Florence Hazrat is the author of “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World.” It’s been reviewed with praise by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail, Bookreporter, The Washington Free Beacon, and the Literary Review. As the New Yorker points out in a review that includes some gentle criticism, the book belongs to a familiar genre: the grand claim that some small, overlooked thing changed everything. In this case, the small thing is punctuation; the grand claim is that “the history of punctuation is the history of humanity.”

Including the evils of the Jews!

“Punctuation marks in Hebrew are relics of a brutal colonial system that is far from over… Language - including punctuation - is complicit in this process, paving the way for an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe, encouraging them to move to the land that already had people—a people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European anti-Semitism in the most horrendous ways for generations, causing bloody wars across the entire Middle Eastern region…”

Now, it’s tempting to simply roll your eyes at this depraved stupidity, and not to even bother refuting it. But considering that this book is receiving so much attention, I think that it’s important to detail precisely why Hazrat’s arguments are not merely hateful but also abject nonsense. (It’s also worth noting that if a book contained a few paragraphs with an attack on, say, African-Americans, or the transgender movement, there is no way that this would be overlooked and the book reviewed positively in the aforementioned publications.)

For this post, I also made use of two excellent critiques that I saw, one by an anonymous author on Reddit and one on X by Isaac Choua. I’m going to begin by dismantling various parts of the section quoted above, then I will move to other claims made by Hazrat.

Punctuation and Colonialism

“Punctuation marks in Hebrew are relics of a brutal colonial system “

I must first address the last three words in that sentence. Zionism was not a “brutal colonial system.” It was a rescue movement that sought to create a refuge to save millions of Jews from being murdered in Europe (and alas succeeded too late for most of them). It did so by enabling them to join their brethren in their ancestral homeland, by purchasing and developing empty land that others had been unable to develop. Zionists assumed that some sort of agreement could be reached with the Arabs who lived on the land, and many even thought that the Arabs would welcome the health and economic benefits that the Jews brought for them. Unfortunately the Palestinian and other Arab leadership rejected any compromise and preferred to try to brutally genocide the Jews, turning it into a zero-sum game - which they ended up losing.

And punctuation marks have very little to do with Zionism. Whatever role European conventions played in standardizing punctuation in modern Hebrew (which did not even start until 1937!), they did not arrive wholesale with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and a band of settlers, nor were they devised as instruments of colonization. Hebrew’s punctuation history predates the modern Zionist movement by centuries. European punctuation conventions appeared in Hebrew texts in the Middle Ages, especially with the development of printing. This basic error in Hazrat’s chronology undermines her entire argument.

“Language - including punctuation - is complicit in this process, paving the way for an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe…”

Language did not “pave the way” for an “artificial” sense of unity, it reflected a genuine fact of unity. Hazrat talks about “Jewish people,” but it’s actually the Jewish People. Jews originated as a single group in the Land of Israel. After their various tribulations ended up in being dispersed around the world, they retained this relationship and stayed in communication, by use of their original language. Jewish communities corresponded in Hebrew across the Mediterranean and beyond, exchanging religious and legal questions, helping captives and distressed communities, and followed events affecting Jews elsewhere. The Cairo Geniza preserves thousands of letters linking Jewish communities in the Mediterranean and Red Sea worlds, including many written in Hebrew. Others were written in Judeo-Arabic, or other languages which were more convenient - but all the correspondence reflected the fact that this was a single people.

“encouraging them to move to the land that already had people”

It wasn’t language that encouraged Jews to move to the Land of Israel. Jews moved back to their ancestral land over many centuries, for religious reasons of living in the Holy Land. Still, the obstacles were often overwhelming, and for all but the most idealistic, the challenges and impracticalities outweighed the religious benefits.

Then, most of the masses of Jews who moved from Europe to Palestine in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries did not do so for any reason relating to language or even to Zionist political ideology. Nor did they need “encouragement” from the Hebrew language. They came because they desperately needed somewhere to survive, and had nowhere else to go!

Immediately following the First World War, over 100,000 Jews were murdered in the Ukraine. Then, in 1924, the Polish government instituted anti-Jewish economic legislation that made it almost impossible for Jews to survive. The United States started severely limiting immigration in 1924, but Palestine was still open. Those who escaped Europe before the Holocaust saved themselves from extermination; indeed, had the British not closed off Palestine during the Holocaust due to Arab pressure, untold numbers of Jews could have escaped death. Those refugees who came after the Holocaust did so when no other country was willing to take them in. They were later followed by hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab countries in widespread ethnic cleansing, which followed centuries of unequal status punctuated by the occasional massacre.

Yes, the land already had people - some people. However, there was plenty of space, and there was no reason for Jews, who had literally nowhere else to live, not to move to their ancestral homeland. And, as noted earlier, the local Arabs had much to gain from this - indeed, Jewish investment in the land attracted many more Levantine Arabs from surrounding areas to Palestine. Arab wages in the late 1930s in Palestine were more than double the going rate in Syria and three times the wages in Iraq, making Palestine a magnet for immigrants from throughout the Arab world.

“a people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European anti-Semitism in the most horrendous ways for generations”

Er, no, actually the people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European antisemitism in the most horrendous ways for generations were the Jews, who were massacred in the millions. Not the Arabs of Palestine, whose population exploded as a result of the medical and economic benefits of Jewish immigration, and only lost politically as a result of their leadership insisting on jihad.

What Changed With Modern Hebrew?

“While Palestinian Jews spoke Arabic like their neighbours, the foreign settlers arrived with different languages. Creating a shared, unifying speech was thus at the heart of the colonial endeavour, as it would be at the core of any nation-building project.”

Hazrat constructs a binary difference between Jews in Palestine who spoke Arabic and foreign European colonial settlers who spoke different languages. But Jews in Ottoman Palestine included Sephardim, Ashkenazim and North African Jews, among others, who communicated in a mix of Hebrew, Arabic, Yiddish and Ladino. Reducing the indigenous and long-established Jewish population to “Arabic-speaking Palestinian Jews” is a not just a simplification, it’s a falsification.

As Isaac Choua points out, “this whole idea that Hebrew somehow had to be ‘turned into a language’ is bizarre. Hebrew never stopped being a written and orally used language. What it stopped being for centuries was the everyday mother tongue of an entire speech community. Jews continued reading it, writing it, praying in it, studying in it, composing in it, and sometimes using it to communicate with Jews who did not share their vernacular. The modern revival was about making Hebrew the language of everything again. The grocery store, the classroom, the street, science, politics, technology, family life. And yes, that meant creating words, adapting old words, and borrowing from other languages.” Which is exactly how all languages work and evolve, and is also what happened with Arabic.

Hebrew vs. Arabic

Arabic puncutation is also a modern phenomenon. Arabic writers and reformers discussed and adopted European punctuation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You’d think that this would present a major challenge to Hazrat’s claim that Hebrew punctuation demonstrates colonial influence and is a tool of colonial domination, but no. The same phenomenon is treated as liberating when Arabs do it!

“Punctuation enabled both the colonised to resist and the coloniser to settle.”

If adopting European punctuation in Hebrew is proof of colonial domination, but adopting it in Arabic is an act of resistance, the distinction is not linguistic. It is political—and selectively applied to Jews. That’s called antisemitism.

Meanwhile, Hazrat claims that there is a crucial difference. She notes that Arabic changed the direction of two European punctuation marks, the question mark and the comma, whereas Modern Hebrew kept the same direction. And she claims that this makes all the difference in the world:

It is in the question mark and the comma, their faces turned towards Europe, that we find answers…

It’s simple ludicrous. That teeny-tiny thing is what she’s basing her distinction on?! Hey, I’ve got an even better one - Jews brought the misidentification of the shafan as the rabbit over from Europe, where they didn’t have hyraxes! And they brought the measurement of an olive as being much bigger than an actual olive, since they didn’t have access to olives in Ashkenaz Europe! And they mark the departure of Shabbat in Israel later than it really is, due to twilight having taken much longer in Europe!

To be sure, there was some baggage as a result of many centuries in Europe. But this does not negate the profound cultural rootedness in Biblical Israel - which you can see, for example, in how European Jews knew and cherished the names of animals and plants from the Land of Israel which did not even exist in Europe, as I discuss in my book The Lions of Zion: Biblical Natural History and the Significance of Israel. Nor does it negate the legitimacy of Jews fleeing persecution and redeveloping their homeland in the Land of Israel.

Meanwhile, if you want to claim that the direction of recently-created punctuation reveals a people’s true home, how about much more fundamental parts of culture? As I further discuss in The Lions of Zion, several aspects of Palestinian cultural identity are actually foreign. The sabra cactus, symbol of Palestinian villages and resilience, is a recent import from North America and is the national plant of Mexico. The Jaffa orange developed by Arab farmers in the 19^th century is a variety of citrus, which all originated in south-east Asia. And, of course, the two holiest sites in Islam - the official religion of the Palestinian Authority - are not even in Palestine.

And much more fundamentally, the Arabic language itself and culture originated in Arabia! It’s extraordinary that Hazrat presents Hebrew - a language that originated in the Land of Israel, and has been used by Jews ever since - as an example of European origins and foreignness to Palestine, rather than Arabic which actually originated outside of Palestine!

From Punctuation to Genocide

Hazrat uses punctuation as a springboard to launch into a tirade of condemnation of Israel:

“Language - including punctuation - is complicit in this process, paving the way for an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe, encouraging them to move to the land that already had people—a people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European anti-Semitism in the most horrendous ways for generations, causing bloody wars across the entire Middle Eastern region.”

The cause of bloody wars across the entire Middle East was not remotely Modern Hebrew or Zionism. First of all, most of the bloody wars across the entire Middle East did not even involve Israel at all. The Iran-Iraq war caused around a million deaths - an entire order of magnitude greater than the entire Israel-Arab conflict. Second, even those wars that did involve Israel started due to the Islamic Arab desire to genocide the world’s only Jewish state, which for both nationalistic and religious reasons they decided should not be allowed to exist in any shape or form.

Today this brutal oppression (aided and abetted by the United States, Germany, and a host of other countries through arms deliveries, technological support, and trade deals) has evolved into the worst crime of all crimes: genocide.

Of course! Indeed, how can you write a book on punctuation and not include accusing Israel of genocide! (And let’s ignore the fact that this allegation is entirely unsubstantiated, was supported only by a tiny minority of actual scholars in the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and was opposed by thousands of people with real expertise.)

“Meanwhile, soldiers gleefully post about their atrocities online in the language that has made nearly a century of injustice possible.”

Actually, it’s been a century of violent Arab rejectionism and hostility towards Jews that has caused warfare, including the unspeakable atrocities committed by Hamas.

“As of 2025, Palestinians faced the explicit violence of forced starvation, indiscriminate bombing of civilian infrastructure from hospitals to schools to tents, AI-fueled surveillance, daily bullying in the streets of Jerusalem, the murder of shepherds in the West Bank, and the burning of ancient olive trees. There have been the assassinations of chief negotiators, scientists, and military personnel, as well as repeated aggression against neighbors or Palestine supporters from Iran to Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Qatar, and Yemen.”

Like all countries, Israel is not perfect, but Hazrat blurs the illegitimate actions of inviduals with the perfectly legitimate and indeed essential actions of a nation to defend itself against repeated aggression from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other countries, generally funded by the Islamic Republic of Iran - a country which, as we shall see later, is of particular significance to Hazrat.

“Language implicitly provides the basis for all those crimes. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Gazans “human animals” on October 9, 2023, a justification for Israel’s subsequent years-long slaughter and starvation of the tiny blockaded strip. Dehumanizing language always proceeds bloodthirsty frenzies against an entire people.”

Actually, the bloodthirsty frenzy was committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and I think that those who gleefully rape and butcher women and children are deservedly called “human animals.” And if you want to point to dehumanizing language that contributed to Hamas’ bloodthirsty frenzy, how about the historical Quranic commentaries and Muslim theological polemicists who referred to Jews metaphorically or literally as the descendants of apes and pigs? Or the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husayni, who compared Jewishness to infectious disease and Jews to microbes in his propaganda broadcasts to the Arab world on Nazi radio?

Hazrat’s Response

As a follow-up to criticism that she received, Hazrat just released a video in response to the “Zios.” In this video, she does not remotely even attempt to counter the criticism. Instead, she boasts about her multiple degrees, boasts about how her book is extremely well researched, and issues a ridiculous claim that “Zionists invented modern Hebrew almost out of nowhere.” I pushed her to actually respond, and she merely referred me to her book.

Hazrat also says in the video that because she only discussed Israel in a three pages out of hundreds, her Zionist critics are doing the typical Zionist thing of “picking and choosing.” But of course those who are against her hateful and nonsensical Israelopathy are not remotely interested in the rest of a book on punctuation - why would they be? If someone writes a book on algebra, and included a few pages claiming that black people are less intelligent and can’t do math, do you think that anyone would challenge critics by saying that they’re being “selective” about what part of the book they are criticizing?!

Meanwhile, Hazrat herself is a German-Iranian who defends the Ayatollahs’ murderous regime. She makes claims like “growing up as Iranian abroad is not better than growing up in Iran” (tell that to all the Iranians who were imprisoned or massacred!) and “sensible people support the Islamic Republic” (!!). She claims that there were not tens of thousands of protestors killed by the Iranian government, and that the three to five thousand (!!!) who were killed included spies, and that the murders of protestors were “not worse than the Iranians killed by US bombs and sanctions” (!!!!). Multiple uses of exclamation marks may not be the most highbrow use of punctuation, but faced with the immoral absurdities spouted by Hazrat, they are called for.

Florence Hazrat whitewashes an Islamist regime which tortured and massacred endless tens of thousands of its own people while funding terrorism worldwide. It’s hardly surprising that someone who denies brutal massacres in Iran invents them in Israel. It’s hardly surprising that such a person is consumed by irrational hatred of Jews, and uses punctuation as a launchpad for her Israelopathy. But it’s disappointing that so many reviewers of her book overlook this.

It’s almost impossible to fathom how much of a catastrophe and tragedy yesterday's flight hijack (or, as the Western media called it, an altercation) could have been. Had the co-pilot not been defeated, Israel would have been faced with a horrific choice: shoot down a plane with 180 passengers, or do nothing and risk even more people being killed.

How was it avoided? Well, it is explained that the pilot, although stabbed in his head and hands and bleeding out, managed to unlock the cabin door. And the passengers were then able to force their way in and overpower the copilot. And one of the passengers who did this happened to have watched a TV show about planes and knew how to pull the plane out of the nose-dive. And he did it without too many parts of the plane breaking off. And there also happened to be off-duty pilots on the plane who were able to land the damaged plane after the pilots were incapacitated. Meanwhile, there was also a Jewish dentist who tended to the wounded pilot.

Many people would call all this a miracle. And I think it’s fair to do so. Not that there was necessarily a supernatural intervention. But, consistent with how rationalist rabbis from Rambam to Rav Soloveitchik explain miracles, this was an incredibly fortuitous combination of factors and events, which resulted in an extraordinary outcome. (Rav Yoel Bin-Nun has a fascinating article in which he gives this as an instance of how Rambam describes Divine assistance accompanying a person, awakening and encouraging him to undertake a great and valuable act, such as rescuing a group of people; a person who experiences this awakening, Rambam explains, is said to have been touched by “the spirit of the Lord.”)

But here’s the problem. Some people only call it a miracle. One person told me that they were worried that the passengers, all being secular Israelis, would not know to credit God with their rescue. That is not the case; most “secular” Israelis very much acknowledge God, and the passengers were effusive about thanking Him. I’m more concerned about certain religious Jews not giving sufficient credit to others who were involved.

The plane was saved because, after pilot Smit Machchhar somehow found the strength to open the cockpit door, several Israeli men got up - while the plane was plummeting through the sky - and took action. There’s all kinds of jokes going around as a result. Here’s one hilarious video:

The following piece by someone named Jtlich is also making the rounds:

“I owe every flight full of Israelis an apology.

“Yes, having everyone standing in the aisle immediately upon landing is stressful. Yes, the rogue babies crawling up and down the corridor is a lot. Yes, blocking the bathroom for minyan is inconvenient.

“But when things go sideways?????? Give me 150 Israelis and Jews on that plane. I want the doctors, pilots, engineers, Mossad agents, and at least three people who are suspiciously calm because “hakol beseder I’ve handled worse!!!”

Now, here there is a common error of conflating different types of people. There’s the people who are brusque, sometimes coarse, and often annoyingly refusing to conform to Western social norms, but who you want on a plane to take on the terrorists if there’s a hijacking. These are secular and traditional/ religious Israelis, who have done army service, which gives them the initiative, bravery and ability to act. There’s also the people with lots of kids but who are often doctors or engineers, and also useful to have during a crisis - generally dati Israelis and American modern Orthodox Jews.

And then there’s the people who sometimes block the aisles because they are making a minyan and don’t care about how it affects others. They tend to be charedi. And they are not going to be of any use if there’s a hijacking.

I’m pretty sure that even charedim themselves, if on a plane during a hijacking, would much rather have some former IDF soldiers on the plane than other charedi yeshiva students - just like in general they very much want the same IDF protection as everyone else. Of course, don’t expect this to make them change their minds; when I made such an argument to one charedi yeshiva student, he admitted to me that he would indeed prefer there to be former soldiers there, but he claimed that it’s only the Torah study of charedim in yeshiva which would ensure that this would happen!

It’s an incredibly contrived argument, but is there a counterargument? Yes, and it’s very simple: the Torah itself tells us that when there is a threat, people need to fight, not learn Torah. We need soldiers to defend us, not Torah students. Sure, they will davven - but personally I’d much rather have the merit of davvening from people who make sacrifices for others, and whose Torah is worth something.

Here’s the dogless picture. It’s the charedi Gedolim(TM) of Keren Olam HaTorah, whose mission is to ensure that their community has no obligations of any kind to the rest of the nation, or even to be economically self-sufficient, even while the rest of the nation is suffering so much because of the war.

And here’s the picture with the dog:

(I should probably clarify, in case it’s not clear, that the dog is not wearing a kippah. It’s just being held such that it is looking over its owner’s shoulder, directly in front of its owner’s head.)

The picture is from a Sukkot gathering of senior rabbinic figures in the Dati-Leumi (National-Religious) community. The dog belongs to the rabbi whose face is hidden behind the dog. His name is Rabbi Menachem Perl.

Rabbi Perl spent many years learning in yeshivah and kollel. He qualified as a Dayan and served as a community rabbi and rosh kollel. He also served as a combat soldier and ended up heading the halachic division of the Military Rabbinate and leading its Beit Midrash. Following this, he founded the IDF’s Halacha and Technology Department, ensuring that tech infrastructure, communications, and security systems conform to Shabbat laws during routine operations. After retiring from the IDF, Rabbi Perl was appointed in 2016 as the official Chief Rabbi of the Israel Fire and Rescue Authority, leading the spiritual and halachic framework for the nation's firefighters. Subsequently he became head of Tzomet, the institution that engineers technological solutions—such as Shabbat elevators, medical devices, and mobility scooters—that merge modern technology with Jewish law.

When October 7th happened, Rabbi Perl was long past the age for reserve duty. But, like virtually all non-charedim and in sharp contrast to charedi rabbis, he wanted to actively help. Rabbi Perl was recruited for intense work over several months identifying the dead. This was, of course, incredibly traumatic. After identifying a body that turned out to be the son of a colleague that he also knew personally, he realized that he himself - like so many thousands of others involved with the war - needed serious psychological help. He entered a facility for soldiers with PTSD and ended up with a service dog; as we discovered following Oct 7 at the Biblical Museum of Natural History, animals can be incredibly therapeutic.

There are two ways in which this tragic and yet remarkable story sheds light on the vast differences between charedi and dati rabbis. (And please note that I do not automatically criticize charedim - for example, see this post I once wrote about charedim and dogs in which I actually defended the position of the charedi MKs!)

First is that in charedi circles, everyone is always looking over their right shoulder and is concerned about not looking frum enough. The yiras bnei adam exceeds the yiras Shamayim. If I had a dollar for every time a charedi rabbi told me that he agrees with me about something but is too afraid to say so publicly, I would have an even bigger museum!

In dati circles, on the other hand, there is more comfort about doing the right thing and less concern about what others will say. Rabbi Perl, who sat with his colleagues while holding his dog, said that he wrestled with whether having a dog accompany him fit his public role as a rabbi and head of a religious institution, but decided to go ahead. “I don’t hide anything,” he said. “I know the dog can help me, so it will help me. We can worry about appearances another time.” The dog is looking over his right shoulder, but he isn’t.

Second, and more fundamentally, Rabbi Perl is suffering from PTSD as a result of his sacrifice in going out to help the nation during a terrible crisis - something that many people in the dati world did, but which hardly anybody in the charedi world did. And this itself is a result of decades of working to help the nation, beginning with his own army service, which is standard for all yeshiva students in the dati world and is considered an important expression of Torah values. This is, of course, unthinkable for a charedi rabbi, for whom it would be disqualifying rather than praised.

There are special people in the charedi world who go out to help the nation. One of the most prominent such people, Shai Graucher, was condemned by R. Dov Landau for it. Those charedim who enlist are generally shunned by their community and certainly by the rabbis.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Perl is now leading an initiative to create a dedicated treatment home for charedi soldiers suffering from trauma and PTSD, since the state institutions are not suited to charedi sensitivities. The rabbis of the communities of these soldiers abandoned them, but at least there are dati-leumi rabbis who look out for their well-being. Thank God and thank dog.

On another note - Parashat Noach is coming up soon. I'll be giving a presentation on the preceding Monday about our incredible collection of Noah’s Ark paintings and models at the Biblical Museum of Natural History, including some amazing new pieces that we recently acquired, for which you can register here. Then I’m flying out for Shabbos of Parashat Noach to be scholar-in-residence at Or Torah in Skokie. I am available on the preceding Thursday in New York for a presentation, on the following Sunday in Chicago, during part of the week in NY/NJ, and on the following Shabbos (Lech Lecha) anywhere in the US/Canada; please write if you’d like to arrange something.

In your article “Where is the Unity?” (https://mishpacha.com/where-is-the-unity/) you bemoan the lack of national unity in Israel. You appropriately acknowledge that the IDF manpower crisis means that charedi wholesale avoidance of IDF service is a serious problem, which understandably causes resentment among those who have to make vastly greater sacrifices and suffer enormously as a result. But you suggest that charedim could at least partially solve the criticism of their community via better PR:

“Nor has the Israeli chareidi community established any public relations operation, like that which I ran for nearly a decade for Agudath Israel of America. Such an effort would address the widespread perception of the chareidi community’s “freeloading lifestyle,” in the words of our harshest critics. In fact, almost every chareidi household has at least one wage-earner. Though the percentage of chareidi men employed lags far behind their secular counterparts, the percentage of chareidi women in the workforce is almost identical, and chareidi women are highly sought in many well-paying professions, such as accounting”

But it’s not a “perception” of a freeloading lifestyle, it’s a fact. And a few exceptions do not affect the overall pattern. The men are vastly underemployed, and even those who are employed are generally in low-wage jobs. With a few hi-tech exceptions, the women are, on average, employed in far lower-paying professions. Consequently, charedim pay far less taxes than everyone else - and meanwhile, they receive all kinds of welfare benefits.

As a result, whereas the average non-charedi family puts far more into the economy than they remove, the average charedi family removes far more than they put in. These are simple and obvious facts. You can see the raw data at https://www.boi.org.il/media/fnffif5h/vol-231-2025-3.pdf. Meanwhile, surveys have shown that, incredibly, most charedim believe that they contribute as much to the economy as everyone else! (I even heard R. Aharon Feldman, CCd here, make this claim.) If anyone needs to be educated about the reality of charedim and the economy, it’s the charedi community.

“Rabbi Rochberger quotes a finding that chareidim pay only 4 percent of the national tax receipts (presumably ignoring VAT), but constitute 14 percent of the population, to explain the secular perception that they constitute a drain on the economy. But the same could be said for all those below the top quintile in income earners. Are they, too, an unconscionable drain on the public?”

There is no comparison anywhere in the world to a community which sets an OFFICIAL UNIVERSAL POLICY of its men having no general studies education and not working for a living, while also raising large families to do exactly the same, and expecting everyone else to support them (and fight to defend them), and then organizing a political bloc to make this happen on a massive scale.

As for your claims about the amazing chessed in the charedi community, you’re talking about a very small proportion of that community. And it doesn’t come close to the chessed performed by non-charedim. See https://www.rationalistjudaism.com/p/the-charedi-chessed-myth

Finally, you claim that “it is both unrealistic and unfair to expect the chareidi community to change dramatically overnight norms that have developed over decades.” Overnight?! Eleven years ago, you yourself warned in Mishpacha Magazine that the chareidi lifestyle is unsustainable for the country (as was perfectly obvious to everyone for many years - except, apparently, “the Gedolim”). October 7th happened three years ago, and made it even more clear that Israel could not tolerate a huge and growing sector that refuses to serve and demands to be paid for the privilege. When none of the rabbinic or political leadership in charedi society is remotely interested in long-term planning, national welfare, and serious change, don’t be surprised when others, out of desperation, force it on you. And yes, this will cause immense suffering in the charedi community - which is entirely the fault of their “wise” leadership.

Meanwhile, if you want to complain about the lack of unity, look no further than the “Cover Tzadik” that Mishpacha chose for this Sukkos edition, “Rav” Bunim Schreiber:

This is a man who, shortly after Oct 7, declared in a shiur to Mir students as follows:

“The soldiers who draft are nebuchs. I don’t think anyone drafts willingly… if there was no obligatory draft, nobody would join, other than perhaps a few crazy Mizrochniks…. There’s no need to express gratitude to soldiers fighting in Gaza any more than to street cleaners... Who says that there needs to be a relationship with the injured? What’s your connection to them? Why do you need to have a relationship with them? ...A ‘community tragedy’ is not if 1200 people were killed… a community tragedy is one that affects everyone.... Lehavdil, the Meron tragedy, you feel connected because they were your friends, they were your family, they were your people.... For the entity called ‘The State of Israel,’ regarding which it is superfluous to talk about our opinion, there is no ‘acknowledgement’ and no ‘good.’”

Your problems begin at home.

Sincerely

Natan Slifkin

For example, Yuval Abraham, the producer of the anti-Israel documentary Naza, is condemned for claiming that Israel was engaged in widespread killing of civilians in Gaza. The government, in yet another pointless gift to those seeking to politically and economically isolate Israel, declares that it will try to revoke his citizenship for badmouthing Israel.

But meanwhile, the most right-wing MKs and their supporters are saying that Israel should engage in widespread killing of civilians in Gaza, and that anyone who says otherwise is not a patriot!

Then today, the government voted (in a move that will presumably be overturned by the Supreme Court, but meanwhile is yet another pointless gift to those seeking to politically and economically isolate Israel) to ban all the Arab parties from the forthcoming elections, on the grounds that they do not accept Israel as a Jewish state (which is undoubtedly true of some, but not of Mansour Abbas, who has been very clear that Israel is a Jewish state and will remain that way).

But meanwhile, the charedim, who are automatically and enthusiastically welcomed by this government as coalition partners, are very emphatic about how they do not accept that Israel is a Jewish state!

It’s all so confusing.

But it’s not only the government and its most right-wing supporters who are leaving me confused about such things. On a not unrelated note, I’m also confused by the forthcoming event at Yeshivat HaKotel under the title “v’yaasu kulam agudah achas,” “they should all be one group”:

Featured in the center is R. Shraga Kallus, perhaps to demonstrate inclusiveness and eilu v’eilu divrei Elokim chayim. But R. Kallus himself has explicitly declared that Religious Zionism is not part of eilu v’eilu divrei Elokim chayim, because its values are not Torah, diverge from The Gedolim and The Mesorah, and are warped! And this is all part of a larger charedi belief and approach that they are very much not part of the same agudah achas as everyone else!

We need some clarity and consistency.

Many years ago the charedi schools in England, where government funding requires basic general education, sought to publish their own English dictionary which wouldn’t include any inappropriate four-letter-words. Someone joked that the forbidden four-letter-word was “work”! But in fact, the word which is perhaps most anathema to charedi society has a whopping 14 letters. It’s “responsibility.”

When a charedi boy grows up, he gets no responsibilities. Sure, he has to learn Torah and keep certain mitzvos bein adam l’Makom, but that’s it. He doesn’t have to contribute to national defense. He doesn’t have to help with any national needs. He doesn’t need to support his wife and children. He doesn’t need to make any decisions or accept any responsibility for his life choices, because he can relax in the knowledge that he has offloaded those to The Gedolim™. He doesn’t even have to wash his dishes.

And this applies even to the community leadership. They don’t concern themselves with any national needs, even as they approach a quarter of the population and make a huge impact on the rest of the country. They don’t make any long-term plan even for the economic viability of their own community (and on rare occasions they even admit it). And when disasters happen, whether with the largest (and totally predictable) civilian disaster in Israel’s history, or various (likewise totally predictable) infant and juvenile deaths, or economic collapse, they can just blame the Zionists or the inscrutable will of God.

Of course, not everyone would agree that charedim shirk responsibility. Following the recruitment of the charedi “call girls,” an article was published by Rivka Ravitz, a prominent member of the charedi community. While acknowledging that this initiative potentially involves breaches of charedi tzniyus standards, she declares herself proud of it, and writes as follows:

“For years, one of the charges levelled against the Haredi community has been that we expect other people to support our Lomdei Torah, our Torah scholars. This campaign has shown that when the need is urgent, the Haredi community can mobilize on an astounding scale. Families who do not necessarily have very much themselves are giving. Girls barely out of school are taking responsibility.”

Now, first of all, let’s be clear here. The charedi community absolutely does not even have remotely close to a fraction of the funding that it needs to be self-supporting, no matter how many poor charedi families contribute, no matter how many trips abroad The Gedolim™ make, and no matter how many girls they brainwash into fundraising for them. They are raising sums in the millions, but the government has been giving them billions.

But, beyond that, the idea of describing girls who fundraise as “taking responsibility” is simply outrageous. Taking responsibility means doing what Chazal said - being economically productive, and raising your children with the education and motivation to be economically self-sufficient. It does not mean desperately trying to fundraise to perpetuate a system that is constantly becoming ever more needy.

Is the abdication of responsibility true of everyone in the charedi world? No, of course not. But that’s why it’s most telling that “responsibility” is the key word in the election campaign for HaTzibur HaCharedi, the group that represents those who recognize the serious problems in the charedi world, are fed up with them, and want to create a radical change. Their very motto is “TakingResponsibility” - because that’s what we all, including charedim most of all, need charedim to do.

If you happen to be on the mailing list of the US Yated Ne’eman, then this past Thursday you received an email asking you to answer the phone with warmth when a teenage charedi girl calls you in the next few days.

What’s this about? The title of the mailing is “An Unprecedented Grassroots Movement Across 80 Seminaries.” In fact, this is the exact opposite of a grassroots movement, which means an initiative driven from the bottom up by ordinary community members rather than centralized leaders. This is an astroturf movement - that’s the real term for a fake “grassroots” campaign. This is an initiative driven from the top down by charedi Gedolim™ and askanim.

So, what’s this particular astroturf movement about? Money, of course. Due to the Court’s legal barriers to Bibi’s government continuing to transfer billions to support charedi draft-dodgers in their lifestyle, an enormous financial shortfall is developing in the charedi world. They’re not going to rely on Hashem having decided their parnasa on Rosh HaShanah, or davening and trusting in Hashem to help - when it comes to things that you can’t offload to the Zionists, you’ve gotta do your hishtadlus! And since they are not interested in enlisting to help relieve the strain on reservists (six of whom committed suicide in the last two weeks), nor in getting a job and fulfilling Chazal’s mandate to support one’s family, it’s necessary to fundraise even more.

The Gedolim™ have therefore been traveling around the world, fundraising millions from American, Canadian, Mexican, Panamian, and other wealthy Jews who somehow believe that supporting charedi freeloaders (rather than dati kollel networks like Echad l’Echad or Torah MiTziyon) is their ticket to heaven. But even that is far from enough to replace the billions usually received from Israeli taxpayers. So now they’re recruiting 30,000 charedi seminary girls to fundraise for them.

Yated Ne’eman showed photos of Rabbonim getting excited about the recruitment event. But they left out the photo of the actual event itself, which was this:

I presume that the American Yated realized that for American yeshivish readers (as opposed to Israeli charedim), it’s a bit jarring to see rabbonim standing behind a tall curtain when addressing a female audience (which does not happen at American charedi women’s events).

But things are actually even more bizarre.

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Pathological hatred of Israel is variously termed antisemitism or anti-Zionism, though personally I prefer to simply call it Israelopathy. In general, discussions about how it relates to the Left and Right refers to its manifestations on the Left and Right outside of Israel, leading to them converging like a horseshoe (and perhaps nowadays simply a ring). But in this post I’d like to discuss something different - the understanding of Israelopathy by the Jewish Left and Right in Israel, their consequent responses, and the mistakes therein.

The Jewish Left’s understanding of Israelopathy has long been that it results entirely from things that Israel does, and the consequent suffering of the Palestinians. Accordingly, if Israel acted in accordance with what the West professed to be normative acceptable international behavior, we would no longer be a despised nation, and we could reach a state of normalcy.

Gradually, this idea was proven false. For example, during the debate surrounding the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, the Israeli government agreed to arm a newly created Palestinian police force to maintain internal order. Amid heavy domestic criticism that these weapons would inevitably be turned against Israelis, Rabin famously claimed that if the Palestinians violated the agreement and used those guns against Israel, the IDF would have full international legitimacy to step back in and act without restriction. Of course, in several cases many PA officers did use these guns against Israel (such as in the Western Wall Tunnel riots of September 1996, during the Second Intifada, and with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade), yet the IDF was relentlessly internationally condemned for responding.

An even clearer demonstration occurred with Gaza. Ariel Sharon famously promised that if missiles are ever fired out of Gaza, Israel will be able to reconquer Gaza with full international support. Of course, Hamas endlessly fired missiles, but whenever Israel responded, it was condemned. And even after Oct 7, Israel was being accused of genocide before it even started its military campaign. We now see clearly that no matter how justified Israel’s response to Arab terror is, it will always be condemned.

What drove this misunderstanding of how the world judges Israel? I think it was desperation. It’s hard to be hated, and it’s even harder to accept that it will always be this way. Much more appealing is to think that we can do something to fix the situation. There’s also sometimes an assumption that the world will act in a basically decent manner, which unfortunately is not true.

But the Left’s misunderstanding of Israelopathy, with all its dangerous effects, is now being mirrored by an equally dangerous misunderstanding on the part of the Right.

The Right’s mistake has two components. First is to think that everyone hates Israel, and nothing we do has any effect on that, so there’s no point in even trying. Second is to think that it doesn’t matter anyway, because we are strong enough to go it alone.

The first belief is just silly, and is typically held by people who live in a bubble. Israel has plenty of supporters around the world, who exist on a continuum. Some of them are die-hard religious supporters who don’t care what Israel does, but for many of them, their support does depend to a certain degree on how Israel actually acts. Or, if they are politicians, their support depends on how their voters perceive Israel. And if Israel, rightly or wrongly, is perceived as acting increasingly brutally and wrongfully towards the Palestinians - for example, electing to Minster of National Security a man who was convicted by Israel itself for terrorism, calling for ethnic cleansing or a genocide in Gaza (even if not actually doing it), tolerating extremist hilltop youth who proudly commit violence against innocent civilians - then their support will naturally decrease.

The second idea, that Israel doesn’t need international support anyway, is likewise silly - not to mention anti-Torah, since the prophets explicitly warn about the folly of believing that God will empower us over our enemies regardless of corruption in the nation, and our history proves this tragically correct. Especially in the modern world, where economic health and military survival requires good political relationships and trade with numerous countries, Israel most certainly cannot go it alone.

Thus, for example, when people passionately criticize Britain for boycotting trade with Judea and Samaria, they are correct. But when they defiantly claim that it doesn’t matter anyway, because the sanctions are meaningless and Israel is strong, they are tragically mistaken. As the Times of Israel noted in a very important article, these particular sanctions could be trivial, but they could unleash a Pandora’s box of boycotts around the world. Businesses, including even those not in the countries threatening trade bans, would stay away from all of Israel rather than trying to untangle penalties.

And it’s not just businesses. The Times of Israel points out that “all Israelis could find themselves cut off from the global financial system, due to banks preferring to avoid the hassle of complying with requirements that they avoid individuals or businesses with settlement ties.” Trevor Asserson, whose law firm represented an Israeli organization sanctioned by the UK for allegedly financing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, warns that “All banks and other financial organizations dread the cost, expense, and effect of an investigation by a regulator which might even lead to being fined, which is a reason not to bother with one small country.” As the Times of Israel notes, all this could put the entire Israeli economy at risk.

In the 90s, voting for the Left put the country at risk. But in 2026, when the Left has virtually disappeared, it’s a coalition with the Far Right that puts the country in serious danger - and not only because their coalition partners are freeloading charedim who do not help with national defense and drain the economy. Even if you think that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir improve Israel’s security and well-being in various ways, they also simultaneously undeniably weaken it tremendously, and potentially place Israel’s very survival at risk.

The talk of the day is about Naza, the documentary by Yuval Abraham about Israel purportedly revealing the “secret systems used by Israel in mass killings of Gaza civilians.” It received a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation after its screening at the Venice Film Festival, which many are implicitly presenting as evidence of the power and/or importance of the film, but which actually merely reflects the audience’s enthusiasm for a film that condemns Israel.

The word Naza itself is a Hebrew acronym for Nezek Agavi (נזק אגבי), which translates to collateral damage (i.e. incidental civilian casualties). The IDF responded that the information from the interviewees themselves is false, and points out that the officers interviewed would not even have information about these things. But there’s something very strange about the film itself and its reception.

Reviews of the film talk about the chilling notion that IDF officers are making cold calculations about the number of acceptable civilian deaths in each operation against Hamas fighters. Yet this itself completely refutes the libel spread endlessly over the last three years that Israel has engaged in indiscriminate slaughter!

Furthermore, there is nothing chilling or remotely inappropriate about the army making these calculations. That’s precisely what every professional army does before each strike. In fact, that’s exactly what shows the contrast between Israel and Gaza - Hamas certainly doesn’t have any such system, because its very goal is to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible!

Of course, there can be debate about precisely how much collateral damage is acceptable. But this in turn would have to evaluated in the context of the war’s overall goals and necessity, which in turn means evaluating the actions and goals of Hamas - something that this film, it is safe to presume, studiously avoids.

The film was produced in partnership with Britain’s notoriously “progressive” and anti-Israel The Guardian. See this editorial from 2014 in which The Guardian condemns Israel for its too-heavy response to Hamas rockets and tunnels, which The Guardian dismisses as a nuisance posing no real threat, and argues that Hamas simply wants to live without restrictions alongside Israel.

Meanwhile, I wrote a letter to The Guardian today about their latest anti-Israel story which is about hyraxes, of all things! You can read my letter on the Biblical Museum of Natural History page here.

What a year it’s been. It’s hard to imagine that exactly one year ago, there were still hostages in Gaza. I’m not sure that we adequately appreciate how amazing and fortunate it is, for them and for all Israel, that they were released. (This is something that even expert analysts such as Haviv Rettig Gur thought could not happen, because Hamas would only give them all up in exchange for being able to stay in power, which Israel could not and would not allow - but in the end Trump strong-armed Israel into agreeing to let Hamas stay in limited power.)

Then we had the Iran war, or at least, another significant stage in it. At first, it seemed to be going better than our wildest hopes. Then Trump suddenly stopped it, and was ready to make an absolutely disastrous deal. Fortunately, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” and the Iranian regime wouldn’t even accept it. And so now we are at a low-intensity conflict, with uncertainty in the future, but at least Iran has been hopefully greatly weakened.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the clash between charedim and the rest of Israel has never been more far-reaching. This was the year when the charedi leadership and much of their community not just detached themselves from helping society, but even declared themselves to be in a state of war against Israel. Even more horrifically, Bibi/Likud along with so-called Religious Zionism and so-called Otzma Yehudit capitulated to them. But with elections on the horizon, and a new political party of charedim who have had enough of the craziness and irresponsibility, there is hope for change, and for Israel being saved from economic and military collapse.

Then there were all the other wild events this year. There was the Mir yeshiva student who spied for Iran, the crazy crocodile plan, and the rise of Flat-Earthers and other conspiracy theorists in Israel. Never a dull moment!

Most of my posts here were about the major topics of war, IDF service, and the charedi-Israel conflict. But this was also a year in which I wrote about various other topics and experiences - leopard skin scams, war elephants, New York lions on the ark, plunging into the ocean with Leviathan, how a hyrax led to some of the worst and best things in my life, and my childrens’ IDF service.

Writing this column doesn’t just take a lot of time; it also takes a lot of mental (and sometimes emotional) energy, as well as occasional professional and personal costs. On behalf of not just myself but also everyone who benefits from these posts - and they have suprisingly large reach and effect - I’d like to express my profound gratitude and appreciation to all the paid subscribers who make it possible for me to do this. And I’m going to take this opportunity to mention that if you’d like to support a meaningful cause that is close to me personally, the Biblical Museum of Natural History helps inspire, educate, and provide respite for nearly fifty thousand people annually, from across the full spectrum of society.

Wishing you all a blessed, happy and healthy new year. And may the forthcoming year be one in which we attain national healing. לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו לאלתר לחיים טובים וארוכים ולשלום

Usually, in the week before Rosh HaShana in the charedi world, the conversation is about trembling before the Days of Awe. But this year, it’s been about trembling with shock over tumultuous decisions regarding charedi politicians along with videos of The Gadol HaDor™ revealing the process behind it. While for the rest of us, Daas Torah died almost exactly 22 years ago, or in the past three years, for many of those still in the charedi world it died this week.

The trigger was Tuesday’s deadline to submit a list of candidates for the forthcoming elections. Things have not been looking good from the perspective of charedim; their former freeloading way of life seems to be coming to an end. Now, the reasons for this are obvious - the rest of the country cannot endure such large-scale freeloading, especially following three years of war. But instead of appreciating that, the charedi powers-that-be decided that it would help to be even more opposed to any level of national involvement.

And so, the Council of Torah Sages met and deliberated, invited their current politicians to discuss the matter, and told them that it would be necessary for them to become more confrontational, or else they would need to be replaced by others.

Just kidding! The askanim decided to fire them and replace them with their preferred candidates, the politicians were sent letters announcing their summary dismissal, and The Gedolim™ were used to rubber-stamp it.

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There is, understandably, a lot of confusion regarding the approach of the various political parties in Israel to one of the most central issues in the forthcoming election: charedim and army service. Some of this stems from the fact that every single party seems to ultimately have the same approach!

The new radically moderate charedi party, HaTzibur HaCharedi, takes the position that charedim who are not learning should enlist, while those are learning should be exempt. And everyone else seems to agree! Nobody, not even Avigdor Lieberman, claims that all the charedim will actually end up being drafted. And even the most pro-charedi politician, Bibi himself, says that he will see to it that charedim who do not learn will enlist. So what’s the difference between any of them?

And indeed, there are rosy-eyed Anglo-religious types who believe that even Likud and so-called Religious Zionism will cause thousands to enlist. Meanwhile, there are skeptics who claim that the goal of HaTzibur HaCharedi and Likud alike is to ensure full exemptions for everyone in the charedi world. So what’s the truth?

The answer is that there are indeed radical differences between the various parties on this issue. But you have to be knowledgeable, and sometimes have behind-the-scenes information, to be sure as to what these differences are.

The most crucial point to recognize is that there is a world of difference between acknowledging that not all charedim will enlist, and officially permitting it. And there is also another world of difference between permitting it, and wanting it.

Nobody at all thinks for a moment that all or even most of the 100,000 or so draft-age charedim are going to enlist. Not under any circumstances whatsoever. Many of them wouldn’t even be remotely suitable for the army. And in any case, what’s really desperately crucial is for the army to get another 20,00 soldiers, not 100,000 (although obviously more would be better).

But there’s a world of difference between acknowledging this situation and officially legally permitting it. This is because that if you legally permit it, then this means that they also receive various forms of financial assistance instead of financial penalties. Aside from harming the economy, this further encourages the charedi freeloading lifestyle.

Moreover, if you want charedim to all be exempt - either because you’re charedi and thus you don’t care about the rest of the nation, or because you are part of Likud/ Religious Zionism/ Otzma Yehudit, and you are willing to sacrifice others in order to maintain political power - then you will increase these forms of financial assistance. And you can always be very flexible with the definition of who is learning, and ensure that there are no checks or ensurance of compliance.

This is exactly the situation with Bibi/Likud, so-called Religious Zionism, and so-called Otzma Yehudit. They may talk about wanting to enlist charedim who are not learning, but this is only to assuage voters who are dismayed and furious about the current situation. As we’ve seen very clearly from the past three years, they are not remotely interested in actually risking their political support from charedim and enforcing any kind of draft or imposing any financial consquences for mass evasion. They can talk about drafting non-learners without the slightest chance of their actually enlisting anyone. (And they are working to neuter the High Court so that it can’t prevent inequality of law, non-enforcement of laws, funding schools which don’t teach general studies as they agreed, and so on.)

At the other end of the spectrum, MKs like Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett (I’m not yet sure about Eisenkot) have very clearly for many years been committed to changing the situation with charedi society. And this is especially since Oct. 7th changed everyone’s understanding of IDF needs. They are basing much of their campaign on this, this is what most or all of their MKs clearly seriously believe in, and if they were to utterly fail to deliver, they would severely disappoint 100% of their voters. If and when they get into power, they will ensure that the financial incentives for non-enlistment disappear, and that various sanctions come into place. This won’t succeed in drafting all or even most charedim, but it will cause 10-20,000 to enlist immediately. And this will gradually effect radical change in charedi society, for numerous reasons, and in all kinds of ways.

What about HaTzibur HaCharedi? Here things get a little more complicated, and there are certain aspects that I can’t write about publicly, but some things are still clear. The top politicians and rabbanim behind it - people like Moti Leitner and Rav Yehoshua Pfeffer - themselves enlisted after October 7th, at great personal cost and sacrifice. It’s obvious that they are very, very serious about the importance of charedim enlisting. (And it’s likewise obvious from their other activities that they are driven by a desire to make profound and essential changes in charedi society that will help both charedim and Israel.)

There are many ways that they can make this happen. Aside from the general laws of Israel regarding enlistment, and subsequent financial ramifications, there are other things that can be done and which HaTzibur HaCharedi plan to do. These include such things as ensuring that charedi hesder yeshivos and charedi schools which teach general studies receive generous funding - as opposed to the current government, which seeks to suppress all these so as not to enrage their charedi political partners who want absolute power over their communities.

What is HaTzibur HaCharedi’s position regarding charedim who are genuinely, seriously learning? They are officially in favor of them being allowed and even supported to continue learning, and they seem to be serious about this. I can attest that at least one of the rabbis involved really believes in the importance of exemptions for serious yeshiva students. I strongly disagree with this position, for reasons that I discussed in a previous post, Who Should Be Learning Instead Of Serving?. But there is no question that HaTzibur HaCharedi are simultaneously very, very serious about drafting the tens of thousands of charedim who are not learning - and they are uniquely positioned to do so.

As I wrote previously, I think that HaTzibur HaCharedi is the best hope for shattering the current charedi monolith and creating a fundamental transformation in charedi society. They are in a position to literally save not just many charedim from collapse, but the entire country. While I do not personally agree with their entire platform, I wish them tremendous success, and I urge people to consider voting for them.

This past Thursday, several leading Chassidic Rebbes, along with R. Malkiel Kotler of BMG Lakewood, met with President Trump. The chassidic rebbes included the Satmar Rebbes of both Kiryas Yoel, Aaron Teitelbaum, and that of Williamsburg, his brother Zalman Teitelbaum. They have been estranged and have fought bitterly for decades, but they put their differences aside for this occasion. Achdus!

The meeting opened with the Kiryas Yoel Rebbe reciting the Hanosein Teshuah prayer for Trump. This of course the traditional weekly Jewish prayer for the ruling powers of whatever country the Jews happen to be in. However, note that charedi rabbis, including these chassidic rabbis, generally do not recite it anymore on Shabbos, neither for the USA nor for Israel.

What was so important about this meeting with Trump that it brought these Chassidic rebbes for their first face-to-face meeting in two decades, along with the Rosh Yeshiva of Lakewood? Well, they discussed several things, including increasing welfare assistance for the undereducated and impoverished US charedi communities that they seek to keep undereducated and impoverished, and improving conditions for charedim in US prisons (consistent with the prevalent charedi approach of treating criminals as martyrs and heroes).

But the main topic of discussion was apparently something else, which does not quite tie in to the achdus theme (unless you define Klal Yisrael as referring strictly to charedim, which of course they effectively do). Here is a letter that was delivered to Trump:

“September 3, 2026

“The Honorable Donald J. Trump
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

“Dear Mr. President,

“On behalf of tens of thousands of Jews currently living in Israel, we are writing to you to request your assistance regarding a matter of the utmost importance to us.

“Long before you first ran for public office, you demonstrated great kindness toward the Jews whom you encountered. After you assumed the presidency, you extended that kindness to the Jewish people throughout the world. We will be forever grateful.

“In light of this longstanding relationship, we implore your intervention on behalf of the 100,000 students studying in Haredi yeshivas and seminaries in Israel. There is no need for us to explain to you the unique way of life of Haredi Judaism, generally known here in the United States as the ultra-Orthodox community.

“For nearly two hundred years, students attending recognized religious schools and training themselves to become ordained clergy have been exempt from conscription into the United States military. For more than seventy-five years, a similar exemption existed in Israel. Recently, it was abolished, a step that has had a devastating impact on the Haredi community.

“For many reasons, it is not practical for the IDF to accommodate the religious and cultural needs of the Haredi community. It would be almost impossible for Haredim to serve in a secular Israeli army without sacrificing their unique identity and relinquishing essential religious freedoms. Here in the United States, we enjoy the protections afforded by the First Amendment to the Constitution, protections that do not exist in Israel.

“It seems inconceivable that in the Land of Israel Jews are being deprived of their religious freedoms. Yet, tragically, this is the situation. Tens of thousands of God-fearing students, whose only desire is to continue living according to the tradition of their forefathers—a tradition reaching all the way back to the patriarchs of the nation—are living in genuine fear.

“As we write these words, dozens of students are imprisoned in military prisons because of their refusal to enlist. Every Haredi Jew of draft age walks the streets in fear and goes to sleep at night knowing that he may be arrested at any time, solely because of his religious faith.

“They are unable to leave the country for any reason, including in order to seek refuge elsewhere. As we understand it, thousands of American citizens who hold dual citizenship are unable to return to their homes.

“Mr. President: Since the days of the Founding Fathers, the world has not seen a leader so determined to defend religious freedom. You will be recorded in history alongside Thomas Jefferson and George Washington because of your courageous efforts to assist Jews throughout the world in practicing their faith in peace.

“We respectfully ask you to instruct your administration to raise this matter at the highest levels of the Israeli government, and to urge its leaders to follow your example by protecting the religious freedoms of ultra-Orthodox Jews instead of persecuting them.”

So finishes the letter.

Now, the most obvious horror with this letter is charedi Jews trying to recruit the US administration’s help to harm Israel. We saw this previously with Rabbi Dovid Hofstedter of Toronto (Dirshu), and now we’re seeing it with American charedi rabbis. Historically, it’s reminiscent of when Jews asked Rome to intervene in Jerusalem.

But it’s not just the effort that is a terrible thing. The lies in this letter are numerous. There was no seventy-five year exemption from the IDF for students in religious schools. Rather, there was an initial exemption for 400 students, to rebuild the losses of the Holocaust, which was gradually increased until Begin removed the cap, and successive charedi religious and political leaders then extended it to include even charedim who are not in yeshiva.

Likewise, it is a sheker on numerous levels to state that the only desire of charedim is to continue living according to a tradition, reaching all the way back to the patriarchs. First of all, there was no ancient tradition not to help with a defensive war! Second, there was not even a recent tradition to refuse to be economically self-sufficient. Charedim do not only desire an army exemption, they also demand a multitude of tax exemptions, welfare benefits, and additional funding.

But I also want to point out an additional distortion in this letter - the appeal to there being a similar exemption from the military in US history. This is something often voiced by charedim arguing for a draft exemption. But it is an utterly fraudulent comparison, for two reasons.

First is that the primary (and single most frequently cited legal) reason for the US exemption is that removing ministers from communities would damage civilian morale during a time of crisis. In a 1944 ruling against Isaac Trainin, an Orthodox Jew who was denied an exemption as being a rabbi, a U.S. Federal Appeals Court explained that ministers are exempt “not so much for their personal religious training and beliefs, but for the disruption of public worship and religious solace to the people at large which would be caused by their induction,” which accordingly did not apply to Trainin since he was only a part-time rabbi. Congress believed that keeping the home front spiritually stable was vital to national well-being. If the government drafted practicing clergy and stopped the training of future religious leaders (divinity students), entire communities would be left without spiritual guidance, funeral officiants, or counseling when they needed it most.

The exact opposite is the case with the vast majority of the 100,000 charedim seeking exemptions today. They are neither clergy nor divinity students training to be clergy - indeed, the goals of charedi yeshivos today are not at all for their students to enter the rabbinate, and are often specifically for them not to enter it. And unlike the situation with Christian clergy in the 1940s, it is their refusal to enlist which harms national morale and disrupts religious solace! (Dati-leumi rabbis and yeshiva students who enlist, in contrast, help national morale and inspire people with religious solace.)

The second critical difference between the US military exemption and the Israeli charedi desire for exemption is that the United States is a gigantic powerful country that has never suffered an existential threat. It is surrounded by oceans, Mexicans and Canadians. It has always had far more manpower available than it requires, and has accordingly historically been extremely generous with its exemptions. And, of course, it’s also important to keep the economy strong and society healthy during a war, as much as possible. Thus, the US historically gave broad exemptions to people merely on the basis of such things as their being in higher education and/or being married breadwinners.

Again, the exact opposite is the case with Israel. It is a tiny country facing constant immense threats. It needs to have a strict mandatory universal draft policy in order to survive. It cannot repeatedly deploy all its older reservists in a long conflict without suffering enormous domestic damage in all kinds of ways - which is what has been happening. Careers have crashed, emotional health problems have exploded, family lives have collapsed, marriages have broken, suicides have soared. The very broad exemptions that are possible and helpful for the US are devastating for Israel. And charedi isolation neither helps with the economy or society healthy - in fact it dramatically harms both.

The charedi claim of being as entitled to exemptions as US clergy is a double fraud that needs to be exposed. Please share this post with others.

HaTzibur HaCharedi, “The Charedi Community,” is a new charedi political party, led by Beit Shemesh Deputy Mayor Motti Leitner. It seeks to correct much of what is wrong in charedi society - the lack of civic (or any) responsibility, the lack of education and its resultant terrible poverty, the corruption of askanim who obtain power and control and money. HaTzibur HaCharedi aims to strengthen charedi army service in various ways, to improve general studies education for the charedi community, and so on.

The question that everyone is asking is whether they will gain enough votes to clear the minimum threshold that requires four seats. Personally I think that it is quite likely - there are many disaffected charedim who don’t vote for UTJ - and in any case hopefully they will unite in a technical bloc with another party so that together they will comfortably clear the threshold.

But the significance of HaTzibur HaCharedi should not just be measured in how many votes they get and how much resultant political power. The very fact of it having come into existence is cause for celebration. We are seeing charedim openly rejecting the mainstream charedi approach, and openly not caring about what The Gedolim™ decree. This is not just vital for the well-being of charedi society and of all Israel, but also far more consistent with the traditional model of rabbinic authority.

I do not agree with all of the positions of HaTzibur HaCharedi. They take the approach that people who are genuine full-time learners should be allowed to stay in that position (though they do not state the extent to which such people should be funded by the rest of the nation). This is a position to which I am strongly opposed - I don’t think that the Torah of people who do not care for civic duties and helping the nation during war has any value.

But I think that HaTzibur HaCharedi nevertheless is the best hope for shattering the current charedi monolith and creating a fundamental transformation in charedi society. They are in a position to literally save not just many charedim from collapse, but the entire country. I wish them tremendous success, and I urge people to consider voting for them.

(Personally I am not voting for anyone - because I will be out of the country on election day!)

I’m amazed at how many otherwise intelligent people talk about transferring millions of Palestinians out of Gaza (and sometimes out of Judea/Samaria). This is a central position of Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut party, which just signed a vote-sharing agreement with the so-called Religious Zionism party. Sure, it’s an appealing idea for many, but has any of its proponents given it any serious thought?

Forget the moral issues for now, which, contrary to popular Western belief today, are complicated. How do they see this actually playing out? Even Trump gave up on the idea. For those Gazans who don’t want to leave, how do you physically get them on the buses? And even more fundamentally, even with the huge number who want to leave - no country in the world is willing to accept them, so where would the buses go?

And these are just some of the innumerable reasons why it cannot actually happen. It boggles the mind that people take this idea seriously and support politicians who claim that they will make it happen. You might as well say that we will send Palestinians to the moon.

(See the interview with Moshe Feiglin here, half-way through the video, where Feiglin flails and avoids answering the young questioner who pushes him to answer the question of what happens to Gazans who don’t want to leave. Feiglin, not even addressing the question of where even Gazans who want to leave would possibly go, says that they could be deprived of water to force them to leave. The questioner points out that he is effectively stating that Israel should starve two million people to death, and thus fully justify the accusation of genocide. Feiglin refuses to own this and instead starts attacking the questioner and asks him why he doesn’t care about Hamas murderers!)

I posted this on Facebook a few days ago, and the response by those who disagreed with me was extraordinary and revealing. My post was about how proponents of this idea are pushing something without giving any consideration to the impossibility of actually doing it. They reacted by insisting that it should and can happen, without remotely explaining how - thereby perfectly proving my point!

Some people responded by saying that it could be done just as Sudetenland Germans were deported from various countries after WWII. But they are ignoring a very obvious and basic difference. Sudetenland Germans were transferred to Germany, which was under Allied occupation and control. There is no such equivalent for Gazans (unless you want to deport them to Judea and Samaria, which is presumably not what is being wished for).

Other people threw out names of countries where they could go. Egypt! Jordan! Syria! But while these countries are of the same ethnicity, and are even the original homes of many Gazans from not too long ago, and certainly should take responsibility for the results of a conflict that they incited, they point-blank refuse to do so (for some very obvious reasons). Even Trump couldn’t change their minds, and Israel certainly doesn’t have as much leverage as Trump.

When I pointed this out, people said that Israel should do it “by force.” But what on earth does that even mean? Break our agreements with those countries, break our various agreements to follow international law, and launch a cross-border war?!

Other silly ideas that people threw out including dropping all the Gazans by parachute over Iran. Eventually, before even engaging with such ideas, I just asked people how much thought they had actually given to their ideas before advocating for them, and whether any complications and drawbacks had occurred to them.

This whole idea is unworkable and thus absurd. And it’s utterly reckless for people to advocate for something so significant without even giving it any serious thought. One can sympathize with how people are desperate for a solution to avoiding another attack, but if we are going to survive in this dangerous part of the world, we have to acknowledge the lack of perfect solutions, recognize the limitations, and work on practical approaches.

Meanwhile, this week I’m starting an additional Substack as a project with the Biblical Museum of Natural History, featuring weekly insights into Torah and the natural world (including a short but fascinating Dvar Torah for the Shabbat table!). This is content exclusively sent to Friends of the Museum. Sign up by clicking on the image below!

Following a one-hour train ride and five-hour bus ride (which was admittedly extremely comfortable, with spacious seats, wifi, and a no-talking rule), I arrived at the Cornell campus. I was staggered by its extraordinary beauty, and indeed a Google search revealed that Cornell is considered to be one of the most beautiful college campuses in America.

The campus is bordered by a lake system featuring waterfalls and osprey nests. The buildings are magnificent, straight out of Hogwarts, with a clock-tower and ringing bells. I noticed a street name that was in Welsh!

The grounds are spacious, with enormous spruces, elms, and maples. I saw an awe-inspiring oak that I later discovered is four hundred years old. A marmot (not to be confused with Marmite) scampered into the bushes, and a red-tailed hawk flew past me and conveniently perched in a nearby tree so that I could take this photo:

On Shabbat afternoon, I went for a walk. I looked out at the rolling lawns, the buildings and trees, and I thought to myself, “Wow, this scene could not be any more beautiful!” I was proved wrong exactly one minute later, when a colorful hot-air balloon drifted past, so low that I could hear the burner firing.

Having heard so much about antisemitism on college campuses in America, I was a little nervous. Just a few days earlier, I had had dinner with a professor at UCLA, who told me that for many months after October 7 she was warned that it was not safe for her to walk across campus. I came to Cornell wearing the traditional Orthodox camouflage/ dead giveaway of a baseball cap. But my fears were entirely unfounded; Jews at Cornell have no problems whatsoever.

The Center for Jewish Living is itself unique. Entirely student-run, it features a synagogue, Beit Midrash, and residence based in a beautiful 1890’s building, resplendent with hardwood floors, oak paneling, and stained glass windows. The meals were attended by Jews from across the religious spectrum, with a smattering of non-Jews joining for the experience - which can only be Good For The Jews.

The CJL also has a remarkable library of old books on Judaism and Israel. I picked up one that was called “Israel Revisited,” written in 1950 by Ralph McGill, a Pulitzer-prize-winning anti-segregationist journalist from Georgia. It was a remarkable record of life in a state that was less than two years old, and the author spent several pages stressing how utterly necessary and appropriate it was for the Jewish State to come into existence.

But what I found particularly interesting was the Foreword by Billy Rose, who explained why this journalist from Georgia was suited to write such an incisive and insightful commentary on such a complicated topic. His first reason was that McGill is an Irishman, “which means that while he has a lively sense of justice in general, he has no axe to grind about Israel in particular.” If you’ve been following any of the news from Ireland’s attitude to Israel lately, can you imagine anyone writing this about an Irish journalist today?!

An oak tree might live unchanged for four hundred years, but society does not. And while Cornell might be fortunate in not suffering from antisemitism or Israelopathy, the attitude of the West in general, including America, towards Israel is going to be increasingly hostile over the next few decades. Accordingly, I spoke to the students about the topic of my book The Lions of Zion, explaining how Biblical natural history and a proper understanding of wildlife in Israel helps refute so many anti-Israel attacks.

Following my presentations to the students, I told them how much I had enjoyed visiting the charming campus. I mentioned my delight on seeing a street on the campus that had a Welsh name.

I got blank looks in return.

I said that I didn’t remember the name exactly, but it was definitely Welsh because it began with two “L”s, like so many Welsh towns - Llandudno, Llangollen, and of course Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

Blank looks.

Then one student said, “Oh! Do you mean Llenroc Road?”

“Yes! That’s it!” I said.

He smiled, and said: “That’s ‘Cornell’ backwards.”

One of the many ways in which Israel is unusual compared to most other countries is in its having extremely high artistic standards for postage stamp design rather than sheer mass production. My father-in-law has been collecting Israeli stamps for 68 years, and the other day I was looking through his collection. I was struck at how so many of the stamps are not just visually beautiful, but also tell a story of Israel’s and the Jewish People’s history.

There are several stamps depicting the wildlife of Biblical and modern Israel, but this stamp in particular, from 1963, caught my attention:

A mosquito might seem an odd choice for a postage stamp, but it’s the graph alongside it which reveals its significance. The graph shows the decline of malaria in Israel, as a result of intensive efforts by Zionist immigrants. This was so significant an event that a postage stamp was created to celebrate it.

The battle against malaria by Zionists is one of many facts that punctures the “Jews are imperialist settler-colonials who oppressed the indigenous peoples” in two ways. First is that the Jews who came to Palestine were not European colonialists who exploited resources to enrich an empire. They did not seize the most useful parts of the land. They focused on underdeveloped regions and developed them, draining malaria-infested swamps and making the land far more productive.

Second is that their actions were incredibly beneficial to the Arab population. Before the swamps were drained, in some Arab villages, one in six children succumbed to the illness within their first few months. This along with other health and economic improvements that the Zionists brought was a factor in the enormous increase in the local Arab population in the twentieth century.

Anyway, as I was contemplating this stamp, I called over my youngest son, age 13, to tell him about it. He’s an extremely knowledgeable kid, and he rolled his eyes as only teenagers can. He told me that he already knows all about malaria and how it was eradicated in Israel and how they drained the Hula and everything else.

Then a thought struck me.

I asked him if he knew what a postage stamp was.

He did not!

Due to an unexpected hiccup with my travel plans, I am available this Shabbos for a scholar-in-residence engagement anywhere on the East Coast. Please be in touch ASAP if you're interested! (I'll be coming alone, not with my seventy-pound friend in the picture.)

Last week I discussed the exposé of academic superstar Jason Arday as a fantasist, a serial plagiarist, a persecutor of those who investigated his work, a defrauder of students, and someone utterly unqualified to hold a professorship at Cambridge. Following this, you’d expect a lot of embarrassment and head-rolling at the institutions which enabled his meteoric rise, at media outlets like the BBC which glorified him, and with the people who were infatuated with him.

But barely any of that happened. Instead, all the critics of Arday and his enablers were met with a single charge: Racism! There was no acknowledgement that there was any possibility of any genuine reason to be opposed to Arday’s status. It was “obviously” all about evil racists, and nobody else needed to take any responsibility.

It was all rather familiar.

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Recently, he issued a claim that there are Israelis who avoid using the plus sign in mathematics (and instead substitute an inverted “T” shape) because it is similar to a Christian cross:

Now, how should one respond to that? In a post that received a huge number of likes, one popular self-appointed hasbara activist drew attention to this video. He responded that Tucker is truly insane and pure evil, and that his claim about the plus sign “is a total 100% lie.”

But actually, while Tucker is indeed truly insane and pure evil, his claim about the plus sign is totally 100% the truth.

Tucker did not claim that all Israelis do not use the plus sign. He specifically said that it was in “some Israeli religious schools.” And this is absolutely true, as people with actual knowledge of Israeli religious schools are well aware. I’ve seen it myself in my own kids’ schoolbooks. (In the earlier days of the State, it was widespread across even non-religious schools.)

And it’s sometimes also found outside of the context of schools:

But claiming otherwise does not just reveal a lack of knowledge of the Israeli religious community that the person has decided to publicly defend (and lives in!). It also demonstrates a lack of interest in doing the easiest thing in the world before making a public claim about Israel. Everyone with even the most basic tech skills can simply ask AI or Google it:

And naturally, this is what Tucker’s fans did, and made an absolute fool of the hasbara activist (who did not retract or respond).

There is a much more truthful and appropriate way to respond to Tucker’s claim: So what?! Yes, there are some Israeli religious schools that stay away from anything resembling a cross, a custom that dates back to Europe when Jews were endlessly persecuted and massacred by people acting in the name of Christianity. This is not something that needs to be hidden and it’s not something particularly significant.

Do you know what’s much, much more significant, if you care about Christianity? It’s how Tucker makes false claims about the collapse of the Christian community in Gaza being the fault of Israel rather than the fault of Hamas. It’s how he regularly ignores the severe, legal, and societal persecution of Christians in Muslim-majority nations like Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Tucker’s beloved Qatar, where church-building is heavily restricted or illegal, and conversion to Christianity is a crime theoretically punishable by death.

The bigger lesson here is something that I’ve been trying to teach for decades. Avoid knee-jerk, tribalist, simplistic reactions. Realize that the facts and the truth might not be the perfect fairy-tale that you imagined when you were a kid. Contemplate, research, and only then react. And then your response will be far more powerful - and truthful.