Ephraim

Husband. Father. Chassidic Jew. Nurse practitioner. Healthcare researcher. Bagpiper. Member of the #JewishResistance.

[Ephraim @BrooklynDNP]

Thank you @DanRather. This is a moment for Jewish solidarity with Black voices, and the use of our privilege to protect Black protesters. It was our honor and duty to arrange it. @ker_a_velt #tahaluchaforsocialjustice

[Dan Rather @DanRather]

Especially for anyone who lived in New York 30 years ago, this is remarkable. It is to know hope and to have faith in the generations who will lead us into the future. https://t.co/02tAonf72C

[Ephraim @BrooklynDNP]

@bradlander You mentioned many topics, but I’ll focus on just one. We CANNOT pretend the Bund has anything helpful to teach us. They had an idea, fair enough, they tried it, and it went up in smoke. Literally. The Bund ended in the crematoria. The idea failed. We MUST be clear about that!!

[Ihab Hassan @IhabHassane]

To all Western media, including pro-Palestine outlets: right now, thousands of Palestinian civilians are taking part in massive anti-Hamas protests across the Gaza Strip.

Stand with them. Carry their voices. Don't abandon them.

[shevereshtus @shevereshtus]

Brad Lander is not a Kapo. He's not even a bad person. In fact, he's trying to be a good Jew.

The problem is that he was robbed of an authentic Jewish education. He was raised to believe bagels, Seinfeld, chinese food on the 25th and liberalism are the sum total of Jewishness.

He wants to be a good person. He wants to be a good Jew. He wants to make his bubbe and zayde proud. I can guarantee you that he's not sitting around thinking 'How can I betray my people? How can I work against Jews, Torah, and Judaism?' He genuinely is trying to live up to his perception of what being a Jew and Jewishness means.

The issue is he was robbed of most of the tools that would have helped him do these things the Jewish way.

Don't blame Brad Lander. Blame the American Jewish establishment who decided that funding museums, galas, and Upper East Side cultural events was good enough to ensure Jewish continuity instead of trying to give each and every Jewish child a Jewish education.

He's a symptom, not the disease.

[Ephraim @BrooklynDNP]

@jaketapper Does @OsseChi have any thoughts on this? 🤬

[Ephraim @BrooklynDNP]

@ArielleLAngel I think the confusion is between Jewish people and Jewish communities. Plenty of people with Jewish grandparents support Lander. Few Jews who will be in a synagogue this shabbos do.

[Ephraim @BrooklynDNP]

@JFREJNYC Are we familiar with the term “sonderkommando” or the history of the “yuddenrat” in the Warsaw ghetto, and elsewhere? Because that historical context is necessary to under what is being said here, whether you agree with it or not.

[Shannon Watts @shannonrwatts]

As a liberal progressive, I would be fine with the party moving left if these wins were about Medicare for all, reproductive rights, universal childcare, taxing billionaires, and creating affordable housing, But they weren’t.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

A growing number of Gaza’s so‑called “journalists” (quite a few of whom are in fact militants with extensive evidence tying them to armed groups), “activists,” and online humanitarians are finally revealing the extent of their fraudulent work and corrupt narratives. As Gazans grow fed up with Hamas and push for the June 26 protests demanding an end to its rule, these same personalities are now inciting against ordinary Palestinians who want change.

The very people who had cameras ready for every Israeli strike, who filled Western feeds with dramatic footage and fiery commentary, are now silent at best – and at worst, demonizing and inciting against the fellow Gazans they once claimed to champion. The “pro‑Palestine” movement in the West, which uncritically elevated these figures as authentic voices, is watching its heroes parrot Hamas’s talking points: branding promoters of the protests as spies, collaborators, traitors, and agents of chaos.

For years, these Gaza‑based “influencers” pushed the “resistance” narrative to Western audiences because that’s what was in demand, while refusing to acknowledge Hamas’s abuses: aid theft, beatings, shootings, thuggery, hiding in hospitals, fighting from civilian areas. They said nothing against the terror group even as Gazans themselves took immense risks to speak out. Meanwhile, many of these same personalities leveraged the suffering of their own people to build brands, raise millions, launch businesses, steal donations, and in some cases leave Gaza for new lives abroad – all while opposing that very option for other Gazans to supposedly prevent ethnic cleansing.

These are the fraudulent “heroes” so many believed without question. Whether or not the June 26th protests are successful is irrelevant – pay close attention to those who support Gazans’ freedom from Hamas and those who oppose it.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

At long last, the UN Human Rights Council has formally acknowledged that Hamas in Gaza carried out executions, torture, improperly used medical facilities for terror purposes, and engaged in violent abuses against women and children after October 7. The report captures only a fraction of what actually occurred, in part because documenting these crimes is extraordinarily difficult and because Gazans fear retaliation if they report anything to the UN or other investigators. The findings on Hamas were buried beneath a long section on Israeli settler abuses in the West Bank, but even so, this marks a significant shift for an international body that has long struggled to speak plainly about Hamas’s brutality in Gaza.

Most importantly, the report acknowledges but barely scratches the surface of how extensively Hamas has weaponized Gaza’s medical infrastructure, embedding fighters in hospitals, using patients as shields, and turning civilian facilities into operational hubs. The UN even notes that Doctors Without Borders evacuated non-essential staff from Nasser Hospital because Hamas was interfering with the hospital’s operations.

When I shared this information, including testimonies from Gazans who documented Hamas’s fascistic behavior inside hospitals, and photos of fighters emerging from Nasser Hospital after the ceasefire, the online “pro-Palestine” chorus had nothing to offer except accusations of Zionist collaboration, accusations of betrayal, and personal insults. This UN report is an indictment not only of Hamas, a violent extremist terror organization responsible for immense suffering, but also of every activist, journalist, and academic who chose to look away. It shows that Hamas’s crimes were so egregious, so undeniable, that even a slow, hesitant, and often ineffectual body like the UNHRC could no longer pretend not to see them.

Shame on anyone who still defends Hamas or ever believed its violence constituted “resistance” on behalf of the Palestinian people.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

“Key Nazi officials”

Hasan Piker accidentally destroyed his own depraved argument that Hamas’s October 7th massacre was comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In Warsaw, Jewish rebels targeted the Nazi soldiers who were liquidating the ghetto and sending its inhabitants to extermination camps.

The Nazis indiscriminately targeted the Jewish civilians, including women and children.

If anything, Hamas, who on October 7th went from house to house murdering and raping innocent Jews, closely paralleled the actions of the Nazis.

He’s so close to getting it…

[ADL @ADL]

You can disagree with AIPAC and the policies it supports or oppose the presence of money in politics completely. But claiming that American officials who receive support from an American organization composed of Americans citizens are "bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu" invokes classic antisemitic rhetoric.

Such accusations call up the age-old dual loyalty trope that casts Jewish Americans as more loyal to Israel than their own country. This hateful undermines their civic credibility and marginalizes their voices in public life.

[Ephraim @BrooklynDNP]

@Timodc @jonfavs If BigOil lobby was funded by oil CEOs and regular gas car drivers your comparison would be fair. AIPAC is both rich donors and regular American (and only American) Jews who support Israel. Decrying AIPAC is quite literally decrying a plurality of American Jews’ political speech.

[Yardena Schwartz @yardenas]

Given Mayor Mamdani's contribution to the revisionist history that has replaced serious discussion of the Nakba - the catastrophe in which 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees - here's a mini history lesson on how that catastrophe unfolded. A 🧵

[Yaacov Behrman @ChabadLubavitch]

I have largely remained silent in public since January 1 because I believe criticism should be constructive and focused. But this post about the Nakba is deeply disturbing, not only because of its one sided and dishonest characterization of history, but also because it attempts to delegitimize Israel as a state even before 1967.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot argue that the “settlements”, which began after 1967 following Israel’s victory in a war against neighboring states, are the root cause of the conflict, condemn them relentlessly, and justify marches through Jewish neighborhoods in New York over so called “illegal” land sales in the West Bank, while simultaneously condemning the very founding of the State of Israel itself through a one sided narrative built on distortion and falsehoods.

It is also worth noting that while thousands of Arabs lived within Israel between 1948 and 1967, Jews were expelled from areas captured by invading Arab armies from neighboring countries. Those expelled included Jews whose families had legally owned and purchased land for hundreds of years.

Take, for example, the Tzemach synagogue in Jerusalem. In 1847, more than a hundred years earlier, followers of Chabad Lubavitch established and purchased the synagogue in Jerusalem’s Old City. During the 1948 war, the Old City fell under Jordanian control. The Jewish population was expelled, and Jews were denied access to Jerusalem, including the Tzemach Tzedek synagogue.

I really do not want to get too deep into the history because that is not my main point here. There can be disagreements and different perspectives about what happened and to whom, but the focus should be on achieving a long term peace in Israel and the region.

The tweet’s one sided narrative deepens division instead of advancing peace, coexistence, and understanding, and it should never have been posted by the mayor of New York City.

[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. 🧵

[NYTimes Communications @NYTimesPR]

@IsraelMFA @nytimes https://t.co/fWVXuRO4rK

[Moshe Emilio Lavi @MosheELavi]

Much has been written about @NickKristof's latest NYT opinion column over the past 24 hours, most of it focusing on the specific claims and their sourcing, but what I think deserves most attention is something broader: how this kind of journalism, whatever its intentions, ultimately makes accountability harder to achieve rather than easier, and harms the very people it claims to champion.

The principle that Israeli abuses should be investigated and condemned is not in dispute, and nobody serious is arguing otherwise. Israel is not above scrutiny, and in fact it operates under more intense international scrutiny than almost any country on earth, routinely held to standards applied nowhere else.

The problem here is something different entirely: the complete collapse of evidentiary standards the moment Israel is the subject.

This piece reads less like rigorous reporting and more like a catalogue of hearsay, unverifiable allegations, and activist claims stitched together into a sweeping moral indictment. Its sourcing leans heavily on Euro Med Human Rights Monitor, an organisation repeatedly criticised over extremist ties, disinformation, and deeply questionable methodology, yet treated throughout as a credible authority while its leadership openly engages in pro Hamas propaganda on X.

Worse, the same ecosystem of activists and self appointed “experts” that amplifies Euro Med’s claims online increasingly feeds narratives into more established organisations and media outlets, laundering deeply contested allegations into the appearance of institutional credibility.

The most severe claims are anonymous, uncorroborated, and presented in the emotional register of established fact rather than allegation, despite lacking meaningful evidentiary backing. Yet Kristof largely adopts them without serious scrutiny, publishing the piece in the Opinion section because even the already diminished evidentiary standards often applied to reporting on the Israeli Palestinian conflict would likely not suffice for it to pass as straight news reporting.

This approach doesn't strengthen accountability, it actively destroys it. When every allegation is immediately inflated into systematic rape and "standard operating procedure" before any serious verification, genuine investigation becomes harder rather than easier.

Real abuses, if they occurred, get buried beneath maximalist narratives so extreme that large portions of the public simply stop trusting any of it, and the people who actually suffered pay that price.

It also alienates the vast majority of Israelis and Jews worldwide, including the many who are perfectly capable of criticising Israeli policy and supporting investigations into misconduct, but who understandably recoil when accusations begin resembling modernised blood libels dressed up as human rights reporting. The framing matters enormously, and so does proportionality, and so does evidence.

Nor does any of this serve Palestinians. Atrocity inflation entrenches both sides deeper into defensive tribalism, and every dubious claim amplified by a prestigious outlet makes legitimate criticism easier to dismiss when it actually matters.

The timing compounds everything. On a day when documented reporting on Hamas sexual violence was again circulating, the NYT chose to run an opinion column built substantially on unverifiable anonymous testimony asserting that Israelis are conducting systemic rape campaigns, not as a rigorously evidenced investigative report but as an opinion piece with the imprimatur of the paper of record.

Kristof is not a naive bystander in any of this. In 2014 he used the full credibility of the NYT to repeatedly platform Somaly Mam, a Cambodian anti-trafficking activist whose harrowing personal story he championed across multiple columns, until it emerged that her backstory was substantially fabricated and he was forced to issue a public correction. When challenged this time around on his sourcing, corroboration, and methodology, he defaulted to bad faith engagement on social media rather than addressing the underlying concerns seriously.

It is the same pattern, playing out again in a different context. Real journalism requires skepticism, corroboration, and restraint applied consistently regardless of the subject, and when those standards disappear the moment Israel is involved, what remains is not human rights reporting but narrative activism wearing a journalist's costume that does far more harm than good to everyone it claims to serve.

[Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib @afalkhatib]

I have no doubt that since October 7 - amid the massive military operations in Gaza and the West Bank and the mass detention of thousands of Palestinians, from militants to civilians swept up in raids - incidents of sexual abuse have occurred in Israeli prisons. Such violations are not unique to Israel; the U.S. committed them in Abu Ghraib, UN peacekeepers have been implicated across Africa, and militaries and armed groups throughout the Middle East, Asia, and beyond have long histories of sexual violence.

What is important to understand in the Israeli context is that in the post–October 7 climate, the scale of dehumanization toward Palestinians, combined with the widespread belief among Israelis that ordinary Palestinians were complicit in the mass rape of Israeli women, created an implicit permission structure for some to ignore rules, bypass oversight, and commit abuses on a larger scale.

It is also fair to scrutinize the sourcing of Nicholas Kristof's NYT opinion article. Some cited entities and individuals, including the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and Shaiel Ben Ephraim, have troubling records on accuracy, conduct, and associations, and in my own case, have engaged in personal attacks and even doxxed my family. They are not credible sources, even if the article relied on others as well. Many Palestinian testimonies were anonymous due to shame and fear of retaliation for reporting sexual torture, which complicates verification but does not automatically invalidate their claims.

These allegations require a transparent, independent investigation to determine which claims are substantiated, whether they point to systemic abuse or isolated misconduct, and what accountability is warranted. At the same time, this reporting must not be weaponized to stoke antisemitism or collective blame. These are alleged acts by individuals, not an indictment of all Israelis or the Jewish people.

@NickKristof @nytimes @nytopinion

[Haviv Rettig Gur @havivrettiggur]

One final point worth making: The timing for Kristof's oped was to get ahead of this new report on Hamas.

In other words, he wasn't trying to reveal sexual crimes, but to cover for them.

And it worked. It always does.

https://t.co/w0zK1JAxjV

The UN secretary general is soon going to decide which countries should be on a UN blacklist for sexual violence.

Kristof is campaigning to get Israel on the list, while getting Hamas's crimes off the public agenda.

[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.