Speak Out! Tom Alter, MAGA McCarthyism, and the Fight for Free Speech
Thursday, November 6, 2025
7:00 P.M. - 8:30 P.M. EST
Online, YouTube
Register Now:
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/haymarketbooks/1917891
The U.S. is experiencing one of the largest waves of political repression in its history. Academics, socialists, leftists, intellectuals, Palestinians, Muslims, labor organizers, trans people, queer folks, migrants, immigrants, people of color, the disabled, the working-class, the poor are all under attack. The state’s efforts to repress free speech are part of a larger campaign to silence and stamp out dissent of all kinds, andmove the U.S. further towards authoritarianism. Recently, Tom Alter, a tenured historian, was fired from his job at Texas State University, simply for speaking as a Socialist.
We must fight back. Join us for this 90 minute Speak Out! with activists, organizers and writers who will share ideas about the meaning of MAGA McCarthyism and how we can together resist.
***Register through Ticket Tailor to receive a link to the live-streamed video on the day of the event. This event will also be recorded, and captioning will be provided.***
Speakers:
Tom Alter is a scholar and activist who was recently fired by Texas State University. He is the author of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas. He is a member of the Texas State Employees Union, the American Association of University Professors, and Socialist Horizon.
Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer, and writer based in Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States and has been cited by NPR, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and other outlets. She co-wrote the revolutionary sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions Press, 2022). She writes a regular column on Palestine and politics for In These Times magazine. Her essays have appeared in Jacobin, Truthout, Zeteo, and other publications.
Jodi Dean is Professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her most recent books are Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging and Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, both published by Verso.
Catarina Kissinger is an organizer with the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU / CWA Local 6186), where she helps lead the union’s campaign in defense of Dr. Tom Alter and works to build collective power among faculty, staff, and student workers in higher education.
Karim Mattar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education. He is currently at work on "Writing the Catastrophe: Trauma and Responsibility Across Generation," a monograph that interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to Palestine. Karim is co-chair of the CAHE Palestine Caucus and Faculty Editor of the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom."
David McNally has taught history and political economy at the University of Houston and York University in Toronto. He is currently director of the Project on Race and Capitalism. David is the author of eight books including most recently, Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History published earlier this year by the University of California Press.
Dave Zirin is a writer at The Nation and hosts The Edge of Sports podcast. He is the author of many books including The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing TheWorld.
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This event is sponsored by Committee to Defend Tom Alter, Texas State Employees Union/CWA Local 6186, and Haymarket Books. While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.
Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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November 15, 2025, 11:00 A.M. - 3:00 P.M.
Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Church
1924 Cedar Street at Bonita
Berkeley, California
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Stop Cop City Bay Area
Did you know about a proposed $47 million regional police training facility in San Pablo—designed for departments across the Bay Area?
We are Stop Cop City Bay Area (Tours & Teach-Ins), a QT+ Black-led grassroots collective raising awareness about this project. This would be the city’s second police training facility, built without voter approval and financed through a $32 million, 30-year loan.
We’re organizing to repurpose the facility into a community resource hub and youth center. To build people power, we’re taking this conversation on the road—visiting Bay Area campuses, classrooms, cafes, and community spaces via our Fall 2025 Tour.
We’d love to collaborate with you and/or co-create an event. Here’s what we offer:
Guest Speaker Presentations—5-minute visits (team meetings, classrooms, co-ops, etc.), panels, or deep dives into:
· the facility’s origins & regional impacts
· finding your role in activism
· reimagining the floorplan (micro-workshops)
· and more
· Interactive Art & Vendor/Tabling Pop-Ups — free zines, stickers, and live linocut printing with hand-carved stamps + artivism.
· Collaborations with Classrooms — project partnerships, research integration, or creative assignments.
· Film Screenings + Discussion — e.g., Power (Yance Ford, 2024) or Riotsville, U.S.A. (Sierra Pettengill, 2022), or a film of your choice.
👉 If you’re interested in hosting a stop, open to co-creating something else, or curious about the intersections of our work: simply reply to this email or visit: stopcopcitybayarea.com/tour
Thank you for your time and consideration. We look forward to connecting.
In solidarity,
Stop Cop City Bay Area
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Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
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Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*  Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest. Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitskyhttps://freeboris.infoThe petition is also available on Change.org *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Living in a Tinderbox
and How to Organize Our Way Out of It
By Bonnie Weinstein, Nov./Dec. 2025
A demonstration of over 80,000 labor union members and individuals against the Belgium government’s proposed austerity measures in Brussels on October 14, 2025.
We are living in volatile times. The United States has the biggest war budget in the world by a long shot. But maintaining this premier military position comes at a great cost to the overwhelming majority here, and across the world.
Countries are spending ever more on their military while imposing drastic austerity measures on workers to pay for it all.
Yet, in the belly of the world’s biggest military beast the failure of the labor bureaucracy to break its partnership with the capitalist class has played a major role in convincing us that the only way we can fight back against their wars and austerity is to vote for whichever capitalist politician promises to throw us a bone. Once we vote for them, their obligation to us disappears into oblivion until the next election.
Meanwhile, the U.S./Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the brutal treatment of documented and undocumented immigrants, the erosion of our democratic and human rights, and the continued assault on our living standards through increased austerity measures continues at break-neck speed.
Yet resistance is growing here and in countries around the world. Masses of working people everywhere are realizing that we have the right to defend ourselves against these attacks on our freedoms and our livelihoods that force us to pay for capitalism’s wars over resources and territorial rule—wars that serve the rich—that we spill our blood for.
The wealthy ruling elite do not sacrifice their lives on the battlefield—they sacrifice our lives.
Solidarity is power
What is sorely lacking today is a unified and democratically-organized resistance among workers that is totally independent of capitalist parties and their bosses—the kind of movement that can bring all non-capitalist sectors of our society together to combat the hardships we are enduring in order to pay for capitalism’s wars of oppression and exploitation.
War is how capitalism maintains its power over us. Our labor pours wealth into the coffers of the rich by funneling our tax dollars into the U.S. weapons-manufacturing industry and into the pockets of the war profiteers.
And all the while, they keep us in perpetual debt and on the brink of poverty with no way up the ladder but winning the lottery.
The working class, in general, has very few organizations of our own. Overall, only 9.9 percent of workers in the U.S. are represented by unions. Of those 9.9 percent, the rate for private-sector union workers is 5.9 percent. The rate for public sector workers is significantly higher at 32.2 percent.1
Currently, in the political realm, our only alternatives are to choose between two major capitalist parties, the Democrats or the Republicans—both controlled and financed by the wealthy elite who frequently donate funds to both parties to cover all their bases.
Building a movement against capitalist war and austerity
While we seem to be living in a very complex, contradictory and confusing world, humanity’s fundamental interests—food, shelter, healthcare, education—are the same for everyone. But the structure of capitalist production for private profit as opposed to human needs—condemns the masses everywhere to poverty and bestows untold wealth on the capitalist class. That is the basic nature and current state of capitalism’s descent into barbarism today.
Workers must fight for every penny we earn—and it still doesn’t cover all of our living costs. All over the world labor leaders who are in partnership with the bosses are negotiating—not for a bigger piece of the pie—but to hold onto the meager crumb of it that we have now. And soon, the likes of Elon Musk will become the first trillionaire on the planet!2
Worker’s power lies in solidarity
Capitalism is a class system consisting of a tiny, wealthy elite that rules over everyone else—the overwhelming majority of humanity. That’s why we need our own organizations independent of capitalists and organized to defend our own interests—the fundamental, democratic right of the majority to own and control the wealth we create through our labor.
Turning things right-side-up—on the side of the working class
We need organizations that are for socialism—workers’ organizations that will stand on the side of the oppressed everywhere.
History matters
In 1905, the workers’ revolutionary struggle against the autocratic rule of Russian Tsar Nicholas II was triggered by the “Bloody Sunday” massacre on January 22, 1905, when imperial troops fired upon peaceful, unarmed workers protesting the poverty and unemployment they had been enduring for years. This led to massive strikes and peasant uprisings against the autocracy of the Tsar.
Widespread demonstrations and strikes spread all over the empire and were brutally repressed by the tsar’s troops. In June 1905, sailors on the battleship Potemkin undertook a mutiny, and in October, a strike by railway workers turned into a general strike in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.
The striking urban workers established councils, including the inaugural St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. From then on, profoundly democratic workers’ councils spread like wildfire in workplaces, in workers’ communities and in the countryside, and eventually led to the 1917 Russian revolution that finally abolished the monarchy for good.
For the first time in history, the working class, through the democratically-structured workers’ councils, became the governing body—a “dictatorship of the proletariat”—the first socialist form of government under the democratic control of the working class. Over 100 years later, these events from history serves as a potent example for today’s working class.
The formation of similar structures in today’s world is essential to the survival of humanity.
Only the mass organization of working people and our allies in direct opposition to, and dedicated to the overthrow of, capitalism and the establishment of socialism worldwide will save us from capitalist annihilation and the destruction of the entire planet. (Read Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed, and The History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky. Learning from history is essential to the victory of today’s struggle for human freedom and dignity.)
Organizing the working class
There are three basic workers’ organizations that can unite us into a power strong enough to end the dictatorship of the wealthy over the poor—and establish the rule of the majority—the masses of workers and our allies:
The United Front
Our power is in our numbers. The United Front is how we can maximize that power by organizing democratically structured, broad-based alliances of different groups, organizations and individuals to come together to achieve our immediate and very urgent goals:
To stop the genocide in Gaza and the West Bank and to demand that the U.S., Israel, the UK and all those countries that have supplied weapons and money to carry out this genocide, pay for the reconstruction of Palestine under the democratic control and supervision of the Palestinian people themselves.
To force an end to Israeli apartheid and, instead, support the creation of a democratic, secular Palestine from the river to the sea—including the right of return—with equal rights for all.
To organize massive resistance to, and defense against, ICE raids, with the goal of dismantling ICE altogether.
To end deportations and bring back all those deported and ripped apart from their families. We stand in solidarity of all migrants because there is no such thing as an “illegal” human being.
To organize against the assaults on our democratic rights—the right to protest and build defense committees to protect us from police and military violence at our schools, communities and workplaces. We stand in solidarity for our democratic right to free speech and assembly, and to build organizations in our own defense and under our own democratic control.
There are a myriad of other issues effecting the overwhelming masses of humanity at the hands of the capitalist dictatorship of the wealthy over the poor—the right to a sustainable environment, a woman’s right to control our own bodies, LGBTQ+ and Trans rights, prisoner’s rights, and more.
We need to build broad coalitions in support of all these rights.
Democratic principles
Each of these coalitions must be profoundly democratic—one person one vote—and open to everyone who agrees with the issues no matter who they are, and no matter whether they may differ on other issues. This assures the greatest number people united together to achieve the goals of each coalition.
United front coalitions are also a training ground for building a united movement of the working class to end capitalism and build socialism everywhere—to save all life on earth.
The Labor Party—a party of the working class that will advance the cause of all workers
The first, most important components of a Labor Party are that it fights for the betterment of all workers—for housing, healthcare, education, safe and healthy food—and against capitalist war, oppression and austerity.
In order to be effective, it must be completely independent of the existing capitalist parties. It, too, must be profoundly democratic and under the control of the majority of the membership. And it must appeal to the entire working class—including all those united-front, independent coalitions in the defense of workers’ democratic rights mentioned above.
It also has to challenge the allegiance of the current labor bureaucracy who are in partnership with the bosses. We must demand they abandon their ongoing support of the two capitalist parties or be voted out of office. We need a new labor leadership dedicated to taking on the bosses and building an independent fighting force for all workers’ rights—we need a Labor Party.
The vanguard party
We currently live in a dictatorship ruled by the capitalist class—a tiny minority that profits from war, racism, sexism—pitting people against each other so that we blame each other for our suffering—instead of from the true cause of it—capitalism.
The ruling-class’s dictatorship over the means of production and the private ownership of the vast profits produced by our labor relegates our lives to a constant struggle for survival.
The vanguard party must be a profoundly democratically structured party of the most conscious and disciplined workers and our allies.
The ranks of a vanguard party must be able to put aside some of our differences in order to lead the masses into a movement strong and united enough to overthrow capitalism and bring the working class into control of society—the economy, the state and the government. It is the kind of workers’ organization that can actually be powerful enough to establish the democratic dictatorship of the overwhelming majority of humanity—a worker-controlled organization strong enough and united enough to build a socialist society based upon the production for human needs and wants of all, and not the profits of the tiny few—a socialist society based on freedom, equality and justice for all.
The vanguard party may seem more out of reach than the United Front and the Labor Party at this time but is an urgent prerequisite for their ultimate success.
1https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percentage+of+people+belong+to+unions+in+the+US+in+2025
2 “Elon Musk Buys $1 Billion in Tesla Stock as Board Defends His Pay”
Tesla’s chief executive bought the stock after the company’s board proposed paying him nearly $1 trillion if he achieves certain performance goals.
By Kailyn Rhone, Sept. 15, 2025, New Yori Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/business/elon-musk-buys-tesla-shares.html
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2) The Doctor Who Hates Medicine
By Rachael Bedard, Oct. 30, 2025
Dr. Bedard is a geriatrician, a palliative care doctor and a writer.
The confirmation hearing for Dr. Casey Means was delayed on Thursday. Reports suggest Dr. Means is in labor.
Dr. Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, graduated from the Stanford School of Medicine but abandoned her residency before completion, and has spent the past half-dozen years as a wellness influencer and tech company founder. She says she left medicine when she realized she was training to treat the complications of illness rather than the root causes.
“With a wall full of awards and honors for my clinical and research performance,” she writes in her book, “Good Energy,” “I walked out of the hospital and embarked on a journey to understand the real reasons why people get sick.”
As the nation’s top doctor, the surgeon general is meant to be a trusted voice guiding Americans on matters concerning their health, bolstered by professional credentials and experience. Dr. Means, whose Senate hearings for the position were supposed to begin on Thursday, is a strange choice for the job. She is simultaneously boastful of her academic accomplishments and insistent on their uselessness. She references graduating at the top of her class at Stanford to establish her authority, only to then use that authority to argue that Stanford and institutions like it are fundamentally corrupt. She is an anti-expert expert, the doctor who believes doctors make people sicker. Her biography is typical of the leaders Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has elevated. In his eyes, this paradoxical relationship to expertise is exactly what qualifies her for the job.
“‘Trust the experts’ is not a feature of science or democracy; it’s a feature of religion and totalitarianism” is a maxim often repeated by Mr. Kennedy. Thus far, his efforts to oust the experts has more closely resembled regime change than democratization. Rather than attempt some novel way to honor diversity of opinion, Mr. Kennedy has simply shut one establishment out while creating another. He has installed a new ruling class at the Department of Health and Human Services and vested it with the authority to determine what ought to count as fact.
When faced with the possibility of dissent from within his ranks, he fires people, as he did with Dr. Susan Monarez, whom he appointed to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only to dismiss her when she told him she would not approve his handpicked advisory committee’s recommended changes to the vaccine schedule.
His new establishment — including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration and others — nonetheless leans heavily on signifiers of conventional prestige for legitimacy. When reporters and scientists questioned the Trump administration’s recent effort to link Tylenol and autism, administration leaders and defenders emphasized that one of the studies they relied on was conducted by a dean at Harvard (who, it turned out, had been paid to testify in lawsuits against the makers of Tylenol).
In a chapter in her book titled “Trust Yourself, Not Your Doctor,” Dr. Means writes that “when it comes to preventing and managing chronic disease, you should not trust the medical system” (emphasis hers). She believes Americans need to lean into lifestyle changes to stop the chronic disease epidemic: whole-food diets free of added sugar and seed oils, frequent exercise, consistent sleep, decreased exposure to toxins. Should she be confirmed, her interest in “metabolic health” — how the body turns fuel into energy — is likely to be a significant focus of her work.
Dr. Means is right to criticize conventional medicine for demonstrating insufficient curiosity about the roles that diet and environmental factors play in making us sick. I dispute, however, her claims about the precise relationship between healthy habits and cell function. “Our modern diets and lifestyles are synergistically ravaging our mitochondria” is a characteristically berserk, science-ish statement intended to suggest Dr. Means is speaking in the realm of fact rather than hypothesis.
Above all, I reject Dr. Means’s insistence that modern medicine has no role to play in preventing, managing and helping reverse chronic disease. It’s rigid, dogmatic and untrue. It also strikes me as deeply counterproductive.
Dr. Means could build a big, diverse tent filled with people eager to tackle her stated priority: the relationship between the food system, the American diet, metabolism and chronic illness. Instead, her intense anti-medicine skepticism forecloses meaningful discourse with people who do not entirely agree with her.
That’s too bad, because an approach that challenged mainstream theories without insisting on their essential rottenness might gain a lot of purchase. There are countless examples of paradigm shifts in medicine pushed by rebels who believed the field was thinking about things the wrong way. Expert culture within health care actually can be confronted with its arrogance, and forced to change. It happens a lot; it’s how the field evolves.
One recent evolution is of special relevance to both Dr. Means and me. She opens her book with the story of her mother, who died of pancreatic cancer. A few chapters later, Dr. Means describes an interaction her family had with oncologists who recommended her mother consider treatments that might extend her life by a few months, but could also introduce new complications or even hasten her death. The Means family, in accordance with their mother’s wishes, opted to forgo those treatments and instead take her home to spend their final days together.
Dr. Means was, of course, deeply affected by this event. She took the entire episode as evidence that the health care system was essentially broken.
I am a palliative care doctor. I work with patients with serious illness who, like the Means family, must make difficult decisions based on what matters most to them. Dr. Means, who trained later in medicine than I did, would have known that palliative care exists for the purpose of supporting families like hers. Palliative care is only decades old, but it has transformed the culture of medicine by insisting that there are concerns beyond shrinking tumors that should inform treatment plans, such as patients’ suffering and agency around what happens to their bodies.
This change happened because of pressures from within medicine and outside it. It has been, to borrow Mr. Kennedy’s ideals, both scientific and democratic. There are plenty of other stories of how science and medicine have changed in the face of new ideas. A surgeon general or health secretary who cared sincerely about challenging a “trust the experts” paradigm might look at this recent history and take interest in it. Make America Healthy Again thinking, a focus on metabolic health, alternative approaches to tackling high blood pressure and diabetes: There’s room for all of it alongside our current disease treatments.
Each surgeon general gets to decide her or his own agenda and how to communicate it to the American people. The most recent surgeon general highlighted such unconventional topics as loneliness and parental burnout. The role is something of a doctor-influencer in chief, and it is well suited to disrupters with big ideas. At this moment, when trust in public health and science is falling, we need disruption. We need leadership with new ideas and the humility to know that Americans hold diverse perspectives on how they want to take care of their bodies.
Dr. Means is not that leader. She and Mr. Kennedy do not intend to democratize science; they want to replace what they describe as one set of orthodoxies with another, with the fervor of manifest destiny crossed with a revenge plot. Their ascent signals that the experts in charge have been switched out for contrarians and dropouts, who continue to trumpet their credentials even as they seek to dismantle the system that awarded them.
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3) What Comes After War, Political Division and Painful Family Feuds
Left-wing Jews are wrestling with thorny questions: What will American Jewish communities look like now? And how will they think about Israel?
By Emma Goldberg, Oct. 30, 2025
Emma Goldberg spent time with parent-child duos, friend groups, rabbis and communities that are wrestling with their views on Israel and American Jewish identity.
From left, Natasha Westheimer, Simone Zimmerman and Liya Rechtman. The three became friends while living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Now none of them identify as Zionists. Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times
For Leah Robbins, growing up in rural Florida meant that Saturday morning synagogue services were followed by lunch at Bono’s Pit Bar-B-Q.
Ms. Robbins lived mostly around non-Jews, so her family members were proud and precise about the way they expressed their Jewish identity. To her parents, part of being Jewish meant donating to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and encouraging Ms. Robbins when she chose to sing the Israeli national anthem while her classmates recited the Pledge of Allegiance.
But during college and in the years after, as Ms. Robbins met friends who challenged her understanding of Israel’s history, its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and its conduct in wars in Gaza, her beliefs about Israel shifted far from those of her Zionist upbringing. She now argues that young Jews who are critical of Israel, like herself, need to build new communities — new spiritual congregations, new schools — that don’t emphasize Zionism.
Watching with flooding relief and trepidation the news of an Israel-Hamas cease-fire, as well as the hostage and prisoner releases, she has asked herself, “When we’re on the other side of this devastation, what’s going to be left of Judaism if the Jewish left isn’t building it right now?”
For years, there had been a sticky and prevailing narrative about the role left-wing Jews played in the broader Jewish community, according to some Jewish leaders and rabbis. The story went like this: young progressive Jews might push their communities to be more critical of Israel, but as they became older they would send their children to the same Jewish day schools they had attended, where those children would sing pioneer songs and eat falafel on Israeli independence day.
In other words, young Jews who criticized Israel would simply come to accept the organizations and institutions they grew up in — or, maybe, leave them.
But that is not what is happening today, at least in some Jewish families.
Across scattered corners of the United States are glimpses of how much progressive Jewish communities have grown or gained wider recognition over the last two years, especially those that don’t identify as Zionist.
Ms. Robbins is raising money with the goal of starting a “diasporist” Jewish day school in Boston, one that puts its emphasis on Judaism outside Israel and teaches Israel’s history with a non-Zionist approach. Three Jewish friends who met in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and now live in Brooklyn, recently went door knocking for a Muslim mayoral candidate who pledged to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he steps foot in New York.
A rabbi in Chicago gathered 400 families for high holiday services in a congregation that is pro-Palestinian and won’t raise the Israeli flag. Most of these groups acknowledge the horror of the attacks by Hamas militants on Oct 7. 2023; they also condemn the Israeli government’s response and the war in Gaza, as well as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank that long predated the war.
In nearly two dozen interviews in recent weeks, it is clear that young people — some proudly Zionist, some pro-Israel but critical of its government, some anti-Zionist, some uncertain — are wrestling with thorny questions: What will American Jewish communities look like in the future, and how will they think about Israel?
Institutional leaders recognize the uncertainty swirling around this. “Your responsibility as a Jewish leader is to be concerned about the people within your movement,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, who leads the largest movement of American Jewry, the Reform movement. “We’re at a critical moment. I don’t think at this moment we have a clear sense of where it’s going.”
This critical moment, since Oct. 7, 2023, has been a painful one for so many, prompting questions within families and communities about morality, safety and identity. What was already a stark generational divide on Israel in the American Jewish community has deepened. Pew polling released in 2024 found that younger Jews expressed more negative feelings toward Israel than older Jews did. A Washington Post poll last month found that 56 percent of Jewish Americans felt an emotional attachment to Israel, but that figure fell to 36 percent among those ages 18 to 34.
The number of dues-paying members in IfNotNow, an American Jewish group that opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, has grown more than 500 percent since Oct. 7, 2023, reaching over 6,000 people. Rabbis for Ceasefire, which formed after Oct. 7, now has some 430 rabbis. Jewish Voice for Peace said it increased its annual budget from $5 million to $9 million and its chapters from 45 to more than 100 in the past two years.
In absolute numbers, these communities are small, though fast expanding. Arielle Angel, the editor in chief of the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents, called for more of these groups in a recent editorial. “We need new Jewish institutions,” she wrote.
The views of these left-wing Jews could keep shifting, Mr. Jacobs said. “If this war is in fact ending, what is the possibility that there could be in the coming months a new government in Israel, a reconnecting of young Jews who had been confused or pained by the war?” he added.
A majority of Jews remain emotionally and politically attached to Israel and to supporting its continued existence as a Jewish state. American Jews also support “Israel’s actions in Gaza” in greater shares than overall Americans do, according to Washington Post and Gallup polling.
But in interviews, some younger Jews say they’ve become increasingly unwilling to join or attend synagogues, schools, camps and nonprofits that don’t share their views on the recent war in Gaza.
“Four in 10 American Jews believe Israel has committed a genocide,” said Daniel May, the publisher of Jewish Currents, citing Washington Post polling. “There’s a disconnect between that number, and the view of American Jewish institutions, where even the most liberal places have leaders that have refrained from calling this a genocide. People who feel committed to Jewish life have no choice but to create new Jewish communities.”
That is what Ms. Robbins is doing in trying to start a Jewish day school that doesn’t put Zionism at the core of its Jewish belief system. The school will be called Achvat Olam, meaning universal solidarity, and she plans for it to open in the fall of 2029. “There is a real hunger to save the soul of Judaism,” she said, “and see it decoupled from nationalism.”
Breaking Tradition
In September, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, a progressive New York-based organizing group, filled a Sunset Park sports center for its gala, the Mazals, with some 1,000 attendees. Dressed in a high-low mix of sequins and clogs, attendees bumped into childhood friends from summer camp, while a speaker shouted, “Mazel tov and free Palestine!”
Milling around the crowd were three women who had all, at one point, felt strongly enough about their connection to Israel, and responsibility for its actions, that they went to live there. They became friends while living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Now, none of them identify as Zionists.
One of them is Simone Zimmerman, 34, a longtime left-wing Jewish activist, who is the co-founder of IfNotNow and focus of the 2023 film “Israelism.” That documentary tells the story of how Ms. Zimmerman came to question her support for Israel, starting when she was a student at Berkeley.
“There is a broad network of people, that I see myself as part of, who have intimacy with Israeli culture and who have my left-wing politics and my understanding of the stakes,” Ms. Rechtman, said.Natalie Keyssar for The New York Times
Her friend Liya Rechtman, 33, grew up in Brooklyn and spent her teenage years signing up for every pro-Israel activity she could find. She did a weeklong training program affiliated with the Israel Defense Forces and recruited college classmates to Birthright Israel, which provides young Jews with all-expenses paid trips there. Ms. Rechtman said she grew more critical of Israel while living there in 2016 and 2017, especially seeing the violent attacks that Palestinians in the West Bank faced from settlers.
She visited Germany shortly after Oct. 7, participating in a Jewish leadership program, and told the room she felt ashamed to be Jewish because of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
There was an audible gasp. “It was upsetting for some people to hear that,” Ms. Rechtman recalled.
Natasha Westheimer, 35, was the last of the trio to leave Israel, remaining until well after the start of the war. Ms. Westheimer said she broke her hand when Israeli soldiers cracked down on an anti-occupation demonstration in the West Bank in 2021. Over time, she grew more concerned about going to these demonstrations, as the risks rose and advocacy opportunities shrank— but she also didn’t feel comfortable living there without joining activism and civil disobedience led by her Palestinian neighbors. She moved back to the United States in 2024.
Ms. Westheimer was struck by just how many anti-occupation activists she met in Israel had since become anti-Zionist activists living in New York.
Ms. Rechtman echoed this. “There is a broad network of people,” she said, “that I see myself as part of, who have intimacy with Israeli culture and who have my left-wing politics and my understanding of the stakes.”
No Middle Ground
The author Benjamin Moser has been at the New York Public Library, in recent months, writing a book about anti-Zionist Jews. His research traces the opposition these rabbis, lawyers, poets and scholars have faced, from Britain to Brazil and Amsterdam to Houston.
“My book tells a pretty unbroken story from the 19th century to the present,” said Mr. Moser, “Of anti-Zionist Jews being exiled and killed, being fired from their jobs, families splitting up.”
Parts of that are what Jewish groups on the left are still experiencing, even as their numbers grow. Lex Rofeberg, 34, a non-Zionist rabbi who lives in Providence, R.I., was targeted by Canary Mission, a group that says it exposes critics of Israel, for his political views. When he was invited to speak at a Reform synagogue in Milwaukee, his hometown, his mother, Ruth Lebed, was surprised to hear “through the grapevine” that some locals were uncomfortable with Mr. Rofeberg’s visit.
When she posted in a Facebook group about his involvement with the film “Israelism,” which explores anti-Zionism, online acquaintances blocked her.
“There are people out there who think that his views on Israel make him antisemitic,” said Ms. Lebed, 67. “Which is ridiculous. The guy is a rabbi.”
An anti-Zionist rabbi in the Chicago area, Brant Rosen, 62, said he was thrown out of his local rabbinical network because of his beliefs. He left the congregation in Evanston, where he had worked for 16 years, because of tensions within the community about his activism. Mr. Rosen decided to start his own anti-Zionist congregation, called Tzedek Chicago (Tzedek means justice in Hebrew), which has more than doubled in size since the Israel-Hamas War began, growing to more than 400 dues-paying households.
Mr. Rosen has felt, since the start of the recent war, that Jews who support and oppose Israel’s policies cannot be together in communities.. “I think the middle ground has become untenable,” he said.
Still, there are many organizations on the Jewish left that identify as Zionist and want to make space for people who are profoundly, wholeheartedly critical of Israel.
“You have a lot of young people saying, ‘This is important to me, but it’s not, as I’ve been told, a simple yes or no, do I support Israel or not?’” said Hadar Susskind, chief executive of New Jewish Narrative, a progressive Zionist group.
Young people he talks to say they care about Israel but are also deeply opposed to the current government.
“So many people, were taught that it’s ‘You support Israel, period,’” he continued. “Many people are not willing to have that be the end of the discussion.”
Generation to Generation
Vivian Russell, 17, was walking in Park Slope in September when she bumped into Ms. Rechtman, Ms. Zimmerman and Ms. Westheimer canvassing with Jews for Racial & Economic Justice. She stopped to introduce herself.
Ms. Russell, a high school student who lives in Washington Heights, told them that she found herself at odds with her public school classmates during conversations about the Israel-Hamas War. She didn’t agree with the Jewish Student Union at her school, so she joined the Muslim Student Union instead.
Back uptown in Washington Heights, two days before the recent Oct. 7 anniversary, Ms. Russell sat with her mother, Dara Herman. Ms. Russell calls herself an anti-Zionist. Ms. Herman, 52, is “more sympathetic to Israel’s plight.”
Their exchanges echo those of so many Jewish families, whose group chats and Sabbath tables have become more tense since 2023.
“If I have kids, I’ll be raising my kids Jewish and celebrating Jewish holidays and stuff,” said Ms. Russell, as she sat with her mother at a neighborhood coffee shop. “But I don’t think that I’ll tell them, ‘Oh Israel is the place of our people.’”
Her mother replied: “But how do you square that with the ancient history that I’ve been taught — that Jews were from Israel, that all those years we wandered in the desert and then finally came back to Israel. Is all of that false?”
“That was many, many years ago!” her daughter said.
“I’m only one generation from the Holocaust,” Ms. Herman said. “It feels very real to me that less than 100 years ago there were millions of Jews being killed and those who survived needed somewhere to go.”
But Ms. Herman, watching her daughter’s evolution, realizes that the Jewish community is transforming as it absorbs a new generation.
It also seems possible, some activists say, that those groups will recede and the new groups that a younger generation on the left is building — like the school Ms. Robbins hopes to start or Mr. Rosen’s congregation — will become some form of establishment.
Ms. Russell, whose father is Irish American, declared that she felt confident in the set of ideas about Judaism she wanted to pass on to her future children.
“I’ll teach them about how my people — both Jews and Irish people — have been rebels,” Ms. Russell said. “Both are a group of people that have struggled, and cared about each other, and cared about freedom.”
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4) The U.N. human rights chief says that U.S. strikes on boats Trump claims are smuggling drugs are illegal.
By Nick Cumming-Bruce, Reporting from Geneva, October 31, 2025
The United Nations human rights chief has condemned the Trump administration’s military strikes on boats that it says are being used to smuggle drugs from South America, saying that they violate international law and should be investigated.
Volker Türk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement released on Friday that there was no justification under international law for the strikes, which have killed at least 61 people since the start of September.
“These attacks — and their mounting human cost — are unacceptable,” he said, in blunt criticism of the United States. “The U.S. must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats, whatever the criminal conduct alleged against them.”
Mr. Türk’s statement has more symbolic power than direct influence over the actions of the United States, which is a permanent member of the U.N Security Council. But the forceful condemnation offers fodder for the criticism of the Trump administration’s policy from Democrats and civil society groups.
President Trump authorized the strikes, and his administration has told Congress that the United States was engaged in an armed conflict with drug cartels that it has declared to be terrorist organizations.
But the administration has presented little evidence to support its claims, and specialists in the laws of war and executive power say he has used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis. Mr. Türk’s office said it had no credible evidence of a confrontation with the cartels that met the criteria of armed conflict under international law.
In early October, Mr. Türk wrote in a letter to the U.S. government that countering drug trafficking was a law enforcement issue and lethal force was only justified as a last resort against individuals who pose an imminent threat to life.
“Based on the very sparse information provided publicly by the U.S. authorities, none of the individuals on the targeted boats appeared to pose an imminent threat to the lives of others or otherwise justified the use of lethal armed force against them under international law,” Mr. Türk said.
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5) Uncertainty Persists for Americans Waiting for Monthly Food Stamps
Judges on Friday ordered the federal government to continue providing food assistance during the shutdown. But benefits will still most likely be interrupted.
By Eduardo Medina, Linda Qiu and Rick Rojas, Published Oct. 31, 2025, Updated Nov. 1, 2025
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to continue paying for food stamps during the shutdown. Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Christine Tully, 78, worried that November would come but her food assistance from the federal government would not.
Maybe she could will a good outcome, she thought, by writing down her grocery list for the month as usual. Chicken. Apple juice. Carrots. And if she could find them on sale, she wrote, “a pack of three steaks.”
Millions of low-income Americans are in a similar position as the new month begins, wondering how long they will have to wait for a vital type of support.
“I’m just so confused,” Ms. Tully, a great-grandmother and retired diner cook in Miami, said on Friday, trying to figure out the status of the federal program that provides her with $285 in monthly help. “How did we get here?”
A judge in Rhode Island on Friday ordered the Trump administration to keep paying for food stamps during the shutdown, finding that it had acted unlawfully by refusing to tap emergency funds to sustain the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Late on Friday, President Trump said that the administration would provide the funding for food stamps in November once a federal court could clarify “how we can legally” supply the money. But he indicated that a delay was inevitable.
“It is already delayed enough due to the Democrats keeping the Government closed through the monthly payment date,” he wrote on social media, “and, even if we get immediate guidance, it will unfortunately be delayed while states get the money out.”
Typically, the issuance of SNAP benefits involves state agencies, vendors who load the program’s debit-style cards, grocery stores, other retailers and the federal government.
Even if SNAP benefits are disbursed at some point this month, there remain broader concerns about how the most vulnerable Americans will weather the effects of the federal shutdown and other cuts to the country’s social safety net.
“It feels like we’re standing on the shore, and we see a tidal wave coming,” said Robyn Hyden, the director of Alabama Arise, an organization that advocates for policies to help low-income people. “But we don’t exactly know how it is going to hit, where it’s going to hit, because there’s still uncertainty over whether they’re going to be able to fix any of this.”
The disruption to SNAP is just one example of how federal programs have been imperiled — not just by the month-old shutdown, but also by the administration’s efforts to curtail spending on social programs as part of the domestic policy and tax cut law that President Trump signed in July.
Federal funding for several antipoverty programs will dry up this month because of the shutdown, affecting tens of millions of Americans who depend on subsidies for child care and utilities as well as food.
Some 6.7 million women and young children who participate in a grocery voucher program known as WIC may lose access to infant formula, food, breastfeeding support and health care screenings. As the weather turns colder, nearly six million households that receive help to pay for utility bills through the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program may face higher heating costs or service cutoffs.
And for more than 65,000 children and families enrolled in Head Start early-education programs that depend on immediate federal funding, the shutdown means finding new child care options as early as next week.
The disruptions to government programs for the poor coincide with sweeping changes to two of the largest safety nets — Medicaid and SNAP — brought by the Republicans’ domestic policy law.
The law cut federal spending on Medicaid by roughly $1 trillion, and on SNAP by $186 billion. It also placed additional work requirements on recipients and reduced eligibility for both programs. The SNAP changes are set to take effect on Saturday. The changes are expected to reduce enrollment in both programs by millions of people over a decade.
This week, state and local governments, nonprofits and recipients of SNAP benefits were scrambling to find alternatives to fill the void. Until now, the benefits had continued without interruption since the Food Stamp Act of 1964 made the program permanent.
Officials and advocates for low-income people warned that any interruption of benefits would push the country into unfamiliar territory, heightening the risk of widespread hunger and threatening to overwhelm food banks already strained by rising food prices and recent cuts to federal programs.
In previous shutdowns, the fate of SNAP had caused less concern because of the relative brevity of those closures and a broadly shared assumption that the government would continue to fund such programs, said Christopher Bosso, a professor of food policy at Northeastern University and the author of a book on the history of federal food assistance.
“There’s always — always — some money,” he said. “Everybody understood that.”
But after the current shutdown began on Oct. 1, White House officials argued that safeguarding SNAP benefits was beyond their control, even as the administration went to unusual lengths to reorganize the budget to maintain other programs. Vice President JD Vance insisted this week that President Trump had “tried to do everything” in his power to make the shutdown painless.
Critics dismissed that assertion, saying that the benefits were endangered because the Trump administration was unwilling to draw upon reserves that had been set aside to fund SNAP during emergencies.
Legal challenges were brought by about two dozen states, charity organizations supporting the poor and the program’s beneficiaries, all of whom contended that there was a legal and moral imperative to preserve benefits and that the billions of dollars in reserves were there precisely for circumstances like these.
In one of the cases, Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts expressed skepticism of the Trump administration’s arguments that legal obstacles and technical hurdles stood in the way of its ability to deploy those funds. Siding with roughly two dozen states, she required the administration to explain by Monday how it would fund aid in November.
A separate ruling by the Rhode Island judge, Judge John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, said the Trump administration “must distribute the contingency money timely, or as soon as possible, for the Nov. 1 payments to be made.”
In Durham County, N.C., where some 32,000 residents rely on federal food assistance, the local social services office has been bombarded with calls and visits.
Maggie Clapp, the county’s social services director, recounted on Friday the questions people had been asking in recent days: “How am I going to feed my family? What am I going to do? Am I going to pay rent but not my grocery bills?”
“They’re firing off questions because they’re in crisis,” she said.
She has struggled to give them a firm answer.
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6) Why Do We Allow Child Marriage in America?
By Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, Nov. 1, 2025
Illustration by Tarini Sharma
Brigitte Combs was 11 years old and living in Los Angeles when her mother found a prospective husband for her.
The mother and father were in the Hare Krishna movement, and she says that as a result, she was never allowed to attend school, was extremely sheltered and was supposed to marry young. The man was 26 years old and a Krishna devotee, and everything was set for a marriage.
Because California allows children of any age to marry, as long as at least one parent and a judge approve, this seemed plausible.
Other countries have banned child marriage, including Sierra Leone last year and Colombia this year, but here in America the practice remains legal in 34 states. Even as the U.S. government advises other countries to end a cruel practice, at home we preserve what amounts to legally sanctioned statutory rape.
Opposition to banning child marriage in America comes from both religious conservatives (but what if she’s pregnant?) and from liberal groups like the California branches of Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union (child rights!).
Combs was all set for the wedding. But at the last minute, the man backed out, concerned about taking on an 11-year-old bride.
She then had a bit of a reprieve as the family moved to Texas. But her mom found a new suitor when she was 13 and announced, “This is a good time for you to be betrothed.”
So it was that at 14, Combs was married in a religious ceremony to a 37-year-old man. Soon she became pregnant.
Her husband was not violent, and at first she was not wholly against the marriage. Her parents were strict and had never taken her to a restaurant, while her husband won her heart by taking her out for a strawberry milkshake. She also now had a stepson almost her age, which at first seemed fun.
Married life soon curdled, however, leaving her feeling trapped with no freedom or future. “I was already thinking about how to get out of this.”
Combs said that when she was seven months pregnant, right after she turned 15, her mother and husband took her to the county courthouse to make the marriage legal. She remembers the judge showing her a look of concern and asking a question along the lines of, “Do you want to do this?” or “You’re both willing?”
“I wanted to cry, and I wanted to say: ‘No, no, I don’t. Do something! Do something!’” Combs recalled. “I was just wishing she’d grab me and hug me and take me somewhere.”
But she couldn’t imagine defying her parents and husband, and she was about to have a baby. And so to the judge’s question, she simply said, “Yes.”
I’ve examined the marriage certificate, and it shows that the judge was Becky Sierra. The certificate lists the ages and birth dates of bride and groom, so there was no uncertainty about the age gap. I called Sierra, and she didn’t remember the case. But she told me that she felt she was obliged to marry a minor when a parent signed the forms. “I probably overstepped just by asking” if there was consent, Sierra said, adding that she had never heard of a judge who did not go ahead with a marriage.
At least Sierra showed concern. I once wrote about a Florida woman, Sherry Johnson, who was compelled by her parents to be married at the age of 11 to her rapist; at the first courthouse the group went to, in Tampa, a clerk refused to marry a girl so young, so the party went to nearby Pinellas County, where officials unquestioningly approved, as documented in the marriage certificate.
Combs had her baby, and her husband moved them to a farm run by Hare Krishna followers, where Combs felt unsafe and “life was hell,” as she recalled. She was too young to drive, but she got a lift to town and stopped in lawyers’ offices to ask about getting a divorce. No one would help a child; they told her to work through her parents.
“So I went to the women’s shelter,” Combs remembered. But the shelter couldn’t help minors.
She explored joining the Army, but then she became pregnant for a second time.
Eventually, Combs simply ran away from her husband, leaving her two children behind, and became homeless, living under a tree. She worked for a while as a nude dancer and then was recruited for prostitution, which she declined. If a marriage doesn’t work out for a child, there aren’t easy escape routes.
In the end, Combs was assisted by a man who helped her get a divorce and became her second husband; that didn’t last, either. Now age 56, she is happily married to a third husband, and she long ago recovered her children.
She said she always carried the trauma of that first poisonous marriage but didn’t have a vocabulary to process it. And then in 2018 she read that Delaware had become the first state in America to ban all child marriage — and she broke down and wept. Now she had a framework to understand what she had endured. When she heard last year that Virginia, the state in which she now lives, was debating a similar law, she rushed to the legislature and testified. The law passed.
After Delaware led the way by banning all child marriages, with no exceptions, Washington, D.C., and 15 more states followed: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.
In some states that allow child marriages, including Nevada and Florida, the minimum age is 17. In a great many others, the minimum age is 16. In Hawaii and Kansas, it is 15. And California, Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma set no minimum age at all, with the consent of a parent, a judge or both.
How frequent are child marriages? The best evidence comes from a nonprofit called Unchained at Last, which obtained marriage license data from around the country and found that between 2000 and 2021, more than 314,000 people under the age of 18 were married in the United States.
Some 86 percent were girls, typically marrying men an average of four years older than themselves. Most of the minors were 16 or 17 years old, but some were as young as 10.
Some 66,000 of those marriages would risk prosecution for statutory rape if it were not for the gloss of a marriage license. Unchained at Last says that marriage represents “a ‘get out of jail free’ card for a would-be child rapist.” (In some states, the contradictions are unresolved: the marriage is permitted, but sex between husband and wife when one is a minor remains a criminal offense that is simply not prosecuted.)
The number of children being married seems to have declined sharply since 2000. But as of 2021, four or five children were still being married on average each day in the United States, according to the examination of marriage license data by Unchained at Last.
Much resistance to banning child marriage comes from conservatives. Some want to defer to parents or to conservative religious communities that are eager to marry girls before they entangle themselves with boys. Others worry that if a pregnant girl cannot marry, she will get an abortion — although the Catholic Conference in several states strongly backed the ban on early marriages.
When liberals oppose the ban, their arguments are different. Opposition in California has come from the state chapters of the A.C.L.U. and Planned Parenthood. Elsewhere, those organizations have often been allies or neutral in the effort to end child marriages, but the California branches have defended minors’ “right” to marry.
“We are concerned that such a ban could drive young people who are already in abusive relationships further underground, out of the reach of social services,” the organizations wrote in a joint letter last year opposing a ban.
“Second, we are concerned about the consequences for those young people who willingly enter a marriage, such as young parents who want to further solidify their family relationship and have already taken on adult responsibilities.”
To me, this position veers into liberal self-caricature and underscores how well-meaning people can be out of touch with those they aim to protect. Spend time with girls who have actually been married young and you don’t find plucky teenagers “who want to further solidify their family” — you find scared girls pushed into marriages that, researchers have found, disproportionately end in divorce.
“Especially during these dark times, when we need Planned Parenthood more than ever to fight for women and girls, it is mind-boggling and devastating to see Planned Parenthood of California instead fighting to preserve a human rights abuse that’s destroying girls’ lives,” said Fraidy Reiss, founder and executive director of Unchained at Last, which has helped lead the fight to ban child marriages. “It feels like a slap in the face and a stab in the back at the same time.”
Reiss, who says that she herself was forced as a teenager into a marriage in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, deals regularly with underage girls caught in unhappy or violent marriages, and she emphasizes the practical challenges such girls face. In some states, underage girls who flee an abusive spouse are legally runaways and breaking the law. Domestic violence shelters mostly don’t take minors. Minors often can’t initiate legal proceedings, such as seeking a protective order or a divorce. Reiss also sees how often early marriages traumatize the young spouses for decades.
“You can’t un-rape a girl,” she said.
Americans understand this when the context is other countries. In 2010, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to enact the International Protecting Girls by Preventing Child Marriage Act, which labeled “all cases of child marriage as child abuse” (the measure died in the House). But somehow we’re less cleareyed at home — or even when granting visas to foreigners.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved spousal and fiancé visas for more than 8,000 foreigners in marriages involving a minor between 2007 and 2017, a Senate investigation found. The investigation found a 13-year-old girl who was forced to marry an older cousin in Pakistan, for example, and a visa for him was then approved so he could come to America. Conversely, an American male pedophile can traffic a foreign teenage girl to the United States by getting her a visa as his fiancée or wife.
“Child marriage is a workaround for statutory rape laws and trafficking laws,” Reiss said.
When Missouri banned all child marriage this year, one of those lobbying for the move was Sheena Renea, whose life journey is, as she puts it, a “worst-case scenario” for such a marriage.
Renea grew up in a troubled household, enduring sexual abuse and addiction; she went into her first drug rehab program at age 12. At 15 she married a 20-year-old, hoping to find safe harbor; instead, she says, her husband regularly beat her and even threatened to kill her.
“I wasn’t old enough to get a restraining order; I wasn’t old enough to go into a domestic violence shelter,” she recalled. “I also wasn’t old enough to get a lawyer.”
With her mother’s help she eventually was able to get a divorce, but her ex-husband continued to threaten her. So when she was 17, drunk and high with friends, she idly mentioned that they could go kill her ex-husband. And so they did, and although she didn’t pull the trigger, she was charged with first-degree murder.
“I wasn’t old enough to get out of marriage,” she said. “But I was old enough in the state of Missouri to face the death penalty.” She served 25 years in prison before being released in 2017, and she makes no excuses.
“A man lost his life,” she said. “I lost my life in prison. We left an array of victims behind us.”
Renea now runs a small nonprofit, Show Me Justice for All, that advocates prison reform and an end to child marriage. She said that all that tragedy could have been prevented if she had been forced to wait to marry.
“If the love is true, why would it hurt to wait for a year or two?” she asked. “When a grown man dates a teenager, society calls it statutory rape, but when that same man marries her, suddenly it’s called matrimony,” Renea added. “A ring does not make it right.”
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7) ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’: How to Wrestle With Death in Gaza
By Michael L. Gross, Nov. 1, 2025
Dr. Gross is a professor of political science at the University of Haifa.
In talks leading up to the cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel, President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “You’re going to be remembered for this” — ending the war in Gaza — “far more than if you kept this thing going, going, going, kill, kill, kill.”
Kill, kill, kill: With those words, Mr. Trump evoked the large-scale loss of life in two years of fighting. Not since the smiting days of the Old Testament have Jews killed as many people as we have killed in Gaza. The number is staggering and may reach 100,000 civilians and combatants when the rubble is cleared. This is not an accusation. It’s just the plain truth.
No matter how we explain, justify or name it, this fact remains, and it is one that Jews — whether they opposed or supported Israel’s conduct in the war — especially in Israel but also abroad, must reckon with if the Jewish community is ever to extricate itself from the trauma of this war, which began with the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that left some 1,200 people in Israel dead. As a nation proud of its moral tradition, how do we do this?
The first step is grappling with the truth. In discussions with colleagues, friends and students, I often hear three arguments to justify the high casualty account: that killing tens of thousands in Gaza was necessary, the killing was not Israel’s fault and the death toll was the inevitable outcome of a high-tech war. These claims, however they seem to offset the moral costs, are partial truths at best, assumptions we must honestly confront through concerted debate and public education.
Right now, there are only questions to be asked about these assumptions. We still need to work out the answers.
Killing in war can be deemed necessary, according to international law and just war theory, when it is the only way to sufficiently degrade an aggressor’s military capabilities and thwart the dire threat they pose. The right to self-defensive killing ends when that goal is accomplished.
Here we all must ask ourselves: Did Israel achieve this aim, and — just as importantly — when? Did it occur when the Israel Defense Forces pushed Hamas back in the early days of the fighting, during the first cease-fire in November 2023 or when Hamas’s ability to launch missiles into Israel largely ended some months later? Did it occur as targeted killings of Hamas’s military leadership degraded the group’s command and control infrastructure?
Was Hamas only significantly incapacitated by the time of the second cease-fire in January 2025? Or was it only the week before the latest cease-fire, brokered by Mr. Trump? Sorting this out is essential because any deaths, Israeli or Palestinian, are gratuitous if they were unnecessary. We can close our eyes or we can look back now at missed opportunities, moments of military opposition to continued fighting and shifting public opinion to understand and judge our killing in war.
Even establishing that killing was necessary does not easily explain its scope. Why did Israel need to kill so, so many Palestinians? Is it because of how Hamas fights? Hamas fighters took over schools, while some Palestinian civilians participated in the attack in Israel and others imprisoned hostages in their homes. As a result, the majority of Israelis — 62 percent in a recent poll — remain convinced even today that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. According to this view, all people living in Gaza are combatants, all fight Israel and none enjoy protection from killing.
And so, by this logic, we must ask: How many civilians in Gaza actually took part in this war? What combat or support roles did they fulfill? Did they include children and the elderly, who make up a significant number of those who have been killed? Only once we have that information can we begin to evaluate how Israel conducted itself in this war. Were the rules of engagement for the I.D.F. sufficiently stringent? Did the military diligently pursue complaints of war crimes? Hamas may bear the lion’s share of fault for starting this war, but Israelis must ask if any is ours.
Hamas’s use of human shields, which it denies, also caused extensive casualties. A thick mattress of living bodies above ground insulated the group’s underground military infrastructure. International law categorically prohibits any use of human shields but offers little guidance to help determine how many casualties are excessive when trying to destroy human-shielded assets. The question runs deeper: Should Israel or any nation fighting a military force so intertwined with the civilian population destroy every available military target when the collateral harm is so great?
A similar question arises considering Israel’s integration of A.I.-assisted systems into its warfare. These systems helped to identify potential military targets in Gaza at a rate exponentially faster and greater than in previous conflicts. More targets mean more killing, none of which is inevitably excessive or unlawful, but it raises a critical question: Were they all necessary?
Addressing these questions frankly requires public forums to draw in politicians, journalists, educators, parents and concerned citizens. The answers won’t come easily. Schools and universities in Israel will soon have to think about how we teach this war. While curriculums are mainly in the hands of the education ministry, concerned citizens should push government officials to encourage students and teachers to scrutinize our conduct in the war.
Information is a crucial component of this reckoning. The government must allow an official commission of inquiry to move forward, and we need internal I.D.F. investigations to be made public. Otherwise our efforts will fall disappointingly short. The I.D.F. objected to continued warfare in early 2025, and more data will illuminate why it believed that and why it was overruled. If they rise to the occasion, investigators can tell us what commanders thought about the necessity of particular operations, the details of friendly-fire and operational deaths and, hopefully, offer a peek into the black box of A.I. targeting.
“Kill, kill, kill” is not an unavoidable outcome of war. With a fragile cease-fire in place, many have set their eyes on distant reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. It is no accident that the process is often called “truth and reconciliation.” Facing the truth is among the next necessary steps if we are to come to grips with this horrific war and find peace.
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