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joelhs.bsky.social
Professor of Religion, Sarah Lawrence College. PhD in Religious Studies, University of Chicago. One of those liberal arts professors JD Vance calls “the enemy.” Probably a globalist elite. Thing-in-itself hating Jew. He/Him/הוא/ער
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Also reinventing antisemitic visual tropes and redeploying them against Muslims.

submitted 1 hour ago • 0 comments

Bratislava Castle this morning.

submitted 1 hour ago • 1 comment

Love when non-Jewish politicians tell Jews how we should be feeling.

submitted 2 hours ago • 2 comments

"America Deported Her for Publishing a Book Titled ‘Lesbian Love.’ Years Later, She Was Murdered by the Nazis for Being Jewish" www.smithsonianmag.com/history/amer...

submitted 13 hours ago • 1 comment

As opposed to Amichai Chikli himself, who is enabling antisemitism against the Diaspora by hosting flashy conferences in Jerusalem where he invites historically antisemitic European far-right parties to get kosher seals of approval from the Israeli government.

submitted 13 hours ago • 2 comments

Even if you are not a fan of Mamdani, comparing him to Karl Lueger is so historically illiterate I don't even know where to start. (www.ynetnews.com/article/ryzv...)

submitted 15 hours ago • 12 comments

It's no surprise that the far-right has been more effective at using AI-generated art than any other political faction thus far. There's no more need to find actual images of the glorious past to which you want to return when you can just generate it. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/t...

submitted 18 hours ago • 2 comments

And people really try to tell me Freud is archaic...

submitted 19 hours ago • 0 comments

Breaking news: Jews have a disagreement about a political candidate.

submitted 19 hours ago • 1 comment

So many people are going to suffer so unnecessarily because of this decision.

submitted 19 hours ago • 1 comment

A lot of the people who want to make this argument want to argue that "true antisemitism" is nonpolitical hatred of Jews just as Jews, utterly disconnected from any ideological understanding of what Jews as a community represent. But that has never been how antisemitism actually functions.

submitted 19 hours ago • 1 comment

A lot of major American Jewish orgs want to be seen as major American civic organizations akin to, say, the Brennan Center for Justice, but actually behave more like diaspora organizations like NORAID that raised money for the IRA or the Serbian Unity Congress that raised money for Serbian militias.

submitted 20 hours ago • 1 comment

"Oops! Sorry about that!" www.reuters.com/business/med...

submitted 20 hours ago • 1 comment

Reminder that late 19th/early 20th century nationalist antisemitism is not just a hatred of Jews qua Jews, but a detailed worldview about rootless transnational border-crossers, and the associated fluidity of both ideologies and financial capital, as threats to the hard borders of the nation-state.

submitted 21 hours ago • 1 comment

Trump won 26% of the total US Jewish vote last November. Zohran Mamdani won at least 20% of the NYC Jewish vote in the primary this week. Whose Jewish supporters get portrayed as marginal to the community, and whose get to portray themselves as an important bloc?

submitted 21 hours ago • 2 comments

This is, for them, a feature, not a bug: www.thebulwark.com/p/teaching-t...

submitted 21 hours ago • 0 comments

Speaking as an extremely Jewish person without a "distinctive Jewish surname," I find this methodology... problematic. (www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/u...)

submitted 23 hours ago • 13 comments

As a Jew from New York, I’ve never expected that the NYPD would be there to protect me, but that’s because it’s well-documented that neo-Nazi and far-right groups are dramatically overrepresented in law enforcement in the US. www.reuters.com/investigates...

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I'm glad that the "New York Times" is portraying this as a genuine rupture among Jews, and not just portraying all Jews as a monolithic bloc opposed to this candidate, like so many other media sources are.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

There is a lot of Islamophobia, a lot of anti-Palestinian racism, and a lot of antisemitism in the US right now, but somehow Trump has managed to combine all of them into a single post. It's almost impressive.

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

"A German court overturned a ban Tuesday on a far-right German magazine that frequently espouses antisemitic and anti-immigrant rhetoric." www.jta.org/2025/06/25/g...

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

I wish American Jewish organizations that rightly want Americans to take antisemitism seriously would equally consider how much their rhetoric about Zohran Mamdani reinforces Islamophobia.

submitted 1 day ago • 26 comments

A Ukrainian scholar told me today, “We need to start doing queer theory here because all the worst people in the world want to keep us from doing it.”

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

This is a take we are almost certainly going to hear for real from someone.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

My guess is that when the final numbers come out, we will find that Zohran Mamdani got at least as high a percentage of the Jewish vote in the primary as Trump got last November in the 2024 election. Pay attention to which Jews get portrayed as a marginal minority in the community and which do not.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I think many exaggerate the influence of Israel-Palestine on American domestic elections, and most NYC Democrats were not thinking about it when voting. But at the very least, Mamdani’s victory shows a substantial number of Democrats no longer view strong pro-Palestine activism as disqualifying.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

I cannot stress enough that this person is the president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, and part of the selection committee for the Genesis Prize.

submitted 1 day ago • 4 comments

What is the overlap of the people who think free baby baskets to newborns is intolerable socialism and the people worried the American birth rate is too low?

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

This is my first time abroad since in Trump's second term, and I was worried that as an American, I would have to apologize everywhere I went for the US gov, and explain that I don't support it and didn't vote for it. But with the political direction Europe is going, most people just understood.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

I’m at a conference on Gender and Sexuality in Eastern European Judaism at a Ukrainian university, and a professor from this university just said, “We’re fighting for the ability to continue to hold conferences like this one. Russian universities would never permit a conference on Gender Studies.”

submitted 1 day ago • 2 comments

A man is dying. His granddaughter asks, Where were you born? Austria-Hungary Where did you go to school? Poland Where were you married? The Ukrainian SSR Where were your children born? The German Reich, then USSR. Where will you die? Ukraine. Wow! You sure moved around! What? I never left the city!

submitted 1 day ago • 7 comments

Explored a castle this morning.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

A lot of people I speak to about it seem to genuinely not know that the largest Jewish community in the world by city proper is not any city in Israel. It's New York City. And I don't foresee that changing any time soon.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict that the most Jewish city on earth is not in fact going to see a mass exodus of Jews in the next few years. But there may be a few select Jewish people who leave and make a very public thing out of it.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Will the RJC do an overheated "leaving New York" essay like Lena Dunham did?

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Good to see that the Republican Jewish Coalition is telling Jews to "evacuate" the most Jewish city on earth outside of Israel.

submitted 2 days ago • 8 comments

This is absolutely the right message.

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

I feel like you can tell a lot about a person by which of Zohran Mamdani’s parents is better known to them: Mahmood Mamdani or Mira Nair.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

Guess centrist Democrats are going to have to do some soul-searching about why they got behind a scandal-plagued sexual harasser.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

I met a Ukrainian man tonight who told me that his in-laws live about 10-15 kilometers from the front. I asked him if they relocated, and he said, "They won't leave. There are still potatoes to harvest."

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

This is not the sign of a healthy communal leadership group that can handle pluralism and dissent within the community they claim to represent: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Had a three-hour dinner tonight with a bunch of Ukrainian professors, and after enough brandy, they all started telling me stories about their former students who graduated university, went off to the front, and got killed by Russia. Now I am in tears at the end of the night.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Me: “I know I’m the only American scholar at this conference here in Ukraine, but I just need you to know, I do not in any way support the current US government…” Professor seated across from me: “Sir, you’re talking to a scholar from Hungary.”

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments