The Dangerous Self-Hating Jew

'I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them they must all go to camp.' 

- Karl Bendetsen (October 11, 1907 – June 28, 1989) 

You’d be forgiven for thinking these words were spoken by Adolf Hitler, or Heinrich Himmler, the principal architect of the Nazi concentration camp system and the Final Solution.

In fact, they were spoken by Karl Bendetsen, a Stanford-educated U.S. Army officer who rose to the rank of colonel and later became Under Secretary of the Army.

The quote comes from an exchange reported by Father Hugh Lavery of the Catholic Maryknoll Mission in Los Angeles. Lavery explained to Bendetsen that there were children in his orphanage who were half-Japanese, others one-quarter Japanese or less. He asked, “Which children should we send to the relocation centers?”

Bendetsen’s reply was unequivocal.

Bendetsen was one of the chief architects of the U.S. government’s plan to intern approximately 125,000 Japanese Americans during World War II—native-born citizens and legal residents alike—on the basis of race alone. He played a central role in implementing one of the most shameful and unconstitutional policies in American history, aided by countless officials, including the Supreme Court.

I learned about Bendetsen through Rachel Maddow’s recent podcast series Burn Order, which recounts the internment, the long fight for justice by survivors, and the government’s sustained efforts to conceal its wrongdoing. In the series, Bendetsen emerges as the principal antagonist: ambitious, highly intelligent, conniving, ruthless, and unrepentant.

Why do I care about Karl Bendetsen?

Partly because there are unmistakable echoes of his logic in today’s America, as masked and armed government agents sweep through communities and transport people to brutal penal colonies abroad, without due process.

But there is another reason—one that hits closer to home.

Karl Bendetsen was Jewish.

His grandparents immigrated to America in the 1860s from Lithuania and Poland. His father was born in New York and co-owned a clothing store. And yet Bendetsen repeatedly denied his Jewish identity, inventing elaborate and shifting genealogies that traced his lineage to Danish farmers or 17th-century timber families. All of it was fabrication.

In 1970, he claimed descent from “Benedict and Dora Robbins Bendetsen” of Denmark. In 1983, while testifying against redress for Japanese American internment survivors, he asserted that his family had arrived in 1670, abandoned seafaring for farming, and had been “in timber ever since.” In reality, Bendetsen entered the timber business only after retiring from the army in the 1950s.

What accounts for this erasure? Shame? Strategy? Delusion? Or a calculated understanding that Jewishness was an obstacle to advancement in the military and government of his time?

What we do know is this: Bendetsen believed race alone was sufficient to establish guilt. He pursued this belief with extraordinary zeal, as if performing loyalty, proving patriotism, and distancing himself—violently—from any association with the persecuted.

Jewish self-hatred is not a new phenomenon. The term was coined in 1930 by the German philosopher Theodor Lessing to describe the internalization of antisemitic stereotypes by Jews themselves. The most infamous example is Otto Weininger, the Austrian philosopher who absorbed antisemitic ideas so thoroughly that he came to despise Jewishness itself, before taking his own life in 1903 at the age of 23.

This is not mere assimilation. It is not anglicizing a name or smoothing an accent to fit in. It is assimilation taken to the extreme—identification with the persecutor.

The term is often abused today, particularly as a political weapon. Disagreement with Israeli policy does not constitute self-hatred. But there is a line—crossed when critique becomes zeal, when participation shifts from dissent to active self-righteous efforts at delegitimization. Here I am thinking of someone like Norman Finkelstein.  

Bendetsen crossed that line decisively. At a time when reports of the annihilation of European Jewry were already circulating, he embraced his role as inquisitor and jailer of another racialized minority. Though he did not target Jews directly, it is difficult not to see Japanese Americans as stand-ins for his own repudiated identity.

What unsettled me most in listening to Burn Order was not the cruelty itself, but how administrative it all sounded—how carefully reasoned, how legally scrubbed, how certain of its own righteousness.

Karl Bendetsen did not act out of rage. He acted out of conviction, ambition, and a belief that his loyalty required visible severity. That combination—zeal, intelligence, and bureaucratic power—is far more dangerous than demagoguery.

Bendetsen had his camps. He had his memos. He had his courts. We tell ourselves that we would recognize such a figure if he appeared again. But I'm not so sure.

Every generation produces an official who translates prejudice into policy and calls it security. And sometimes that dangerous official is a self-hating Jew. 

In ours, that role has been filled by Stephen Miller.

2025, the decade that was

Sayonara 2025: It was quite a decade.

The year that started in 2015—the year trump entered politics and Americans demonstrated that they didn't grasp the concept of public office. They thought it was a television show.

A very bad television show.

Some argue Americans were confused. They mistook reality television for reality itself, and figured why not turn reality into a TV show? I predicted The Trump Show jumped the shark on January 6, 2020. Boy, was I wrong.

Americans opted for a sequel in 2024. And we all know how bad sequels are. 

Trump’s was way worse.

By many accounts, 2025 became the most violent year in American politics since the 1960s. In the first half of the year alone, roughly 150 politically motivated attacks were recorded—nearly double the same period in 2024. The tone was set the year before with two assassination attempts on trump. That was followed this year with the killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, and then the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. There was also an arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s residence, and a shooting at the CDC headquarters—thankfully limited to property damage.

I don’t think this is a red or blue problem—though statistically, vastly most political violence until this year came from the right. I think when regular politics fails, people take matters into their own hands. And politics is clearly failing in the United States.

Trump bears direct responsibility for ginning up the violent rhetoric—the Destroyer in Chief. But the deeper cause of his return is the collapse of politics itself.

During Trump Show - Season One, he was still learning the role. He performed a clumsy song-and-dance about putting his businesses in the hands of his idiot children and hadn’t yet figured out how to properly monetize the Oval Office. He settled for diplomats staying at his Washington hotel and selling merch to his cult followers. Petty larceny.

This season, he’s gone big. Threatening titans of industry and world leaders with illegal tariffs as a protection racket to funnel billions into his crypto ventures. Trump has no reason not to treat the presidency like a tawdry one-night stand with an under-aged, starry-eyed model or a former porn actor. He’ll be leaving town soon enough.

But trump’s re-election was enabled by the feeble, inept, and criminally underappreciated Joe Biden. Biden’s core flaw has always been that he’s old school. That worked during a pandemic, when Americans craved normalcy. But a return to normalcy only reminded them how bored and miserable they already were.

Biden never grasped that the rules had changed. Americans wanted to be entertained more than they wanted a semi-functional government. Harris suffered for the same reason. Biden and Harris didn’t just alienate Republicans and Independents—they put Democrats to sleep in 2024.

How do I know? Two words: Zohran Mamdani.

The avowed democratic socialist proved political labels barely matter anymore—something trump obliterated back in 2015, along with the Republican Party. The surprise New York mayoral race showed voters were fed up with both the tired old guard (Cuomo) and the pro-trump corrupt guard (Adams). They wanted a young, sharp face with some nerve, regardless of ideology.

Democrats had better get the message for 2028: People want something new.

America has shifted from a country on a mission—confident, disciplined, and forward-looking after World War II—into a spoiled, bored, whiny, entitled brat that takes everything for granted. Trump was the perfect avatar for that transformation.

Fortunately, it appears Americans are beginning to recognize what they re-elected—thanks in part to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—and they don’t like the reflection staring back at them.

The next three years will be rough. An easy prediction to make. Trump is effectively a lame duck. Democrats will retake the House. There will be corruption probes, cover-ups, and hearings galore. Trump will howl and snarl like the wounded, cornered dog he is. One can only hope he doesn’t drag America into a war with Venezuela, a plotline twist for his flailing show. 

Looking ahead to 2028, Democrats have a simple task: nominate someone who knows how to manage the bored, rude, entitled child America has become. Entitled children are miserable. They lack boundaries, respect, and consequences. Sound familiar?

According to my sources (read: the internet), there are a few ways to deal with them:

1. Simple, clear, ambitious messaging: Articulate what America stands for. Not a policy menu—a vision. Democrats haven’t offered a compelling national vision since the 1960s. Biden-Harris demonstrated that policy talk is the refuge of those with no vision. An entitled child desperately needs direction.

2. Expect more, encourage accountability, not dependency: Lower expectations and Americans will always oblige. JFK had it right - don’t tell Americans what government will do for them, tell them what they will do together. Set bold goals with deadlines. We will go to the moon by the end of the decade etc.

3. Model respect, show that character is strength: Entitled children suffer from a deficit of meaningful attention. They prefer abusive attention to none at all—Trump in a nutshell. The antidote is leadership grounded in character: integrity, honesty, respect, authenticity, discipline, kindness and generosity. And a little charisma would help.

America doesn’t need another show. It needs a grown-up.

[Side-note from the Canadian hinterland. We were no exception to the entitled child rule. We had Trudeau and were on course to elect the whiny spoiled child of Canadian politics Pierre Poilievre until trump's reelection slapped us out of our stupor. The threat to our sovereignty from the south restored our sense of national purpose and we responded by electing the grown-up we needed. America might learn something from us for a change.]  

Just Sayin

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Turn the music up,

Keep your eyes on the road.

You're looking sorta sleepy,

Or is it just bored?

Something with a heartbeat,

And lyrics you can hear.

So your mind stays alert,

And your direction is clear.

The night is so black,

The lines so white.

Can't see the route ahead,

Beyond our headlights. 

Is this the way home?

Did we cross a wrong bridge?

Did we miss a sharp turn?

Are we heading for a ditch?

You're in charge from here,

Keep a grip on the wheel.

I'm not a great passenger,

Just sayin how I feel.

Just saying how I feel.

Everything's a blur,

We're moving so fast.

It's hard to keep track,

Of what we just passed.

It's been a long time,

Since I've felt in control.

My mind keeps screaming,

You're heading for a hole.

I think we talked - 

I've had some accidents.

And you really can't repair,

All your scratches and dents.

I need reassurance,

And it has to come from you.

I'm trying to find a way,

To enjoy the view.

You're in charge from here,

Keep a grip on the wheel.

I'm not a great passenger,

Just sayin how I feel.

Just sayin how I feel.

The World Is Flat

Magellan was wrong after all. The world is flat.

This past week I had another conversation with a 30-year-old who said he didn’t know who the Beatles were. Well, that’s not exactly true—he’d heard of them, but wasn’t sure he knew any of their songs. I’ve had that conversation a few times before with people of that age or younger. It makes me wonder whether this is just the usual generation gap, or something more profound.

I think back to when I was in my teens and twenties. In addition to listening to hard rock bands like The Who and progressive rock bands like Yes and Pink Floyd—the music of my generation—I also knew crooners like Frank Sinatra from my father’s generation. In fact, I was a big fan of Sinatra. But maybe that was just my own weirdness.

Still, let’s assume there’s something more going on than the ordinary passage of time. “Profound” seems like the operative word here—as in deep. Could it be that younger people have become more superficial? I don’t mean superficial in their values. Our generation was hyper-consumerist; theirs seems far more concerned about the planet than we ever were. By “superficial,” I mean having less of a sense of history. Their world feels more horizontal than vertical. It’s wider, but not as deep. Everything exists on the same plane of meaning.

In 2006, Thomas Friedman wrote a book called "The World Is Flat". In it, he primarily discusses how globalization and the internet were changing the way companies did business. He focuses on the speed and ease with which economies now compete across borders, and how this reshapes flows of capital, information, and immigration, with profound effects on society. Friedman’s view is largely positive. Globalization, he argues, offers opportunities to lift millions out of poverty through education and economic integration. He also suggests there are political benefits, since integrated economies are less likely to go to war with one another.

What Friedman didn’t fully address were the more disruptive social consequences—ones we have since come to know well: cultural backlash, widening inequality, friction around immigration. To be fair, Facebook didn’t exist when the book was published, and even when social media emerged, few anticipated its more corrosive effects.

What we’ve learned in the two decades since is that we’re being flattened in another, even more meaningful way: in our thinking.

Experiencing the world primarily through a screen has a powerful flattening effect. It makes everyone and everything appear equivalent and relative. It diminishes our sensitivity to the dimensionality of others—and even of ourselves. Expressions of vitriol and hatred are stripped of consequence, making them easier to produce and consume. People become more shameless, quicker to judge, and less reflective. This flattening helps explain why intolerance spreads so easily and why conspiracy thinking finds such fertile ground.

The searchable universe of the internet also flattens time. Everything exists in a kind of suspended present, untethered from what came before or what followed after. The sense that one thing grows out of another—that it owes its existence to its predecessors—is weakened. Yet it’s precisely that awareness of connection and lineage that gives us perspective, gratitude, and appreciation.

When I asked my young friend what music he listens to, he did mention a few songs from my era. When I asked how he discovered them, he explained that some of the music he likes samples older songs. His curiosity about the originals led him to look them up online. That, I suppose, is one way of forming a connection with what came before.

My fear is that when life is flattened—when everything is placed on the same level—it ends up devaluing everything equally. Nothing feels more important, more true, or more meaningful than anything else. Cultural and artistic touchstones lose their prominence, not because they lack merit, but because the context that gives them weight has eroded.

Understanding the rich, layered evolution of thought and sensibility is central to our personal development. A flat experience of the world is impoverishing. Without depth, there is no perspective; without perspective, no humility; and without humility, little chance for wisdom. A world that is wide but shallow risks mistaking immediacy for significance, and novelty for meaning.

Lucky Enough

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If you’re lucky enough to have good looks,

Lucky enough to know a good cook.

If you’re lucky enough to have loving parents,

Lucky enough to pay a cheap rent.

If you’re lucky enough to get top grades,

Lucky enough to be self-made.

If you’re lucky enough to be a good speller,

Lucky enough to write a bestseller.

If you're lucky enough to win a few bets,

Lucky enough to have a safety net.

If you're lucky enough to take a few risks,

Lucky enough not to fall off a cliff.

If you’re lucky enough to have a hit song,

Lucky enough never to be wrong.

If you’re lucky enough to have nice neighbours,

Lucky enough they do you nice favours.

If you’re lucky enough to have lots of money,

Lucky enough be earn a big salary.

If you’re lucky enough to have a warm home,

Lucky enough to own a smart phone.

If you’re lucky enough to breathe clean air,

Lucky enough not to live in despair.

If you’re lucky enough to live in peace.

Lucky enough to get a good night's sleep.

If you’re lucky enough to have good genes,

Lucky enough to drink water that’s clean.

Lucky enough to get your fair share,

So lucky you don't know that luck is even there.

Take dancing lessons

Sometimes we need to go back to the beginning.

Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

God’s story, according to the Western biblical tradition, begins with creation. There is no prologue—no scene of God cavorting in a heavenly realm with other gods, no sense of what the Creator might have been doing before deciding to make the world, or even why He decided the world needed to be created at all.

Was God lonely? Why doesn’t the text say, “In the beginning God was lonely, and so He created some company”? Or bored? Why not, “In the beginning God was bored, and since crossword puzzles required words—which had yet to be created—He decided to take on a different project to occupy His time: making a world”?

It can’t be that God needed to create the world. That would imply that creation and God exist on the same level of necessity, which theology insists cannot be. The only explanation that makes sense is that God made a decision—one whose reason we simply do not know.

In the Hebrew tradition, human beings are described as 'partners' in creation. Our purpose is to help God “repair” the world—tikkun olam. But we must be junior partners, since by definition we cannot be equal to God. That already presents a problem. And it gets worse.

Because we don’t know why God created the world, we don’t know “God’s Plan” for it either. Yet we are repeatedly told there is a plan—otherwise, why bother creating anything at all?

It’s like being asked to help build a shelter without ever seeing the blueprints. We don’t know what the shelter is meant to look like, what purpose it serves, or why the architect decided to build it in the first place. And the architect isn’t taking questions.

Conveniently, not knowing God’s Plan has given people endless excuses for the tragedies and injustices of the world. Suffering becomes part of God working in “mysterious ways.” We’re told we aren’t supposed to understand the plan, because if we did, we would be equivalent to the Creator—which we cannot be. The arguments quickly collapse into a tangle of circularity.

It would have been far simpler if scripture had said: "In the beginning God got tired of the heavenly décor and decided to add another wing, populated with animals and humans, whom He could summon to relieve His boredom." At least then we might reasonably conclude that the purpose of creation was to entertain God—a view some have argued, only half-jokingly.

But perhaps creation begins with creating because it isn’t His story at all. It’s ours.

When we interpret the creation story as God’s story, with humans as secondary bit players, life itself becomes secondary to serving God. And that framing—serving a divine plan we cannot see or question—has been used to justify some of the most heinous and inhumane acts in human history. Human life becomes expendable in service of something abstract and unknowable.

If the story of creation is not about a plan, then it may be about exactly what it describes. Creation is its own purpose. We are not meant to serve a mysterious divine blueprint; we are meant to serve creation itself—to find our place in it, to honor and respect it, and to be fully present in our own lives.

And now, the pivot to the non-biblical, technologically advanced present.

People today worry about the growing power of AI—the omniscient entity they fear will one day enslave us.

But there is a moment—if you’re lucky—when you realize that what your smartphone is doing is more than manipulating your choices or nudging your decisions. It’s trying to disempower you. It’s trying to strip you of your agency.

Once you see that, you understand that it isn’t enough to “escape” technology by turning it off, as if it were Rikers Island and freedom were just a matter of walking away. That’s not how it works.

You have to be active. You have to learn to play the guitar. Or the piano. Learn to crochet. Build furniture. Practice Tai Chi.

You have to re-empower yourself by creating. Learning and practicing skills—one, two, three—is how agency is reclaimed. That’s how you begin to break free. Because the technology has you in your head. That’s where it lives, and it follows you wherever you go. To resist it, you have to re-enter the world—much like God did when He created it.

You have to use your hands. Or your feet. Or both.

Alan Watts famously compared living to dancing. Like dance, he said, the purpose of life is not to reach a particular destination or end point, but to engage fully in the process itself. Life is musical, playful, and immediate—not a grim, goal-oriented march toward some final achievement. 

It turns out that modern technologies are designed to exploit our goal orientation to turn us into addicts seeking the next fix.  

But creation is not something that happened once. It's happening all the time, if only we can attend to it.

The only way to be present in biblical Creation is to be creative in the mundane everyday sense. So take dancing lessons.

Shimon Ben-David z"l

I need to tell you about Shimon, who passed away yesterday. 

We typically pay public tribute to famous people, celebrities, or to people who have made some important or noteworthy contribution in some field of endeavour that affects many of us. Shimon did none of these things. He sold textiles. A jobber (or more formally a 'converter') in the parlance of the shmatta trade. It's someone who buys ends or remainder textiles from manufacturers to re-sell wholesale to other smaller manufacturers or to retail customers. 

I need to write something about Shimon because on the website of Paperman's & Sons, where obituaries of most every member of the Montreal Jewish community normally appears, there's a photo of Shimon (above), but no obituary. I don't know why the family has chosen not to write anything. That's okay, we all have our memories. But because there is no formal obituary I can't put his dates next to his name. I believe he was close to 80 at the time of his passing. 

To say Shimon wasn't a celebrity is not exactly right. To many of us who worked in and around the Montreal shmatta business he was a kind of celebrity. I got to know him when I started managing 99 Chabanel. He had a textile business on the 4th floor of the building. He was a tenant long before I got there in 1995. He frequently told me that he was the oldest continuous tenant in the building, and I believe that is true. He took a lot of pride in that.

The photo posted on Paperman’s website captures him perfectly: the enormous smile beneath his equally enormous trademark mustache. Shimon had a warm, larger-than-life personality and a booming, expressive voice. He was open, affectionate, and endlessly talkative, a natural storyteller who could charm you within minutes. Once Shimon liked you, he liked you forever, without reservation. I was fortunate to be on the receiving end of that affection.

I never learned much about Shimon's upbringing, except that he was born and grew up in Israel. Even after many decades of living in Canada Shimon never lost his Hebrew accent. I'm sure he did military service and perhaps even fought in '67 or '73. But I can't say for sure. He never talked about it. At some point I may have asked him why he came to Canada, something I asked many of my tenants who were immigrants - and most of them were either first generation immigrants, or the children of immigrants. I wanted to know if he was a 'Yored' because of war. 'Yored' is the Hebrew word for a native Israeli who leaves Israel, literally someone who goes down, the opposite of an 'Oleh' which is someone who goes up ('makes aliyah') when they immigrate from the diaspora to the Holyland. In our tradition immigrating to Israel from the diaspora is considered a spiritual 'step up', which is why I am always fascinated by Israelis who chose to leave. Shimon never said much about it. One 'Yored' who I knew told me that he left because being a businessman in Israel is like swimming with sharks, while in Canada it's like taking candy from babies. Maybe that's why Shimon left, I don't know. But one thing I can say about Shimon is that he was no business shark, and I mean that in the best sense.   

Shimon had a huge heart, that I know for sure. He loved the textile business, but he loved people even more. I saw it every day in the way he treated his suppliers, his customers, and his employees. Shimon liked to make a buck as much as the next guy. But I got the impression that doing business was more about the people he interacted with than about the deals he made. His customers loved him and he built a loyal retail clientele, mostly consisting of the immigrant ladies who sewed their own clothes, in recent years mostly Haitian and Arab women. When you bought fabric from Shimon he always gave you an extra yard at no charge to make sure he wasn't shortchanging you. 

When my youngest daughter learned to sew and wanted to buy some fabric to make her own clothes, the first place I took her to find fabric was Shimon's on the 4th floor at 99 Chabanel. She was so excited to peruse his shelves stacked high with roll upon roll of fabric. He had a great selection and she always found exactly what she was looking for at Shimon's. 

Truth is I took my daughter to Shimon's not just because I knew she would find the fabric she needed, but because I wanted her to meet him. I wanted her to get a feeling for the relationships I had with my tenants, and Shimon was at the top of my list. I wanted my daughter to get a sense that what I did for a living was meaningful not for the money I earned but for the relationships I made - and Shimon embodied that more than anyone. I didn't expect that after she collected an armload of fabric, Shimon wouldn't let us pay for it. On our last visit to his place, he told me, to my embarrassment, that he would never let me pay no matter how much fabric my daughter wanted. Like I say, he was no shark in business.  

He had a feud with another textile retailer in the building for a while. They were neighbours on the 4th floor and kept trying to undercut each other on price. There was some animosity between them, but it didn't last for very long. Not even fierce competitors could hold a grudge against Shimon.

Shimon loved his family and took tremendous pride in the accomplishments of his children, Dominic, Carmello, Amanda and Sheena. In the years I managed 99 he was married to Angela and they worked together. I don't know what went on between them behind the scenes, all I can say is that even years after they split, he would talk about her fondly and with affection.  

Shimon stood out simply by being generous, loyal, and a mensch. He loved people and they loved him back. That, in the end, is more than enough. He will be spoken about with affection for many years to come.   

The Antisemitic Cultural Moment

After a brief conversation with a friend last week about the Bondi Beach massacre, I realized that I am far more concerned about the all-consuming power of technology than I am about the rise in antisemitism. Almost immediately, another thought followed: what if the two are connected? What if the current resurgence of antisemitism is related to new technologies—but not in the obvious ways?

Recently, some of the more perceptive online commentators (the smart ones worth reading), have been noting that society is becoming increasingly conformist. They describe it variously as cultural blandness, the disappearance of “weirdness,” or the flattening of taste. What I’ve observed in a much more personal way—watching my own children move through adolescence into adulthood—is that they are markedly more conservative than my generation was.

Admittedly, my experience is highly skewed: I’m an Ashkenazi Jewish, upper-middle-class, university-educated person. Still, when I was growing up in the 1970s—the first broadly affluent postwar generation, living in the so-called “Me Decade”—there was a widespread spirit of testing social boundaries. In the wake of the 1960s, experimentation with drugs, sex, art, fashion, and identity was not marginal; it was mainstream. Life was meant to be lived colorfully, weirdly, even dangerously. Rock stars were idolized not just for their music but for their excess, their refusal of bourgeois norms, their visible transgression.

That cultural moment is gone. The rock-star lifestyle—defined by sexual freedom and drug experimentation—began its decline with the AIDS epidemic of the mid-1980s. Around the same time, political neoconservatism took hold under Reagan and Thatcher, and we’ve arguably never recovered from that turn. The radical energies of the 1960s and 70s were slowly neutralized—either demonized or absorbed into the mainstream and rendered harmless.

It’s difficult to point to genuinely new movements in fashion, music, art, or literature over the past 30 years. As one telling example, the popular music YouTuber Rick Beato argues that rock music effectively died in 1996. Whether or not that date is precise, the broader point stands. The most dominant American musician of our era, Taylor Swift, is less an artist in the traditional sense than a perfectly optimized creative entrepreneur—the prototype of the monetized content creator. The last truly disruptive popular music movements were punk and hip-hop, both of which emerged from specific subcultures, underground scenes, and physical spaces that no longer exist in meaningful form.

Those scenes depended on infrastructure: clubs, independent labels, local promoters, critics, and risk-taking entrepreneurs willing to back the non-conformist. That infrastructure has collapsed. In its place stand tech megacorporations that don’t cultivate cultural risk so much as absorb it, sanitize it, and feed it back through algorithms optimized for scale, predictability, and engagement.

Social media and algorithmic culture haven’t created conformity from scratch, but they have accelerated and entrenched it. Social media may be the most powerful pacifying force in history—more intimate and omnipresent than any religion. It offers the feeling of belonging without the obligations of community, the sensation of political engagement without political action. Above all, it optimizes our most conformist activity—consumption—making it frictionless and total. Where shopping once required exposure to other people, other classes, other tastes (think of going to the mall) consumption now arrives at our doors, curated precisely to reinforce who we already are.

So what does all of this have to do with antisemitism?

First, the obvious point: algorithms keep us in bubbles, endlessly reinforcing our existing preferences, biases and resentments. That has been thoroughly discussed.

But there is a deeper historical pattern worth considering. Jews have long occupied the position of the non-conformist outsider. Think of Marx, Freud, and Einstein—figures who didn’t merely contribute to their fields but fundamentally altered how we understand history, the 'self', and the universe. In both 19th-century Europe and 20th-century America, Jews have had an outsized cultural influence precisely because they lived at the margins of mainstream society. That marginality granted a certain freedom: the freedom to question received wisdom, to cross boundaries, to think otherwise.

That outsider perspective has repeatedly invigorated the societies Jews have lived in. But it has also come at a cost. Non-conformity threatens those invested in the status quo—especially people in positions of power. The recurring response has been scapegoating: portraying the non-conformist as subversive, dangerous, corrupting. Jews, over and over again, have been cast in that role.

What strikes me about our current moment—oddly, and perhaps tellingly—is the relative cultural absence of Jews. In postwar America, Jews dominated many of the industries that shaped culture: Hollywood, theater, publishing, television, popular music and even comedy. In 1979, Time magazine estimated that 80 percent of American comedians were Jewish. Until roughly the 1980s, non-conformity wasn’t just tolerated; it was celebrated.

Today, the industries that once nurtured and amplified that spirit are in steep decline. They’ve been replaced—or more accurately, consumed—by tech platforms whose business models reward standardization, safety, and scale. The risk-taking producers, editors, club owners, and impresarios who once brought weirdness into the mainstream have largely vanished.

The ideological irony is striking. The informal godmother of today’s tech elite—Gates, Musk, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos—is Ayn Rand, a lapsed Jew whose philosophy fused extreme individualism with moralized selfishness and unrestrained capitalism. Her ideas have shaped a cultural model that is, in practice, profoundly conservative: hostile to deviation, allergic to disorder, and obsessed with optimization.

So perhaps we are living through an antisemitic cultural moment precisely because of hyper-conformity. And it's important to note that it's not a left-right phenomenon. History suggests that periods of intense conformity—Nazi Germany (right), Stalinist Russia (left)—are precisely when Jews are most vulnerable. When societies narrow, harden, and standardize, the outsider becomes intolerable. The non-conformist must be explained, blamed, and eventually expelled.

If that pattern holds, then the rise in antisemitism may tell us less about the actions of Jews (read: Israel) than about the culture itself—and about the price societies pay when creative disorder is traded for algorithmic control.

The Opening Heart

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starts with a walk

around the block

alone, within,

the in–out breath

rhythm of soles on pavement

scent of flowering trees

cut grass, fallen leaves

and a turn into the park

along the path

black birds circling overhead,

landing like exclamation marks

squirrels with comma tails

scurrying for scraps

a dog walker tugs the leash

a courtesy move to let me by

ricochet of playground laughter,

a cry and consolation

a child lifted feather-light

sips a parabola of water

a frisbee disc

slices the field’s plane

balls being batted back

over tennis court nets

thoughts float through

the heightened mind like wisps—

so much shared under this sky

and not a word.

Dangerous Times

Two Montreal police officers spent an hour in my office yesterday. No, they weren’t there to arrest or question me. They were there to collect surveillance footage from our security system. That has never happened before.

I’ve mentioned before that federal cabinet minister Melanie Joly is my tenant. Her riding office sits directly beside our building management office. Since October 7, our building has been the site of several anti‑Israel protests—some of them loud, disruptive, and intimidating. Dozens of protesters have entered the building with bullhorns, plastered her door and the corridor walls with stickers, and even thrown red paint at the lobby entrance. Every incident was captured by our cameras. Until now, Montreal police had never come to retrieve the footage.

Yesterday’s protest was comparatively subdued. I didn’t even know it had occurred until the police arrived asking for video. The cameras show roughly two dozen people entering the building carrying a large box, along with one protester holding a black sign with bright yellow lettering. Inside the box was a papier‑mâché mock‑up of a bomb. The sign read: 'Le Canada doit arrêter d’armer Israël' (“Canada must stop arming Israel”).

I asked the officers why they were being so thorough this time. One replied that they wanted to identify every face possible. Clearly, something has changed.

Perhaps this heightened diligence reflects broader concerns following the horrific attack in Bondi, Australia. If so, the local police being on high alert is reassuring. Still, the coincidence of these events may point to something more troubling.

The Bondi attack occurred during Chanukah, one of the few times each year when Jewish communities gather publicly and visibly to celebrate. I don’t believe the protest in my building was directly connected to Chanukah. But I do believe something is stirring online—an effort to incite action against Jews in the diaspora.

Ordinarily, one might expect a ceasefire in Gaza to ease tensions. Historically, however, it is often precisely when vigilance relaxes that violence occurs. That is when adversaries of Israel and of Jewish communities have struck in the past—targeting relatively defenceless Jewish populations outside Israel. The 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, which followed the first intifada, is a grim reminder. That attack did not emerge from a spontaneous local grievance; it was later traced to Iranian planning and Hezbollah execution, carried out far from the Middle East against a soft diaspora target.

History offers multiple examples of this pattern. During the Second Intifada and its aftermath, attacks against Jewish targets surged across Europe: the 2002 bombing of the Ghriba synagogue in Tunisia, the 2012 murders of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse, and the 2014 attack on the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels. In 2008, Lashkar‑e‑Taiba operatives targeted the Chabad House in Mumbai—explicitly selecting a Jewish religious centre as part of a broader geopolitical terror operation.

The common thread is not timing alone, but strategy: when direct confrontation with Israel is constrained, violence is displaced outward. Diaspora Jewish institutions—schools, synagogues, community centres, cultural gatherings—become symbolic stand‑ins for the Jewish state, and therefore targets of opportunity.

I have also been watching closely for an Iranian response to recent blows against its regional influence. My expectation has been that any response would be indirect and gradual—through the activation of sympathetic networks, militant proxies, or sleeper cells abroad. Such networks are typically loose and decentralized, which is exactly what makes them difficult to detect and prevent. I expect we will learn soon that Bondi fits this pattern.

Anyone who knows me knows I am not an alarmist—if anything, I’m usually the one cautioning against social‑media‑driven hysteria. But realism matters. And my sober assessment is that we may be entering the most dangerous period for diaspora Jewish communities since October 7.

Talk About Problems

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

Let’s talk about problems,

The ones that we've all got.

Cause if you ain’t got problems,

You’re someone that I’m not.

We've got problems. 

Problems making money,

Problems how you spend.

Problems with your family,

Problems with your friends. 

Problems with your woman,

Problems with your man.

Problems with what you do,

Problems with what you can’t.

Problems with your eating,

Problems with your drinking.

Problems with your feelings,

Problems with your thinking.

Problems with too little,

Problems with too much.

Problems motivating,

Problems taking drugs.

Problems being together,

Problems being alone.

Problems socializing,

Problems being at home.

Problems with what you say,

Problems with what you don't.

Problems with what you will,

Problems with what you won't.

Problems with desires,

Problems not intended.

Problems how it started,

Problems how it ended.

Problems with depression,

Problems feeling stress.

Problems with the world -

It's such a flipping mess.

Let’s talk about problems,

The ones that we all got.

Cause if you ain’t got problems,

You’re someone that I’m not.

I've got problems.

8½

There’s a line in Federico Fellini’s 8½ that stayed with me: “Happiness,” Guido says, “consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.”

I finally saw the film last night on the Criterion Channel. Long considered one of Fellini’s masterpieces, it stars Marcello Mastroianni as a film director on the verge of a nervous breakdown as he struggles to make his next picture. The story takes place largely in a spa town where Guido is being treated for exhaustion, but the real setting is his subconscious — a shifting, carnivalesque landscape where memory, fantasy, and artistic anxiety become indistinguishable.

I normally have little patience for stories about storytelling; they tend to collapse into self-involved puzzles that keep the audience at a distance. 8½ is different. It manages to be intimate and enthralling, even as it toys with, and often dismantles, the conventions of the art form it explores.

Part of its success is purely visual. The film is rapturously composed: every shot meticulously framed without feeling rigid. Fellini’s use of foreground and background, of bodies drifting in and out of the frame, gives the film a choreographic precision. Yet it never becomes self-conscious. It’s elegant when it needs to be, frenetic when it must be, always expressive of Guido’s inner life.

One brief scene at a train station captures this perfectly. Guido waits for his mistress, torn between the raw desire she evokes and the genuine love and respect he feels for his wife. Fellini places him off to the side, almost hiding behind a gate, while a massive steam-belching train fills the center of the frame — a one-eyed steel animal bearing down on him. When the passengers disembark and she is not among them, Guido looks relieved. Then the train pulls away, and there she is, dramatically overdressed and trailed by a porter lugging five enormous suitcases on the opposite platform. Guido’s face collapses into ambivalence. In a few seconds, Fellini gives us the entire moral geometry of Guido’s predicament.

Guido, and by extension Fellini, is torn between philosophical ambition and the demand to make films that both entertain and matter — pressures embodied by the critic Daumier, who shadows him while quoting great thinkers and analyzing his screenplay.

But the film’s deepest concern is how to find happiness, which requires telling the truth — especially to oneself. In the final scenes, Guido imagines crawling under the table and killing himself at a press conference, only to end up directing the very film he has been avoiding, surrounded by a disordered parade of the people in his life: past, present, real, imagined. They form a circle and begin a kind of ritual dance around an orchestra. The moment suggests that happiness lies not in clarity but in acceptance — of the entire ragtag collection of one’s life, the mistakes made, the pain inflicted, the contradictions that won’t resolve. Happiness, Guido concludes, is directing the circus rather than fleeing from it.

The most important character in this circus is his wife, Luisa. Grounded and intelligent, she is the only one who truly sees him, and the only one unwilling to indulge his evasions. She delivers the film’s sharpest line: “What could you ever teach strangers when you can't even tell the simplest truth to the ones closest to you?”

But is there such a thing as a “simple truth”? 8½ suggests not. Truth is layered, unstable and often obscured — and the hardest ones to admit are the ones we need to tell ourselves. Without that, we can’t tell the truth to anyone else.

And yet, paradoxically, artists — whose tools are artifice, exaggeration, and imagination — use deception to reveal emotional truth. Fellini turns this paradox into a lifelong project: the idea that truth is not a statement but a process of integration. Guido’s final dance is not clarity achieved but self-deception relinquished — the moment when the artist finally accepts the fullness of who he is, contradictions and all. 

He may not be 'happy' but he is now able to engage his life's work by beginning a new project. Every new film is a sort of re-birth - there's a scene at the end where the adult Guido is essentially re-birthed by all the women in his life -  and his half-made 9th movie, can now become his completed 9th. 

It's as close to happiness as he is able to come.  

The Only Song I Had

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

They’re gonna gather round,

Some friends and family.

Piece me back together,

From thoughts and memory.

Won't be a perfect story, 

Cause stories never are.

Hope they'll have some laughs,

Cause living life's bizarre.

I'm not a man of faith,

Never claimed to be.

But I did the best I could,

Or a reasonable facsimile.

I kept the wheels greased,

While resisting the machine.

Life is constant push and pull,

While you're stuck in between.

Gonna sing a song to God,

It may be good, or bad.

When my song is done he'll know,

It’s the only one I had.

 

I tried to show my gratitude,

For everything you gave.

I hope they'll say about me,

"He never was self-made."

I'd find a quiet place,

Inside a forest clearing.

And build a fire to burn remains,   

Of all that I was fearing. 

Gonna sing a song to God,

It may be good, or bad.

When my song is done he'll know,

It’s the only one I had.

I never asked for very much,

Just my basic needs.

Believed that every stranger,   

Deserved some dignity.

When the world spun in my head,

I turned it into dance.

Sometimes I got too dizzy,

To take a solid stance.

Gonna sing a song to God,

It may be good, or bad.

When my song is done he'll know,

It’s the only one I had.

They’re gonna gather round,

Some friends and family.

Piece me back together,

From thoughts and memory.

Won't be a perfect story, 

Cause stories never are.

Hope they'll have some laughs,

Cause living life's bizarre.

I'm not a man of faith,

Never claimed to be.

But I did the best I could...

Naturally to me

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

The poetic turn of phrase

doesn't come naturally to me,

nor finding the perfect note,

or the soulful bend

on the guitar.

What comes

naturally is selfishness, 

laziness and denial,

blaming others

for my faults and problems,

jealousy and lust.

Also mistrust

comes naturally to me, and fear,

pessimism and doubt

I do with hardly any effort at all.

Tell me that you love me

and you're safe,

I won't believe you -

because belief doesn’t come 

naturally to me,

nor romance as you know,

but neither does 

being alone.

A Life of Self-Rediscovery

The midrash tells of an angel who accompanies the soul in the womb. This angel teaches the unborn child the entire Torah and all the wisdom of the world, only to tap the baby’s lip just before birth, causing it to forget everything.

It’s usually read as a charming explanation for the philtrum—the indentation beneath the nose—but the story intends much more. It speaks to the profound sense of alienation most of us feel from our own innate self. According to the myth, we once possessed a perfect, intuitive knowledge of who we are. Birth is the moment we lose it. The rest of life becomes a long, halting effort to remember.

Birth, in this reading, is a kind of exile. And the trauma of childbirth—leaving the warm, floating cocoon of the mother’s body, being squeezed through the narrow canal, expelled into cold light, poked, prodded, assessed as your lungs strain for their first breaths—is not incidental to the myth. It is its first proof.

Even the recent return to home births, meant to soften the harsh sterility of the hospital environment, can only go so far. But birth is only the first trauma of life.

The next arrive almost immediately, when your nascent sense of self collides with your absolute dependence on the people who keep you alive. As you grow stronger and more cognitively aware, those two impulses—independence and dependence—begin to grind against each other. You develop innate tastes and traits, early intuitions of who you are and how the world touches you. And at the same time, family expectations, household values and rules, and the norms and conventions of your immediate world begin pressing inward.

This is traumatic—not as a singular emotional shock, but as a continuous shaping force that leaves marks. As surely as the body carries scars from repeated blows, the psyche carries scars from repeated collisions with the expectations of others.

The process intensifies once we enter school. It is worth remembering that the modern classroom—rows of desks, the teacher at the front, bells, grading—was designed during the Industrial Revolution. The goal then was explicit: to mass-produce standardized workers with maximum economic efficiency. The system was not designed to cultivate the individual needs of children but to ensure conformity, predictability, and output. Even though educators have spent generations smoothing the rough edges, the basic structure remains.

Under these pressures—family, school, peers—we develop personas, masks in the original sense, to help us function within the rules of the game. But the more skilled we become at wearing masks, the more the question presses: what becomes of the authentic self we began with? The one closest to our emotional essence? The one the midrash says we once knew perfectly?

For some, the discontinuity is manageable. For many, it becomes a lifelong struggle that we tend to label as emotional dysfunction. I think it is more accurately a spiritual struggle—a yearning for reconnection with one's innate nature, the self that was lost at birth.

Viewed through this lens, the angel’s touch is not simply the cause of forgetting but the beginning of alienation. And the re-learning of Torah throughout life becomes a metaphor for personal rediscovery. To learn is to remember who we were.

If we take this seriously, then education should not be a mechanism for further alienation. It should be its antidote—a process that encourages self-rediscovery rather than conformity. Learning would not be defined solely by the acquisition of skills, although those matter. It would be defined by the deepening of one’s connection to one’s own nature: one’s innate feelings, predispositions, curiosities, and gifts.

In that sense, the highest purpose of education is not to prepare us for the world, but to help us find our spiritual path to our authentic place in it - not the place assigned to us by others, but the place remembered from before we were born.

The Alternative Future - We're All Artists Now

“Would that all of Israel were prophets.”

That is Moses’ startling response to Joshua, when Joshua frets that Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp—“false prophets,” as the anxious deputy frames it. Joshua worries they pose a threat to Moses’ authority. But Moses waves him off. “Are you jealous for my sake?” he asks. Moses doesn’t give the episode a second thought—secure as he is in his own standing with God. "If only," he adds, "all of Israel had the spirit of holiness."

A lot of people today are prophesying catastrophe about AI. They worry it will overshadow so much human activity that we will be left bereft of purpose, wandering in a desert of too much leisure and too little meaning. What will humans do when machines perform most of the tasks we once defined ourselves by? Find novel forms of mischief? As Proverbs reminds us, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” Or, as the rock band Styx sang with theological precision, we’ve got too much time on our hands.

AI will almost certainly take over a large swath of white-collar work—the intellectual and managerial functions we’ve long associated with human distinction: analysis, instruction, diagnosis, computation, counsel. In the near term, though, I’m confident there are jobs AI won’t touch: nursing, plumbing, farming, building, maintenance—all the work we were suddenly reminded was "essential" during the pandemic.

AI will entertain us, but not everywhere. Not in sports. The whole point of sport is watching humans strive. We reject artificially augmented athletes even when they remain human; the idea of machines competing for our amusement leaves us cold.  Robot games, are a real thing, but haven't captured the imagination for a reason. They don’t scratch the itch.

And then there is art. Art is the thing AI will never truly do—not with honesty, credibility, or respect. The reason is simple: art is an act of human expression, and expression requires experience, feeling, and a subjectivity you cannot simulate. AI imitates, generates, computes. It doesn’t express. Without a human behind a work, the essential ingredient is missing. AI output may be consumed, but not 'appreciated'. It will be treated like a Big Mac: maybe tasty, but no one lingers over it. It will gain market share, but not reverence.

So what will humans do with all the time AI gives back to us, once it diagnoses, calculates, and counsels on our behalf? We will still seek purpose, challenges, meaning—because that is what we do. And increasingly, we will pursue those things for their own sake, not because they are necessary for survival or success.

That is what art has always been: the making of something beautiful and meaningful for its own sake.

In fact, we have been drifting toward this future for 150 years. As machines have made more and more of the objects we use, and leisure time expanded, artmaking escaped the academy and became a popular pastime. Never in history have so many people written, painted, sculpted, composed, or photographed. The artist is no longer a rare, romantic figure touched by the muse; today they are everywhere. This is not cultural decline but cultural abundance. Only the professional gatekeepers - the critics, snobs, and agents who profit from it - lament the democratization of creation.

As Moses might have said, had he lived to watch Bob Ross on PBS: “Would that all of Israel were painters.”

Perhaps that is what AI will give back to us—a renewed sense of what is irreducibly human, and a reminder of its own limits. It may accelerate the return to art-making as the quintessential human activity. AI will be able to do almost everything better than we can—the more complex, the better—from calculation to diagnosis to useful design.

But not art—because art is the human spirit made visible.