Joel S.

New Ohio bill would create state registry of applicants who skip job interviews COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – Some Ohio legislators are trying to make it more difficult to skip scheduled job interviews. House Bill 395 would create an online registry of applicants who don’t show up t…

This is an absolutely horrible idea: www.nbc4i.com/news/politic...

UN report finds United Nations reports are not widely read A United Nations report seeking ways to improve efficiency and cut costs has revealed: U.N. reports are not widely read.

Okay, but who's going to read this to find out? www.reuters.com/world/un-rep...

Head of U.S. pro-Israel group J Street 'won't argue' with those calling Gaza war genocide ***

This is a notable shift from a liberal Zionist group (left of ADL/AJC, right of IfNotNow/JVP), but also feels like an attempt to have it both ways - tacitly acknowledging the charge while not wanting people to be upset with them for using it themselves. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

Genocide Debate over whether there’s a genocide in Gaza has special resonance when your family was a victim of the crime that gave the world the term.

This post from J Street's Jeremy Ben-Ami is quite telling, in that he all but admits that "genocide" is the most appropriate legal term to describe Israel's actions in Gaza, but also says he can't, for emotional reasons, bring himself to use it. jeremybenami.substack.com/p/genocide

"'Everyone lost': How a Zionist migration programme deprived Morocco of its thriving Jewish community In the 1960s, more than half of Moroccan Jews left the country with the promise of a better future in Israel. MEE spoke to those who decided to stay in the North African kingdom"

Portraying this as "Those dastardly Zionists deprived the good people of Morocco of the ability to live in harmony with their Jewish neighbors" is certainly a choice.

You can compare that to the West Bank, with large populations living close together with vastly unequal legal status. None of that is to say that partition might not be the best outcome for Israel-Palestine, but if Yugoslavia is the comparison, that's a pretty pessimistic prediction for the future.

So you had a situation where everyone was living together under a strongman, but then when the strongman died and it collapsed, people couldn't live together anymore, but separation itself was a process of ethnic cleansing to carve out ethnic-majority territories.

I mean the thing about that historic region of the world is that historically everyone was all mixed in, and there weren't clear geographic dividing lines along ethnic demographic lines. It wasn't a case of just drawing borders, but engineering demographic majorities through war crimes and genocide.

I mean I actually think "Politicians shouldn't adjudicate the question of genocide; it should be left to academic legal experts" is a desirable standard to hold, if it were consistently upheld across the political spectrum.

Jews prefer Mamdani to other NYC mayoral candidates but worry about their safety under him, poll finds The poll by commissioned by a group that campaigned against Mamdani in the primary.

This is a poll result that has a little something in it for every side: forward.com/fast-forward...

I actually think "Genocide ought to be a term left to the experts in the legal category, and not to politicians" is a reasonable and perhaps even a desirable response. But the people who are legal and academic experts in that field are more and more reaching an emerging consensus on this question.

AI hype is inherently unfalsifiable, because anything it does badly is just taken by the boosters as a sign that we need to spend more resources trying to make it work better. AI cannot fail; we can only fail it.

"No, George Soros did not collaborate with the Nazis. As a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Hungary, he survived by posing as the Christian godson of a government official who inventoried confiscated Jewish property. Soros accompanied him once but did not participate, as confirmed by his biography and fact-checks from Reuters, PolitiFact, and others. Claims otherwise misrepresent his survival story."

A lot of people on the Nazi social media site are not going to like this response.

If AI does a good job writing academic papers, that's a sign we need to pour more resources into improving AI. If AI does a poor job writing academic papers, that's a sign we need to pour more resources into improving AI.

But if you are saying that they would come to different conclusions about the ostensibly descriptive question, if the political context of the term were different, perhaps that is true; we can't really know for sure.

All I was trying to say is that I know Jews who think it is genocide and say so, and those who don't think it is, but I don't know anyone who earnestly thinks it is but is afraid to say so for political reasons.

I think that's a fair characterization - these terms create understandings as much as describing them - but then that has serious ramifications for the entire understanding of post-Holocaust genocide prevention, if speaking the term is what creates the moral obligation.

I'm trying to separate the factual question of whether genocide is occurring from the normative question of what one does with that fact, if one concludes it is occurring. Are you suggesting there is no purely factual question, because applying the term "genocide" is always a normative decision?

And presumably people who genuinely do not believe it meets the legal standard of genocide wouldn't suddenly start to believe it does, even if the demands for what to do with that claim were entirely different.

But the question of what the impact of acknowledging a genocide would be is separate from the factual question of whether what is happening meets the legal standard of genocide.

And of course there is a lot of motivated reasoning in the people who deny it, but I don't know that is entirely about the pragmatic geopolitical impact of acknowledging it, so much as the broader emotional investment that people have with the idea of a Jewish state, even if they don't live there.

I don't actually think this describes many people though. Some people think Israel's war in Gaza is genocidal, and say so. Others do not think it is. I don't know how many people are in the category of "believe it is but do not want to say so out loud because of what people will do with that fact."

In the past week, I've seen several Jewish academics not known as far-left publish articles acknowledging that Israel's actions in Gaza deserve to be characterized as genocide, and half the responses ask, "How dare you betray our people this way?" while the other half ask "What took you so long?"

The way the right-wing talks about academics, it sounds like they think we all get paid six figure salaries to teach 4 hours per week with summers off. Meanwhile, I am struggling to find housing I can afford in the area where I have to live in order to teach at the school where I teach.

I suspect that most Americans are not even aware that Israel regularly demolishes Palestinian homes in the West Bank, and that the ADL making Americans more widely aware of that through "antisemitism" trainings is not going to have the effect they hope it will have.

Maybe the only thing that Hitler and Adorno had in common.

"Actions which purport to protect Jews... position Jews as enemies of criticism and free inquiry and at the forefront of a broader conservative attack on higher education. Exploiting Jews for such ulterior political ends has historically always harmed Jews." archive.ph/2025.08.03-1...

How the George Floyd Protests Changed America, for Better and Worse

This book review is wonderfully brutal, and deservedly so: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/b...

As an Israeli political scientist, I resisted thinking this war was a genocide. Here's what changed my mind The incitement for genocide in the Israeli public sphere is undeniable. So why are so many of us liberal Jews so reluctant?

I've read a lot of articles in the past week or so from intellectually honest scholars that look like this one: forward.com/opinion/7598...

See, for example: bsky.app/profile/joel...