Mr. Nehorai, I knew the cost, and would pay it again.

Don't assume that because we're both members of "the Tribe" that you know my motives.

On December 7, Pop Chassid blogger and Torah Trumps Hate founder Elad Nehorai wrote a piece in The Forward proclaiming "My Fellow Pro-Israel Jews: You Got What You Wanted, But You Paid Too Much". In this piece, he parrots the classic tropes about Donald Trump being "in cahoots with the Russians", how he "demonizes Muslims", and how he has "done everything he can to destroy the rights of everyone but rich white Americans". This is ironic given that in Dave Chappelle's latest Netflix special, the world famous black comic taunts the audience by saying "he (Trump) was looking out for me" while discussing his experience waiting in line at the polls last November in Central Ohio as the only black Hillary voter among a sea of Trump supporting hill-rods. And by himself, Chappelle was referring to the rich, and not only the white ones. So I want to address the rest of this post to Nehorai directly.

You could not help it but to include a complaint about how Trump "equivocated" between Nazis at Charlottesville and those that "marched" against him. What you conveniently omit is that it wasn't the marching of one peaceful movement against a violent one, it was violence between two superficially different but intrinsically similar totalitarian movements - white nationalism and leftist totalitarianism. As someone with grandparents that escaped Nazism, Soviet communism, and Iraq, I am here to tell you Elad Nehorai: You CAN walk and chew gum at the same time by opposing TWO ideas that you oppose for different reasons. If you truly want to, you can form your OWN viewpoints as distinct from one or the other and fight them both simultaneously. That's essentially what George Orwell wrote about in 1984 when he used the satirical metaphor of the almost light switch-like shifting of enemies by the state between "Eurasia" and "East Asia". And conspicuously Donald Trump, a man that you consider a total moron, illustrated that very simply by condemning violence on both sides. You should know better, as a constant critic of police conduct, that Charlottesville was an excellent occasion to criticize the Virginia State Police for not separating the two groups of lowlifes, but instead you went to your ever-culprit, Donald Trump. 

Please allow me to state that I did not want to address you this way, and I tried to contact you in order to ask for a discussion on my YouTube channel so we could compare our viewpoints. While you didn't block me, which I should consider a courtesy given your Pop Chassid article entitled "Why I Blocked You" where you expound on some philosophical reasons for blocking so many of you erstwhile friends because "You (they) have hurt me (Elad Nehorai)", I am wondering exactly what goal you had in mind when you published that self-righteous diatribe in December. You said your piece about how we had "sold out American democracy" but if you had ever believed in democracy to begin with maybe you would have tried to process why so many Americans, and yes that includes some Jewish people like me, voted for a person that you hate for your own personal reasons.

And here is where we get to your key blind spot. A lot of us DON'T support a candidate exclusively because of their Israel stances. To be honest with you I thought that Donald Trump was lying when he first promised to move the embassy, just like every president since Bill Clinton has. And in my mind the placement of a diplomatic outpost one place or another is inconsequential. The status of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion. Just like when Germany moved its capital from Bonn to Berlin following the Cold War, and Brasil moved theirs to the new city of Brasilia in 1964 from Rio de Janeiro. What Donald Trump did was a courtesy that was blown out of proportion by a hyper-partisan Pavlovian media and social media environment that is addicted to one thing: Trump. 

I know you don't care about the true reasons that we voted for him. That's because. . .

• You don't care that many of us like my cousin saw their premiums skyrocket under Obamacare. We were promised so much by the progressive hope peddler, yet you have addressed not one of his failures to his citizens in your blog. . .
• You don't care that here in the Midwest, we were fed lies and innuendo for years by presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush again, and Obama about bringing jobs back to the United States through NAFTA, the GTAA, and the TPP. Let me state for the record that I didn't vote for any of them. I am pleased to say that despite naysayers like Paul Krugman, a fellow Trump nemesis like yourself, we are getting jobs here and for the first time in almost four years our job growth is above the national average.
• You don't care that unlike your very very recent awakening against Donald Trump which was wholly tied to the 2016 election cycle, many of us had researched his opponent over two decades and realized that a person like Hillary Clinton would jeopardize the due process of law, freedom of speech, and other elements of the Bill of Rights. That doesn't mean that YOU had to support Trump, but it would have been a great opportunity to exercise Orwell's option of not buying into a world of Manichean good-evil dichotomies by choosing someone like Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.
• You don't care that in cities like mine, school choice is not only popular, but it is almost necessary in order to provide adequate alternatives to a failing and corrupt public school system. I'm not saying this because I have kids, but because I saw through in my own college education that the children that arrived from charter schools were ambitious and ready to be challenged in our engineering, while the ones that came from standard public schools were often poorly motivated. 
• You don't care that the candidate you supported, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, was complicit in the expansion of the surveillance state and that there are those among us that hope to see the end of it under this president or another. You also don't care that President Obama's spy chief lied under oath in 2013 about those surveillance programs, and was only exposed by Edward Snowden's revelations to Wikileaks. I supported Rand Paul, so my conscience is clear on this topic. 
• You don't care that the candidate you supported, Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State supported policies that began new wars in Libya and Yemen and wreaked havoc across the Middle East. Perhaps if she had had some of the wisdom that you deign to have we might not have had to deal with the waves of refugees and migrants caused by those conflicts that you now bemoan us not admitting to these shores.
• You don't care that we as sentient human beings are capable of using our LOGIC to see through the chatter of the media to decide for ourselves which choice fits our beliefs and interests as voters. You've stated that "facts care about your feelings", but in your example of why so-called logical actors like Nate Silver are failures, you omitted the fact that it wasn't the actual numbers that lied. It was the pollsters like Silver that lied here about oversampling Democrats like was revealed here in an interview with veteran pollster John Zogby of Zogby Polling. So essentially the feelings of pollsters clouded their logic, not the other way around.

But you also don't care because you decided on your own that we aren't worth the trouble of engaging. The idea that someone else might have a completely different set of priorities than you do offends your moral sensibilities. How does that make you a "Pop Chassid"? If anything that makes you a "Pop Misnaged", someone judgmental that feels any deviation from a core set of doctrines stated in a particular way.  I understand that you don't owe a stranger like me a response or an interview. That's your choice. But if you're out their marching, and resisting, and raising your fist as you always brag, then let me ask you a simple question: Who are you trying to swing? Who is your audience? If it is people that already agree with you, then the marches might as well be done on VR or in a chat room. You're not convincing anyone.

Also, you deflected a few months ago concerning a march where "we spoke about the importance of being able to inhabit spaces with people we disagree with". That was when you decided to march in a rally that included "Jewish Voice for Peace", a group that in February 2016 bragged about disrupting an anti-BDS event. So you're fine with other people disagreeing with you, but they are not and yet you still affiliate with them by proxy through appearing in the same march. Good job buddy, really big step in the direction of something or another. I just wish you would apply the same standards that you do with JVP to people like me that don't belong to a political organization and state their views and opinions without attempting to abridge the freedom of expression of others. 

In the same article you stated that you "don't want to talk about Linda Sarsour today". Well, when you show up at an event where her role is considerably more visible and weighty than yours, don't expect people to care what YOU want to talk about. You said "I (Elad Nehorai) am tired of speaking about only my concerns". Good, because MY concern is that YOU don't care about even a SINGLE one of the concerns listed above, and that's why you have this myopic view of people you disagree.

I'd like to end on a note that we will both understand by its spiritual implications, as we believe in the same faith. However, it's a point that should be universally understandable regardless of whether you are a Jew, a Buddhist, a Christian, or an atheist. Leviticus 19:18 relates that "You shall neither take revenge from nor bear a grudge against the members of your people; you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord." The Hebrew word Re'a can mean neighbour, fellow, or friend. This is a mitzva (commandment) that typically I don't want to do and often I fail at, but I'm willing to give it a shot. I try to do that not because it makes me feel good, but because I know it's a logical necessity in order to maintain a civil society where people can use ideas to solve problems before they resort to force. 

You can do that too. I'm still here to listen and I'm not going anywhere.  You don't have to do it by talking to me, but it's not gonna happen if you avoid everyone you disagree with.