disqualifying, or at least as a negative.

Sure, there are a lot fewer Jews in NYC than in Maine, but that one cuts both ways: It would actually be easier to speak to a large percentage of the Jews in Maine just by going to one of the shuls in Portland.

If you truly believed Graham Platner is not antisemitic at all, you would be sending him to synagogues in Maine to speak to Jews and reassure them of that. That is what Mamdani did during the NYC mayoral election. The fact they are not doing that is... telling.

No one is writing more lucidly on this topic than Joel. Follow, read, etc.

Thank you!

I published two pieces this past week, both grappling with Israel's role in the Iran War, how to separate Israel's government lobbying the US from the US exercising agency, and what it means for rising antisemitism.

1. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

2. forward.com/opinion/8096...

"Jeremy Ben-Ami: I think it’s very important to make the case that when Zionism began, it was fundamentally liberal. There was no distinction. Zionism was inherently liberal, and it’s part and parcel of being a Zionist is to hold liberal values, in my view."

I think the people in J Street are good people, but part of why their worldview is incoherent is that this is a bad history of Zionism. Zionism was never rooted in liberalism. Liberal Zionist is an American invention imposed on it. There were leftist and labor Zionisms, but not "liberal Zionism."

Buffeted on the left and the right, these liberal Zionists are holding their ground - Jewish Telegraphic Agency A virtual roundtable of Jewish activists reflects on political homelessness, progressive alliances and the case for loving and criticizing Israel.

"The word Zionism has largely ceased to be useful in that it prevents us from having an actual conversation about the state of Israel, which is not an idea or a theory, it’s a country." www.jta.org/2026/03/05/i...

I hope Shabbat this week is better than Shabbat last week was. It's a very low bar.

Hungary detains Ukrainians carrying $82 million in cash and gold; Kyiv calls it a hostage-taking The incident further inflamed tensions between Hungary and Ukraine, which are embroiled in a bitter feud over Hungary’s access to Russian oil through a pipeline that crosses Ukrainian territory.

The government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary - repeatedly cited by American nationalist conservatives as their greatest ideological inspiration - has escalated to taking Ukrainian hostages. www.nbcnews.com/world/ukrain...