But Do They Have Paradox-Absorbing Crumple Zones?

Eugene Volokh flags an interesting case out of Wisconsin lying on that intersection of religious freedom and anti-discrimination. Basically, a male Muslim prison inmate objected to being strip-searched by what appears to be (the record doesn't say explicitly) a transgender male guard. The inmate claims that part of his religious beliefs are that (a) sex is assigned by God at birth (so if you're born a woman, you're a woman) and (b) he cannot be seen naked by any woman save his wife. He's demanding a religious exemption from being strip searched by that guard under RLUIPA (he doesn't object to strip searches generally).

Reading about this, all I could think about it is: how would Breitbart cover this? Which hatred would win out? Would they back the Muslim prison inmate, or the transgender man whose job description includes seeing people naked?

I really think it's a toss-up.

When The Mask Comes Off ... What's Beneath Doesn't Look All That Different

The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, explains why he is "glad" to be called an antisemite.

“There is one race that cannot be criticized. If you are anti-Semitic, it seems almost as if you are a criminal,” Mohamad said in an interview with the Associated Press on Monday, denying that he disliked Jews, as such. “Anti-Semitic is a term that is invented to prevent people from criticizing the Jews for doing wrong things.”

“When somebody does wrong, I don’t care how big they are. They may be powerful countries but if they do something wrong, I exercise my right of free speech. They criticize me, why can’t I criticize them?”

Mohamad, an avowed anti-Semite, was sworn in as prime minister in May, nearly two decades after he last held office. He is well known for his anti-Semitic rhetoric, writing on his personal blog in 2012 that “Jews rule this world by proxy.”

He has also said, “I am glad to be labeled anti-Semitic […] How can I be otherwise, when the Jews who so often talk of the horrors they suffered during the Holocaust show the same Nazi cruelty and hard-heartedness towards not just their enemies but even towards their allies should any try to stop the senseless killing of their Palestinian enemies.”

This, of course, is rather naked. It speaks of Jews (although the de rigueur conflation with Israel is present), and it does not shy away from (indeed it actively embraces) the idea of antisemitism. In that sense, it is almost too easy of a case. And this is not remotely out of character for Mohamad either.

But where these passages may be of some use is in highlighting how certain antisemitic tropes work in a context where they are freely and openly attached to an antisemitic ideology, the better to spot them when they appear without such an overt gloss. Basically everything Mohamad is saying is something that, dressed up (a little) more nicely, is a common feature of discourse about Jews in global society today.

First, there is the claim that the real victims of antisemitism are those accused of it -- antisemitism is not (or is not primarily) a genuine form of oppression for Jews, but rather is a perk Jews enjoy to shield ourselves from critical review. Compare here Bruce Robbins "The real issue here is anti-Semitism; that is, accusing people of it" or Naomi Klein suggesting that some Jews "think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free-card."

Second, there is the argument that in taking on the Jews, he is taking on someone or something "big". Here he really dips between referring to "Jews" generally and "Israel" specifically (For the record, Malaysia has four times the population of Israel across a territory almost sixteen times its size). Of course, the perception of Jews as inherently "big" -- domineering, cabalistic, pulling the strings -- has deep pride of place in antisemitic rhetoric. Mohamad is appealing to a notion whereby antisemitism always is a form of "punching up", "a movement of the little people against an intangible, global form of domination".  This perspective has come to occupy a critical role in the narrative Corbyn supporters tell of Jewish outrage -- both in the view that Corbyn, in antagonizing the Jews, is tackling the powerful, and in the view that the Jewish backlash is itself attributable to some nefarious conspiracy

Next, there is the invocation of "free speech". Of course, this particular ploy should by now be familiar to anyone forced to endure alt-right trolling of college campuses -- when they choose to be racist, it's just free speech! And if you call it racist, you're suppressing their free speech! But this device makes its appearance regarding antisemitism too, and has done so for a very long time. Jewish Voice for Peace's old blog was titled "MuzzleWatch", and one of the major fringe groups backing the Corbynistas and opposing Jewish efforts to raise awareness of antisemitism in the UK is named "Free Speech on Israel". Glenn Greenwald has likewise dismissed the widespread adoption of the IHRA antisemitism definition as part of a "global campaign to outlaw criticisms of Israel as bigotry".

Then there's the comparison of "Jews" (represented through Israel) to Nazis -- we're all familiar with that play, and I'm glad to see it here if only for completion's sake.

But we'll conclude with the most striking bit, and the one that perhaps seems least applicable to more workaday antisemitic cases: where Mohamad says he is "glad" to be called antisemitic. Here one might say I'm actually being a touch unfair to Mohamad, for what I suspect he means is something more like "while antisemitism -- appropriately (and narrowly) defined -- is terrible; what is called antisemitic in public discourse are actually good, noble, and virtuous positions that one should be proud to hold." This is buttressed by the caveat Mohamad gave at the beginning, where he denies that he "dislikes Jews, as such."

Once again, this has parallels. Steve Bannon notoriously said that being called racist is a "badge of honor"; Steven Salaita's contention that antisemitism has become "honorable" thanks to Zionism plays on the same turf. In all cases, the claim actually isn't "it is good to hate outgroups"; it's something more like "what outgroups claim is hateful, actually is good". Now, to be clear -- that's still a BS response, partially because it is too clever by half, partially because it depends on an epistemic injustice directed against the outgroups whereby their assessments of their own experience of inequality is so unreliable that one should be "honored" if they feel threatened by you. But at least formally, it reduces down to a claim that "one can and should dislike X group insofar as they act in A B C bad ways, or support D E F bad policies."

Which actually circles back, strangely enough, to my Tablet Magazine article on Open Hillel's intervention in the SFSU antisemitism debate. In that article, I cited Bernard Williams for the proposition that virtually no form of racism holds itself out as being a product of raw, unadorned antipathy. It always comes attached to claims that are at least on-face about something that qualifies as a candidate for a reasonable position. Wrote Williams:

Few can be found who will explain their practice merely by saying, 'But they're black: and it is my moral principle to treat black men differently from others'. If any reasons are given at all, they will be reasons that seek to correlate the fact of blackness with certain other considerations which are at least candidates for relevance to the question of how a man should be treated: such as insensitivity, brute stupidity, ineducable irresponsibility, etc. Now these reasons are very often rationalizations, and the correlations claimed are either not really believed, or quite irrationally believed, by those who claim them. But this is a different point; the argument concerns what counts as a moral reason, and the rationalizer broadly agrees with others about what counts as such -- the trouble with him is that his reasons are dictated by his politics, and not conversely. The Nazis' 'anthropologists' who tried to construct theories of Aryanism were paying, in very poor coin, the homage of irrationality to reason.

So too here. I quoted Mohamad's words extensively because to my mind they represent an unquestionable case of antisemitism. But his caveat that he does not dislike Jews "as such" is one that Open Hillel's standard of antisemitism has great trouble grappling with. If Mohamad's point is that he doesn't dislike Jews-qua-Jews, only the bloodthirsty ones, the Zionist ones, the Nazi-like ones, the ones who are "big" and the ones who censor his free speech -- is that antisemitism? Cast in that light, Mohamad isn't actually all that different from the peers I've been comparing him to; perhaps just a little rougher around the edges.

And that, ultimately, is the real point here. One might think that Mahathir Mohamad represents what happens when the screen of respectability comes down and an antisemite simply says what he thinks. But it turns out that, when that happens, what one sees doesn't look all that different from what one sees when the mask stays on. Mohamad uses tropes and claims and devices that are common in discourse about Jews by people who have far more claim to respectability than Mohamad does. One would like to think that's an indictment of the respectable. But it just as easily can become a defense of what we otherwise would think of as undeniable antisemitism.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XLVIII: Turkey's Currency Collapse

Turkey is going through a currency crisis. The causes are complex, as global finance often is, but one of the known triggers is tariffs imposed by President Trump in retaliation for Turkey's detention of an American pastor.

And another cause is, well, take a guess:

A senior Turkish official has blamed "Jewish-originated Zionist bankers" in a late-night rant for the currency crisis that saw the lira plummet against the US dollar in recent weeks.

Burhan Kuzu, a founding member of Turkey’s governing Justice and Development (AK) Party, made the remark in a series of late-night tweets in which he suggested US President Donald Trump was “not aware” his country was being managed by what he termed “Jewish banking families”.

[...]

“The American people believe the dollar is the US's currency,” Mr Kuzu wrote in one tweet in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

“In fact, the world is managed by the cash notes printed by twelve families of Jewish-originated Zionist bankers numbering not more than 300.” 

 In a later tweet, he said Mr Trump could demonstrate "courage" by wresting control of the US dollar from Jewish bankers and printing the notes himself — but that he would be likely be killed if he tried.

Hey, at least it's a step up from being blamed for Uber. Global currency manipulation is definitely a nod back to the classics.

In completely unrelated news, a full 10% of Turkey's remaining Jewish population has applied for Portuguese citizenship in response to rising tides of antisemitism in the country.

Who's Your (U.S. Citizen) Daddy?

The Second Circuit decided a very interesting case this week, concerning deportation proceedings against a man whom, it turns out, is a U.S. citizen. The litigant, Levy Jaen, was born abroad to a married couple; he and his family moved to the United States in 1988 when Jaen was 15. The husband was a U.S. citizen, and Jaen's father satisfied all the other requirements through which his citizenship would pass down to his son.

The problem was that Jaen's biological father was not the man her husband was married to. And the biological father (with whom Jaen's mother had an extra-marital affair) was not a U.S. citizen. So the question before the court was who, for the purpose of the federal statute governing citizenship in cases like Jaen's, was Jaen's "father"?

The court concluded that under well-settled principles of common law, the "presumption of legitimacy" that attaches to children born to married couples, Jaen's "father" is assumed to be the man married to his mother (the linchpin precedent for this proposition is a well-known family law case, Michael H. v. Gerald D., authored by Justice Scalia). And because Jaen's father was a U.S. citizen (and satisfied all other statutory requirements for transmitting his citizenship), Jaen was too -- and therefore could not lawfully be deported.

This is a happy ending, though it of course raises the question of circumstances where the facts are reversed (the biological father is a U.S. citizen but the "legitimate" father is not). Moreover, it is a happy ending to a grim tale -- Jaen was imprisoned for the entirety of his immigration proceedings and appeals, notwithstanding the fact that he had a colorable claim to citizenship that ended up being vindicated.

But a happy ending is a happy ending. Also, a shout out to my old firm Covington & Burling, which was on the brief for this case representing Mr. Jaen.

A Semi-Serious Question of Legal Strategy

One of the things Trump v. Hawaii does is that it seems to narrow the circumstances where we can infer discriminatory intent, at least in cases where the allegedly discriminatory-action does not wholly encompass all members of the putatively targeted group.

Of course, Trump is not the only precedent on that point, and in most cases it won't be dispositive one way or the other.

But here's my question: Suppose you were a plaintiff's attorney in a discrimination case, one which hinges on inferring discriminatory intent even though not all members of the protected class were targeted by the action you are challenging. And suppose you had a relatively liberal judge whom you were fairly confident detests the Trump decision. Finally, let's say that for whatever reason your case was somewhat politically contentious and so the judge might not be ideologically-predisposed to rule in your favor anyway.

Obviously, you can cite a string of precedent that supports a favorable ruling in your case. My question is: Would it be helpful to append a "but see" cite to Trump v. Hawaii at the end?

Of course, if Trump is a really powerful precedent for the defense, then one probably doesn't want to draw attention to it in this way. But if it isn't -- if the suggestion is more "in the evolution of anti-discrimination, the defense's argument takes us further down the road Trump v. Hawaii has paved" -- one might think that could be a savvy way of turning the judge against that approach.

I suppose this is another way of asking how quickly Trump v. Hawaii will become part of the anti-canon -- at least for liberal judges.

A Nice Rabbinical Lesson in Not Judging

I came across this earlier today -- it's from an Orthodox Jewish advice column where a woman asks how she can be less judgmental of other Orthodox Jewish women who don't dress according to her standards of modesty.

Obviously, on the substance of the issue I have no skin in the game. Modest dress -- by men or women -- is not a matter of religious significance for me, and indeed I'm not wild about religion arrogating to itself an opinion on the question at all.

But what I like about the answer is that -- putting the substance of the question aside -- I thought it was a great model in thinking through how to be kinder, more open, and less judgmental as a general matter -- something that no doubt we all have occasions to practice.

Anyway, here is the columnist's answer:

In terms of your question, I believe the answer can be found in Pirkei Avos. Our sages teach: “asay l’cha rav, u’konay l’cha chaver, v’haveh dan es kol adam l’kaf z’chus (make for yourself a rabbi, acquire a friend, and judge all men favorably).” Until today, I never understood why these three things are listed together, but upon trying to answer your question, a beautiful connection hit me. 

Let’s start with “judge all men favorably.” [It is] easy to think badly of others when we see them doing things which we consider “wrong,” but judging others favorably is a foundational Torah idea and the way you can do it in this case is: a) assume these women learned a different opinion than you did, because there are a range of opinions when it comes to the laws of modesty (the range is not infinite, but there is a range, which means there is more “grey” and less “black and white” than you may realize), b) assume they learned the same opinion you did but were never shown the beauty of modesty and Jewish law like you were and therefore don’t feel compelled to keep it like you do, c) assume they believe in the idea in theory, but it’s such a big struggle for them – much bigger than it is for you – that they haven’t conquered it yet, d) assume they are doing whatever their parents taught them and never looked into it further to realize there was anything problematic about it. 

Again, as applied to the "modesty" question this does nothing for me. But the core of the suggestion: that in matters of religious dispute, consider that the other person (a) has thought about the issue and has a different view; (b) has thought about the issue but doesn't view it as compelling in their life; (c) has thought about the issue and agrees with your view in theory but finds living up to it to be a greater struggle than you do; or (d) just never really thought about the issue at all -- all of these strike me as better and more charitable ways of approaching the matter compared to just assuming the person is willfully ignorant, obtuse, or wicked.

The questioner also suggested that seeing women who didn't adhere to her own standards of modesty made it harder for her to stay true to her own path. And the columnist gave advice on this matter as well:

But you can’t only judge others favorably without solidifying your own path. Just because these women have their reasons for doing what they do doesn’t (necessarily) mean that they should be your reasons. So “make for yourself a rabbi,” comes first. Find a rabbi (and rebbetzin) who are your speed that you trust as role models and stay close with them. Maintain a certain standard for yourself that your rabbi/community holds by. 

“Acquire a friend” comes after that because while it’s important to have a guide who can you look up to, it’s equally important to have close friends who have shared values so you can support each other even as you see that different “options” exist. It is possible to accept that there are differing opinions to the ones we follow and that there are opinions which we simply disagree with (but reserve judgment on those who follow them), while simultaneously maintaining a high standard for ourselves. Such a balancing act does not come very easily, but then again, nothing worthwhile in life ever does.

Anyway, it jumped out at me as something that was noticeably kind-hearted, even on a matter whose import is quite foreign to me, and so I figured it was worth sharing.

If Trump Used the N-Word, It Won't Matter

The debate of the day is whether, if a tape drops where Donald Trump uses the n-word, will it make a difference in how his supporters view him? Some say yes -- the n-word is such a redline that it removes all plausible deniability. I, however, am firmly on team Adam Serwer here:

Some have argued that Republican voters held their noses and voted for Trump because, while odious, issues dear to their hearts like religious freedom, or abortion, or taxes compelled them to make such a choice. But there’s no evidence a large number of Republicans object to Trump’s discriminatory policies, or to his frequent attacks on black public figures. According to one recent CBS poll, while most Americans disapprove of Trump’s record on racial issues, 83 percent of Republicans approve. The vast, overwhelming majority of Republicans aren’t quietly disgusted with Trump, but grateful for Neil Gorsuch. When Trump calls black athletes who protest police brutality “sons of bitches” and demands they be fired, they’re not embarrassed. They like it. Trump knows they like it. That’s why he keeps doing it. 

Given that, it’s hard to imagine that, even if a tape of Trump using the word nigger exists, it would substantially erode political support from his base. The idea that the word is some kind of red line that erases plausible deniability is an illusion. Every time Trump’s behavior violates some conservative value—from his alleged infidelity to his denigration of war heroes and gold-star families to his relentless crony capitalism— pundits predict his undoing, and Trump emerges unscathed. There’s no reason why many of Trump’s strongest supporters wouldn’t also be able to rationalize his use of a racial slur, especially given their enthusiasm for his culture-war provocations. 

It’s possible that this time would be different, that a recording of Trump using a racial slur would meaningfully alter his supporters’ perception of him. But given this track record, it seems very unlikely. 

The more likely outcome is the one that followed the recording of the president saying he likes to grab women “by the pussy.” Most Trump supporters easily acquiesced to the explanation that the remarks were mere “locker-room talk,” despite the more than a dozen women who said otherwise. This time, too, many would likely argue the tape is fake, or taken out of context, or that he’s being victimized by the political-correctness police. Or they’d simply change the subject. (Aren’t there lots of recordings of the Pulitzer Prize–winning artist Kendrick Lamar using the word? Checkmate, libs.)

The only thing I'd underscore here is that there is a propensity in the media to simply refuse to believe that sizable portions of the Republican base is racist. I think this stems from a lingering anxiety about being part of the "liberal media", all coastal elite-ish and out-of-touch with real America, and a corresponding skepticism about their intuitive instincts regarding the racial politics of middle White working class America. Sure, the most obvious reason for why they're attracted to Donald Trump is racism -- but that's such a mean thing to think! So media figures scramble about for alternative explanations that seem less judgmental and hostile -- hence how we've gotten years of "economic anxiety" narratives that just aren't backed by the data.

But the fact is, by and large Republicans like Donald Trump on race. It was racism, after all, that caused him to emerge from the pack of Republican candidates in the first place. Unabashed racism is and always has been Donald Trump's comparative advantage over other high-profile conservatives. And the past several decades have been one long campaign by conservatives in rationalizing what one might have thought would be indisputable cases of bigotry -- they're pros at it at this point.

So no, I don't think a tape of Trump using the n-word will have more than a marginal and fleeting impact on Trump's approvals. The people who like him already know who he is. That's why they like him.

The Slowly Crumbling Arrogance of the Center-Right

Israeli Rabbi and pundit Daniel Gordis is not a liberal.

But he's not a dyed-in-the-wool conservative either.

He's a member of the center-right, which at this point means he basically believes in conservative policies while being committed in principle to the underlying liberal architecture of freedom of expression, democratic norms, fairness and factuality in politics, and respect for minorities.

And like many members of the center-right, he's starting to feel uneasy about the decay of this liberal architecture at the hands of his less "center" compatriots. Here's him writing on the recent spate of heavy-handed security actions Israel has taken at Netanyahu's behest against dissident voices (detentions at the border, expelling artists):

Although it is hard to know exactly who is issuing directives to the security services on this issue, the clumsiness leads one to suspect there is an unstated goal. It seems likely that Netanyahu has decided to stoke the embers of “Zionists versus Israel’s enemies” discourse, which will win him points with the right-wing factions of Israeli society he needs to win the next elections, scheduled for next year, but may be called early. 

The prime minister is playing with fire. More than half of Israel’s Jewish citizens are either immigrants from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq and Iran or their descendants. They come from societies where freedom of speech is not nearly as sacrosanct as it is in the U.S. Add in more than 1 million Russian immigrants, many of whom are comfortable with the sort of heavy-handedness President Vladimir Putin is displaying there. Israel needs a leader who can model devotion to the values of liberal societies, not undermine them for the sake of short-term political gains. Appealing to citizens comfortable with authoritarian-leaning regimes may earn Netanyahu short-term political gains, but could eventually yield a country which no one would call “one of the world’s most open democracies.”

The first paragraph can't be stressed enough. Netanyahu doesn't fear confrontation with BDS activists and strident Israel critics. He revels in it, because it allows him to pour gasoline on an "us-vs.-the-world" dynamic which both energizes the right-wing base and puts the squeeze on liberal Zionist voices. Israel's right and the global left exist in symbiosis with one another, and Bibi knows it.

The second paragraph, though, needs some unpacking, and brings us back to the title of this post.

The defining characteristic of the center-right over the past few decades has been confidence -- I'd say now revealed to be arrogance -- in the absolute stability of the basic liberal norms of Western society. Whether due to cultural chauvinism or something else, they were absolutely sure that the core liberal commitments weren't going anywhere.

This thread on Jonah Goldberg provides a good iteration of this issue in the American context -- Goldberg now is recognizing the danger of the decayed form of conservatism that now runs supreme on the right, but doesn't acknowledge how he was a key contributor to it. The reason is that, at the time, he probably thought his dalliances were harmless. A little rabble-rousing here, a little mob-baiting there -- what's the big deal? It's all in good fun, or the wink-and-nod of playing the democratic game to win. The institutions were durable, they'd hold up. The stability of the liberal order was taken for granted.

Now, we're finally seeing that confidence fade a little bit. It turns out that liberal and democratic values need work put into them; they don't defend themselves, and they do decay under constant pressure of xenophobia, chauvinism, conspiratorial thinking, and the like. Democracy, as my former professor Melvin Rogers (channeling John Dewey) wrote, is a habit -- and it needs to be practiced.

In Gordis' second paragraph you can see both the recognition of the danger but also the denial of it. He locates the danger to Israel's liberal democratic character in its Middle Eastern and Russian Jewish population -- they, you see, don't have the patrimony of liberalism that we otherwise could take for granted. The implication of the paragraph is that Bibi is playing a game, but alas the ostjuden might not realize he doesn't mean it.

But why assume Bibi is playing a game? Why assume he does, somewhere, deep down, care about or retain commitment to liberal ideals? It's a relic of the center-right arrogance that assumes the unshakable bond between its tribe and those liberal commitments. But if there's one lesson we've learned over the past few years, its that this connection is far frailer than we thought. Bibi may be playing with fire; but he might really be indifferent to that which gets burned. And since he's the one wielding the flame, it's more than a little arrogant to point to the Russians and the Mizrahim and say they're the real threat.

The fact of the matter is that in Israel, or America, or the UK or France or Greece or India or anywhere else that has been blessed even with a temporary and partial spark of the the liberal democratic ideal -- these things require work to survive. They do not persist on their own. The center-right assumed they would, and so did not see the danger that was boiling up in their own yard. And now that it has boiled over, the sobering truth is that there is no natural counterweight to it. The system will not readjust to a natural liberal equilibrium, there is no such equilibrium that exists. Liberal values need to be practiced and they need to be fought for, or they will disappear.

"Hitler Was Right" Candidate Wins Missouri GOP Primary

This past week, Steve West, who has said "Hitler was Right" and that "Jewish cabals" harvest baby parts from Planned Parenthood, won the GOP primary for a Kansas City-area Missouri State House seat.

As many people know, there has been an uptick of racist and antisemitic extremist candidates running on GOP platforms this election cycle (the ADL rounds up some of them). Some of the most prominent, like Arthur Jones in Illinois, come with their own excuses: he was the only candidate on the GOP ballot in a overwhelmingly Democratic seat. In other cases, the seat is so lopsidedly Democratic that the GOP party is basically a random assortment of fringe cranks anyway, so it's arguably unfair to extrapolate.

But this is different. For one, West won a contested primary, taking nearly 50% of the vote in a four-way field. For two, while the 15th Missouri House District has gone uncontested the past two cycles, the last time there was a general election race the (current incumbent) Democrat won by a 56/44 spread. That's a comfortable margin, and in a strong Democratic year like 2018 the seat should be safe, but it is not an overwhelming figure (by comparison, the last time Dan Lipinski -- the Democrat Arthur Jones is running against in Illinois -- faced a general election challenger, he won by a 65/35 margin). Put another way, while this is a distinctively blue-tinted district, it is not the sort of place where Republicans don't exist beyond a bizarre fringe, nor is it the sort of place where it'd be implausible for the Republican to win.

So even though this is far less prominent a race than Jones' congressional campaign, in many ways its a significantly more dangerous signal. In a race where other Republicans were running, in a district where Republicans at least are conceivably competitive, GOP primary voters chose an unabashed, loud-and-proud antisemitic bigot.

The Problem of "Centering" and the Jews

Note: I wrote this piece quite a few months ago, shopping around to the usual Jewish media outlets. None were interested, and I ended up letting it slide. But it popped back into my mind -- this Sophie Ellman-Golan article helped -- and so I decided to post it here. While I have updated it, some of the references are a bit dated (at least on an internet time scale). Nonetheless, I continue to think a critical look at how the idea of "centering" interacts with and can easily instantiate antisemitic tropes is deeply important.

* * *

In the early 2000s, Rosa Pegueros, a Salvadoran Jew, was a member of the listserv for contributors to the book This Bridge We Call Home, sequel to the tremendously influential volume This Bridge Called My Back. Another member of the listserv had written to the group with "an almost apologetic post mentioning that she is Jewish, implying that some of the members might not be comfortable with her presence for that reason." She had guessed she was the only Jewish contributor to the volume, so Pegueros wrote back, identifying herself as a Jew as a well and recounting a recent experience she perceived as antisemitic.

Almost immediately, Peugeros wrote, another third contributor jumped into the conversation.  "I can no longer sit back," she wrote, "and watch this list turn into another place where Jewishness is reduced to a site of oppression and victimization, rather than a complex site of both oppression and privilege—particularly in relationship to POC."

Pegueros was stunned. At the time of this reply, there had been a grand total of two messages referencing Jewishness on the entire listserv. And yet, it seemed, that was too much -- it symbolized yet "another place" where discourse about oppression had become "a forum for Jews."

This story has always stuck with me. And I thought of it when reading Jews for Racial and Economic Justice's guidebook to understanding antisemitism from a left-wing perspective. Among their final pieces of advice for Jews participating in anti-racism groups was to make antisemitism and Jewish issues "central, but not centered".

It's good advice. Jewish issues are an important and indispensable part of anti-racist work. That said, we are not alone, and it is important to recognize that in many circumstances our discrete problems ought not to take center stage. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be heard. It just means they should not be given disproportionate attention such that they prevent other important questions and campaigns from proceeding. Ideally, "central, but not centered" in the anti-racism community means that Jewish issues should neither overwhelm the conversation nor be shunted aside and ignored outright.

Yet it also overlooks an important caveat. Too often, any discussion of Jewish issues is enough to be considered "centering" it. There is virtually no gap between spaces where Jews are silenced and spaces where Jews are accused of "centering". And so the reasonable request not to "center" Jewish issues easily can, and often does, become yet another tool enforcing Jewish silence.

Pegueros' account is one striking example. I'll give another: several years ago, I was invited to a Jewish-run feminist blog to host a series of posts on antisemitism. Midway through the series, the blog's editors were challenged on the grounds that it was taking oxygen away from more pressing matters of racism. At the time, the blog had more posts on "racism" than "antisemitism" by an 8:1 margin (and, in my experience, that is uncommonly attentive to antisemitism on a feminist site -- Feministing, for example, has a grand total of two posts with the "anti-Semitism" tag in its entire history). No matter: the fact that Jewish feminists on a Jewish blog were discussing Jewish issues at all was viewed as excessive and self-centered.

Or consider Raphael Magarik's reply to Yishai Schwartz's essay contending that Cornel West has "a Jewish problem".

Schwartz's column takes issue with West's decision to situate his critique of fellow Black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates by reference to "the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people." Magarik's reply accuses Schwartz of making the West/Coates dispute fundamentally "about the Jews", exhibiting the "the moral narcissism in thinking that everything is about you, in reading arguments between Black intellectuals about the future of the American left and asking: How can I make this about the Jews?"

Now, Magarik is surely correct that the Jewish angle of West's critique of Coates is a rather small element that should not become the "center of attention" and thereby obscure "the focus [on] Black struggles for liberation." But there is something quite baffling about his suggestion that a single column that was a drop in the bucket of commentary produced in the wake of the West/Coates exchange could suffice to make it the "center of attention". If Magarik believes Schwartz overreacted to some stray mentions of Jewish issues in an otherwise intramural African-American dispute, surely Magarik equally brought a howitzer to a knife fight by claiming that one article in Ha'aretz single-handedly recentered the conversation about the West/Coates feud onto the Jews.

What's going on here? How is it that the "centering" label -- certainly a valid concern in concept -- seems to routinely and pervasively attach itself to Jews at even the slightest intervention in policy debates?

The answer, as you might have guessed, relates to antisemitism.

As a social phenomenon, antisemitism is very frequently the trafficking in tropes about Jewish hyperpower, the sense that we either have or are on the cusp of taking over anything and everything. Frantz Fanon described antisemitism as follows: "Jews are feared because of their potential to appropriate. ‘They’ are everywhere. The banks, the stock exchanges, and the government are infested with them. They control everything. Soon the country will belong to them.” If we have an abstract understanding of Jews as omnipotent and omnipresent, no wonder that specific instances of Jewish social participation -- no matter how narrow the contribution might be -- are understood as a complete and total colonization of the space. What are the Jews, other than those who are already "everywhere"?

Sadly, the JFREJ pamphlet does not address this issue at all. When "central" crosses into "centering" will often be a matter of judgment, but while the JFREJ has much to say about Jews making "demands for attention" or paying heed to "how much oxygen they can suck out of the room", it does not grapple with how the structure of antisemitism mentalities often renders simply being Jewish (without a concurrent vow of monastic silence) enough to trigger these complaints. It doesn't seem to realize how this entire line of discourse itself can be and often is deeply interlaced with antisemitism.

JFREJ's omission is particularly unfortunate since Jews have begun to internalize this sensibility. It's not that Jewish issues should predominate, or always be at the center of every conversation. It's the nagging sense that any discussion of Jewish issues -- no matter how it is prefaced, cabined, or hedged -- is an act of "centering", of taking over, of making it "about us." When the baseline of what counts as "centering" is so low, I know from personal experience that even the simplest asks for inclusion are agonizing.

As early as 1982, the radical lesbian feminist Irene Klepfisz identified this propensity as a core part of both internalized and externalized antisemitism. She instructed activists -- Jewish and non-Jewish alike -- to ask themselves a series of questions, including whether they feel that dealing with antisemitism "drain[s] the movement of precious energy", whether they believe antisemitism "has been discussed too much already," and whether Jews "draw too much attention to themselves."

Contemporary activists, including many Jews, could do worse than asking Klepfisz's questions. For example, when Jews and non-Jews in the queer community rallied against the effort by some activists to expel Jewish and Israeli LGBTQ organizations from LGBT conference "Creating Change", Mordechai Levovitz fretted that they had "promoted the much more nefarious anti-Semitic trope that Jews wield disproportionate power to get what we want." Levovitz didn't support the expulsion campaign. Still, he worried that even the most basic demand of inclusion -- don't kick queer Jews out of the room -- was potentially flexing too much Jewish muscle. In this way, the distinction between "central" and "centering" collapses -- indeed, even the most tertiary questions are "centering" if Jews are the ones asking them.

This is bad enough in a world where, we are told, oppressions are inextricably connected (you can tell whose perspective is and isn't valued in these communities based on whose attempts to speak are taken to be remedying an oversight and whose are viewed as self-centered derailing). But it verges on Kafka-esque when persons demand Jews "show up" and then get mad that they have a voice in the room; or proactively decide to put Jewish issues on their agenda and yet still demand Jews keep silent about them.

Magarik says, for example, that Jews "were not the story" when the Movement for Black Lives included in its platform an accusation that Israel was creating genocide; we shouldn't have made it "about us". He's right, in the sense that this language should not have caused Jews to withdraw from the fight against police violence against communities of color. He's wrong in suggesting that Jews therefore needed to stop "wringing our hands" about how issues that cut deep to the core of our existence as a people were treated in the document. Jews didn't demand that the Movement for Black Lives talk about Jews, but once they elected to do so Jews were not obliged to choose between the right's silence of shunning and the left's silence of acquiescence. To say that Jews ought not "center" ourselves is not to say that there is no place for critical commentary at all. We are legitimate contributors to the discourse over our own lives.

I'm not particularly interested in the substantive debate regarding whether Cornel West has a "Jewish problem" -- though Magarik's defense of West (that he "has a good reason for focusing on Palestine" because it "demarcates the difference between liberalism and radicalism") seems like it is worthy of some remark (of all the differences between liberals and "radicals", this is the issue that is the line of demarcation? And that doesn't exhibit some sign of centrality that Jews might have valid grounds to comment on, not the least of which could be wondering how it is a small country half a globe away came to occupy such pride of place?). The larger issue is the metadebate about whether it's valid to even ask the question; or more accurately, whether it is possible -- in any context, with any amount of disclaimers about relative prioritization -- to ask the question without it being read as "centering". The cleverest part of the whole play, after all, is that the very act of challenging this deliberative structure whereby any and all Jewish contributions suffice to center is that the challenge itself easily can become proof of our centrality.

But clever as it is, it can't and shouldn't be a satisfactory retort. There needs to be a lot more introspection about whether and how supposed allies of the Jews are willing to acknowledge the possibility that their instincts about when Jews are "centered" and when we're silenced are out-of-whack, without it becoming yet another basis of resentment for how we're making it all about us. And if we can't do that, then there is an antisemitism problem that really does need to be addressed. When discussing their struggles, members of other marginalized communities need not talk about Jews all the time, or most of the time, or even all that frequently. But what cannot stand is a claimed right to talk about Jews without having to talk with Jews. The idea that even the exploration of potential bias or prejudice lurking within our political movements represents a deliberative party foul is flatly incompatible with everything the left claims to believe about how to talk about matters of oppression.

West decided to bring up the Jewish state in his Jeremiad against Coates. It was not a central part of his argument, and so it should not be a central part of the ensuing public discussion. But having put it on the table, it cannot be the case that Jews are forbidden entirely from offering critical commentary.

One might say that a column or two in a few Jewish-oriented newspapers, lying at the tertiary edges of the overall debate, is precisely the right amount of attention that should have been given. If that's viewed as too much, then maybe the right question isn't about whether Jews are "centering" the discussion, but rather whether our presence really is a "central" part of anti-racism movements at all.

Drawing the line between "central" and "centering" is difficult, and requires work. There are situations where Jews demand too much attention, and there are times we are too self-effacing. But surely it takes more than a single solitary column to move from the latter to the former. More broadly, we're not going to get an accurate picture of how to mediate between "central" and "centering" unless we're willing to discuss how ingrained patterns of antisemitism condition our evaluations of Jewish political participation across the board.

I'll Tell You What's Really Detestable, Mr. Wiesenfeld

How is it that every time I see something embarrassing being done by an American Jew, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld's name pops up?

Trump isn’t perfect, of course, say some of his Orthodox supporters. Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a former political aide to Republicans and Democrats (Mayor Koch, Gov. Pataki and Sen. D’Amato), referenced the Trump administration’s family separation policy for arrested illegal immigrants, including asylum seekers, at the Southern border. “Yes, the policy was not carried out with finesse, no question about it,” Wiesenfeld said.... But, added Wiesenfeld, “what’s really detestable is when this gets compared to the Holocaust.”

Is it opposite day? Let me fix that for you:

"Yes, some of the comparisons have not been carried out with finesse, no question about it. But what's really detestable is ripping small children away from their families at the border."

You know what that's called? Perspective. Wiesenfeld should try it out.

Other Wiesenfeld highlights include trying to bar Linda Sarsour from speaking at CUNY's graduation and leading the fight to block Tony Kushner (whom he compared to a "kapo" -- though he chivalrously put the words in his mother's mouth) from receiving an honorary degree. More recently, Wiesenfeld was furious that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave a speech at the Museum of the Jewish Heritage.

How Trump v. Hawaii Will Be Overturned

Leah Litman has a good essay up on Trump v. Hawaii and Korematsu. Litman persuasively demonstrates how the former is a continuation of the latter's legacy (despite the majority's attempt to disavow the connection), and in that respect it makes for a maddening read. But the good news is that, as Litman further argues, part of Korematsu's legacy is that it became part of the anti-canon and eventually overturned -- and that, she predicts, will be Trump's fate as well.

I agree with Litman on this front, and for me the only question is when. But my true fantasy -- which I doubt will come true but dreams are dreams -- is that Trump be overturned and disavowed while members of the majority (especially Roberts) remain on the Court.

They deserve that. They deserve to have to sit there are watch as their opinion is relegated to history's dustbin. If there's justice in the world, they will be there the day Trump v. Hawaii finishes Korematsu's arc.

Post-Op Thoughts on Tonight's Elections

With one major exception -- the Kansas Republican gubernatorial primary -- most of the big races from tonight have been called. The biggest, of course, is the special election in the Ohio 12th, where Republican Troy Balderson looks to have just eked out a victory over Democrat Danny O'Connor to keep this seat red. That about exhausts the good news for the GOP, though -- a sub-1% win in an ancestrally Republican district that voted for Trump by double-digits can hardly be thought of as good news. If the country swings the way this district did, the Democrats take back the House by a comfortable margin.

That's the obvious takeaway. But what else have we learned tonight?

• O'Connor improved on Hillary Clinton's numbers pretty much everywhere in the district (save Balderson's base of Muskingum County) -- which you kind of have to, in order turn a double-digit deficit into a near-dead heat. But where he really outperformed is in juicing turnout in the most Democratic part of the district: Franklin County, home to The Ohio State University. What does that mean? Well, on the one hand it supports those who argue that the route to Democratic success lies in exciting the core base rather than chasing swing voters. But on the other hand, it also suggests that the core base is perfectly happy to get energized about a relative moderate like O'Connor (at least in the right district).

• The other tea leaf we're seeing is that Democrats are casting more ballots in these primaries than Republicans, even in locales that have generally been thought of as Democratic stretches. So far, more Democrats than Republicans have cast ballots in the WA-03 and WA-08 primaries, and are tight in the WA-05 -- all GOP districts (Reps. Jamie Herrera-Beutler and Cathy McMorris Rodgers hold the WA-03 and WA-05, respectively, while in the WA-08 Dino Rossi will be looking to hold retiring Rep. Dave Reichert's seat). Ditto the MO-02, where incumbent Rep. Ann Wagner was thought to be a tough, if reachable, target for Team Blue.

• Gretchen Whitmer's victory over Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan's Democratic gubernatorial primary shows what should be obvious: sometimes Sanders-style progressives win primaries, and sometimes they don't. Democratic Party voters are neither implacably opposed to left-wing candidates nor are they congenitally averse to them.

• What might be true, though, is that there is genuine progressive energy right now in big cities, especially around criminal justice issues. Ferguson City Councilor Wesley Bell's upset ouster of longtime St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch (he who unsuccessfully prosecuted the Michael Brown shooting) is the under-the-radar Big Deal of the day. I also think we can slot in Rashida Tlaib's likely victory in the race to replace Rep. John Conyers in the Detroit-based MI-13. If her lead holds, Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, will become the first Muslim woman in Congress (she's also a J Street endorsee). Congrats to her!

• Finally, Missouri voters soundly rejected proposed "right-to-work" anti-union legislation, overturning the legislatively enacted bill by a crushing 2-1 margin. There's been a noticeable trend of union and working-class victories in some traditionally red-territories (think the teachers' strikes in Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona), and this seems like further evidence of a shifting tide on the issue.

There Are No Credits Leftist Jews Can Cash

Jon Lansman is the founder of Momentum, the left-wing group that swept Jeremy Corbyn to power in UK's Labour Party.

He's also Jewish -- a fact which might surprise external observers familiar with how Momentum in general and Corbyn and particular have ridden a wave of antisemitic sentiment.

You might not believe me, but I really am not too familiar with Jon Lansman. I don't know if he's a good guy in a bad situation, or a crass as-a-Jew opportunist. For the purpose of this post, I don't need to know.

What I do know, and what this Nick Cohen column very effectively establishes, is that despite his unimpeachable credentials as a leftist and as a Corbynite, Jon Lansman would not be able to effectively combat antisemitism in his movement even if he tried. Why? Because the moment he does, he'll lose his credentials as a leftist and a Corbynite.

When Corbyn supporters cite the support of Lansman or groups such as the tiny Jewish Voices for Labour as evidence that accusations of left anti-Semitism are groundless, they argue in bad faith. If Lansman or any other Jew were to say they had gone too far and must change their behaviour, the left would denounce them. 

When he challenged Corbyn’s appointee for the post of Labour general secretary, Corbyn supporters immediately told Lansman his views were worthless because he was ‘a Zionist infiltrator’, who puts ‘Israel above the left or even Britain’. In Leninist terms, the function of Jews on the modern left is to be useful idiots who can be dispensed with as soon as their usefulness ends.

There's a mythology out there that people don't listen to antisemitism claims because Jews "cry antisemitism" all the time. The corollary to that is that, were there Jews who were better Jews -- Good Jews -- and didn't engage in such abominable behavior, then their call-outs of antisemitism would get attention and a fair hearing.

And I suspect at least some Jews (I have no idea if Lansman is one of them) really believe this. They think "I'm not -- I've shown I'm not -- one of those Jews. I acknowledge that antisemitism claims are sometimes (often, usually) a bad faith smear. I've proven myself a good comrade. I've earned my credits. So if I say somethings antisemitic, I can cash those chips."

It doesn't work. It never works. The minute you go to that well, you'll find out it's dry. Even a group like JVP -- whom you'd think could never be accused of being too quick on the antisemitism trigger -- still falls victim to it on the rare occasions they do try to levy a claim of antisemitism against one of their "friends".

Why?

Because they're not actually thought of as epistemically reliable. They're not trusted independent of their utility in propping up the previously-arrived-at conclusions of their putative allies. And once they stop serving that function, the antisemitic default rises back up -- a Jew who disagrees with you is a Jew who's probably lying, probably part of the conspiracy, probably [hiss] a Zionist. It doesn't matter what your credentials are. The threshold bar for talking too much about antisemitism is talking about antisemitism, period.

In a sense, this makes me more sympathetic to Lansman than you might expect. He's in a trap he can't escape from; there's no way for him to be an influential leftist and a prominent critic of antisemitism in his movement at the same time. There's no trick -- neither ironclad arguments nor impeccable left credentials -- that would force people to let him occupy both worlds. He is in what Memmi calls an "impossible condition", one "which can have no solution in its actual structure." Without being too glib about it, when you think the reason people gaslight, deride, and dismiss Jewish testimony is because of the Jews, and not the antisemitism, of course you'll fail to see the trap. But in an antisemitic society, Jews get no usable credits for being Good.

On Open Hillel's Brief Against Hillel

There is an ongoing lawsuit by Jewish students at San Francisco State University alleging the school has tolerated and promoted an antisemitic environment -- among other ways, by deliberately excluding the campus Hillel from certain university activities. Open Hillel just filed an amicus brief in that case, arguing that because of its controversial "standards of partnership," Hillel does not represent all Jews and therefore acts singling it out for exclusion and ostracization cannot be seen as probative evidence of antisemitism.

I have a column in Tablet Magazine today that goes into further detail. In essence, my observations are that (a) this represents a dramatic escalation of Open Hillel's posture towards Hillel International and the establishment Jewish community; and (b) as a matter of anti-discrimination doctrine, the principle it asserts (that attacking an identity-affiliated group cannot be seen as evidence of discriminatory intent if the group is not wholly coterminous with or uniformly backed by the relevant protected class) would represent a disastrous narrowing of anti-discrimination law -- not just for Jews, but for all marginalized groups.

There are no LGBT groups supported by all queers, no African-American groups that enjoy the backing of every Black individual, no Middle Eastern groups inclusive of all Middle Easterners. But if a public university made the terrible decision to single out the Gay-Straight Alliance or the Black Lives Matter chapter or the Middle Eastern Students Association for exclusion, LGBT, Black, and Middle Eastern students would have every right to feel as if their equal standing on campus was threatened—regardless of whether every single member of those identity groups felt represented by the corresponding student organization and regardless of whether the university could identify a more palatable (if likely far less representative) alternative. So too with Hillel. That Jewish students perceive university efforts to extirpate Hillel from campus life as a form of anti-Semitism is neither mysterious nor idiosyncratic.

The full argument is in the column, of course. The only other thing I want to observe is that Open Hillel's press release promoting the brief suggests it is motivated in large part by opposition to the Lawfare Project, which is backing the plaintiffs' suit against SFSU. OH asserts that the Lawfare Project "uses lawsuits as a tactic to shut down speech that calls attention to Israel’s actions or protests Israel’s policies."

I have no quarrel with skepticism towards the Lawfare Project, and on the internet OH and TLP can squabble back and forth indefinitely for all I care. But courtrooms are not the venue to act out such grievances, because court decisions set precedents. They're not just meaningless notches in a virtual scorebook; anti-discrimination law changes as a result of these rulings, and (as I argue in my column), it would change much for the worse if Open Hillel's position is adopted. There are stakes here -- not only for themselves -- that I highly doubt Open Hillel considered, and that is a failure of responsibility on their part for which they deserve serious chastisement.

The Internet Teaches You Things

I've been on the internet for a long time. This blog has been around since 2004! That's positively ancient in internet-years.

Over the past few days -- not prompted by anything in particular -- I've been reflecting on some of the things I've learned from just observing people talking on the internet. Of course, you could say that the internet is a very particular forum where people exhibit very particular forms of behavior. And that's true. But it's also the case that the internet is an unprecedented aggregation of a diverse array of voices, personalities, and speaking styles, and that there is something to be said for taking its denizens seriously.

So, without further adieu, here are some things I've learned, and advice I accordingly offer, as an official Elder of the Internet:

1. No matter your ideology, there will always be someone purer than you. That doesn't mean they're right. This includes centrists.
2. 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.
3. No ideology is immune from having assholes as adherents. Moreover, people who are assholes can and will express their assholery in the argot of their ideology. So a conservative asshole will use conservative rhetoric and language to effectuate being an asshole, while a socialist asshole will use socialist rhetoric and language. Ditto liberals, ditto centrists, ditto nationalists, ditto anyone. Nothing about the ideology will stop them from doing so, and certainly do not believe your ideology is an exception.
4. Consequently, I'm dubious that the fact of being an asshole makes one significantly more likely to be attracted to a particular ideology. Rather, I think people adopt political ideologies for other reasons and, "fortuitously", then find that they can still be as trollish and nasty as they like within their confines.
5. Virtually everyone is more complex than they appear at first glance. Try to give people the benefit of the doubt that they're not the stock caricature version of the position you think they hold or the identity you imagine they occupy. If you take them seriously, you'd be surprised how far they might be willing to walk with you.
6. That said, there are many genuinely bigoted, malicious, prejudiced people out there. You can call them out, or ignore them, or block them, or mock them, or even argue with them. But don't be in denial about their existence. This goes triple for acknowledging the existence of bigots who are targeting people-not-like-you.
7. Related: The bigotry you and yours face is serious and should be taken seriously. But you don't need to deny that others are burdened in their own way, and you should be self-critical about one's assumption that they're not. Whether your claim is that "nobody would ever tolerate this if it was said about Jews" or "only when it's said about Jews do people tolerate this", you're almost certainly wrong. They would say it about Jews; they'd say it about other groups too.
8. There will never be an "-ism" (racism, antisemitism, sexism, etc.) case that is incontestable to everyone. No matter how obvious it seems, someone will be there to contend it's actually fair play (why hello, Councillor "Jews are blood-drinkers"!). Consequently, the whole point of asserting that something is racist or antisemitic or what have you is to do so in cases where someone is contesting it. And the fact that the -ism claim is contested does not, itself, suffice to refute it.
9. Resist pile-ons. Yes, accountability is important. And yes, each individual contribution to the pile-on would typically (not always -- see death threats) be proportionate and reasonable if isolated and placed in the context of an individual, face-to-face encounter. But aggregated together, they quickly can spiral out of control, and frequently magnify all the internet's worst qualities.
10. Be generous when reading others. Precision can be hard on social media platforms. Try to be precise in your own work. When you inevitably fail (and you will), you'll be grateful when others are generous while reading you.
11. The worst thing you can be on the internet is an abusive troll. But the second worst thing you can be is a hack. Practices associated with hackery include cheap shots, indifference to facts, mischaracterizations, ungenerous reading of interlocutors, smarminess, and lazy adoption of prevailing narratives without evidentiary support. Don't be a hack. Perhaps more importantly: if you're a publisher, don't publish hacks. Nobody is forcing you to do it.
12. Hypocrisy arguments are almost always a double-edged sword. If you say "how can you criticize A for X when you don't criticize B for Y?", it invites the retort "how can you criticize B for Y when you don't criticize A for X?" Typically, all that's revealed is that both parties to the conversation are hacks.
13. There is a huge difference between suggesting that a given piece of art or writing was of such poor quality that it shouldn't have been run (and that the fact of its publication reflects poorly both on the author and on whoever elected to run it) versus suggesting that some de jure authority should have prohibited it from running. The latter is censorship, the former is quality control. Also, the claim that a given piece is racist, antisemitic, etc. etc. is a (subset) claim about its quality, not something that stands apart and separate from it.
14. That said, stretch yourself in terms of what you're willing to read or consider. Precisely because personal, private refusal to read or consider something is not censorship, it is in some ways a more tempting and dangerous mechanism for isolating yourself from challenging ideas. It's a fine line between the truth that one need not consider obviously repugnant and unjustified claims (e.g., Holocaust denial) and the truth that one should consider difficult and challenging claims, and only you can police yourself on this front. Take responsibility for your intellectual health.
15. Recognizing the diversity and pluralism in other groups is good. Searching high and low for the members of other groups who happen to agree with what you already think about them, and then claiming credit for your diverse, pluralistic reading habits, is not good. It is hackery.
16. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if something you write is widely disparaged and reviled by your target audience, it's not because you were telling some difficult truth or produced a misunderstood masterpiece. It's just because it was bad. Reveling in a hostile reception for its own sake is a bad habit. Reflexive contrarianism is not a good look. Telling yourself that it's all just "people who like being offended" is usually self-serving. And provocation for its own sake is almost always hackery.
17. People follow people on social media for all sorts of reasons. Don't read too much into it, unless there's a really obvious pattern. "So-and-so follows X-and-Y who once tweeted Z in 2009!" is pretty much always a hack move.
18. Nobody can force you to be an asshole, or a troll, or a hack. Own your choices online. No one is a saint all the time, and far be it from me to discount the joy of a great internet burn. But default towards kindness.

Negative Partisanship and the Politics of Hurt

Idealistically, we think of the process of political identity formation proceeding something like this:

• I am pro-life; Republicans are the pro-life party; therefore, I am a Republican.

We come to certain political positions, we figure out which party best matches those positions, and we vote accordingly.

In reality, this turns out to be wildly optimistic. What is more often observed is that loyalty to one's political team comes first, and that in turn drives one's substantive political commitments. It looks something like this:

• I am a Republican; Republicans are pro-life; therefore, I am pro-life.

Partisanship rules the day, and the implications for the project of political persuasion are worrisome. If people adopt their political positions first (presumably via a process of reasoning) and then pick their party in turn, then they can be persuaded to change their minds through debate about the underlying issues. But if they pick the party first (based on...?) and only come to the positions later, what new information would cause them to change their minds?

Yet there is some evidence that the picture is grimmer still. The above account suggests that people positively associate with a party and pick positions that line up with that party. But there's another theory making the rounds -- that of negative partisanship -- which says that the focus isn't positive but reactive. People are motivated by dislike or outright hatred for the other party, and choose issue-positions based on whatever is dispreferred by the external group. So we get something like this:

• I hate Democrats; Democrats are pro-choice; therefore, I am pro-life.

In many cases, this looks observationally-equivalent to the above (are you pro-life because Republicans are or because Democrats aren't?). But not always. Consider the rapid ... let's go with "evolution" ... of Republican voters on the subject of Russia and Putin. It doesn't seem to me like there was widespread public embrace of Russia by Republican Party elites. But as Democrats continually hammered on Russia being a threat and meddling in our election, Republicans started to associate "concern with Russia" with a Democratic position. And so, like lemmings, they flocked to the opposite. Indeed, the Trump phenomenon itself can be viewed in this light. Republican Party elites did not, to say the least, initially back him. But it was evident that liberals hated Trump. And if you're motivated by "whatever liberals hate", then Trump's appeal is obvious.

Any iteration of acting "to own the libs" is basically an iteration of this. "Cleek's Law" famously posited that "today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today: updated daily." Go back further, and you have Nietzsche's idea of ressentiment. It's reactionary politics; it isn't based on being for anything.

None of this is me saying anything new. But I did want to make two observations that I think are worth stressing.

The first is that I doubt negative partisanship is limited to parties. People can be negatively motivated by a desire to hurt groups as well. I suspect a lot of the backlash against, say, Black Lives Matter, is a form of racial negative partisanship (in another era we could get away with simply labeling that "racism", but today we need to obscure under layers). White racial resentment is such that when they see large-scale Black political action, that's reason alone to react against it. And one of my main worries of rising antisemitism is a concern that we'll start to see a form of negative partisanship there too -- circumstances where Jews being worried or concerned is taken as proof you're doing something right. 

That's not been the status quo on the left -- including the African-American community, whose staunch anti-antisemitism commitments have been evident for as long as they've been underappreciated by too many in the Jewish community. In race after race, where Jews have expressed concern that a given candidate (Cynthia McKinney, Nikki Tinker, Charles Barron) is hostile to us and ours, the African-American community has responded like allies (and Jews, for our part, have wanted no part with our anti-Black extremists like Seth Grossman). But there's worries that might be changing -- that when Jews say "we're worried about such and such candidate", too many seem to think of it as a sign that the candidate is on the right track. It means one is striking a blow against AIPAC (that this is raised even in cases where AIPAC doesn't seem remotely related to the controversy is independently worrisome), or is proof that new, more deserving minorities are rising to political ascendancy. What was it that Linda Sarsour said? Jews might have to "have to come to terms with being uncomfortable." Jewish discomfort isn't a problem to be addressed, it's a positive good to be lauded.

And that brings me to my second point. Negative partisanship is not by any means solely a right-wing phenomenon. We're all susceptible to it, and indeed, there's a certain logic to it: if you told me that a given piece of legislation was supported by Donald Trump and I knew nothing else about it, I'd still take that one fact as at least prima facie evidence that the legislation was bad. But I can't help but think that negative partisanship is, at root, necessarily reactionary. It's a politics driven by a desire to hurt, and that never moves us in the right direction.

Yes, there are days when I'm like "you know what? Kansas can burn to the ground for all I care -- their voters made their bed and they should have to lie in it." But in my better moments, I don't like that version of myself. It's not just because there are plenty of Kansasans who didn't vote for insane reactionary Republicans and ultra-regressive tax cut extravaganzas. It's also because I don't want to endorse any sort of politics that is predicated on seeing people hurt. Yes, it's funny in its way that the leopards are eating their faces. But that doesn't mean I don't oppose leopards-eating-people's-faces on principle.

More Memmi Quotes (on Autonomy as the Specific Liberation of the Jew)

Is it obvious what I'm reading these days?

You may choose, in spite of everything, to remain on the side of the oppressed, whatever the risks; but you cannot prefer to be oppressed. In any case I fail to see the glory in it. To uphold one's oppressed condition is an act of false daring and empty words, if it does not also mean an action to abolish it, the firm decision to do everything in one's power to cease being an oppressed person and to end the oppression.

For me the dignity of the oppressed begins, first, the moment he becomes conscious of his burden; second, when he denies himself all camouflage and all consolation for his misery; third, and above all, when he makes an effective decision to put an end to it. May all the victims of history forgive me. I know only too well how a victim becomes a victim. I understand the subterfuges which enable him to survive. I pity his inner ruin, but I do not admire his grimaces of pain or his scars. I do not find his suffering face the most beautiful in the world nor do I consider the plight of the victim to be very admirable.

Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, trans. Judy Hyun (New York: Orion 1966), 271-72.

The first condition of a specific liberation seems to me self-evident: the oppressed person must take his destiny into his own hands. My life must no longer depend on any treaty, often signed with other ends in mind, by anyone with anyone. Not that alliances or the aid of generous friends must be refused, but neither Socialist planning, nor the abstract humanitarianism of the Democrats, nor Christian charity are essential. Better still, no one owes us anything. I became adult, I believe, the day I understood that nothing was owed me. It was high time we became adult; in other words, non-dependent, neither in fear nor in hope. We should not have had to ask ourselves piteously and in vain why the Pope was silent or why the Americans abandoned us, why the Russians didn't budge. And why not the Red Cross! And the A.S.P.C.A.! Liberty is not a gift; bestowed, conceded, protected by someone else, it is denied and vanishes. Our liberation must depend on our own fight for it.

Id. at 274-75.

Still none of this was specifically Jewish. All impossible conditions call for a radical solution, all absolute misfortunes demand an absolute revolt. How were we to discover the specific conditions of each liberation? Here I proposed another criterion: the liberation of an oppressed person must be made as a function of the specific conditions of his oppression. In other words, our starting point had to be the complete description of the Jewish condition, which I have attempted to give in my last book and in this book. The reader may now understand why I have dwelt on this problem; it was not only because I needed to free myself of it, or to exorcize my own ghosts. The liberation of the Jew must be deduced from his particular misfortune.

 The misfortune of the Jew is then a total misfortune; in other words, it does not encompass only one aspect of his life, his political autonomy, his economic function, his culture or his religion. It concerns his whole existence, his relations with himself and with others; it affects the unity of his personality, divided into a private individual and a public person; and his whole dimension as a questionable citizen and an historically impotent man. It is true that all oppression has a strong tendency to become a total oppression, but it is a question of degree and nuance, of generalities and accent. The specific conditions of each oppression consists precisely of such degrees and particular intonations. The Jew is not oppressed as a member of a class, which distinguishes him from the proletariat, for example. Nor is he oppressed as a member of a biological group, which distinguishes him from Negroes or women. He is affected as a member of a total, social, cultural, political and historical group. In other words, the Jew is oppressed as a member of a people, a minor people, a dispersed people, a people always and everywhere in the minority (which distinguished him from the colonized, also oppressed as a people, but a people in the majority).

Therefore the Jew has to find a total solution, one which answers every aspect of his threatened existence, which guarantees his present but also rehabilitates his past and restores to him possession of his future. In other words, the Jew, oppressed as a people, must find his autonomy and freedom to express his originality as a people. Therefore to overcome absolutely, the revolt of the Jew must include that particular aspect which will necessarily rehabilitate and recognize him as a major and majority people.

In effect, if the Jews do not pull themselves together as a people they will necessarily remain a separated minority, threatened and periodically exterminated. If they do not defend themselves as a people they will remain subject to the benevolence of others, in other words, to the fluctuations of their moods, more often bad than good. They will remain condemned to serve as a too-convenient scapegoat, a target for other people's economic and political difficulties, to live in ambiguity and by subterfuge and in fear--his own and that of others, to which he strangely clings, like a hated ghost.

Only this collective autonomy will give us at last the daring and the taste for liberty which alone are the foundations of dignity....

Humanism yes, but humanism after the liberation and not this fake humanism, a one-way street where I must consider all men as saints in a humanity in which I still have no place.

Id. at 276-79.

The Tide Never Goes Out Roundup

I've been relying on roundups more than I'd like recently, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

* * *

Potential blockbuster lawsuit by a former top staffer accuses ZOA chieftain Mort Klein of massive financial improprieties. I don't think I can even cover this story I want it to be true so badly.

Chris LeBron reviews Charles Mills on American liberalism and race.

Robin DiAngelo's article on "White Fragility" has been making the rounds forever (and nearly from the moment I've read it I've wanted to write about "Gentile Fragility"), but now she's turned it into a book.

First explicitly joint Jewish-Arab pride event in Israel held in the city of Lod.

Labour continues its aggressive campaign against antisemitism .... reporters. Meanwhile, another Labour Councilor suggests that the entire antisemitism controversy is a Mossad plot to undermine Corbyn, while Corbyn himself (in 2012 comments) went on Iranian State TV to suggest that a terrorist attack on Egyptian police was actually an Israeli false flag ("I suspect the hand of Israel in this whole process of destabilisation" could, at this point, be Labour's motto). But they did suspend their "Jews are blood-drinkers and should be executed" Councilor, so there's that.

Any time I read one of these "I'm a conservative professor and my students refuse to read any White Male author" screeds, all I think is "Really? Because my students never give me a fuss about reading those same authors you listed. Maybe you're just terrible at teaching?"

Albert Memmi on the Jew-of-the-Left

As part of my summer reading (basically, this summer I committed to do zero work on my dissertation and instead just ... read. Doesn't matter what, just read things. I'd say my success in this endeavor has been middling), I've picked back up the work of Albert Memmi. He's a fascinating figure -- it's no accident he's been a regular feature of my periodic philosophical musings about Jews on this blog -- and much of his observations on Jews and the Jewish experience remain resonant a half century after publication.

One of the things I like about Memmi is that he is an unimpeachable member of the left -- he made his bones, after all, as an advocate for Tunisian decolonization and his most famous work, The Colonizer and the Colonized, is part of the anti-colonial studies canon -- but he is not blind to its faults or its perils. He simultaneously believes the left is the only reasonable path for the Jew and is well aware of the betrayals the left has regularly foisted upon its Jewish comrades. A chapter in his The Liberation of the Jew ("The Jew and the Revolution") remains an outstanding exploration of how Jews relate to the left, and is worth diving into in detail.

First, we should place an important preliminary front and center: Memmi states outright that a reasonable, thinking Jew "can only be of the left". "[A] Jew," he writes, "is conservative only out of blindness or some short-sighted caution." While money or economic success may provide some measure of security in certain cases, "it is in the final analysis an illusory shelter; the Rothschilds themselves supplied their quota to the deportation camps. Whatever kind of insurance he has, the Jew remains a dominated person." And while right-wing politics occasionally gestures towards a sort of facile inclusion of the Jews, "[t]he government of the Right, cultivating the myth of the homogeneity of the nation, of the people or of the race, naturally tends to exclude the Jew, or at least limit his participation" (228-29). This echoed a point he made in his earlier Portrait of a Jew, where he said:

How can a man be a Rightist when he is a Jew?. . . The alliance of Jewry with Right wing movements can never be anything but temporary . . . To preserve the existing order, the Right has to stiffen and emphasize differences while at the same time having no respect for what is different. To preserve itself as a privileged group, it must repulse, restrict and repress other groups. Now it may be that a Jew may desire the survival of a given social order in which, by chance, he is not too unhappy. But in addition, he wants the differences between himself and the non-Jews in that class to be forgotten or at least minimized. The Right, either openly or covertly, drives the Jew back to his Jewishness and can only condemn and burden his Jewishness (218-19).

As Daniel Burston fairly observes, this argument doesn't hold in a case where Jews can themselves form the government and realistically attempt to cultivate their own myth of the homogeneity of the nation -- that is, it doesn't hold in Israel (surely, the nation-state bill is very much an illustration of how Jews, too, can genuinely indulge in this sort of right-wing exclusivity when they'd be the beneficiaries of homogenization). In its way, Israel is what has allowed the emergence of genuine right-wing Jewish politics. This isn't itself an argument against Israel (there's no time to go into that here, but see my post on strength, repentance, and diasporaism for hints on where I'd go), but it does reveal the potential for a sort of complacency in the Jewish world that thinks it is our destiny rather than our work to remain democratic, egalitarian, and a light-unto-nations. They're more committed to the slogan of "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East" than they are to the reality of it.

Anyway, I digress. Memmi thinks that Jews -- certainly, at least those in the diaspora and under conditions of domination from non-Jews (a condition not solved simply when some Jews have money) have to be on the left. And on that I agree, and anyone who thinks that the Trumpist Republican Party or Orbanist Hungary or Austria's Freedom Party or any of their compatriots will be reliable friends of the Jews is deluding themselves. All the seeds of nativist resentiment stand ready to blossom against the Jews, now as they ever had, and if you think past attendance at a CUFI rally is going to stand as even a speedbump to embracing it going forward you haven't been paying attention to contemporary politics. The right is not and will never be a friend of the Jewish minority.

But, Memmi continues, this does not and has not meant that the left has reciprocated in protecting us:

It is true that the parties and governments of the Left very quickly gave us reason to doubt their ability to resolve our problem. Relatively speaking, we had certainly furnished the different parties of the Left with the largest contingent of hard-core militants, but this did not put an end to the hesitations and muddling of the European Left with respect to us. The Left did not defend us against the vile racist aggression with the complete strength and decisiveness which we had a right to expect from it. I have already spoken of the enthusiasm with which many of our youth movements followed the Soviet experience.... Did all this prevent an anti-Semitic brochure from appearing in Kiev as late as 1964? Did it prevent Russia from feigning ignorance of the kibbutz, the only true collectivist experience in the world? I will never be able to rid myself of a terrible doubt: would the Red Army have stood immobile at the gates of the Warsaw ghetto if it had not contained Jews alone? (Liberation of the Jew, 229)

And then Memmi writes a passage that rang very familiar: a "portrait" he drew of the prototypical "Jew-of-the-Left" -- or at the very least, of its most devoted foot-soldiers:

A portrait of the Jew-of-the-Left would be easy to paint. Under a dogmatic and assured exterior, he would be emotional, easily disturbed, both Manichean and Rousseauist; determinedly logical, but blind to the obvious, a mixture of desperate intellectual severity and annoyingly naive sentimentalism; stubbornly insisting on seeing as friends people who would watch him being tortured with indifference; believing in the fundamental goodness of man and in the irremediable evil of some men; clearly dividing humanity into two imaginary lot: on the one side the dirty skunks--reactionary, racist, incomprehensible monsters, or those reduced to thoughts of their wallets alone; on the other, their victims--the good and the pure who happily make up the great majority. Though they are at present mystified, one day they will certainly carry out the revolution because they have already done so in their hearts. Then, that which comically betrays, better than all the rest, the Jewish note: a touchy disinterestedness. On no condition can anyone suspect him for a moment of thinking of himself or his people. He fights unconditionally for all humanity; a trait which everyone uses and abuses; perfectly abstract, in reality laughable and touching; in the final analysis always ridiculed and in fact he is a sort of cuckold (231).

Why yes, I am familiar with the type (and again, for the right-wing Jews crowing in the bleachers -- scroll back up, because he thinks you're even more ridiculous).

Memmi proceeds to delineate and critique a particular pathology of the Jew-of-the-Left, who can abstractly agree that Jews are among the people he or she is fighting for but is squirmy and uncomfortable to do so with any specificity. It feels too provincial, too parochial, to back those distinctively their own -- a logic which ends up concluding at the absurd demand that people "fight only against an injustice of which he is not a victim" (234). And then you get the plea that the silence about Jewish issues is a tactical one -- yes, we must fight for Jews, but not in a "provocative" way; yes, we must fight for Jews, but doesn't speaking of antisemitism just "give substance to [its] delirium?"; yes, we must fight for Jews, but we don't want to divert attention from "more decisive battles" (234-35).

He even identifies a particular form of comfort this sort of Jew-of-the-Left can create for him or herself by encrusting themselves in the body of the left so wholeheartedly that antisemitism and the Jewish question really do cease to be a problem for them (this is how you can get the Jews who proclaim that their entire careers have been spent inside the belly of leftist politics and yet they've somehow never once experienced antisemitism -- almost always, they're Jews whose Jewishness starts and ends at that sentence). Here Memmi is alluding back a prior chapter on "encystment", a condition of ghettoization where the ghetto itself provides a soothing, comfortable (but ultimately quite brittle) shield against the dangers and anxieties of the outside world. The left can be its own ghetto, albeit of an inverted sort where instead of being entirely Jewish the Jew instead is asked to be not Jewish at all: To be comfortable in the left,

the Jew-of-the-Left must pay for this protection by his modesty and anonymity, his apparent lack of concern for all that relates to his own people. In the hope of a future victory he must first agree to lose everything. Like the poor man who enters a middle -class family: they demand that he at least have the good taste to make himself invisible. As if this obligatory discretion were not already a very nasty symptom of the real meaning of this admission (236).

Here there is at least a bit of a more modern complication, in the form of a racial capitalism which very much values and demands that its "good Jews" speak as "good Jews". But the point still generally holds.

Next, Memmi attacks what has become almost a shibboleth among the contemporary left that I am exceedingly skeptical of (it is a mainstay of the corrupted form of intersectionality): that all oppressions are connected such that every oppressed person is the natural ally of all other oppressed persons. Memmi takes a dimmer but I think more realistic view: "[A]n oppressed person must never expect others to hand him his liberation." He chides Sartre for thinking that the French Democrats would naturally be allies of the Jews or the Algerians in their fight -- why, exactly, would we think that other than romanticism? And this reliance -- never all that reliable -- can also end up being demobilizing and debilitating:

[T]he Democrat's fight for the Jew always had overtones of "in favor of the Jew." At best, he fights for the Jew because he fights for all the oppressed. But it is always graciousness on his part. The Jew must depend on the good will of the Democrats for his security, his safety. The Jew must hope for his salvation indirectly and the Democrat will give it to him indirectly.

Alas, that is not all: the history of our relations with the Left--of our messianic hope of being delivered by the Left--is the history of a great derided hope. Forty years after the Russian revolution anti-Semitism remains a fact in Socialist countries and among the militants of many political parties and unions of the European and American Left. When I pointed out this fact in Portrait of a Jew I was indignantly told I was repeating calumnies perpetrated by the adversaries of democracy. Except for a few tirelessly stubborn or blindly unconditional advocates no one denies this any more today. At most they try to explain that it is not exactly racism, that it is not a deliberate desire to hurt Jews, but a question of certain inevitable social and historical difficulties. Maybe so; in any case, it looks savagely like anti-Semitism to me (238-39, emphasis added).

That last italicized part reads far, far ahead of its time. A few pages later, addressing the Soviet apologists who say their government cannot be accused of "intentional anti-Semitism," Memmi concedes the point but rejoins "what follows is even worse: it has become, in spite of itself, objectively anti-Semitic, as if by some internal fatality" (243). The interceding pages were a critique of Marxism's impotence at answering "the Jewish question"; this same discourse could apply with considerable force towards UK Labour today (right up to and including the potential concession that "intentional anti-Semitism" is lacking so long as it is reciprocally conceded that this absence is utterly besides the point. Such reciprocity, alas, is never forthcoming).

Memmi concludes by suggesting that Jewish liberation, like American Black liberation or any other liberation, must occur in a specifically Jewish way. Generalities about liberation that claim to back them all in one fell swoop won't do the trick (this is where Marxism's over-reliance on class fails). That segues into the next chapter. But what I want to conclude with is that this critique of the Jew-of-the-Left -- bracing as it is -- works only because Memmi is, in his own way, very much a Jew-of-the-Left (as am I). It is not and should not be viewed as a cri de coeur for right-wing politics or even a rejection of Jewish leftism (anymore than, say, intersectionality's critique of left-wing feminism and anti-racism practices should've been viewed as a plea for conservatism).

It is a distinctive feature of Jewishness in its own right that, no matter how many bodies we contribute to the left, any critique we offer of the left is never perceived as coming from the inside -- it always demonstrates that we were at best a Fifth Column. It'd be hard to make that charge of Memmi (at least in his mid-century iteration); though I have no doubt that somebody is hard at work trying to pull it off.

 Albert Memmi, Portrait of a Jew, Elisabeth Abbott, trans. (New York: Viking [1962] 1971)

Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, Judy Hyun, trans. (New York: Orion 1966)