The Nebraska Cornwhisker Scenario (U.S. Senate Edition)

As polling for incumbent Montana Senator Jon Tester (D) looks increasingly grim, it becomes increasingly hard to see how Democrats maintain control of the Senate this election. But because the universe's sadistic screenwriters love a good out-of-nowhere twist, there may be one last shot at reprieve from the most unlikeliest of places: Nebraska.

Something really interesting is happening in Nebraska, where Dan Osborn, who is running as an independent, is leading incumbent Republican Deb Fischer in a couple of new polls. (Fischer is being hurt by among other things her decision to ignore her previous commitment not to run for a third term. Her explanation is that she just hadn’t realized that seniority is a thing in the US Senate.)

Osborn, a former union leader, is pro-choice and anti-billionaire, which are two unacceptable positions in the contemporary GOP caucus, but still the best that can be hoped is that he would be more or less the Nebraska version of Joe Manchin.

He’s promising not to caucus with either party, but that’s not realistic, given that caucusing is how committee assignments are handed out. If the Senate ends up 50 GOP 49 Dem and Osborn, and Harris wins, Osborn will be in a position to essentially hand control of the Senate to the Democrats, which of course will given him enormous negotiating leverage. Assuming Tester loses and the Dems hold all the other genuinely competitive seats, that will in fact be the split, so this is definitely a race to watch closely.

While both campaigns are issuing dueling internal polls showing them ahead, Fischer hasn't led in an independent poll since August; the last independent poll of the race (at the end of September) had Osborn up five.

If Osborn wins, I do think it is most likely he will end up caucusing with Democrats (after extracting some monster concessions) -- partially because it'd be weird to run against a Republican in the general and then caucus as a Republican, partially because that's what all the other recent "Independent" Senators have done. But I do wonder at the possibility that he tries to create some sort of centrist junta to run the show,  like we've seen in some state legislatures (Alaska, New York). It'd probably be Murkowski and Collins on the Republican side, Angus King on the Dem/Independent side -- maybe someone like Bob Casey joins them from the Democrats too? Hard to know the exact personnel.

Obviously, from a Democratic vantage point such a setup would be (a) better than GOP control of the Senate and (b) worse than Democratic control of the Senate. But I'm inclined to think that such a setup would be closer to better for Democrats (though I may be unduly influenced by just how catastrophic full GOP control of the Senate would be). It would probably mean that more ambitious Democratic priorities (including things like DC statehood) would be DOA. But I do think it would mean that a President Harris could get (most of) her cabinet and other major appointees through, which is not something we can take for granted under Republican rule. At the very least, it would enable a semi-functioning government, which is a lot more than we can say if Republicans control the Senate and decide to filibuster absolutely everything.

"... But They're Doing Great" at UW

The University of Washington has just released a joint task force report on antisemitism and Islamophobia on its campus. I haven't read it cover-to-cover, but I have looked it over, and it seems to be an excellent and thoughtful report on an obviously touchy subject, for which the authors deserve kudos.*

There's a lot of interesting data to sift through, but there was one chart in particular that stood out to me, and not in a good way.

For those who can't read the chart, it asks a set of affected campus constituencies (e.g., Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims) how they assess the campus climate for themselves and all the other groups. The results were basically that each group said "things are awful for us and ours, but they're doing great!" So, for instance, when Israelis were asked this question, they overwhelmingly reported a hostile campus climate for Israelis and Jews, but generally reported that the campus was comfortable for Arabs, MENA people, Muslims, and Palestinians. Palestinian respondents reported the opposite -- they thought the campus climate was swell for Israelis and Jews, and terrible for Arabs, MENA people, Muslims and Palestinians.

I'll leave aside the first half of the equation ("things are awful for us") for now, though it's bad enough. One could I guess try to contest it if one wanted to, but I see little reason to doubt that the relevant communities are accurately reporting their own experiences in what has almost universally been characterized as a very rough year. But for the latter half of the finding ("... they're doing great") the polarization in responses is especially disturbing. 

The best case explanation I can think of is a failure of empathic imagination. Over many years, I've observed variations of this phenomenon where one's own lived experience of hurt and marginalization is paired with a decided conviction that everybody else is getting life fed to them on a silver platter. This certainly is part of my story around "Us Too-ism" -- everybody else supposedly can get a hostile speaker canceled at the first sign of discomfort, so why not us too? -- but it long predates it. Eight years ago I was writing about circumstances at Oberlin where both Jewish and Black students contrasted tepid community responses to discrimination targeting them with what they saw as "hypervigilant" reactions enjoyed by the other. That post in turn referenced a post almost ten years before that about the "pane of glass" which is obvious to someone standing in one position and invisible to their neighbor looking from a different vantage. We're all able to see the pane of glass standing as an obstacle in front of us, while blind to the pane of glass similarly blocking our neighbor.

And so, perhaps, at UW. The Jewish and Israeli students feel lonely and isolated. They look over at the encampments and the teach-ins and the flag-wavings and think "how lucky they have it -- clearly, the community has their backs when they cry out." The Muslim and Arab and Palestinians students, meanwhile, feel hyperscrutinized and overpoliced. They observe the congressional hearings and the discipline meted out to protesters and think "how lucky they have it -- look how responsive the powers-that-be are to them when they claim injury!" Both groups feel as if they're walking on eggshells, both feel that the tremendous stress and strain they are under is being ignored. In concept, this shared vulnerability could be a vector for solidarity and compassion -- these feelings are commonalities, not distinctions. But the problem is this shared vulnerability isn't perceived as shared at all, but rather unique, and that further entrenches the feeling of loneliness.

And this, as I said, is what I'd consider the best case scenario. Another explanation for the polarized responses is that we're seeing, not a failure of imagination, but a motivated refusal to acknowledge the vulnerability of the "other side", in favor of a constructed image where their power can be contrasted with our weakness. I would not be the first to observe that there is a strand of contemporary politics that aggressively valorizes weakness and vulnerability as its own justification for political solidarity. Though sometimes identified with the identity politics left, there's actually no intrinsic political cadence to this -- the right makes this move all the time. Who can forget when Breitbart, playing off investigations into "Big Oil" or "Big Pharma", created an entire subsection of his website dedicated to resisting the overawing power of "Big Peace"(!)? And of course, the contemporary right contains no shortage of claims that it stands against the elites, the powerful, the globalist cabal -- all attempts to claim the mantle of weakness against the evils of strength.

The true cynic would point to this politics to explain why each group is so emphatic about its own vulnerability -- it wants to stay on the right side of the empathy line. As I said, I don't think one needs to go that far -- I think it is more than likely that each group is accurately recounting its own experiences about itself. The point is, though, that where vulnerability (or at least the perception thereof) is a political resource, it can become a strategic imperative to deny it to one's competitors. Acknowledging that a given community -- Jews and Israelis, or Palestinians and Muslims -- are in a vulnerable state means acknowledging them as valid subjects of empathic concern and legitimating some flow of solidaristic political resources in that direction. Denying that acknowledgment can obstruct that flow, and better maintain an asymmetry in who is worthy of care and concern. Even in circumstances where antagonism isn't that overt, where resources of care and concern are assumed to be scarce, there still will be the temptation to withhold that acknowledgment and try to direct the flow to oneself.

The reason why this is worse that the first explanation is that it isn't something that can be resolved just by expanded imaginative capacities. Again, it speaks to a motivated refusal to recognize the aforementioned joint vulnerability. It's not just ignorance, there are reasons behind it. The work of overcoming this refusal to extend empathy means, in a very real sense, insisting on sharing a political resource that feels very much in short supply with a group that may in important respects feel like a rival. That is not an easy task, least of all in present climates.

Which is the true explanation? To be honest, I suspect there's a little of column A and a little of column B. That does give me a little hope, because I still believe -- justifiably or not -- that there are enough people who won't run away from their expanded empathic imagination such that, once they're peeled away from their more fundamentalist fellows, a new core of solidarity can emerge. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part. But I don't see much of an alternative.

* I also read a critique of the report issued by a small group of Jewish UW stakeholders (I actually read the critique before the original document). I'm not a member of the UW community myself, and so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. But to be perfectly honest I found the critique to be churlish, even petty, clearly partisan in its motivation, and ultimately not at all compelling. 

The overall theme of the critique was a contention that the report was intentionally suppressive of anti-Zionist/pro-Palestinian Jewish viewpoints and so generated skewed conclusions. That contention was extremely weakly supported -- it seemed to me that the critics came in spoiling for a fight and made a series of tendentious or stretched inferences to justify picking one. For example, a single passing mention of the IHRA antisemitism definition (which the report said it "took into consideration along with other definitions", and then never mentioned again) inspired a veritable temper tantrum by the critics and a demand that the university instead adopt the Jerusalem Declaration of Antisemitism as its preferred definition (ironic, since JDA at its inception insisted that it should not be used as a definition of antisemitism in official proceedings!). It also lambastes the report for "attacks" on DEI work, but there is no such attack -- the report actually recommends incorporating antisemitism education and training into existing DEI structures. One can contest the mechanisms through which that incorporation would occur, but this is not an "attack" in any sense -- so where on earth is this defensiveness coming from?

Perhaps the most serious allegation contained in the critique is its speculation that the report authors intentionally skewed their focus groups toward pro-Israel identifying students. This is a very grave charge, but the critics give absolutely no concrete evidence to support it. Literally their only basis for making this claim was that "one focus group was held at UW Hillel (an organization with standards of partnership that explicitly disallow affiliation with Jews critical of the state of Israel)." That and that alone was sufficient for the critics to assert with confidence that "We know" (we know!) "that whatever steps were taken were not sufficient" to ensure proper representational diversity.

This is absurd on a multitude of levels. First, the critic's position apparently is that an attempt to connect with the UW Jewish community should have a blanket policy of refusal to work with Hillel (again, their complaint is that one focus group was held there), which is an absolutely wild claim to make and utterly incompatible with actually trying to get a deep cross-section of the UW Jewish community. Second, it's simply false to say Hillel's partnership standards "explicitly disallow affiliation with Jews critical of the state of Israel." The partnership standards aren't directed at students qua students to begin with, and they are a fair flight more specific than targeting those who are merely "critical of the state of Israel" -- an especially important distinction because the UW report is actually very good about recognizing the heterogeneity of Jewish views on Israel and expressly disaggregating those who are "critical of Israel" from those who are outright "anti-Israel" (in the sense of wanting Israel to cease its existence). At most, only the latter would find Hillel an exclusionary space, but the numbers suggest that this cadre is a small (though not non-existent) minority amongst Jewish students. 

Finally, and most damningly, the report clearly did speak to and incorporate the views of the anti-Israel minority. How do we know? Because the report (to its credit!) specifically delved into and devoted an entire section to experiences of marginalization by anti-Zionist Jews -- something one does not see every time one of these reports emerges but is absolutely appropriate given the subject matter. The report even says it included comments from "self-identified anti Zionist/anti-Israel Jews in proportion to their representation in the random sample of quotes provided to the task force co-chairs (18%)" -- that 18% figure is either equal to or if anything higher than (the report was fuzzy on this) the proportion of anti-Israel Jews in the UW Jewish community. Despite all of this effort, none of it is given any mention whatsoever in the critics' document. Perhaps they missed it. But it I think decisively belies the unsupported assertion that the report deliberately ignored the diversity of Jewish views on Israel at UW.

Ultimately, as someone who periodically does consulting work with university leaders on issues of antisemitism, I found this critique tremendously disheartening and frustrating. The report seemed unusually attentive to the diversity of views amongst Jews on matters relating to Israel, and seemed like a good faith attempt to accurately communicate the sentiments of the Jewish community as a whole. That even an effort like this was met with a response like that -- the near-reflexive at this point fuming about Zionist hegemony and suppression of dissident voices etc. etc. is, to be honest, a substantial deterrent in continuing that work forward. There's just no pleasing some people.

Draw the Lines

Slowly but steadily, there are increasing sanctions on Israeli actors responsible for implementing human rights violations in occupied Palestinian territories. The UK just announced new sanctions against West Bank outposts. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken warned Israel that if it doesn't increase the flow of aid into the Gaza Strip, military aid might be cut off. And in one of the more symbolically (if probably not tangibly) impactful moves, Canada revoked the charitable status of the Jewish National Fund* due in part to its activities in the occupied West Bank.

Given the ubiquity in the diaspora Jewish imagination of JNF's little blue boxes, the Canadian decision was a bombshell, and the Canadian Jewish community is reportedly aghast, and claiming that it is being unfairly targeted by a biased organization. I'm not a Canadian lawyer, and so I won't comment on the underlying legal issues. Speaking broadly though, JNF's historical importance does not and should not give it any immunity to violate Canadian non-profit laws or to funnel "charitable" donations to projects that violate Canadian policy, which absolutely can include projects that retrench Israel's occupation of the West Bank and which stymie the project of Palestinian statehood. Blue box or no, there is no right to leverage Canada's tax code to flout Canada's foreign policy priorities regarding Israel and Palestine.

The one thing that does give me pause is the claim that the Canadian tax authorities have refused to tell JNF exactly which activities are out of compliance or how to get back into compliance. That seems troublesome. JNF absolutely should be given clear guidance about what it the tax authorities deem to be compliant and non-compliant activities, at which point JNF can decide whether it wants to come into compliance or not (and the public can decide whether the rules are or are not reasonable). Draw the lines clearly about what is and is not permissible, and let the chips fall where they may -- but secret rules smack of punitive targeting. Other than that, though, my general view is that it is up to Jewish charities to stay in compliance with the law, and it is entirely reasonable for the law to declare that aiding the occupation is not a charitable endeavor.

* The article on this story did give me one blast from the past moment. It extensively quoted Corey Balsam, head of Independent Jewish Voices, praising the decision to revoke JNF's charitable status. That name rang a bell -- Corey Balsam was who I cited in my White Jews: An Intersectional Approach paper arguing that even non-White Jews were functionally "whitened" by virtue of being Jewish. He made that argument in a graduate school thesis paper, so seeing his name pop up again was a fun "where are they now" moment.

Kyrsten Sinema: The Origin Story

Here are some quotes from a politician currently stumping in Michigan, rallying voters around the 2024 presidential race:

• "[W]e do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan."

• "[The goal is] fighting to defeat Harris, not just symbolically but in reality. This is ground zero to punish Kamala Harris and defeat her."

• "Ultimately, Harris is a more reliable and consistently controllable tool for billionaire interests."

• "The Democrats were the party of slavery, and of slave owners — that’s in their history."

Now here is my question for you, dear reader: Based on these quotes, do you think this politician is (a) an utterly unremarkable, bog-standard conservative promoting the MAGA right, or (b) a self-described "leftist" campaigning on behalf of Jill Stein?

Guesses in? Answer: It's a trick question! Self-described "leftists" campaigning on behalf of Jill Stein are utterly unremarkable, bog-standard conservatives promoting the MAGA right!

Anyone who was baffled by Kyrsten Sinema's "journey" from the Green Party to obnoxious contrarian "independent" doesn't pay attention to what the Green Party is all about. Though in fairness, even at her worst Kyrsten Sinema never came out and actively campaigned on behalf of Donald Trump.

(The politician in question is former Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant, who was elected under the banner of the Trotskyist-Socialist "Socialist Alternative" party but, in true splitter fashion, has broken away to form two new organizations -- "Workers Strike Back" and the "Revolutionary Workers" party).

How Awful They Must Be, To Compel Us To Do Such Dreadful Things

I'm writing this post today, because all indicators suggest that tomorrow will be a terrible day.

It is a hazard of being Jewish that the commemorations of our worst moments are, for too many, an opportunity to victimize us further. The flurry of October 7 events that seek to reframe the day away from Hamas' massacre and onto the claim of an Israeli genocide are a case in point -- they are rhetorical salvos against the right of Jews to even grieve, against anything that might suggest that they, too, are inside the communities of concern. Those who say "the genocide didn't begin on October 7" prove too much: if the genocide didn't begin on October 7, then October 7 is not a distinctive date for commemorating the genocide save for those who argue -- with varying degrees of explicitness -- that "the genocide" makes October 7 justifiable or even praiseworthy.

I make that point wholly cognizant of the fact that for others, it is the Palestinian people who cannot be allowed to count as people, whose grief can only be understood as so much performance and manipulation. It is the same basic moral disease, only goring a different ox, and nobody should confuse recognizing the reality of what's happening tomorrow with some sort of tout court denialism of Palestinians right to grieve. Yet one catastrophe amongst many over the past year has been the choice of too many to view acknowledgment of legitimate grief as a zero-sum phenomenon -- we can only truly be in solidarity with these folks if we commit to truly hating those folks.

As terrible as that conclusion is, in a sense it does not surprise me. Many Jews were shocked at how rapidly October 7 seemed to accelerate a sense of hatred against Jews and Israelis. How was it that many people, it seemed, appeared to hate Jews and Israelis more, and more passionately, and more vocally, in the aftermath of October 7 than they did before? But I was not that surprised. Indeed, I understood this response as quite rational -- at least, from a given point of view. If one is truly committed to a pure politics of solidarity, of uncritical defense and apologia of anything and everything occurring under your banner, then the only way to metabolize an atrocity like October 7 is to flee into a deeper cavern of hatred and dehumanization. "How awful they must be, to compel us to do such dreadful things." The more dreadful the thing, the more awful they must be; for surely we and ours would never do engage in such murderous barbarism unless it was against the truly monstrous.

Lest anyone get too smug, this is the same basic impulse behind that sermon I heard last week in synagogue. The theme there, too, was to redirect the congregation's presumed aversion and revulsion towards the scenes of devastation in Gaza and in Lebanon, and explain why they actually showed the depths of our enemies' depravity -- they must be monsters indeed, to force those as righteous as us into such terrible acts. How awful they are, that they force us into such dreadful things. Or take that famous Golda Meir quote, "We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children." 

It's the same theme, repeated ad nauseum. Recall what Montesquieu said about the Spanish atrocities against the indigenous population of the Americas:

Once the Spainards had begun their cruelties, it became especially important to say that "it is impossible to suppose these creatures [the indigenous population] to be men, because allowing them to be men a suspicion might arise that we were not Christian." 

And so too here. An earlier generation predicted that "The Germans Will Never Forgive the Jews for Auschwitz." Now it seems that Palestine solidarity advocates will never forgive the Israelis for 10/7, and the pro-Israel community will never forgive the Palestinians for the war in Gaza. Over and over again, the last atrocity is used to justify the next atrocity, and everyone it seems must play along as a means of expressing "solidarity".

So I expect tomorrow to be a terrible day, and not wholly or even primarily because it commemorates another terrible day. It will be terrible because it be an exclamation mark upon a year's worth of usage of atrocity as its own justification, a terrible cycle of self-generating and self-affirming hatred. Somehow worse than "they did this horror to us, so we must do that horror unto them" (and that's bad enough!), it will be "we did this horror unto them, so we must construct an even more vile image of who they are in order to justify it."

All I will say -- in acknowledged futility -- is that these are choices. It does not have to be this way. We can choose a different path. We can allow for Jews to grieve without complication for those lives destroyed October 7. We can allow for Palestinians to grieve without complication for those lives destroyed in the war on Gaza. We can choose to use tomorrow, and any other day, as an opportunity to deepen empathy and encourage different choices.

If that feels futile, maybe it is. I can't fathom any way to make Bibi Netanyahu choose differently, or Yahya Sinwar, or Columbia's CUAD students, or criminal UCLA "counter-protesters", or Tom "bounce the rubble" Cotton", or Ali Khamenei, or MAGA-hat extremists or professors with paraglider pictures pinned to their profile pics. Their choice to pursue politics of antagonism and hatred and dehumanization may be forever beyond me. Or forget them -- there are all too many people in my immediate circles, friends and loved ones, who I already know I will never be able to make choose differently, and that impotent thought hurts me immeasurably.

But I can choose differently. You can choose differently. Each of us can be a little better than what's going on around us. And who knows? Maybe a lot of people being a little better will make a bigger difference than one might think.

So as hard as it is, try to avoid the awful things that will pervade tomorrow -- the many, many, many voices that will try to persuade you to turn towards hatred and antagonism and extremism. And equally importantly, resist the inclination to flee so far in the other direction that you just develop a polar opposite hatred, antagonism, and extremism. Commit, tomorrow, to a different choice. I'll try my best too. We won't be perfect. But it's the best way I can think of to truly commemorate such a terrible day.

The Sermon Every Jew But Me Heard Every Week

One supposedly ubiquitous aspect of millennial Jewish upbringing that I do not at all relate to is the storyline where their Jewish education was a completely uncritical and unsophisticated "Israel right-or-wrong" drumbeat, one which eventually shattered upon the reality of going to college or meeting Palestinian friends or visiting Israel and the occupied territories. This story is omnipresent amongst Jews of my generation, and it just never resonated with me. I never felt like my Israel education was so inflexible, and so I never had the experience of it crashing into the real world.

The synagogue I grew up in was, admittedly, in many ways atypical. It wasn't especially liberal (no more so than is normal for a Jewish congregation, anyway), but its location in the DC suburbs meant it did have quite a few genuine experts on Israel and the Middle East (well beyond the armchair experts I imagine one can find in any synagogue pew). Their views were by no mean unchallengeable and the environment was certainly unabashedly "pro-Israel", but it did mean we perhaps avoided some of the more nakedly crude manifestations of pro-Israel politics.

This apparent idiosyncrasy in my upbringing has really jumbled my ability to connect with the zeitgeist. On the one hand, I hear the aforementioned tales of Rabbis giving these near-comical caricatures of the "true" contours of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and I can't help but be skeptical -- that's certainly not how I remember it. On the other hand, you hear it often enough and you have to think that maybe I'm just the weird one. While I certainly wouldn't characterize myself as detached from the organized Jewish community, it is the case that my connection to a synagogue has been sporadic in my adult life (if only because I moved around so much) -- so I have little in the way of comparison to juxtapose against the synagogue I grew up with.

But the imminent arrival of a little one in our family has finally prompted us to begin synagogue shopping in earnest, and over the high holidays we've been surveying various congregation's services. One congregation in particular checks a lot of our boxes -- a vibrant community, lots of young families, excellent early childhood resources, and we were excited to try out their services for the first time.

At the same time, I was seeing a flurry of posts and resources talking about how anti-Zionist or Israel-critical Jews were struggling to find welcoming Jewish communal spaces -- where could they go to high holiday services where they wouldn't be bombarded with hasbara defenses of the war in Gaza? And I will admit -- I was feeling skeptical. "Bombarded"? Come on. My own experiences made me exceptionally dubious that there would be much beyond the anodyne and unobjectionable. There'd probably be an Israeli flag on the bimah, and a prayer for the state of Israel, and statements of concern for the hostages and spiking antisemitism on college campuses. If that's what passes for an unwelcoming atmosphere, I'd say deal with it.

And so I attended services, which were quite lovely, and then the Rabbi stood to give his sermon. And it didn't take long for me to realize "oh, so this is the sermon that every Jew of my generation but me is talking about."

My first thought -- since I was synagogue-shopping and so had recently seen exactly how much it costs to join a synagogue -- was "I could just subscribe to Commentary and save a lot of money!" The second thought was to remember all the wonderful programs and suddenly understand why people join megachurches ("I may not agree with the pastor's politics, but my goodness what a preschool!"). I asked my wife her thoughts, and she said "honestly, I just tuned him out" (probably another regular facet of Jewish experience that I don't relate to -- the Rabbi at my childhood synagogue may well be the single most compelling orator I've ever met in my life).

In terms of the sermon itself, I'm not going to go to deep into the substantive details. The nicest thing I could say about the speech was that it was, at best, a good twenty-plus years out of date in speaking of an Israeli government that of course wants nothing more than peace, but alas must deal with the reality that the Palestinians will settle for nothing less than maximal and total victory. This does not, to say the least, aptly characterize the current Israeli government; much of the ideology the Rabbi imputed to Hamas and Hezbollah resonated just as strongly with Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, or yes, Netanyahu -- all of whom have proven entirely willing to sabotage prospects of peace for a chance at complete and utter dominion between the river and the sea.

At root, the sermon read as an attempt to rally a wavering audience to continue to back a war without end whose suffering has been immeasurable, because the belief that a peaceful solution can be achieved is just so much Western naivete. And it was made worse because the sermon did contain the periodic rhetorical gestures in a liberal direction -- a concession that the occupation is a problem here, a willingness to admit Bibi hasn't been perfect there. Hearing such sentiments expressed as brief asides amidst a sea of "we are fighting a culture of death" jeremiads made me understand why so many of my peers view such positions as meaningless smokescreens -- they were not actual concessions; they were balms meant to reassure the audience of its own virtue. And more broadly, if this was the Israel-outlook that I was exposed to as a teenager, then I absolutely would've gotten clobbered when reality hit in adulthood.

Again, I was not prepared for this. In fact, I had a different blog post ready to roll that was all about there being a spectrum of Jewish opinion out there and the broad tent had room for a variety of voices. The week before I had just been invited to give a talk at the Eastside Jewish Commons, and nobody had any qualms about my own harsh critiques of the Israeli government (and indeed on the bulletin board in the space I saw a posting for the Center for Jewish Non-Violence, advertising its work of "co-resistance and solidarity against Israeli occupation and apartheid." I was planning to buttress that experience by reference to my High Holiday experience, which (I was already drafting in my mind) was a High Holiday experience, not a Bibi Netanyahu appreciation tour.

Now, to be sure, I'm still not convinced my initial instincts regarding communal pluralism were fully off-base. Leaving aside the wrongness of making judgments off of an n of 1, even at this very synagogue, the other Rabbi had just written a column about the importance of choosing peace even as her colleague was delivering an ode to the virtues of war. So one might say that Jews engaging in aggressive pro-war politicking is just as much part of a pluralism as Jews organizing to demand a ceasefire is. And again, as much as people say that any "whiff" of dissent results in an insta-purge from mainline Jewish spaces, I feel like I have dissented more than a whiff and I remain unpurged. So what am I doing that's so special? 

But nonetheless, I had a prediction of how I expected the High Holidays to go, and it was falsified. I could have just kept that to myself, of course -- none of you would have been the wiser. But it felt more honest to relay the experience.

We Don't Know What a Fast Garland World Would've Looked Like

It is almost certain that Donald Trump is going to run out the clock on facing real legal consequences for his myriad 2020 election related crimes before the 2024 election occurs. Consequently, many are blaming Attorney General Merrick Garland for being too slow and cautious in his prosecution of Trump. By taking so much time before bringing his case, Garland enabled Trump's various delaying tactics -- aided, of course, by loyalist judges at both the trial level and Supreme Court -- to stretch the cases out until after election day. Had he moved faster and more aggressively, things would have been different.

Maybe. But the thing about alternate futures is that we can't live there; and if we did live there, we wouldn't know here. Suppose that Garland did move fast and aggressive on Trump right at the outset of Biden's term. And suppose that right-wing judges such as the current Supreme Court majority, or Judge Cannon, issued the same rulings that they did in our timeline -- providing broad immunity to Trump designed to shield him from legal accountability. I suspect that, in that timeline, there would be a lot blame cast at Garland for moving too quickly -- he rushed things, he let political expediency get in the way of methodically building a case, and so he gave the courts an excuse to slow things down or even to cast his investigation as a witch-hunt rather than a genuinely legalistic inquiry. Had he been more temperate, things would've gone differently

Now, since we live in our timeline, we know that a more temperate and methodical approach would not have led to a success story. But the point is not just that it's always easy to speak with the benefit of hindsight. It is that we actually don't know what alternative paths-not-taken would look like, and if we did know we wouldn't know what was happening in our path. This is a ubiquitous problem, and while it is entirely reasonable given what we know now to say that Garland made the wrong judgment, it is not hard to imagine a very plausible timeline where Garland made the judgment we (in the prime timeline) say is clearly "right" and it is widely viewed (in the alternate timeline) as a terrible and eminently avoidable miscalculation.

Teshuva in Springfield

When I first saw a story about the Rabbi of Springfield, Ohio giving his views on the Trump campaign's racist invective targeting Haitian migrants, I was heartened at what I assumed would be a clarion call to stand by the stranger in our midst. Then I read the actual story, where the Rabbi instead echoes the hostility in the worst way -- contending that Haitians lack "Western civilized values", stating that "white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant" residents were being "disenfranchised", and contrasting today's immigrants from Jews whom, he said, "wanted to assimilate, they wanted to be good Americans" -- and I felt embarrassed and sad. As much as Ohio and national Jewish organizations might speak otherwise, this would be -- both locally and nationally -- seen as the paradigmatic "Jewish" take.

There has, however, been a modest update to this story, which I found a bit more heartening. The actual Jews in Springfield (it's a small community; this Rabbi commutes from Columbus) made clear that they did not endorse or accept these sentiments. They pushed their Rabbi to do better -- to issue an apology, to acknowledge his lack of knowledge of the actual circumstances of both the community and of their new Haitian neighbors, and to meet with representatives of the Haitian community,

“I was not well-informed on the situation with the Haitian immigrants,” [Rabbi Cary] Kozberg said. “Since the interview, I have learned much more about the immigration situation in Springfield. My opinions have definitely been modified.”

Kozberg made his statement alongside Temple Sholom’s president, Laurie Leventhal, who told the Observer that her rabbi made a “mistake” and would be pursuing teshuvah, or the Jewish process of repentance.

“We are not giving him a pass,” Leventhal said. “He has asked lots of questions and learned lots of stuff about what’s going on in Springfield, and he has changed his views. And that is how human beings grow. And that is what we are about. And I hope that you will not go on a witch-hunt and take a situation in a city that is so hurting and make it worse.”

This was coupled by additional moves by area Jewish organizations to express support for the Haitian community:

Viles Dorsainvil, a local Haitian community leader in Springfield and the executive director of the Haitian Community Health and Support Center, told JTA on Monday he hadn’t been aware of Kozberg’s comments and hasn’t received any communication from the rabbi. But he said he had been glad to receive a letter of support from the Dayton Jewish Federation, which the federation had sent to him on the same day JTA published Kozberg’s interview.

In their letter, the federation heads introduced themselves as “your Jewish neighbors to the west” and added, “It is a core tenet of our faith to ‘welcome the stranger.’ We, along with so many others of different faiths and cultures, whose ancestors made this journey before you over the decades, support your quest, and welcome you. We are sending all our virtual thoughts of goodwill your way, including our prayers for your safety.”

The letter was touching, Dorsainvil said. “We’re so happy that the Jewish community in Dayton reached out to us,” he said, adding that he, too, saw similarities between what Jewish immigrants to the United States experienced in the past and what Haitian migrants are currently experiencing. 

I'm not asking anyone to give Kozberg a prize here. For one, he hasn't really done anything yet. I'd also suggest that "Most people don’t know me as a racist" doesn't quite communicate the sentiment that Kozberg I think is trying to get across. And even amongst his congregants, there is a split between those who think his apology is "genuine", and those who more circumspectly "hope" that it is. The local Jewish news coverage indicates that Kozberg maybe has a bit more of a self-pitying streak than might otherwise be let on, quoting him repeatedly suggesting that the initial interview he did was a "politicized" and "taken out of context." I'd also note the congregation, even as they recoil against his "racist" statements, is standing by him as their Rabbi -- noting that they have a thirty-year history they're looking across whereas all the rest of us are only accounting for this past week. It is a fair note, and one that I hope we can remember with regard to other potential instances where someone imbricated in a particular small community spikes to prominence for acts of (real, genuine) bigotry and is not immediately met with exile.

But on the whole, what I'm really flagging and really heartened by is not Kozberg but the Springfield Jewish community. When someone they loved and who they were close to and who was their leader stepped out, they stepped up. They demanded accountability. They used their own voices to try and set things right. It's never fully possible to make these wounds whole. But I've seen far, far worse attempts than this, and I hope the project of Teshuva and repair continues to make amends and build new bonds in Springfield.