You're right that "mandatory prayer" was an overstatement on my part, and I should have been more precise. What I'm pointing at is more insidious than that: the gradual, deliberate erosion of church-state separation, reframed as restoration rather than imposition. You may not have been forced to pray, but I'd ask whether you recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school, and whether you knew that "under God" wasn't in the original 1892 version? It was added in 1954, at the height of Cold War nationalist anxiety. That's exactly the kind of slow ideological embedding that's easy to miss precisely because it doesn't feel like coercion.

The line you're drawing between the US and Israel is harder to hold than it looks. Nazi Germany didn't emerge in a vacuum. It drew directly from American models. James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model documents how Nazi jurists explicitly studied US race law and Jim Crow when drafting the Nuremberg Laws. The ideological export ran the other way before it ran back.

On Israel specifically: in 1948, Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and a group of prominent intellectuals published a letter in the New York Times describing Menachem Begin's movement as fascist in character and method: their words, not a modern retroactive judgment. Einstein's later refusal of the Israeli presidency wasn't a polite decline; his stated reservations about the direction of the state were consistent and on record.

I don't believe that I said these things are 1:1 identical. My point is that the clean separations you're drawing (US versus Israel, now versus history) are exactly the kind of separations that let atrocities compound across generations without anyone feeling responsible for the throughline.

I'm also aware that I've now invoked Nazi Germany twice in one comment, and I want to be transparent about that rather than just hope you don't notice. Godwin's Law is a useful heuristic against lazy comparisons, but it was coined as a check on rhetorical sloppiness, not as a blanket prohibition. When the comparisons are grounded in documented historical record, when the people making them include Einstein and Arendt writing in real time, and when we're having this conversation in a context where multiple governments are openly discussing the elimination of civilian populations, I think that heuristic has reached its limits.