I just read an article about Jewish Greek survivor relatives returning to Athens for a ceremony to return Holocaust victims’ belongings to their families.
From my Diaspora mural: Mothers and children murdered in the Holocaust ascend from the smoke of the crematoria, assuming their angelic form. Permanent collection, Historic Blue Moon Hotel, New York.
The German government undertook to pay reparations. But how does one compensate for ten thousand Jewish villages erased from the earth? How does one repay the destruction of hundreds upon hundreds of yeshivot and institutions of learning where G-d stood at the center of every lesson? How does one assign a price to the deliberate annihilation of the holiest elements of Jewish life across Lithuania, Latvia, eastern Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine?
How can there be compensation for the generations of Jews who contributed, produced, and enriched Europe while sending their sons to fight in its armies, only to see a millennium of accumulated life, faith, scholarship, and culture reduced to ash?
Reparations can never restore what was stolen. They are but blood money.
Yet if there remains even the humblest object once touched by a Jew who sanctified G-d’s Name in martyrdom, and it can be returned to that person’s family or to the Jewish nation, then it should be returned without hesitation.
In a profane world, it is a sacred obligation.
It is not the return of property.
It is stolen memory placed where it belongs. No longer to be defiled.
It is dignity for the desecrated.
History has a way of exposing illusions, and adversity reveals who we are and what we stand for.
The Price of Statelessness. A detail from my Diaspora mural portraying the generations of Jews driven from Judea, sold into slavery, and condemned to a millennia-long nightmare of exile and persecution until the rebirth of the State of Israel. Throughout it all, they carried their children, their faith, and their hope. Permanent exhibit, Historic Blue Moon Hotel, New York.
The Price of Statelessness
To those who ask, either out of ignorance or veiled contempt, “But why were the Jews slaughtered?" to offer a reason to a question that should never be asked, we were slaughtered because a stateless people have no hope of defending themselves against citizens, police, and an army incited by the very same kind of insane accusations and propaganda.
“A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth." Joseph Goebbels.
Blood Libels Never Die
What we see on the internet today would boggle anyone’s mind. People claim every kind of sick, satanic, licentious, world-controlling cabal of Jews imaginable.
The accusations are without measure because the hatred is without measure.
One influencer with 12 million followers claimed that, in lieu of Temple sacrifices, Jews throw puppies into their festival bonfires. Kristof, touted as a celebrated journalist, ran a NYC exposé on Israelis using dogs to rape Arab/Palestinian prisoners.
This truly weaponizes the Jews with demonic abilities capable of perpetrating biological impossibilities.
Debunked corrections are meaningless.
No matter how absurd the accusation, even anatomically impossible rape is circulated like a revelation from on high.
Why?
“Evil is sought in the Jew not because he is evil, but because he is hated."- Max Nordau.
Humanity Is a Sham
Max Nordau, a heavily assimilated German Jew married to a Dane, awoke one morning, much like Herzl, to realize that a horse is a horse.
A Jew is a Jew.
Humanity is a sham.
World brotherhood is a farce, when it comes to the Jew.
Bread for Stones: Too Good Is No Good
The Jewish contributions to the world are indisputable, and so is the hatred. Which brings an additional thought to mind.
I know of no more succinct explanation for the way Jews are treated than the old mafioso and Yiddish adages. The common sense preserved in both cultures often explains human nature more clearly than volumes of academic theory.
I often heard old-time mafiosi lament, “If you are too good, you are no good."
Which fits nicely with the Yiddish expression, “Some give stones in return for the bread given them."
Mundus vult decipi.
The world wants to be deceived. But a people is known by its history.
Israel has been magnanimous at the expense of its own soldiers, risking lives to warn the enemy of impending strikes. Gaza’s chosen enemy is Gaza's luck.
Had Gaza committed the atrocities of October 7 against Egypt, Syria, or Jordan, raping women to death, sexually mutilating their victims, slaughtering infants as at Kibbutz Be’eri, and murdering Shiri Bibas and her two little boys, there would have been no humanitarian provisions.
Instead of rubble, there would have been rivers of blood.
What is a Walrus?
Theater vs. Famine
A satirical nod to the absurdity of a culture that can no longer distinguish between a walrus and a giraffe, sanity and delusion, good and evil, night and day, a humanitarian catastrophe and the terrible cost of brutally attacking a neighboring civilian population. Part of a worldview where moral equivalencies are pulled from a hat. Apparently, once common sense is surrendered, everything identifies as everything else.
The Nazis allotted Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto 184 calories a day, later reducing the ration to 177 calories. Jewish physicians secretly documented the body’s slow consumption of itself.
Warsaw Ghetto, where Jews were reduced to 184, then 177 calories a day. The body consumes itself. Childhood disappears. This is what deliberate starvation looks like..
These are Gazan children during the war:
Comparing Gaza’s robust children to the Warsaw Ghetto is an obscenity.
A Pita a Day
Apparently, starvation in Gaza means excess calories and a confabulated famine staged for hashtags and Instagram theater. The West is done rewriting the Holocaust. It cannot purge its complicity through projection.
Nothing in Gaza can eclipse the war against the Jews or the deliberate starvation of Israeli hostages. Eviatar David. Held for more than two years in a forty-foot Hamas tunnel, he and another hostage survived on a single pita a day. He lost 41 percent of his body weight. That is what starvation looks like.
Israeli hostage Eviatar David after more than two years in Hamas captivity. In August 2025, Hamas released a propaganda video showing him emaciated in an underground tunnel, using a spade to dig his own grave. He survived on a single pita a day and lost 41 percent of his body weight.
Gaza: Staged Famine
Israel sustaining the enemy is another first in the history of war. An Israeli nutritional assessment calculated that food entering Gaza between January and July 2024 provided an average daily supply of 3,004 calories, 98 grams of protein, 61 grams of fat, and 23 milligrams of iron per person.
Sham Famine Exposed by Captured Hamas terrorists.
Obviously no one here was on a draconian diet, let alone starving. Some appear to have been eating for two.
What Is a Woman? What Is a Genocide?
“It is easier to make nations believe a big lie than a small lie." Adolf Hitler.
Gaza is the big lie.
It is hardly surprising that a generation unable to distinguish the biological difference between a man and a woman is likewise unable to distinguish self-inflicted terrorist casualties that delusional Hamas supporters identify as being genocide from an actual genocide.
In Iraq, the U.S. killed 250,000 people, 210,000 of them Iraqi citizens. Yet shrill voices sputter constant screams of genocide over 70,000 casualties that are claimed as civilians although most were not.
According to Hamas itself, fifty thousand terrorists’ families are in receipt of special pensions for the widows of terrorists, and regarding the twenty thousand, it’s no secret their death rolls held natural deaths and included child soldiers.
Urban warfare experts from the American John Spencer to the British Richard Kemp all agree Israel is the gold standard in urban warfare.
The belongings remain. Their owners do not. Mountains of eyeglasses stripped from Jewish victims before their murder bear silent witness to what genocide truly. Here are the glasses needed for the myopic to distinguish between the Night of the Holocaust and the fog of the Gazan farce.
What Is a Genocide?
If you really want to know what a genocide really is, look at places where less than five percent of the Jewish population survived.
The mass murder of accumulated Greek Jewry.
By 1945, between 82 and 92 percent of Greek Jews had been murdered, one of the highest proportions in Europe, and of the 3.4 million Polish Jews, less than ten percent survived.
Providing to the simplest of minds, at a price too great to bear, what a genocide is, and to the Jew specifically, there is no place on the face of the earth other than our ancestral homeland.
I love America and am grateful for the benefits of our society, our way of life, and the safety it afforded my ancestors.
My grandfather, father, father-in-law, uncles, and brother-in-law have all served proudly in the US armed forces.
My Italian great-grandfather built a good deal of Brooklyn in his day, only to be undone by the Depression. My grandmother, widowed by the harsh conditions the Italians suffered in the construction industry, rebelled into entrepreneurship when women had just won the right to vote.
My father suffered a similar fate as his father, and my mom worked waitressing, trying exhaustingly to prevent deprivation.
My Jewish grandparents, pogrom survivors, were given refuge and worked the sweatshops and served as janitors in their building.
And every one of them sang “G-d Bless America" with a full heart, because they knew what America had given them. They understood the cost of freedom because they had lived without it. They cherished this country not because it was perfect, but because they remembered the alternatives.
That is why the battle over history matters.
Erasing and rewriting history has become one of the primary objectives of the red-green coalition. No history, no pride; no pride, and the healthy sense of identity is gradually erased. That is the road to the deconstruction of the West, because people would often rather embrace a destructive identity than no identity at all. That vacuum leaves them vulnerable to a subversive culture.
If the day comes when America no longer offers Jews the freedom and security it once did, if another Democratic administration advances the agenda of the DSA, the Squad, and the Islamists, I know where my home ultimately is. Like countless Jews before me, I will return to the only homeland given to us from on high, the only land that has truly been ours: Israel.
A Nation That Will Not Die
“For You have been my refuge, a tower of strength before the enemy." - Psalm 61:4
It is our sanctuary and fortress, where we can live without fear of the contagion of the nations, while continuing to love all people as we always have, contributing our gifts to the betterment of the world, but at arm’s length. Only a people with a state and an army, hardened by thousands of years of oppression and a holy will to survive, have a chance to overcome man’s inhumanity to man.
But, if you still want to kill Jews despite the decency and the benefits offered, then lace up your boots, get on the ground, and see if you can do any better than the 600 million Arabs who have already tried and failed.
“If these laws should ever depart from before Me, says the Lord, then the offspring of Israel, too, shall cease from being a nation before Me forever." - Jeremiah 31:35-36
Randy Yisroel Settenbrino is a writer, artist, and public intellectual whose work bridges theology, philosophy, and psychology. He is a passionate advocate for Israel and Jewish-Christian solidarity, and the founder of the Historic Blue Moon Hotel, recognized by National Geographic as one of the 150 most unique projects in the Western Hemisphere. Founder of Ohr Chodosh L’Zion, a cultural and spiritual initiative dedicated to restoring Jewish identity, courage, and moral clarity through the fusion of art, history, and living faith. His newest release on Amazon Between the Altar and the Sanctuary: The Life, Faith, and Fire of Rabbi Meir Kahane