ProSocial Valuation

ProSocial Valuation is an exciting new partnership that assesses the social impact of initiatives on society to provide concrete measures of success

[GAZAWOOD - the PALLYWOOD saga @GAZAWOOD1]

"Are you an Arab Christian and you live in Israel? Are there others like you?"
"There are tons of us. We all live here happily."

Watch another amazing video from @talthetraveler that joins the growing collection of testimonies about the shocking "apartheid" in Israel.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

John Lithgow winning a Tony at 80 for Giant, the oldest man ever to win acting Tony, 53 years after his first, is just about the most deserved thing I’ve ever seen. And for a play that stares at antisemitism dead in the eye. A lifetime of brilliance, and still getting better.

[Rachel Moiselle @RachelMoiselle]

A simply superb paragraph by Sam Harris.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Sam Harris has written the best thing you’ll read today.

https://t.co/gI0wZZNH4m

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Even Arab leaders admit it.

Everyone is sharing the Bill Clinton clip where he describes how Yasser Arafat rejected a generous peace offer at Camp David that would have given the Palestinians a state on 96 percent of the West Bank, land swaps, and a capital in East Jerusalem. Clinton says Arafat lied to him and that the Palestinian leadership never actually wanted a two-state solution. They wanted to destroy Israel. It’s a video often shared by people like @VividProwess, and it’s an important one for people to see.

Of course, critics immediately dismiss it. They claim Clinton is biased or he’s pro-Israel. They’ll tell you that you cannot trust the American perspective.

Ok, so let us set that aside.

Now watch this.

In this powerful interview, former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a major Arab leader who was directly involved in negotiations, says exactly the same thing from the Arab side. He talks about the Mena House Conference in Cairo as well as the Camp David negotiations of 1978. All failed because of the Palestinians repeatedly rejecting any offer. The Oslo accords were signed but because Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad were not involved, they derailed the accords and any chance for peace by initiating 4 years of terrorist suicide attacks in Israel. Then came the second Camp David negotiations in 2000 which Arafat agreed to, then rejected and instead initiated the Second Intifada.

Mubarak explains how the Palestinians refused to even participate in the Mena House conference of 1977. He describes repeated opportunities they were given, including a detailed document that called for Israeli withdrawal from the Samaria, Judea and Gaza, security arrangements during a transitional period, and other major concessions. The Israelis were willing to negotiate on difficult issues like who would control security. The Palestinians, according to Mubarak, kept saying no and wasting chance after chance.

He speaks with clear frustration about how for decades the Palestinian side has rejected peace initiatives and realistic compromises.

The video further shows footage from the PLO representative in 1977, as well as old footage of Egyptian president Sadat who was involved in the Mena House and first Camp David negotiations of 1978.

This perhaps is far more impactful than Clinton’s account because it is not a Western or Israeli voice. It is prominent Arab leaders who lived the negotiations, who represented the broader Arab world, and who had zero incentive to defend Israel.

When leaders from both sides of the table describe the same pattern of Palestinian rejectionism and violence, it becomes much harder to dismiss as bias.

The pattern is clear across decades and across different voices… generous offers, repeated refusals, and continued demands for everything while giving nothing in return.

This is not ancient history. It is the core reason the conflict continues today.

If you value the truth, please share.

[Jaimee Michell @JaimeeUSA]

America’s founders were obsessed with Jews.

This July 4th, America turns 250.

But there’s a Jewish side to that story that most have never heard.

James Madison studied Hebrew at Princeton.

Alexander Hamilton went to Hebrew school.

And Benjamin Franklin wanted Moses splitting the sea on the Great Seal of the United States.

But why?

“I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.” - John Adams

Because the core principles that define the American identity were rooted in the biblical tradition and culture carried by one people:

The Jews.

Freedom. Equality. The inherent value of every individual. And education as a universal right.

These ideas weren’t born in Rome or Athens but at Sinai, and were preserved throughout history by the Jewish people.

The founders didn’t just look to “Western values.”

They looked to the Torah.

They saw ancient Israel and the Jewish people as the ultimate model of a free people bound not by force but by covenant. Governing themselves under a shared sacred law.

And America was their attempt to do it again.

“May the Deity . . . who delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors [and] planted them in the promised land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States. . .”

@myJLI

[Trisha Posner @trishaposner]

It took a non-Jewish political commentator @HughHewitt to drop a truth bomb this morning about the Democratic Party and antisemitism.

“The Democratic Party is deeply infected with anti-Semitism — not anti-Israel sentiment, not anti-Zionism — antisemitism. And it’s like a sepsis….It’s either going to kill the Democratic Party or it’s going to kill the United States.”

25 years after 9/11, the Muslim Brotherhood influence and radical jihadist sympathizers are being mainstreamed in the Democratic Party.

This is no longer a warning. It’s a diagnosis.

#Antisemitism #JewHatred

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

On This Day — June 3, 1948

Over half a million Arabs poured into Mandate Palestine in just 12 years to take advantage of the economic opportunities created by Jewish development — the only place in the entire Middle East with a growing Arab middle class.

Robert F. Kennedy, then only 22, made that striking observation in his reporting from British Mandate Palestine in April 1948 (just weeks before Israel’s independence). His dispatch was published this day in the Boston Post.

RFK wrote:

“The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs ... came into Palestine to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state. This is the only country in the Near and Middle East where an Arab middle class is in existence.”

He described how the Jews had transformed arid desert into flourishing orange groves through relentless labor and ingenuity. Tel Aviv had grown from a small village into a modern metropolis of over 200,000 in a single generation.

RFK noted that the Jews had already built a thriving community with its own institutions, language, and national characteristics — and were determined to reclaim their ancient homeland “as of right and not on sufferance.”

A young Bobby Kennedy saw the truth clearly: a people returning home, rebuilding their land with their own hands, and refusing to live as guests in their own country.

[ProSocial Valuation @ProSocialValue]

The World Cup According to Gianni Infantino #FIFA https://t.co/B4xqLAIF9c

[Bernard-Henri Lévy @BHL]

What’s the common thread from the Dreyfus Affair to 1930s Poland and now today in NYC 2026? I’ll answer this on June 2 and June 3 in NYC on stage appearing in the new play, Dreyfus in Rehearsals - Again. Tix here: https://t.co/CmFjV8PTWL

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

So thrilled and moved to have won the Emmy for Outstanding Historical Documentary last night - deeply grateful to @PBS and @BBC , (Simon Young, history commisooner); WNET and Oxford Films and Television and our brilliant creative team @hugo_macgregor Richard Wilkinson; Jyoti Mehta; Charlotte Sacher, for making this happen - at a time when the truth about the Holocaust in all its enormity, needed more than ever

[Reuven Goldstein @curatorWH]

Batman (Bob Kane), Superman (Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster), Spider-Man (Stan Lee) and Captain America (Joe Simon & Jack Kirby) were all created by Jews. Drawing on immigrant experience, they shaped heroes about justice, outsider identity, resilience, and moral responsibility.

[Rawan Osman روان عثمان @RawaneOsmane]

Wherever I travel — across Europe, across North America — I notice the same quiet ritual. Jews make themselves smaller. The Star of David gets tucked under a shirt. The kippah comes off, or disappears beneath a baseball cap. Hebrew drops to a whisper.

Last night I flew into Abu Dhabi from Tel Aviv. Not one Israeli — orthodox or secular — switched into invisible mode.

And yet, no tension followed them through the terminal. No dirty looks, Arab or otherwise. I watched faces. I observed conversations, casual exchanges, spontaneous interactions. I asked myself whether the smiles extended to those Israelis were genuine. Some probably weren’t. But no one felt at liberty to insult or assault a Jew. Everyone extended the same basic respect they would to any other traveler. Because in the UAE, law mandates civility — and it holds.

Give those same people the freedom of expression granted in France, the UK, or Canada, and some would cross that line without hesitation. A random Jew spotted in Dubai would become an opportunity for a heroic act of activism — a performance of solidarity with the Palestinian cause that achieves nothing except the bullying of a stranger. Which is, increasingly, what is happening across much of the world, except in the places already emptied of Jews entirely, or in Israel, where Jews do not live at anyone’s mercy.

What made the UAE different did not happen by accident. It took leaders with a vision — one radically alternative to the mainstream Arab narrative that has fed on rejection and apocalypse since the Arab world first learned of the Zionist project in the 1920s. It took the courage to swim against a powerful current, to pioneer a different path when every surrounding voice called that path a betrayal. These leaders chose to anchor their politics not in the desires of those who glorify martyrdom and dream of a final confrontation, but in the wellbeing, safety, and prosperity of their own people. And the confidence to hold that course came from something simple and sustaining: the smiles of citizens who are safe, productive, and proud.

That choice stands in stark contrast to the leadership of the Arabs of Palestine, who across a century and multiple historic opportunities made the opposite calculation — consistently prioritizing the cause over the people, the struggle over the state, the narrative of resistance over the unglamorous work of building. Had the Arabs of Palestine ever produced a leadership prioritizing the prosperity of its own people over the romance of permanent grievance, the entire region would look entirely different today. So would the world’s living rooms, where the consequences of that failure are now playing out — not as a political abstraction, but as Jews quietly tucking away their Stars of David on the streets of London and Paris.

I was raised in the Arab world — a world that was methodically emptied of its Jews. I moved to Europe believing I was entering a civilization that had learned to reject cruelty, where no one is persecuted for who they are.

I cannot help but smirk at the irony: a Jew is safer today in an Arab Muslim country than in large parts of the progressive West.

#israel #abrahamaccords

[Black Jewish Entertainment Alliance @BJEAlliance]

Did you know about this 1938 Jazz concert that changed Black and Jewish history?

In January 1938, Jewish clarinetist Benny Goodman performed at Carnegie Hall. The performance was the most significant jazz concert in history as it was one of the first public concerts to feature a racially integrated cast.

Benny Goodman was the first swing orchestra leader to hire black musicians, such as Teddy Wilson, and Lionel Hampton.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Senior Vice President of Cultural Strategy at Nike.

My department does not make shoes. My department makes people say the word "Nike" 4.2 billion times in 72 hours without paying for a single impression.

I have a model. We call it the Kaepernick Yield Curve internally. Slide 4. The number.

$6 billion in brand value. From one man kneeling. Cost of distribution: zero. The entire internet did it for us. Both sides. At the same time. Sharing the same thirty-second spot. Saying our name while they burned our shoes on camera.

We watched them set fire to a product they had already purchased.

That was the moment I got promoted.

The formula requires what we call a Cultural Tension Index. Every country has fault lines. Not geological. Demographic. Linguistic. Chromatic. We map them quarterly. The Netherlands scored a 94 in February. France was a 91. Japan is at 87 but rising.

I have read Geert Wilders' platform. Not for politics. For market research. Every grievance he names is an engagement segment we can activate with a single kit reveal. I have read Le Pen's manifesto. I have read AfD campaign literature. I have a folder on my desktop called "Sentiment Reservoirs" and it contains every populist platform in Western Europe indexed by activatable emotion.

Housing crisis. Wage stagnation. Cultural invisibility. The feeling that the country your grandfather built now speaks a language you don't recognize.

These are not problems to me. These are market conditions.

I'll tell you how the Dutch kit was built.

We partnered with Patta. This is the part I'm proudest of. Patta is real. Edson and Gee, twenty years in Amsterdam, genuine street culture, Surinamese and hip-hop roots baked into the concrete of Zuidoost. The community is authentic. The collaboration is authentic. We are not authentic. We are selecting authentic things and placing them at the exact intersection where they will generate the maximum argument.

Patta doesn't know they're the match. They think they're the product.

Remove: orange. Remove: windmills. Remove: tulips. Remove: every signifier that one demographic considers "theirs."

Insert: steel drums. Insert: African prints. Insert: bodies that do not look like the 1988 squad.

Not because those bodies don't belong. They do belong. That's what makes it work. The ad is CORRECT. We made a correct ad that generates more outrage than an incorrect one ever could. Because you can't say it's wrong. You can only say it makes you uncomfortable. And discomfort is worth three times what outrage is worth in our model. Outrage peaks at 48 hours. Discomfort cycles for weeks.

We don't sell shoes. We sell the argument about the shoes.

I have a dashboard. It's called ROAR. Return On Algorithmic Rage. It refreshes every six minutes. I can watch the Netherlands kit travel from right-wing accounts ("demographic replacement") to progressive quote-tweets ("if this bothers you, you're telling on yourself") to mainstream think pieces ("What Nike's Dutch Kit Reveals About European Identity") to late-night monologues. Each handoff multiplies the impression count by 2.3x. We have never found the ceiling.

The far-right accounts respond in four hours. We know this because we tested it with the France kit in 2024. The progressive defense takes six hours. The think pieces take thirty-six. The "I'm not racist BUT" accounts — the ones who feel something and don't know what to call it — take seventy-two hours. Those are the most valuable. They share the ad to say "I'm conflicted." Conflicted shares have a 4.1x engagement multiplier over angry shares.

Both sides share the ad.

Here is what I find interesting. The far-right says elites are replacing them. The left says this is representation. In my budget, both words appear on the same line item. "Replacement" and "representation" are the same P&L entry viewed from different positions in the income bracket. Neither side is wrong about what's happening. Both sides are wrong about who benefits.

The answer is in our quarterly filing. Page 114.

The workers in Tangerang stitch this kit for $204 a month. Eleven-hour shifts. Factory dormitory built within walking distance so Nike's supplier doesn't have to offer transportation stipends. It costs $3.70 in labor to produce a jersey that retails at €150.

The Dutch factory worker in Eindhoven whose job went overseas fifteen years ago and the Surinamese kid in Zuidoost whose grandmother came on the last boat from Paramaribo — neither can afford this jersey. Both will argue about it online. For free. One is a "response cadence" in our model. The other is a "content asset." Neither is a customer. Both are inventory.

I mention the wages not because it troubles me. I mention it because it is the one detail that generates zero impressions. No one screenshots a wage slip. No one boycotts a supply chain. They boycott a COLOR SCHEME. They share a thirty-second ad to prove which tribe they belong to while a woman in Indonesia sews the swoosh onto polyester for eleven hours and does not have an opinion about Dutch identity because she is thinking about whether her daughter can attend school this term.

The word "diversity" appears in our marketing budget. Not under "values." Under "earned media catalyst." Line item 7. Right between "athlete controversy window" and "geopolitical sentiment farming."

We discovered something the sociologists missed. You don't need to give people representation. You just need to show them their own face. Showing is cheaper than paying. A face in an ad costs one production shoot. A living wage costs quarterly, forever, compounding. We replaced redistribution with recognition. The algorithm cannot tell the difference. The quarterly filing can.

Both sides share the ad.

My team is seven people. The Cultural Tension Mapping unit. We sit on the fourteenth floor in a room called "The Fault Line." There is a world map on the wall with color-coded pins. Each pin represents a national team kit that has not yet been released. Each pin has a number. The number is the projected earned media value of the controversy that kit will generate. The Netherlands pin said $340 million. We came in at $410 million. I got a spot bonus.

I need the wound to stay open. If the Netherlands solved its housing crisis tomorrow, our CTI drops forty points. If wages rose. If integration succeeded so completely that nobody felt displaced. That kit becomes just a kit. A pretty collaboration between a sportswear brand and a streetwear brand. No one argues. No one shares. No one says our name for free.

We don't need the problem solved. We need the problem shareable.

I have a meeting in eleven minutes. We're looking at the 2027 cycle. Japan is interesting. A Harajuku collab with no cherry blossoms. Brazil without yellow. England without St. George. Every country with an identity has an identity fault line and every fault line is a product launch.

The kit itself? The kit is beautiful. That's the thing nobody wants to admit. It's a gorgeous piece of work. Patta did extraordinary design. The community it represents is real. The culture is real. The celebration is real.

We just noticed it would also generate $410 million in free advertising if we positioned it correctly.

Both sides share the ad.

The graph goes up and to the right. It has never gone any other direction. I have a 2027 pin for every country with a flag.

[Mor Edge Insight @MorEdge_Insight]

Two different boys. Two different videos. Two different locations.
But yet the identical scripts.
Word for word. Every word. Identical tears. Identical act…

And the entire world fell for it.

H/T @CatShoshanna

[Captain Allen @CptAllenHistory]

On This Day — May 23, 1960

In one of the most dramatic moments in Israeli history, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood before the Knesset and made a stunning announcement:

“I must inform the Knesset that not long ago the security services found one of the great Nazi war criminals — Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible, along with other Nazi leaders, for what they called the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem — that is, the extermination of the six million Jews of Europe. Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in Israel and will soon face trial in Israel.”

The man who orchestrated the logistics of the Holocaust — the trains, the ghettos, the death camps — had been hunted down by Mossad agents in Argentina and brought to justice in Jerusalem.

This was the Jewish people, just 15 years after the Holocaust, declaring to the world:

We will not be victims forever.
We will find you.
We will bring you to justice.

From the gas chambers to the defendant’s dock in Israel — that is the arc of Jewish history.

The defenseless, scattered exiles became a sovereign nation that reaches across continents to settle its accounts.

And we still do.

Am Yisrael Chai.

[Henshi @HenshiG]

In September 1943, Italy fell under German occupation. The SS hunted Jews for deportation to Auschwitz.

In Assisi, a 32-year-old Franciscan friar named Rufino Niccacci—peasant-born, Guardian of San Damiano Monastery, and someone who had never met a Jew—received an order from Bishop Giuseppe Nicolini.

“We are hiding Jews in every monastery and convent in Assisi.”

“If we’re caught, we’ll be shot,” Rufino replied.

“Yes,” the bishop said. “As many as can come.”

Rufino accepted.

What followed was one of the war’s most daring rescues. Jews fleeing from Rome, Florence, and the north poured into Assisi.

Rufino hid them across 26 monasteries and convents—including the Basilica of Saint Francis and ancient cloistered houses that had never admitted outsiders.

They disguised Jews as monks and nuns. Rufino taught them Latin prayers, how to walk, pray, and sit in chapel. Children memorized Catholic rites they didn’t understand.

A local souvenir shop owner, Luigi Brizi, and his son printed hundreds of flawless fake identity cards, claiming the bearers were from already-liberated southern Italy.

The SS raided repeatedly. They searched monasteries, convents, and homes. They found nothing.

For eight months, an entire town kept the secret. Not a single betrayal. A German colonel, devout Catholic Valentin Müller, was stationed there. He loved Assisi’s churches, attended Mass, and even toured holy sites with Rufino—never knowing (or never acknowledging) the hundreds of hidden Jews around him. He successfully petitioned to make Assisi a protected hospital town, removing combat troops.

Inside the convents, quiet miracles occurred. Jews observed Yom Kippur with the nuns’ blessing; the nuns prepared the breaking-fast meal. Rufino arranged Hebrew lessons for the children, ensuring they could still practice their faith while pretending to be Catholic.

“They were children of God,” he later said. “What else were we supposed to do?”

The network nearly broke in May 1944 when the Bishop’s secretary, Father Aldo Brunacci, was arrested and interrogated. He revealed nothing. Vatican pressure secured his release.

One month later, on June 16, 1944, the Allies liberated Assisi. All 300 hidden Jews walked out alive. Not one had been caught or deported.

They had been sheltered by hundreds of nuns, priests, and townspeople who knew the penalty: priests across Europe were being executed for less.

One informant could have doomed them all. It never happened.

After the war, Rufino returned to quiet Franciscan life. He founded a settlement for poor Christian and Jewish families, served as a parish priest, and avoided fame.

In 1974, Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations. He planted a tree in Israel and quietly reunited with one of the women he had saved.

He died in 1976 at 65, asking to be cremated in solidarity with Holocaust victims. The Church buried him traditionally. Today, few outside Assisi know his name.

Yet his legacy endures in the thousands of descendants of those 300 saved souls.

An entire town proved it was possible to choose humanity over fear.

No collaborators. No betrayals. No exceptions.

They did not yield.

May all of their memories be a blessing, especially Friar Rufino Nicacci.

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

100% there is no genocide in Gaza. No eradication project. People confused about what the word means is culturally appalling and dangerous for the future of western society. The confusion has indeed been engineered by people know what they are doing. No genocide does not mean simply too much death and destruction in war. It is about intent and action to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Sam Harris @MakingSenseHQ is spot on.