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John Roberts will not save us — but we might just able to save ourselves
One of the many virtues of Leah Litman’s lucid and blistering new book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes is that it, as the title suggests, reads almost like a pulpy crime story. But unlike most whodunits, we know at the very start of Litman’s tale who dun the crime. No less unusual, Litman ends her story with what can be dun by Americans who wish to resist this state of lawlessness.
Litman is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Michigan, and co-host of the popular weekly legal podcast “Strict Scrutiny,” which subjects the decisions made by SCOTUS to scathing wit and surgical analysis. (In Litman’s wide-ranging criticism of SCOTUS, she lambastes the hypocrisy of the Republican-majority’s skepticism on abortion cases presented by Jewish plaintiffs who argue that their religious faith compels them to perform, provide, or access abortion care. As she notes, this skepticism is a decidedly unusual response from a court that is usually keen on expanding, not retracting, religious exemptions from law.)
When I spoke to Litman over Zoom, she expanded on the Roberts court’s cultural grievances, crackpot theories, and overall “bad vibes,” a term she says she uses to draw a distinction between “what some people think of as law,” i.e. “something that’s objective or determinate.” Instead, it becomes something based on feelings and what “triggers them and what upsets them,” which she sees as reflective of the “talking points and zeitgeist of the Republican Party.”
In our conversation, Litman traced the historical origins of bruised feelings and bad vibes that passes itself off as conservative jurisprudence. We can see today, she emphasized, a reaffirmation of the Lost Cause movement following the Civil War, “this firm commitment to restoring and entrenching white conservative political power and shutting out racial minorities from the political process and treating the inclusion of racial minorities in the polity as an affront to white conservatives and as a form of discrimination against white conservatives. And these same ideas seed, you know, the opposition to the modern Voting Rights Act.”
“Bad vibes” is, of course, not a term often found in the footnotes of law review articles. Yet while Litman acknowledged the term is kind of “loosey-goosey,” she sees it as the driving force behind SCOTUS’ legal reasoning. One of the many problems with vibes, Litman observed, is that “while everyone has feelings, my feelings don’t govern what other people can do. I am allowed to have feelings and views about the world. But that doesn’t mean I get to declare that everyone must make me feel good.”
In the case of the court’s conservative majority, Litman says, this means that they get to feel good about expressing their cultural and social grievances. They can, like Martha-Ann Alito, do so by, say, flying an upside-down American flag outside their house in support of the men and women who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6. But, more importantly, they can also bring those grievances to their legal reasoning and turn our constitution upside down. (Something that Mrs. Alito’s husband has done time and again as one of our nation’s nine sages.)
Yet, though the Roberts Court — which Litman refers to in her book as “the guys (and Amy)” — might be consumed by grievance, they are not blind to the need to garb these bad vibes in the guise of theories. This is the case for originalism, a seemingly neutral method to decide cases based on a literal reading of the Constitution. Yet, the absence of any mention of women in our founding document has allowed the Supreme Court, even after the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment, to continue to deny equal rights to women.
Hence the importance of the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade. As Litman drily observed, originalism offers conservatives and reactionaries a way to speak about issues without acknowledging the actual stakes involved. It provides a kind of plausible denial from positions that, in effect, declare, “Yes, we should take away women’s birth control pills, force them to go through childbirth, and not allow them to get divorced.”
Meanwhile, as Litman remarked, the Roberts Court often dons the guise of another supposedly objective theory, institutionalism. Her critique is particularly unsettling for those of us who would like to think that Chief Justice John Roberts is an institutionalist who, like the deus ex machina in ancient Greek tragedy, will suddenly appear over the stage set and lift us free of our tragic and fatal predicament.
On one level, Litman said, “anyone looks like an institutionalist when compared to Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. That John Roberts is more along the spectrum toward the median American voter than either of them is just obviously true and doesn’t tell us that much about whether John Roberts is actually a moderate or median. There are just so many examples where decisions by John Roberts have undermined our institutions and delegitimized our institutions.”
Consider all the decisions written or signed onto by Roberts on campaign financing, presidential powers, partisan gerrymandering, or voting rights to illustrate her claim. Clearly, Litman is not waiting for the Chief Justice to save us. “Look at all the things that Donald Trump is doing that defile our institutions and degrade our democracy. Those are things that John Roberts made perfectly clear that the president is constitutionally entitled to do. And there’s just nothing our lawmaking institutions like Congress or the federal courts can do about that,” she said.
What, then, are we to do? In her book, Litman urges the reader to “make them fight for their nihilism and obtain it at a cost.” In our conversation, she eagerly expanded on this call to action. The forces of democracy and decency cannot win this fight overnight, she told me. “There is no magic fix that will work. Instead, we need to make the case to our fellow citizens and our future elected leaders that in order to get ourselves out of this mess…and shore up our democracy so that we don’t run the risk of sliding back into autocracy and authoritarianism, we need to reform and democratize the Supreme Court.”
It is not what we might hope to hear, but it is the message we need to hear. In fact, as Albert Camus insisted, there is no reason for hope, but that is never a reason to despair. Or, as Litman concludes in her book, “the nihilistic take would be to throw up our hands and do nothing because it all seems too difficult. They’ve stolen a Court and they are practically daring anyone to challenge them. It’s time to call their bluff.”
The post John Roberts will not save us — but we might just able to save ourselves appeared first on The Forward.
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Christians are displaying menorahs in their windows post-Bondi Beach attack. Why some Jews object
In the wake of Sunday’s attack on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia, some non-Jews are placing menorahs in their windows as a visible show of support for their Jewish neighbors.
“My family is not Jewish. Our house is decorated for Christmas. Tonight we are adding a menorah in the front window,” one Threads user posted and received 17,000 likes. “We stand with our Jewish neighbors. 🕎 #hanukkah”
That was one of several viral posts shared by non-Jews lighting hanukkiot after the Bondi Beach attack, which left 15 people dead, including a Chabad rabbi, a Holocaust survivor, and a 10-year-old girl.
The practice, however, has also exposed a divide between Jews who welcome the gesture as an expression of solidarity and those who view it as a form of appropriation.
“Lighting a menorah is a closed practice and is not meant to be done by someone outside of our community,” one user replied to a non-Jew posting about her Hanukkah candles.
“We love you for this! You’re a mensch,” another commented in support.
An act of solidarity
In November 2023, Adam Kulbersh founded Project Menorah, an initiative that encourages non-Jews to display menorahs in their windows as a way to fight antisemitism. The practice gained traction in the aftermath of Oct. 7, he said, drawing thousands of participants across 16 countries and all 50 U.S. states.
After Sunday’s attack at Bondi Beach, Kulbersh, who is Jewish, said he noticed another surge in social media activity around the idea.
“This happens in a cyclical way, where non-Jews in many cases underestimate the amount of antisemitism that’s out there, and then it spikes, and they go, Oh, right, these are our friends and neighbors, and we can’t close our eyes,” he said in an interview with the Forward.
The idea for Project Menorah grew out of Kulbersh’s personal experience. When his then 6-year-old son, Jack, asked to put up Hanukkah decorations at their Los Angeles home, Kulbersh hesitated, worried that a visibly Jewish display could make them a target.
He mentioned the concern to a non-Jewish neighbor, who responded by offering to place a menorah in her window to show the family they weren’t alone.
Moved by the gesture, Kulbersh went all out with “flashy” Hanukkah decorations that year. Soon after, he launched Project Menorah to encourage other non-Jews to follow his neighbor’s example.
“I thought, This is an answer,” Kulbersh said. “We don’t need to wait for governments to solve all the problems. This is something neighbors can do for neighbors.”
It wasn’t the first time menorah displays had been proposed as a means of fighting hate: In Billings, Montana in 1993, neo-Nazis threw a brick through a 6-year-old Jewish boy’s bedroom window, which was displaying a menorah. In response, thousands of residents taped paper menorahs to their windows in solidarity — and the neo-Nazis retreated from town.
A ‘closed practice’?
The idea of non-Jews displaying menorahs, however, has elicited a different response from some Jews who take offense.
“I understand that the gentiles who are lighting their own menorahs as a show of solidarity mean well but that’s not for y’all to be doing. Judaism is a closed practice,” one user posted. “Get the circumcision first, then we’ll talk.”
The term “closed practice” reflects the fact that Judaism is a non-proselytizing religion and does not encourage people to adopt it casually. Unlike Christianity, which generally welcomes anyone who accepts Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, Jewish identity is not defined solely by belief. Becoming Jewish requires a formal and demanding conversion process, typically involving extensive study and approval by a rabbinic court.
The backlash may also reflect anxiety about increased adoption of Jewish rituals and symbols by messianic Jews and Christians. These practices tend to put off Jews who believe groups are co-opting Jewish rituals without fully appreciating their history and meanings — from “Jesus mezuzahs,” to Christian Passover seders and shofar blowing, to observing a “Jewish Sabbath,” aka Shabbat.
But for others, it’s possible to distinguish between those who combine Jewish symbols with Christian symbols, and well-meaning non-Jews want to express support.
For its part, Project Menorah offers paper cut-outs of menorahs on its website, not instructions for actually observing the holiday.
“If people want to light an actual menorah and put it in their window, great, and if they want to say a prayer that works with their religious beliefs, great,” he said. “But I’m not encouraging anyone who’s not Jewish to participate in the Jewish ritual, the Jewish prayers.”
He added that when he started the initiative, he consulted rabbis about the practice. As is often the case when asking a group of Jews about anything, he said, opinions varied.
But the majority, he said, agreed that “when the house is on fire, we don’t question the people who want to help put the fire out.”
The post Christians are displaying menorahs in their windows post-Bondi Beach attack. Why some Jews object appeared first on The Forward.
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My religion was ‘None of the above,’ until Oct. 7 and now Bondi
Judaism is on fire — or really, being Jewish is on fire. The mass murder of Jews on Bondi Beach during a Hanukah celebration was only the most recent example. But the reaction that surprised me the most was how unsurprised I was watching the news reports on Sunday morning. Like too many, I have become anesthetized to mass shootings in general and those targeted toward Jews in particular.
Antisemitism is raging across the world like a global pandemic, except the contagion this time is not a virus, it’s hate — and the fire is burning out of control. It shows up on our news platforms, our social media feeds, even, perhaps especially, in the polite company of dinner parties and faculty lounges. Jewish worshippers shot in a Manchester synagogue, an Israeli tourist viciously beaten on a busy Manhattan street while onlookers casually walked by, two Israeli embassy staff members murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C. are just a few recent examples.
Space doesn’t allow a full accounting of all the Jewish hate crimes in the last few years. But this much is true: Jewish hate is old, truly biblical, but it’s become increasingly hot in the aftermath of the war in Gaza that, parenthetically, was initiated by a heinous attack against the Jewish people. Though obvious, sometimes, especially as it relates to this conflict, the obvious needs restating. And now, for reasons that are beyond baffling, who started the war seems beside the point.
Until recently, I could feel removed from this global phenomenon, given the ambiguity of my own religious identity. Despite my last name and appearance, for most of my life, I didn’t identify as Jewish. Instead, I was the confused product of a Baptist mother from Selma, Alabama and a Jewish father who escaped Nazi Germany just in time. Both my parents turned away from their religions, my mother because of the silence of churches in the South in the face of racial injustice and my father as protection against Jewish persecution that didn’t end when World War II did.
Growing up, my religious identity was None of the Above, a designation that made me feel as though I was aimlessly wandering around a non-denominational desert.
As I grew older, the subject of my religious identity made me immediately uncomfortable, whether as a topic of conversation at a dinner party or as a simple question on a form. At times it elicited a visceral response — flushing, a bit of nausea, a bead of sweat on my back — not just because I didn’t have a ready answer, but because it made me feel disconnected from the rest of society. I would have rather been asked anything else: Who did you vote for or How much money do you make?
The question What religion are you? felt like an interrogation, a bright light shone in my face. While most people could respond to the question with a one-word answer, that was never going to be an option for me. And that made me feel like an outsider, a person that could not fit neatly into a religious box, akin to the children in military families who stumble when asked, Where did you grow up?
Everywhere, nowhere.
Because not having a religion to call my own never sat well with me, I went on a decade-long journey, one that went here and there, ending only when I spent the time to, once and for all, put the matter to bed. After thousands of hours of research, discussion, and a significant amount of rumination, I’ve decided to embrace my Judaism, to run into the burning building, as it were, when the convenient choice would have been to run away from it, an easy choice for someone that had spent his whole life undifferentiated when it came to religion.
Which brings me to today, to where I am now, to where we all are now.
Oct. 7 happened to occur in the midst of my grappling with my own religious identity. But even if that was still a bit murky then, I felt rage nonetheless when anti-Israel protests ignited in many Middle Eastern and Western capitals, all before one IDF plane was in the air. As I watched these images from the comfort of my living room, I thought of my father and his family, the knocks on the door in the middle of the night, the trains, and yes, the burning furnaces. As ever, societal opinions that surround Israel and Jewishness today have become conflated, manifesting as antisemitism when it might simply have been disagreement with the Israeli prosecution of the war in Gaza.
This country finds itself in a rare situation where extremists on the Right and the Left have merged into an unholy antisemitic coalition, exemplified by Progressives yelling and screaming about “genocide” without having a clue what that word really means and voting overwhelmingly to elect a New York City Mayor who refuses to walk back his call to “globalize the intifada.”
Meanwhile on the Right, Tucker Carlson, who has a podcast that goes out to 16.7 million followers on X, recently gave Nick Fuentes two hours to spew antisemitic rhetoric, including his comments that with regard to his enemies in the conservative movement, “I see Jewishness as the common denominator,” and that Jews are a “stateless people,” certainly true if Fuentes had his way.
Not to be left out, Carlson helpfully added that the United States gets nothing out of the relationship with Israel. Given that Israel is the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, a part of the world not known for stability, I would argue that support of Israel is not just in the interest of the “Jews” (the monolith that Carlson and his ilk view them/us) but rather in America’s interest. Carlson obviously sees the geopolitics differently, arguing recently that Israel was not “strategically important” to the United States and, in fact, a “strategic liability.” For his part, President Trump defended Carlson, saying, “You can’t tell him who to interview,” without commenting directly on what was actually said in the interview.
For a confused maybe/maybe not a Jew like me, Oct. 7 provided an impetus to reassess my faith. So I did. But after hundreds of hours of research and thousands of miles of travel, I realized my Judaism didn’t start on Oct. 8, 2023 — it began in 1320 when the progenitor of my family, Juda Weill, was born. Juda was then followed by generations of Jewish family members, mostly rabbis and including the famous composer Kurt Weill, until the German Weills were either murdered by the Nazis, or for the lucky ones, dispersed all over the world. My grandfather, fresh off the horrors of Buchenwald, made it to America with my father, grandmother, and uncle.
Then — at nearly age 60! — I learned that my mother converted to Judaism, and the path toward my own Judaism was set, when all that was left was to walk along it and pick up the breadcrumbs along the way.
What did I find at the end of that road?
A burning building. And what did I do as I looked at that place on fire, whether in Australia, Europe, or on the streets of American cities?
I ran in, because that’s what we all must do, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and everyone else of any religious identity.
If any of us wonder what we would have done, Jews or Gentiles, during the early days of the Nazi regime, we are doing it now.
The post My religion was ‘None of the above,’ until Oct. 7 and now Bondi appeared first on The Forward.
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France 24, Mother Jones Receive UN Award for Work Built on Word of Discredited Ex-Contractor Who Lied About Israel
Anthony Aguilar, a former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who previously served as a US Army Green Beret. Photo: Screenshot
The UN press corps on Friday gave an award to news outlets France 24 and Mother Jones for their reporting based on the testimony of Anthony Aguilar, a US Army veteran and former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) who has made discredited claims against Israel.
France 24 and Mother Jones were awarded the Bronze medal in the Ricardo Ortega Memorial Prize category at the UN Correspondents Gala Awards, an event hosted by the UN Correspondents Association at the global body’s headquarters in New York City. The award is for broadcast coverage of the UN, its agencies, and field operations.
According to France 24, its journalists were the first to interview Aguilar on camera on the morning of July 23, 2025. Aguilar claimed he witnessed human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israeli military and others at sites run by the GHF, which until the Gaza ceasefire went into place was an Israel- and US-backed program that delivered aid directly to Palestinians, with the goal of blocking Hamas from diverting supplies for terrorist activities and selling the remainder at inflated prices.
France 24 and Mother Jones both published a story based on Aguilar’s testimony.
However, it was revealed last year that Aguilar’s most explosive claim, about the death of a Gazan boy, was false and that he was fired by the GHF for his conduct and pushing misinformation.
Aguilar claimed he witnessed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shoot a child — Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hamdene, known as Abboud — as the GHF was distributing humanitarian aid on May 28.
After Aguilar made his claim, he rapidly rose to prominence, presenting himself as a whistleblower exposing supposed Israeli war crimes. His story gained traction internationally, going viral on social media. He subsequently embarked on an extensive media tour, in which he accused Israel of indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians as part of an attempt to “annihilate” and “disappear” the civilian population in Gaza.
However, Aguilar, who erroneously labeled the boy in question as “Amir,” gave inconsistent accounts of the alleged incident in separate interviews to different media outlets, calling into question the veracity of his narrative.
The GHF launched its own investigation at the end of July, ultimately locating Abboud alive with his mother at an aid distribution site on Aug. 23. The organization confirmed his identity using facial recognition software and biometric testing.
Abboud was escorted in disguise to an undisclosed safe location by the GHF team for his safety, according to The Daily Wire, which noted that the spreading of Aguilar’s false tale put the boy’s life in danger, as his alleged death was a powerful piece of propaganda for Hamas.
Fox News Digital reported that Abboud and his mother were safely extracted from the Gaza Strip in September.
In footage obtained by both news outlets, the boy can be seen playfully interacting with a GHF representative and appearing excited ahead of their planned extraction.
During the summer, as Aguilar’s claims were receiving widespread media attention, the GHF released a chain of text messages showing that Aguilar was terminated for his conduct. It also held a press conference to present evidence showing that Aguilar “falsified documents” and “presented misleading videos to push his false narrative.”
There was no apparent mention of the revelations about Aguilar’s narrative when the award was given out on Friday.