09/17/2025
Israeli singer איה כורם Aya Korem took to X to respond to actress Hannah Einbinder over comments she made at Sunday night's Emmy Awards. For those who don't know, Einbinder ended her acceptance speech by saying, “I just want to say, finally, go Birds, F--- ICE, and free Palestine."
Einbinder elaborated backstage:
“I feel like it is my obligation as a Jewish person to distinguish Jews from the State of Israel, because our religion and our culture is such an important and long standing institution that is really separate to this sort of ethno-nationalist state.”
Speaking on X, Aya Korem responded beautifully:
A few things I know about that she probably doesn’t: The name Einbinder (“bookbinder” in Yiddish) likely comes from the Russian Empire, where Jews were forced to adopt surnames. The rich could pay for names like “Goldberg,” while ordinary people had no choice.
We’re a small people, so it’s easy to track: Jewish families named Einbinder likely lived in Eastern Europe—mainly Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania—under Russian or Austro-Hungarian rule before emigrating to the U.S. in the late 19th–early 20th century.
Reasons Jews left: Poland (today’s borders): laws and economic restrictions targeting Jews. Ukraine: pogroms and restrictive laws. Lithuania: pogroms and limited rights. Many Jewish families fled these areas seeking safety abroad.
But only some Jews from Eastern Europe could reach the U.S. before 1921. After the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, strict quotas left many behind—those who didn’t arrive early often missed their chance to emigrate. Similar quotas existed across Western Europe.
Jews who stayed in Eastern Europe, like my family, faced brutal pogroms, harsher and harsher laws, and ultimately the horrors of the Holocaust. Many who couldn’t leave early never got a second chance.
Even after liberation, some Holocaust survivors couldn’t leave the camps—American soldiers kept them inside. Later, some could emigrate, and for my grandparents, Israel was the only place willing to take them, even after the world had witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust.
While your grandparents escaped in time and settled in the U.S., enjoying a liberal “paradise,” Holocaust survivors who arrived in Israel—what you call the ethnostate—were weak and traumatized, yet had to take up arms to defend the only place willing to take them in 1948.
You, , a fourth-generation American, could probably afford to forget. We, Jews from Poland, Yemen, Austria, Iraq, or Egypt, could not. Your ״ethnostate״ (other ethnostates: Greece, Ireland, every Arab country) is the only reason I’m alive.
So go ahead, wear your little badges and deliver your tiny speeches, enjoy feeling superior and moral. We, the only living Jews in the Eastern Hemisphere, will continue to bleed for the right to live with dignity. I hope you, as a Jew, never know a world without Israel.
