On the November issue:

Podcasting Since October 7

To the Editor:
Thank you to John Podhoretz and Dan Senor for leading the charge (“Podcasting Through Two Years of Hell,” November). I credit both COMMENTARY and the Call Me Back podcast for bringing much-needed clarity, accuracy, and breadth to the issues that have been at the forefront of our minds since October 7, 2023.

I am a Christian (and retired federal magistrate judge) who grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where I had many close friends of the Jewish faith. Like you, I marvel at the explosion of anti-Semitism, and I fear that it’s further proof that the classical liberalism I grew up under has largely been discarded.

I recently became a COMMENTARY subscriber because I believe in what you’re doing. Our only hope is to continue to speak the truth, in love.
Thomas M. Parker
Dublin, Ohio

To the Editor:
For me, reading the conversation between Dan Senor and John Podhoretz seemed like a remarkable coincidence. I am a bicycle rider, and I listen to podcasts and audiobooks, as riding can be boring. My two favorite podcasts are Commentary’s and Call Me Back. Together, they get me out the door for my two-hour workout on the bike. I have sent them to some of my friends, who are now also listeners.

I am one of those irreligious yet traditional Jews in the Diaspora who were in high school during the 1967 and 1973 wars. My parents were postwar immigrants who lost family in the Holocaust and became staunch Zionists. Due to them, I have always been a strong and proud supporter of Israel, but I have become an even stronger one since October 7. I’ve written many letters to newspapers in defense of Israel against the propaganda that’s so often published. And some of the ideas I’ve expressed have been the fruits of listening to both podcasts.

My outspoken views, not dissimilar to those of the center-right media, have led to my falling out with a non-Jewish friend of more than 50 years. His anti-Israel sentiment inspired him to accuse me of being radicalized and supporting a supposed genocide in Gaza.
John Kempler
Rose Bay (Sydney), Australia

To the Editor:
I can’t begin to tell John Podhoretz and Dan Senor how much their podcasts have meant to me. Your shows have been essential listening. I have even come to hate weekends because I have to endure them without listening to a new episode from either of you.
Marc Bromberg
Norwalk, Connecticut

Rubio in Israel

To the Editor:
Reading the words that Secretary Rubio spoke in Israel and reading Meir Y. Soloveichik’s added contextualization and commentary brought me a feeling of hope that our bond with the Jewish state, which

has grown stronger during Donald Trump’s second presidency, will endure (“Marco Rubio in the City of David, November). It will outlive the wishes of those nations that long to see Israel discredited and defeated and of those who hope Jews everywhere will be displaced from history.

I am relieved, too, that when Secretary Rubio recognized the significance of our own covenant with God in America’s Founding, he did so unapologetically and in such a public forum.

Thank you for your column about that historic day.
Jesse Wheeler
Tuscaloosa, Alabama

To the Editor:
What Marco Rubio said in Israel, and his acknowledgement of an ancient Hebrew source for our Founders’ concepts of “natural rights” that derive from “natural law,” made me recall an introductory course in the history of modern philosophy that influenced my undergraduate years at UCLA in the 1950s. I repurchased my out-of-print textbook from that time and reread its summary of 2,500 years of Western man’s intellectual ponderings about science and politics and the world around him.

What struck me in reading it this time, and what I realized only owing to my adult experience with Modern Orthodoxy and Rabbi Soloveichik’s message, is that this textbook makes no reference to Jerusalem, Torah, and the Hebrew concept of morality in justice and the law. By disregarding this important source of modern Western thinking, the book simply cannot resolve the inherent conflict between individual, inalienable rights and the political force of government.

In trying to convince the reader that the rational ideas of Greek philosophy were the foundational ideas for our American nation, the book’s author overlooked the importance of the Hebrew idea of the creation of man in God’s image. This is a key element, and it’s missing entirely from the textbook. That absence renders the work insufficient.

It is commendable that what has been missing in some histories of Western philosophy—its Jewish sources—has now been expounded openly in Jerusalem. Moreover, it was done so by an American secretary of state. This idea is, thankfully, taught energetically by Rabbi Soloveichik and his colleagues. May it soon, please God, find its way onto the pages of American public school history books and be writ large in what we will teach to future American generations. It is a well-deserved, long-overdue gift to our great and exceptional nation on its 250th birthday.
Robert S. April, M.D.
New York City

The Trans Demands

To the Editor:
I often enjoy and appreciate the perspective of COMMENTARY’s writers, but I’m afraid Christine Rosen’s column on the transgendered community conflates a few relevant issues (“The Dangers of Trans,” November). 

I know several people who transitioned as adults, at great personal cost and with incredible fortitude and effort. Not only did they not receive special treatment; they often lost careers or spent years overcoming fear and prejudice to prove that they were as good as the next man or woman.

It is true that the loudest trans advocates have blurred the lines between “identifying” and actually transitioning, but these are not the same thing, and Rosen’s column fails to make that distinction. A magazine of COMMENTARY’s quality should be engaged in exploring these nuances, not taking advantage of public confusion to promote another faction’s fear-fueled agenda. Your commentators have taken on important issues regarding youth transitions and sports, but their insights are undermined by the tenor of the coverage, which dehumanizes all trans individuals, who do exist whether or not you care to admit it. They deserve to live productive, fulfilling, and safe lives within the same legal and civil structure we all enjoy.
Elaine Wolff
Scottsdale, Arizona

Christine Rosen writes:
While I welcome Elaine Wolff’s compassion for those who have transitioned (a compassion I share as I also have trans colleagues and students), I think she misunderstands the argument I was making in my column. Trans people have the same rights as every American. What they don’t have the right to claim, but that their advocacy groups (who are well-organized, well-funded, and at the forefront of these debates) do claim, is the right to demand that Americans adhere to their claims about themselves and accommodate their demands, sometimes at the expense of the safety and privacy of their fellow citizens. 

Every adult has the right to transition, but that does not make that person the opposite sex. Trans women are not women; they are biological males who have decided to live as women. Some of them undergo surgery and hormone treatment; others do nothing more than “identify” as female. None will ever become biological women. The demand that they be allowed the use of women-only private spaces, such as locker rooms and restrooms, cannot be divorced from that biological reality. It is not an attempt to fear-monger to point out that this potentially impinges on the right to privacy and safety for women in those spaces. There are many disturbing and criminal incidents in which trans women harassed and assaulted women and children in restrooms and locker rooms; I noted only the most recent in my piece. Does that mean every trans person is a potential predator? Of course not, nor did I suggest any such thing. But turning a blind eye to the fact that trans people have committed violent and illegal acts in women-only spaces under the veil of their supposedly protected status is unacceptable as well. 

There is also the problem of a two-tier system of justice that grants special treatment to trans men and trans women for no other reason than that they claim to be the opposite sex—sometimes out of pure opportunism, not genuine conviction. The case of the would-be assassin I mentioned is only the most egregious example, but there are many men convicted of crimes who then identify as women so that they can serve time in women’s prisons. Just recently, as media outlets reported, a man serving a 22-year sentence for strangling his mother to death was allowed to transfer to a minimum-security women’s prison in the state of Illinois because he decided to identify as a woman named “Hannah.” Trans-women prisoners have sexually abused and raped women in women’s prisons, prompting lawsuits and calls for reform of the lax self-identification standard for men who want to transition while incarcerated. It is also notable that transitions in prison are overwhelmingly those of men claiming to be women, rather than vice versa, just as the violent incidents occur mostly in women-only spaces. These have largely been committed by biological men claiming to be women, rather than biological women claiming to be men. Mother Nature is not a feminist. Men who “identify” as women benefit from significant physical advantages in strength, which is why allowing them to compete against women in sports is unfair. It is also why they pose a unique threat in women-only spaces.

The problem in many of these cases is that the lack of legal standards (to say nothing of the overreach of activist judges) leaves room for a great deal of abuse of the system. I think many Americans can and do happily accommodate trans people in public restrooms and the like. What is not acceptable is special treatment for trans people in the justice system, or dismissal of the valid concern for the privacy and security of biological women. There are plenty of solutions: Gender-neutral changing rooms, for example, could accommodate someone who is biologically male but lives as a female and does not feel comfortable using the men’s locker room.

Personal freedom is not absolute; when one person’s behavior impinges on the rights and freedoms of others, we have laws and norms to help guide us. Nothing in what I wrote was an effort to “dehumanize” trans people, nor to deny their existence. The point of my column was to note that the trans movement, which claims to speak on behalf of trans people, demands conformity and special accommodation in numerous arenas, often at the expense of other Americans’ rights, particularly the rights of women. It also insists that we deny biological realities. This is not something the overwhelming majority of Americans accept as legitimate. Nor should we.