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American Jews have a Hasan Piker problem. Solving it is going to hurt
Years ago, I went to a therapist who practiced Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — popularly known as ACT — which asks patients to interrogate what their values are, and whether their behaviors are aligned with those values. This therapist had me use a little matrix. In one block, I would write down what really mattered to me; it was then my responsibility to figure out the particular behavior or choice that would help me accomplish it.
For a while, I had that matrix pinned to my fridge. I have thought of it again while following the increasingly vocal concerns raised by some Jews about Hasan Piker, the leftist, anti-Zionist Twitch streamer whose presence on the campaign trail with Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has caused great consternation.
Piker’s profile has been on the rise for some time, and his rhetoric about Israel in particular — which he has accused of advancing “Jewish supremacy” — has drawn allegations of antisemitism. But his appearances alongside El-Sayed, who has said he believes Israel’s government is as evil as Hamas, have brought particular scrutiny. El-Sayed’s opponents have seized on Piker’s presence to, essentially, accusing the candidate of not taking antisemitism seriously enough.
Rep. Haley Stevens said that Piker “is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state.” State Sen. Mallory McMorrow said Piker is “not entirely different from somebody like Nick Fuentes,” a far-right Holocaust denier. The Anti-Defamation League has accused Piker of denigrating Jewish people, and its leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, has said El-Sayed’s decision to campaign with him reflects “the dangerous normalization of antisemitism in our politics.”
Some of this may be political opportunism. But I do not doubt that there are many American Jews who are sincerely concerned about the normalization of antisemitism, and who are worried that Piker’s increasing prominence plays into that trend. I would ask those American Jews: What is it that really matters to you in this situation, and what are the behaviors and choices that can help you achieve your goals?
A flawed strategy for fighting antisemitism
If pushing back against antisemitism is the top priority for our community, I suspect that writing Piker off as an antisemite with whom engagement simply can’t be countenanced will do more harm than good.
There are plenty of things that Piker has said that I, too, find offensive.
I agree with him that Hamas’s horrific actions on Oct. 7, 2023, including acts of sexual violence, don’t justify the slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But I think saying that it “doesn’t matter” whether rape happened amid the Hamas attack, as Piker has, is a cruel and callous way of making that particular point.
And while anti-Zionism is not categorically antisemitism, I think that Piker’s statement that anyone who has exhibited “positive feelings about the state of Israel” should be barred from consideration from any position of import, including “the fucking local dog catcher,” runs the risk of creating a litmus test for Jewish participation in civic life. That’s a concern I hope people running to be elected officials in a pluralistic society take seriously.
But to say that Piker, whose fervent anti-Zionism can cross over into potentially damaging and derisive territory, is akin to Nick Fuentes — a Holocaust denier whose entire worldview is underpinned by the idea that Jews are evil and exploitative — is to make a claim that there is little evidence to support.
This distinction matters. Fuentes’ antisemitism is so extreme and all-encompassing that his fans and followers will never be allies to American Jews. There is little evidence to believe the same is true for Piker. To successfully fight antisemitism, American Jews need a broad base of allies. In that context, Piker’s audience — including nearly 3 million followers on the streaming platform Twitch — is one that it would be a mistake for us to wholly write off.
Many people who follow Piker may agree both with his condemnation of Israel’s government and his condemnation of the deadly attack on a 2025 hostage solidarity walk in Boulder, Colorado. Those people can help in the fight against American antisemitism — but not if we completely refuse to engage with them.
Building alliances on the left
If American Jews’ goal is to discourage antisemitism, and to encourage people to speak thoughtfully and empathetically about Jews, then treating Piker as someone too extreme to engage with risks sending a message that Jews don’t want allies on the left.
This echoes a problem that arose during last year’s New York City mayoral race. Some Jewish groups discounted now-Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s substantial efforts at Jewish outreach, instead focusing wholly on his criticism of Israel. In practice, that choice risked suggesting that there was no reason for Mamdani to bother trying to support New York Jews, because given his stance on Israel, no positive actions he could take would ever be enough.
Thankfully, Mamdani hasn’t stopped making an effort. There’s no guarantee, however, that others on the left will do the same.
There are other ways to approach the ACT matrix on this issue. But in all the ones I can think of, treating Piker as persona non grata seems like a poor strategy for success.
This is true, as well, if concerned American Jews decide that what really matters to them is the opportunity to push back on increasingly negative views of Israel in the United States. Trying to do that by punishing any public figures who associate with Piker is unlikely to pay off. Negative views of Israel have risen since 2022, particularly among Democrats. In that time period, many American Jews have tried to call criticism of Israel antisemitic; the trends have nevertheless continued.
Is blaming or trying to silence or sideline people who speak critically of Israel the thing that’s going to get people to change their minds? That former therapist taught me to think more clearly about the connections between my actions and what I wanted. It was sometimes an uncomfortable experience; change often is. Piker’s popularity is one of the many signs that there is no going back to a past U.S. in which Jews could assume non-Jews (or even other Jews) supported Israel or Zionism. Given that reality, we will need to think about how to bring ourselves closer to the country we want to live in — without ignoring the practical realities of the country we have now.
The post American Jews have a Hasan Piker problem. Solving it is going to hurt appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.
Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.
Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”
“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”
“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.
He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”
Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.
“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”
“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”
Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.
After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.
What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.
Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.
“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.
“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”
“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”
Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.
But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”
That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”
That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”
As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.
Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.
To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”
At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.
“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.
“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”
Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”
Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”
During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.
“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
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