In its latest episode, Saturday Night Live featured a joke based on the presumption that Israel denies medical care to its non-Jewish citizens. Another series—Nurses, also on NBC—recently aired an episode featuring an injured ḥasidic teenager and his father. Not only do the writers misrepresent Orthodox Judaism as hostile to medicine, they perpetuate the old anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are possessed, as the Roman historian Tacitus put it, by “a hatred of humanity in general.” Allison Josephs writes:

Israel, [the ḥasidic teenager], is told by the doctor that he’ll need a bone graft to heal fully. Israel doesn’t understand what this means, so the doctor explains that he’ll have to have part of a dead person’s bone surgically inserted into his leg.

Cue the horror! Israel and his father are distraught at the notion that he’ll have a dead person’s body part in his body and a “goyim” part to boot! But even worse than that—it could be an “Arab” body part or a “lady” body part. Or as the nurse reminds them, “an Arab lady” body part. There is no prohibition, [of course, even in the most stringent interpretations of halakhah], on getting a dead body part surgically inserted into one’s body. In fact, Jewish law [strongly encourages the use] of medicine to recover from illnesses. Nor is there a prohibition on getting a non-Jewish body part inserted, even if it belonged to a woman or an Arab.

[T]he idea that such a surgery would be problematic in general or problematic because of where the bone came from . . . is a vicious lie that endangers men who walk around with curled sidelocks and black hats.

As an aside, another theme of the episode, involving other characters, was kidney donations. If the writers ever bothered to learn about Orthodox Jews, they might discover that they and specifically ḥasidic Jews, are off the charts when it comes to donating kidneys to strangers—15 percent of all altruistic donors in the U.S. are Orthodox Jews, even though they make up only 0.3 percent of the population.

Even if the agreement with Hamas to secure the release of some, and possibly all, of the remaining hostages—and the bodies of those no longer alive—is a prudent decision for Israel, it comes at a very high price: potentially leaving Hamas in control of Gaza and the release of vast numbers of Palestinian prisoners, many with blood on their hands. Nadav Shragai reminds us of the history of such agreements:

We cannot forget that the terrorists released in the Jibril deal during the summer of 1985 became the backbone of the first intifada, resulting in the murder of 165 Israelis. Approximately half of the terrorists released following the Oslo Accords joined Palestinian terror groups, with many participating in the second intifada that claimed 1,178 Israeli lives. Those freed in [exchange for Gilad Shalit in 2011] constructed Gaza, the world’s largest terror city, and brought about the October 7 massacre. We must ask ourselves: where will those released in the 2025 hostage deal lead us?

Taking these painful concessions into account Michael Oren argues that they might nonetheless be necessary:

From day one—October 7, 2023—Israel’s twin goals in Gaza were fundamentally irreconcilable. Israel could not, as its leaders pledged, simultaneously destroy Hamas and secure all of the hostages’ release. The terrorists who regarded the hostages as the key to their survival would hardly give them up for less than an Israeli commitment to end—and therefore lose—the war. Israelis, for their part, were torn between those who felt that they could not send their children to the army so long as hostages remained in captivity and those who held that, if Hamas wins, Israel will not have an army at all.

While 33 hostages will be released in the first stage, dozens—alive and dead—will remain in Gaza, prolonging their families’ suffering. The relatives of those killed by the Palestinian terrorists now going free will also be shattered. So, too, will the Israelis who still see soldiers dying in Gaza almost daily while Hamas rocket fire continues. What were all of Israel’s sacrifices for, they will ask. . . .

Perhaps this outcome was unavoidable from the beginning. Perhaps the deal is the only way of reconciling Israel’s mutually exclusive goals of annihilating Hamas and repatriating the hostages. Perhaps, despite Israel’s subsequent military triumph, this is the price for the failures of October 7.