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dehumanization
Words Are the First Weapon of War
The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized.
Oct 18, 2025
I sit here at my desk, looking out the window—and see someone walking through the parking lot. This is the most ordinary of moments. I shrug quietly. Life goes on.
My impulse is to stop writing the column here. That’s it. Nothing more to say. Life is totally fine and civilized and I’m here in the middle of it, growing old but giving no thought whatsoever to the darkness that lurks at humanity’s margins. Sure, the news covers that stuff, but what do I care? Things are fine where I live.
But the darkness tugs. I read the news. I know that hell consumes parts of the planet and certain lives have no safety—no value—whatsoever. Here’s a recent New York Times headline, as ordinary as the fact that someone was walking through the parking lot outside my window:
“U.S. Military Kills Another 6 People in 5th Caribbean Strike, Trump Says.”
Well, so what? They were transporting drugs. “The military has now killed 27 people as if they were enemy soldiers in a war zone and not criminal suspects...”
To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them.
Minor news, right? But consider the complexity of the context that emerges from these words. The story is critical of President Donald Trump for bombing boats and claiming without evidence that they were transporting drugs meant to be sold to Americans. But there’s a quiet assumption here. By making the point that this was not a war zone, the story quietly leaves the assumption hanging that if it were a war zone—and the boat had been carrying officially declared American enemies—well, that would be a different matter.
War itself is unchallenged and accepted—certainly by the mainstream media (whatever is left of it). And also by the collective American, and perhaps global, norm. And here’s the problem. War is a 50-50 deal: There’s a good side and a bad side. And if you’re on the good side, the war you wage is just. That means you have the moral leeway to kill whomever you want... excuse me, “must.” This includes children.
But “permission to kill” is psychologically—indeed, spiritually—complex. It requires a further step, one that lets us off the hook from our own inner moral sensibility: We’re all humans. We are deeply alike. We are one.
The way around this emotional difficulty is simple: Dehumanize the enemy! It happens virtually automatically, as soon as a particular group is declared the enemy, i.e., “them.” But it requires linguistic assistance: The bad folks must be given a name. and when they are, the name explodes in significance. Ka-boom! Now it’s a weapon. Anyone assigned that name is instantly dehumanized. Language is the initial weapon of war, and is an indispensable tool of those who wage it.
Indeed, dehumanization exists almost as though it’s part of who we are. I believe with all my heart that it is not part of the human DNA, but it sure seems to act like it is. To dehumanize a group of people who are different from us simplifies life enormously. Even if we don’t go to war with them, we free ourselves from having to try to understand them. We can just dismiss them.
Welcome to racism. Welcome to ethnicity. Welcome to borders, both political and religious. Welcome to us vs. them—the hole in the human heart.
In my lifetime, here in the USA—in the wake of World War II—the primary way to dehumanize someone, at home as well as abroad, was to declare them a communist. The term had instant power. Every leftist was a commie. They were taking over Hollywood, not to mention Washington. They were under our beds! Because of the existence of nuclear weapons, America’s powers-that-be wisely avoided going to war with the Soviet Union or China, but we nonetheless had the wherewithal to create the military-industrial complex here at home and engage in proxy wars, killing a few million people and, oh yeah, intensifying our long-term, unacknowledged war on Planet Earth itself.
Another dehumanization term that emerged from those wars was “collateral damage”—a unique form of dehumanization. Those who were collateral damage were not necessarily our enemies, just people in the vicinity of the just war we were waging. They were merely in the way. But the term did its job. It took the humanity away from anyone our bombs unintentionally eliminated and turned them into scrap metal at a junkyard.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, however... uh oh, now what? The communists were done with, but we still needed an enemy! Governing is so much harder without one. Enter the terrorists, our primo enemy of the last couple decades and a word with enormous potency. For instance, anyone who criticizes Israel for killing 70,000 Palestinians (or far, far more than that) is both pro-terrorist and antisemitic. The flotilla trying to bring food to Gaza is a terrorist operation.
And then, closer to home, we have the “illegals”—aliens, wetbacks—who are not just fleeing poverty and crossing the border into the USA, but invading it. Looks like we’ve got another war on our hands, folks.
I’m not worried about the guy I saw walking through the parking lot a little while ago, but what if he looked like an invader? Hey, ICE...
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Responding to Charlie Kirk's Killing With the Wisdom of Our Inner 3 Year Old
Valuing life and understanding its profound complexity is humanity’s future. Snorting at life, laughing at life, killing it, is humanity’s suicide.
Sep 17, 2025
Charlie Kirk’s killing last week—and the aftermath of grief and political outrage—are too overwhelming to ignore, even though I couldn’t possibly have anything to say that hasn’t already been said.
The best I can do is wander into the spiritual unknown and perhaps ask an impossible question or two. The first one is this: Are words adequate for the exploration of life and death? I ask this question as a writer. To me, words are virtually magical entities. They give us the means to shape, if not the world itself, at least our comprehension of it... and thus we assume we know what’s going on around us.
For instance, here I am, sitting at my desk, looking out my window on a beautiful, blue-sky afternoon. The leaves on the tree in front of me flutter in the breeze. A woman in a red coat walks through the parking lot, which is mostly empty. Everything is calm. The time is 2:43 pm on a Tuesday. This all seems simple enough, right?
But of course this is nothing more than the surface of this moment—a real-life postcard, you might say. Putting it into words, at least in one sense, limits what I see. I see what is “known,” categorize it all as normal—and move on. If I were 3 years old, I’d still be staring at the tree, perhaps one leaf at a time. I could well be lost in its beauty and complexity.
Why is his death shocking while a 5-year-old Palestinian child’s death by bombing, or by starvation, is nothing at all? Is Kirk the only one of them who’s human?
As I return to the news, I’m suggesting that we bring with us our inner 3 year old. The news of the Kirk assassination is given to us with simple us-vs.-them clarity. He was speaking at an event in Utah. Someone fired a rifle from several hundred feet away. He was hit in the neck. He died.
And then it turns political. Well, it does and it doesn’t. Charlie Kirk was a husband, the father of two young children. No matter where you stand in regard to his right-wing, MAGA politics, the horror of his death—the horror inflicted on his family—is explosive. "No!” screams our inner 3 year old. The nation is stunned.
But almost immediately, things turn political. US President Donald Trump and others instantaneously blame the “radical left” and let their hatred spew. Kirk is now their martyr, and they feel they have permission to make the most of his death politically that they can. Eliminate the left. I can feel the joy oozing from their hatred, which gushes like blood from a bullet wound.
All progressives can do is express shock and grief. Kirk’s murder isn’t “political.” He was a human being! And here’s where words can too easily fail us. This isn’t Side A vs. Side B. This is “We are all one” vs. “We’re great and you’re evil, and we’re comin’ for ya.”
But the divide is infinitely deeper even than that. Charlie Kirk’s murder is international news, but it’s also only one murder out of unknown thousands and thousands every day. Why is his death shocking while a 5-year-old Palestinian child’s death by bombing, or by starvation, is nothing at all? Is Kirk the only one of them who’s human?
Killing requires dehumanization. That’s the nature of war—every war. And the larger the number we kill, the easier the dehumanization becomes. Oh, they’re just “the enemy” or, ho hum, collateral damage. Any questions?
And here’s where language deeply, deeply, deeply fails us. “Left” and “right”—life and death—are simply equal opposites, at least in much of the media coverage of this. Nothing could be further from the truth: Valuing life and understanding its profound complexity is humanity’s future. Snorting at life, laughing at life, killing it, is humanity’s suicide.
Here are the words of Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayoral candidate, speaking at a Jews for Racial and Economic Justice award ceremony the day of Kirk’s killing:
Before I begin, I do want to take a moment to address the horrific political assassination that just occurred today in Utah. Charlie Kirk is dead, yet another victim of gun violence in a nation where what should be a rarity has turned into a plague. It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn. It must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all...
We hold a common belief in the shared dignity of every person on this planet, and the refusal to draw a line in the sand, as it so often is done, when it comes to Palestinian lives...
We know, because the United Nations tells us, that by the end of the month, millions will be facing starvation, if they are not starving already. This is not accidental. This is not due to a freak blight. This is not because the world now lacks the means to feed the hungry. It is because those decisions made by the Israeli government and by our government here continue to ensure that that is a reality. And if that does not stagger the conscience, what will?
Let me repeat these words: “the shared notion of humanity that’s behind us all.”
Our inner 3 year old knows this. How do we start embracing it politically? Humanity is a collective entity. We can’t kill our enemy without eventually killing ourselves.
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When the Starved Become the Starvers: A Jewish Voice on Gaza
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it—because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors.
Jun 11, 2025
The photographs are unbearable. Hollow-eyed children staring into cameras, their faces etched with a hunger that reaches beyond the physical. Families huddled in makeshift shelters, their possessions reduced to what they could carry. These images from Gaza pierce through my screen and lodge themselves in a place where other images have lived for decades—the inherited memories of my grandparents' stories, passed down like sacred wounds.
All four of my grandparents fled the Nazi machinery of death. They carried with them fragments of lives destroyed: a photograph here, a recipe there, stories that began with abundance and ended with ash. They spoke of hunger as a weapon, of siege as strategy, of how systematically cutting off food, medicine, and hope could break a people's spirit before breaking their bodies.
I grew up believing that "Never Again" meant exactly that—never again would any people, anywhere, face the deliberate infliction of starvation and suffering. I believed that we, as Jews, would be the first to recognize the early warning signs, the first to cry out when others faced the machinery of dehumanization.
Today, I am ashamed.
"Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
Not ashamed to be Jewish—that identity remains precious to me, woven as it is with traditions of justice, compassion, and repair of the world. But ashamed that a state claiming to represent Jewish values has chosen hunger as a weapon of war. Ashamed that siege has become a strategy. Ashamed that the descendants of those who cried out, "Let my people go" have become deaf to similar cries in Arabic.
This is not what my grandparents envisioned when they dreamed of a Jewish homeland. They dreamed of safety, yes, but not safety built on others' suffering. They dreamed of dignity, but not dignity that required stripping it from their neighbors. They imagined a place where Jewish children could grow up free from fear, but they never imagined that freedom would come at the cost of Palestinian children growing up with empty stomachs.
The Israel my grandparents hoped for was meant to be a light unto the nations—a place where the lessons of Jewish suffering would translate into Jewish compassion. Instead, we see policies that mirror the very tactics once used against us. We see justifications that echo the language of those who once justified our persecution. We see the slow strangulation of a people that feels horrifyingly familiar to anyone who has studied the ghettos of Warsaw or the camps of Europe.
I know the counterarguments. I know about security concerns, about terrorism, about the complexity of this conflict. I know that Israelis have suffered, that Jewish children have died, that fear runs deep on all sides. But none of this justifies using starvation as a weapon. None of this justifies trapping 2 million people in what amounts to an open-air prison. None of this honors the memory of those who died precisely because the world stood by while their humanity was systematically denied.
The Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—demands that we speak truth even when it's uncomfortable, especially when it's uncomfortable. It demands that we hold our own people accountable to the highest moral standards, not because we hate them, but because we love them too much to watch them betray their own values.
Being Jewish taught me that moral authority comes not from power, but from how that power is used. It taught me that we have a special obligation to protect the vulnerable precisely because we were once vulnerable ourselves. It taught me that "Never Again" loses all meaning if it only applies to Jewish suffering.
The images from Gaza haunt me not despite my Jewish identity, but because of it. They haunt me because I recognize in Palestinian faces the same hollow desperation my grandparents described in the faces of their neighbors. They haunt me because I see in Israeli policies the same cold calculation that once sought to break Jewish spirits through systematic deprivation.
This is not Jewish. This is not what our ancestors dreamed when they prayed, "Next year in Jerusalem." This is not what it means to be a people chosen for the hard work of justice.
We can do better. We must do better. The children of Gaza deserve better. The memory of those who perished in the Holocaust demands better. The future of Judaism itself depends on better.
The photographs will keep coming. The question is whether we will keep our eyes open long enough to see ourselves reflected in them, and whether we will have the courage to look away from the mirror and toward the work of repair.
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