Hey, beloved tribe.
It’s an extraordinary week to be in NYC (or maybe it’s just a regular week in NYC — equally plausible). Every single day, some of the world’s most brilliant and compelling Jews are presenting on a local stage. This includes Dan Senor, Amir Tibon, Eylon Levi, Natasha Hausdorff, Rudy Rochman and Angela Buchdahl among many others. And this isn’t even to mention literary luminaries from elsewhere who are in town, like Zibby Owens, Jessica Elisheva Emerson, Erica Cohen Lyons, and Mimi Zieman.
I’m here for eight intensely scheduled days and feel it isn’t nearly enough. Once my kids are in school, I’m going to do everything in my power to live in NYC every spring and fall (ideally renting a room in someone’s apartment, so let me know if that apartment is yours!) and in Portland every summer and winter.
This overextended schedule is why this newsletter is a day late. People have asked me: “Why not just tell your readers you’re in NYC and overcommitted this week?” The answer is: because I already did that when I unexpectedly had to go to Ecuador and then China in immediate succession. I can’t bear to do it again so soon, so I just hope you’ll forgive the irregular arrival of this week’s three missives.
I really wanted to write to you yesterday. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: I am not among the hallowed and holy souls who mourn even the death or injury of terrorists. I’ve never heard of anything more brilliant in my life than thousands of pagers exploding at the same time, blowing the dicks and various other extremities off Hezbollah operatives across Lebanon.
Yes, I know some civilians were also injured or even killed, including a child. I hope I don’t need to say that my joy does not include them — but of course it doesn’t. Unlike far too many “progressives” here in the U.S., I would never gloat or feel a moment’s glee about the death of any child anywhere. I would not take joy in even the death of Sinwar’s children, if his progeny were truly children and not adults.
But does it delight me that Israel found a way to target terrorists with undreamed-of surgical precision, and minimize civilians casualties to an unprecedented degree? Absolutely, unequivocally and unapologetically yes, it makes my heart burst with pride, it makes my soul sing with joy, it makes me kvell like an ancient Jewish crone who has survived a lifetime of persecution and is now surrounded by hundreds of her own grandchildren at some Kotel family reunion.
This takes one-upmanship to a whole new level. It’s like:
Hezbollah: “We just launched an ingenious unmanned aerial vehicle that managed to slip past the Iron Dome’s vaunted defense system.”
Israel: “Hold my beer.”
And the memes. Oh, the memes. Jewish Twitter gives me life.
Here are just a few of my favorites:
Of course, Squad members and other far leftists are fuming over this evil and dastardly Israeli attack on those poor Hezbollah terrorists.
AOC, who has not issued a single word of condemnation against Hezbollah for the 8,000 rockets and missiles it has fired into Israel over the last eight months, for the murder of 12 Israeli children playing soccer on a field, or for its long list of atrocities committed around the world (including a lethal attack on hundreds of U.S. Marines) had this to say about Operation Pager:
So there you have it: there is nothing Israel is allowed to do in self-defense. Anywhere. Ever.
Bomb a hospital known to house the headquarters of Hamas? How dare Israel bomb a hospital and do collateral damage to the civilians in the vicinity!
Enter another hospital in a stealth operation and kill only the Hamas terrorists being treated there? How dare Shin Bet operatives dress as doctors and murder patients in their beds!
Pull off the most ingenious attack in human history, targeting thousands of terrorists with surgical precision? How dare Israel endanger even a few civilians while hitting thousands of terrorists!
There is so clearly not one single thing Israel is ever allowed to do in the context of a war or in self-defense.
Well, in my opinion, Eve Barlow of Blacklisted fired off a perfect response to the haters:
And we won’t apologize for that.
*
A word about JUDITH Magazine here, and also a question.
First, today was Rachel Neve Midbar’s debut as our poetry editor.
This role requires a presentation of one poetry showcase per week. This could take the form of a few shorter poems or even just one long poem. And I gave her some content I’d already accepted, so all she had to do was upload it to the magazine site on the appointed day.
But she was driven to go so far above and beyond that in her inaugural offering. In response to our collective grief over our six recently executed hostages, and in particular for Hersh, she created a folio of poems in his honor. And fam, they are inexpressibly powerful and beautiful. I hope you will have a look and give them some love.
One technical note: poetry layouts are notoriously challenging because poems are all formatted uniquely, with very irregular spacing and placement of words and lines.
Our layout genius Amanda Kreklau has informed me that, due to substack’s technical parameters, a layout that’s precisely correct on your desktop will be compromised on your phone or vice versa. So if you’re seeing those poems on a substack app on your phone, and the layout looks less than professional, it’s because we had to sacrifice the perfection of one mode of delivery or another, and we prioritized the desktop. One advantage to this choice is that you can always choose to view a site in desktop mode, even on your phone, so when you’re reading poetry in JUDITH on a mobile device, I devoutly hope you will do that.
Finally, one quick question. This newsletter was launched in response to October 7th and its ghastly aftermath here in the U.S. and around the world.
When it started, there was a very urgent need to build community and connection for progressive Zionists, and left-leaning Israel lovers were intensely hungry for that.
To date, including today, I have written 97 essays defending Israel against the far left’s most pervasive accusations and building the strongest case I could summon for why Zionism is the most progressive of values (because it is).
Now the war and the tidal wave of anti-Semitism has been dragging on for almost a year and the need is a little less acute. The U.S. election is looming. Kamala’s ascendance has been a sensation. I’ve written a minimum of 100,000 words on my chosen topics, easily enough to fill a full-length book and maybe even two, and I certainly don’t want to say the same things over and over when they’re easily accessible in the archives.
A huge part of serving a community is reading the room. So I wanted to ask how you would feel about the following proposition:
I’m thinking of sending out my Jews Of The Universe column to the Never Alone community each Friday, instead of a regular newsletter.
There will be a tsunami of material in JUDITH that Never Alone readers will NOT get. The only JUDITH content I’d like to offer on both channels, so to speak, is Jews Of The Universe. One reason for this is that I don’t know when I’ve ever been more excited to write anything, and I think you will LOVE these profiles. They will be wildly varied and beautifully human and generally uplifting and totally non-partisan.
So here’s my question, and I would appreciate very much if you’d register your opinion here (all subscribers, paid and free, can answer this)!
Thanks so much in advance for anyone willing to weigh in.
I will be back with you tomorrow, either with another newsletter or with a JOTU column.
In the meantime, I hope you’re having a great week.
Huge love to you all.
Am Yisrael Chai.
My understanding is that the destruction of pagers has a strategic defensive and military purpose: the explosions identified Hezbollah soldiers who are embedded among civilians, and it has destroyed the communication capabilities of Hezbollah operatives and their Iranian leaders coordinating plans for all kinds of terrorism and other attacks. The double standard of course is how it's being portrayed as provocative...ignoring how Hezbollah is battering Israel with rockets and drones everyday.