This is the start of an experiment.
It feels like the time has come to stop giving Mark Zuckerberg comments and posts that he can monetize, now that his company has gone full MAGA and deliberately blocked the main Instagram account of Indivisible, the organizer of the No Kings protests. From 1 p.m. Saturday until after 3 p.m., the account was mysteriously locked down and was not able to post photos and video reports from the thousands of No Kings protests around the country.
With the lion’s share of corporate-owned media in the control of billionaire oligarchs who have donated millions to Donald Trump, I’m no longer believing any statements by these companies that it was a mistake or a software glitch.
Just like the Ellison-owned CBS News has pushed out the door journalists unwilling to bend their reporting to a right-wing perspective, it clearly seems like Meta and its subsidiaries wants to control what you see.
So I’m going to bring my commentary on the day’s political events to RadioFreeSomewhere.com, this Substack landing page where I have at least a semblance of control over what people see from me.
We hired a Hillel rabbi, wait, no, never mind.
For starters, let’s talk about the Emory University Hillel rabbi, Nikki Golomb, who got fired by Hillels of Georgia when it learned her fiancé, Sam Stein, has posted on Instagram in support of Palestinians being attacked by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
Hillels of Georgia handled this pretty badly, first calling her into the president’s office and summarily firing her.
(South Jersey residents will recognize the president of Hillels of Georgia is Rabbi Larry Sernovitz, who spent several years in the South Jersey community before moving to Georgia.)
In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Golomb said Sernovitz had told her a donor’s funding was in jeopardy if it learned about her engagement to Stein.
After Rabbi Golomb went public about the firing in Jewish news media, Hillels of Georgia tried to do some damage control by claiming it wasn’t really about Sam’s posts, but about her own affiliation with a group called Rabbis for Ceasefire, a group that describes its mission as “speaking out with one voice to fulfill the most sacred obligation in Jewish tradition Pikuach nefesh: Saving a life.”
Mainstream Jewish groups often criticize groups like this as being anti-Israel, but it feels more like a group of Jewish spiritual leaders trying to find some common thread of humanity underpinned by Jewish moral values.
Where do you come down on this question?
Should a rabbi lose her job because someone close to her speaks out on a controversial issue?
Can she be part of an organization that fits her conscience but may not make donors to her employer completely happy?
There’s enough there to chew on for today.
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