The Jew News Review - July 18, 2025

Diaspora Jews: "It's not that easy being green"

Shabbat shalom!

While the orange man continues his efforts to cancel Sesame Street, I thought it would be fitting to dedicate the theme of this post to one of my favorite Sesame characters, Kermit the Frog.

Kermit first sang those words in 1970, his felt forehead creased with existential gloom. It was a melancholy little number about feeling invisible, overlooked, burdened by a difference no one seemed to value. Green, he sang, “blends in with so many other ordinary things.” But deep down, the song wasn’t about blending in. It was about being othered—about learning, eventually, to be proud of what sets you apart, even when the world makes you pay for it.

Over half a century later, Kermit’s lament has taken on new meaning. For diaspora Jews in 2025, it’s no longer just a Sesame Street singalong—it’s a mood, a metaphor, a whole damn vibe. Because right now, we are living through a moment where the pressure to shrink, to apologize, to blend in has never been more intense. In the span of one week, The New York Times delivered a trifecta of cultural whiplash: first, a scathing long-form essay accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of prolonging the war in Gaza to serve his own political survival; second, an op-ed by Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, accusing Israel of becoming a "Jewish supremacist" state, one that, in his words, has "come to resemble some of the darkest regimes of the 20th century"; and third, a viral interview on The Daily with actor Mandy Patinkin, who compared Israel’s war in Gaza to his Princess Bride character’s revenge fantasy, and asked: “How could it be done to you and your ancestors, and you turn around and do it to someone else?”

Three different men. One Ivy Tower. One Hollywood/Broadway. One Balfour Street. But the same message: Jewish suffering is real, but Jewish defense is suspect—and Jewish power, even when wielded in the name of survival, is now suspect, too. Bibi Netanyahu’s alleged manipulation of war timelines to preserve his own political power doesn’t just erode trust in Israel’s leadership—it hands ammunition to those already eager to portray the Jewish state as morally bankrupt. They beg the question: “October 7th may have been brutal, but haven’t we become the monsters we once fled?”

In the context of daily reports of civilian casualties, of Palestinians killed while sitting in Church or waiting in line for food or water, the question is getting more and more difficult for Jews to answer. The unbearable weight of October 7 and the ongoing hostage crisis has seared itself into the national psyche. But alongside that trauma, Israel is also absorbing a growing blow to its moral standing in the eyes of the world, as the conduct of the war draws increasing scrutiny. The tension between those two burdens—grief and global judgment—is taking a quiet, corrosive toll on the country’s spiritual well-being.

This is the climate we’re in. This is the soil from which our children and grandchildren are trying to grow Jewishly. And it’s why this week, Kermit’s lament hits harder and different. Because it’s not easy being green. Not when “green” now means Jewish. And not when the very people who once embraced our story are now telling us—firmly, gently, heartbreakingly—to shut up, sit down, and stop being so damn visible.

This is a story about that tension. About how it feels to be a diaspora Jew in a world that has turned on us with shocking speed—and about how, despite it all, we’re still here. Still green. Still growing.

There was a time—not long ago—when diaspora Jews could pretend we had blended in. We became valedictorians, senators, Oscar winners, Supreme Court justices, and stand-up comedians. We put our Hebrew school diplomas in drawers and our mezuzahs up quietly. We changed our names from Goldstein to Greene (oy, the irony) and thought the tide of assimilation would keep the pitchforks at bay. We voted blue, donated to the ACLU, and joined the DEI committees, because we believed in a pluralistic promise: if we fight for everyone else, surely someone will fight for us. We’ve spent decades embedding ourselves in liberal movements, often at great personal and communal cost, hoping to be seen as allies. But when the time came to cash in that moral equity, what did we find? A bounced check.

We marched for Black lives. We stood for LGBTQ rights. We fought Islamophobia and cheered for refugees. But when Jews were slaughtered, raped, burned alive in October 2023, those same movements didn’t just ignore us—they gaslit us. They explained our grief away. They posted infographics about “context” and “power dynamics.” They told us our dead children were political abstractions.

So yes, Kermit, it is really not easy being green. And yes—we are green. Green with rage that the very spaces Jews helped build are now turning us away at the gate.

In publishing, Jewish editors and agents whisper privately that they can no longer advocate openly for Jewish stories—especially ones that don’t paint Israel as the villain. Book proposals from Jews who refuse to denounce Zionism are suddenly “not the right fit.” Award-winning Jewish authors are disinvited from festivals for refusing to issue statements against Israeli “apartheid.” We’ve watched book lists celebrating diversity suddenly find Judaism too complicated, too controversial, too white-adjacent to qualify.

The arts? You mean the industry built by Jews? Where half the great American songbook was written by men named Gershwin and Berlin, where Jewish comics invented late night, where Jewish producers invented Hollywood? That arts world?

That world has decided we’re expendable.

Ask the Jewish playwrights and screenwriters who can’t get their scripts read unless they come prepackaged with a paragraph explaining how they “stand against genocide.” Ask the actors dropped by agents or silenced by PR firms for posting Israeli flags. Ask the gallery owners being boycotted for exhibiting Jewish artists, or the dancers forced to defend their birthright trips like they’re war crimes.

And ask us what it feels like to watch Mandy Patinkin—Inigo Montoya himself, Saul Berenson, the man who carried Yiddishkeit into American living rooms—take to The New York Times Daily to call Israel’s Gaza campaign “unconscionable. There was no mention of Hamas’s October 7th massacre. No political analysis—just the quiet accusation that the Jewish state, in defending itself, has violated its moral soul. For many diaspora Jews, it was like watching a hero unplug from the narrative—like a band’s frontman trashing the stage mid‑concert. You feel abandoned. And it validates the grief many of us have been carrying for months.

Because when even Mandy’s voice joins the chorus questioning the morality of our survival, you know something’s broken. Jews are being made to walk through ideological metal detectors. And the only way through is to disavow your people.

What’s most enraging is that this exclusion is happening not in spite of our contributions, but because of them. Jews helped build these spaces. We helped build the publishing houses, the universities, the studios, the concert halls. We built them because we believed in a shared cultural inheritance—a belief in ideas, in beauty, in books and learning, in progress. And now we are told that our presence is oppressive. That our history is a burden. That our success is a form of theft.

We are not asking for special treatment. We are demanding what everyone else gets: the right to show up fully—visibly, Jewishly, green as hell—and not be punished for it.

But instead, we’re being told that unless we denounce Zionism, unless we disclaim our people, unless we disavow the only Jewish state on Earth, we cannot participate. That is not activism. That is ideological blackmail. We are being cancelled, if that’s still a thing.

So yes. We are green with rage.

And yet, even in this scorched earth moment, we are seeing something remarkable: growth. Green shoots, poking up even through the Gaza rubble and the cracks in the sidewalks of the diaspora world. Sprouts of solidarity, courage, and unapologetic Jewish pride.

Jewish students are forming new campus coalitions like New Zionist Congress and Jews on Campus to push back against the tide. At Brandeis University, the administration banned Students for Justice in Palestine, drawing a moral line others were too scared to draw.

Digital creators like Julia Jassey, Miriam Anzovin, and Noa Tishby are using TikTok and Instagram to reach millions with a message of Jewish resilience, history, and unfiltered truth. On stages around the world, Israeli artists are refusing to self-cancel. Internationally known acts like Matisyahu have returned to the spotlight with renewed urgency, performing openly Jewish and Zionist anthems in defiance of boycott pressure. At the Eurovision Song Contest, Eden Golan stood tall while crowds outside chanted for her country’s death. She sang anyway.

The Combat Antisemitism Movement, StandWithUs, The Jewish Leadership Project, and #EndJewHatred are fighting on the legal, educational, and civil rights fronts. Meanwhile, The Free Press and Sapir Journal are telling the stories mainstream media refuses to publish.

Green isn’t just the color of envy or rage. It’s the color of resistance. Of renewal. Of Jewish stubbornness in the face of exile and erasure. And we’re not done growing. We are learning, again, what our grandparents knew: we cannot outsource our dignity. We cannot subcontract our safety. And we certainly cannot beg for our humanity from people who only extend it when it’s politically convenient.

But what we can do—what we’ve always done—is build. Build new spaces. New coalitions. New culture. New stories. And when the old structures collapse under the weight of their hypocrisy, we will still be standing. Green. Glorious. Unapologetically alive.

If you want us to be silent, you picked the wrong people. And if you thought this moment would make us fade into assimilation or step out of the spotlight? You obviously haven’t met our mothers and grand mothers.

And maybe here’s the twist Kermit never saw coming: maybe green doesn’t need to blend in. Maybe green should stand out. Maybe it should flash like an emergency beacon—a color that demands attention, that says “We are here, we are proud, and we are not going anywhere.”

Maybe being green is the whole point.

So this weekend, as you sip your oat milk latte while reading the JNR and consider whether to wear your Star of David necklace outside your shirt, remember Kermit’s second verse—the one we forget. He realizes, eventually, that green is beautiful. “It’s beautiful,” he sings, “and I think it’s what I want to be.”

Yes. It’s not easy being green. And yes, it aint easy being Jewish these darkened days. But it’s still worth it.

And I think it’s what I want to be.

Be safe out there everyone. And have a great weekend!

Brad out.