David Cohen

Experienced Exec Dir/CEO, entrepreneur for social change I @IsraelInspired

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

If your take on morality paints a vague collection of people as immoral - or as monsters - you have entered into demonization and bigotry. Both AJC and the URJ agree. I would think that alone should give one pause.

https://t.co/DRd94drQPI

[Ted Deutch, CEO of American Jewish Committee @AJCCEO]

After watching @NYCMayor's recent speech at a political rally, I wanted to offer these thoughts to him.

Mayor Mamdani, referring to fellow New Yorkers as “monsters” is outrageous and dangerous, and the impact of your words extends far beyond politics.

It’s not only about your repeated attacks on Israel and those who support it, now rooted in the oldest antisemitic conspiracy theories of secret control and nefarious agendas. It’s about politics and division. You are doing exactly what you falsely accuse others of doing.

Your accusation, Mr. Mayor? Efforts “to turn us against one another instead of our leaders turning toward the moral change we all know to be necessary.”

But when you use your position to label people you disagree with as monsters - people who live and work and pay taxes in the city you lead, people who loved the Knicks championship parade as much as you did, people who spent yesterday celebrating their fathers and grandfathers - you are turning people against one another.

Your speech wasn’t just about preserving your power. By every measure, it was about growing that power by dividing New Yorkers.

You want to debate ideas? Fine. But when you call people monsters, you’re not debating ideas, you’re dehumanizing the people you disagree with. And when that comes from a mayor, it creates an environment where people hear clearly who is being cast as outside the community, one where they wonder whether they can safely live and speak as themselves.

You say we deserve leaders who lead with hope and not fear. We all agree. But what you did here is the opposite.

No one should have to wonder whether they are safe expressing who they are or what they believe, whether they worship at shul, at a mosque, in a church, a gurudwara, or at a temple.

Contributing to an environment in which people feel that fear is not leadership. It is exactly the kind of division you claim to oppose.

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

@SethWickersham @DVNJr Like your work Seth. One thing. In your interviews on this you need to add context for people new to the topic. You say “League … penalized Patriots for ‘illegally filming signals’”. Implies it was the filming and not the semantic location. Filming signals was not illegal.

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

@Mishi_2210 908

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

Thank you @RabbiWolpe

Just one of the myriad of ways the Mayor - as I and many have written - has the same understanding of Jews as those who delegitimize us daily.

Hoping to see those who support him on economics also call him out on this. It’s all I ask.

[David Wolpe @RabbiWolpe]

I await the Mayor's careful evaluation of the programs of every religious institution in NY. He wouldn't only be criticizing synagogues, right?
https://t.co/61CunXDrKB

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

Hamas's weaponization of UNRWA in Gaza needs to be fully exposed and understood. A newly released video that was filmed by Hamas terrorists themselves shows how the group used an UNRWA elementary school for children in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip, to hide weapons that connect to an underground route. You can tell it's an UNRWA school by the use of blue window guards, a color the UN agency uses distinctly, which I remember from growing up in Gaza and attending UNRWA schools there.

From its schools, clinics, and headquarters to its displacement camps during the war, the level of penetration by Hamas of UNRWA's educational and medical infrastructure points to a deeply disturbing fact: the agency is so thoroughly and deeply compromised and has massive Hamas networks operating at every rank from within. There is no way that the UN agency did not know the extent to which its system was weaponized for terrorism by Hamas.

The journey to reclaim, rebuild, rejuvenate, revitalize, and reconstitute Gaza must entail the ending of UNRWA's operations inside the coastal enclave. UN agencies can and should play an interim role in the Strip's recovery, but there must never again be space for a permanent industrial complex that monopolizes the aid, acts like a humanitarian mafia, and fails to keep violent terrorists and Jihadis out of its schools, classrooms, and system.

It's time to end UNRWA's presence in Gaza once and for all and to allow for new educational infrastructure to take shape, focused on bolstering pragmatism, moderation, nation-building, science and technology, and Gaza's regional integration.

Video source: https://t.co/e1USyovjal

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

Have to agree with all of this. If anyone wants to dm to discuss I would be glad. This would be based on these more accurate numbers and dozens of conversations had with generals, IDF officers and soldiers, and policy makers about how operations were actually conducted.

[Aviva Klompas @AvivaKlompas]

The numbers are in. There was no genocide in Gaza.

“Using Hamas’s own statistics, and subtracting natural deaths and fatalities caused by munitions fired by Gazan combatants, one gets a total of about 33,000 civilian casualties. The widely accepted number of combatant casualties is at about 25,000.

Every one of those 33,000 civilian casualties is a tragedy and a testament to the effectiveness and ruthlessness of Hamas’s human-shield strategy. That number also means that there are fewer than 1.5 civilian deaths for each combatant war death.

A genocide didn’t happen—that we knew a long time ago. But it is now clear that there is no plausible case that Israel used excessive force against civilians or targeted noncombatants.

The opposite is true: In pursuing Hamas, Israeli soldiers sacrificed their own lives to protect civilians. This is not an interpretation of some contextless video floating around social media; this is established fact.”

[Aviva Klompas @AvivaKlompas]

The numbers are in. There was no genocide in Gaza.

“Using Hamas’s own statistics, and subtracting natural deaths and fatalities caused by munitions fired by Gazan combatants, one gets a total of about 33,000 civilian casualties. The widely accepted number of combatant casualties is at about 25,000.

Every one of those 33,000 civilian casualties is a tragedy and a testament to the effectiveness and ruthlessness of Hamas’s human-shield strategy. That number also means that there are fewer than 1.5 civilian deaths for each combatant war death.

A genocide didn’t happen—that we knew a long time ago. But it is now clear that there is no plausible case that Israel used excessive force against civilians or targeted noncombatants.

The opposite is true: In pursuing Hamas, Israeli soldiers sacrificed their own lives to protect civilians. This is not an interpretation of some contextless video floating around social media; this is established fact.”

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

@DavidLBernstein @JoshKraushaar Couldn’t agree more. If guardrails have faltered - what were they in the first place and what led to their deterioration? One question I have posed. If we seek viewpoint diversity and have worshiped at that alter - might we not have flattened any criteria for speech at all?

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

@Molliekat3 @LahavHarkov Well if you are going at it that way, it would be what the Roman’s named it - which was after Judea, and after Israel. And after Judah. So I guess you’d have to say it was after Israel - then before it again - and all that leading up to Zionism which brought BACK the Israel. :)

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

Thanks HRG

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

The seeds for Gaza’s next war are being sowed at this very moment by Hamas.

So says the PA, not Israel.

And everyone is looking away.

There is nothing any of you can do for Gaza that Hamas won’t undo. Until you understand that, you’ll never actually achieve anything for Gaza.

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

An excellent articulation of an important question that’s always been a part of this - what do my well meaning friends who are simply against war not get about their naivety? You are so right. If this is a great awakening about war. Then great. If not. Then what is it ?

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

I'm sorry this is so long. And probably incoherent and uninteresting. It looks like a political diatribe, but it's actually a Jewish homily. I just had some thoughts I needed to put down in words to see if they make sense.

The horrors in Nigeria and Sudan deserve mass marches in Western capitals. Attention would make a difference.

But, well, as Bill Maher points out, no Jews.

And that raises the interesting point that the marches for Gaza are a truly unique and extraordinary phenomenon, unique enough to be worth exploring. Do they signal a positive moral shift? Or, as critics would have it, a return of old bigotries? How would we know?

In some important ways, the marches are completely unprecedented, even in comparison to the Vietnam and anti-apartheid campaigns. Their regularity, duration, visual coherence (flags, slogans, rituals), repetition across cultures and countries, and the diversity of the marchers all make them pretty close to exceptional.

But what caused such an unprecedented outpouring into the streets of so many for so long? Why this war (or, as the marchers would say, genocide), and not any war (or genocide) before it?

It could be social media. In the age of TikTok and Instagram, any war anywhere can be experienced viscerally by everyone everywhere. If that's the cause, then are we seeing a new radicalization against war qua war, against the injustices of occupation and the suffering of civilians as such, irrespective of the specific parties to the conflict, simply because it's all so present and immediate on everyone's phone screens?

If so, then the marches are an extraordinarily good thing, even if they occasionally draw some bigots into their ranks.

I mean, yes, we Israelis are now in the dock for a genuinely horrific war that is nevertheless far less harmful than half a dozen other conflicts just in our region just in the last few years. But if the only difference is these new platforms, then we find ourselves in this position only because we're the first major target of a great and general moral awakening against war.

That would mean that the unique response to the Gaza conflict is basically a function of its timing - and that the one silver lining of this horrible, destructive war is that it is occurring amid a sudden extraordinary shift in the world's consciousness that will ultimately make my children - all children - safer and happier in the coming years.

If that's the story, then this is what redemption feels like in its first fitful steps. And I welcome it. Let's make this the last damn war. Or at least let's make whatever war came before it the last ignored war.

But there's another possibility: That these marches aren't just unique in the history of the West - nothing ever mobilized you quite in this way - but that they will remain unique in the future as well.

That nothing unrelated to Israel will ever mobilize you like this again.

And this is a truly awful thing to contemplate. Because it means that the salient fact underlying the marches isn't the situation in Gaza but the identity of the Israelis, and the never-ending flood of propaganda and rage that's only really imaginable against Jews. It would mean that it is easier for Westerners or Middle Easterners to train their sights on Jews than on themselves, and that this fact is playing a significant role here. It would suddenly become relevant that Jews have served for nearly two millennia as a canvas on which Christian or Muslim societies painted their anxieties and fears and failures, and that "decolonization" and anti-Western and Islamist ideologues today are eager to continue to do so.

If indeed this moral awakening remains exclusive to Gaza, then all the outrage will have been so surgically selective that it was never actually outrage, but the old and comfortable and wild little prejudice that always made your ancestors feel better about themselves and that retains its mobilizing usefulness in the present day.

This would be true even if most of the marchers are ordinary decent people responding to what they see on social media. The structural bigotry would enter into the equation in the simple fact that the Gaza war was the only war the activists and the algorithms ever demanded that they be made to see.

What if social media isn't a new dawn of freedom but merely a more direct tool of mass manipulation? Or more simply: What if Gaza is the only war you'll ever see images of because the algorithms aren't trying to make you more decent or more human, but more radicalized and pliable? What if they don't so much overturn power structures as provide tools of information control to those in power?

What then, O paladins of the West? What if this moral rage, inherently, structurally, can only ever direct itself at one target?

I'll admit, I suspect it's the latter option. Not just because I'm Israeli, and so somewhat more primed to notice the selectivity, but also because of a general distrust of sudden moral awakenings. They seem to come fast and furious and shallow and self-absorbed and exceedingly short-lived in the social-media age.

By here's my real point: What if you, dear marcher for Gaza, can make it so that it doesn't actually matter which of the above options is true?

Hear me out.

The Talmud teaches in Tractate Yoma, page 69b, that the "evil inclination," the selfish, animalistic side of our psyches, is a great source of corruption and pain in our lives, but also a great engine for good when its hungers are properly channeled. Indeed, that without it, there is no life.

Without lust and selfishness, the Sages explain, no one would build a home, marry, have children or work the land. When these base, objectifying instincts are corralled into the covenant of marriage, they are transformed into engines for new life and loyalty and meaning and holiness.

Elsewhere, in Tractate Bava Batra, the Sages say the same thing about jealousy. Jealousy is destructive, but also creative. When funneled through competitive meritocracies, it becomes a driver of excellence: "The jealousy of scholars increases wisdom," we read in Bava Batra.

Noble and beautiful things can flow from baser instincts. Indeed, those baser instincts are often the only things inside us strong enough to drive fundamental, powerful change.

In that spirit, let me offer a humble prayer for the marchers for Gaza now that there is some hope, however fragile, that the days of bloodshed are over, now that they are in search of purpose and an effective way to continue their advocacy.

Even if what we're witnessing in the streets of Western cities is driven at its cultural core by the reawakening of an old prejudice, as I and so many of my fellow Jews believe, it can nevertheless set you on a path to that first possibility, to that larger moral shift.

I pray that the Jews' own harping on your extremely predictable selectivity - or perhaps your own embarrassment at it - ignites in you a deep desire to prove us whiny Jews wrong. That you learn and march and rage about Sudan and Nigeria and all the rest of suffering humanity, even if only to rob the Israelis of the satisfaction of victimhood.

That'll show us.

Sorry, that wasn't snark. That'll actually show us.

Then, even if there is something darker and less noble at work here that you're refusing to notice, it'll hardly matter. You will have harnessed that base thing to the greater good. And there's nothing embarrassing about that. As with all cases of the harnessing of the evil inclination, no other part of the human psyche is powerful enough to do the job. Let latent antisemitism and some small shred of shame over it mobilize marches for Nigeria's Christians and Sudan's ongoing catastrophe, and so be a net good in the world.

Don't stop marching for Gaza. But do start marching for Nigeria.

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

@havivrettiggur An excellent articulation of an important question that’s always been a part of this - what do my well meaning friends who are simply against war not get about their naivety? You are so right. If this is a great awakening about war. Then great. If not. Then what is it ?

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

This was inevitable. It is true. And to denounce it does not mean anyone supports this horrific action. @DavidCornDC always a voice of reason.

[David Corn @DavidCornDC]

Before knowing all the facts, voices on the right are now exploiting the tragic death of Charlie Kirk & calling for all-out war on the left. This is sad, but not surprising, at a time when we should all be denouncing political violence (if that is indeed what this was). They were not so upset when Minn. Democrats were assassinated.

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

#smallbutlatevictories

[Alex גדעון בן װעלװל @JewishWonk]

UK government, which has been fairly critical of Israel, looks at the evidence and concludes they aren't committing genocide. Reality sometimes wins.

https://t.co/zQPVBpFZBB

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

@zohranmamdani says that there is “silence” in reaction to the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. #tool
Is he not seeing it covered every hour of every day? (Plus side - I guess people now know Jews DON’T control the media. Does he?)

[New England Patriots @Patriots]

THE GOAT. IN BRONZE.

@TomBrady | @NFL

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

@JewishWonk Mazel Tov!!

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

@DavidLBernstein TY for acknowledging.

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

Agree. Fairly good rules of thumb for dealing with anyone becoming widely acceptable who also has “at least a blind spot” for how their rhetoric impacts those looking to do harm or raise the temperature against Jews writ large.

[Alex גדעון בן װעלװל @JewishWonk]

Advice to anyone in the professional Jewish world in New York who is trying to reach out to Mamdani or being reached out to by his campaign.

A thread.

[David Cohen @DavidLCohen]

Well said.

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

Everything antisemites think the Jews are doing, the Qataris are actually doing. Their money is everywhere, reaches the elites of both parties, extends from top universities to Wall Street to K Street.