Husband; disinformation exposer par excellance; investor; former entrepreneur; proud Zionist.
Washington, D.C.
Joined April 2023
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Gregg Rosenberg retweeted
This is such an interesting response to my explanation for Israeli legal tricks to avoid the religious designation of mamzerut that it's worth answering.
Not because the complaint matters. And yes, it's vaguely "anti-Jewish medieval polemic" style. But because the answer is interesting.
In Judaism, you see, the great God-given law, once actually given, is from that moment a human-shaped law.
It's a core principle of the tradition. Because if the law keeps needing to refer back to God for rulings, that's revelation. And if revelation continues, then the Torah isn't the thing itself, merely the opening shot.
Even prophecy, the dimmest, thinnest shadow of the thing, has stopped, the tradition affirms.
Thus Deuteronomy teaches: "Surely, this commandment that I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, 'Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?' No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it."
No written law can encompass lived experience. So law speaks in categories, not just details. The application and adaptation are for humans.
And more fundamentally, we're supposed to bend the law toward mercy. That's a core precept of the whole system. It's in Ramban's interpretation of the very chapter of Deuteronomy quoted above.
God is infinite truth. But as God teaches in the Torah itself, infinite truth isn't always enough. In the here and now, in the narrow confines of our limited human experience, we need mercy too. That's why the Torah, while it commands that we obey the laws, includes among those laws, "be holy," "love your fellow like yourself," and other instructions that boil down to being merciful and good, not just sticklers for the law.
It's also in the examples of our fathers.
Abraham argues with God to spare Sodom, and he doesn't mince words: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?”
That's a hell of a thing to throw at God. Justice isn't just what wicked people deserve, justice is also generosity and mercy beyond what is deserved.
There are many other examples of arguing with God -- Jacob wrestling the angel, Moses routinely protesting the divine will. These are usually held up as examples of goodness.
In one famous debate about an oven in the Talmud (Bava Metzia 59b), one rabbi manages to summon a divine voice to affirm he's right. The opposing rabbi decrees, "it isn't in the heavens," and the rabbis rule by the that opposing rabbi. And God, the story tells, laughs in pride and says, "my children have defeated me."
The proud father who sees his children, obedient to the law and joyful in its service but nevertheless carving out their own path, knows He taught them well.
That's what Israeli courts do about mamzerut, and it's a practice enshrined in long-standing Jewish law.
We are to carve our own path through the law, erring on the side of mercy. That's the tradition.
(If you want more, if you want to see the Talmud literally mock these issues, point out that nobody cares about a mamzer's status if they have money or if their family has power, and then conclude that God irons out the imperfections in the end, go to Kiddushin 71.)
And it's worth mentioning: Christianity took this thread in Jewish religious culture and built a vast and beautiful religious universe out of it. This is the part of our tradition that Christians should have the least trouble understanding. When Jesus says, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice," he's quoting the prophet Hosea. In Christianity, this became the warp and woof of redemption itself.
Gregg Rosenberg retweeted
For years, we were told by people like @PeterBeinart that the intense focus on Israel was due to U.S. foreign aid, nothing to do with Jews or obsession with Israel, etc. Just the aid. Now that it's ending, the focus will be on Jordan, Egypt and Ethiopia. Right? Right?
Gregg Rosenberg retweeted
You have both misstated my post and reinvented history.
1. Jewish attachment to Eretz Israel didn’t begin with “political Zionism.” It began 3,800 years ago. It predates the Kingdoms of Israel and Jacob. It predates the First and Second Temples. It predates Islam’s creation and the invasion of the Arabs into JUDEA in the 7th Century.
2. “Political Zionism” was not unique to Europe. It had support movements among Middle Eastern, North African, and North American Jews.
3. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending partition of the British Mandate into an independent Jewish state, an independent Arab state, an an internationally administered Jerusalem. The Jewish Agency accepted the partition plan. The Palestinian Arab leadership and Arab Higher Committee rejected it, as did the surrounding Arab states.
5. The Jews did not exile the Arabs when the modern state of Israel was established. Israel's Declaration of Independence, issued May 14, 1948, explicitly appealed to Arab inhabitants to stay:
"We appeal [...] to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship."
It also promised equal social and political rights regardless of religion, race or sex.
By the early 1950s, Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel constituted a significant Arab minority within Israel. Today, there are 2.1 Israeli Arab citizens. They have 4 political parties, are leaders in the Knesset, serve (by choice) in the IDF (they cannot be conscripted). There are more Arab doctors in Israel than there are Jews in Arab countries in the MENA.
5. The Holocaust and the plight of displaced European Jews at the time that the modern state of Israel was established were not irrelevant, nor is the fact that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem recruited Muslims to help Hitler exterminate the Jews. They needed a safe haven, and the world had to a large extent helped create that reality by its complicity and/or silence.
6. It is also not irrelevant that of the 850,000 Jews forced into exile by Arabs from the MENA between 1948 and the early 1970’s, most fled to Israel. In other words…you forced them out, stole their homes, their livelihoods, their property, destroyed their communities, places of worship, told them to go back to Judea, from where, historically, they’d been exiled, and now complain that they are there and demand that they “go back to Europe,” from where 2/3 of European Jewry was exterminated and when most of them were from the Arab countries in the MENA from which you exiled them.
7. History is relevant. It’s not a deflection. You claim that the Nakba resulted from Jews forcing the Palestinians out in 1948. Even if that were an accurate description of what happened, you’d be supporting their return after close to a century, and such a return would displace all the Jews and take away their self determination and only safe haven - and after you kicked them out of their homes in the MENA.
You cannot credibly say on the one hand that Palestinians have maintained a tie to the land and should be allowed to return no matter how much time has passed, but that Jews who’ve maintained a nexus to the land for millennia should have to leave it.
8. You act as if the Jews just appeared in Israel in 1948, as if the only people there were Arabs. Had Muslim Arab armies not conquered Judea and the wider region from the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire in the 7th Century, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
9. There are 57 majority Muslim countries with less than 10,000 Jews. There is 1 Jewish nation with 2.1 million Arabs who enjoy greater rights than in any majority Muslim country.
You are either killing us or asking us to commit suicide.
We are done dying for your pleasure. Celebrate something else in the streets.
In 1925, Arab workers in Haifa won a nine-hour day with help from Jewish unionists. Then two religious leaders sent by Arab notables offered them a nine-and-a-half-hour day—if they stopped associating with Jews.
That extra half hour opens a much bigger story about what was being defended in Palestine.
These were Jews behaving incorrectly.
He bought land. He organized workers. He built institutions. He claimed political standing. An old social relationship was being overturned—and the story of “settler” and “native” has trouble seeing it.
Link in the first comment.
Gregg Rosenberg retweeted
Gaza's Ministry of Health recently released data demolishing the "famine" claim. Non-violent deaths in 2025 are nearly the same as pre-war with no apparent excess malnutrition deaths. This should be welcome news but is ignored as it would mean so many "experts" were so wrong.
Gregg Rosenberg retweeted
On this day—October 25, 1934
Harvard’s “Jewish problem” is nothing new.
This day, the university held a mock trial of Adolf Hitler. All testimony about Nazi persecution of Jews was ruled irrelevant, and a panel of Harvard professors acquitted him on two of four charges.
The very same Harvard warmly welcomed Hitler’s foreign press chief and personal associate, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, only months earlier. The Harvard Crimson had argued he deserved “the marks of honor appropriate to his high position in the government of a friendly country.”
Harvard maintained ties with Nazified German universities, hosted Nazi officials and naval officers, and limited Jewish enrollment. Events in 2023 and 2024 proved the legacy endured, as Harvard became a national symbol of campus antisemitism after October 7.
Check out my new post! An antizionist came prepared with the familiar arguments: stolen land, settler colonialism, apartheid, and Jewish supremacy.
Mike and I didn't exchange slogans. We went through the history, the logic, and the evidence.
Things got interesting.
Read the exchange. Is Mike real? What do you think? Substack’s AI detection engine indicates Mike was just falling back on AI-generated talking points.
Link in the first comment.
Your kids ask AI about history. But whose history are they getting?
I tested Google's Gemini on Jewish land purchases in Palestine. Its answers were revealing. What happened when I challenged them was even more revealing.
You should care because the most effective ideological indoctrination doesn't announce itself. It simply presents one interpretation of history as THE FACTS.
I caught Google Gemini doing exactly that.
And then it admitted it.
Link in the first comment.
Antizionists call Israel an expansionist state.
A simple thought experiment turns the conventional story upside down.
Palestine is a state? Fine.
Then its attacks on Israel are acts of war.
And its efforts to destroy Israel are expansionism.
You can't have statehood without state responsibility.
What happens when we take Palestinian statehood seriously—and follow the logic wherever it leads?
Link in the first comment.
Gregg Rosenberg retweeted
It’s almost as if the Palestinian Authority took all these clown governments for mugs 😢
Joint statement by 🇬🇧, 🇨🇦 , 🇦🇺 and 🇫🇷: "As longstanding supporters of Palestinian self-determination, we call on the Palestinian Authority to reconsider the decision to postpone elections and to take the necessary steps to hold legislative and presidential elections, without further delay."
gov.uk/government/news/joint…
Was Palestine in 1920 really a thriving indigenous society destroyed by Zionists?
Or is that a story built backward from today’s politics?
This chapter looks at who actually lived there — and how we know.
“Indigenous Palestinians” is often treated like a fact. But in 1920, Palestine was a mixed population of Arabs, Jews, Christians, Bedouins, migrants, clans, peasants, townsmen, and imperial leftovers.
We ask a dangerous question: Is a population automatically a people?
Link in the first comment.
Check out my new post! “A Land Without A People” never meant nobody lived there. So where did people live, what land did they hold, and what remained beyond those settlements?
Start with the maps. Not the four map sequence called “Disappearing Palestine.” The maps of reality, instead. The answers they give may change how you see those other ones everyone shares.
Link in the first comment.
