Scott Kahn of JCH

Rabbi, writer, podcast producer & host. Love 🇮🇱 & Boston teams. I'll help you pod!

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

Right before we walked Tali to the chuppah, she and our other kids all hugged and danced. It was a really sweet moment.

[SK Tedeschi @skedeschi]

I'm a middle eastern historian. My own family were made refugees. And this is my honest view of the Nakba (“catastrophe”) - the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs during the 1947���49 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

A thread. 🧵

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

A lot of subscribers have asked what I made of the Nick Kristof oped.

So much has already been said. What more is there to say?

My first thought was everyone else's. Horrifying. Testimonies of pain and torture. We know that the Israeli Prisons Service is notoriously incompetent. There have been cases of Hamas prisoners abusing each other, and even famous cases of them abusing female Israeli guards. We know, too, that all prison systems struggle with the problem: New York prisons face 2,000 claims against them. So abuse of prisoners isn't merely possible, it's guaranteed. October 7 and the ensuing war sent thousands of detainees into the prisons. And in the early months, drafted into the system undertrained reservist guards. Guards who had seen Hamas's videos gleefully documenting their crimes.

I expected, therefore, a hard-hitting story of real abuse, something Israeli leaders must take notice of.

And then I came across the first obvious lie. And then the second. And then an odd claim -- maybe possible, but how exactly? -- and then another just like it. And a famed Hamas propagandist laundered as a reliable source. And then another.

Why, if there is no doubt that abuse occurred -- and there is no doubt -- was there so much obvious propaganda in Kristof's oped?

I won't pretend the lies weren't a relief. They were. It's agony to read about Israeli criminality, and the lies let me cast doubt on the whole narrative. There's an obvious propaganda campaign at work here.

But as claim followed claim, it became hard not to wonder: Despite the propaganda, what part is nevertheless true? How bad has it gotten?

So here's what we know, or at least what I think I know.

This is a campaign that seeks our destruction. Kristof quotes people who celebrated October 7 and want Israel destroyed, and will lie to achieve that goal. We know how the lies in this story made their way into it, where they came from and what purpose they serve.

Even so, I'm not willing to conclude there's no truth at all in there, just because there are lies.

Dogs did not rape anyone. The people who invented that particular inanity claimed it without evidence, knowing that no one, certainly not self-appointed moral arbiters like Nick Kristof, would ever bother checking the provenance of the claim.

Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?

So the claim spreads through the millions-strong activist network without investigation, exciting and mobilizing -- not because anyone understands how it might be possible but for the sheer thrill of it.

And it's cited by Kristof as a reliable report.

A recent report by a Norwegian NGO, also referenced, claimed "systemic sexual violence" in the West Bank by citing just 16 cases across three years in a geographic region containing as many as three million Palestinians and over half a million Israelis. And some of the examples scarcely cleared the bar for harassment.

But the NGO in question knew for a fact that no journalist would look too deeply into any of it. And indeed, no journalist did.

Because they never, ever do. Because why would they?

Friends, a paper trail is being created. Just like they created a paper trail on mass starvation in Gaza -- mass starvation first claimed in early 2024, and then claimed again and again by NGOs, the UN, everybody. Some were nuanced warnings of a "possibility," some declared it had arrived. The headlines from both were largely the same. And then, in thundering silence, the mass starvation claim just faded away, never having materialized -- while billions of ordinary people around the world who don't follow too closely remain convinced that countless Gazans died of starvation.

So they moved on. A Lancet letter claiming hundreds of thousands of deaths spread like wildfire, mostly because (a) nobody actually read or understood what it claimed and (b) nobody cared enough to check if it was remotely plausible. Then, just in case anyone forgot Lancet, came the claim by UN rapporteurs of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children -- 380,000 infants under five allegedly died, more than the entire population of infants in Gaza. Stupid, right? But it was repeated again and again by activists and protestors.

No one checks, no costs are exacted for the never-ending barrage of fakery. Because why would they?

A wild religious frenzy has taken hold. Hatred of Israel is now definitional to the left, and to parts of the right. Greta Thunberg has forgotten all about climate change. An enemy of humanity has been identified just in time to unleash all the pent-up religious rage that this troubled secular age won't allow against anyone else.

And by complete and utter coincidence, that enemy you're suddenly allowed to hate is vaguely associated with the Jews.

Yes, alas, it really is that simple.

But also, dear friends -- bear with me -- it isn't.

All the above is true. They're fucking liars and bigots. They marched in their millions, again and again and again, for weeks and months and years -- marches completely unprecedented in their size, regularity and duration in all the history of the West, in all the history of war, larger by orders of magnitude than all other marches for all other conflicts and wars and suffering combined, even those caused by their own governments. And no serious person pretends that anything similar could ever have coalesced or will ever coalesce again unless Israel is involved.

"But we fund you," shouts the American activist to explain this mind-numbing selectivity. Then why did one-third of the city of Amsterdam march? Or millions of Spaniards, Brazilians and Indonesians? It was unprecedented and it was everywhere.

And Kristof has joined the new religion. Not by being concerned about abuse, but by not caring one whit whether he's trafficking in truths or lies. Only the Jews will ask to distinguish between the two. He just needs to throw it all on the page, and his membership in the glorious crusade is assured.

Alas, the Jews are correct about the nature of this moment. Some things are so big and fundamental, so assumed and widespread, that they become hard to see. Fish don't notice the water. Activists who can only ever march against Jews are convinced they are merely righteous people enraged by war, without ever pausing to wonder why the only war that ever enraged them or ever made its way to their phones was one particular war, and not larger and deadlier wars also conducted with Western weapons and money.

And so the Jew is made fearful once more. Throughout Christendom and Islam, he is being returned to his proper place in the social hierarchies of old, complete with anxious conversos and ideological purity tests.

And yet, still, despite it all, their lies aren't the end of the story. Their lies are a separate story. A campaign of lies that constitutes a return to the mean for the Jewish condition in the West. A campaign meant to justify brutality against us, not to end war or suffering.

And despite all of it, dear Jews, there really is abuse.

It's nowhere near as much as the psychotic claims of these fantasists. Not by orders of magnitude. If it was, they wouldn't need to lie so much.

But it's there nonetheless. Many dozens of cases at least, probably in the low hundreds by now, most of them without any sexual aspect, but still wanton violence. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the army gave a few estimates to the courts a couple of times over the past three years. There have been many indictments filed against soldiers, serious ones. I know something about a handful of those cases. I know that the problem is real.

It's there, it's real, and it doesn't seem to be stopping. And if it isn't stopped with an iron will and uncompromising hand, it will continue to fester and grow.

And it must be said: neither Ben Gvir nor Netanyahu are interested in fixing it. Nobody at the top cares about the rights of prisoners.

Let me be clear: For the first time in my life, I support a death penalty. No one who crossed over the border to massacre and kidnap on October 7 should be left alive; they came to kidnap children precisely because they sought the release of mass murderers kept alive in our prisons. Hamas, as always, in its totalizing brutality, forces the choice: If their murderers live, our children may die. I choose our children. And those who came for our children cannot be deterred, reformed or deradicalized. They murder their own to clear a path to murdering ours. And so I believe they must die. We must try, convict and destroy them.

And even I, radicalized in this narrow, specific way, say we cannot collapse into torture or abuse. That's not justice. It isn't even vengeance. It is participation in Hamas's way of war.

Nor do our leaders seem to care about the simple breakdown of discipline that these abuses represent, the kind of breakdown we saw again and again with the incidents of looting in Gaza and in the early cases of prisoner abuse that came to light.

No, dogs aren't being trained to systematically rape prisoners, you nattering halfwits. And no, Hamas propaganda operatives are not reliable sources on the question of Israeli crimes. The vast, vast majority of soldiers are honorable men who walked into fire so our families may live. The whole world may turn on them; I will stand with them, grateful for their sacrifice. And Kristof, a willing purveyor of propaganda happily feigning that he can't see the water and thrilling to a moral crusade engineered by would-be genocidaires he pretends not to understand -- is no messenger of moral reckoning.

But friends, so fucking what. Let the narcissistic guttersnipes strut their moral emotions before the world, let the UN publish endless reports that don't hold up to basic scrutiny, let the NGOs dream their rabid, sick dreams that no journalist ever fact-checks -- yes, they're lying. But so fucking what.

We still, for ourselves -- because fuck them -- must see that it isn't all fake. The problem is real. It's far smaller than they claim, but real nonetheless. And when discipline and morality break down, it can only get worse. We either crack down now or we watch it fester and grow.

And our own Ben Gvirs are stubbornly refusing to fix what is actually broken, the real thing in the real world.

And so we are caught in a strange sort of vise, the same vise we find ourselves in with the genocide lie: A vast propaganda machine that seeks to destroy us -- countless activists too high on their own self-regard to see the irony of raging against a "genocide" while calling for the erasure of a people -- all while our own incompetent, venal, self-absorbed political class insist in their mindless chatter on confirming every claim of our enemies for sheer, bald egomania.

I'm sick of it all. I know you're all sick of it too.

And that, in a nutshell, is what I think about this.

Just because they're lying, just because a vast perfidious campaign has overwhelmed global elites in a bid to clear the way for our removal, just because they're still, after two millennia, building their visions of redemption on The Evil Jew -- doesn't mean there isn't also, separately, a problem on the ground.

So what do we do now?

Simple. We see it, we acknowledge it's happening, we bring our rage to our inept leaders until they bend to our will and act to stop the breakdown...

And we soldier on.

We soldier on because the enemy really is coming to murder us. Because Hamas must still go if Gaza is ever to rise to a new day. Because Hezbollah will yet destroy Lebanon on the altar of destroying us. Because the ayatollahs built their whole damn religion on the extermination of our children.

We fix the broken things within us as if the pogromists and their simpering Kristofs don't exist. We owe no answers to the propagandists who seek to clear a path to our deaths. But we do owe answers to ourselves.

Let the screaming mob rage and churn like so much sea-foam. Despite that raging mob, despite the enemy who still seeks our destruction, and yes, despite feckless incompetents like Ben Gvir, our minister of prisons, who claim to lead us -- we remain the strongest, freest Jews who ever lived, more capable and committed than our self-destructive enemies ever imagined. And the task is still before us, yet to be completed, the sacred duty given to our generation to ensure our children don't have to face the genocidaires who now surround us. We do not waver, we do not stumble. We soldier on.

Because fuck them all.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@RealCandaceO No one questions Iran's right to exist.
They did not warn civilians to get out.
The civilians harmed were nowhere near military or terrorist infrastructure.
You're just a vile antisemite.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@BriannaWu I'm really glad to hear that. You deserve good things.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@NickKristof @vali_nasr It takes a desire for peace to hammer out a peace deal. Iran has shown absolutely zero inclination in that direction. You're talking as if the problem were personalities, rather than intractable hatred of Jews, Israel, and the West.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@hayfarani Why do you think Israel did that? Don't you agree that if Hezbollah were not hiding there and using it as a base, Israel would have left it alone?

Obviously that's the case, Israel gains nothing by randomly targeting an apartment building.

You left out the main point.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@BernieSanders You @BernieSanders would literally prefer that Israel allow Hezbollah to fire missiles into Israel with impunity than to have Israel fight back.

What a pathetic self hating person.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@minakimes Mina is absolutely right and left Dan tongue tied. :)

[Emily Schrader - אמילי שרי��דר امیلی شریدر @emilykschrader]

Iranian protesters: “You suppress us in the streets with violence, but we will come for your families and deal with you soon”

They are now marking homes of regime officials

[Kevin Youkilis @GreekGodOfHops]

Amazing to see the strength and courage of the Iranian people standing up for their freedom. 💪

[Brianna Wu @BriannaWu]

I do not understand how this is not the top story in all media.

If the IRGC falls it will literally reshape the middle east.

[Amit Segal @AmitSegal]

Israel’s population grew by less than 1 percent this year—0.9 percent—marking a historic low in national growth. Now, complaining about a tenth of a percent might sound petty. After all, countries like Japan and Korea pray for a birth rate like Israel’s. But let’s take a closer look.

According to researchers at the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, the slowdown is the product of three converging trends:

-More deaths, as large Jewish and Arab age groups move into their 70s and 80s.
-Falling birth rates across nearly all sectors.
-A growing number of Israelis leaving the country, outpacing immigration.

It’s worth noting: Since 1950, Israel’s population has never grown by less than 1.5% annually—except for two minor dips. This year breaks that record.

Let’s take this one by one.

The growing number of older Israelis was inevitable—but it’s also remarkable. They are the first generation to grow old in the State of Israel. Think about it: Israel is still in her late 70s. A baby born the day Ben-Gurion announced independence is now celebrating their seventy-seventh-and-a-half birthday. According to the Jewish custom of wishing someone a long life, they’ve still got 43 years left.

Now, birth rate—that’s a different story. Israel has long prided itself on being the only country in the OECD with an above-replacement fertility rate, nearly double the OECD average. That hasn’t changed—but the details are shifting. Fertility among non-Jews has fallen by roughly 30 percent in recent years. The research paper also projects a decline among Jewish women, but in 2024 it actually increased slightly. Even if the Jewish State’s population isn’t growing, the Jewish population is.

And then there’s emigration. In 2025, there was a net loss of about 37,000 people—more Israelis left than arrived. But even here, the picture is more nuanced. Many of those departing were recent immigrants, such as Ukrainians who came in 2022. Yet the number of native-born Israelis leaving has also risen significantly in the past few years.

But not all of these departures are permanent. Some are part of the natural “back-and-forth” of a globalized, mobile population—academics, entrepreneurs, tech professionals—whose temporary relocation benefits Israel in the long run.

Cards on the table: I’m an optimist. After welcoming another child last month, how could I not be?

A 0.9 percent growth rate may look like a slowdown on paper, but in context—with Israel still young, still growing, and just finished with an intense war—it feels to me less like the end of an era, and more like a country catching its breath.

📸My son born last month. (Credit: my wife)

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@20th_Centurygal Pet Sounds.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@JosephiAdele Mazal tov, b'sha'a tova!

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

When I was a kid, Israeli TV ran ads telling people to turn off the water while brushing their teeth because Israel was drying out.

Now we have so much desalinated water, we’re using it to rehabilitate nature.

Israel is part of the solution to the Middle East’s challenges.

[Eylon Levy @EylonALevy]

Just listened to the latest @ezraklein episode with John Ganz, and I’m blown away by the total lack of self-awareness about antisemitism on the far-left… even as they diagnose the exact same patterns on the far-right with Fuentes and Carlson.

They accurately describe antisemitism as “blaming every social problem on the Jews”—and call out the far-right conspiracy that “Jews, or maybe the Israeli government,” run the porn industry (WTF?)

But then they completely skip over Mamdani, who does the exact same thing: taking every grievance in New York and tracing it back to the Jews (fine, only the Jews in Israel). When Mamdani said, “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, the IDF laced it,” that is Fuentes-level scapegoating. The only difference is that Mamdani openly describes his strategy as building a political coalition around making the Jewish state the enemy. In 2021, he literally argued that to mobilize New Yorkers, you must connect “the struggle against austerity” to “the struggle against the funding of Israeli Apartheid.”

How do Klein and Ganz not see that Mamdani and Fuentes are two ends of a horseshoe now meeting? Klein whitewashes Mamdani, “I don’t think there’s anything antisemitic about him at all,” and treats antizionism—the political project to eliminate an existing democratic state—as if it’s about human-rights. How can he not see the movements Mamdani and Fuentes come from are mirror images?

And it gets worse. Both Fuentes (far-right, bad) and Ganz (progressive, good) are spreading the same libel about Israel: that its war to free the hostages and dismantle Hamas was “genocide.” Can they not see that they're engaging in the same libel and demonization? They would want you to believe that while they both claim to care about a "genocide," Fuentes is only crying crocodile tears to hate against Jews. But it's the genocide lie that's fueling hatred and violence against Jews in the first place. And both far-right and far-left are fueling that same hoax.

Yes, the American far-right has a massive antisemitism problem. The rise of Carlson and Fuentes should alarm anyone who cares about the wellbeing of Jews or the health of American democracy. And that problem is being mirrored on the far-left, where far too many useful idiots can’t see that they are reproducing the same patterns of hate by making up libels about Jews and tracing all the world's problems back to them.

Antizionism is a hate movement. It builds coalitions on both extremes—and increasingly between them—by mobilizing politics against Jews. It poisons democracy. And it needs to be called out wherever it appears.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@YoBenCohen @MagnumIceCream It's worth noting that it is not illegal to fly the Palestinian flag in Israel. Police are given leeway to confiscate the flag if it causes public disturbance, and have used that license particularly over the past two years when that flag was used to celebrate October 7th.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@ZohranKMamdani You have no problem condemning antisemitism, but you also feel that you can define it. When Jewish people tell you that it includes denying their right to a homeland, you say that's not antisemitism - because that's what you think, too.

So you're basically saying nothing.

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

Jewish teens have real questions about bodies, desire, and values. Are we giving honest and healthy answers, or leaving them to figure it out alone?

Intimate Judaism Ep 65 w/ Shuli Taubes. Listen here (or anywhere you get your podcasts):
https://t.co/SSRlinc5eX
@TalliRosenbaum

[Scott Kahn of JCH @JewishCoffeeH]

@clairlemon Well, one place.