Emet: Truth in an Era of Lies

The smoke had barely cleared from Temple Israel in West Bloomfield before the contextualization began.

Before anything was actually known about the shooter, people were already explaining it. Justifying it. Connecting it to the war with Iran, to Israeli strikes in Lebanon, to Gaza. The logic, if you can call it that, was familiar: Jewish children in suburban Detroit are fair targets because of events half a world away.

This is what antizionist antisemitism does. It dehumanizes Jews so thoroughly, so systematically, that the near-massacre of children in a suburban synagogue becomes, for some, an understandable reaction to geopolitics. We have reached a dangerous point.

A conversation on Facebook illustrated this perfectly. A friend posted a simple, gracious statement of solidarity with the Jewish community. A friend of hers jumped in to tell me she finds “pro-war Jews odious.” I asked the obvious question: therefore Jewish children in suburban Detroit are fair game? She told me the whole Zionist movement is problematic. I ended the conversation and blocked her — not out of anger, but out of clarity. My friend’s solidarity with Jews under attack should not be hijacked by someone else’s bigotry.

Here is what I want to say clearly: Antisemitic violence is not caused by Jews defending themselves. If your response to Thursday’s attack begins with “Jewish children should never be targets of terror, but...” — you’ve lost me. I will not read any further.

Don’t rise to the bait. Don’t empty out your pockets as if you need to prove your innocence, as if you need to demonstrate that you’re worthy of existence. Stand proud. Because truth — אמת, emet — is on our side.

Which brings me to my book.

I have been developing Emet: How Jews Can Reclaim Truth in an Era of Lies for some time now, and Thursday’s attack on Temple Israel — in my own backyard, in the Detroit Jewish community I have covered as a journalist for decades — clarified for me why this book needs to exist.

Emet is more than the Hebrew word for truth. It is considered one of the most powerful words in the Jewish tradition because it contains the first, middle, and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet — א, מ, ת — symbolizing completeness. Enduring truth. Truth that encompasses everything.

I come to this concept personally. I am a descendant of the Maharal of Prague, the great 16th-century rabbi and mystic who, according to legend, created the Golem — a creature brought to life by the word emet inscribed on its forehead. The Golem was meant to protect the Jewish community from those who wished to destroy it. Remove the aleph from emet, and the word becomes met — death.

There is no Golem coming to protect us now. There never was. The legend was always about something deeper: that truth itself is our protector. That when we are anchored in emet — not just factual accuracy, but truth as a state of being, as integrity, as reliability — we have something that lies cannot ultimately defeat.

I spent the first half of my career as a journalist. Truth was not optional. It was not subject to my personal feelings or political preferences. It simply was, or it wasn’t, and my job was to find it and report it. That discipline has shaped everything I have written since, and it is the foundation of this book.

Emet will give readers tools to confront the lies — the October 7 rape denials, the “contextualization” of terror, the dehumanization dressed up as political analysis. We are outnumbered in this information war. We always have been. But we still have emet. And if we stay anchored in it, repeat it, embody it — it will hold.

The book is already attracting the attention of agents and publishers, which is exciting and nerve-racking in equal measure. It is by far the most significant thing I have written to date.

I will be sharing excerpts and updates here on Substack in the coming months. The introduction will be available to all readers. Subsequent chapters will be available to paid subscribers.

Stay tuned. And stay true.