A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.

The term for rabbinic ordination is Semicha. It means laying hands on someone, which implies confidence, identifying with the person, and expecting there to be a continuity in passing on the tradition. The word comes from the law mentioned in the context of sacrifices, where one was commanded to place one’s hands on the head of the sacrifice before it was offered.

“And if a person brings a sacrifice to the Tabernacle … he should place his hand on the head of the sacrifice, and it will be accepted as an atonement” (Vayikra1:4).

Placing one’s hands on the animal was meant to create a bond between the human and the animal, and to respect the sacrifice the animal was making. The animal represented one’s failure to rise above the norms expected of humans. Therefore, there was a need to atone. The sacrifice of the animal was giving the human a second chance, and for this, he had to be grateful to the animal and God. To put one’s hands on the animal’s head was a sign of empathy. Ironically, we are, in a way, blessing them.

When one blesses children, one also places one’s hands on their heads. This goes back to Yaakov’s blessing. When we bless our children, we are showing we care and praying they will be protected and succeed in life and carry on our traditions.

The same thing happens when a rabbi is appointed. Those who give Semicha hope the rabbi will continue their traditions and work to keep them and the community alive, and follow the spirit of the Torah as well as the law. This too can be a kind of sacrifice, of oneself for the greater good. Sadly, as with parents and rabbis, not everyone succeeds. Sacrifices had another important function: community and eating together.

Although the sacrificial system has fallen into disuse for the past 2,000 years, there are still lessons to be learned from the procedures and laws mentioned here in the Book of Vayikra, which merit analysis.

The issue of sacrifices is controversial. But the voice on this issue that resonates with me is that of the great Maimonides, who seems to have two different points of view. In his great work, the Mishneh Torah, he includes in great detail those areas that have fallen into disuse, such as sacrifices and many of the laws of purity. But on the other hand, in his philosophical work, The Guide to the Perplexed (Section 3.32) he says quite clearly that sacrifices were introduced because that’s what everybody did at that time, and it would have seemed abnormal to start a religion without including sacrifices. His implication is that they were a temporary feature that would be replaced. And, in fact, they were replaced by devotional prayer after the Second Temple was destroyed.

I would suggest that whereas nowadays nobody would think of starting a new religion without prayer, it’s possible that at some stage in the future, we may substitute prayer in the way we recite it today by Artificial Intelligence or some other system. Who knows? But in the meantime, as I said above, there are important lessons we can learn from the past from traditions that are applicable today.

The author is a writer and rabbi, based in New York.

National Counterterrorism Center Director Joseph Kent attends a House Homeland Security hearing entitled “Worldwide Threats to the Homeland,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, Dec. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz

Within hours of publishing his resignation letter on X, Joe Kent, the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, had reached millions.

The media, predictably, was enthralled.

“‘Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation’: Trump-appointed intelligence official resigns over Iran war,” CNN blared.

Axios followed suit, presenting Kent’s claims with little skepticism: “‘No imminent threat’: U.S. Counterterrorism Center head resigns over Iran war.”

The Hill amplified another conspiratorial voice, headlining Tucker Carlson’s warning that “neocons” would now try to destroy Kent.

The New York Times published multiple pieces within hours, including one that packaged his resignation letter as a standalone piece.

Readers were invited to see Kent’s words as a serious, insider indictment of both the war against Iran and President Donald Trump’s administration itself.

Director Kent is entitled to resign on a matter of principle.

He is not entitled, however, to falsely smear Israel on his way out by abusing the tragic death of his wife.

Shannon Kent died not in a “war manufactured by Israel,” but at the hands of ISIS in Syria in 2019. The… https://t.co/mKKVm3epVH

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) March 17, 2026

After all, this was a man personally appointed by the president, working under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The Daily Mail went further still, elevating Kent’s rhetoric about the “Israel lobby” in a headline that nodded to one of the oldest conspiratorial tropes in circulation.

The Associated Press soberly reported that Kent had resigned because “Iran posed no immediate threat.”

Across outlets, the framing was clear: Kent was to be taken seriously.

His claims — that the war was driven by Israel and its American “lobby,” that Trump had been “deceived,” and that Iran posed no imminent threat — were not meaningfully interrogated, but simply transmitted.

Even his more outlandish assertions were handled with care.

Kent claimed that his wife, Shannon, had died in a “war manufactured by Israel.”

In reality, Shannon Kent was killed in Syria in 2019 by an ISIS suicide bomber, a fact Kent himself stated plainly in a 2020 NBC op-ed. That article did not mention Israel once.

Odd how you didn’t mention Israel when you wrote this in 2020, isn’t it?  pic.twitter.com/leDBGWP1t7

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) March 17, 2026

Apparently, it is only in retrospect that Kent has decided ISIS — an Islamist terrorist group that broadcast the executions of Western hostages from the Syrian desert  — was somehow a product of Israel.

Yet even here, major outlets softened the reality.

NPR avoided stating how she was killed, noting only that she “died serving in Syria in 2019.”

The BBC similarly declined to mention ISIS, reporting merely that she “was killed in a bombing in Syria.”

This is how credibility is quietly manufactured: not through explicit endorsement, but through omission.

But there is a deeper problem:

The same media outlets now treating Kent as a credible whistleblower were, until recently, describing him very differently.

When Kent first entered national politics, his record was viewed — quite rightly — as something far more troubling.

Kent, 44, has twice run unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state.

During his 2022 campaign, he gave an interview to a neo-Nazi YouTuber who had praised Adolf Hitler as a “complicated historical figure.” He also engaged with figures from white nationalist circles and reportedly complained that America was “anti-white.”

He sought support from Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes during a GOP primary. Though Kent later attempted to distance himself from Fuentes, the outreach itself was not in dispute.

His campaign drew endorsements from figures like Paul Gosar, who has long associated with white nationalists, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has a long and well-documented history of antisemitic rhetoric. Kent’s website also featured support from Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers (R), who was later censured after appearing at a white nationalist conference and invoking anti-Jewish tropes.

Kent even hired a member of the Proud Boys as a campaign consultant.

At the time, much of the media covered this record in detail.

CNN itself reported extensively on Kent’s “past association with extremists” and his interactions with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers.

Now, that same outlet reduces this history to a paragraph that references his “past associations with far-right figures became a key issue,” while dedicating far more space to his peddling of conspiracy theories about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

The Daily Mail omitted it entirely, opting instead to highlight his “decorated military career” and a spat with Laura Loomer.

Equally absent from much of the coverage was the extent to which Kent’s claims were rejected across the political spectrum. Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) pushed back publicly, while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt directly called his central claim — that Iran posed no imminent threat — “false,” stressing that President Trump had “strong and compelling evidence” of an impending attack.

Joe Kent resigning and immediately pivoting to blaming Israel for everything is as predictable as it is unserious.

Scapegoating Israel isn’t just a tired antisemitic trope – it’s anti-American.

This is a guy with ties to white supremacists and has “PANZER” tattooed on his arm,… https://t.co/qbZRqf0s0c

— Rep Josh Gottheimer (@RepJoshG) March 17, 2026

In other words, the man has not changed; he is still peddling the same absurd conspiracies as he always has.

What has changed is the media’s willingness to contextualize him.

When Kent was politically inconvenient, his extremism was central to his identity.

Now that his claims can be used to undermine a war involving Israel — and, by extension, the Trump administration — that same extremism is quietly set aside.

The result is that a figure once treated as beyond the pale is suddenly recast as a credible authority on matters of national security and foreign policy.

His claims are not strengthened by evidence, but by the selective amnesia of the outlets amplifying them.

And the public is left with a dangerously distorted picture: not just of Joe Kent, but of the issues he is now being used to comment on.

Because when the media decides who is credible based not on consistency, but on convenience, it does more than mislead.

It erodes the very standard by which credibility is judged in the first place.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

Paul Klee is hard to describe. The German artist’s works, which he began creating in his childhood until 1940, when he died at age 60, vary widely; they often feature abstract forms, but just as often figures. They are known for strong colors, but some are monochrome. He taught at the Bauhaus school, is considered by some to be the father of abstract art, but he’s also foundational to surrealism and German expressionism. He uses cubism and pointillism.

What he is not particularly known for is his political statements. But a new exhibit, Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds, opening this week at the Jewish Museum in New York, is looking to change that.

The exhibit, curated by Mason Klein in his final exhibit as senior curator at the museum, includes work from throughout Klee’s career, tracing a throughline of political commentary on fascism and authoritarianism that has gone little discussed. Its centerpiece is the first U.S. exhibit of a cycle of sketches the artist made in response to the Nazi assumption of power in 1933. It was an important year for Klee — it was the year he was removed from his teaching position at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, in response to pressure from the new regime.

Klee was not Jewish. But Nazi press defamed him as Jewish anyway to justify his termination. “He tells everybody he has pure Arabian blood in his veins, but he is actually a typical Galician Jew,”read an article in Nazi outlet Die Rote Erde. 

Klee was one of the first artists the Nazis declared “degenerate,” a descriptor applied to the abstract artists, often Jewish, who the regime sought to smear as sick, immoral and corrupting to the idea of German culture that Hitler promoted; 17 of his works were featured in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition organized by Nazi leaders in 1937, which compared the artworks to the drawings of the insane. In another Nazi publication, Volksparole, he was accused of advancing “the Bolshevist ideals in art of communists and Jews.”

Klee, along with his wife Lily and son Felix, fled to Switzerland. But before he left, he drew hundreds of sketches satirizing Nazi ideology, full of chaotic lines, evoking the distress of the era. Klee’s concerns about the shifting culture are also seen in the pointed titles of each work, which he noted in a meticulous catalogue he maintained.

In “Stammtischler,” a clearly recognizable portrait of Adolf Hitler stares out from the page, with small, beady, scribbled eyes. In English, the title translates to “drinking companion,” a term with the positive-leaning connotation of an affable friend. But in German, writes curator and art-historian Pamela Kort, the term Klee uses suggests an oaf who voices loud, poorly-informed opinions. Given that U.S. pundits often discuss which candidate the voters can imagine drinking a beer with, “Stammtischler” feels like a warning.

The museum’s director, James S. Snyder, noted the exhibit’s resonance to our current era in his remarks at the exhibit’s press preview. And it is hard not to think of our current political milieu when perusing Klee’s sketches.

“This Game is Getting Out of Hand,” which shows a group of children with several balls in the air, depicts brawling as much as playing; Klee, the wall text elsewhere in the exhibit notes, was deeply concerned about the long-lasting effects of exposing children to Nazi ideology and violence. This evokes today’s extremist influencers — often young men who grew up immersed in the toxic soup of the internet — who use a trolling tone when espousing antisemitism or misogyny. It’s all a joke, supposedly, but the joke is getting less and less funny.

The political dimensions of Klee’s work are most obvious in the sketches. But they highlight the mockery of authoritarianism and fascism woven throughout his other work. “Your Ancestor,” a drawing of a monstrous, Gollum-like creature, pokes fun at the Nazi focus on eugenics. The wall text argues that his strangely colored paintings of fruit can be read as commentary on the pitfalls of selective breeding. “Athlete’s Head,” a portrait of a distorted face, is, according to the exhibit, “satirizing the Nazis’ superficial glorification of the heroic athlete” in light of a required five hours a day of athletics in schools.

Klee’s dismissal from his teaching position was not the first time Klee was slurred as a Jew. Over a decade earlier, when he was nominated as a professor at the Stuttgart Art Academy, critics who felt his art was too left-wing referred to him as “Paul Zion Klee.” (He did not get the position.)

This inspired Klee to paint “Harlequin on the Bridge,” which deals openly with antisemitism. In it, a harlequin figure represents Klee himself, a Star of David hanging over his head, against an ethereal, unsettling background. The work wrestles with the idea of the perpetual outsider, whether jester or Jew, as the bridge between worlds, their positionality enabling them to access new ideas, combine categories and reach other worlds.

Klee’s politics are not always obvious. At times, it can feel hard to imagine that these abstract, modernist works are truly making a winking political commentary on antisemitism or Nazism, especially given that Klee did not speak publicly about his political views — though he wrote about them in personal letters to his wife and friends. Other Possible Worlds compellingly highlights the political valences in his work, but they remain open to a wide range of interpretations.

It all raises the question of why, if so much of his work had a political subtext, Klee did not take a louder, more pointed stand against the Nazis. Even his sketches, which criticize the new political regime, do so via caricature and irony. The titles, which give a trenchant context to each work, are still indirect. The power of Klee’s work lies in its ambiguity and ability to contain worlds, but it makes for poor activism.

In his writing, Klee appears to have decided that the best response to the vilification was to refuse to dignify it with any acknowledgment, however much he addressed the criticism in his art.

“It seems unworthy of me to undertake anything against such crude attacks,” he wrote in a letter to his wife. “For even if it were true that I am a Jew and came from Galicia that would not affect my values as a person or my achievement by an iota.”

Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds will be on display March 20 – July 26, 2026 at The Jewish Museum in Manhattan.

The post The Nazis didn’t care that Paul Klee wasn’t Jewish appeared first on The Forward.