No One's Jew Card Can Be Revoked
And neither can Amy Goodman's
As much as I wish they could, Jewish terror apologists cannot revoke their Jew cards. That is because the Jew card is issued by society and not by the person holding it. Nowhere is this concept more salient than with self-described journalist Amy Goodman and her contributions to misinformation on Israel and Jews—oh sorry, I meant “Zionists.” Allow me to explain.
Amy Goodman is the principal host of Democracy Now!. Particularly ironic about a show with “democracy” in the name is how that same show acts as a mouthpiece for Iranian-backed dictatorships under the guise of modern progressivism. A 70s-era hippie whose ideas have not aged well, Goodman presents as one of the OG ‘As a Jews.’ She’s also one of the first Jews of this persuasion to create a large platform for herself before social media became a widespread phenomenon. For a Boomer, Goodman has done a fairly respectable job appealing to the younger masses, specifically those who have turned wrapping themselves in kaffiyehs and yelling for an intifada into their entire identity.
As one might expect, Goodman spends a large percentage of her program nowadays talking about Israeli “war crimes” parallel to Palestinian victimhood. It’s an easy binary, and hardly a unique one to be found over today’s airwaves. Now that there’s a ceasefire agreement in place, I would expect that Goodman and her friends would be thrilled, right? Well, not exactly:
Goodman’s reporting on Israel always follows the following formula, which up to now seems to have worked pretty well for her:
Step 1: Open the segment with Israel’s horrible governmental leaders and portray those leaders as representing all Israelis.
Step 2: Invite an Israeli As a Jew (in this case journalist Gideon Levy, a regular guest on her show) along with a representative from “the other side” (in this case Mouin Rabbani) to condemn Israel as a duo, as if this casting decision indicates balance in her reporting.
Step 3: Blame Bibi and his supporters for everything whilst whitewashing Hamas.
I cannot speak for how Rabbani represents Palestinians, but I can say with confidence that Levy does not represent the average Israeli/Jewish voice on this conflict—just a very renown dissenting one. Check out this exchange between him and Goodman:
AG: Thirty-three Israeli hostages will be released. Not as much is said about the 1000 Palestinians. Talk about who they are.
GL: So half of them are terrorists, murderers…part of them are political prisoners, and part are hostages. Israeli has captured in Gaza thousands of Palestinians. They are being held in horrible conditions. I’m not sure they’re being held in better conditions than the Israeli hostages. […] And they are not counted at all. Nobody cares about them.
“Nobody cares about them”? Well, clearly Hamas cared about them enough to negotiate for their release. Such humanitarians those Hamas negotiators are—they’re clearly the only ones who “care.” Here is a small sample of the 90 winners just released for a grand total of three Israelis kidnapped on October 7th (at the time of this writing, they are just getting started on the “phase one” releases, with more to come in the coming weeks):
Khalida Jarrar: leader of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) who masterminded a 2019 bombing that killed a 17 year-old in the West Bank.
Abla Abdelrasoul: ordered the assassination of Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi in 2001. She had been serving a 50-year sentence before getting released under the current deal.
Nawal Abed Fatiha: knifed a 70 year-old man in Jerusalem.
Goodman is playing into the “dehumanization” trope so common among today’s anti-Israel elites, which is a way to express feigned concern for the side that the speaker has deemed “oppressed.” This is not a “prisoner exchange” because those kidnapped on October 7th didn’t do anything to warrant their capture; they are not “prisoners” in the same way as someone undergoing due process for committing a crime. The two sides in this scenario don’t share equal social value just because Goodman wants them to. They are being released in a deal that positively reinforces Hamas’s civilian hostage-taking methods, but that Israel agreed to in order to get their hostages back. Goodman’s attempted humanization of the prisoners is a red herring, a distraction from what the deal actually means and why it matters.
I have read a lot of diatribes from the anti-Israel crowd about how many Palestinians in the Israeli prison system are 1) under age 18; 2) charged but not convicted due to delays in hearings and meeting with attorneys; or 3) held indefinitely without being formally charged. I have no doubt there is some truth to that criticism. So, why don’t all prisoners on the release list fit into these protected categories, if that’s the “wrong” being corrected here? Regardless of how many convicted murderers and rapists (and there are several on the list) are included in the exchange, why would any society fight to have people like that back in their community unless that community is interested in engendering more violence? Has Goodman stopped to consider that in her quest to humanize terrorists?
It’s one thing to act this way in college; one could just write it off as a phase. But Goodman is in her late 60s. Not only is she providing a platform for terror apologists from all kinds of institutions (journalism, academia, media, etc.), she’s also giving validation to the anti-Israel mob. I have seen countless social media posts from various antisemites citing Goodman as “one of the good ones,” and I’m sure that much of her smug sense of superiority comes from this winning distinction. As the old adage goes: with friends like that, you don’t need enemies.
As tempted as I am to declare that Goodman has revoked her Jew card, I regret to say that she hasn’t. The validity of that card is not up to us to decide. Why? Because if this were Europe in 1944 instead of the USA in 2025, we all would have been shoved into the same box cars enroute to the same destination, arguing with each other about who was right. Religious, secular, Zionist, anti-Zionist, it doesn’t matter—none of it provides immunity. Our enemies do not care about our ideological differences.
Goodman’s anti-Zionist media platform is not helping her, it’s not helping us, and it’s definitely not helping Palestinians. She’s not helping anyone except those profiteering off of the terrorist industrial complex of which she is part. Goodman will never admit her role in any of it, and I am not here to convince her or anyone of their own wrongs. But if I can help even one person sucked in by her rhetoric to reconsider that position, then I consider it a win.
You can thank me later. I promise, the freed Palestinian prisoners won’t thank her.
Excellent post Jill. I have but one slight disagreement, and that is when you say Goodman's take on the situation doesn't help Palestinians. When Jews take an "As a Jew" stance in support of hamas, of terror, of the mistaken accusations directed towards Israel of genocide and apartheid, they help frame the issue as not one of anti-semitism or of Jew hatred. The Jew hater sitting beside somebody like Goodman can claim they have nothing against Jews. Here they sit, beside a Jew, and have no issues with that person as a Jew. They hug that Jew, if not physically, than by the connection. Jews like Goodman provide cover for the Jew hater, and in that way they may stay off the death train, or at least be among the last Jews to board that train.
Sadly, the phenomenon of the self hating “kapo Jew” is not uncommon throughout Jewish history. Whether through profound ignorance or some deep seated psychological need (ie Stockholm Syndrome) such individuals turn their backs on their own people, land, culture and history. What they never understand until it is too late is that there is no great success in being on the last train to Auschwitz.