What It Means To Call Him Brave

On Matti Friedman, Bill Maher, and the antisemitism many are hesitant to name

There is a sentence I keep trying to write, and every version sounds worse than the last. It begins: “Bill Maher was brave to…” The rest does not really matter, because the opening has already given the game away. It is 2026, and a comedian on American television is being called brave for saying, in plain English, that the systematic dehumanization of Jews is wrong. We have arrived at a moment in which that observation requires courage, and I want to say where I stand on it — why I stand there, and what I have seen with my own eyes that brought me here.

Bill Maher on Real Time (Screenshot from YouTube)

I’ll start with the simple part. Matti Friedman is right about Nicholas Kristof’s column, and right in a way that goes far beyond Kristof himself. Friedman draws a distinction that I have come to believe is one of the most important habits of moral seriousness available to anyone who claims to care about this conflict: there are two conversations going on in the West right now, and from a distance they can look nearly identical, but their purposes are opposite. One is about how to make Israel better. The other is about how to make Israel disappear. Friedman has the discipline — and, crucially, the love of country — to hold both ideas at once: that Israeli prisons are not beyond criticism, that abuses and humiliations and moral failures exist, that figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Benjamin Netanyahu often seem disturbingly uninterested in repairing them, and also that a great deal of what is now circulated internationally as journalism is something else entirely — activist narrative, NGO-laundered rumor, and in some cases outright fabrication. The issue is not whether Israel should be criticized. Of course it should be. The issue is whether the criticism is being undertaken in the spirit of reform or in the spirit of erasure.

Haviv Rettig Gur, writing alongside Friedman, has described a paper trail of viral falsehoods, each absorbed by millions before correction ever arrives — claims about fourteen thousand babies dying within forty-eight hours, viral statistics about dead children that exceeded the actual demographic population being described. Each claim is emotionally detonated, partially corrected later, then immediately replaced by the next, and the pattern itself becomes the story. The correction never catches the accusation. That is why Bill Maher’s monologue mattered to me. He did something almost no one with a major American platform seems willing to do anymore: he named what he believed he was seeing. He argued that a great deal of what is now parading as “anti-Zionism” is in practice antisemitism wearing contemporary political language, and he pointed to the extraordinary inconsistency of the obsession — Sudan, Iran, the Congo, catastrophes of staggering scale that rarely generate anything remotely comparable to the sustained emotional mobilization directed at Israel. One does not need to agree with every rhetorical flourish Maher used to recognize the larger point he was making.

He argued that the horseshoe has closed — that parts of the radical left and parts of the conspiratorial right, though they differ on almost everything else, increasingly tell remarkably similar stories about Jews and about Israel. He mocked the fashionable transformation of the keffiyeh into a kind of moral accessory (”the new Che Guevara T-shirt,” as he put it) and read aloud statements by academics describing Israelis in language that would be instantly recognized as hateful if directed at almost any other ethnic or religious group. And then he asked what may have been his sharpest question: why this people again? Why is a North Carolina teenager allegedly plotting to attack a synagogue in Houston? Why does an influencer with thirty million followers fantasize publicly about killing Israelis? Why do people who agree on almost nothing else suddenly find common emotional purpose here?

Maher’s answer — whether one accepts it fully or not — is that antisemitism has never really been about Jews alone. Jews become the screen onto which societies project grievances they cannot locate elsewhere. Throughout history the Jew has functioned as a symbolic vessel for capitalism and communism, weakness and sinister power, rootless cosmopolitanism and stiff-necked tribalism, often at the same moment. The keffiyeh-clad Columbia sophomore and the tiki-torch marcher in Charlottesville may never march together for anything else, yet emotionally and rhetorically — and now politically — they are beginning to converge around this. That convergence frightened me long before I had language for it.

Now the harder part: why I feel any right, from California, to write with conviction about matters so painful and contested — and why I want to ground what follows not only in argument, but in experience.

I sat for hours with Yossi Klein Halevi, whose Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor remains, to my mind, one of the few serious attempts in recent years to address the other side not as abstraction but as human beings. Yossi is routinely classified in parts of the American academic world as a settler-colonialist by definition, but in reality he is a man who spent years trying to imagine a moral language broad enough to contain both peoples. What stayed with me most from our conversation was not anger but exhaustion — the exhaustion of someone who had devoted much of his adult life to coexistence and then watched October 7 rupture not only Israeli assumptions but faith itself. He spoke about how the Israeli peace camp was hollowed out after that day not because Israelis stopped wanting peace, but because many felt the events of October 7, and the reaction to those events abroad, had shattered confidence that the desire for coexistence was reciprocated. He spoke too about the shock many Israelis experienced watching demonstrations erupt around the world almost immediately after the massacre — before the dead had even been fully identified, before the hostages had been accounted for, while entire Israeli communities were still effectively war zones.

I also spent time with Raja Shehadeh, whose Palestinian Walks I admire deeply. Raja describes the West Bank with the intimacy of someone who has walked it for decades — its beauty and its erosion, its humiliations large and small. He speaks with precision about occupation and settlement expansion, about loss and despair, and he has every reason in the world to be bitter. And yet he remains recognizably morally serious. Nothing in Raja’s writing resembles the feverish emotional pornography that increasingly circulates online and, at times, even in prestigious media institutions. He is trying to imagine a future for his people, and that is fundamentally different from imagining the disappearance of another people.

Then I went to Sderot, and I want to describe it because I do not think many people in the West have truly permitted themselves to imagine it. Sderot is not a military base. It is an ordinary working-class Israeli town with schools and supermarkets and playgrounds — except the bus stops are reinforced concrete shelters, because residents often have roughly fifteen seconds to reach cover after a rocket siren sounds. Fifteen seconds. There are bomb shelters integrated into the playground equipment, and children who have grown up running on instinct. I remember visiting the police station compound and seeing piles of spent rocket remnants stacked almost like firewood, and standing there I found myself thinking about the language casually deployed on American campuses — “colonizers,” “apartheid,” “settler privilege” — and trying to imagine explaining those abstractions to a mother whose child measures daily life in seconds to shelter. The cognitive dissonance was almost physical.

From there I went to Netiv HaAsara, the small moshav pressed against the Gaza barrier, a community of roughly a thousand farmers and families known for its mural of ceramic peace tiles embedded into the wall facing Gaza. Each tile had been made by a visitor — a tiny act of faith in coexistence. On October 7, Hamas paragliders came over that wall. Later I saw photographs from the aftermath: some of the peace tiles remained intact, others were blackened or shattered, the concrete behind them scarred and broken. Looking back, I realize what formed in me there was not simply anger but something slower and more painful — a clarity shaped by grief. These were not militants or ideologues. They were among the most dovish people in Israeli society, people who had deliberately chosen to live near Gaza because they believed proximity might someday become coexistence. They planted flowers there and wrote poems there and made mosaics for peace there. And they were among the first people Hamas murdered. That was the moment I understood, with frightening force, how grief can mutate into the desire for vengeance — I felt, for an instant, the urge not merely to mourn but to strike back blindly, with the terrible moral certainty grief can generate. I have not forgotten that feeling, and I do not entirely trust anyone, on any side of this, who claims never to have felt something like it.

Which brings me to the morning that changed me more than any other single moment in this entire period: not October 7 but October 8, the day after. The hostages were still in Gaza, entire Israeli communities were still not secured, families were still trying to locate missing relatives, and Israel had only just begun responding militarily — the scale of what had happened was still barely understood. And already the demonstrations had begun, in Times Square and London and on the lawns of Harvard, where more than thirty student organizations issued statements holding Israel “entirely responsible” for what had just happened to Israeli civilians. That moment mattered to me profoundly, and not because criticism of Israel emerged — criticism of Israel always emerges — but because the moral sequencing collapsed so quickly. Before proportionality arguments, before policy analysis, before the facts had even stabilized, something older rushed in first. Once you see that clearly, certain things become difficult to unsee. You begin to notice how activist ecosystems amplify claims before verification, how corrections never travel with the force of accusations, how quickly maximalist rhetoric becomes normalized, how professors casually employ language about Israelis or Zionists that would end academic careers if directed at nearly any other minority group. You begin to notice that antisemitic incidents in the United States have surged to levels wildly disproportionate to the Jewish share of the population. You begin, in short, to notice that something many people insist on describing as merely political often contains a very old hatred just beneath the surface.

Dan Senor and Matti Friedman (Screenshot from YouTube)

This is where Friedman’s distinction becomes, for me, indispensable. It is possible to say simultaneously that Israeli democracy has suffered serious damage under Netanyahu’s coalition, that settler violence in the West Bank is real and morally corrosive, that extremists within Israeli politics have disgraced the country’s democratic ideals, and also that a significant portion of what now circulates internationally as anti-Israel discourse is not interested in reform. Those statements are not contradictory. The trap increasingly laid before Jews, and before anyone defending Israel’s legitimacy at all, is the insistence that acknowledging antisemitism somehow requires denying Israeli wrongdoing — and Friedman’s answer, which I think is correct, is to reject the framing itself. One does not answer a blood libel by carefully negotiating percentages. One asks why such stories emerge so eagerly, who benefits from them, why they spread with such velocity, and why so many otherwise intelligent people seem emotionally prepared to believe the very worst about Jews almost instantly.

Which returns me, finally, to Bill Maher and to my discomfort with my own admiration. I do think his monologue was brave. I think it was brave in the sense that it has become socially dangerous in parts of elite culture simply to say that antisemitism exists in progressive spaces, that Jewish fear may sometimes be justified, or that the eliminationist rhetoric directed toward Israel should perhaps be taken literally when people openly chant it. And the fact that saying such things now qualifies as “brave” is itself the indictment. In a healthy culture, what Maher said would not have registered as daring; it would have been an ordinary moral baseline. The people openly fantasizing about destroying Israel would be fringe figures, and the people objecting to such fantasies would scarcely need to speak. We are not in that culture. We are in a culture in which many Jews now report concealing Jewish symbols in public, in which Jewish students at Columbia and UCLA describe feeling physically unsafe, in which attacks on visibly Jewish gatherings have become frighteningly common. In that culture, yes — a comedian saying plainly that antisemitism is real becomes an act of courage. And that is not an indictment of Maher. It is an indictment of us.

I think often now about something Yossi said almost in passing about the diaspora: Israelis, he said, argue with each other constantly, loudly, endlessly, because beneath the arguments lies an assumption that the country itself should continue existing. Diaspora Jews cannot always assume that of their interlocutors anymore. Many of the people now offering Jews a seat at the table of progressive respectability do so conditionally — the invitation stands only if Jews publicly renounce the one Jewish state on earth. That is not inclusion. It is a test. And I increasingly fear that far more people are failing that test than I would have believed possible even five years ago.

So this is my letter, and I want certain things on the record. I believe Matti Friedman is doing the honorable work of an honest critic, criticizing his own society while refusing to allow criticism to become fuel for erasure. I believe Haviv Rettig Gur is right to warn about the cumulative effect of viral fabrication and emotional disinformation. I believe Bill Maher was brave, and I am ashamed — on behalf of both my countries, Sweden and the United States, and on behalf of my century — that this required bravery at all. I have been to Sderot and to Netiv HaAsara, I have sat with Yossi and with Raja, I have read obsessively and listened carefully, and all of it has led me toward one conclusion I can no longer evade: the antisemitism that surged so visibly after October 7 was not created by the war. The war gave it permission to speak more loudly. And permission, once granted, is very difficult to revoke.

The work of the next decade — the work of anyone whose heart genuinely beats for justice and who is willing to read beyond slogans and headlines — is to refuse that permission: to refuse the false equivalence, to refuse the emotional laundering of rumor into truth, to refuse the moral numbness that treats hatred of Jews as historically understandable or politically fashionable or intellectually sophisticated. To insist, as Friedman insists, on the distinction between wanting a country better and wanting it gone. And when someone like Bill Maher says so publicly on a Friday night, to thank him — and then to make sure that by the time we are old, nobody will ever again have to be called brave merely for saying it.