That Train Is Arriving On Schedule

One of my recent hobbyhorses has been to raise the alarm at one of the single most self-destructive trends I've witnessed in contemporary Jewish political activism: the pivot away from coalitional work with allies to tackle all forms of hatred and bigotry in favor of a far narrower focus on purely Jewish concerns. 

This move is sometimes justified with the rhetoric of "put your own mask on before helping others", the idea being that the threats Jews face now are simply too acute for us to divide our attention and allocate resources to the needs of our peers. But this new Look Out For Number One strategy is staggeringly short-sighted, for a host of reasons. 

The one I've mostly concentrated on is that it fails to account for the obvious fact that Jews are a small minority, and if we're justified in ignoring the needs of others to concentrate solely on our own self-interest, others are justified in doing the same to us. In a democratic system where one needs 51% of the vote, and Jews are ~2% of the population, that is an obvious losing strategy.

But Paul Horwitz flags another problem (that again, should have been obvious from the get-go): allowing hatred for other minority groups to seep into the political mainstream inevitably ends up bolstering antisemitic hatred as well. As he puts it:

Unsurprisingly, given their opposition to anything like liberal pluralism and religious freedom, when unhinged Christian nationalists start going after one faith, it’s rare that they will stop there. A good deal of the time, they won’t have started there either.

Horwitz's hook is a recent incident involving Carrie Prejean Boller, then serving on President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission, haranguing Jewish witnesses about their views on Israel/Palestine and defending antisemitic conservative activists Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson (Prejean Boller was later removed from the commission but refused to resign herself, saying she would "would rather die than bend the knee to Israel"). There was a fair amount of conservative shock to find gambling in their establishment, but Horwitz notes that the conservative "religious liberty" ecosystem that Prejean Boller is a part of and that reflects the membership of Trump's commission has long promoted Islamophobia of the most rabid sort (see, e.g., the hearings over the "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act"). The antisemitism that is coming further into focus now is the natural extension of the Islamophobia that has been prominent and largely unchallenged for many years now. Indeed, research has consistently found that the best predicator of antisemitic views is whether the subject holds other racist and bigoted views targeting other minorities.

Again, none of this is surprising. It is the flip side of the advice Fanon got from his philosophy teacher: "When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you." For us Jews, we might say the same thing: "When you hear someone insulting the Muslims pay attention; he is talking about us." The point being that, if you're looking to head off antisemitism, you can't afford not to care about other tides of bigotry and illiberalism that may be cresting. The "people who sincerely adhere to these views," Horwitz observes, "are hardly going to be satisfied with one enemy or one minority to threaten and deny basic constitutional rights." Even where they didn't start by talking about Jews, they'll get there. That train, as a different wise commentator put it, is never late.

The Big 4-0

I turned 40 yesterday.

As in so many things, my emotions are a mix of "the world is a trainwreck" and "my very narrow slice of it is great." I have a great job, a great family, a great house in a great city. I'm raising a great baby. I'm financially secure. If the looming specter of fascism wasn't darkening my doorstep, I'd have no complaints at all!

My wife turns 40 later this year, and she has for quite some time now been insistent that her forties will be her best decade. I've never been quite as convinced that same will be true for me. It is cliche to say "I don't feel forty; I still feel young" -- but I do. Not, you know, in terms of being able to ski or stay out late or not have random body parts start hurting for unknown reasons. And there are plenty of areas where I've always been an old soul crotchety old man. But in terms of exuberant enthusiasm? Or in terms of enjoying feeling taken care of? Or just liking video games and Star Wars and Legos? Or feeling like an up-and-comer who will wow the powers-that-be with his fresh new ideas? I still feel very young. 

And once you're forty, you are not young. There's no getting around it. In your thirties, you can kind of futz about still being a young professional -- forty isn't ambiguous. I feel like I am constitutionally required to lose all knowledge of technology, and never voluntarily listen to a new artist ever again.

But it is what it is. Time stops for no man. I'm lucky that, with a minor false start related to a (turns out wholly unneeded) dentist's appointment, I had a very nice fortieth birthday-day. The more "official" celebrations came around the Super Bowl and this weekend, but yesterday included good food and chocolate cake and quality time with wife and baby and the Olympics. So let's go back to the basics -- I am very lucky. Here's to (at least) forty more lucky years.

The Return of Encystment

I didn't see most of the Super Bowl ads, but one I actually did see was Robert Kraft's latest "blue square" installment addressing contemporary antisemitism. The basic narrative is pretty straightforward: Jewish kid walks down the hall, gets bumped by some bullies, who place a sticky note on his backpack that says "dirty Jew". Jewish kid is mad, but then a (presumably) non-Jewish kid, a student of color, offers his support (and empathy -- "I know how it is"). They walk off together as friends. Scene.

I thought it was okay. It's probably impossible to create a "good" ad on this subject -- it's always going to read at least in part "hello fellow youth" and be intrinsically uncool in that register -- but if we leave that aside it was pretty unremarkable.

And that, of course, means that many people are remarking on it -- particularly on the Jewish right, which over the past few weeks as taken an interesting pivot against fighting antisemitism at all (Bret Stephens' big 92NY speech where he argued for "dismantling" the ADL was the clarion call here). A couple people have asked for my thoughts on this new narrative, and now is as good a time as any.

At one level, the fact that the Jewish right is suddenly uninterested in tackling antisemitism at the precise moment where resurgent right-wing antisemitism has finally become so normalized amongst mainstream conservatives that even the usual hacks can't see-no-evil it is the most obvious convergence imaginable. Fighting antisemitism is a hoot when it's batting the left around, but now that it's Republicans whom one has to stand up to it just isn't fun anymore, is it?

It's almost tempting to leave it there, but I do think there is a little more that should be said. One pattern we're increasingly seeing on the Jewish right is a hostility to Jews being outward-facing, of the entire idea of building relationships and friendships and coalitions with non-Jewish partners and peers. Everything from the ADL's decision to abandon its historically broad-based civil rights mission to the near-reflexive cry that any attempt to situate the fight against antisemitism alongside other forms of bigotry is to "all lives matter" the former is part of this malaise. It stems from a sense that these other groups won't stand up for Jews, and if they won't do their part for us, why should we stand up for them? This wounded grievance doesn't come from nowhere -- I myself once wrote a post titled "Solidarity is for Goyim" -- but for some it has become exaggerated to the point of pathology: the entire prospect of cross-communal support is treated as so outlandish as to be offensive.

In that light, I think what most offended some people about the Kraft ad is that it showed a non-Jew (a non-Jew of color, no less) helping a Jewish peer. That prospect is what the new right-wing narrative dismisses as unrealistic, impossible, a sucker's bet. No wonder it infuriates them so. In a world where there is no hope for Jews to be anything other than hated by non-Jews, the only move is to turn to ourselves.

With that, turn back to Stephens. The narrative Stephens is pushing is that, in lieu of "fighting antisemitism", we should be investing more in the development of a positive Jewish identity -- in things like Jewish education and camps, Jewish media and Jewish religious education. On its own, I have no quarrel with any of these, though I don't think any of these priorities are in conflict with tackling antisemitism. In context, though, Stephens' call should be seen as a call for Jews to turn inward -- to stop focusing on our relationships with others (the negative things they say about us, yes, but also the positive opportunities we have to grow and cocreate together). They, the non-Jews, will never be reliable partners and it is a waste of time and money to pretend otherwise. Instead, let's self-generate our own authentic Jewish identity, without waste or taint from the outside world.

The great Jewish philosopher Albert Memmi had a name for this sort of move: "encystment". Encystment is a sort of self-ghettoization that occurs when the ghetto itself is perceived as providing a shell and shield (albeit a brittle one) against the dangers and anxieties of the outside world. Non-Jews are intrinsically untrustworthy; we have nothing to say to them except to bristle hard enough that they hesitate to attack us. We pull back from relating to others because we assume they will only hurt and endanger us; and instead rely solely on ourselves -- for who else is there to trust? (There's an obvious parallel to the more reactionary strands of Zionism here, on all fronts: the overwhelming sense that the entire world is against us, the fascinating interplay of weakness and strength, the obsession with self-reliance, the intrinsic value assigned to thumbing one's nose at outsiders, all of which generates a self-fulfilling prophecy of auto-isolation).

In the JTA article on the Kraft ad controversy, they quote Liel Leibovitz illustrating this pattern in typically crass fashion: "If I had ten million dollars to spend on a Super Bowl ad, I'd just show a bunch of exploding beepers, dead Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, hot Israeli girls with guns, and the caption 'F–k Around, Find Out.'"* Of course he would. The likes of Liel have no way of relating to the non-Jewish world except via extended middle finger. And so when we juxtapose Liel with Stephens or Shabbos Kestenbaum dinging the ad by saying we should invest in Jewish day schools instead, there is a connection -- don't reach out, don't try to work with others, the world sucks, curl up into your cocoon where it's warm inside.

There is, to be clear, no conflict at all between believing Jews should invest more in Jewish institutions who can help cultivate a positive Jewish identity, and in looking favorably upon the outward-facing coalitions and relationships envisioned by the Kraft ad. Indeed, for many Jews that is the foundation of our positive Jewish identity -- much of what it means to be Jewish, for us, is in how we positively relate to and affect the broader world around us. What we're seeing from Stephens and from the backlash to this ad is a longstanding frustration by the Jewish right with how American Jews have constructed their Jewish identity; a self-construction where a series of liberal values have become imbricated in the meaning of Jewishness itself.

For the likes of Stephens. this is an anathema -- it is not Judaism, it is a substitution of liberalism for Judaism. The concept of tikkun olam, both its centrality to contemporary Jewish identity and the mockery that centrality elicits amongst right-wing Jews, illustrates the point well. When Stephens calls for building positive Jewish identity, he is very much not trying to encourage those Jews who view tikkun olam as central to being Jewish to be more intentional and linking living Jewishly to, say, opposing ICE or preserving reproductive autonomy. What Stephens means is for Jews to abandon such liberal frivolities in favor of being taught how to "really" be Jewish. For Stephens, this is a matter of righting ship. But the Jews who are Jewish in the way Stephens indicts obviously disagree that our Jewishness is a false one, and we understand -- correctly -- that Stephens actually just has contempt for the Jewishness of most American Jews. He is trying to war against the predominant way American Jews have actualized our Jewishness over the past century. 

Without overstating its importance or its quality, this ad is emblematic of a vision of Judaism that has been central to the American Jewish experience for decades -- an acknowledgment of antisemitism, yes, but also an acknowledgment that we are part of a broader community that includes allies who care about us and about who we care in turn, and that this mutuality of care is part of what makes our Jewishness live. The Jewish right hates that vision and they hate the Jews and Jewish institutions who espouse it. So they are using the chaos of the present moment to try and destroy it.

* Liebovitz also wrote "it's almost impossible to imagine a more retarded ad", and I commend the JTA for not letting that slur drop unnoticed. Even better, they flag how Liebovitz's deployment of that term fits into a pattern of right-wing discourse eager to vice-signal how little they care about the equal dignity and standing of other vulnerable groups. (Specifically, JTA wrote "The epithet, which had fallen out of favor, has recently resurged on the right, dismaying people with disabilities and their advocates.").