Antisemitic Hate Crimes are Like Any Other Hate Crimes

I want to flag three different stories about antisemitic hate crimes, all in service in the same fundamental message: Hate crimes which target Jews are not distinct from other hate crimes. They'd do it to Jews, they'd do it to other people too.

Case #1 is a sentencing decision in New York, where a judge gave no jail time to a man who

allegedly entered a Jewish nursing home in the Bronx and proceeded to "terroriz[e] residents," punctuating his rampage by "repeatedly bashing an 84-year-old man on the head with a fire extinguisher while shouting, 'I’m going to kill you, you mother f—ng Jew!'"

The judge concluded that the offender had a drug and alcohol problem, and recommended in-patient treatment in lieu of incarceration.

As someone who generally thinks we overincarcerate, I'm always leery about coming down too hard on judges for handing down sentences viewed as too lenient (this was always my worry in regarding the successful recall effort of Judge Aaron Persky, who gave only a six month sentence to a Stanford student convicted a rape). Of course, one can think we overincarcerate and also believe that a zero day prison term seems a bit light. But the bigger point is just to emphasize that Jews are not different from other groups in that, even in cases of brutal assaults, it is not the case that the rage of the criminal justice system reflexively rouses itself on our behalf.

Case #2 concerns a recent spate of alleged attacks on Bukharin Jews in Queens, which the NYPD has thus far refused to classify as hate crimes. I mention this in the context of the oft-reported statistic that Jews are among the most common victims of hate crimes in America (including, by far, being the most targeted religious group), and the occasional retort one hears to this fact that most of the reported cases are "only" vandalism or property crimes.

As these cases demonstrate, though, there is considerable concern in the Jewish community that many of the more severe attacks against us don't get recorded as hate crimes (even if they are acknowledged as crimes). To take a striking example: the 2014 FBI hate crimes dataset records no instances of homicides stemming from antisemitic motivations. Why is that striking? Because 2014 was the year where a White Supremacist killed three people at a Kansas City-area JCC. While it was reported at the time that the suspect would face hate crimes charges, the offense apparently never made it into the FBI database.

Again, the point here is that it isn't the case -- as some imply -- that the high levels of reported antisemitic violence is an artifact of the police being ready to jump on each and every incident which has even a whiff of antisemitic motivation. For Jews, like for anyone else, it can be a hard, uphill slog to even have severe violence against us acknowledged to be, and reported as, an incidence of hate.

Case #3 is actually two cases -- one of the Queens incidents mentioned above, and a Menorah vandalized in broad daylight in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In both cases, non-Jewish bystanders immediately came to the aid of the victimized Jewish community -- chasing away the attackers in Queens, helping put the Menorah back upright in Cambridge.

Here, we see a different sort of similarity between Jewish and non-Jewish hate crimes targets: For each, there are good people of all backgrounds, races, religions and creeds, who will stand up and do the right thing. Antisemitism is real, racism is real, Islamophobia is real, misogyny is real, homophobia is real -- all these things are real. But there are allies, and there are helpers. We're not alone. Thankfully, having friends who have our backs is another thing that Jews and non-Jews still have in common.

Lessons from the UN's Failure to Condemn Hamas

A UN General Assembly resolution that would have condemned Hamas for terrorism and incitement was rejected today. The resolution received a majority of votes (87-57, with 36 abstentions), but did not pass after an earlier vote pushed by the Arab League successfully required the resolution to secure a two-third majority.

Some lessons to draw:

• Let's not get too excited about Israel's new "friendship" with Arab states. There's been a lot of talk about Israel's increasingly warm ties with Arab nations, and to be fair, it isn't entirely a mirage. But it hasn't progressed anywhere close to the point where an Arab state is willing to vote to condemn a Palestinian actor in an international forum. American diplomats had sought to pick off at least a few Arab League nations as aye votes -- not only did they not succeed, they didn't even convince these countries to adopt the potentially face-saving route of voting against the resolution while allowing it pass or fail on a majority vote. Push came to shove, and the Arab League continued to stand as a rock-solid wall against anything that looks like it might deviate away from the UN's extreme and reflexive anti-Israel slant.

• Nothing that is viewed as a "victory for Trump" is going to pass easy, particularly when it comes to the Middle East. As much as everyone likes to tout Nikki Haley, miracle-worker, the fact is that the Trump Administration's bull-in-a-china-shop orientation to foreign policy has severely circumscribed its negotiating leverage in international fora. This resolution, had it passed, would have been viewed as a major international triumph for the Trump administration. Nobody wants to give Donald Trump a major triumph in anything right now. In large respect, the failure of this resolution is the fruit of Trump's alienating unilateral recklessness in decisions like the embassy move. Trump-tactics come with a cost, and it's paid in the defeat of resolutions like this.

• Is criticizing Palestine the "last taboo" in international diplomacy? We hear so much about how it's "impossible" or "taboo" to criticize Israel. Clearly, nobody has ever told the UN that -- it criticizes Israel all the time (indeed, sometimes it seems like it literally spends all of its time criticizing Israel). But, as this resolution demonstrates, even a single solitary denunciation of Hamas (not even the Palestinian Authority -- just Hamas!) yields a knockdown, drag-out fight -- and a fight that few are surprised to see Hamas ultimately win. That's a testament to just how sacrosanct and untouchable the United Nation's anti-Israel orientation really is.

• Chile, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland (among many others) are weasel states. I mentioned before that the Arab League successfully moved to require that the anti-Hamas resolution require a two-third majority. That vote was extremely close -- it passed by a 75-72 margin, with 26 abstentions. Among the abstaining states were Chile, Norway, New Zealand, and Switzerland -- all of whom proceeded to vote in favor of the resolution they'd just ensured could not pass. Nice try. Even worse than them were states like Argentina, Japan, and the Bahamas, who outright voted in favor of the two-thirds requirement before voting to pass the resolution. Nobody is fooled by this play.

Edward Said on the One-State Solution

Edward Said was a fervent proponent of a one-state, binational solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But unlike some, he at least recognized legitimate reasons to worry about it. These quotes, from an interview Said did with Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, are very illuminating:

 On the status of the Jews in the bi-national state he tirelessly advocated, Said told Shavit, “But the Jews are a minority everywhere. They are a minority in America. They can certainly be a minority in Israel.” 

Regarding the fate of that minority in Arab Palestine, Said conceded, “I worry about that. The history of minorities in the Middle East has not been as bad as in Europe, but I wonder what would happen. It worries me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don’t know. It worries me.” 

In addressing this concern, the critic of imperialism looks to “the larger unit” and recalls another empire. “Yes. I believe it is viable. A Jewish minority can survive the way other minorities in the Arab world survived. I hate to say it, but in a funny sort of way, it worked rather well under the Ottoman Empire, with its millet system.  What they had then seems a lot more humane than what we have now”

Each of these are interesting in their own way. The first is striking for just how blase it is -- Jews have been minorities before, they can be minorities again. What's the big deal?

Of course, history suggests that it might be quite a big deal, and in the next segment Said -- to his credit -- at least acknowledges that. In contrast to those who suggest that only an Islamophobe could possibly worry about the status of Jews as minorities in a single state, Said at least has the historical literacy to recognize there are real reasons for concerns. It "worries" him. It worries us too! It's a very real and live worry!

And then the final section, which is perhaps the most ironic -- calling back to an older, truly imperial order where the territory was not in Jewish or Palestinian hands. Maybe things were better off when some third party was in charge and could force the Jews and the Palestinians to stop squabbling and live together. Call it the "no state for two people" solution -- but the yearning for a far more explicit period of foreign dominion is, to say the least, fascinating from a figure like Said.

Republicans Don't Care About Democracy

I remember, after Trump won, but before he was inaugurated, reading some cockamamie plan for how Democrats could get Merrick Garland's nomination through the Senate. It had to do with when new Senators were sworn in and Joe Biden presiding over the Senate for the last time and basically meant slamming the nomination through during an extremely short period when the new Senate members hadn't officially taken office so the body was operating at just two-thirds of normal capacity -- with those two-thirds happening to have a Democratic majority.

I had no idea if it would actually work. And it's not as if I didn't understand the temptation. But I distinctly remember -- as despondent as I was over the election results, and as furious as I was about how Senate Republicans acted regarding Garland -- that this just wasn't fair play. It was an obvious abuse of form over substance, designed to subvert the outcome of a democratic election. There were, I thought, deeper dangers that lurked about when that sort of move became acceptable.

With what we're seeing in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, that is feeling more and more like a sucker's move.

As the 2016 election season closed, we all remember the alarms raised when Donald Trump indicated he wouldn't necessarily accept the results if he lost. That fear was mooted when he ended up winning -- though we got a taste of it in North Carolina -- but now two years later we're seeing these anti-democratic impulses surge back in full force.

What has become evident is that the principle of majority rule scarcely even has pull as a reason when it comes to the Republican Party. The blase attitude toward the fact that in four of the last five presidential elections their candidate has lost the majority vote is one thing, as is their unsurprising reverence for the massively anti-democratic effects of the Senate.

But couple it to the ruthless use of partisan gerrymandering, which has allowed for Republicans to retain massive legislative majorities even in states where they are in the electoral minority. Couple with it open use of voter suppression techniques, often tracking racial lines, usually done with the outright endorsement of conservative judges. Couple it with transparently partisan power grabs like those we're seeing this week. And couple it, of course, with the overwhelming popularity amongst Republicans of an undemocratic thug like Donald Trump occupying the Oval Office.

Put all those couplings together, and you have a Republican Party that at this point that cannot be said to value democracy. Indeed, given their conduct over the past few years, it's almost impossible to put together a good-faith case that Republicans do care about majority rule. That's not something we could say 20 years ago. But it poses an existential threat to the continued vitality of the American experiment.

So let's be clear: If the republic falters, it will be the Scott Walkers, the Robin Vos's, the Pat McCrorys, just as much as the Donald Trumps, who will deserve blame, and who will and should go down as villains in the American history books.

Vectors of Threat for Academic Freedom

The prospect that Temple Professor Marc Lamont Hill might be dismissed from his tenured university position -- the Chair of the Temple University's Board of Trustees said he would "look at what remedies we have", but suggested that many on the board and the administration would like to fire Hill -- has sparked a renewed round of the ever-popular "who's the real threat to academic freedom" game. For all the belly-aching conservatives have issued over liberal universities which can't tolerate opposing viewpoints, there sure are a lot of cases where conservatives have successfully censored progressive academics!

I doubt that Hill will end up being fired, and it's been good to see many conservative academics make clear that any such university sanction would be an egregious violation of academic freedom (see, e.g., Robert George, Jonathan Marks, and Keith Whittington -- FIRE, which sometimes is viewed as conservative though I don't think that reputation is deserved, also has come out swinging backing Hill's academic freedom rights).

But this case did help crystallize in my mind the different vectors of threats to academic freedom, which may help explain how both the left and the right think it's self-evident that the "other side" is the real danger (beyond the usual self-serving reasons I mean). To generalize:

When threats to academic freedom bubble "up" from below -- come from students or faculty -- they tend to come from the left;

When threats to academic freedom percolate "down" from above -- come from politicians or the Board of Trustees -- they tend to come from the right.

Front-line administrators (like Deans), who can encounter pressure from both sources, are "swing votes".

No doubt there are exceptions. And I hasten to add that this typology only holds on a political axis -- along other axes of campus identity (e.g., racial, sexual, or religious lines), there are different stories to be told about who and what prevents certain groups from engaging as equals in campus discourse.

But on the purely political side of things, and based on my admittedly non-scientific recollection of cases, this distinction seems to hold up pretty well. Start with the threats progressives face: It is the Temple Board of Trustees threatening Hill's job. Steven Salaita was "unhired" by the Univeristy of Illinois' Board, validating a decision by the Chancellor. It was UNC's board which voted to shut down centers and clinics which clashed with conservative political priorities, for nakedly political reasons.

If you move over to cases of conservative academics being targeted, examples like Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State or Charles Murray at Middlebury are primarily cases of student behavior. Academic BDS campaigns almost exclusively emanate from students or faculty, while facing strong administrative resistance (see Pitzer or Michigan). And the more general claims that conservative views are "unwelcome" or that college is an "unsafe space" to be a conservative are typically directed at the conduct and outlook of students and faculty.

No doubt this divergence is in large part attributable to the relative political make-up of college faculties and students versus governing boards or political overseers (in retrospect, it also explained the instincts behind my "Do Jews Need a Protest Politic" post, which posited that campus groups who protect their rights via administrative action rather than student protests will automatically code as conservative). But the differences between these threat-vectors has significant practical ramifications, that go far in explaining why both conservatives and liberals think they're the primary victims of academic freedom violations.

On the one hand, it perhaps shouldn't surprise -- though many people were surprised -- that there have been more "political" firings of left-wing professors on campus than right-wing professors, and the gap has gotten bigger over the past few years. And if you think of who has the capacity to issue blunt, sweeping, heavy-handed assaults on academic freedom -- terminating employment, shuttering a program, passing a law -- then that figure makes sense. For the most part, students and faculty can't do that (or at least, not with much greater expenditures of effort).

So the liberals can justly point out to the conservatives that, if they're the political orientation threatened by the elements within academia that have the de jure authority to end a career or eliminate a program with the stroke of a pen, then they are the group more threatened by academic freedom violations -- period.

But there's another way of viewing the problem. It's true that boards and politicians have greater blunt dominative authority which, when exercised, poses a greater threat to academic freedom than any power faculty or students hold. But it's also true that board and politicians "touch" the day-to-day operations of academia far more infrequently than faculty and students do. What the latter lack in bluntness, they make up for in terms of omnipresence -- the conservative complaint regarding the state of academic freedom tends to rely less on direct cases of censorship by administrators and more about an atmosphere or mood where certain views are shunned or difficult to air (see this profile of conservative women at UNC, or this account from NYU). It is not a single act of censorial pronouncement that silences conservatives on campus, but the constant prick and needle of dismissiveness, eye rolls, "jokes", and shunning that together creates a landscape where conservative views are effectively unable to be aired.

So the conservatives could reply by saying that a few stray bolts of administrative lightning might be flashy, but they hardly overwhelm the suffocating blanket of ubiquitous liberalism which they see as draped over their academic communities. It is nuts, they would argue, to suggest that in general academic squelches liberal ideas and facilitates conservative ones.

One reason that I suspect progressives would find this argument frustrating is that it adopts a view of power that conservatives tend not to find attractive in other contexts. When speaking of racism, for example, conservatives are not generally sympathetic to any understanding of the term other than deliberate de jure action by an official authority. The complaints about eye rolls and dismissals are -- dare I say it -- best characterized as "microaggressions", and we all know how conservatives feel about those.

This framework also has some difficulty distinguishing between bad de facto "censorship" and simple widespread negative reactions to ideas. After all, thinking "this idea is wrong" -- or even "this idea is racist" -- is not censorship, it's judgment. That one's speeches are met with protests, one's classroom contributions are met with snickers, and that nobody wants to date you after that column you wrote calling abortion murder -- none of these would be viewed as a form of oppression by conservatives but for the fact that conservatives are experiencing them.

Hence, the conservative appeal to this framework in the academic context reasonably comes off as opportunistic. It also opens the door to a more expansive liberal retort, identifying a still-further basic threat to, if not "academic freedom", then at least the diverse and pluralistic exchange of ideas. If academia is built for a particular type of student -- one who is, on average, wealthier and Whiter than America writ large, then it follows that certain types of views and arguments will most likely be systematically underrepresented and underconsidered. If, for example, campuses are poorly equipped to engage with and include undocumented immigrant students, that likely has an impact on the way campus debates about immigration will proceed. This argument relies on a similar (albeit not identical) understanding of power as does the conservative case; if they admit one, they really should have to admit the other.

Be that as it may, I do think that a focus on the vectors of threats to academic freedom -- the different ways in which those threats manifest when they stem from politicians and boards (right targeting left) versus when they stem from faculty and students (left targeting right) -- can help explain the sense of talking past each other that is so prevalent in these conversations. 

Brazen acts of censorship, firings, or political interference are more likely to stem from the right. Day-to-day discomfort, including microaggressions, and an overall atmosphere of having to "walk on eggshells" are more likely to be the product of the left -- though any consistent theory of academic freedom then has to also admit that these same dynamics might also "censor" or "chill" other campus outgroups (such as racial, religious, or sexual minorities). The former is more nakedly wrong and more individually dangerous, but also rarer. The latter is more omnipresent, but also primarily an issue in aggregate and in any event more complicated at the case level.

And then even below those, there's a whole additional layer of ideas and perspectives which are not aired on campus because their proponents never make it to campus, because campus isn't built for them. Different vectors, all threatening the pluralistic exchange of ideas in different ways.

"From the River to the Sea": A Guide to the Perplexed

So we're all talking about the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" -- which, after Temple Professor Marc Lamont Hill said it at a UN conference, reportedly caused his termination from CNN.

I don't want to talk about Hill directly though. Quickly: He should face absolutely zero professional consequences at Temple -- that's a straightforward academic freedom issue. There is no academic freedom analogue to a sinecure at CNN, but I probably wouldn't have fired him either -- then again, I have a pretty high bar for firing people in cases like these. Certainly, the network that employs Rick Santorum doesn't have much of a leg to stand on in this respect.

What I do want to do is give some context -- hopefully helpful -- to the slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." I do not wish to directly challenge anyone's substantive political commitments on the score. Much the opposite: my assumption is that there are a great many people for whom the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" sounds wholly innocuous if not laudatory -- who doesn't want freedom for all people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea? -- and are a bit baffled that such a statement could trigger such an intense backlash.

In particular, my target audience is someone I imagine thinking along roughly the following lines:

1. They support freedom for all people who happen to reside between the Jordan and Mediterranean;
2. They read "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" as a pithy way of expressing the above commitment;
3. They've noted, with some confusion, that many Jews seemed to react extremely poorly to the use of this phrase; and
4. They assume that there's at least a decent chance that the reason for this negative reaction is not that the Jews in question are opposed to all or some people between the Jordan and the Mediterranean being free, and accordingly wonder what the actual reason is.

That fourth proviso is important. I say that while fully recognizing the sad truth that there are plenty of people -- Jewish and not -- who really don't desire or care about the freedom of all people in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

Still, I stress this element because I think that thinking along these lines is a good habit to get into: when a marginalized group reacts with strong negativity towards a statement or program which seems, on a facial semantic level, wholly unobjectionable or laudable, it's good practice to hold open the possibility that they have reasons for their rejection that are not purely venal, selfish, or stupid. 

This is habit shouldn't just extend to Jews, of course. In the recent controversies over Louis Farrakhan's antisemitism, for example, some Black (including some Black Jewish) authors expressed concern over the way discourse on antisemitism honed in on Farrakhan. Many White people, for whom Farrakhan's antisemitism, homophobia, and all-around awfulness seemed obvious and uncontroversial, were perplexed by this response, and some resolved that confusion by saying "wow, Black people just can't condemn even obvious bigots like Louis Farrakhan!" But this was a bad response. Certainly, some people had that problem (just as some people really do simply object to the notion of a free Palestinian people). But a cursory reading of many of the authors in question would demonstrate that their issues had nothing to do with failing to recognize Farrakhan's bigotry. The better move was to instead figure that the hesitation regarding how the Farrakhan/antisemitism discourse was proceeding stemmed from something more complicated than the naked inability to see obvious antisemitism for what it is.

So, to swing it back to the case at hand: when Jews respond poorly to a statement that you read as simply an uncontroversial call for freedom, you can either think (1) "wow, Jews sure do hate freedom!" or (2) "wow, there's probably something more complicated going on here -- I should investigate!" This post is dedicated to those who take door #2.

Enough throat-clearing. What is the "more complicated" that drives many Jews' sharp antipathy to the phrase "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"?

First, some history. This phrase does indeed predate Hamas. But its historical pedigree has tended to be tied to more maximalist elements of Palestinian politics -- the branch which really doesn't see a place for Jews (or at least an equal place) anywhere in Israel or Palestine, and who have at times quite explicitly endorsed the project of pushing Jews into the sea.

At the most basic level, then, the triggering aspects of "from the river to the sea" stem from its association with a brand of violent anti-Zionist maximalism which, particularly around the War of Independence in 1948, spoke of throwing Jews into the sea (the internet is replete with debates over whether this or that Arab leader really said this or that precise quotation, but there doesn't seem to be much controversy that the general rhetoric of "pushing them into the sea" was present at that time and was perceived as a genocidal threat).

The traumatic associations here cannot be overstated -- just a few years after a third of the world's Jewish population was massacred, a goodly chunk of the survivors living in the nascent Israeli state were threatened with a renewed genocide that promised the Jews living west of the river that they would soon find their final resting place in the sea. Insofar as "from the river to the sea" reverberates with that history, it should not surprise that it is viewed as a threat.

The above account explains why, for some Jews, the "river to the sea" rhetoric is perceived as outright genocidal, and for many, that's enough. But another line is that the "river to the sea" language is a call for the "destruction of Israel." In broad strokes, this claim is that the slogan seeks the elimination of the state "Israel" and its replacement with something else -- namely "Palestine" (think the "Make Israel Palestine Again" slogan). This interpretation presents a more complex case.

The question of when a state is "destroyed" is peculiarly metaphysical -- it evokes the Ship of Theseus -- but the slogan's defenders seem to have an apt rejoinder: they are not calling for the destruction of Israel, but its reformation. All they want, in Hill's articulation, is a secular, equal state -- not a "Jewish" state or a "Palestinian" state, but a state for all its citizens where all those permanently residing between the river and the sea enjoy the same, full, free rights. Just as America didn't stop being America when it passed the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act, neither would Israel cease to be Israel if it changed its laws to provide for that vision of secular liberal equality. It would simply be an Israel with better laws and institutions than Israel does now. And just as urging civil rights for American Blacks did not entail desiring the subjugation of American Whites, neither is calling for freedom for Palestinians a demand for the oppression of Israeli Jews.

One interesting feature of this rejoinder, however, is that it suggests that the slogan need not actually be "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free." It could just as easily run "from the river to the sea, Israel will be free." Indeed, on a purely semantic level, that would seem to be the more accurate expression. The state that currently exists, and where objectionable unfreeness currently obtains, is Israel. The state which would be passing the equivalent of the Civil Rights Act would be Israel, not Palestine. If the political program on the table is really a set of statutory reforms designed to provide secular equality, the name of the state need not change.

Nonetheless, I suspect that most of those who chant "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" would reject the substitution. This suggests that there is a replacement going on: Israel-with-better-laws is not viewed as the same thing as a free Palestine. That, in turn, indicates that the political ambitions are not reducible to simply establishing political rules in the river-to-sea territory that replace "Israeli" or "Palestinian" or "Jew" or "Arab" with just "citizens".

The trick is that the slogan does not refer to freeing Palestinians. It speaks of freeing Palestine -- a territory, not a people. When we speak of freeing a people, we usually are referring to individuals who lack certain legal rights and prerogatives. When we speak of freeing a territory, we usually are speaking of a land that is under foreign dominion. The former is the language of, e.g., segregation -- people lacking full citizenship rights. The latter is the language of the occupation: Palestine, the land, is ruled by outsiders -- i.e., Israel. This status would not itself be cured by the extension of citizenship rights (any more than, say, France giving Algeria equality in the French state would have "freed" Algeria, though it arguably would have freed the Algerians). And this also explains why a slogan saying "Israel will be free" rings so odd: free from who? Israel already controls the territory in question; there's no foreign domination to speak of. It is Palestine that currently is occupied by an external power, and so it is Palestine, not Israel, that needs to be freed.

Put another way: the grammar of the slogan gives a hint as to what is meant by the word "free". It isn't the freedom of individual liberties implied by a call for a secular, equal state; it is the freedom of liberating an occupied territory from foreign domination. That's not wrong, it's just different. If I wrote "from California to Texas, Mexico will be free", any normal reader would take that to be saying that this entire stretch of territory should be under the rule of Mexico -- that these Mexican territories are under the foreign domination of the United States, but one day they will be freed (restored to Mexico). You can endorse that revanchist claim or not, but it'd be very weird for me to insist that this slogan actually was just urging that the Chicano/a community be treated fairly by whatever country happened to rule from California to Texas.

So let me stress: on its own, the claim that there is a territory "Palestine" that is currently under alien rule by Israel is not objectionable. Indeed, it is the locus insight of a two-state solution: there is a Palestine -- the West Bank and Gaza -- which Israel occupies or has occupied, that territory is not Israel's (i.e., Israel is a foreign or alien power to it), and that territory should revert to Palestinian control. Likewise there are territories which are properly Israeli (they are not foreign or alien, these lands are its "homelands"), and so those territories are rightfully under Israeli control. Put aside the usual half-million complications, and this is roughly my position: Israel should control Israel, and Palestine should control Palestine. Two states for two peoples.

But the formulation of viewing Israel as the alien outsider occupying the land of Palestine is not the same thing as a call for equal rights. More to the point, this formulation takes an ugly turn when it is conjoined with "from the river to the sea". Whereas in the two-state model there is an equality between Israeli and Palestinian entitlements -- both are "home" in at least some of the territory, neither are wholly alienated or excluded -- if Palestine as a political entity extends from the river-to-the-sea, then none of the territory is "Israel's", Israel is foreign to all of it, and the demand that it be reverted to Palestinian control really is a demand that Israel disappear in a very tangible way. In a different way, this would be the (or a) problem with "Greater Israel" -- it implies that Palestine is nowhere, that there is no Palestine to be freed (which, of course, is a claim right-wing Israelis make all the time -- "there's no such thing as Palestine" -- and suggesting that Palestinians are foreign interlopers on Jewish land).

The "Make Israel Palestine Again" slogan crystallizes the view that -- beyond the particular legal regime that might be enacted -- there is something more fundamentally wrong about there being an "Israel" of any sort, that it represents a sort of alien intrusion whose existence in itself thwarts the existence of a free Palestine. Palestine is not fully free so long as there is an Israel, because any territory that Israel might occupy is occupied. When Hill said that he "just got off of a flight from Palestine", referring to a flight that almost assuredly departed from (pre-67) Israel, he's not making a statement about the existence or not of legal rights. He's making a statement about the true lawful ownership of land that has been usurped. The land -- all the land -- is Palestine. Israel -- all of Israel -- is a foreign occupation. And while I don't think it is fair to Hill to suggest he supports genocide against Israeli Jews, I do think it is fair to say he believes that the great bulk of Israeli Jews are fundamentally foreign interlopers anywhere they reside from the river to the sea -- which is why he can characterize the entire conflict is being "about land theft, expulsion and ethnic cleansing by foreign settlers to indigenous land."

If the entire presence of Israel anywhere from the river to the sea is an alien imposition on Palestine, then the net result is that Jews are deemed foreigners everywhere from the river to the sea. In addition to echoing some specific antisemitic tropes (the Jew as the eternal outsider/foreigner/wanderer), this sort of otherization very often comes attached to decidedly inegalitarian projects and attitudes towards Jews, and accordingly it tends to cause skepticism about the feasibility, durability, and sometimes sincerity of professed commitments to full equality in a secular state. At the very least, it isn't really compatible with the professed neutrality of this state -- one group is in its home, the other is at most a tolerated outsider. At the extreme, triggers those more terrifying "into the sea" worries (even if here the Jews might be given the courtesy of boats, that they might "go back where they came from").

This connection is far from speculative. When Helen Thomas snapped that Jews in Israel should "get the hell out" and "go back to Poland", Mondoweiss suggested that this was a salutary gesture -- it would certainly inject some new vigor into Polish Jewish life (as one Jewish wag replied, "I'm deeply touched by this gesture of philanthropic ethnic cleansing."). More recently, I recall reading a thread by a (Jewish) anti-Zionist who acknowledged that, if and when Palestine was freed "from the river to the sea", it was very likely that many Jews in Israel would leave. This, he assured us, was not a bad thing or a problematic thing -- it was a normal fact of decolonization, no different from the pied-noirs returning to France upon Algeria's independence. The incongruity of where "returning" would refer to in the Jewish case -- what, exactly, was our France in this scenario? -- was overlooked, as was the sheer historical audacity of just assuming that a sudden mass migration of Jews would be absorbed by the other nations of the world without any friction whatsoever. Such troublesome thoughts are easy to avoid thinking, when one sees Jews in Israel as settlers, colonizers, foreigners, and outsiders -- of course they can go back to "where they came from".

So in addition to the historical pedigree, another reason why "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" might provoke a strong reaction is that it is taken to imply that Jews are foreign to all of the land from the river-to-the-sea, that we are outsiders and interlopers in its entirety, that the goal isn't the creation of a Palestinian state but the elimination of a Jewish homeland, that Palestine will be freed only when Israel is gone, and that while our departure from the land may or may not be explicitly desired, it will not be viewed as any more tragic than any other colonizer uprooted from lands he had occupied.

So those are some associations or implications of the "river to the sea" slogan that help explain why many Jews react so strongly against it. There is a particular historical overlay between this rhetoric and the more explicitly violent, even genocidal, rhetoric that has been directed at Israel since its foundation; there is also the implied demand that "Israel" be struck down and replaced by "Palestine" -- suggesting that more than just a demand for equal citizenship and a neutral state is at issue -- and the corresponding portrayal of Jews as utterly and completely foreign presences in all the river-to-the-sea land.

Perhaps you find these rationales compelling, perhaps not. But -- as odd as this is to say -- my goal wasn't exactly to persuade.

Recall what I said my ambition was and who I said my desired audience was. My audience was those persons who found the slogan innocuous and who were confused why so many Jews reacted so sharply against it; my ambition was to explain those reactions in ways that don't reduce to "Jews hate the idea of Palestinians being free."

What had concerned me most about much of what I had been reading wasn't that many people thought this slogan was a straightforward and praiseworthy call for freedom. It was the jump from "this slogan seems to be about freedom" to "if Jews object to this slogan, it must be because they hate freedom." The jump should have been to "if Jews object to this slogan, there's probably something more at work -- and while I don't know if learning what it is will change my mind, I should at least be willing to hear it out".

I do not think that, if you had never heard "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", the case for why this slogan raises Jewish hackles is self-evident. I just dumped a lot of history and analysis on you; I fully get why someone who isn't versed in that history or analysis would hear those words and not have it raise any alarm bells whatsoever. Indeed, I get why some might be perplexed at how it even could raise alarm bells for someone else. I also get why someone who wasn't versed in the relevant history and was dropped from a mountain hut wouldn't immediately get why "all lives matter" is objectionable. Context is something acquired, it isn't innate. We can't ask for people to be born with the necessary context. We can ask that they be aware that there might be context left to acquire.

So I tried to give context, and hopefully you found the context informative and maybe even persuasive. But I'll frame my ambitions even more modestly: all I hope to have accomplished is that, even if you didn't find my above analysis ultimately persuasive, you would nonetheless agree it presents an explanation for Jewish unease or unhappiness about this slogan that isn't flatly risible, as it would be if we simply detested Palestinian freedom. At the very least, there's a genuine issue here that goes beyond the superficially absurd. And if that seems like a rather small victory, think of how big of a step it is from "these people just hate the idea of Palestinian freedom."

This is the habit I seek to inculcate. Whether we're talking about Jews or any other outgroup, it is good practice to assume that if alarms are raised, they're probably not raising them based on the obviously stupid, venal, or self-interested reasons. There's a strong chance there's something more complicated going on.

So go ahead and assume we have the basic capacity for empathy, reasoning, and analysis that would take us beyond the obvious traps, and see where the path takes you. Maybe you conclude we're still wrong. Maybe you conclude that we're right. Maybe there's a more nuanced position in the middle you end up landing on. No matter what, you've done us the service of treating us as epistemic equals. And that's no small thing.

The Farr Nomination and the Future of Senate Oversight

The announcement from Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the Senate's sole Black Republican member, that he would oppose the nomination of Thomas Farr to a federal district court seat in North Carolina has officially torpedoed the nomination. Without Scott (and Jeff Flake, who has said he will vote against all judicial nominees until a bill protecting the Mueller investigation is brought to a vote), Farr didn't have enough votes to be confirmed.

The reason Farr was a particularly controversial figure is that he was implicated in racist voter suppression efforts in North Carolina, dating all the way back to his time on the Jesse Helms campaign. I assume that, aside from that bit of historical pedigree, he is more or less identical to any other candidate the Trump administration might nominate for the seat.

It is interesting to me, then, that in all cases such as this the burning question is always "will these two or three Republican Senators vote no?" We're way past the possibility that the bulk of Republican Senators might in any way buck the Trump administration's dictates -- even in circumstances where the tangible impact of the defection is nothing. The man (or woman, but let's be realistic about probabilities here) who is nominated instead of Farr will no doubt be a conservative, FedSoc approved jurist whose pattern of voting on controversial cases will be almost impossible to distinguish from how Farr would have voted. When that jurist gets confirmed instead of Farr, there is no net loss for the conservative legal project.

And yet -- by all appearances, it is beyond the realm of possibility that more than a bare handful of Republicans would oppose Farr. Scott's defection did trigger a belated (and pointless) return back to undecided from Official Moderate Republican Susan Collins (surprising no one, when it looked like she'd be the decisive vote she announced she'd back Farr). One might think that -- especially after Scott sank the nomination anyway -- a cluster of, I don't know, 30 Republican Senators might announce that Farr's history of racist voter suppression made him unsuitable for the federal bench, bask in the praise the media would heap upon them for their independence, and then get ready to vote for the functionally-identical nominee Trump put forward instead. But no.

This, above all else, was my thought during the Kavanaugh hearing. Had Kavanaugh been defeated, the alternative would have been almost certainly "a judge whose predicted voting record on the bench would be substantively identical to Kavanaugh's in every respect, but who wasn't also maybe a sexual predator in his youth." Oh the sacrifices! But apparently it is one, since pretty much no Republican Senator has ever found this logic remotely compelling.

This is why I have no confidence in the GOP Senate's ability or interest in providing even a modicum of checks upon the Trump administration. Faced between the choice of a conservative nominee who is corrupt/racist/incompetent/criminal, and waiting another few weeks for a nominee who is just as conservative but doesn't have any of that baggage, the Republicans in the Senate have proven they'll choose Door #1 every single time.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume L: The Titanic

It's the 50th iteration of this series! When we began, way back with the Fukashima disaster, could anyone have imagined we'd find fifty random world events that people blamed on the Jews? (answer: yes, effortlessly)

On this special day, we explore blaming the Jews for The Titanic. The ship, not the movie (obviously, we get the movie by default since, you know, Hollywood. I'll leave it to the commenters to decide whether the 1997 Oscar Best Picture is something to be blamed or credited for).

Anyway. A Canadian Arabic-language newspaper has an account of why the Titanic was built, and why it sank. You might be surprised to learn that neither "luxury passenger travel" nor "icebergs" factor into the narrative:

The Jewish Freemasons built the giant Titanic ship and charged it with the fictional costs, only to kill three businessmen, who built it with a magnificent construction, to drag them on board, and then sink them into the ocean floor and bury the secret with them for ever. The [businessmen were against] the idea of ​​creating the Federal Reserve! They loved to be rid of them in order to pave the way for the new world order. 

This is the sort conspiracy theory that really riles me up. I mean, it's one thing to accuse Jews of murdering powerful global actors as part of a plot to retain dominance of the international financial system. It's another thing to have us take such a manifestly inefficient path towards the goal.

Do you really think that there aren't simpler ways to kill three businessmen than constructing the largest ship the world had ever seen, then sinking her during her maiden voyage? Think of how wasteful that is! You're an antisemite -- you're supposed to think Jews are stingy.

I can accept baseless conspiratorial hatred, but I will die before my tribe is charged with sloppy craftsmanship. There are lines, people.

On Israel's "60 Discriminatory Laws"

At a UN meeting commemorating International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Temple University Professor Marc Lamont Hill referred to the existence of "more than 60 Israel laws that deny citizenship rights to Palestinians just because they are not Jewish."

It's one of those claims I've heard bandied about, in various formulations, many times, and I thought it was worth digging into a bit.

The basic referent here, as far I can tell, is a list from the Israeli NGO Adalah (The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel), which compiles laws which "discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens in Israel and/or Palestinian residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) on the basis of their national belonging." The "or indirectly" matters quite a bit -- as Adalah confirms, while some of these laws represent explicit discrimination, "more often, the laws are worded in a seemingly neutral manner, but have or will likely have a disparate impact on Palestinians in their implementation."

Now, one might think that my objection here is to the conflation of "direct" and "indirect" forms of discrimination. And to be sure, there is a very large difference between a law which says directly "Israeli Jews, but not Israeli Palestinians, are entitled to X" and a law which is neutral in form but happens to have a disparate impact on Palestinians. Likewise, not all of the entries on the Adalah list seem like fair play. For example, Adalah includes a 2010 law which offers certain perks to soldiers discharged from the IDF. It contends this discriminates against Palestinian Israelis because, unlike other Israeli citizens, they are not subject to mandatory military service. But they aren't excluded from military service either -- they just (unlike Jewish Israelis) have the option to forgo it (one could argue that this is a law which favors Palestinian Israelis at the expense of their Jewish co-citizens). So to characterize this law as one that denies Palestinians equal citizenship seems like an extraordinarily deep stretch.

Others are likewise shaky calls. For example, the law which increases the threshold for entering parliament is attacked as a means of seeking to squelch Arab political participation. And to be sure, it seems evident that one motive (though not the only one) for that law was the belief that, given deep fragmentation among Arab Israeli parties, it would knock out some of the smaller groupings. But if that was the goal, it backfired: Arab parties instead united under a Joint List and surged to become the third-largest party in the Knesset. In any event, to characterize that law as one which " den[ies] citizenship rights to Palestinians just because they are not Jewish" is more than a bit of a stretch.

Still, it is absolutely fair to observe that "indirect" forms of discrimination nonetheless contribute in a very real way to tangible inequality. That's as true in Israel as it is in America; a focus on formal equality is manifestly insufficient to capture ways in which Palestinian citizens of Israel are disadvantaged in Israeli society. And it'd be unfair to accuse Hill of hypocrisy on this score, at least -- I have no doubt that he would, if asked, also deem American laws which are facially neutral but have a disparate impact on African-Americans as contributors to a racist American system.

Nonetheless, something slick is happening here, and I think it's important to zero in on what it is. The phrase "laws that deny citizenship rights to Palestinians" is vague, intentionally so, but it certainly connotes more explicit forms of identity-based discrimination that mimic something like South African apartheid or American Jim Crow. Hill could rejoin that this isn't what he means by the phrase -- he intends to sweep more broadly, because unjust inequality isn't limited to cases which mimic South African apartheid.

Fine -- but if that's the case, then we have to start asking whether a state having "60 laws" which are facially neutral but have a disparate deleterious impact on certain vulnerable minorities is comparatively abnormal. Put another way: if we adopted Adalah's standard for a law which "den[ies] citizenship rights" to a particular outgroup and applied it to America, how many discriminatory laws would we have? 20? 100? 1000? What about Poland? What about Cameroon? What about China? What about Kuwait? And so on. My strong guess is that, under this metric, having sixty discriminatory laws falls well within the normal range for countries of its size.

To be clear, despite the verbiage above my argument isn't "whataboutism". It is perfectly fair to say that the existence of such laws -- even the existence of more of such laws -- in many other countries wouldn't justify them in Israel's case. And I'd agree with that. But -- and here's the "slick" part -- Hill is not trying to make the argument that Israel is common among nations in having laws which in effect disadvantage certain outgroups. He's trying to assert that Israel is unique in this respect, or at least uncommon. Speaking of "laws that deny citizenship rights" is meant to suggest that Israel stands out and beyond the pale -- so much so that we should support (Hill is explicit on this point) violent resistance efforts against it akin to that which the ANC employed against apartheid South Africa.

What we have, in short, is a bait-and-switch. On the one hand, the rhetoric Hill employs is designed to give the impression of a narrower and more virulent set of wrongful conduct that is similar in form to apartheid and seems harmonious with a relatively aggressive set of responses. On the other hand, if you press him on the substantive meaning behind the rhetoric, he can fall back and say "no, no -- I'm talking about something much more expansive". But that class of wrongs is no longer in sync with the sort of remedies Hill is proposing -- unless he's willing to say that pretty much every country on earth should be subjected to violent insurgency on account of its failure to abolish laws which have a disadvantageous disparate impact on certain minorities in the state.

And if even he is willing to ride that slope all the way to its slippery bottom, he'll find that few are willing to follow him down. A theoretical consistency is overshadowed by an known and accepted practical inconsistency; the mobilizing force of his remarks depends on preserving an intentional asymmetry between substance and rhetoric, between the actual content of the wrongs he's alleging Israel commits and the connotations implied by how they're described. It is not feasible to get widespread support for the proposition that every country should be targeted for a terrorist insurgency as a means of overturning its unjust practices. It is feasible to get widespread support for the proposition that a particular country (preferably someone else's) be so targeted.

Again, the argument here isn't "well, if you don't criticize Romania and Sri Lanka for this, how can you criticize Israel?" I'm well aware that caring equally about everything is an impossible and unreasonable demand; people focus on what they focus on for all number of reasons. But there is a very large difference between arguing "this is a wrong we see everywhere, I just happen to focus on it in this particular place" and "this particular place stands out as wrongful in a way one doesn't see anywhere else." The former and the latter are different claims and demand different justifications.

And likewise, I'm concerned about the rapidity with which people are beginning to argue that a claim of double-standards is just a way of kicking up dust. Yes, it's true that no functioning program of political or social action actually comprehensively applies to every "like" case simultaneously. No, that doesn't mean that patterns of disparate or disproportionate focus on a particular group never can give rise to an inference of discriminatory maltreatment (hell, that's the entire basis for looking askance at disparate impact!). Curtis Marez's limp argument that academic BDS targets Israel because, hey, "one has to start somewhere" -- as if the focus on Israel was a sort of random precipitation, as if the next academic organization over might just as easily look at China or Turkey or America -- is an insult to everyone's intelligence.

Certainly, Hill understands this well in his case -- defending his friendship with and admiration of Louis Farrakhan (with whom he is far closer to than, say, Linda Sarsour), Hill contended that "Black people are the only people who are demanded to throw people away". Regardless of whether it is in fact true that this is only demanded of Black people (and I might respond with: "Hi! I'm a Jew! My people should talk with your people about our shared experiences on this dimension!"), would it really suffice as a response to reply by saying "well, maybe 'throwing away' open bigots is only demanded of Black people -- but it's still the right thing to do, and we should demand it everyone, so what grounds have you to complain"? In reality, it isn't an accident that such demands disproportionately fall on certain groups and not others, and that non-accidental non-proportionality does not exist outside of valid discourses about justice and equal treatment.

In any event, we've strayed afield from where we started. In broad sweep, the move Hill is making is a similar play to that which I critiqued in my column on accusing Israel of "genocide". That allegation likewise attempts to harness the moral gravity of a narrow set of wrongs and apply it to something substantively much broader -- switching back and forth between the rhetorical force generated by the former (genocide as death camps) and the substantive sweep captured by the latter (genocide as "losing your culture"). The move only works if one consciously blurs the pivot, but that obfuscation is fair to call out. Here, it's paired with the more prosaic problem I identified with those omnipresent maps -- a failure to use consistent metrics across cases, such that the statement "laws which deny citizenship rights" doesn't mean "nothing short of explicit segregation or denaturalization" in Turkey and "any law which isn't arrived at through a perfect simulacrum of the Rawlsian original position" in Israel.

The problem with the "60 laws" formulation isn't that there aren't valid objections to some or even many of the laws Adalah has in its database. Nor is it the self-serving (and transparently ridiculous) argument that Palestinians (whether citizens of Israel or not) face systematic and serious discrimination in Israel, much of which emanates directly from the Israeli state. The problem is that the move Hill is pulling relies on a set of disingenuous rhetorical tropes that deliberately mislead as to the content of the claims he's making. The substantive content of his claims absolutely establish that Israel commits wrongs -- but only within the normal bandwidth. That's a problem, because Hill needs to characterize Israel as especially evil, especially mendacious, especially corrupt, and especially worthy of revulsion. Why? Because he knows full well that the sorts of demands he wants to make -- a full boycott coupled with a violent military insurrection -- only fly if people believe he's talking about an especially horrible Other.

And that's how you get a phrase like "more than 60 Israel laws that deny citizenship rights to Palestinians just because they are not Jewish."

Racial Discrimination isn't a First Amendment Right (Yet)

I've written a bit about First Amendment Lochnerism -- the use of the First Amendment to strike down a bevy of (generally progressive) government regulations as violations on "free speech". Because an expansive view of "speech" can encompass all manner of activities hitherto thought of as unremarkable subjects of public regulation (consider laws which force drug manufacturers to disclose potential side effects -- compelled speech!), a hyperactive First Amendment jurisprudence can threaten huge swaths of the modern regulatory state. And indeed, it seems as if the First Amendment has been the conservative judiciary's weapon of choice against disagreeable liberal policy victories -- from campaign finance reform to public sector unions.

Anti-discrimination law, in particular, is vulnerable to this trend because it is very easy to view an anti-discrimination rule as a form of compelled association (why should I have to engage in a business transaction with a group I don't want to associate with), and because most discrimination has a self-consciously expressive character (I'm not doing business with this group as a means of expressing my disdain for them).

A few days ago, the Ninth Circuit encountered another probe in this direction when Charter Communications, the third-largest cable distributor in America, defended itself against a § 1981 charge of racial discrimination by claiming its application would violate its First Amendment rights.  Charter was accused of refusing to distribute the channels of a Black-owned cable company due to racial animus. It denies the claim, of course, but it also argued that even if it had been engaging in racial discrimination, such a choice would represent an exercise of Charter's "editorial discretion" and thus was immune from governmental oversight under the First Amendment. To the extent § 1981 -- one of the oldest civil rights laws in America, forbidding race-based interference in the creation of a contract -- is applied to such "editorial" choices, it is unconstitutional.

The Ninth Circuit rejected this defense and allowed the suit to proceed. But we're still seeing more and more data points suggesting that the First Amendment is viewed as a promising avenue for derailing discrimination claims, and I think there are ample grounds for civil rights activists to be very anxious about the trend.

Cynicism as "Realism" as Cowardice

Among the many, many terrible things Mort Klein has written -- well, I don't actually want to rank them, because there's a lot bad. But this is bad.

If these illegals were all conservatives who would likely vote republican, none of these leftwing supporters of these illegals would be supporting the illegals.None! https://t.co/uEJMhj5u0x

— Morton Klein (@MortonAKlein7) November 26, 2018

Indeed, it's not just bad. It is one of the more despicable rhetorical ploys one sees in politics today. It is cynicism dressed up as realism. But it's worse than that, because what it's really intended to do is to serve as a buoy, a life raft to allow people to ignore obvious moral obligations by pretending that nobody really follows them anyway.

First of all, as Jill Jacobs notes, it's not like anybody has polled these migrants, so we actually have no idea how they might vote if and when they become U.S. citizens. The blithe assumption that they'll obviously vote Democratic is itself a pretty brutal self-own -- "clearly, given how terribly we've treated immigrants there's no way they'd ever vote for us!" is now right-wing orthodoxy -- and the Republican extension that this justifies xenophobic policies is the epitome of murdering your parents and crying orphan.

But if we lived in a different sort of world -- one where Republicans weren't committed to explicit policies of gratuitous cruelty towards refugees and immigrants, one where bipartisan immigration reform had succeeded instead of being torpedoed by an ascendant racist right -- would these groups be automatic liberal constituencies?

I hardly see why. It wasn't that long ago that Latinos were a swing bloc. It wasn't that long ago that Asians were a swing bloc. It wasn't that long ago that Muslims voted Republican by crushing margins. To the extent these groups are now viewed as reliably Democratic, it's caused less by unalterable cultural properties and more by the GOP's increasingly brazen embrace of open White Supremacy.

And on the other side: there have been refugee groups whose politics have coded "right" -- generally those fleeing socialist authoritarian nations. Cubans and Vietnamese would fall into this category, as would (I suspect) Venezuelans more recently. Yet contra Klein, I've seen no evidence that Democrats have abandoned their generally positive pro-refugee stances as applied to these groups. Just because conservatives can't imagine not acting based on partisan motives doesn't mean nobody does it. It just emphasizes how morally bankrupt contemporary conservatism is -- it's lost the ability to even fathom a principled stance. And as for Democrats, when faced with new constituencies that might start off suspicious of progressive politics, you know what we do? We try to win their votes, by making the case that our policies are better. Our success in doing so has translated to flipping a few south Florida and southern California House districts -- and that's the way it should be. Oh boo hoo -- it's so unfair that you need to actually appeal to different constituencies, even when they're not White! Welcome to democracy!

What's going on here? Why is Klein making arguments of this sort? The specific answer, obviously, is that Klein is a xenophobic hack with a loose allegiance to factual reality. The general answer, though, is that it's offering conservatives a way to be moral cowards while saving face.

Here's the thing: everybody understands that morality makes certain demands of us in the political realm. And everybody also understands that those demands might sometimes incur costs, or cause dissonance, or otherwise make us feel uncomfortable. So we're all vulnerable to pied pipers suggesting that we can dispense with those commitments -- who tell us what we already long to hear, who let us recode our cowering instincts as a form of nobility, or at least savviness.

Klein's cynicism styles itself as realism -- the hard-headed political realist understands that all this noble talk about "loving the stranger" is only so much political posturing, you'd be a sucker to be taken in by it. It's an attractive message because it disguises moral cowardice for clear-eyed vision, and that's exactly why it's so despicable. Messages like these do immense damage to the moral fabric of our political world; they don't just unravel the sense that we have duties to one another that extend beyond momentary political advantage, they undo that sensibility in a way that is masked as a virtue.

But make no mistake: it is cowardice. Telling oneself that just treatment of refugees is a sucker's game because it's just Democrats playing politics is a way of avoiding an obvious moral duty. It exploits a vulnerability in our collective psyches to make our politics coarser and crueler, and that makes the activists who peddle it utterly beneath contempt.

Nazi Saluting Students Won't Get Punished

The Baraboo (Wisconsin) School District has so decided, contending that it "cannot know the intentions in the hearts of those who were involved" and that any proposed discipline would violate the First Amendment.

I don't want to get into the merits of either these justifications. Hearts are notoriously hard to read (itself a good reason not to hinge our approach to discrimination on the fickle organ), and I'd have to do more research to feel confident appraising the merits of the First Amendment question (on the one hand, presumably the school's power is limited in cases of off-campus speech like this, on the other hand, remember "Bong Hits for Jesus"?).

All I want to say now is something I've said before: They would say it about Jews; they'd say it about others too. Sometimes one hears claims to the effect that "nobody would ever tolerate such-and-such behavior if it was targeting Jews", as a claimed contrast to cases where social actors are tolerating some form of bigoted behavior which targets another group. It's an ugly bit of victim-competition which attempts to cast Jews as having yet more unearned privileges and advantages that set them apart from the truly marginalized.

But, as we see here, people do target Jews with hateful acts, and other people do let them get away with it. The myth that -- alone amongst the oppressions -- any hostile act towards Jews (and -- the implication often goes -- many acts that aren't really hostile at all) is met with immediate and overwhelming punitive firepower is just that: a myth. It isn't reflected in reality, and it shouldn't be relied upon.

Trendlines! (Almost) 50 State Edition

In politics as in anything else, one does not want to be caught fighting the last war. And so, reflecting on the last election, it's worth asking not where the states currently are on the red vs. blue continuum, but where they're going. What are the trendlines?

Note: A trend is just that -- a trend. A state can be "trending" blue but still be quite red, or vice versa. Nonetheless, I'm not including states that are, for lack of a better word, "boring" -- so overwhelmingly and consistently preferring one party or the other that it doesn't really matter of any side is marginally improving its prospects.

* * *

Alaska -- Blue: While still a pretty reliably Republican state, Democrats have been quietly making the last several congressional elections close. Rep. Don Young (R) may have served since 1973, but he hasn't gotten over 55% of the vote since 2012. An extremely robust independent streak (allowing, e.g., Lisa Murkowski to win a write-in Senate campaign) also makes Alaska a little more complicated than your average red bear.

Arizona -- Blue: Kyrsten Sinema's Senate victory caps off the official entry of Arizona into "purple" territory (strong performance on the House side too!).

Arkansas -- Red: Hey, remember how Bill Clinton was from Arkansas? That was a long time ago.

California -- Blue: California's leaned blue for awhile, but it wasn't that long ago that some Republicans could at least compete (remember the Governator?). Not today. The sweep of Orange County House seats cements the complete collapse of the Golden State's GOP.

Colorado -- Blue: It seems like Colorado almost leap-frogged over "purple" to go straight to "light blue". Cory Gardner has a massive target on his back come 2020.

Florida -- ???: Florida's a tough nut to crack. It was probably the purplest state to almost completely resist the blue wave this year -- the GOP performed about as well here in 2018 as it did in 2016. That's testament to (a) better-than-average performance among Latinos and (b) really cranking up the dial on rural Whites -- a good recipe for GOP success. The wildcard is the passage of Amendment Four, which significantly relaxed Florida's brutally draconian felon disenfranchisement laws. Most states, that wouldn't be enough to make a difference -- but Florida is close enough (and its felon disenfranchisement rates racially skewed enough) that it could matter.

Georgia -- Blue: Slowly but steadily, Georgia is getting competitive. But the emphasis is on "slowly". Brian Kemp's defeat of Stacy Abrams -- without even needing a run-off -- shows that there's still a ways to go before Democrats really put the Peach State in play.

Indiana -- Red: Obama managed to win here in 2008, but that seems like eons ago now. Indiana was always the most conservative of the rust belt states, but it's really tacked hard right over the past few cycles.

Iowa -- ???: Democrats won three of four House seats and almost managed to flip the fourth (a feat which, to be fair, reflects more on King's unique awfulness than any general Democratic competitiveness in western Iowa). But we lost what seemed to be a winnable governor's race, and rural midwestern states seem to be inching right. Hard to say which way the winds are blowing, but if you forced me to guess I'd say Iowa is more likely to get redder than bluer.

Kansas --- Blue: Again, it's a slow process, and not likely to show up on any presidential races anytime soon. But Democrats are starting to consistently compete in Kansas House races again, and, of course, we just took the governor's mansion.

Maine -- Red: Maine still has a decidedly blue lean. But its rural environs aren't as decisively blue as they used to be, and this is still a state that -- however flukishly -- gave Paul LePage two terms as governor.

Michigan -- ???: Michigan snapped back hard into the Democratic column in 2018, but it's still worth asking whether it will join a broader midwestern drift rightward. Debbie Stabenow's closer than expected Senate race against John James (she won 52-45) suggests that there's still plenty of fight left in Wolverine Republicans.

Minnesota -- Red: Republicans flipped two congressional seats from blue-to-red this cycle, and both were in Minnesota. They were washed out two Democratic gains in the suburbs, but there's no question Republicans have been consistently improving their performances here over the past few years. They may not be able to touch Amy Klobuchar, but one day Rep. Colin Peterson (D) is going to draw a real challenger and then it's quite likely Minnesota will have an even D/R congressional delegation.

Missouri -- Red: Time was Missouri was a national bellwether. No more: it's pretty firmly in the red camp these days.

Montana -- Blue: Jon Tester's best performance yet is buoyed by growth in the western -- and more liberal -- half of the state.

Nebraska -- ???: Democrats have been wondering if Omaha might give them an opening, but Kara Eastman actually did worse in her 2018 race against Rep. Don Bacon than Brad Ashford did in 2016. Yes, Ashford has the advantage of (one term of) incumbency, but 2018 was a much better year than 2016 was. The rest of the state remains ruby red.

Nevada -- Blue: The American west/southwest is probably the area where we're seeing the most decisive Democratic momentum, and Nevada -- where Harry Reid helped build a formidable Democratic machine -- is at the forefront of that. Like Colorado, Nevada seems to have jumped straight past "purple" and into "light blue".

New Hampshire -- ???: Like much of New England, New Hampshire seems to be consolidating blue a bit, but the Granite State in particular is notoriously politically volatile. Gov. Chris Sununu's (R) 53/46 re-election win was a bit closer than expected though.

New Mexico -- Blue: Of all the southwestern states, New Mexico has the longest standing blue roots, so in terms of "trend" it's probably moved less than some of its neighbors.

North Carolina -- ???: A few years ago, there was a lot of hope in the southeastern United States -- Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida -- as the big growth area for the Democratic Party. Looking back, it's been a mixed bag. The fact that the North Carolina legislature has gerrymandered itself to hell and back and has a questionable commitment to the entire concept of "democracy" isn't helping matters, but voters have put a kibosh on some of their worst instincts.

North Dakota -- Red: Do you know that Barack Obama kept North Dakota to a single digit margin in 2008? That feels like a long time ago. Goodbye Heidi Heitkamp -- you'll be missed.

Ohio -- Red: As non-college educated White voters have shifted red, things have gotten a lot harder for team blue in the Buckeye State. Sherrod Brown was a big bright spot in an otherwise dim Democratic performance this year.

Pennsylvania -- ???: "Pittsburgh in the west, Philadelphia in the east, and Alabama in the middle." Pennsylvania is tough to characterize. On the one hand, of all the "blue wall" Trump wins in 2016, PA was the most surprising, and Democrats performed well here in 2018. On the other hand, both the "Pittsburgh" and "Alabama" portions of Pennsylvania seem like the sort of places that could continue a red-ward trend -- albeit one perhaps offset by the bluing of greater Philadelphia.

Texas -- Blue: It's easy to overread Beto O'Rourke's performance this year -- which to my mind was equal parts (a) Texas getting bluer, (b) Beto being a really good candidate, (c) 2018 being a good Democratic year, and (d) everyone hating Ted Cruz. But still "a" is a real part of that story. I wouldn't characterize Texas as "purple" yet, but it's definitely moving in that direction. And importantly, Democrats are making serious plays in some of the suburbs.

Virginia -- Blue: The only southeastern state which has decisively taken a turn in the Democratic direction is Virginia. Virginia's DC suburbs are starting to catch up to their Maryland neighbors as deep blue pools, and Democrats are also performing decently downstate too.

West Virginia -- Red: No region of America has shifted more decisively towards the GOP than Appalachia, and no state is more Appalachian than West Virginia. Puts Joe Manchin's victory in perspective, though.

Wisconsin -- ???: Beating Scott Walker was sweet, and Tammy Baldwin had little trouble winning reelection to the Senate. But the midwest still seems to me to be a troublespot for the Democrats -- it's hard to imagine that if Minnesota is pivoting right, that Wisconsin will buck them and move left.

Philadelphia Police Department Sued for Antisemitic Discrimination

Two Philadelphia police officers are suing the department, alleging antisemitic discrimination.

In a nice bit of "THIS is what a Jew looks like!" communal pluralism, the Latina Jewish officer is the one making note of "jokes" about blowing up Israel and alleging retaliation for trying to take Rosh Hashana off, and the White (Russian) Jewish officer is the one who got hit with threats of deportation.

Hurray for Jewish diversity!

Anti-Pelosi Democrats are 2018's Stein Voters

The attempted rebellion of about a dozen and a half Democrats -- primarily "moderates" -- against Nancy Pelosi is a nice reminder that self-indulgent posturing in the service of self-destructive politics isn't just a feature of the progressive movement's left flank. Anybody can play!

There isn't any good reason for why Nancy Pelosi shouldn't be Speaker of the House, and the rebel faction has barely offered one other than some vague murmurings about "change" (I'm having flashbacks just writing that sentence). But the political calculations here are, if anything, even worse. Let's review:

• Not to put too fine a point on it, but the broad argument that Nancy Pelosi is a weight dragging Democratic electoral chances seems to have been rather decisively falsified by our massive gains nationwide a few weeks ago.
• Speaking of which, the political storyline with respect to the House should be "Democrats pick up nearly 40 seats in a crushing blue wave", followed closely by "Donald Trump is terrified of a House with subpoena power." But let's step all over that story in favor of yet another "Dems in disarray" narrative the media loves so much! Nothing says "the adults are back in town" like immediately collapsing into petty infighting!
• The idea that the savvy political move right now in the Democratic Party is to step on perhaps the most prominent female elected official in the party in service of a tack to the center is ... let's go with "counterintuitive."
• Even in swing districts, the number of independent voters who realistically are making their D-or-R voting decision based on whether Nancy Pelosi is speaker is charitably described as "trivial". And of that set, the number who will care about something as an inside-baseball-y as the vote for Speaker cannot be measured by any instrument known to man. Put differently: if someone is going to vote Republican because Nancy Pelosi is speaker, it's cute to think they'd make an exception for a Democrat who voted against Pelosi on the floor.
• To the extent that anyone who promised to "not vote for Pelosi for speaker" needs a face-saving measure, the solution clearly is "vote for someone else in the caucus meeting". Then -- once you lose that vote by a predictably crushing margin -- say you've fulfilled your promise to "vote for someone else" and fall back in line like a good soldier. If that sounds too clever by half, keep in mind we are dealing with a hypothetical class of voters who will hold a grudge over the House leadership vote for two years, yet apparently won't be influenced by or care about anything the House actually does over that time period.

Honestly, there's nothing more "Democrat" than a bunch of sanctimonious morons deciding that opposing Trump is way less fun than a few weeks of needlessly self-destructive intraparty fratricide. 

The only pleasant thing about this whole affair will be watching Pelosi crush the insurgents like bugs. See, unlike them, Nancy Pelosi actually does know how to play the political game.

What is This Strange Feeling of Hope I Have?

I've written a lot about Corbyn, and Corbynism, and the deeply toxic impact it's had on British (and particularly progressive British) Jewish life. There's so many depressing or negative emotions associated with that whole state of affairs, and I have to think over the course of the past few years I've articulated all of them in one form or another.

But one thing I don't think I've ever written -- but which I've felt for awhile now -- is my sense of inspiration.

Because as terrible as Corbynism has been for progressive Jews in the UK -- they haven't taken it lying down. They've rallied, they've organized, they've refused to be cowed. And they've won serious victories -- the adoption of the full IHRA definition being just one example. Yes, there are many -- many -- Labour activists who are still quite publicly and viscerally hostile to Jewish activity. But it's also the case that there are many Labour politicians who have boldly and uncompromisingly stood with the Jewish community -- obviously Jewish figures like Luciana Berger, but also prominent non-Jewish members like Sadiq Khan.

Faced with an emergent antisemitic tide in Labour, UK Jews dug in their heels and fought back. And if you compare the genuine resistance to antisemitism that we're seeing inside Labour to, say, the utter capitulation to racism that's characterized the contemporary Republican Party in the face of Trumpism, there's no question that the left comes out looking much better -- not because we've won the battle (or anything close to it), but because there actually is a battle. It hasn't been a steamroller, and we've given as good as we've got.

I'm inspired because in the UK there are far fewer Jews, who are far less interlaced in political and social life, than in the US. So if they can do it there, we can do it here. Yes, there's antisemitism on the left in America. But the Jewish community hasn't slunk away, and we haven't even stepped back from our posts as a core progressive constituency (79% of Jews voted blue in the midterms -- that's more lopsided than pretty much any other group save African-Americans).

If you're worried about the influence of Louis Farrakhan on the left, go ahead and do that -- but also be cognizant of the fact that, as much as certain figures in the movement have been utter failures on that issue, there's been a sustained, powerful firewall of progressive activists who have stepped up to the plate and who are -- again -- giving at least as well as we're getting. If this is a fight, then we're fighting -- and on Farrakhan-related questions, I dare say we're winning pretty decisively.

There's a fantasy in which the Democratic Party saw a group of left-wing activists hostile to Jews and immediately tossed us overboard, and then there's the reality where the Democratic Party has been remarkably robust in listening to Jewish concerns and holding the line against attempts to exclude us from the movement. It's not the case that antisemitism doesn't exist in the Democratic Party, but neither is it the case that when it manifests it riots unchecked. Jews speak out, and when we do it matters.

And here the comparison to the Republican Party couldn't be starker. I don't know if the RJC has even tried to object to, say, Soros conspiracy mongering by Republican officials -- but if it has, it's barely been a speedbump. You want to talk about a political movement which is scarcely even trying to fight antisemitism in its own ranks -- there's your mark.

Bizarrely, sometimes it seems like conservatives get more credit because Jews are so marginal in their movement that there are no "fights" about antisemitism at all -- if the Republican Party wants to run conspiracy theories about the globalist Jews corrupting the volk, nobody on the inside could stop them and nobody on the inside really tries to stop them. The progressive movement has visible friction precisely because there's resistance to internalized antisemitism that is virtually non-existent in conservatism. What sometimes seems like comparative placidity in the conservative ranks is a mirage -- it disguises an utterly routed state.

So I'm feeling weirdly good right now. Are there efforts within the left to marginalize Jews? Yes. But are Jews going to simply roll over and concede to them? Not bloody likely. And the most heartening part is -- experience has taught me that we won't be fighting alone, and we won't be fighting in futility. This is a battle we can win.

The Antisemitism that Keeps Me Up at Night

What is the type of antisemitism that keeps you up at night?

For me, believe it or not, it isn't the violence. It isn't Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is scary, but -- rightly or wrongly -- I continue to think that this sort of antisemitism is and will remain a rare occurrence in the United States.

The antisemitism that gives me nightmares is a different sort, and requires some explaining. But the short version is that it's the antisemitism of negative partisanship (or "the politics of hurt").

Here's what I mean by that. Antisemitic acts are sometimes done by people who don't conceive of themselves as antisemites. In such cases, we'd expect that the reaction of Jews to those acts -- the declaration that "this was antisemitic" and "this hurt us" -- to count as a negative. The actor would not have desired that result, that his or her action elicited such a response would count against it. And even if the actor isn't so chagrined, we'd hope that this would be the impact on social observers. If people see that Jews reacted negatively to something -- that we thought it was scary, or unjust, or antisemitic, or what have you -- then they'd be less favorably disposed towards whatever it was that caused us to react so poorly.

But this isn't always what happens. Sometimes, in some cases, a poor Jewish reaction isn't viewed as a negative. It's viewed as a positive. It shows that you're poking the right people. It shows you're standing up to power. It shows that you haven't been cowed. "If you're taking flak, that means you're over the target", as the saying goes -- a saying which assumes that those firing the flak are also the enemy to be targeted.

Consider Tamika Mallory's infamous remark, in response to Jewish criticism of alleged antisemitism, that "If your leader does not have the same enemies as Jesus, they may not be THE leader!" Obviously, in context there was a specific antisemitic valence to the "Jesus" reference that has been much remarked on. But even if you strip that part away, there's a deeper problem: Mallory is casting it as a point of pride that the Jews are critiquing her -- are her "enemies". It's one of the ways she knows she's on the right track. The victim-blaming template Ariel Sobel attributed to the Women's March -- where largely progressive Jewish criticism is transformed into a coordinated right-wing assault (itself an antisemitic maneuver of deep vintage) -- is in the same vein. The goal is to make it so that when people hear these sorts of criticisms from these sorts of people, their instinct is to pull closer towards the object of critique. If they're taking flak from Jews, then they must be over the target.

This is what keeps me up at night, because it subverts any possibility of effective Jewish political action in response to perceived wrongs. If it is a perk that Jews are upset, if it is a positive political sign, then it's counterproductive for Jews even to try and communicate "this hurt us." Expressions of Jewish hurt end up redounding to the benefit of those causing the hurt. What are we to do?

Particularly in political contexts, this can yield dangerous feedback loops. I have no doubt that Jewish dislike of Jeremy Corbyn cost Labour votes in some districts, particularly heavily Jewish neighborhoods. I also have no doubt that, on a national level, the perception that Jews dislike Corbyn gained him at least as many votes as it lost him. There are definitely people for whom the chasm between Corbyn and the Jews is how they know Corbyn is "THE leader". The reason why Labour under Corbyn has so much trouble "quitting" antisemitism is because Labour is, in very real ways, aided by the perception that Labour under Corbyn antagonizes the Jews.

This has effects here at home too. Consider how Minnesota Jews might react to the Ilhan Omar doubletalk controversy I wrote about yesterday. Right now, the way I feel towards Omar, and the way I imagine many Minnesota Jewish community members feel, is something like the following:

We have serious problems with BDS, which for us has deep associations with antisemitism and antisemitic exclusion targeting Jews around the world. But beyond those substantive problems, it's especially upsetting and disrespectful for you to come before a synagogue, say you find BDS 'counteractive', and then once the election is over say 'actually, I've always supported BDS' and pretend like you weren't blatantly misleading us. The moderator "didn't ask a yes or no question"? Don't insult our intelligence. And add this to the 'hypnotize' tweet -- which you've still never acknowledged has antisemitic resonances -- and we've got some very serious concerns right now.

In a healthy political environment for Jews, this sort of sentiment would be viewed as a negative for Omar. It would be damaging, if Jews in her community were reacting this way, that would be a sign she'd done something wrong. I'm not saying it should necessarily be fatal or unrecoverable -- indeed, I think the opposite. In a healthy political environment, the fact that this would be viewed as a problem would motivate Omar to try to heal the damage and mend the rift. It would be bad for Ilhan Omar to be in a state where Jews were upset with her.

But does anyone have any confidence that, if such above sentiments were expressed, it would be viewed as a negative for Omar? Is it not possible, even likely, that such a reaction from Jews instead would be evidence that Omar was "bold", was "independent", was "unapologetically progressive" (even though, of course, the base of the controversy was actually that Omar had engaged in a pretty classic case of political weasel-wording)? Wouldn't the Jewish reaction very quickly be recast as a right-wing reaction, even though most Minnesota Jews are quite consciously progressive? Wouldn't many people be even more positively inclined towards Omar than they already were -- proud to see her stand tall against the Jewish onslaught?

Again, this is speculative -- we don't know how, if at all, the Jewish community in Minnesota plans to respond to Omar, nor how Omar plans to respond to her Jewish constituents. And the possibility of turning converting Jewish opposition into political support doesn't mean it's a path that would be taken. A genuine ally would resist the temptation; even if the prospect of adulation for "standing up" to the Jews presents itself, she would not indulge because of her own accord she would be unhappy that Jews were unhappy with her.

Nonetheless, this prospect -- and my fundamental lack of confidence that this prospect isn't actually reality -- keeps me up at night. David Hirsh wrote worryingly that -- more than BDS, more than school or synagogue security, more than the future of relations between Israel and the west, more than anything else -- "what really frightens me is that a generation of left-wing activists are being taught that the enemy is the Jews." Even if you think that's a little overwrought, I would endorse the notion that a generation of left-wing activists are being taught that if Jews are angry at them, that means they're doing something right rather than something wrong.

Naively or not, the cornerstone of my resistance to antisemitism -- what gives me the confidence that it can be resisted -- is a firm belief in the possibility that empathic dialogue and open communication can change minds and alter behavior. I believe -- again, perhaps naively -- that most people don't want to see Jews hurting, and hence that when we express hurt, people will be at least more inclined to change their ways.

If that's wrong, if people -- including the people in my community, including the people that supposedly are my most essential allies against Pittsburgh-style antisemitic violence -- are excited, thrilled, empowered by seeing Jews in distress, then my entire edifice for fighting antisemitism crumbles. And that keeps me up at night.