Bernie Sanders and the Rise of the Jews of Privilege

Benjamin Kerstein

Daily Wire, October 13, 2026. Read the full essay here.

One of the most important and certainly one of the most politically powerful Jews of Privilege to appear in recent years is Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who nearly gained the Democratic presidential nomination twice over.

Sanders is a somewhat strange case. He bears the legacy of the Holocaust in his family and was by no means born into wealth or class privilege. But as much as he may deny it, he is now an elite. In terms of personal history and ancestry, Sanders is not a Jew of Privilege. Ideologically, he is a Jew of Privilege in every way.

Indeed, his privilege has made him one of the most important leaders of the progressive oligarchy now vying for control of the Democratic Party, mainly through the electoral benefits of antisemitism. There have always been money and votes, after all, in running against the Jews.

It became clear very early on in Sanders’s first campaign, when he referred to his ancestors as “Polish” rather than “Jewish” immigrants; falsely accused Israel of killing 10,000 Palestinians in the 2014 war (the actual number was a fifth of that amount); and surrounded himself with advisors and surrogates like James Zogby, Cornel West, and others whose loathing for Israel and unprivileged Jews was palpable, that something was very wrong..…

Continues here. Benjamin Kerstein is a fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Jews of Privilege: Elites, Anti-Zionists, and Our Secret Civil War (Wicked Son & Z3, 2026).

Read the full essay

The Jewish Sin We Never Confess: Choosing Indifference Over Love

Shivi Greenfield

Jerusalem Post, September 20, 2026. Read the full essay here.

The law is oddly specific. You go to the person you wronged and ask him to forgive you. He refuses. So you come back – this time with three of his friends, who stand there and watch while you ask again. If he refuses again, you return a third time.

Then the law does something strange: it releases you. You may stop, Maimonides ruled, and the sin moves: the one who refuses forgiveness is now the sinner (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 2:9).

Read that as procedure, not piety. You do not legislate three visits with witnesses for a feeling; you write law like that when someone is not permitted to walk away – and here that includes the person who was wronged.

The season we have now entered is precise about what it cannot do. Yom Kippur atones for what stands between a person and God. For what stands between you and another person, it does nothing at all – not until you have gone to him and he has been appeased. Fasting will not fix it.

The holiest day of the year is powerless in precisely the place where love lives. The vertical relationship can be settled in a day; the horizontal one requires you to knock on a door, or to open one.…

Continues here. Shivi Greenfield is a fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of A Jewish Tale of Love: On Defiance, Meaning, and the Fate of a People (Wicked Son & Z3, 2026).

Read the Full Essay

Moscow’s Man at the United Nations

Izabella Tabarovsky

Tablet, September 18, 2026. Read the full essay here.

It’s hard to imagine it today, but there was a moment during the Cold War when a Jew nearly headed the United Nations. It happened in 1971—the year of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to select the next secretary-general—and the man was the 47-year-old Finnish ambassador to the United Nations, Max Jakobson. The son of a Finnish Jewish father and a mother who had converted to Judaism, Jakobson began his career as a journalist, working for the BBC before joining Finland’s foreign service. He was widely regarded as “one of the ablest men” at the United Nations: an experienced diplomat “with a cool head and good nerves.” African states appreciated his firm anti-colonialist stance. He was an American and British favorite, and France’s only complaint against him was that he didn’t speak French. For much of that year, he was considered the front-runner.

His chief rival was 52-year-old Kurt Waldheim, Austria’s former foreign minister and now the country’s permanent representative at the United Nations. A chairman of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, he was typically mentioned alongside a slew of other long-shot candidates. Journalists had a hard time finding anything distinct to say about him: He told them his favorite hobby was work and that he believed the United Nations should be used as an instrument of peace. He was like so many other diplomats who filled the halls of the United Nations—a man with a “correct and colorless record.”

He also had the backing of the Soviet Union.

The 1971 secretary-general selection was the first since the 1967 Six-Day War, which marked a major defeat for the Soviet Union in the Middle East. Israel’s victory over the USSR’s Arab allies was a turning point in the Soviet attitude toward the Jewish state and Zionism. Moscow was always hostile, but after 1967, as Soviet Jews began to demand the right to emigrate, it painted Zionism as a threat to its interests everywhere. But that was also a period of rising Soviet influence inside the United Nations, as former colonies became member states in the 1960s; a position that the Soviets wanted to consolidate.

By November, Waldheim was neck and neck with Jakobson, as the USSR repeatedly vetoed the Finnish candidate in the Security Council. Two days before Christmas, the United Nations officially made its pick: The Austrian representative became its new head. When the initial shock subsided, many concluded that it was precisely Waldheim’s blandness that had won him the job. “Certainly the Soviet Union, which supported his candidacy, does not expect daring initiatives from this model of noncommittal neutrality,” quipped The New York Times. The paper wasn’t wrong: Moscow had other plans for this secretary-general…

Continues here. Izabella Tabarovsky is Senior Fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide (Wicked Son, 2025).

Read the Full Essay Now

The Assassination of Memory

Benjamin Kerstein

Substack, July 24, 2026. Read the full essay here.

The historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi is perhaps best known for his book Zakhor, titled after the Hebrew command “remember.” In it, Yerushalmi posited that, for centuries, the Jewish people had, in a sense, no history, in that they abandoned history in favor of memory.

Yerushalmi pointed out that the Jews of the Diaspora did not write history, as they had in the ancient world, and relied for knowledge of the past through memory reinforced by ritual, such as the Passover seder. It was only after the trauma of the expulsion from Spain that history again emerged as a Jewish literary genre. For centuries, the Jewish past was a presence, not a text.

This was, in a sense, ancient in and of itself. Memory has always coexisted alongside history in Jewish thought, as proven by passages throughout the Bible that use the term zakhor or variations thereof, such as Deuteronomy 32:7: “Remember the days of old. Consider the years of every generation. Ask your father, he will tell you, and your elders, they will say to you.”

The priority given to memory continues today, with, for example, sites like Yad Vashem and rituals like the sounding of sirens on Israel’s Yom HaShoah emphasizing the collective memory of the Holocaust over the exacting contemplation of specific statistics of the dead and the locations of death camps—though that is common as well. “The six million,” after all, is the measure of the victims for Jews, not the precise digits themselves. One must admit that, in this case, memory may be more accurate, at least emotionally and symbolically, than history, whose detached perspective cannot possibly capture the immensity and impact of the slaughter.

Even the most exacting intellectuals have acknowledged this, with French scholar Pierre Vidal-Naquet, for example, entitling his book on Holocaust denial Assassins of Memory. In the present as in the past, the Jews have chosen the accuracy of memory over the precision of history. Jewish history is, in effect, Jewish memory, and vice versa.

However, Jews have always known that memory is extremely fragile. Perhaps, ironically, this particular fragility was described best by a non-Jew: the ancient Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote of the early years of the emperors, “There were few indeed who remembered the republic.”.…

Continues here. Benjamin Kerstein is an associate fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto (Wicked Son, 2025).

Read the Full Essay Now

David H.—Every once in a while, a single well-constructed video can effectively encapsulate centuries of history, offering us both a reminder and something we can use. This is the case with “ZIONisM” (pronounced “Zionism Is”), produced by Z3 Senior Fellow Einat Wilf together with Eitan Chitayat. The video (below) is five minutes long, animated, and spells out the singular story that enabled Jews to return to their ancestral homeland under the banner of Zionism.

Zionism today, of course, is under endless assault from without, flooding the discourse with malevolent ignorance about what exactly the word means—to the point where well-meaning people, Jews and non-Jews alike, are tempted to stay away from the word just to avoid trouble. This video is for them, for educators, and for anyone who needs a digestible, clear, definitive, and fun dose of the most powerful Jewish story of the last century.

This is how Wilf explained it in a recent post on X:

Zionism belongs to the Jewish people. Others can have opinions about it. But they don’t get to define it. Not our enemies, not hateful mobs, not bots or useful idiots regurgitating lies on social media as if they know our history better than we do.

Our national liberation movement has been recast as colonialism, racism, apartheid, and genocide, through repetition, inversion, and a sustained campaign to pressure Jews into surrendering its very meaning.

It’s only by understanding what Zionism is that we can see antizionism for what it is, too. Not the opposite of Zionism, but a comprehensive and sinister assault on Jewish life everywhere, wearing a sophisticated mask…

Zionism is our identity, carried for thousands of years of exile by hope, faith, and memory, and now embodied in our survival, our sheer will, and our refusal to disappear.

Zionism is the Jewish People’s movement for self-determination in our ancestral homeland. It affirms our rights without denying anyone else’s. It is freedom, justice, co-existence, strength, innovation, diversity, survival, indigenous rights, and so much more.

For a more in-depth look into Einat’s experiences teaching what Zionism really is to American college students, check out her new book Teaching Zionism: Revelations from a Skeptical Classroom, published in May by Z3 and Wicked Son.

Explore "Teaching Zionism" by Einat Wilf

Watch the video here:

Save the Date: Z3 Conference 2026

The Z3 Conference is returning to Palo Alto on November 1, 2026. I’ll be there as well as many of the writers and scholars associated with the Z3 Institute. Tickets will go on sale soon. Learn more about the Z3 Conference.

The Great Moral Accounting Fraud

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour and Shany Mor

The Abrahamic Metacritique, July 5, 2026. Read the full essay here.

Contemporary Western moral-political conscience is organized around a negative canon. It is made of a trinity of sacred crimes: Atlantic slavery, the Shoah, and European imperialism. They are taught, memorialized, litigated, aestheticized, theorized, and endlessly returned to as the trinity that makes up the singular historical identity of the West. Each belongs to history, but none remains merely historical. Each has become a site of moral interpretation, a privileged scene in which the West reads its own promises against the record of its own acts.

This theological centrality is why their place in Western moral life cannot be explained only by scale, cruelty, or novelty. Human beings conquered before Europe conquered. They enslaved before the Atlantic system. They massacred, expelled, burned, starved, deported, and humiliated long before the twentieth century furnished murder with rail schedules, offices, files, industrial chemistry, and the administrative patience of the modern state. To say this is not to diminish the three crimes but to clarify their peculiar status.

Atlantic slavery came to be read as the secret wound beneath modern liberty. The Shoah came to be read as the abyss beneath Enlightenment reason. European imperialism came to be read as the theft beneath civilization. Each crime was attached to one of modernity’s noblest words and made to darken it from within. The crimes are not merely treated as events but as revelations, each made to appear as an apocalypse disclosing the concealed truth of the modern West and judging it. In this sense, they exited the realm of history and entered the realm of myth. And if we see them as myth, we discover that their singularity is a function of narrative rather than of the events themselves. Their canonical singularity lies not in what occurred but in the form of historical consciousness into which they were and are received. They became epochal because they were incorporated into modernity’s own literature of self-narration.

A crime committed in history can be made to serve as a myth about history. The enslaved African, the murdered Jew, and the colonized subject are drawn out of the density and particularity of their own worlds and made to appear inside a drama whose real protagonist remains the West. Even guilt becomes a form of possession. Modernity places itself in the dock, but, like Milton’s Satan, it also appoints itself witness, prosecutor, historian, penitent, and priest; its abasement becomes another mode of centrality. The victims are invoked, often with solemnity, but they are invoked as figures in modernity’s endless self-commentary….

Continues here. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is an adjunct fellow at the Z3 Institute and editor of The Abrahamic Critique on Substack.

Read the Full Essay Now

The Left-Wing Case Against Antizionism

Adam Louis-Klein

The Atlantic, June 18, 2026. Read the full essay here.

In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and conquest. A military tribunal accused Ades of selling arms to Israel, and he was convicted within days. The state determined that the execution would take place outside his own mansion in a public act of humiliation. Regardless of whether it was true that Ades was a Zionist, his murder was an act of anti-Zionist violence—driven by a violent hatred of Israel and anyone associated with it.

The flight or expulsion of 850,000 Jews from countries across the Middle East is a story that still too often rests in silence, but even when it is told, the ideology that caused it is seldom named.…

Continues here. Adam Louis-Klein is an adjunct fellow at the Z3 Institute and founder of the Movement Against Antizionism.

Read the Full Essay Here

A Metacritique of Palestine

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

The Abrahamic Metacritique, May 18, 2026. Read the full essay here.

There is no shortage of writing about Palestine. This small and provincial conflict has generated more commentary, more theory, more denunciation, more advocacy, and more counter-advocacy than any comparable political question of the modern era, and the volume of this commentary has stood in inverse proportion to its analytical value.

The reason for such a lack of value is that what has been written is, with rare exceptions, written from inside the very structure that the writing claims to describe, and the writing therefore serves the structure rather than illuminating it. The liberal who writes about human rights, the leftist who writes about settler colonialism, the realist who writes about regional security, the conservative who writes about the clash of civilizations, the Islamist who writes about Crusaders, the Arab nationalist who writes about Western betrayal, and the post-Christian European who writes about the unbearable irony of Jewish power are not, despite their mutual hostility, engaged in incompatible projects. They are engaged in the same project, which is the conversion of the victimhood, regardless of its details, produced at a particular site into a particular kind of symbolic capital usable within a particular ideological market. They quarrel about the terms of the conversion. They do not quarrel about the conversion itself, because the conversion is what they all live on.

This essay is an attempt to step outside that conversion long enough to describe the system that makes it possible. The attempt is necessarily imperfect, because no one stands fully outside the system, and the writer who claims such a vantage is either lying or mistaken about his own position.

What is possible is the more modest achievement of seeing the Palestine system as a structure rather than as a contest within which one has already chosen a side. This requires the reader to suspend, at least for the duration of the essay, the question of which party is right and to consider instead the question of what kind of arrangement produces the very ground on which the question of rightness gets posed. The reader will recognize, I hope, that this suspension is not a refusal of moral judgment but its precondition. One cannot judge what one has not first understood, and the Palestine word-symbol has been, for at least three generations, a question about which everyone has had opinions, and almost no one has had understanding.…

Continues here. Hussein Aboubakr Mansour is an adjunct fellow at the Z3 Institute and editor of The Abrahamic Critique on Substack.

Read the Full Essay Now

The Kafkaesque Trial Facing Israel and Its Supporters

Benjamin Kerstein

The Dispatch, May 22, 2026. Read the full essay here.

It is quite common for defenders of Israel to preface their statements with the phrase, “Israel isn’t a perfect country,” which is true, as far as it goes, but rather misses the point. Given the blizzard of defamation and demonization that surrounds the Jewish state, the issue is not whether Israel is perfect, but whether it is as imperfect as its enemies claim.

The answer is self-evident, because no country could be as imperfect as Israel’s enemies claim. Even Nazi Germany, perhaps the one completely uncomplicated case of an outright demonic regime, was only charged (rightly) with wanting to take over the world, whereas Israel is regularly charged with having already taken over the world. Demonization can only be taken so far before it takes on a distinct quality of the ludicrous.

This simple fact was demonstrated once again last week when the New York Times published Nicholas Kristof’s impossibly long opinion column (tellingly, it was not published in the news section), charging that Israel systemically sexually abuses Palestinian prisoners, including through the physical impossibility of trained rape dogs.…

Continues here. Benjamin Kerstein is an associate fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Self-Defense: A Jewish Manifesto (Wicked Son, 2025).

Read the Full Essay Now

Open Hiding

Izabella Tabarovsky

Quillette, June 1, 2026. Read the full essay here.

My father’s dissertation adviser emigrated from the USSR on the eve of his postdoctoral defence. In the Soviet Union, emigration was an act of betrayal, and by the time my father appeared before the committee tasked with approving his defence, his fate had already been sealed. Committee members peppered him with questions so far afield from the subject of his dissertation that he—a brilliant 29-year-old geophysicist—never stood a chance.

My father understood immediately what was happening. The year was 1974, and Soviet anti-Zionist hysteria was at a peak, blocking countless Jews from university admissions, academic advancement, professions, and entire career fields. He walked out, returned to his desk, and went on to do work so innovative that, when we landed in America in 1990, a major company grabbed him and never let him go. Shortly before emigrating, he successfully defended a brand new dissertation, but by then he had nothing left to prove to himself—or anybody else.

Twenty-five years after our emigration, as the ghosts of antisemitism we thought we’d left behind reappeared across the West, I asked my father: Were the people on that committee personally antisemitic? “No, no,” he told me. “They just knew what time and country they were living in.”

Antisemitism is often viewed as visceral hatred of Jews. But that’s a limited understanding of the phenomenon.

Antisemitism is also a politics and a zeitgeist; a conspiracy theory that feeds mass hysteria about Jewish power; an underlying culture that teaches people that Jews are different, they don’t belong, they aren’t on our side—and ultimately, that they are our misfortune. It draws an invisible line between Jews and the broader society, step by step normalising their marginalisation and disappearance….

Continues here. Izabella Tabarovsky is a senior fellow at the Z3 Institute and author of Be a Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide (Wicked Son, 2025).

Read "Open Hiding" at Quillette

David H.—I’m thrilled to share with you my latest essay in the journal Sapir. In it I critique the classical Diaspora model of allyship, in which we make allies only with those who share our broader vision of democratic, liberal values. and show how it has failed. I then propose an alternative “Druze model” that more appropriately fits the tumultuous moment we currently live in. As I write:

In the wake of October 7, when Jews around the world find themselves in the thick of an existential battle, arguments of this type no longer seem to make sense. True, we should never partner with outright antisemites, Left or Right. But we should no longer impose broader litmus tests on allyship. We should no longer, to use Hirsh’s formulation, “keep some distance from those who do not share our values.” We have tried this. It has failed us.

Instead, we should ally with whoever helps us win.

Read the essay here.

Read the Essay in Sapir Journal