Wednesday, September 10, 2025
Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.
Last week, after writing about how Jewish prayer ties us daily to the Land of Israel, I asked an AI program to suggest a feature image. Among the ideas it gave me was this: “Sunrise over the Judean hills with someone wrapped in a tallit praying.” It was perfect—authentic, moving, and exactly what my column was about. So I said, “Yes, generate it.”
The reply? “I wasn’t able to generate that image—the request violates our content policies.”
Imagine that. First, ChatGPT suggests it as an appropriate image. But when I approve it, suddenly it’s a violation. What changed? Nothing—except that the moment I asked for the image to be made real, the rules shifted. The message seems to be that Jews praying in Judea can be floated as a suggestion, but must never actually be shown.
The official explanation? That such an image was deemed “politically sensitive.”
But “politically sensitive” is just code. It means appeasing those who cannot bear to see Jews in Judea, who insist we don’t belong there. Yet Judea is not just our homeland; it is our very name. In Hebrew, it is Yehuda; from this comes Yehudi—the Jew. To call a Jew praying in Judea a violation is itself a violation: of indigeneity, of identity, of truth.
It no doubt upsets Arabs to see Jews praying in Judea. But it certainly upsets this Jew to be told we may not even depict ourselves praying in our native land. Why don’t Jewish sensitivities matter? Why do Jewish feelings count for less? Is it because there are more Arabs than Jews? More Muslims than Jews? More antisemites than Jews? Or is it simply because they shout louder?
Actually, the plain truth is starker than that. It’s this: the world simply doesn’t care what Jews feel and think. In fact, it is expected that when the world insults the Jews, the insult will be swallowed—our people too polite or too fearful to respond. We are expected to endure having our rights trampled, our sensitivities ignored. The world knows we won’t riot or burn embassies.
But those who rage at the sight of Jews in Judea—the Arabs and their sympathizers, along with the just plain Jew-hating chorus—are loud and angry and violent, especially the last. And so their outrage is indulged, while Jews are expected to tamp down their feelings—not to air them, but to starve them of oxygen until they die. Jewish love for the land is, to the Jew-hating world, inconsequential, immaterial, to be dismissed. Not because the world feels bad that the Arabs don’t have a state, but because the world really, REALLY hates Jews.
But the thing is, the refusal to depict a Jew praying in Judea is a denial of history. It’s the erasure of the Jewish right to be seen praying in the place we come from. And we must not let that go unchallenged. The world expects us not to speak out. It’s time we stopped caring.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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