"Vulgar Intersectionality" Doesn't Strike Again

For the past few months, I've been following the story of Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a Jewish professor who was summarily terminated from his tenured position at Oregon's Linfield University after whistleblowing about sexual assault allegations against members of the university's board of trustees (Pollack-Pelzner was the faculty delegate to the board). Pollack-Pelzner also had complained of antisemitic language used by the university President.

The AAUP has just released its investigation and report into the incident, and it is blistering in condemning the university and its treatment of Pollack-Pelzner. The report is about 20 pages long, and is absolutely unsparing -- definitely worth reading if you want a thorough account of what happened here. One would struggle to find a more vicious (and frankly petty) abuse of power by a university administration against one of its tenured faculty than is presented here.

Here, I only want to add one thing. The President of the University (whom Pollack-Pelzner had accused of using antisemitic language) is African-American, and as the allegations against him and other high-level university leaders began to pick up steam in the media, he started to complain that the backlash against him was racist in character -- even enlisting the NAACP to conduct its own investigation. That investigation, in turn, inveighed against groups like the ADL and other Jewish organizations who had vigorously backed Pollack-Pelzner, and characterized the allegations against the President as "what systemic and institutionalized racism looks like in Oregon."

I do not venture an opinion as to whether the university president has faced disproportionate scrutiny on account of his race. Clearly, such treatment would in no way justify the inexcusable fashion he and Linfield had treated Professor Pollack-Pelzner.

However, I flag this because of what it tells us about a certain alleged trend that we are often told is ascendant if not unchallengeable in spaces like education and academia. Sometimes dubbed "vulgar intersectionality", this is the claim that in putatively progressive spaces the only factor that is functionally considered in cases of controversy or conflict is a sort of crude ranking of oppressions, one where (we are told) Jews are slotted in with privileged White folks (and accordingly ignored) while groups like African-Americans are giving immediate and unquestioning deference -- facts be damned.

If this thesis were true, it would suggest that in this case -- where a White Jewish man (alleging, among other things, antisemitism) was in conflict with a Black man (making a counter-allegation of racism) -- a group like the AAUP would have unquestionably backed the university president and vilified Pollack-Pelzner. This, we are told, is the hegemony of vulgar intersectionality: Jews are at the bottom (or top, depending on your point of view) of the totem pole, and so are unworthy of support when victimized or wounded -- still less, when the perpetrator is a member of the "favored" (to the intersectionalists) class.

But of course, this is not what happened. This is not even close to what happened. The AAUP conducted its investigation, assessed what happened, and again, backed Pollack-Pelzner to the hilt. It specifically condemned any effort to use claims of racism "to invalidate or distract attention from other allegations" of discrimination, such as those here. Simply put, the report's approach could not have been further from that predicted by the "vulgar intersectionality" thesis -- a thesis which always relied more on social panic than empirical observation.

I am pleased, of course, to see Professor Pollack-Pelzner vindicated. I hope that he his restored to his position at Linfield (if that is his desire), or gains whatever recompense or remediation he believes is his due. And I hope the Linfield administration listens to the robust consensus of its faculty and students (who have loudly rallied behind Pollack-Pelzner and the community members he had been supporting as a whistleblower) and shifts course away from these sorts of abuses and towards the ideal of academic freedom and shared governance.

Intra-Jewish Antisemitism

The New York Jewish Week has an interesting story about a clump of fringe Satmar Hasidic Rabbis in New York who are urging their followers not to accept food donations from "Zionist" organizations, which in this case means umbrella communal organizations like the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty. The Rabbis are "playing to the crowd" here, since as the article makes clear both they and their followers almost certainly are accepting donations from the Jewish groups they detest, they just are lying about it. So practically speaking, it is not changing anyone's behavior.

Nonetheless, it is interesting. There is, of course, the superficial irony of a group of Jews trying to shun the mainstream Jewish community by yelling about "Zionism", but from the right -- many will no doubt observe that this sort of rhetoric and conduct would, if done by (to pick a random example) some Reconstructionist congregation in Chicago, be immediately lambasted as a form of extreme antisemitism. But since it is the Satmar, it gets a pass.

Yet I actually do think there is more that has to be said beyond just the usual charges of hypocrisy. I do think it is true -- indeed clearly true -- that Jews can engage in antisemitism (though of course we should be extra-cautious about applying that label in reference to intracommunal debates and conversations). One example often given is certain behaviors by far-left anti-Zionists; another we could reference is some secular Jews joining with non-Jewish neighbors in raising hostile and conspiratorial complaints about Orthodox Jews who might be moving into their community. It's antisemitic when non-Jews do it, and it's antisemitic when, sadly, Jews do it too. The term "self-hating" Jew is deeply misleading and doesn't capture the phenomenon -- the persons who engage in this sort of behavior are very often quite proudly Jewish in other contexts. Rather, it is intra-Jewish antisemitism -- antisemitism from one faction of the Jewish community directed at another.

And, in addition to the examples I just gave above, one iteration of such intra-Jewish antisemitism that we need to start talking about is antisemitism emanating from the Orthodox community targeting their less traditionally observant brethren. As the NYJW article makes clear, the statement by these Rabbis targeting the umbrella New York Jewish organizations is part of a broader movement occurring within highly religious Orthodox Judaism that is -- and there is no other way to put it -- stirring up hate and antagonism towards non-Orthodox (particularly Reform) Jews. The story refers to articles in Satmar newspapers spreading stories about how Reform Jews, whom they characterize as "criminals and infidels" are "infiltrating" the community. It expresses outright horror at the prospect that they "build bridges and to unite the communities of the non-believers and Haredis in New York." If ever there were a case where "Zionist" didn't really mean "Zionist" but rather was a stand-in for "[Reform] Jews", this is it. The statement is motivated by, and an expression of, a deep, abiding hatred of a huge swath of the New York Jewish community.

And unfortunately, this not a problem that can be limited to a few fringe hot-heads amongst the Satmar (though if the Satmar's anti-Zionism is the hook that causes the broader community to finally recognize it as a problem, so be it). Four years ago I raised the terrible prospect of an out-and-out schism in Judaism where Orthodox Jews simply cease recognizing other Jews as Jews (this was prompted by an Israeli MK who blamed Reform Jews for causing earthquakes), and it does not feel as if things have improved since then. For example, anyone watching Jewish Twitter cannot help but notice the regular and repeated dismissal and denigration of the validity of non-Orthodox Jewish Rabbis -- especially women -- "Rabbi" placed in quotation marks, sneers about their ordination, and so on. It is behavior that, were it coming from non-Jews (and to be clear -- it often does) we would never have any trouble labeling it as antisemitic. More broadly, one could very easily categorize all the debates over permitting women to pray at the Western Wall, or the non-recognition of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism in Israel, as a form of antisemitism directed at non-Orthodox Jews.

It is terrible disgrace that part of our conversation about rising antisemitism has to include antisemitism that is promoted by Jews, and it is a further disgrace that "antisemitism promoted by Jews" comes with multiple subcategories. Some of these are political -- far-left Jews cheering on the ostracization and shunning of their "Zionist" brethren, or reactionary right-wing Jews bolstering conspiracy theories about George Soros or "cultural Marxism". Others have religious overtones, such as when secular Jews try to obstruct or block their Orthodox peers from moving to their towns. And, sadly, another in that category is open, seething disdain by some Orthodox Jews directed at the non-Orthodox -- viewing them with hate, viewing their religious practices with disdain, in some cases refusing to view them as Jewish at all. It is, as I said, disgraceful -- and it's not easy to talk about. But talk about it we must. This is not a problem that is going to go away on its own.

The Feast of the Baby Heads

Upon Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin's inauguration, I made an observation about how wonderful it is to be Republican in purple-state America. Namely, that so long as you hold off on biting off a baby head during the campaign, the media will declare you the very essence of sobriety and moderation, and dismiss anyone who tries to tell otherwise. Then, once you enter office, you can bite as many baby heads as you want -- shocking the professional punditocracy (and gullible "independent" voter) who was ever-so-sure you were actually quite reasonable!

I made that observation upon Youngkin's opening gubernatorial salvo designed to help COVID be even more lethal. But it also applies to his latest round of petty partisan vindictiveness, vetoing widely popular bipartisan initiatives that passed the legislature by overwhelming margins for no other reason than that they were sponsored by Democrats. After "earning" the title of a moderate for, as best I can tell, no other reason other than that he wears fuzzy fabrics, Governor Youngkin has in his first few months been gorging himself on the baby heads that he temporarily deprived himself of on the campaign trail -- governing as a virulent right-wing extremist in a state that remains purplish-blue. The best analogy I can think of is if a Democrat manages to sneak into the Missouri governor's mansion in an off-year election and immediately abolishes the police. It's simultaneously unfathomable and yet exactly what one gets from these so-called "moderates".

The reality is that there are, functionally speaking, no more moderate Republicans -- a fact which does not remotely seem to dampen the media's willingness to be duped into believing that this Republican will be a moderate. We went through this a few years back with Cory Gardner -- the Denver Post endorsed him in 2014 against then Senator Mark Udall, saying it was "unfair" to label Gardner an "extremist" and predicting he'd be a fresh and independent voice in the Senate, only to shame-facedly admit its mistake when it turned out he was an utterly bog-standard right-wing hack. Who could have predicted? Answer: everybody! And so it is too with Youngkin. But alas, we didn't learn the lesson then and we certainly won't learn it now. Instead, we're doomed to repeat this dance every single election cycle it seems.

What Does "Reading the Opinion" Tell You?

In a speech the other day, Justice Barrett had a request of persons criticizing the Court for decisions they claim are politically- or results-driven: "read the opinion".

"Does (the decision) read like something that was purely results driven and designed to impose the policy preferences of the majority, or does this read like it actually is an honest effort and persuasive effort, even if one you ultimately don't agree with, to determine what the Constitution and precedent requires?" she asked.

Americans should judge the court — or any federal court — by its reasoning, she said. "Is its reasoning that of a political or legislative body, or is its reasoning judicial?" she asked.

I am not the first to point out the irony of this request in conjunction with the Supreme Court's increasing propensity to issue "shadow docket" rulings, nearly always in tandem with the court's ideological preferences, rarely in the context of any actual emergency that might justify expedited decisionmaking (unless one views "too many Black people voting" as an emergency -- which, in fairness, the current Court does seem to treat as a five-alarm fire). Just today, the Court issued yet another one of these decisions staying a Clean Water Act ruling with no substantive opinion whatsoever for us to "read" and assess!

Still, in concept I think Justice Barrett's plea is a fair one. We should look at the actual reasoning of decisions to determine if they're legalistic or not; and that determination should not collapse into political agreement or disagreement with the outcome. For example, I disagree with the outcome of Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, and I also think that Justice Stevens ultimately gets the better of the legal issue in his dissent, but I don't think the majority there wasn't engaged in a good-faith effort "to determine what the Constitution and precedent requires."

By the same token, when one reviews the Supreme Court's recent decision to invalidate the OSHA vaccine mandate in defiance of crystal-clear statutory text on the basis of a concocted "major questions" doctrine which still shouldn't have militated against the plain language of the statute, I absolutely think it reads "like something that was purely results driven and designed to impose the policy preferences of the majority" and that's exactly how it should be treated.

(That's the thing about rhetorical questions: sometimes, you get the other answer.)

But there's a deeper point worth making here. One of the first legal research projects I ever embarked upon dealt with how southern courts dealt with challenges by Black litigants in the Jim Crow era -- most notably, in the Scottsboro cases. From our 21st century perch, we understand the rulings of the Alabama judiciary in those cases as little more than an extension of White Supremacist inclinations -- a "legalized lynching" that happened to have the trappings of a judicial proceeding. And I think that understanding is by and large correct. However, as I point out in my Sadomasochistic Judging article, that quality is very much not immediately apparent just from "reading the opinion". The Scottsboro opinions look, in terms of stylistic presentation, absolutely normal in the way they address precedents, make legal arguments, and so forth. If they are best explained as a reflection of Alabama's "policy preferences" of White Supremacy, there nonetheless is little about them that observationally distinguishes them from a "purely" legalistic endeavor.

The presupposition of Justice Barrett's request is that one who "reads the opinions" will be able to immediately spot the difference between contestable but nonetheless legalistic judging compared to pure results-driven hogwash. This presupposition is almost certainly untrue. That's not the same thing as claiming that all judging is results-driven. It means that whatever differences there are between results-driven and legalistic judging, those differences will not necessarily be facially apparent just by reading the opinions. Indeed, any judge worth their salt should be fully capable of dressing up their results-oriented logic in the trappings of legalistic language. Sometimes they do a better job of it than others (see, again, the OSHA case). But on the whole, it is far more myth than reality that even rancid lawlessness by the court will be "marked on the body of the text."

Israel Exists. That's Reality. What Next?

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick

Israel exists. It is not going anywhere. It is not going to allowed itself to be wiped off the map, it is not going to be pushed into the sea, its denizens are not going to go "back to where the fuck they came from". Israel exists. No matter how many quotes or asterisks or decapitalizations you put in its name, no matter how much chanting and chest-thumping you might hear about how the Zionist entity's days are numbered and its collapse is imminent and Israelis better start learning "how to swim", Israel's existence is a reality. Refusing to believe it doesn't make it go away.

This fact -- the reality of Israel, the fact that it is there and is not going away -- is often cited against those chest-thumpers who every day boldly predict anew Israel's demise. It is a gesture of defiance, a nyah-nyah to those who have since 1948 promised the destruction of Israel will be any day now, just you wait. It tells people who still dream of rolling back the clock to before 1948 that they are only dreaming, and they need to snap out of their nightmarish fantasizing.

I certainly don't have any objection to this usage, but there is another implication of understanding Israel's existence as a reality that I think doesn't get the attention that it should.

If Israel's existence is reality, such that other people refusing to believe it so will not make it go away, then many of the more existential questions that sometimes loom large in discourse about Israel no longer seem as salient. When we debate, for example, the proper response to Israel's occupation of the West Bank, or the legal rights and entitlements of its non-Jewish citizens, or the valid claims that non-citizen Palestinians could legitimately have vis-a-vis the Israeli state in the event that it ends up establishing permanent formal sovereignty over the West Bank and/or Gaza, we are not having a debate about whether Israel "exists", now or into the future. Israel does exist, and, as we've stipulated, that isn't going to change. So the actual issue at stake in all these questions is not "should Israel exist", but rather "what should the state of Israel, which by stipulation absolutely does exist and will continue to exist, do in the course of living out its existence?"

It is no response to note the many, many people who continue to loudly and angrily deny Israel's existence, or who kick up dust challenging its "right to exist", or who brashly predict its forthcoming dissolution. If one actually does believe that Israel's existence is reality, then their beliefs, however passionately held, do not change reality; reality is that which, when one stops believing it, doesn't go away. Israel has not and will not go away in the face of these non-believers, this is the whole point of asserting that Israel is a reality. 

So for my part, I say let's leave the non-believers to their fantasies. The rest of us can live in the real world. This is a world where Israel exists, and will continue to exist, and so our primary salient questions are how this extant state will behave as a state today, tomorrow, and outward into the future.

The Virtues of Remembering Extremists, Near and Far

Sometimes I think the most important thing we can do keep ourselves politically healthful is to remember the existence of extremists -- both near and far from our own positions.

It's important to remember the extremists whose positions are (relatively) near one's own -- that is, persons who take the extreme version of your "side" of a given political contest -- in order to guard against the allure of purism. Being pro-Israel for example, one ignores or downplays the existence of pro-Israel extremists at one's own peril. It important to remind oneself that it is not better to adopt ever-more fundamentalist or uncompromising iterations of one's own position, and you are not a failure or a traitor for refusing to fall onto that path. Recalling and recognizing those who speak under your banner but do so in a destructive or harmful way can help dissipate some very dangerous temptations and forestall one from excusing things that are fundamentally inexcusable.

It is also important to remember the extremists whose positions are on the far side from one's own -- if only so one is not surprised by them when they inevitably do emerge. Particularly if one is feeling frustrated with one's own camp, there can be the temptation to romanticize one's opposition; going beyond the (important and correct) refusal to generalize and demonize and instead allowing oneself the delusion that there is no dangerous politics on the other side of the rainbow. The delusion is bad enough, but the real damage comes when one is forced to confront the reality -- if one isn't prepared, it is a shock of cold water that can quickly trip the unwary into spiraling down their own path of extremism. I can't tell you how many videos and screenshots I've seen from "pro-Israel" Twitter displaying the worst of terribleness from various pro-Palestinian rallies or protests, all of which style themselves as trying to shock complacent Jews out of their purported stupor. And indeed, if one hasn't prepared yourself to encounter it, it is quite a bracing sight to behold. But for my part, since I've never deluded myself that this sort of anti-Zionist extremism did not exist, I was never unduly shocked when confronted with its manifest existence. 

Keeping these things in mind allows one to keep one's head on a little straighter. Instead of retreating to pathetic denials that this sort of abhorrent politics is present, or opportunistic romanticism of why it's actually permissible or just, remembering and acknowledging the genuine existence of extremism allows one to keep a sense of perspective. Being able to name and recognize extremism as part of the story also allows one to keep a sense of proportion that it is not the entire story. 

Lesson #2 of the internet:

No matter your ideology, there will always be someone profoundly idiotic who largely agrees with you, and someone profoundly idiotic who largely disagrees with you. Neither fact should be unduly weighted.

 

The Abraham Accords and The Prospects of Israeli/Palestinian Peace

I am a booster of the Abraham Accords. I consider them an unadulterated good. In a region of the world that has been beset by tension and conflict, anything that is a step towards collaboration and cooperation is a good thing, and I have no problem saying so.

Some have suggested that the Abraham Accords makes an Israeli/Palestinian peace accord less likely, and oppose them on that basis (or purportedly on that basis). I am not sure whether that's true, but I do think it's worth thinking about how the Abraham Accords interact with a common narrative about the viability of an Israeli/Palestinian peace process -- the idea that an Israeli/Palestinian accord will only come into being if it is attached to a wider regional deal. How do the Abraham Accords affect that narrative?

One way one might think about it is as follows: Israel has, from its founding, labored under a genuine risk of existential destruction that has understandably colored all of its security determinations. The idea that the West Bank (particularly the Jordan Valley) is necessary as a "buffer" in case of attack in an example: something that at face value is an Israeli/Palestinian matter is inextricable from Israel's region-wide security posture. If this is one's view, then the Abraham Accords are a net positive for the prospects of peace insofar as they represent a significant diminishing of existential military threats Israel faces from its neighbors. This, in turn, allows for Israel to relate to the issues of occupation of Palestine qua Palestine, as opposed to re-situating the occupation as part of larger regional security issues (where the existential threats to Israel's safety have, historically speaking, been more salient).

Now to be clear, "diminishing" the existential risks that come from hostile neighboring military powers is not the same as "eliminating" them. Not counting Palestine, two of Israel's four bordering neighbors (Syria and Lebanon) retain a highly belligerent, aggressive posture toward Israel, and that doesn't even get into Iran. Still, there is a marked difference in Israel's existential situation when it was genuinely all alone in the region compared to when it is increasingly aligned with a significant regional bloc. If one has been cynical about or excusing of (choose your favored verbiage) peace prospects because Israel is "surrounded by enemies who want to destroy it", then the breaking of that proverbial (and sometimes not-so-proverbial) siege should be heartening (or take away the excuse).

But there's another line on this that I've sometimes heard. Some people are arguing that the Abraham Accords prove that Israel doesn't need to make peace with Palestine in order to make peace with its neighbors. These people style themselves as responding to hectoring leftists who insisted that if Israel wants to be an integrated member of the Middle East community of nations it would have to resolve the occupation of Palestine first. The target of said hectoring are those members of Israeli society who very much desire the former but have little interest in pursuing the former; the idea is that the former is the leverage necessary to stop foot-dragging on the latter.  But the Abraham Accords falsified the premise, so now these Israelis are celebrating being able to have their cake and eat it too -- they got what they want (regional integration) without ever having to compromise on Palestine at all. For these people, the Abraham Accords are a net negative for the prospects of a peace accord with Palestine; they feel more emboldened that they needn't take a step they do not want to take because a potential cost now appears to have rendered moot.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, for Israelis who genuinely want a peace deal with Palestinians and an end to the occupation, the Abraham Accords make it easier for them to say "yes"; and for those who at root wish to thwart such a deal, the Abraham Accords make it easier for them to say "no". For those of us on the outside, and particularly those of us who are cheerleaders for the Abraham Accords, it is important that we stress the narrative that bolsters the former framing. In particular, it means starting to lay off some of the well-worn, historically reasonable but perhaps now dated, rhetoric about Israel being "surrounded by enemies". The reason we celebrate the Abraham Accords is precisely that it represents a break from that history; but we cannot return to it at convenience in order to justify more hesitation and foot-dragging on robustly and vigorously supporting an end to the occupation.

Why is Ukraine Different?

Why has the Russian invasion of Ukraine grabbed and held international attention? It is not, sad to say, the only example of armed conflict right now or in recent years. And Americans, in particular, are not known for being gripped by foreign affairs. So what makes Ukraine different from other conflicts? Here are a few (non-exclusive) potential explanations.

First, Ukraine is a European country being invaded by another (coded-as) European country. That, for better or for worse, makes a difference, though I don't have much more to add to it.

Second, it's a (relatively) evenly matched hot war conflict between two (relatively) modern and modernized military powers. Most of the major military confrontations involving modern militaries in recent years have been cases where one party is far more powerful in conventional terms than the other (e.g., either of the Gulf Wars). The traditional "war" part of the conflict was pretty much a walkover; any difficulties came later in reconstruction and/or insurgency. Here, neither side has the ability to decisively demolish the forces of the other in the short run even as we remain in a phase of traditional battlefield confrontation as opposed to guerilla resistance and insurgency/counterinsurgency.

Third, the war here involves a relatively stable, relatively liberal democracy on the defensive, being invaded in an existential threat to its existence. That is quite rare in my lifetime. Cases where, say, America has been attacked by illiberal forces tend to be sporadic and asymmetrical terrorist events; America certainly hasn't experienced nor has been at any substantial risk of an invasion in decades, or any other assault that poses a genuine existential risk of seeing the country dissolved. That's been true of most of our European allies as well; ditto countries like Japan or Australia. To see the liberal democratic camp on the defensive like that is, I think, quite shocking.

Other factors I might be missing?

Levin and Stevens Talk to Michigan's Jews

Michigan Reps. Andy Levin and Haley Stevens -- Democrats thrown into the same district following redistricting -- had a candidate's forum today hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which Ron Kampeas was helpful enough to livetweet. Levin (who is Jewish) is known as a strong progressive, while Stevens (not Jewish) usually presents as more of a moderate, so it was interesting to see how they pitched their message in this particular forum.

My takeaway -- and this is just from following Kampeas' tweets -- is that they actually didn't sound too different from one another. A lot more agreement than disagreement. There was some distance on issues like Israel and the Iran Deal -- Levin favored the Iran Deal and has spearheaded efforts to reinvigorate the two state solution, which has earned him the ire of AIPAC, while Stevens tends to take more modest and AIPAC-friendly line on these issues -- but they weren't wildly apart. And their rhetoric on domestic policy was pretty similar, and pretty progressive -- which is to say, it seemed like in front of this audience, Stevens was tacking closer to Levin than vice versa.

What does this mean? While I tend to think many intra-party divisions amongst Democrats are overstated, particularly when they're presented in flatly apocalyptic terms, that doesn't mean I think Levin and Stevens are basically interchangeable. Levin really is a more progressive option than Stevens is, rhetoric from this debate notwithstanding. And moreover, I suspect that in other venues Stevens may do more to accentuate her "moderate" credentials -- I don't think this is necessarily symbolic of how she'll run her entire race. What is interesting is that both Levin and Stevens apparently came to the conclusion that the way to appeal to the Jewish audience, specifically, was to emphasize their progressive bona fides. In contrast to some narratives of "Jexodus" or "Jexit" or whatever portmanteau neologism is being pushed this week, the betting line on how to talk to Jewish Democrats is to emphasize that you are a progressive Jewish Democrat. That's heartening to see.

What Can "Objectively Reasonable" Do For You?

A new study (summarized here, published and paywalled version here) explores how the phrase "objectively reasonable" -- a very important phrase in the law surrounding assessments of police misconduct -- changes American perceptions of police officers. The core finding is that "objectively reasonable" makes listeners -- and particularly racial minorities -- think more favorably of the officer so labeled (compared to saying something like "the average police officer").

It's an interesting study, though my initial instinct is that the takeaway from it may be exactly opposite of what the authors imply. The authors suggest that the use of "objectively reasonable", since it is associated with more positive perceptions of the police, primes listeners (such as jury members) to think of the police more favorably than they otherwise would. But I think the effect may be the opposite: by asking jurors whether a given officer acting as an "objectively reasonable" officer would, the fact that "objectively reasonable" brings to mind higher levels of professionalism and conscientiousness means that the actual flesh-and-blood officer being judged is effectively being held to a higher standard than he or she otherwise would have.

Consider a jury deliberating over whether an officer accused of misconduct violated the legally-relevant standard of behavior. If that standard is that of the "average officer", the juror might think "well, their conduct wasn't great -- but then, the average officer isn't that great either. Can I really say that this guy performed worse than average?" But if "objectively reasonable" calls to mind more conscientious behavior, that same juror might conclude that the officer in front of the court did not meet that more idealized conception of how an officer should behave. So telling the jury that the officer they're evaluating must have acted as an "objectively reasonable" officer would cause them to more rigorously scrutinize the officer's conduct.

In other words: an officer whom we've already stipulated is "objectively reasonable" will be viewed more favorably than one who we only stipulate is "average". "Objectively reasonable" is better than "average" (at least for non-White respondents). But for that very reason, an officer whose performance we are trying to assess on a blank slate should be more likely to surpass the standard of "average" than the standard of "objectively reasonable", since the latter appears to be a higher bar than the former. So insofar as jurors are instructed to ask whether an officer behaved in a manner that comports with an "objectively reasonable officer", that should make them less likely to answer "yes" compared to if their standard was that of the "average" officer.

On Comics and Speakers Who Bomb

Suppose you attend a stand-up comedy performance. You're excited to listen and giggle and laugh. But unfortunately, the comic in question -- let's not mince words -- bombs. The jokes don't land, or worse, they're outright offensive. The crowd, which started with a few half-hearted chuckles, starts to turn stony, and eventually downright ugly. Eventually, halfway through the set, the boos set in. Ultimately the comic is booed all the way off the stage.

Most of us, I think, would not view this as a successful evening -- either for the audience members or the comic. But would we say the comic's free speech rights have been violated? I doubt any of us would go that far. Free speech by no means guarantees a favorable reception.

Yet many of us -- myself included -- think things are quite different in the case of an invited university speaker who is "shouted down" by protesters in the audience, such that they cannot finish their talk. This is thought to represent a free speech threat. But what -- and I ask this question earnestly -- marks out the difference between this and the comic?

The answer typically given for why drowning out of the university speaker is wrongful is that it deprives those members of the audience who did want to hear the talk of their ability to do so. I do find this a compelling argument generally, but it doesn't successfully distinguish the comic's case -- it is easy to imagine that somebody in the comic's audience also wanted to see how the set would have ended.

Another possibility is that the audience for the comic did not come to the show with the intention of blocking the performance. Their anger was unplanned and organic, in contrast to the university protesters, who we suspect came to the talk knowing from the outset that they wanted to disrupt it. If this is our distinction, it suggests that there is no foul in "shouting down" a university speaker some stanzas deep into their talk, if it is the result of genuine on-the-spot negative reactions rather than a planned disruption (though how one could tell the difference, I don't know).

Still another possibility is that a comic performance is only valued insofar as it pleases the audience, and so where the crowd turns against the performance there is no particular interest in the comic being able to continue performing. A university lecture at least nominally is not quite so hedonistic in its assessed value, and so we feel it is important that such talks be allowed to proceed notwithstanding the fact that the audience does not like what they hearing. This makes some intuitive sense to me, though it gets blurry with intentionally political stand-up comics, or university talks that are more performative than educational. I also struggle with how this accounts for a permutation of the hypothetical where a political speaker is speechifying on a public square soapbox and the crowd (while not violent) reacts deeply negatively to his speech, in a way that effectively drowns out the speaker. There, even though the talk is as "political" as a university speech, I do not tend to think there is a violation of free speech norms if the speaker ends up being drowned out. But why not?

Perhaps the answer is a lot more contingent than we might otherwise like to admit: certain spaces and events, like talks by invited speakers at universities, are ones where we stipulate heightened valuation for rules which allow for speeches to be given relatively uninterrupted in a fashion where they can be heard by any who care to listen. This is not a general rule of "free speech"; there are many other spaces where it does not apply -- but the very fact that there are many other spaces where the rules are different and responses can be more "raucous" (if you will) actually serves to further justify the importance of the validity of having a space with this sort of rule. It's good to have some known space where we can stipulate in advance that the speaker will be able to "complete their set" notwithstanding a possible hostile audience, and the fact that there are many other spaces where people are allowed to be more immediately expressive in their disdain mitigates the burden of foreclosing or limiting that sort of expression in this particular space.

Anyway, I don't have firm conclusions here, but this is a puzzle that I had been wondering about for awhile so I figured I'd sketch some preliminary thoughts here as I work through it.

Some Things I'm Already Really Tired of Seeing "Debated" Everywhere (Israel on Russia/Ukraine Edition)

A non-exhaustive list (though I, personally, am quite exhausted):

1. Is Israel (or Palestine) more the "Ukraine" or more the "Russia"?
2. Who is supporting Ukraine more, Israel or Palestine?
3. Do the incipient boycott/sanctions efforts against Russia make it hypocritical to oppose BDS against Israel?
4. Does the justified backlash against boycott/sanction overreach targeting ordinary Russians make it hypocritical to support BDS against Israel?
5. Does praise for Ukrainian resistance against Russia's invasion make it hypocritical to oppose (which forms of?) Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation?
6. Is Israel really supporting Ukraine, or really supporting Russia, or really staying neutral to serve as an "arbiter"?
7. Is Ukraine inspired by Israel's example or furious at Israel's faint-heartedness?
8. Is Israel offering asylum to Ukrainian Jewish refugees salutary or colonialist?

Some of these are, in isolation, at least marginally interesting questions, but the degree to which they are constantly dominating my Twitter feed -- and admittedly, that's in no small part due to selection bias re: who is on my Twitter feed -- is absolutely draining. Marginally interesting as they may be, these are sub-sub-tertiary questions that often are treated as the critical geopolitical fulcrum around which all other Russia/Ukraine debates must revolve, and I just can't.

Anyway, since they're apparently inescapable in my neck of the internet woods, here are my very quick answers, with the caveat that I probably won't expand on any of these because -- again -- they're of sub-sub-tertiary importance and my opinions simply do not matter that much.

1. Israel is more the "Russia" re: Palestine but historically has been more the "Ukraine" re: the rest of the Middle East; this entire stupid debate depends on the frame of reference.
2. Don't know, and you can probably find cherry-picked evidence to support either claim.
3. Not necessarily, but it does further weaken the "singles out" argument while also normalizing boycott-type activity as a non-extraordinary tool in the political activism toolkit.
4. Yes, at least as far as the more over-reaching forms of boycott that target Israelis-qua-Israelis (e.g., the Moshava Philly incident), but not all forms of boycott activity are that sweeping (and are not being subjected to the backlash).
5. Public opinion probably would be different if Ukraine's "resistance" took the form of firing rockets into Moscow, but at the very least the Ukraine example seemingly requires one to affirm that Palestinians have the right to military resistance against Israeli military targets.
6. If I had to guess, I'd say Israel is trying to tip-toe around Russia (for reasons including but not limited to Russia's dangerous presence in Syria) and is using the "we have to preserve our ability to be a neutral arbiter" as an excuse to refrain from some more aggressive anti-Russia actions without publicly dissenting from their legitimacy. That said, the real answer is unknown, as the stories are constantly in flux on this and frankly Ukrainian public officials have more important things to do than be sure that international media outlets receive the most perfectly accurate impression about how earnest or not Israel's diplomatic efforts have been.
7. Probably a bit of column A and a bit of column B, but again mostly they're not thinking about Israel at all and it's the height of vanity to assume otherwise.
8. Salutary, full stop.

The Right To Be Wrong in Claiming Antisemitism

Is it necessarily problematic when people make "wrong" claims of antisemitism?

"Wrong", of course, is not a synonym for "intentionally false", "malicious", or "bad faith". A "wrong" claim of antisemitism is one that, we will stipulate, is sincerely believed and not facially absurd, but which following our best sincere investigation we conclude is ill-taken.

This is something I initially started thinking about in the context of folks calling Amnesty's "apartheid" report on Israel antisemitic. Many responded to those claims by objecting to the very question -- it was "chilling" or "silencing" to make that allegation, even if (as was often conceded) one could legitimately disagree with the conclusion Amnesty came to that Israel was an apartheid state. I thought about again in the context of this letter signed by several University of Toronto faculty members, condemning a university colleague for promoting the IHRA definition of antisemitism (a definition the letter-signers think is wrong and incorrectly labels as antisemitic innocuous criticism of Israel). The letter doesn't just say "here is why we think IHRA is wrong"; it suggests that the choice to adopt an understanding of antisemitism the letter-writers disagree with is facially problematic.

This struck me as an interesting formulation. In the Amnesty example, it suggests that it is not problematic for Amnesty to call Israel an apartheid state even if that conclusion turned out to be incorrect (Amnesty is "allowed" to be mistaken), but it is problematic for Amnesty's critics to call Amnesty antisemitic unless they've got the organization dead to rights (there is no tolerance for being "mistaken"). One could, after all, say to the critics of Amnesty's critics "it's fine to disagree with the contention that Amnesty is antisemitic, but don't preemptively dismiss the claim as facially illicit" -- which is, of course, the same structure urged for responding to Amnesty's claim of apartheid. We can agree or disagree that Israel is an apartheid state, we can agree or disagree that Amnesty is an antisemitic organization, but our ultimate evaluation of either question will not suffice to preemptively invalidate assertions positing contrary conclusions.

So what is it about putatively "wrong" antisemitism claims that makes it different in kind from putatively "wrong" apartheid claims? I'm not sure what could legitimately account for the difference. If, for example, the argument against "wrong" accusations of antisemitism is that the term is so explosive and earth-shattering that it must only be deployed in cases where the claimant absolutely, positively, has the goods, one could say the exact same thing about claims of "apartheid".

Next week, I'm presenting at a conference on law and antisemitism at Indiana University on the subject of "epistemic antisemitism"; a core theme of the paper is on how, by restricting "legitimate" antisemitism claims to only those which are "clearly" correct, we end up sabotaging the ability to conduct the discourse at all. In a political context, antisemitism claims are virtually always going to be contested; there will be arguments and factors that push in favor or against the label. In these circumstances, there has to be a gap -- I'd say a somewhat sizeable gap -- between circumstances where we conclude that a given claim is incorrect and circumstances where we conclude that leveling the claim is a form of abuse.

In general, political conversation cannot occur if there is no room to be wrong. Political conversation is a series of people making claims, and many of them will turn out following discussion and investigation to not hold water. If that outcome preemptively delegitimizes the initial conversational gambit, the entire project comes to a screeching halt and quick. As tempting as it is to say that people should only make claims of "antisemitism" (or "apartheid", or "racism") when they are right, there is no universe in which free discussion of such ideas can occur without some instances of the claims being wrong. A system which allows for no false positives, even at the initial claim-formation stage, is one that will endure near-infinite false negatives. 

All of this, of course, was the impetus behind one of the jokes I made about the "trans-left unifier": They insist that calling anti-Zionism "antisemitism" is an outrageous conflation that suppresses discourse, while calling Zionism "White supremacy" is a legitimate position we must respect. That sort of disjuncture, where Jews are told over and over again "even if your instinct is to disagree, you have to allow the argument to be made" for every hostile appellation given to Israel, whereas if they give a non-conforming argument about antisemitism they're accused of poisoning the conversational well, is tremendously frustrating and I think theoretically unsustainable. "Antisemitism" is like any other claim -- sometimes it will be right, sometimes it will be wrong, we figure it out by considering it carefully, and the fact that some of those careful considerations will yield the conclusion of "the claim is wrong" does not, on its own, demonstrate that it was a foul to have proffered the claim in the first place.

The Crime versus the Blunder: AIPAC's Insurrectionist Endorsements

A few months ago, AIPAC announced it was breaking with its longstanding tradition to directly endorse and fundraise on behalf of political candidates. Several more liberal Jewish groups immediately pressed AIPAC to refuse to endorse any candidate who supported the January 6 insurrection by trying to prevent certification of Joe Biden as President. AIPAC demurred, and now we know why: its initial endorsement list contains dozens of GOP insurrectionists. Among the 61 endorsed Republicans (alongside 59 Democrats) are such luminaries as Jim Jordan(!!!), Nicole Malliotakis, and Tom Emmer. Shared values!

This decision is so obviously disgraceful that one could almost overlook how stupid it is too. But in the annals of "obvious 'pro-Israel' lobbying own-goals" this may well surpass anything DMFI has done, and that's saying something. What's so amazing about AIPAC's blunder here is that it's not only indefensible on the merits, but even the second-order apologias for why "even if this wasn't the wisest move they were in a difficult position" don't work either.

Most obviously: AIPAC did not need to do this. Any observer (read: this observer) could have told them that this election cycle was an especially fraught time to initiate overtly wading into partisan politics. It'd be one thing if these candidates were ones it had been supporting for years and was now being asked to explicitly withdraw support previously extended. They still should have done it -- friends don't stay friends with insurrectionists -- but at least that'd be an actual dilemma. But here AIPAC made the affirmative choice to initiate this support right now; voluntarily and consciously jumping into a political thicket. It could have avoided all of this merely by sticking with its longstanding practice of not endorsing candidates. It chose not to, knowing this was the consequence.

Other attempted excuses that try to move AIPAC out of "bone-headed" into merely "indefensible" fare no better. Let's run through a few:

"AIPAC has to maintain relationships with both parties."

First of all, if AIPAC cannot find enough Republicans to endorse without wading into insurrectionist territory, that seems like it should be a GOP problem, not an AIPAC problem. But in principle, I agree that AIPAC cannot jettison either party outright. In particular, it makes sense to put both parties' leaders -- Pelosi and McCarthy -- on the list; if that was all that was happening here, I could at least understand the logic notwithstanding McCarthy's insurrectionist ballot.

But this logic cannot explain why, say, Jim Jordan (again -- !!!!) makes the list. Jim Jordan isn't on the foreign affairs committee, he's not known as a crucial player in international relations, he's not some necessary bigwig you have to cultivate if you're going to succeed in pro-Israel lobbying. When it comes to Israel, Jordan is basically indistinguishable from the next marginal Republican who is not directly implicated in trying to overthrow the government. He brings nothing to the table other than being a frothing right-wing extremist and budding authoritarian, and so every observer who sees his name on AIPAC's list will assume that he's on there because AIPAC wants to curry favor with a frothing right-wing extremist and budding authoritarian.

If you're doing the "keep relationships with both parties" thing, put down the congressional leaders plus a dozen or so uncontroversial figures from both parties to keep up a balance. AIPAC didn't make that choice -- they deliberately put down some of the most extreme and inflammatory figures, for no clear political gain.

"AIPAC is a single issue lobby -- the only criteria for inclusion is a politician's Israel policy."

This was AIPAC spokesman Marshall Wittman's argument, and it's bull. To begin, if you're going to tie support for Israel to "shared values", then you can't say its irrelevant whether a given politician rejects the principle of democratically-elected governance. If you can't be trusted to defend democracy in America, you certainly aren't going to do it in Israel.

But moreover, particularly on the Republican side there's no Israel policy thread that distinguishes the GOP politicians who are on the endorsement list from those who aren't. I defy anyone to tell me how Elise Stefanik's Israel views differ at all from Lauren Boebert's. The reason the latter isn't on AIPAC's list has nothing to do with her not having the "right" views on Israel (from AIPAC's vantage anyway), it's because she's a loon and AIPAC doesn't want to be associated with her. But once it makes that judgment, it's entirely reasonable to hold them accountable for their cheerful association with the insurrectionist caucus. AIPAC is choosing to tie itself to GOP insurrectionists; it could have very easily chosen not to, and absolutely deserves to take all the hell in the world as a consequence of its indefensible and eminently avoidable choice.

"Sometimes, you have to support the lesser-of-two-evils, and support unideal figures to prevent someone with overtly anti-Israel from occupying these seats."

Again, the logic is fine, but the application to AIPAC's actual conduct is nonexistent. Problem #1: The vast majority of these congresspersons are not running in competitive seats. I have no idea who Jim Jordan's Democratic opponent is, much less what his or her Israel views are, but (regrettably) said opponent stands no chance of dislodging Rep. Jordan. And as for competitive races, I guess I can understand why AIPAC felt compelled to endorse Nicole Malliotakis, notwithstanding her insurrection vote, if the alternative would be known anti-Israel zealot *checks notes* Max Rose. Seriously -- that endorsement might be the biggest slap in the face of all: Rose is a pro-Israel darling, exactly the sort of Democrat AIPAC claims to want to foster, and AIPAC won't even support him (hell, won't even stay neutral) in his race against a woman who tried to overturn the 2020 election? Screw you!

The most likely place where we're liable to see a contested race where one candidate has (from AIPAC's vantage) a much worse Israel record than their competitor is in Democratic primaries where a strong pro-Israel Democrat might face a challenge from their left that AIPAC would want to fend off (the reason this doesn't apply to Republican primaries is that I doubt there is any rightwing position on Israel -- at least that which nominally drapes itself as "pro-Israel" -- that is too extreme for AIPAC to accept. But remember, they support a two-state solution!). This probably explains the Haley Stevens endorsement in her intra-party match against Andy Levin -- an endorsement which I have no facial problem with even if the rhetoric could stand to be tamped down a notch. But it's far from clear that AIPAC's endorsement is even beneficial these days in a Democratic primary, and associating AIPAC with GOP insurrectionists makes the brand even more toxic. If the top priority is keeping pro-Israel Democrats secure against flanking attacks, the main effect of AIPAC's endorsement list is to kneecap their own credibility.

What was it De Talleyrand famously said? "It's worse than a crime, it's a blunder." AIPAC's decision to endorse politicians who are barely a year removed from trying to overturn American democracy is a grave crime against political decency. But its criminality is almost exceeded by its sheer stupidity. AIPAC did not have to endorse candidates in 2022; indeed, 2022 seems like the absolute worst time for an organization that seeks to straddle partisan divides to initiate wading into direct political campaigning. And once it made that decision, it did not have to endorse GOP insurrectionists -- it very easily could have limited itself to at least less controversial figures on both sides of the aisle and stayed out of the fray. Instead, for no discernible reason, it made the conscious choice to single out some of the most overtly extreme and toxic figures in American politics and a wrap them in a big ol' bear hug. The result is already proving catastrophic for AIPAC's brand. And if AIPAC ever did care about shoring up support for Israel among Democratic politics, it's made that task far harder to accomplish as well.

Nice work, guys.

The Best Little Antisemitism Training in Kentucky

A Kentucky state legislator went on a bizarre tirade about various Jewish connections to RU-486 (popularly known as "the abortion bill"). It really is impossible to summarize -- it features alleged connections to Zyklon B, musings about Jewish women's sexual practices, complaints about the Nobel Prize awards process ... really, just click through the link.

Anyway, the conclusion of the story informs the reader that "A spokeswoman for the state’s Senate Republicans told the [Louisville] Courier-Journal that the leadership will add training on antisemitism to the annual training senators receive."

Put aside whether any amount of training could anticipate ... this. And put aside whether we trust the Kentucky Republican Party to be even halfway competent in picking antisemitism training. My question is, even if Kentucky Republicans were being earnest here, what major counter-antisemitism training initiatives right now are primarily focused on the sort of antisemitism Kentucky Republicans are most likely to indulge in (see also: "Jew them down")? 

Regardless of your views on the nexus between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, I don't think Kentucky Republican politicos are especially likely to start endorsing BDS in an antisemitic fashion. And while I don't want to suggest, falsely, that the programs attacking contemporary antisemitism do not care about or cover more right-wing varieties, I do feel as if much of the new energy and material on the subject tends to focus on alleged left-wing iterations. The relevant curriculum and research on right-wing practices, in other words, perhaps hasn't been updated -- particularly with an eye towards moving past overt KKK style right-wing antisemitism and into the more "insidious" (to borrow a term) forms that are penetrating mainstream conservative politics.

On Non-Jews Telling Jews They're Bad Jews

A minor league baseball player, Brett Netzer, was released by the Red Sox organization after going on a bigoted tirade against a Jewish team executive, Chaim Bloom. There's plenty of awful here, but I want to flag one comment in particular: while agreeing(!) that his tweets were racist and homophobic, Netzer denied they were antisemitic because, he said, Bloom is "an embarrassment to any Torah-following Jew."

Netzer, I am pretty sure, is not Jewish. So this another example of non-Jews believing it is their place and prerogative to tell Jews what it means to be a good Jew.

This entitlement is one I am seeing increasingly often in right-wing discourse, and it is not getting nearly enough attention. It is, simply put, a monster lurking beneath the discursive waters about Jews, because it offers a way for non-Jews (typically Christians) to harmonize their abstract claims of being great friends of the Jewish people with their very concrete seething hatred for the actual Jews in America and around the world who do not behave according to their expectations. When they hate those Jews, it is not hatred of Jews; it is the opposite, it is hating those Jews for being bad Jews. In their twisted imagination, the most naked antisemitism becomes almost a form of allyship -- protecting "the Jews" from, you know, actual Jews.

Again, Netzer is not acting in isolation here. This sort of discourse is an emergent pattern, and mark my words, it is going to be a key driver of a new wave of antisemitism (thinly presented as philosemitism) that purports to love Jews even as it intentionally and expressly drives hate towards the vast majority of Jews. And this logic also of course fits in with Christian supersessionism -- the idea that Christians, ultimately, are the true inheritors of Judaism and so have the prerogative to declare what is and is not authentically Jewish. So even when it isn't overtly hateful, it's still inherently antisemitic. But increasingly, that hate and disdain for Jews is wide open.

Non-Jews have no authority to tell Jews what being a good Jew means. If Jews do not behave in manner that coheres to Christian understandings of what it means to be Jewish, that's a them problem, not an us problem. When it comes attached to such an obvious wretch as Netzer, hopefully that's obvious enough. But this is a problem that goes way beyond him, and as far as I can tell a lot of the big antisemitism watchdogs are slow to catch on.*

* I am very proud that the Nexus document on the connection between Israel and antisemitism, which I helped draft, does gesture at this practice in stating that "[d]enigrating or denying the Jewish identity of certain Jews because they are perceived as holding the “wrong” position (whether too critical or too favorable) on Israel" is a form of antisemitism. But that is very much an exception.

What Does a Ukraine Peace Deal Look Like?

Russia's war against Ukraine has begun in full force. So far, the Ukrainian government and people have done a remarkable job in slowing Russian aggression. But Russia is much bigger than Ukraine, and every day this war goes on is another day of wholly unnecessary death and bloodshed.

There are reports that Ukraine has asked Israel to mediate peace talks with Russia (Israel being one of a very small number of countries that remains on at least halfway decent terms with both nations). Obviously, if Israel can do anything to bring this horrific war to end I hope it does so. We also, unfortunately, know that what with Israel being, you know, Israel, any hiccups in the negotiation process, or any sense that a resulting agreement is unfair or unjust (and someone will always find it unfair or unjust) will yield a quite ... predictable sort of discourse as a consequence.

Which leads me to ask: what, even roughly speaking, does a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine even look like?

This is an area I want to emphasize I am no expert in, and so I invite people who are experts to correct or supplement me. But here are some of the assumptions I'm working off of (which, again, I'm very open to correction).

1. First and foremost: this was a complete and unprovoked pure war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine. In a just world, they should get absolutely nothing -- not Donetsk, not Crimea, not Luhansk, nothing but a barrelful of summons to an international war crimes tribunal.  Any end to the conflict which appears to reward Russia for launching this invasion will be hideously unjust. Unfortunately, the ends of wars needn't be any more just than their beginnings.
2. While Ukraine has done an impressive job stymying Russia's advance so far, in terms of pure military material Russia retains a considerable advantage. It is highly unlikely that Ukraine can actually push Russia back on the battlefield or force Russia into a position where it has to "surrender", even though it can inflict heavy losses on Russian forces.
3. Ukraine is in a bit of a paradox: it obviously wants the war to end as soon as possible, but it's only chance to prevail is in slowing it down -- putting Russia in a morass, making the price unacceptable for the Russian people on the home front.
4. The war has not gone as quickly or as smoothly as Putin predicted, and that's a big problem for him. Europe is far more unified than he expected, his military is underperforming, and his normal allies are saying "nuh-uh, this is your mess". He needs something to come out of this that he can point to as a win, and undoing western sanctions that only came into play because of his own recklessness won't cut it. Launching an obviously optional war of aggression and limping back in pure defeat potentially puts his entire regime in jeopardy. In this context, it realistically puts Putin's head in jeopardy.

Basically, the core of the problem is that a viable deal almost certainly needs to give Putin something face-saving, but there's nothing obvious to give him that would not rightfully be a non-starter from the vantage of Ukraine and which wouldn't set a horrible precedent in terms of incentivizing offensive wars of aggression. Now to be clear: I, personally, have no interest in saving Putin's face or any other part of his body. He can swing for all I care. But while Ukraine can perhaps stop Russia from achieving total victory, it can't force Russia into a position of abject defeat, and so cannot compel a deal that -- however just -- Putin will never accept and can never accept without probably being ousted from power outright.

So that's my question: under these constraints, what does a peace deal look like? What proposal can be put together that maintains Ukraine's territorial integrity, deters Russia from undertaking similar actions in the future, but actually can get Russia's signature? If such a deal cannot be contemplated, it is hard to see how this war can be prevented from dragging on for the foreseeable future.

Russia Invades Ukraine

The war has begun. It is pure, unadulterated, irredentist imperialist aggression by a far-right authoritarian state against an American ally, and if there's the tiniest of silver linings it's that every serious commentator -- which includes people like Bernie Sanders but excludes people like Donald Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, and Tucker Carlson -- is unapologetic in recognizing it as such.

We can only hope that something convinces Russia to turn off this course of action with a minimum of bloodshed and human suffering. But acts require a united response from the liberal democracies of the world, and so far thankfully it looks like that's what we're seeing.

Who's Afraid of Jewish Priorities?

The JTA reported yesterday that the Jewish Federations of North America, the umbrella organization of local Jewish Federations, had removed several prominent issues -- such as gun control, LGBTQ rights, and voting rights -- from its list of "policy priorities". The relevant document now speaks in far vaguer generalities about "policies that ensure justice and equity" and promoting "resources to combat abuse and harassment." Many suspected the change came at the behest of conservative elements in the Jewish community annoyed that our umbrella organizations were tackling issues they view as politically controversial or contested. The document does continue to specifically list "support for Israel" as an ongoing policy priority.

For their part, JFNA officials claimed that the change was meant to permit local federations to be more "nimble" in their approach, and contended that it was "misleading" to suggest it constituted a backtracking on prior commitments to at least LGBTQ and gun control issues. Its decision to speak in terms of more "theme-based priorities" should not be seen as a denigration of the importance of specific issues like guns or gay rights (I actually have not seen, in any of the subsequent commentaries and apologies from JFNA spokespersons, an express mention of voting rights as a continued priority area).

I seem to recall a branch of Jewish public discourse that was positively furious anytime, say, "antisemitism" was left unnamed or held to be subsumed under some generic commitment to "equality". They would call that move "all lives matter-ing" the issue; perhaps we could refer to the JFNA's new approach as one of "all issues matter"? In any event, it seems quite evident that the move away from explicitly naming these issues as priorities is an attempt to decenter them, and that in turn is yet another example of mainstream Jewish organizations kowtowing to right-wing pressure even in the face of an obvious Jewish consensus.

For example, polls indicate that on the matter of guns, Jews have a perfectly robust consensus: 70% favoring a pro-gun control position versus 25% opposed. That 25% figure, incidentally, is about the same as the percentage of Jews who stake out anti-Israel positions that sharply deviate from what JFNA and like organizations would no doubt consider "support for Israel". To be clear, I don't have any objection to the JFNA representing the huge majority of Jews who do care a lot about "support for Israel" over the comparatively small minority that takes the dissident view. But the point is that the "consensus" around the two issues is identical, yet it's no accident which one the JFNA feels comfortable cutting loose. It is part of a long pattern and practice of Jewish communal organizations taking liberal Jews -- the Jewish majority! -- for granted, and thumbing us in the eye as expendable. Our issues can be thrown out, even if they carry huge majority support, based on mewling complaints from the right flank -- a privilege never accorded to liberal Jews objecting to more conservative priority areas.

The issues that JFNA decided they now want to soft-pedal for fear of upsetting delicate conservative feelings are policy arenas which are reaching a crisis point in 2022. After Colleyville and Louisville, can we really say gun violence is no longer a critical area? We're seeing a veritable torrent of state legislative action targeting queer and especially trans youth for ostracism and discrimination, a pattern that has only accelerated over the last year. And of course, on the question of voting rights, following 1/6 and the Supreme Court's laser-like determination to gut the Voting Rights Act, the basic precepts of American democracy may never have been under more direct threat in my lifetime. To deprioritize them now represents an appalling abdication of duty.

The broad point is this: when the JFNA decides to decenter and soft play issues like gun control and voting rights, they are not acting to promote "Jewish priorities". They are afraid of "Jewish priorities". They think "Jewish priorities" are too partisan, too controversial -- frankly, too liberal -- to fit within their comfort level. And so they make the decision to jettison them. That's them selling out the very people they purport to represent. It's outrageous, and they deserve every bit of blowback they've gotten over this.

I wrote a somewhat ... pointed ... email to my contacts at the Portland JFed making these points, and both urging that the local organization continue to be clear it will work in these policy arenas and communicating to the national office that it cannot keep selling out the liberal Jewish majority like this. I received a perfectly nice note back confirming that our local JCRC has and will continue to advocate in all of these areas (though demurring on calling out the national body). But it is important to keep the heat on (and I think it's notable that the JFNA clearly did feel some heat and responded somewhat defensively). These organizations have to come to understand that "Jewish consensus" is not "when the right agrees with the center".

UPDATE: The JFNA has released a new document which adds back in many of these priorities. One can still quibble with the details, and be annoyed at their initial skittishness, but it is a good thing they both felt and were responsive to community pressure on this axis.

The Bongani Masuku Case Comes To A Close(?)

Long (loooong) time readers of this blog may recall the case of Bongani Masuku, a former top trade union official in South Africa alleged to have engaged in hate speech against Jews in the course of condemnatory comments about Israel during the 2009 conflict with Palestine in Gaza. This has been a lengthy saga -- in 2009, the South African Human Rights Commission concluded that Masuku had engaged in hate speech; in 2017, that ruling was upheld by the Equality Court; and in 2018, that ruling was in turn reversed by an appellate court. Now, finally, in 2022, the Constitutional Court of South Africa -- the highest court -- has weighed in, unanimously concluding that one of the four challenged statements by Masuku does in fact constitute hate speech and ordering Masuku to deliver an apology (link to the opinion here).

Again, this is a complicated saga and some of the points I would make would be repetitive. But a few points are worth (re)emphasizing here:

• Some of the most damning statements by Masuku do not seem to be in the record the courts have been reviewing -- I'm not sure why (I assume it is for some procedural reasons regarding how the challenge was brought, not that the courts are just studiously ignoring them, but I'm not sure). For example, Masuku reportedly expressly said that his comments were meant to "convey a message to the Jews of South Africa", which seems quite germane to assessing whether his comments should be seen as targeting Jews.
• Likewise, I have no particular knowledge about South African law, and so cannot comment on whether this decision is correct or not as a faithful application of the current (or "best") reading of the relevant constitutional clauses and statutes.
• Finally, while I oppose "hate speech" rules on principle, South Africa has elected to take a different approach on speech than does American constitutional law. Given that, there is no reason why the Jewish community of South Africa should not be able to avail itself of these protections.

The Court analyzed four (but really two) comments by Masuku to see if they qualified as hate speech. The first was a blog comment where Masuku said:

1. [A]s we struggle to liberate Palestine from the racists, fascists and Zionists who belong

to the era of their Friend Hitler! We must not apologise, every Zionist must be made

to drink the bitter medicine they are feeding our brothers and sisters in Palestine. We

must target them, expose them and do all that is needed to subject them to perpetual

suffering until they withdraw from the land of others and stop their savage attacks on

human dignity.

(In the realm of "damning comments not discussed", during this blog discussion Masuku reportedly said that he had come to conclude that "Jews are arrogant, not from being told by any Palestinian, but from what I saw myself").

The other three all came during a pro-Palestine university rally (and the court analyzes them together, hence why I think it's perhaps more sensible to view them as one statement rather than three). There Masuku said:

2. “COSATU has got members here even on this campus; we can make sure that for that side [the pro-Israel side] it will be hell.” 

3. “[T]he following things are going to apply: any South African family, I want to repeat it so that it is clear for anyone, any South African family who sends its son or daughter to be part of the Israel Defence Force must not blame us when something happens to them with immediate effect.”

4. “COSATU is with you, we will do everything to make sure that whether it’s at Wits, whether it’s at Orange Grove, anyone who does not support equality and dignity, who does not support rights of other people must face the consequences even if it means that we will do something that may necessarily cause what is regarded as harm.” 

The Court ultimately concluded that the first statement (in the blog) was hate speech, while the other three are not. The deciding factor was the Hitler reference, which, the Court concluded, would reasonably be seen as targeting the Jewish community insofar as Hitler of course is famous for targeting Jews (and not specifically "Zionist Jews"). The other statements, by contrast, however hurtful or offensive they might have been, appear to be in the context specifically of opposing "pro-Israel" persons rather than the Jewish community as such.

Overall, I think this should be viewed as a pretty sizeable victory for the Jewish community. I might suggest that the fourth statement, too, could be seen as targeting the Jewish community insofar as Orange Grove is apparently well-known as a heavily Jewish neighborhood and its inclusion therefore seems to be specifically about referencing the Jewish community as Jews (that is, just as a Hitler reference is evocative of Jews, not Zionist Jews, Orange Grove is also associated with Jews, not specifically Zionist Jews). I think the Court's assessment of the second and third statements is fair enough; there is no doubt those words represent sharp blows thrown, but they expressly relate to persons who are by some form of action taking a side and are commentary on that side. One need not like or approve of them to think they fall within the bounds of protected speech.

But on the whole, the Court seemed quite thoughtful here. It recognized that words which on face might appear neutral or nonsectarian may, given social context, historical usage, or other considerations, nonetheless evoke hateful tropes; this was very important in avoiding what I thought was some too-quick moves by the appellate court to simply intone the truism that Zionism and Judaism are not synonymous and call it day. On this point, the Court said something that may well be worth framing:

Due regard to this context and history must be observed when dealing with expressions that are allegedly anti-Semitic, because many socially acceptable words may become a proxy for anti-Semitic sentiments. Focusing on the plain text and ignoring the objectively ascertainable subtext would be ignorant, inappropriate and antithetical to what our Constitution demands.

Couldn't say it better. 

In any event -- Masuku and COSATU have been very aggressive in fighting this case (and, I'll be honest, I expected them to prevail). It will be interesting to see how the court-ordered apology plays out. But it appears that, as a legal matter, the Masuku saga has finally come to a close.

What To Draw from the San Francisco Recall

A recall election targeting three progressive members of the San Francisco school board has succeeding by a thumping margin, with the pro-recall side taking around 70% of the vote. I was following this saga semi-closely (I never lived in San Francisco, but being just across the Bay I still paid some amount of attention). And while everyone is going to have their hot takes on this, I'll provide the hottest take of all by serving mine at room temperature.

I will say that I'm going to try to avoid a normative assessment about whether the decision by the voters here was good or bad. You're going to get a lot of either (a) "Even in liberal San Francisco...." or (b) "San Francisco views itself as so liberal, but when push comes to shove...."; you don't need me to adjudicate that for you.

Anyway, when you read stories about the recall, the narrative seems to focus primarily on three things: (1) the failure of the Board to prioritize reopening schools; (2) the Board's insistence on renaming a huge swath of schools whose namesakes were deemed historically problematic; and (3) the Board instituting a "lottery" for admission to an elite public high school which had previously used a competitive, test-based admissions regime (this reportedly aroused the anger of the city's Asian-American community, which had a large presence at the school that it thought would be reduced under the lottery system).

Of course, everyone wants to tell the story in such a way that it fits their political priors. If you are fulminating about the excesses of "wokeness", then the renaming controversy is going to loom large. If you are excited about the new flexing of Asian-American political muscle, the controversy over Lowell HS admissions will be a major factor. And so on.

My lukewarm take is that one should not read too much into this because it's really the confluence of factors, taken together, which was a bit of a perfect storm. For example, there are plenty of school renamings that go off without a hitch, but here the board's buzzsaw like approach targeting dozens of schools (often on thin-to-nonexistent research) really smacked of performance over substance (and we could ask -- performance for who? Who, exactly, wanted this -- or more accurately, this much of this?). The Board just clearly got too far in front of its shoes here; it wildly overestimated the demand and the appetite for this sort of endeavor (noting that "overestimated" is not the same thing as saying there is no appetite at all).

But even that would have been probably overlooked for the most part except that it was occupying much of the Board's attention instead of the seemingly more pressing matter of figuring out how to reopen schools. I have some amount of sympathy here because "reopening the schools" is a genuinely difficult problem and it's not something the Board could have just fiated into existence with a finger snap. That said, if you seem to ignore the most pressing public education issue of the year for the sake of a comparatively lower priority and you appear manifestly incompetent at addressing the thing which you've (wrongly) decided to make agenda item #1, yeah, that's going to piss people off. That reopening the schools is hard is a compelling argument that one needs to very clearly and publicly exert all your effort on figuring out how to make it happen; the worst thing you can do is appear to shrug your shoulders at the whole endeavor and say "you know what seems like a lot more fun than trying to get kids back into the classroom? Figuring out whether Dianne Feinstein should have her name on a building!"

So for me, the lesson to be learned is not "San Francisco voters reject wokeness", but it is very much that competence matters and San Francisco voters are not going to just blindly accept anything its elected pols do just because they drape themselves in the cloak of "wokeness". It has to be about substance, not symbolism. That goes for the school renamings too -- if one thinks it's all about symbolism and "sending a message", then maybe the execution doesn't matter so much. By contrast, if one actually views this issue as one of substantive import, then one should be willing to do the hard work of doing research and consensus-building and line-drawing. Arguably, one could say than San Franciscans want actual, good, thought out "wokeness", which they do not define (contra the semi-strawman version) as just pulling out a flamethrower and torching everything in sight.

But more fundamentally, the takeaway is that the basic, often dull, but bread-and-butter policy work of making sure the schools function has to come first. That's my big conclusion (and if one wants to say this is me just promoting my political priors, I don't judge you). A lot of good politics is the dry endeavor of just competently insuring that things work. The best political leaders do that and can innovate and inspire and push the ball forward. But the fundamentals have to be in place before one can build flair on top.

Get the foundation down, and you can do great work building on top of it. But if you elect people who aren't interested in the foundational work because they're mostly excited about some high-level ideological vision -- well, that can work if the underlying structure is strong enough that the system can manage itself on autopilot. But if you enter a time of stress or strain, like we are now in COVID, you need people at the helm who are both capable and committed to doing the slow boring work of making government work.

The DSA Seizes The Tankie Moment

The original "tankie" incident, the one that gave the term its name, came when the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 to crush a workers' uprising. "Tankies" were those leftists who followed Moscow's line in supporting the invasion, dutifully repeating Soviet propaganda about how this was "anti-fascist" or how it was responding to "American aggression", despite the fact that under any objective metric it seemed a straightforward form of imperialist aggression by a powerful state against the very democratic and labor forces that these same leftists claimed to stand in stalwart defense of. 

Most of us, of course, were not around in 1956 and so missed the opportunity to be original tankies. But all that's old is new again, and we now literally are faced with a seemingly imminent decision by Russia to once again send in tanks to invade southeastern Europe! And the Democratic Socialists of America have responded by showing just how excited they are at the chance to fly their tankie flag high. Their statement that regurgitates every predictable horseshoe-theory trope about why Russia is really the victim here, everything bad is America's fault, and "solidarity" means telling Ukraine it deserves what it has coming to it. Way to seize the moment, DSA! Who even cares that Russia is now itself a right-wing kleptocracy? It's adverse to American interests, and that's (apparently literally) all that matters.

It's a side issue, but I think there were some Jewish progressives who had some sympathies with the DSA, at least on matters of domestic policy, and were accordingly a bit rattled by the DSA's decision to go all-in on backing BDS in its most extreme and uncompromising possible form -- not because of the "trend" it did or didn't portend, but because it caused them (the Jewish progressives) to second guess their own instincts that were averse to BDS. If the DSA is a reliable guidestone to good progressive policymaking generally, what does it say that I'm bucking them here? It is, I imagine, a relief to remember that the DSA's foreign policy approach is consistently terrible, anti-democratic, and pro-authoritarian (see also: Venezuela), and that there is absolutely no reason to feel even remotely anxious or skittish if you end up on the opposite side of the argument from them.

Happy Birthday To Me!

My birthday (actual birthday, not blog-birthday) was today! Congrats on surviving another year!*

* Not quite the given it's been in years past!

Joy Counts for Something

"That kiss wasn't for pleasure, it was strategic and joyless."

Both Kevin Drum and Amanda Marcotte, in slightly different ways, think progressives need to learn to have more fun. Nobody likes a coalition of sourpusses. 

Now, at one level, the charge that progressives only speak in terms of the dark and dire is unfair. For example, Drum gives as one example of "grim and joyless" progressive politics the assertion that "Nobody is 'illegal.' We should welcome hardworking folks from south of the border. Unless you're a racist, that is." But this is a politics that can and often is expressed in positive terms (it has "welcome" right in the tag!). Celebrating immigrants and embracing them as full members of the community is the stuff of many a heart-warming viral video. Certainly, progressive immigration talk has its share of downer narratives ("children in cages"), but on the whole the framing is far more upbeat on the progressive side, where it is mostly celebratory and about inclusion and growth -- certainly as compared against dark GOP mutterings/bullhornings about stolen jobs and foreign invasions and great replacements.

At another level, anyone who spends time in a largely Christian society quickly learns just how many people do love a bit of self-abnegation. A little masochism goes a long way, and clearly there is pleasure to be taken (and people take great pleasure) in forms of performative self-flagellation that are the hallmark of at least some forms of progressive political behavior. The line between pleasure and grimness isn't quite as sharp as we think it is.

That said, I think there is something to the notion that progressives are maybe not giving joy the credit that it should get -- perhaps on the theory that anyone who has the temerity to express joy is disrespecting all the terrible oppressions and mistreatments that afflict various marginalized groups in contemporary society. But this approach just doesn't resonate with people who even or perhaps especially in dark times want to see and feel opportunities for happiness.

Take the Olympics. I'm on the record as a strong Olympics booster, even as I'm fully cognizant of all of the very compelling critiques of the Games: they're corrupt, they displace people, they're a fig leaf for authoritarian oppression, and so on. All of which is, indeed, true, and I don't deny the weight of those critiques. But sometimes it seems as if the persons making those critiques act as if there is nothing of weight on the other side of the ledger -- it's this parade of terribles on one side against meaningless frivolity on the other, such that only the truly self-indulgent or bubble-headed could possibly find value in it. No. No, no, no.  The Olympics represent a rare -- perhaps singular -- example of the entire global community coming together in one place for the primary and fundamental purpose of doing something fun and joyous. That is a great thing, and there is virtually nothing else comparable to it.

Recognizing that doesn't mean that there aren't important proposals for how to reform the Olympics to mitigate or eliminate its darker sides, it doesn't even compel one to weigh that good as superseding the aforementioned evils. But there needs to be recognition that the good, is a good; that the joy the Olympics creates can and should count for something, and one is not showing oneself to be a self-absorbed dilettante if one enjoys something meant to spark joy. The inability to recognize the joyousness of the Olympics -- to solely see it through the lens of the dark and the grim and the dire -- is not healthy, and for most people it's not relatable.