Two Trip Roundup

I have two trips coming up -- one to Colorado to visit my brother and parents, and the second to Seattle to visit friends (and see Liz Miele). I've been shirking my blogging duties of late, and the travel won't help, so here's a roundup to at least get something moving again.

* * * *

JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa) has launched a new journal, Distinctions, focusing on Jewish issues through a Sephardic and Mizrahi lens.

Nice to see some big Hollywood A-Listers step up and support the SAG-AFTRA's strike relief fund.

Ironically, Twitter deciding to become a site solely appealing to grifters and trolls is making it increasingly useless for grifters and trolls.

Does Cornel West actually want Donald Trump to win, or is his vanity presidential campaign a grift to dig out of his tax debts? Hard to say!

There's a new HuffPo "expose" revealing that Richard Hanania had a history of overt White supremacist writings, and I can be 100% honest in saying that it never occurred to me that Hanania ever presented himself as anything but an overt White supremacist (but yeah, apparently there were folks who tried to push the line that he was a "centrist").\

A new, if long-anticipated, frontier of artificial intelligence has hit, as an Indian politician hit with alleged leaks of scandalous material says that the recordings were actually deep fakes -- and it's really hard to figure out who's telling the truth.

Not really a "roundup" item, but I want to give a quick promotion to the internet series "Jet Lag: The Game". It's an online series where each season basically creates a new, full-scale travel board game -- "tag" but across all of western Europe, or "Connect Four" using the western United States. It's wholesome, entertaining, and just a lot of fun. Jill and I have been binging it for the past few weeks, and I'll recommend to all of you as well.

Ubaidullah Abdulrashid Radiowala: Another One We Betrayed

This case brings back some bad memories. A rickshaw driver in his native India, Ubaidullah Abdulrashid Radiowala came to the United States on a visitor's visa in 1998. He stayed, as he was fleeing an Indian mobster whom he had informed on to the police.

In his time in the U.S., he built his own successful business and served as sole provider for his wife and four children (two whom immigrated to the US with him and are under DACA protection, two of whom were born in America). Three of his children are now in college, the fourth in high school. His earnings account for the entirety of his household's expenses -- food, tuition, rent, everything.

Radiowala was arrested in 2017 on a traffic stop, and was ordered deported. Although there was some evidence that the mobster he had informed on might try to hurt him in India, it was too late for Radiowala to request asylum. And while the U.S. has the power to cancel removal for persons in his position, the IJ concluded that removing Radiowala would not cause "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship to his spouse, parent, or child, who is a United States citizen" (in this case, his two U.S. citizen children). Although his children would no doubt suffer, the IJ and Board of Immigration Appeals decided that their suffering was not exceptional compared to any other family with a parent or spouse facing removal.

The Third Circuit affirmed. And the reason this case brings back some bad memories isn't because I think the decision was wrong. It's because it was probably right. The bad memories I have stem from the near-impossible standard of review that we were faced with when overseeing the immigration docket. The needless cruelty and trifling pettiness of the immigration system was entirely out of our hands to check. It didn't matter. Where it might matter was in the chambers of immigration judges -- who were wildly overworked and may or may not care -- and, of course, in the initial decision of immigration officials to make commonsense decisions about which cases to prioritize and which to let slide. But by the time the case gets up to the appellate court level, the immigrant is pretty well doomed -- no matter how cruel or manifestly unjust their case is.

So let's be clear: deporting Ubaidullah Abdulrashid Radiowala is needlessly cruel and manifestly unjust. There's no point to it other than the cruelty. He had been living in the United States for almost twenty years. He had raised a family here. He had sent his kids to college. He had built a successful business. He hadn't hurt anybody. He came to immigration authority's attention based on a traffic stop. A traffic stop!

But of course, today the cruelty is the point.

Radiowala has already been deported back to India. I hope he's safe. And I hope his family is getting by. But goodness, what a terrible thing we've done. What a terrible, terrible betrayal of the American ethos this is.

Suit Up Roundup

The latest wedding prep item to be checked off the list is my wedding suit. I like it. It's snazzy. Still have to pick it up post-alterations, though.

* * *

Anil Kalhan explains what was evident to anyone paying attention: John Roberts didn't "overturn" Korematsu in Trump v. Hawaii -- he renamed it.

What do you call a Jewish Indian fusion food truck? Nu Deli. I love this more than I can express (semi-related: I picked up The Last Jews of Karala: The 2,000-Year History of India's Forgotten Jewish Community at a bookstore the other day. So far, so good.).

Right now, we're seeing growing recognition of the full diversity of the Jewish community. That's good. But it also means reckoning seriously with the fact that the Jewish community has not always been welcoming of our full diversity. Hey Alma hosted a roundtable discussion with six Jews of Color that's definitely worth a read. Sandra Lawson and Donna Cephas write of racism they've experienced within the Jewish community. And the Baltimore Jewish Times just ran a profile on Mendel Davis, son of an African-American Chabad Rabbi.

Nobody expects the National Review to defend the Spanish Inquisition!

An interesting blast from the past: the Jewish Current reprints an exchange between Rabbi Joachim Prinz and an antisemitic Christian pastor who heard him speak at an army base in Abilene, Texas. It is striking reading, precisely because the pastor's arguments come couched in language we'd recognize today: he condemns Nazism, acknowledges the existence of some good Jews, speaks in unfailingly polite terms -- but nonetheless makes sweeping generalizations against the faith as a whole to justify his bigotry. It's well worth reading not because of how alien it is, but because of how little the language of "civil" bigotry has changed over the past seventy years.

JTA profiles Alma Hernandez, a 25-year old Mexican-American Jewish women running for a seat in the Arizona House of Representatives. (She's also being targeted by David Duke, which is possibly the least surprising thing imaginable).

WPSA and Personal Troll Roundup

I presented my "White Jews: An Intersectional Approach" paper at the Western Political Science Association (intersectionality section) yesterday. It went quite well! I've now presented the paper to political theorists, to Jewish Studies folks, and to intersectionalists. If you haven't read it yet, I think it's pretty good.

But the prize for biggest professional accomplishment this week goes to the discovery that someone has created a website dedicated solely to informing the world that "David Schraub the UCLA Law Professor is a Disgusting Zionist Punk."  That's how you know you've made it. I may not have the highest quality trolls ("UCLA"?), but at least they're mine. (I can't say I recommend reading the entire screed on the website, but it's worth browsing for a few laughs).

* * *

The African Muslim immigrant who saved a dozen Jews during the 2015 terrorist attack on a Paris kosher supermarket quietly arrived at the funeral of the elderly Holocaust survivor who was stabbed and burned to death in her apartment in an antisemitic hate crime. "I want to tell the Jews of France, you are not isolated. You are not abandoned. This is your country."

Jews and Muslims in America actually agree on quite a lot! And alignment increases alongside devoutness (more devout Jews and more devout Muslims share more in common), as well as contact (the more Jews and Muslims interact with each other, the more likely they are to perceive the two faiths as being similar in nature).

A former police officer turned criminal defense attorney discusses the Stephon Clark shooting, the way police are acculturated to fear (especially fear Black men), and the way poor instructions (e.g., "show me your hands" when your hands are holding a cellphone) can place innocent people in impossible situations.

Russian airline allegedly "deports" U.S. citizens of Indian descent back to India during a layover in Moscow. Great -- another reason for Trump to love the Russians.

Jewish News (UK) publishes an interview with Jeremy Corbyn. It's rare to see a conversation this long between two parties who so evidently loathe one another (it's really, really apparent in the interview).

Harvard Hillel is hosting a "liberation seder" focusing specifically on the ongoing injustices faced by Palestinians under occupation. The organizers worked closely with Jewish groups already affiliated with Hillel to ensure that it did not run afoul of the partnership guidelines. I'm all for this -- I have mixed feelings about the guidelines, but it's important to establish decisively that they will not be applied ad hoc to prohibit any criticism of Israel that's deemed too "sharp" in character. (Harvard Hillel has actually been consistently good on this issue -- refusing to allow the guidelines to metastasize to block, say, a program which has nothing to do with BDS because one participant backs the movement).

Sephardic Chief Rabbi in Israel may face criminal charges for likening a Black child born to White parents to a "monkey."

Spring Break Roundup!

It's Spring Break! Sadly, that's markedly less exciting when you're 31 years old and revising article drafts.

Nonetheless, it does present a good opportunity to do a roundup.

* * *

Kate Manne has an incredibly powerful essay on sexual violence, the struggles over reporting it, and why men get away with it. It follows on Martha Nussbaum's revelation, in a lecture last year, that she was sexually assaulted at 20 years old by a famous actor and her explanation for why she didn't report it. This is a must-read.

A neat looking art exhibit by Indian Jewish artist Siona Benjamin.

Truly every dark cloud has a silver lining: Donald Trump's army of internet trolls is in a state of panic over the upcoming rollback of internet privacy protections.

Hungary's right-wing government looks to try to close the Central European University. CEU was founded by George Soros, and if what the Hungarian right says about Soros sounds familiar, that's because it's identical to what the American right says about him. And if talking about shadowy international Jewish financiers threatening our way of life sounds a wee bit antisemitic when Hungarians do it, well, thank God for American exceptionalism.

Mayim Bialik and Emily Shire on Zionism and feminism (it's the latest salvo in this whole thing).

Maajid Nawaz, a former Muslim extremist turned liberal reformer, is profiled in the New York Times magazine. It is hardly uncritical, but it does seem to support the argument that the SPLC did a hatchet-job on him. And the observations about why it is difficult to promote "eat-your-peas" secular liberalism have resonance well beyond the Muslim community.

Quote of the Day

From my Feminist Philosophy readings:

Edward Said's Orientalism has fathered a received wisdom in colonial studies that has proved to be as narrow and frozen in its scope as it has been powerful in its impact. It proceeds from a conviction in the totalising nature of a western power knowledge that gives to the entire Oreint a single image with absolute efficacy. Writings of the Subaltern Studies pundits of a group of feminists, largely located in the first world academia, have come to identify the structures of colonial knowledge as the originary moment for all possible kinds of power and disciplinary formations, since, going by Said, Orientalism alone reserves for itself the whole range of hegemonic capabilities. This unproblematic and entirely non=historicised "transfer of power" to structures of colonial knowledge has three major consequences; it constructs a necessarily monolithic, non-stratified colonised subject who is, moreover, entirely powerless, and entirely without an effective and operative history of his/her own. The only history that s/he is capable of generating is necessarily a derivative one. As a result, the colonised subject is absolved of all complicity and culpability in the makings of the structures of exploitation in the last two hundred years of our history. The only culpability lies in the surrender to colonial knowledge. As a result, the lone political agenda for a historiography of this period shrinks to the contestation of colonial knowledge since all power supposedly flows from this single source. Each and every kind of contestation, by the same token, is taken to be equally valid. Today, with a triumphalist growth of aggressively communist and/or fundamentalistic [identity]-politics in our country, such a position comes close to indigenism and acquires a near-Fascistic potential in its authoritarian insistence on the purity of indigenous epistemological and autological conditions.

It has weird implications for the feminist agenda as well. The assumption that colonialism has wiped out all past histories of patriarchal domination, replacing them neatly and exclusively with western forms of gender relations, has naturally led on to an identification of patriarchy in modern India with the project of liberal reform alone. While liberalism is made to stand in for the only vehicle of patriarchal ideology since it is complicit with western knowledge, its opponents--the revivalists, the orthodoxy--are vested with a rebellious, even emancipatory agenda, since they refused colonisation of the domestic ideology. And since colonised knowledge is regarded as the exclusive source of all power, anything that contests it is supposed to have an emancipatory possibility for the women. By easy degrees, then, we reach the position that while opposition to widow immolation was complicit with colonial silencing of non-colonised voices and, consequently, was an exercise of power, the practice of widow-immolation itself was a contestatory act outside the realm of power relations since it was not sanctioned by colonisation. In a country where people will still gather in lakhs to watch and celebrate the burning of a teen-aged girl as sati, such cultural studies are heavy with grim political implications.

Tanika Sarka, Rhetoric against the Age of Consent: Resisting Colonial Reason and Death of a Child-Wife, Economic and Political Weekly (September 4, 1993), p. 1869.

Professor Sarkar is an Indian historian (currently teaching at Jawaharlal Nehru University). The piece is on how this harsh binary between empowered colonial discourse, and resisting "traditional" ones, ended up masking and suppressing an indigenous political and social resistance to certain oppressive practices (here, child brides). While Orientalism certainly flattens out the cultures it gazes upon (so that "India", as a whole, supports marrying off children), defenders of the orthodox status quo are easily able to pivot off "anti-colonialism" to do the same thing -- casting their preexisting intellectual and social opponents as agents of the empire, complicit in its evil, while their behavior -- far from representing an internally-contested expression of proper cultural norms -- is "resistance", and thus not the proper subject of critique.

I don't repost this quote because I think this is something "all feminists" or "all people opposed to colonialism" do (the fact that Professor Sarkar wrote the article, and that it was assigned in a Feminist Philosophy class, gives lie to that notion anyway). But I do think Professor Sarkar is responding to a real dynamic that has real consequences in terms of how we understand securing human rights across diverse, plural societies.

Fuzzy Math

The Yahoo headline is Republicans take aim at cost of Obama’s trip to India.

But as the article later points out, the Republican claims that the trip will cost $200 million/day -- advanced by luminaries like Mike Huckabee and terminally unhinged Michele Bachmann -- are flatly false. There's no basis in reality for them. Claims that Obama will be accompanied by 10% of the US Navy are also, unsurprisingly, wildly false.

Why isn't the headline "Top Republicans Lie About Cost of Obama's India Trip"? This is an open and shut case.

NCAA and a Roundup of Other Things

I love the NCAA tournament. And I particularly love the first few rounds, with a billion games going on at once and buzzer beaters and upsets by nobody-seeds you couldn't find on a map. And then there's the fun of making fun of my Georgetown alumni. Unfortunately, this year I took pity on her and the Hoyas going to the Final Four. That turned out great -- teach me to be nice to Liz.

* * *

A retired US general has blamed the Srebrenica massacre on Holland allowing gays in the military. That's because this general is a prejudiced dick, with views that have no basis in fact, history, or logic.

Bibi Netanyahu has apparently listed off concessions Israel is ready to make after its serious diplomatic faux-pas that has strained US-Israeli (not to mention Israeli-Palestinian) relations. Essentially, it would freeze, though not cancel, the offending housing announcement, as well as release more Palestinian prisoners and reduce checkpoints in the West Bank -- even possibly expand the amount of West Bank territory under PA control.

Jon Chait quite properly eviscerates Juan Cole's attack on "people like Jeffrey Goldberg", and the general presumption of ascribing to any remotely pro-Israel figure sets of views that they don't hold. This is yet another example of the maddening vagueness that often typifies discussions about who believes what regarding Israel and Palestine.

It's a shame we don't do more racial profiling -- we might have been even less likely to catch this guy.

Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN) becomes the second "no-to-yes" switch on the health care vote (after Dennis Kucinich).

Don't blog on controversial topics you know absolutely nothing about, unless you're indifferent to spreading malicious and false insinuations.

Non-SOTU Roundup

'Cause that would be cliched.

* * *

Pennsylvania Superior Court overturns a slew of anti-gay child custody decisions from the 1980s.

Indian roads create new opportunities.

The impact of Obama's school speech, one year later.

People are casting this post as Ta-Nehisi Coates pasting Chris Matthews, but I think the important points are far broader than anything Matthews-specific. That said, it's a fabulous post.

A U.Chicago study finds that female math teachers who are anxious about their own skills transmute that anxiety onto female pupils, resulting in reduced performance.

Bill Clinton hails Israeli mission to Haiti.

A touching post by Al Brophy on a friend of his who recently passed away.

As a pinball fan, I actually knew of the "call the shot" story which got pinball legalized in New York -- but that doesn't mean I won't share it.

Get Down Again!

Adam Serwer comments on the machismo response tragedies like Mumbai elicit from some conservatives. Here's John Hinderaker:

I wondered earlier today how a mere ten terrorists could bring a city of 19 million to a standstill. Here in the U.S., I don't think it would happen. I think we have armed security guards who know how to use their weapons, supplemented by an unknown number of private citizens who are armed and capable of returning fire. The Indian experience shows it is vitally important that this continue to be the case. This is a matter of culture as much as, or more than, a matter of laws.

Serwer responds:

This is a really strange and immature coping mechanism that manifests on the right in times of high profile tragedy. Rather than contemplate being a victim of a terrorist attack, the subject imagines him or herself as the star of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. I'd say it's simple racism, but it really is fear masquerading as bravado, a cultural chauvanism that directs itself at other Americans as readily as it does at foreigners. It is the "short skirt" theory of violence. If it happened, you must have been asking for it.

Look, I admit to doing this too. I have my own little fantasies of disarming the baddie with a well placed strike to the wrist, downing him with a left hook to the liver, then grabbing the now-abandoned gun to give my compatriots time to escape and seek aid (I suppose it's my wussy liberalism that prevents me from systematically gunning down the remaining perps with my shirt torn masculinely asunder). The difference is that I don't explode these adolescent dreams into a full-fledged national security policy.

Anyway, as Serwer notes we saw this same thing after Virginia Tech (although Hokies apparently aren't "real Americans" to Hinderaker, presumably because they're attending college). I'd also like to add that a) your average security guard is neither trained nor equipped to counter highly trained suicidal terrorists bent on destruction and carrying automatic weapons and grenades, and b) a firefight breaking out between, say, the terrorists and hotel guests, will not only likely turn out badly for the guests, but will make rescue operations an absolute nightmare for the police.

Via Ezra Klein.

Clearing the Pile

Stuff has been accumulating since Thanksgiving. Time to dump it on you.

The myth that Blacks were responsible for the passage of Prop. 8 has been debunked. But the need to engage that community remains as strong as ever. My friend Lauren sent me an interesting article trying to break down why Blacks (and specifically, Black women) voted overwhelmingly against gay marriage.

The breadth and scope of the Mumbai terrorist attacks made it feel churlish to focus on the specific attack on Jews. But as this Z-Word comment points out, the decision to devote resources towards Chabad House was actually remarkably inefficient for the terrorists. In other words, they went out of their way to kill Jews. Particularly given PG's explication of patterns of Indian terrorism (see comments), this is disturbing.

Echidne has the story of a woman, convicted of running errands for her cousin's cocaine ring, who was originally sentenced to four life terms. It got reduced to 12 years, but the government appealed and bumped it back up to 27 years. This is for a first time non-violent offender, mind you. As Echidne says, there are first degree murderers who get out faster than that.

Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone argues that the passage of Prop. 8 implicates Establishment Clause values, because at root it "enact[s] into law a particular religious belief." Rick Garnett dissents, and I think he has the better of the argument.

Following up on my previous posts, The Gaucho Politico sent me another link on the obstacles former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele is facing to become RNC chief.

Saudi Girls love to rock. Or at least four of them do.

How Mumbai Indicts Iraq (Again)

Obviously, the horrifying attacks in Mumbai, India, continue to be in everyone's thoughts. It seems like the violence is winding down, but the repercussions are likely just beginning. India has faced terrorist violence before. But for some reason, this feels different. It was more organized, more coordinated, and (by the use of gunmen rather than bombs) more visceral than ever before.

Reading USA Today this morning, though, I was struck by how this attack really undermines a central component of how we've been prosecuting our war on terror.

Though it was unclear exactly who orchestrated the attacks, they appear to provide further evidence that the main battleground for Islamist extremists is shifting from Iraq, where violence has fallen dramatically this year, to the democracies of South Asia. Militants are inflicting heavy casualties on U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, seizing control of territory from a fragile government in Pakistan and proving they can strike just about anywhere in India.

Some would look at this and say, "victory in Iraq"! And perhaps it is indicative of the fruits of American blood and iron in that country. But if so, so what? If the tangible impact of the Iraq war is simply to have terrorists shift terrain from Iraq to India, we've spent the last five years going in neutral.

The problem is one I brought forward in the very early days of this blog: the overemphasis on sovereign states as the arena for combating terrorists. This, I held, was misplaced, since the very nature of terrorist groups makes them transnational and relatively untied to traditional geographic borders. If we view al-Qaeda as seeking to disrupt the hegemonic power of the Western world (ideally to bring up a new Islamic counterweight), it can accomplish that through operations nearly anywhere in the world. Al-Qaeda could flee the field entirely in Iraq tomorrow, and it wouldn't accomplish anything if they merely reconstituted themselves in South Asia.

The signal of the Mumbai attacks is that we've been looking at the problem all wrong. Cowboy rhetoric of "force being the only language evildoers understand" notwithstanding, it is becoming more apparent that while force is necessary to react to terrorist violence, it is a relatively ineffective weapon for creating an offensive posture. We need to start looking into alternative strategies for stopping terrorist activity before it starts. That's an intelligence issue, in part, but (as much as conservatives hate to admit it) it also is a question of greater engagement with countries and peoples worldwide, and (perhaps more importantly) a greater commitment to inclusion in the world's bounty.

Iraq was the last gasp of the belief that American muscle, alone, could solve any problem. We went into Iraq with the deliberate view that we didn't have to account for any other place or any other people. This was where the terrorists were, we go in, we take 'em out, mission accomplished, let's go home. That has proven to be a fatal error in judgment. And the longer way take to learn from it, the more Mumbai's the democratic world will have to suffer.