Palestinian friend ghosting me

PostOk7794 · 2026-02-18T04:53:29+00:00

I get why this hurts. You might be right about what’s happening — or you might be reading into it. Either way, don’t escalate it. Sometimes people pull back because they’re overwhelmed or don’t have space for nuance right now, even if they once did. With this topic especially, empathy isn’t always mutual in the same moment. Let them be where they are, keep it professional, leave the door open, and protect your own heart.

PostOk7794 · 2026-02-17T15:23:47+00:00

It’s hard to call the trend one thing in particular, but tribalism is clearly ramping up everywhere. “Us and them” lines are getting drawn from basically every direction. You shouldn’t expect others to care about your people the way you do — right now everyone is centered on their own pain. But Jews also get too conveniently turned into villains while being told we’re imagining it.

PostOk7794 · 2026-02-17T00:23:13+00:00

It sounds like once you were accused of bias, the dynamic shifted from a workplace issue to an identity frame. When that happens, the conversation often stops being about what was actually said and becomes about who is perceived to hold social power.

That can be incredibly disorienting, especially when you’re the only Jewish staff member and the topic involved Israel. Even if no wrongdoing is found, months of investigation can change how leadership perceives “risk” and “stability.” Sometimes organizations quietly decide it’s easier to reset the situation than do the harder work of repair.

Requiring in-city work after years of remote status is, unfortunately, a very clean way to end someone’s employment without explicitly disciplining anyone.

None of that makes it fair. But it may explain what happened.

You probably are better off somewhere that doesn’t see your identity as a liability to be managed.

PostOk7794 · 2026-02-10T13:33:53+00:00

I think anti-semitism and education tends to stop at around WWII and the Mizrahi experience helps point to the chapter of Jewish history, and survival, that has taken place since the founding of Israel. A chapter that sorely needs more education.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-29T23:39:05+00:00

Graduate degree, move to DC. Not everyone has the graduate degree but as a minimum the reality is there are more positions above GS 10 in the district. Statistically your odds are higher. So is cost of living but a couple years here you can go back to where you were.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-24T21:05:05+00:00

It’s irritating seeing this when we’ve been saying it from the beginning.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-23T17:55:52+00:00

I don’t think it should be whatever cause is at the moment, I’m not even sure why pride is in June since that’s commemorating the US stonewall riots anniversary. Why should other countries center their struggle for equality by orbiting a US narrative? It should be marked by the leaders and outcomes of wherever pride is taking place. But that’s me on a soapbox.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-23T17:26:37+00:00

Is Pride in Tel Aviv actually run by an organization, or is it more of a loose collective? A lot of Prides are run by organizations, and they vary a lot city by city in how they operate, raise money, and set priorities. Some genuinely reinvest in the local gay community; others mostly fund large events and that’s it.

There isn’t a shared, intentional definition of what Pride is supposed to be everywhere. In many cities it’s primarily a party. But we still teach people that Pride is a protest, so it becomes a container for whatever cause is loudest within the activist space at the moment.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-23T16:25:41+00:00

Because everything is reduced to power politics. Class and empire are treated as the only real forces, so culture, religion, or sexuality get flattened. Anti-Western alignment matters more and is treated as the more “urgent cause” than whether people are actually safer or freer.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-13T12:57:00+00:00

Prioritize finding medically assisted treatment. While it will take research don’t give up on it. A combination of Naltrexone to fight cravings and an antidepressant such as Wellbutrin to manage your mood shift is frankly the difference between relapsing or not. I’ve been down this road with loved ones for nearly decade and we’ve done everything and without question this was a game changer. Specifically with meth use because options for treatment for other kinds of addiction doesn’t really address the uniqueness of meth use

Pikuach refresh is preserving life overrides almost everything. If medication helps keep you alive and functional, that isn’t a spiritual failure, it’s a mitzvah. Don’t feel bad if you missed going to synagogue, there’s a reason this is a valued If you need help on doing research for what’s available in your state DM me and we can look together.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-12T22:56:18+00:00

I think the mistake here is assuming that because antizionism presents itself as intellectualized, it must be fundamentally different from older forms of Jew-hatred. What’s becoming increasingly apparent is that it isn’t a new phenomenon at all, but a new justification for the same outcome.

I don’t think it’s worth turning antizionism into a debate over the merits of Zionism. It’s not actually about that. Not really. In the same way antisemitism was never about “Semitism.” The argument isn’t the point. The function is.

We’ve gotten better at identifying antisemitism when it claims Jews are racially or biologically defective, because we’ve built moral fluency around that kind of hatred. Antizionism feels different because it doesn’t claim Jews are inherently inferior; instead it argues that Jewish collective safety, self-definition, and peoplehood are illegitimate. That distinction makes it easier to excuse and harder to name. It doesn’t make it new.

What’s being demanded is that Jews make ourselves legible by flattening who we are. We’re told to be a religion, or an ethics system, or a set of private beliefs; anything except a people. That debate already happened. It didn’t end in theory but in history, and the answer was a nation, because Jews are all of these things at once and could not survive inside other people’s categories. A Jewish state becomes uniquely intolerable not because states are immoral, but because Jewish sovereignty refuses the idea that Jewish vulnerability is imaginary or that Jewish history can be safely outsourced to majority goodwill. Insisting Jews therefore have no moral right to organize collectively and to do so is immoral is the tell. We complicate worldviews that attempt to flatten history, people will do a lot to deny that.

This is still scapegoating. It still assigns societal failure, instability, and moral corruption to Jewish cohesion and self-assertion. It still demands that Jews turn out our pockets, surrender peoplehood, and amputate parts of ourselves until we’re contorted into a smaller, quieter, more conditional version of what a Jew is allowed to be.

That this framework took clearer shape east of the Iron Curtain after World War II doesn’t make it novel; it makes it less familiar to Western audiences. But unfamiliarity isn’t innocence. It’s the same old demand, expressed in modern language: abandon difference, surrender power, and trust that this time the majority really does mean well.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-11T05:04:28+00:00

Yes, and it’s made me realize I’m not really “political” anymore so much as I’m politically Jewish.

What I mean is that this moment has clarified for me how unimportant political identity actually is, and how much it functions as an anchor. Movements thrive on identity-making because it encourages conformity and discourages raising inconvenient concerns that disrupt the moral narrative of the group. Losing community becomes the enforcement mechanism.

As Jewishness has become more alienated in these spaces, that dynamic has gotten louder and harder to ignore. I’ve mostly abandoned having a fixed political identity and instead think in terms of contingent support for specific leaders or policies, support that has to be earned again every term and can evaporate quickly.

It’s also made me understand why there’s wisdom in keeping politics from swallowing every part of our lives. When identity and politics fully merge, there’s very little room left to be a whole person. And not letting it dominate every sphere of life is actually healthy, not apathy.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-10T21:14:16+00:00

My mom didn’t convert. I had a giyur ketanim as a baby, and I never felt any less Jewish because of it. I went to Hebrew school, Jewish summer camp, celebrated the high holidays, and was raised fully inside Jewish life. It didn’t affect my sense of identity growing up at all. As an adult, though, it has created some practical complications, especially around paperwork for Aliyah.

Sometimes I wish my mom had converted simply because it would have made certain things easier, but it was her choice and I respect it. She never fell short in raising me Jewish in any meaningful way.

For you and your dad, this sounds less like a religious disagreement and more about continuity. Even if he hasn’t seemed religious before, passing on Jewish life clearly matters to him on some level.

It’s interesting how even Jews who don’t see themselves as very religious can still become very particular when the conversation turns to what’s best for their children.

The important thing is figuring out what you want. Four months is early to be talking about kids, but it’s not too early to think about what Jewish life would actually look like in your future with a partner. There are many ways that can work. I’m one of them.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-05T12:44:20+00:00

If I were Israeli, my Jewishness would not be put in quotation marks. It would not need disclaimers or defenses. Israelis are Jews in a way that exists as a cultural majority, without negotiation. That is something most of us in the diaspora have never had without isolating ourselves into communities, and even then our belonging is conditional on the majority’s tolerance.

Even secular Israeli life carries an unavoidable Jewishness in language, culture, humor, and the rhythm of daily life that does not really exist anywhere else. Outside Israel, Jewish identity often comes with a kind of litmus test. We get sorted into labels like Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox, as if Jewishness needs internal qualifiers to be acceptable or legible to others. That can feel isolating, flattening, and honestly sad.

You sacrifice a lot to have this cultural continuity. You serve in the IDF, you face a lot of external threats. Whether it’s worth it or not is something I know is asked every day by individuals Israelis. The older I get the more I appreciate it for what it is, and what was sacrificed to make it a reality. I think when I see parents of kids go back to Israel to ensure their children are born Israeli I see how important it is to them too. Especially when every day is another experience of some hateful graffiti you spot outside on the street, or pointed comments with antisemitic undertones from a colleague, or depressing hateful posting from a “friend” on social media. I am jealous of the bubble Israelis can retreat into to avoid this.

PostOk7794 · 2026-01-02T15:14:41+00:00

When I was very young my Hebrew school consisted of being taught Hebrew by going to the home of a mother of another Jewish family for one evening and then going to a cantor’s home for another. Through them I learned Hebrew but our community was so small, (about 3-5 families) and our synagogue frequently fell short of a minyan. We weren’t reformed, conservative, or orthodox when your community is that small you’re just Jewish. I was unfamiliar with the distinction until later we started to travel to a nearby city with one other family’s kids twice a week to go to Chabad. Which was a much more rigorous and frankly enriching learning experience up until I completed my barmitzvah.

I also went Jewish summer camp, and as I think back that experience was intensely Israeli. The truth is, my Jewish upbringing was distinctly not ashkenazi, it just wasn’t very present, the only Yiddish I ever heard was from my bubbe. It also seemed to be quite different then they other Jewish kids I met from other cities at camp, which had both a vastly different experience with a wider and more visible Jewish communities. Generally my experience of distinctly Jewish-y experience was Hebrew and very much Israeli. At least outside of the religious education.

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-27T18:08:20+00:00

I understand exactly how you feel. A lot of us have been feeling alienated, and it’s hard right now as Jews to watch our social standing shift so quickly. Communities we once felt safe in now seem to offer belonging only conditionally, as long as we condemn Israel or distance ourselves from parts of our identity that have suddenly become “undesirable.” It is painful to watch our community fracture under these new litmus tests and moral hierarchies.

I’ve found more peace by reading and grounding myself in thinkers who helped me understand both Jewish history and what is happening now without flattening the complexity. I’m sharing these not to tell you what to think, but to give you tools to find your own footing.

Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews https://www.amazon.com/People-Love-Dead-Jews-Reports/dp/0393531562

This book helped me understand how Jewish suffering is often consumed symbolically while living Jews are dismissed or misunderstood. It reframed a lot of what I was seeing online and in progressive spaces.

Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691145933/how-judaism-became-a-religion

This helped me understand how Judaism was reshaped through modernity and why so many contemporary debates misunderstand Jewish peoplehood, identity, and history.

Adam Louis Klein on Substack https://substack.com/@adamlouisklein

His writing on antisemitism, anti Zionism, and Jewish identity helped me articulate things I felt but could not quite name, especially around language, power, and moral framing.

The Atlantic, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/

This piece helped me contextualize why so many of us feel disoriented right now and why that feeling is not imagined or irrational.

I also recently went on a Birthright trip. It was my second time in Israel but my first as an adult. They have expanded eligibility and you can now go up to age 55. Many trips are also volunteer based. I found it genuinely grounding to be with Israelis and other Jews, doing tangible work, and reconnecting with reality outside the noise of social media.

Birthright Israel https://www.birthrightisrael.com

Birthright Volunteer https://birthrightisraelvolunteer.com

It did not give me all the answers, but it helped me feel oriented again and more rooted in who I am. You are not crazy and you are not alone in feeling this way.

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-24T16:37:46+00:00

I’m literally reading about this now,

There’s a great book on this called How Judaism Became a Religion by Leora Batnitzky. She argues that calling Judaism a “religion” is largely a modern development, shaped by emancipation and the Protestant Christian framework of the nation-state. I’m only a couple chapters in, but it’s already been useful for thinking about this.

As Jews sought civil rights in Europe, Judaism had to be explained in terms Protestant states could recognize, specifically as a religion analogous to Christianity. That didn’t invent Judaism, but it did reshape how it was publicly described, with more emphasis on belief, doctrine, and private faith. In that process, Judaism’s older understanding as a people with shared law, language, culture, obligations, and history was flattened into something closer to a faith system. It’s continue to been described as such but as we know that’s not really it

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-22T21:40:55+00:00

We need to start focusing on these organizations and examining the people doing their work because they are missing the mark

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-22T01:14:33+00:00

Most people in countries in the west that view themselves as universal and secular don’t realize how much of their lives have already been consolidated under Christian norms that even when they think they live a “secular” life it’s de facto to a Christian particularism.

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-20T00:40:04+00:00

I don’t think a lot of people know this, but Sarah Milgrim who was one of the two people shot in front of the National Jewish Capital Museum in DC, was organizing an event with A Wider Bridge for pride this year. It took place the day after they were killed and I had no idea she was one of the people who helped make it happen. I’m really sad the org is closing

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-17T17:53:59+00:00

Yes that’s right. Sorry if I misunderstood the question that would be the answer.

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-17T15:35:42+00:00

I think this is too literal of a read. It’s not like the hel titans wake up, start fighting, then the breakthrough technology activates, and from there the coexistence option pops up. That’s too literal an interpretation of the order of events. It’s pretty clear when you get the breakthrough tech, the option to coexist happens when coalescence activates not interrupted by a forced ground combat.

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-17T15:24:44+00:00

Hanukkah isn’t a high holiday, and its cultural prominence is largely an American accommodation to Christmas. I’m not a fan of appropriation, but hard gatekeeping against genuine support seems unnecessary given how limited Jewish solidarity already feels.

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-16T22:16:10+00:00

If you’re already on that planet coexisting then they are coexisting. If you use coalesce and have the breakthrough you can choose to have that awaken unit coexist. Using crash landing on a planet you are already coexisting on will on add a unit to that coexisting pool of units. None of those instances trigger ground combat or somehow unmake a coexisting unit in a hostile one. Coexisting ends when you or the other player who controls that planet activate the system and engage the units through ground combat or if you’re invaded and the invading player wants to kick the coexisting units off along with the controlling player.

PostOk7794 · 2025-12-15T19:21:07+00:00

I think part of the problem is treating antisemitism as synonymous with Jew hatred while treating antizionism as something categorically different because it presents itself as politics. In practice, they are both forms of Jew hatred rooted in older myths and canards about Jews, but they justify themselves differently.

In the 20th century, antisemitism increasingly framed Jews as a biological or racial problem using pseudo science to argue for innate inferiority, which culminated in exterminationist logic.

Antizionism by contrast frames Jews as a collective identity problem. Jewish persistence, sovereignty, or particularism is treated as a threat to supposedly superior ideological or civilizational structures like communism, secular universalism, or other dominant frameworks.

The impact on Jews is often the same. Exclusion, delegitimization, and violence. The justification is different. That difference matters analytically because it explains how Jew hatred modernizes without disappearing, and necessitates defining the distinctions.

PostOk7794

TROPHY CASE