About This
Project
Maison Bonfils, c. 1880
I’m not a historian. I’m a Jew who grew up in the American Jewish mainstream, with all the assumptions and blind spots that come with it. When antizionism went mainstream in the American discourse, I started reading — really reading — and what I found was a story I’d never been told.
Not a propaganda story. Not a “our side is right” story. A factual, documented history of what happened to Jews in the land of Israel over 2,500 years of imperial control — and how that history has been systematically wiped from the slate in the modern conversation about Israel and Palestine.
This project exists because I believe that honest conversation requires honest context.
The five facts presented here aren’t about justifying every Israeli policy. They’re about basing the conversation in a deeper history — one that’s usually left out.
This is a story of decolonization — but not the kind we’ve been taught. The decolonizations we know are majority movements. This is a small group reasserting itself, and that kind of return is always more fraught, because the majority population that was also colonized wants decolonization too — they just want to inherit the power that was there.
This isn’t a culture-war project. The point isn’t to score against the other side. It’s to put back the historical record so the argument can be had on honest ground.
Ed Weinberg is an American writer who’s written about the antisemitism of Hanukkah gnomes for The Forward, the legacy of Soviet antizionism for Times of Israel, the problem with calling Jews white for Newsweek, and many other things for his day job writing about the stock market. His father was the president of Alden Films, a Jewish documentary film distribution company. Ed also runs the personal history company Timekeeper Archives.
Synagogue. School. JCC. Campus. Anywhere Jewish people gather.