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

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ

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.