Philosophy

She approaches, the wife of the president. Sherlon, her name is. Sherlon Goldfarbstein. "What a beautiful son you have," she exclaims, gesturing towards my daughter. She gestures enthusiastically towards my other daughter, thinking she’s my partner. “Such a beautiful son you've made.” Upon clarifying the second of her two mistakes, that my partner...

I was contemplating the talking points I was fed as a child, around both nationalism and religion, and I believe the key feature of these narratives was oversimplification. The most salient example of these was the grouping of all Arabs and all Jews into two homogeneous masses. There was no...

The way I was raised, race, peoplehood, and identity were intertwined with ethics and morals. In Teachings It started with Jewish texts and teachings. Muslims were descendants of Ishmael, “a nation who resembled donkeys,” destined to be perpetual shit-disturbers. Christians were sons of Esau, a bloodthirsty cutthroat who lived by the...

The worship of Israel as a state, especially by Jews abroad, is a recent invention. Not even after its founding in 1948, was this the popular sentiment. Only after 1967 did this become the mainstream, a way for Jews to express their Judaism even if they didn’t believe in...

Unofficially, using mainly common sense as our guide, we can think of two definitions of terrorism. The term gets thrown around rather freely, and is used by governments to police and invalidate a wide range of individual and social behaviors. Definition #1: Deliberate Attacks on Civilians Part of the terrorist...

Much as militant religion is full of contradictory claims, each invoked at the right moment, militant ethno-nationalism suffers the same fate. For every Israeli killed since 1948 (9,000), there are 10 Palestinians dead (90,000). For every Jewish child killed in October 7th (38), there are 300 Palestinian children killed in...

Without the Holocaust, Zionism would not have succeeded. It was a fringe movement, ignored by assimilated secular Jews as unnecessary, and by religious Jews as oppositional to its beliefs. The Holocaust was critical for the formation of the state of Israel - it shifted the views of Jews around...

Flip the tables for a moment, and imagine the Jews as Palestinians - how would you interpret their behaviors? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter Imagine the Jews were living in a country. Not even Israel, which holds much Sentimental Value. Just an arbitrary land, in which they happen...

I have been on a journey of deconstructing religion for the last 9 years, and this site is a testament to the variety of angles in which I've (literally) attacked the subject. In many ways, the challenges I grapple with around religion were ones that were issues for me...

"Those delusional Palestinians," I remember my father telling me as a child. "It's been 60 years since they declared a war, and lost. Now, they stick to themselves in refugee camps, carry the keys to their lost homes, and keep dreaming of coming back. The should shut up, get...