Sisyphus' Boulder in Boulder Colorado

The Struggle For The Soul Of America

“As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” - Abraham Lincoln

Some of you may be wondering why I’ve been so quiet lately. It’s not because I’ve run out of things to say, God knows the world hasn’t run out of things worth saying something about.

But I’ve grown tired. Tired of writing about controversy for the sake of controversy. Tired of watching people behave like emotional looters, rummaging through tragedy in search of something to be outraged by, performatively, before moving on to the next fire.

So instead, I started writing songs. About people who thrive on controversy. The kind of people who wouldn’t recognize sincerity if it bit them on their curated, carefully-lit social feeds.

But today… I’m compelled to speak again.

When October 7th happened when innocent civilians were slaughtered in their homes, and the so-called moral conscience of the left responded with a deafening, calculated silence… I was confused. Naïve, perhaps.

When the war began, and those same voices began parroting propaganda so cartoonishly false it would make Baghdad Bob blush, replacing the word “Jew” with “Zionist”, as though that semantic sleight-of-hand somehow sterilized the hate, I thought: Surely now… now people of good character will speak up.

They didn’t.

And then, when antisemitic hate crimes in the U.S. hit historic highs, not just “concerning” levels, historic levels, I thought: Now. Now there will be marches. Now there will be vigils. Now will be the moment when left and right, black and white, Muslim and Jew, all stand shoulder to shoulder and say: Not here. Not again.

But the truth is… among all the options on the menu, we’ve chosen apathy.

The total and unbroken silence of the progressive left on the sustained, direct assaults against America’s Jewish community over the past four years can no longer be dismissed as mere oversight. At some point, silence stops being neutrality. It becomes consent. Acceptance. A not-so-subtle signal that, frankly, they just don’t care.

These are the same people who decry violence in the home, in the streets, in the economy. Who hate guns. Who were apoplectic when America fought a war on terror. And yet they seem fine with mass casualty events as long as those casualties don’t interfere with the odds of winning the next election.

You want to know America’s great failing? It isn’t capitalism. It isn’t even imperialism. It’s this: We no longer know what we stand for.

We can’t articulate our values, not honestly, not without a caveat, or a hashtag, or a think-piece poised to walk it all back.

The only value we seem to grasp now is rage.

Rage from the right, red-faced, flag-draped, and marching toward ruin.

And rage from the left, the smug, self-congratulatory kind. The rage of a college sophomore who just discovered Howard Zinn and now thinks themselves a geopolitical genius.

We are a nation screaming into a hall of mirrors, each side convinced only they are real. In that chaos, truth becomes radioactive. Empathy becomes optional. And yes—Jews become expendable. Again.

They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And lately, the rhyme scheme is sounding painfully familiar. Maybe it’s time, past time, for Americans to stop shouting and start asking: What do we actually value?

Me? I was for the war. Then I was against it. Then I was for it again. I’m penciling in more opposition for next week.

That makes me a flip-flopper. And thank God.

Anyone watching a war should be a flip-flopper. Because war, no matter what your favorite influencer says, isn’t a Netflix drama. It’s not color-coded. It’s not clean. War is death. That’s its design. It’s not a moral lesson, it’s a moral failure.

And still, sometimes… it’s necessary.

But that never, never, justifies the death of innocents. Ever.

Those are real people in Gaza. With real lives. Real families. Real ghosts that will haunt the living. And anyone who talks about “breaking eggs” to make some geopolitical omelet isn’t serious. They’re sociopathic.

But perhaps the most dangerous byproduct of war isn’t death. It’s indifference.

That creeping numbness to suffering.

And in this latest chapter, that indifference has been loudest, most hypocritically—from the American left. A group that prides itself on compassion… until the victims don’t fit the aesthetic.

Let’s be blunt: many of these people don’t know a damn thing about the Middle East. Or Zionism. Or Jewish diaspora. Or the long, ugly history of antisemitism in this country, from the right, yes, but also from the left.

But ignorance, sadly, isn’t the real sin. Indifference is.

Indifference dressed up as activism. Indifference that cosplays as justice.

Because as long as the hate is aimed at people they fear, people they don’t understand, they’ll call it “resistance.” They’ll call it “decolonization.” They’ll call it “righteous.”

Now yes, the right has its monsters: the Klan, the neo-Nazis, the Westboro Baptist Church.

But at least they’re honest. You don’t have to guess with a man in a white hood.

The left? They just wrap their bigotry in a thesaurus and a press release.

But the message is the same: You’re not welcome here.

And the fix is not to dig deeper ideological trenches, to carve bunkers out of Twitter bios and grad school jargon. The fix is to look up. To look around. And to say, without stammer or spin:

Murder is not activism.
Hate is not justice.
And silence is not solidarity.

So I ask again:

If we care about children in Gaza, truly care, can we help them by burning children in Boulder?

If we cherish civil liberties, can we really stay silent when someone is murdered in broad daylight, not in the West Bank, but in Ventura?

Can we claim to be anti-fascists while Holocaust survivors are being burned alive in Colorado?

What do we actually value? Do we want peace?
Or do we just want vengeance with a better PR team?

And if peace is the goal, then we have to ask: What does it look like?

Because this country wasn’t founded simply to escape oppression, it was founded on the radical hope that the ancient hatreds of the old world wouldn’t poison this one.

If that’s how they felt about Europe, imagine what John Adams might say about Israel and Palestine today.

And yet, here we are.

The truth is, American Jews have done something quietly heroic. They’ve integrated. Built lives. Raised families. Contributed to every corner of American life, asking only for the dignity of being left alone in peace.

Now they’re being hunted. Not just physically, but morally. Asked to answer for a war they didn’t start, in a country they don’t live in, for the sin of existing visibly.

It’s time, long past time, that those who claim to love peace, who say they stand with the marginalized, begin a serious conversation with their neighbors. Especially those who came here carrying ancestral grief, and sometimes, ancestral grudges.

Because when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, it wasn’t in Gaza.
It was in a hotel kitchen. In Los Angeles.

When the observation deck of the Empire State Building became a war zone, that wasn’t Tel Aviv. That was Manhattan.

And just two weeks ago, when two Jewish kids were gunned down in D.C., that wasn’t “over there.” That was here.

When do we stop pretending these are isolated incidents?

Don’t you think we should’ve had that conversation by now?

I do.

And if there’s any hope, any, for Palestinians, for Arab Americans, and for every human being caught in the middle, it lies in this:

Violence will not bring peace.

You cannot separate Jews from Israel any more than you can separate Egyptians from Egypt, or the Irish from their island. And Jews having a home is not a slight against Palestinian’s having a home. And while not every anti-Zionist is antisemitic, antisemitism isn’t a deal-breaker for them either. Neither does violence, and hate crimes.

When we fail to do this we end up with a type of racism lite. All the hate, half the calories.

And it will not resurrect the dead.
It will not build a homeland.
It will not make anyone safer.

Not there.
Not here.

Because as the old saying goes:

“You don’t make peace with your friends. You make it with your enemies.”

In just a few months, my life will change forever. I’ll become a father.

And my greatest hope, for my child and for yours, is that we finally learn to set down our phones, and start a conversation.

That we remember values aren’t downloaded, they’re built. Together.

I want a world where peaceful disagreement is the gateway to civil discourse, and civil discourse is how we grow new values.

But a community as small as the Jewish one cannot do this alone. Nor should they have to.

It’s going to take you.
Yes, you. The person reading this.

You don’t need to know the full history of the region, or 5,000 years of Jewish history. You just need to know this:

Anyone who thinks more death will solve this is not serious about solving it.

And if we can’t have that conversation…

Then maybe, just maybe, we were never serious about peace at all. And perhaps Lincoln was right. Maybe we on the left should abandon our presence of being peace loving, forward thinkers.