I would sincerely hope that Jewish American people would look around them, at their supposed "friends" and "allies" and also to the kinds of people they have all voted for since FDR and change their voting habits.
Will you, Candace? Will you stop voting for people in the Democratic Party who hate you, who hate Israel, who now feel free to let their actual antisemitism run rampant as they still lie to you that the actual real problem in this country is the less than 10K known white nationalists on the fringe of the Right and not the Woke Leftist antisemites who have captures entire institutions like media, academia, big tech, entertainment, and an entire political party?
Will you, and the rest of the people here at The Free Press stop listening to the lies fed to you by the DNC Apparatchik and see that giving your vote to them has actual real world consequences? Or no? Will American Jewish people still believe that conservatives are their enemies counter to everything they see with their own eyes for the last three weeks?
This is what I wonder. Sadly, I don't think they will change. Just like all the people who've fled California only to try to turn their new homes blue, I don't think American Jewish people understand the connection between their votes and the nonsense the profess to believe and all of the antisemitism we see in this country today enabled by how they've voted for 80 years.
I'm now on the threshold of elderly, a product of mid-century attitudes and culture. Our fathers served in "the" war, mine in the South Pacific, my childhood friend's in Europe. The latter, a warm Italian-American man, was in an army division that liberated a death camp. Afterward he kept a manila envelope with large B&Ws that recorded what they first encountered, and he would give it to the kids to take to school for show & tell. "Show them what they did." Not your standard stamp collection. At school we read "The Diary of Anne Frank." We watched "Judgment at Nuremberg" and thought, how awful, but at least this could never happen again. What is happening now, in American streets and on American campuses is something I can't believe I'm seeing.
Candace Mittel Kahn, I don’t know if you read these comments, but this article was one of the best I’ve read. It touched me deeply. I have friends who went the way Sarah did and it hurts so bad. You made me feel less alone. I hope with all my heart that these people - the ones we know, and all the others - one day very soon find morality and basic ethics.
That was heartbreaking. The past few years have revealed too much about people who we know or even considered friends. Were they always like this, or did college indoctrination and urban group think warp their minds?
“People all over the world—especially young, cool-looking people, with nose rings and neon backpacks—are ripping them down.”
Call they for what they are - anti human leftists. The same people like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot who have slaughtered millions over the past century. You cannot reason with a demoralized person, my namesake tried to warn us in 1984...
This is where slippery slopes lead—when you accept the premise that some groups are "oppressors" (comparatively affluent, largely white looking Israelis) while others are the victims (poor, brown-skinned Palestinians) then you've drawn a morally black and white line in the sand that is based on ethnic groups. It is not a big leap to say that the bad guys, the "colonizers" are simply getting what they deserve, if you accept the prior premise. The only way to avoid this is to view people as individuals, not faceless masses of people to whom you can assign collective guilt to.
I see video of these people ripping down posters, or cheering at such barbarism committed against the Jewish people, or openly showing their hateful antisemitism & I just feel like they have gone mad. It has been supremely disorienting to me at a time where, as a life-long California liberal, I have felt in a frequently disoriented state since 2020, where I look around at the people that I used to “get” and just say to myself “how could you? What happened to you?” .
How can they attempt to dehumanize these victims? I am grateful for the incredible reporting the Free Press is doing right now. I realize it is taking an enormous emotional toll on you all. Thank you & please don’t stop.
As pessimistic as I am (and have long, long been) about human nature, it is agonizing to watch people demonstrate how deeply evil they really are.
It isn't that I didn't know that humans are capable of evil. It's that most humans try to wear a mask of respectability that only occasionally slips off.
Now we are seeing hundreds of people ripping off those masks of respectability and stomping on them. And claiming that the monsters they've revealed underneath are really the only "righteous" people in the world.
Candace, she is not your friend, she is antisemite. She is the ultimate proof on how DEI/ Ethnic degrees / postcolonial studies and the universities supporting them (with our tax payer money) are a machine to create radicals. She checks all the boxes (bonus for the pronoun).
The universities are really the last bastion holding free thought, they are in free fall and failing, if they fall that's it. They will be creating more Sarahs...
I’m not sure non-Jews and ordinary passersby understand how painful this is...
You don’t have to be Jewish or even religious to understand how heartbreaking it is to know that children have been abducted and are now in the hands of Hamas.
But you do have to be human and value other human beings. You do have to have a heart...
Spouse (Jewish) and I (not) have simply, gently, stopped communicating with our admittedly limited circle of friends. We have already heard too much.
On the surface, it sounds reasonable to express sorrow for Gazans whose homes are being bombed. But I do not think very many Brits, after having lost 40,000 to the Luftwaffe, worried much about Germans. I do not think that the wives and mothers of those murdered at Pearl Harbor particularly considered the fate or feelings of the Japanese. Nor did most Americans for the next four years.
And I can tell you that my young father, steaming towards Tokyo Bay for what would have been a mortal engagement with a military and population for whom surrender was high shame, was, like his fellow sailors and America at large, inordinately grateful that the Japanese were forced to surrender at last -- and mind you, only because the emperor made that decision after not one but two atomic bombs.
Some Palestinians lost their homes in 1948. Many more Jews lost their homes in Egypt, Syria, and other Arab lands over the next 10-15 years.
Close family friends, Greeks living in Istanbul and other largely Greek towns, had to flee Turkey in the 1920s, taking with them nothing but their memories of their homes, in the so-called exchange of populations: None spent the rest of their lives plotting murder.
Our friends are far too broad minded for us to be comfortable with them just yet. Perhaps when the hostages are released . . . Perhaps after Hamas has been crushed . . . .
I feel for you. Two years after I left Law Enforcement to become a therapist the BLM riots kicked off. It broke my brain. I lost so many friends and was isolated from my coworkers. I asked my own brother point blank if he thought all cops were racist and if he thought it was an inherently racist system. He refused to answer the question.
In times like these people show you who they really are. It sucks, i’m sorry your former friend has been radicalized.
This is the sort of “product” and attitude that caused me to terminate any further giving to Northwestern eight years ago after examining what was being taught in these new “studies” disciplines.
I would sincerely hope that Jewish American people would look around them, at their supposed "friends" and "allies" and also to the kinds of people they have all voted for since FDR and change their voting habits.
Will you, Candace? Will you stop voting for people in the Democratic Party who hate you, who hate Israel, who now feel free to let their actual antisemitism run rampant as they still lie to you that the actual real problem in this country is the less than 10K known white nationalists on the fringe of the Right and not the Woke Leftist antisemites who have captures entire institutions like media, academia, big tech, entertainment, and an entire political party?
Will you, and the rest of the people here at The Free Press stop listening to the lies fed to you by the DNC Apparatchik and see that giving your vote to them has actual real world consequences? Or no? Will American Jewish people still believe that conservatives are their enemies counter to everything they see with their own eyes for the last three weeks?
This is what I wonder. Sadly, I don't think they will change. Just like all the people who've fled California only to try to turn their new homes blue, I don't think American Jewish people understand the connection between their votes and the nonsense the profess to believe and all of the antisemitism we see in this country today enabled by how they've voted for 80 years.
I'm now on the threshold of elderly, a product of mid-century attitudes and culture. Our fathers served in "the" war, mine in the South Pacific, my childhood friend's in Europe. The latter, a warm Italian-American man, was in an army division that liberated a death camp. Afterward he kept a manila envelope with large B&Ws that recorded what they first encountered, and he would give it to the kids to take to school for show & tell. "Show them what they did." Not your standard stamp collection. At school we read "The Diary of Anne Frank." We watched "Judgment at Nuremberg" and thought, how awful, but at least this could never happen again. What is happening now, in American streets and on American campuses is something I can't believe I'm seeing.
Candace Mittel Kahn, I don’t know if you read these comments, but this article was one of the best I’ve read. It touched me deeply. I have friends who went the way Sarah did and it hurts so bad. You made me feel less alone. I hope with all my heart that these people - the ones we know, and all the others - one day very soon find morality and basic ethics.
if i did a map of antisemitic attacks in the usa it would overlay perfectly with urban areas that pour money into social justice and dei programming
That was heartbreaking. The past few years have revealed too much about people who we know or even considered friends. Were they always like this, or did college indoctrination and urban group think warp their minds?
“People all over the world—especially young, cool-looking people, with nose rings and neon backpacks—are ripping them down.”
Call they for what they are - anti human leftists. The same people like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot who have slaughtered millions over the past century. You cannot reason with a demoralized person, my namesake tried to warn us in 1984...
This is where slippery slopes lead—when you accept the premise that some groups are "oppressors" (comparatively affluent, largely white looking Israelis) while others are the victims (poor, brown-skinned Palestinians) then you've drawn a morally black and white line in the sand that is based on ethnic groups. It is not a big leap to say that the bad guys, the "colonizers" are simply getting what they deserve, if you accept the prior premise. The only way to avoid this is to view people as individuals, not faceless masses of people to whom you can assign collective guilt to.
I see video of these people ripping down posters, or cheering at such barbarism committed against the Jewish people, or openly showing their hateful antisemitism & I just feel like they have gone mad. It has been supremely disorienting to me at a time where, as a life-long California liberal, I have felt in a frequently disoriented state since 2020, where I look around at the people that I used to “get” and just say to myself “how could you? What happened to you?” .
How can they attempt to dehumanize these victims? I am grateful for the incredible reporting the Free Press is doing right now. I realize it is taking an enormous emotional toll on you all. Thank you & please don’t stop.
I haven’t read anything as emotional and moving as this piece in a while. Thank you for your beautiful words and your powerfully personal perspective.
As pessimistic as I am (and have long, long been) about human nature, it is agonizing to watch people demonstrate how deeply evil they really are.
It isn't that I didn't know that humans are capable of evil. It's that most humans try to wear a mask of respectability that only occasionally slips off.
Now we are seeing hundreds of people ripping off those masks of respectability and stomping on them. And claiming that the monsters they've revealed underneath are really the only "righteous" people in the world.
Candace, she is not your friend, she is antisemite. She is the ultimate proof on how DEI/ Ethnic degrees / postcolonial studies and the universities supporting them (with our tax payer money) are a machine to create radicals. She checks all the boxes (bonus for the pronoun).
The universities are really the last bastion holding free thought, they are in free fall and failing, if they fall that's it. They will be creating more Sarahs...
I’m not sure non-Jews and ordinary passersby understand how painful this is...
You don’t have to be Jewish or even religious to understand how heartbreaking it is to know that children have been abducted and are now in the hands of Hamas.
But you do have to be human and value other human beings. You do have to have a heart...
Spouse (Jewish) and I (not) have simply, gently, stopped communicating with our admittedly limited circle of friends. We have already heard too much.
On the surface, it sounds reasonable to express sorrow for Gazans whose homes are being bombed. But I do not think very many Brits, after having lost 40,000 to the Luftwaffe, worried much about Germans. I do not think that the wives and mothers of those murdered at Pearl Harbor particularly considered the fate or feelings of the Japanese. Nor did most Americans for the next four years.
And I can tell you that my young father, steaming towards Tokyo Bay for what would have been a mortal engagement with a military and population for whom surrender was high shame, was, like his fellow sailors and America at large, inordinately grateful that the Japanese were forced to surrender at last -- and mind you, only because the emperor made that decision after not one but two atomic bombs.
Some Palestinians lost their homes in 1948. Many more Jews lost their homes in Egypt, Syria, and other Arab lands over the next 10-15 years.
Close family friends, Greeks living in Istanbul and other largely Greek towns, had to flee Turkey in the 1920s, taking with them nothing but their memories of their homes, in the so-called exchange of populations: None spent the rest of their lives plotting murder.
Our friends are far too broad minded for us to be comfortable with them just yet. Perhaps when the hostages are released . . . Perhaps after Hamas has been crushed . . . .
As was said in a famous horror movie "The calls are coming from inside the house!". That's the US now.
I feel for you. Two years after I left Law Enforcement to become a therapist the BLM riots kicked off. It broke my brain. I lost so many friends and was isolated from my coworkers. I asked my own brother point blank if he thought all cops were racist and if he thought it was an inherently racist system. He refused to answer the question.
In times like these people show you who they really are. It sucks, i’m sorry your former friend has been radicalized.
This is the sort of “product” and attitude that caused me to terminate any further giving to Northwestern eight years ago after examining what was being taught in these new “studies” disciplines.
PS. Arm yourself. Seriously.
Well I think there is an overlap between these they then pronoun folks and poster tear down folks. A denial of utter reality.