How Oligarchs Corrupted the American Dream
Last year, I testified in front of Congress about the dangerous consolidation of government tech vendors. Then, a MAGA rep from Montana asked: but isn’t that the American dream? To sell your tech company to Oracle for a billion dollars?
That’s not my American Dream, nor is it my dream to enable billionaires. My dream is to live safely in a nation that accepts me as I am, to raise productive members of society without fear, to be gainfully employed without having to hide my ethnicity, and to help build a meaningful civil society.
Let it be known: I didn’t abandon America. My family worked to build this nation for 120 years. We have been civil servants, teachers, farmers, kosher hotel owners, artists, businesspeople, academics, doctors and dentists, founded hospitals and synagogues, worked in the Senate, the White House, marched for women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, and against nukes.
Our ancestors came to America to build a Jewish American dream, but that time is over. Today, America is building an oligarchic free-for-all that grows more dangerous with every passing hour. In the US, we are okay with death, because death is freedom. Everyone is armed to the teeth, in a nation full of people who do things because they CAN, not because they should.
We can print guns at home, or call for the death of Jews to earn promotions. We send our kids to school, not knowing if they’ll come home or spend ten hours hiding in a closet. We deny women basic safety in medicine or cars, all in the service of the American Dream.
I’m sorry to dash the hopes of the ones who left Europe. If they’d stayed, they would be lying in a mass grave or burned in a crematorium. Eva Chava Lutsky, Joseph Shima Rosenberg, Helen Chaya Roth, Abraham Avraham Szinkelewski and the Pearsons and Levines — you made the best choice you could, with the knowledge you had.
I wish I could have seen your dream through. Every day I worked in the White House I thought, there’s no fucking way my relatives would believe this. A Jew in the White House! And a female one,to boot! Take that, Nazis
But now, a permanent war zone feels safer than watching the United States self-destruct.
AS A JEW (the real kind, who keeps our heritage and people alive, not a Met Gala quilter for Gaza) the choice is clear. We’ve really tried to make the Diaspora work for us, but there comes a point where you just can’t subject your family to life as an other. Jews only have a choice between Diaspora and Permanant War. I’ve had Diaspora, and I choose war, building a cohesive civil society, and holding my head high.
Nefesh b’nefesh is currently overwhelmed by Jews making Aliyah from France, the UK, Australia, Ireland, and … the United States . I never thought I would see the day, where once again we must become olim.
But it’s time to go home.
And you know who's funding all these Maga lunatics to the tune of billions of dollars? You're precious AIPAC and an assorted alphabet soup of dark money Trump megadonor ultrazionist PACs.
I was also indoctrinated for years in Hebrew school about the Jewish state, and it's most moral army, and the perfidious ay-rabs who "never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity", and all the rest of that hogwash. Luckily, I was disabused of all that crap slowly over the years, mercifully long before I had to watch the spectacle of an Israeli PM sitting next to a US president who picked a literal Sieg Heiler as his consiglieri in chief. A PM who while sitting there also told lies promoting the most grotesque atrocity porn about nonexistent "babies burnt by Hamas", a falsehood so brazen that only the staggering ignorance and fascistic immersion of almost forty percent of the US population lets him get away with, despite his own officials having already walked those claims back almost a year ago.