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.

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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.

The Race To Narrate Mizrahi Jews

We are witnessing the start of a race: the race, between various political factions generally but not exclusively tracking "Zionist" vs. "anti-Zionist", to determine where Mizrahi Jews will be placed in contemporary political narratives. If the starting gun has not been fired, it will be soon. And while I think most readers of this blog are relatively familiar with the competing narratives being put forward, to summarize briefly:

• The Anti-Zionist narrative seeks to present Mizrahi Jews as "Zionism's other victims". While not necessarily denying the fact of some oppression, this narrative presents Zionism as having destroyed a vibrant and robust Middle Eastern Jewish (sometimes rendered "Arab Jewish") culture and having replaced it with a concocted framework where Jew and Arab were irreconcilable opposites. It highlights past and ongoing discrimination of Mizrahi Jews by Israel's Ashkenazi elite to suggest that Israel's multicultural claims are deceptive and opportunistic, and suggests that a potential alliance exists between Israel's two "brown" underclasses vis-a-vis their foreign European oppressors. More broadly, it presents a rejection of Zionism as a step towards  (and a prerequisite of) restoring a fractured relationship between Mizrahi Jews and their former neighbors, seeing past tales of eternal enmity and envisioning mutual recognition and support.

• Under the Zionist telling, by contrast, Mizrahi Jewish presence in Israel, and general commitment to Zionist beliefs, destabilizes the notion that Zionism is a European import. It, too, contests the sharp divide pitting "Jew" versus "Middle Eastern", but does so by suggesting that the "Middle Eastern" perspective has until now been implicitly Jew-free in orientation by not accepting Mizrahi Jewish political behavior as legitimately "Middle Eastern" to the extent it aligned with Jewish (read: Zionist) perspectives. The oppression and eventual expulsion of Middle Eastern Jewry may not "cancel out" Palestinian oppression, but suggests that anti-Zionists have their own reckoning to do and that there is more interfering with paradisiacal co-existence than evil Zionist perfidy. Emphasizing Mizrahi Jewish life also means that certain more extreme anti-Zionist arguments -- e.g., that Israeli cultural is purely "appropriative" or invented -- can easily be turned as forms of antisemitic erasure that denies basic elements of (Mizrahi) Jewish history. To the extent Mizrahi Jews identify Zionism as part of their liberation (and anti-Zionism as part of their oppression), this links up with elements of contemporary discourse which respect minoritized communities' right to define their own experience, even as against persons who do not accept that (White European) Jews generally count as a minoritized community.

As presented above, these narratives are both over-simplified. This is intentional -- not necessarily because those working this field are committed to oversimplification (though some may be), but because the manner in which these narratives will penetrate popular consciousness almost inevitably will be oversimplified. As a matter of popular political discourse, there likely will never be a deep, layered, and complex understanding of Mizrahi Jewish history (matters of popular political discourse do not tend towards deep, layered, and complex understandings of anything). What there will be a sort of gestalt understanding of a "side" that the Mizrahi Jewish frame supports. And so the casual way of putting the question is: for which side will "Mizrahi Jews" become an argument? Will "aligning with Mizrahi Jews", in its most general public understanding, be taken to mean acting in accordance with the first narrative (broadly conceived), or the second?

Right now, this is an open question. For many years, Mizrahi Jewish history and experience was ignored in contemporary discourse about Jews, Israel, Zionism, and the Middle East. This overlooking was in many way overdetermined. Here are just a few of the factors that likely played a role:

1. Eurocentrism. For many years, history in general, as a subject, ignored most things and happenstances that occurred outside of Europe and America.
2. The demographics of American Jewry being disproportionately Ashkenazi, making Mizrahi Jewish heritage relatively unfamiliar to American Jews writing about "our own" history.
3. The concentration of Mizrahi Jews as being mostly in Israel, meaning that most people not-in-Israel, when they encountered Jews, encountered Ashkenazi Jews and assumed that they were all who needed to be thought about when thinking of Jews.
4. Israel's desire to be seen as as a "western" nation, which involved minimizing or diminishing the salience of non-European elements (such as its Mizrahi Jewish inhabitants).
5. Anti-Zionists' desire to present Israel as a purely foreign, colonial imposition to the Middle East, which is disturbed by recognition of significant Middle Eastern Jewish presence; as well as a desire to minimize their own decidedly ignoble behavior towards their Jewish communities in the 20th century (which is why Mizrahi Jews are now concentrated mostly in Israel -- see #3).

There are no doubt other factors as well. Put them all together and you had a recipe which simmered for decades, one in which Mizrahi Jews were mostly a sideshow to broader patterns of political discourse about Jews (and Jewish states).

Even a few years ago, this was still true -- I still remember how rare it was to write on this subject when Analucia Lopezrevoredo and I published our "Intersectional Failure" article in 2016. But things are different now. Like it or not, the turn towards identity politics continues apace, and in the extremely well-trodden terrain that demarcates debates of Israel, Mizrahi Jews represent rare fresh land to till. Most people along most dimensions of Israel have views that are, if not always informed, then are relatively entrenched. Narratives about Israel being colonial or liberatory, a democracy or an apartheid state, struggling against terrorism or crushing necks under its boot, are by now familiar to anyone paying a speck's worth of attention, and people largely know where they stand on them.

But the issue of Mizrahi Jews is not a subject most people have given much thought to, and as a matter of social discourse it has not yet concretely been narrated into a particular side. It also seems to sit adjacent to several important conceptual "nodes" relevant to current debates about Israel -- e.g., indigeneity, Jewish (non-)Whiteness, colonialism, cultural appropriation, and even ethnic cleansing. This makes it very valuable discursive real estate, and one can already see just how hot this commodity is when considering the sharp, dare I say histrionic, reaction found in some quarters to the announcement that several professors have received a grant to write a book about contemporary (post-1800) Mizrahi Jewish history. As ridiculous as it is to witness such fulminations for a book project that is a good three years out (and I say that without prejudice to any judgment as to whether the final product will be good or bad), the underlying cause  of the reaction is recognition that this is a rare arena where opinions remain unsettled, and so nobody knows which will be the book (or set of books, or articles) which successfully implants the new conventional wisdom.

Which raises the question: who do I think will win the race? I can't answer that, but it does seem that both sides have some noticeable advantages and disadvantages that can be flagged from afar (I will skip making any contentious judgments about who has the "advantage" of being right). 

The Zionist-favoring narrative has one very obvious advantage: realistically speaking, more Mizrahi Jews agree them. This is an advantage that can manifest both in terms of raw numbers but also in terms of perceived legitimacy -- if part of this project is to present a "Mizrahi Jewish" perspective, it should matter what position resonates with the bulk of Mizrahi Jews. The fact that many of the anti-Zionist claims simply do not gibe with how most Mizrahi Jews conceptualize and articulate their own history is a decided disadvantage, notwithstanding earnest efforts to present those conceptualizations as matters of false consciousness or foreign implantation.

The anti-Zionist narrative, however, may see its adherents disproportionately present in academic forums dedicated to researching the question, and that may allow them to punch above their weight in terms of driving intellectual conversation on the subject. Moreover, they may be more adept at speaking in the "tongue" of identity politics -- an arena which many more conservative Jewish figures remain suspicious of and whose endeavors to work in this argot sometimes fail to be much more sophisticated than "I know you are but what am I?" The anti-Zionist narrative may be able to more easily produce a resonant narrative that fits within how we are conditioned to think of "identity politics" stories. So both sides have attributes working for and against them.

Ideally speaking, of course, the history would be the history, and we'd talk and engage and write on it because it's important to know and explore regardless of which or what political narrative it endorses -- accepting, as will inevitably be the case, that history rarely supports any one political narrative with its full throat anyway. And I do not mean to suggest that the bulk of authors or academics working in this area are consciously intending to serve as political leafleteers, or that their academic interest is merely a smokescreen for a political agenda. I am sure many of the people working in this area are diligent and are attempting as best they can to be dispassionate, fair-minded, and sensitive to all the various complexities of the area. But I am fairly convinced that the political headwinds here are too strong to be ignored. And the result is going to be a pitched and nasty fight over where to situate Mizrahi Jews -- and I fear that Mizrahi Jews themselves will not necessarily get the last word.

What are the Stakes of "Indigenous"?

95% of discourse applying the "indigenous" frame to Israel/Palestine, whether "pro-Israel" or "pro-Palestine" in orientaiton, is political rather than analytical.

This is something I've believed for a long time, and it was further entrenched seeing this narrative cartoon by J.B. Brager in Jewish Currents titled "When Settler Becomes Native" (Brager borrows their title, consciously or not, from prior works by Mahmood Mamdani and Raef Zreik). 

The cartoon purports to trace and attack claims by Jews that they are "indigenous" to Israel. If one reads it carefully, though, one notices that it actually never succeeds in this objective on an analytical level. 

The case for Jewish indigenous status in Israel is relatively straightfoward: Israel is where Jews are from, not just in a vague historical sense but in a concrete sense that has continually demarcated their status as a "people", they were over the course of history forced out and forced into a subordinated structure of domination by foreign powers, and now they've come back. 

Against this, Brager doesn't actually do much to show that Jewish claims of indigenous status are not valid. They somewhat limply acknowledge that the Jewish claim actually fits decently well with the common benchmarks of indigenousness proposed by UN Special Rapporteur  Jose Martinez Cobo, but contends that their adoption to this case is exploitative -- if anything, Cobo's framework must fail because it seems to allow for the Jewish claim. 

Waving at Patrick Wolfe's well-known aphorism that settler-colonialism is a "structure, not an event" doesn't alter this. The claim that Zionism is a decolonial movement is precisely the claim that it disrupted a prior structure of dispossession and disenfranchisement that Jews had been laboring under  properly characterized as "colonial" (that it is difficult to point to a specific moment in 1549 when Jews "lost" territory that was previously theirs makes the "structure, not event" paradigm more, not less, attractive as a means of encompassing the Jewish case. It is not a specific historical moment but an ongoing structural condition where external powers arrogated to themselves the exclusive power to declare what Jews were and what their relationship to politics, land, culture, and so on could be). Ironically, the strongest claim for why Jews aren't "indigenous" to Israel is that "indigenous", as a category only applies in cases where the dispossession is ongoing -- if one succeeds in reversing it, one isn't indigenous anymore (hence why it makes more sense to refer to Algerians as "indigenous" during the French colonial period than it does today, post-independence). But this would be a pyrrhic victory for Brager, since it would defeat Jewish claims of indigenousness only by accepting that Zionism was successfully decolonial.

For these reasons, Brager's argument is not primarily focused on actually falsifying the notion that Jews are indigenous. For the most part, Brager instead works backwards from the conclusion; their argument is primarily that recognition of Jews as "indigenous" would have bad political consequences -- described variously (and the oscillation between the two is so rapid that they effectively blur together -- an effect that is certainly intentional) as either endorsing Israeli territorial maximalism and the view that Palestinians are foreign colonial invaders, or endorsing that Israel has any claim to exist at all. Since JC readers think both of these positions are bad things to endorse, it must conclude that the Jewish claims of being indigenous are bad as well.

Of course, working backwards from the conclusion, in addition to being bad analytical practice, comes with "political" dangers of its own -- as when Brager comes within a hairsbreadth of asserting that the entire idea of Jewish "peoplehood" must be rejected because any understanding of Jews as more than "just" a religion might bolster the claim that this "people" could legitimately claim indigenousness. Ironically, given the time Brager spends accusing their adversaries of engaging in biological essentialism, here they suggest that the only possible foundation for Jews being a "people" is a biological one (the other day I interacted with someone who used the fact of converts to mock the idea that Jews, as a whole, could be "indigenous" to Israel -- now who's running the biological essentialism play?).

Likewise, addressing the case of Mizrahi Jews (and groups such as JIMENA, which have long made the association of continued indigenousness), Brager doesn't refute the indigenous status, they just denounce them endorsing the "mythologization" of leveraging their own status as (potentially?) indigenous with those of all Jews. But -- leaving aside the actual demographics of Israel -- why can't they view the relevant frame of analysis as "the Jewish people", viewed as a collective? Why must they be forced to endorse compulsory separation such that their history is not our history? Put simply: why aren't Mizrahi Jews, to the extent they are indigenous, entitled to state that all Jews are part of their community and are thereby indigenous as well (Ironically, the implied answer is -- once again -- biological essentialism). 

I don't have time to fully go into it here, but there is a sort of enforced normative quiescence being demanded of Mizrahi Jews where they maybe can be accepted as indigenous so long as they accede to non-Jewish Middle Easterners' declarations over who counts as a community member and what constitutes valid political and social action. They can be indigenous so long as they do not in any way challenge other actors' decisions over why they're indigenous or how they count as indigenous. If they deign to operate independently and make their own choices over who is part of "their" community -- for example, viewing all Jews as being part of their collective and thereby sharing in whatever patrimony they can claim as indigenous to the region -- then they need to be slapped down. We see a version of this in Yuval Evri and Hagar Kotef's provocatively titled "When Does a Native Become a Settler?", which regardless of its other faults, does not dismiss out of hand the prospect of Jewish nativeness. However, it does persistently locate "native" Jewish choices that linked up with the Ashkenazi Jewish Zionist project (such as adopting Hebrew as the daily language) as decisions to "settlerize", rather than decisions expressing indigenous agency and intentional choices regarding how they conceptualized who was part of their community. Put differently, if we accept Mizrahi Jews as valid indigenous "cases", that has to include their authority to declare that, under their conception of who they are, all Jews are part of their community in the relevant respects -- they are not bound to endorse others who wish, for their own purposes, to make and enforce sharp lines where "these Jews" are qualitatively a different people than "those Jews".

All of that said, it is the case that "indigenous" and "settler-colonial", in their political valence, tend to be associated with maximalist claims. On the pro-Israel side, they are often mustered to defend not just Israel's existence but the occupation and the wholesale rejection of any valid Palestinian claims, presented as foreign interlopers; all the land simply is Jewish land by right, settlement is simply taking the land back, and any non-Jewish presence is at most tolerated at the sufferance of the rightful owners. On the pro-Palestine side, these terms are again frequently deployed not just to object to the occupation but to contest the validity of there being an Israel at all; Israel is naught but a foreign invasion, the Jewish population anywhere in Israel is a settler population, the morally correct remedy to the crime of Israel existing is for it to be dissolved, and we should cheer if Jews (to quote a figure quoted in Brager's cartoon) go "back to where the fuck they came from."

Whatever their uses as analytical paradigms -- and I agree they can be quite useful (for example, I found the Zreik article, linked above, very thought-provoking) -- as terms of political mobilization "indigenous" and "settler-colonial" are the terms of first resort for those seeking to drape extremist solutions in a moral garb. That's true, again, on both sides of the ledger (it is not an accident that the Jewish claims over Sheikh Jarrah are framed as "land back" claims -- the Jewish claimants are successors to Jews who were dispossessed and expelled from their land by Arab armies in 1948!). As far as Israel and Palestine are concerned "indigenous" is where political commentators go to when they don't want to compromise a single inch but still want to appeal to some sort of putatively non-partisan moral principle. It is seductive in that it doesn't just promise everything, but promises everything with the gloss of moral justification to take a free rein.

No wonder, then, that Brager views it as unacceptable that Jews could claim "indigenous" for ourselves. Of course, their problem isn't the maximalism, it's who gets to be maximalist; they don't want to give up the maximalist utility of the indigenous frame, they just want to keep it for their preferred side. To some extent, the impetus behind this whole cartoon is oh no -- if it isn't the consequences of my actions paradigm! 

But if anything, the potential validity of Jewish claims of indigenousness should trigger a reassessment over the stakes of that label, and it probably would be worth reflecting on why this framework is so easily associated with and utilized by those proposing "solutions" to the conflict that are more-or-less open in their disdain for any sort of rights or claims by their disfavored side. If Jews are indigenous to Israel, then ... what? Does that mean Palestinians cannot also be indigenous to it? Does that justify violent expropriation of Palestinian-owned land, or the depravation of Palestinian civil rights and liberties? It would indeed be bad if Jews being indigenousness to Israel meant that therefore permanent occupation and dispossession of Palestinians is thereby justified! Brager's implicit response to this is to say "yes, it would be justified if Jews were indigenous, which is why Jews can't be indigenous" (I have sometimes wondered if Revanchist Zionism is what happens if Fanon wins the decolonization battle in a rout). My preferred response is to say "no, it wouldn't be justified, which means that can't be a consequence of Jews being indigenous." 

Brager is not fully wrong that the discursive impact of the "indigenous" debate, as it is used in contemporary political discourse, often serves to distract from if not justify obvious ongoing and continuing injustices. But ideally, it is precisely the strong potential legitimacy of Jewish claims of indigenousness that should prompt us to resist the deployment of "indigenous" to justify maximalist irredentism whose manifest immorality would otherwise smack us in the face. It is a bad thing -- this shouldn't have to be said, but apparently it does -- that we have people flirting with overt ethnic cleansing or mass expulsions and presenting them as moral imperatives (still worse when it is being done by people who have the power to carry out their flirtations, but certainly not good when it remains -- for the time being -- "merely" a fantasy)! And once we do that, we can start to think about what useful work "indigenous" (or "decolonial") can do in terms of both explaining the present and imagining the future, that is not simply a tool for maximalist fantasizing (this article in Tikkun is, I think, a worthwhile example of the project).

The Antisemitic Quote That Wasn't in California's Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum

A few years ago, back in 2019, there was a significant controversy over California's draft Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC). Basically, it was a hodgepodge of far-left jargon that barely talked about Jews or antisemitism but sure had some things to say about Zionism and BDS. This did not make the Jewish community happy, as one might expect, and -- led by Mizrahi and Middle Eastern Jewish activists who were particularly galled to be erased from the course given their significant numbers in the state of California -- they rallied an impressive array of allies and community members to demand changes (full disclosure: I was among those who submitting comments on the initial draft urging significant modifications). Luckily, the education powers-that-be in California were actually quite receptive, and the text was sent back for substantial revisions.

Fast forward to today. The ESMC is on its third draft, and many of the Jewish community's suggestions have found their way into the curriculum. The current ESMC draft cites surging rates of hate crimes against Jews, and that we are the most common victims of religious-based hate crimes in southern California. It has an excellent unit focusing on Mizrahi and Middle Eastern Jews -- one of the first I've seen dedicated to this subject -- that specifically characterizes Jews as indigenous to the Middle East. It includes passages from a range of Jewish luminaries including Ruth Wisse, Julius Lester, and Angela Buchdahl. It speaks on how, while Jews have found America to be a land of opportunity, especially after World War II, our successes stand side-by-side with the continued reality of antisemitism -- especially for Jews who have resisted assimilation into dominant American culture. 

Like any work done by committee, one can pick at this or that bit of rhetoric or focus. Still, on the whole, leaders in the Jewish community, such as Tye Gregory of the San Francisco JCRC (and formerly of the LGBT rights group A Wider Bridge) are celebrating it for what it is: a success story. It is a testament to what we in the Jewish community can accomplish via constructive engagement and participation, and proof positive that we can be included in a positive and affirming way in an Ethnic Studies curriculum.

Unfortunately, for certain pockets in our community, this very success is a threat. There are some in the Jewish community who are have made much of the threat posed by Ethnic Studies and other leftist academic ideas, and who have gained a great following and acclamation from fear-mongering about it. Unlike those who have recognized problems in the field but have sought to engage and improve things, these persons are invested in the notion that things like Ethnic Studies are inherently antisemitic, inherently anti-Jewish, and inherently incapable of reform. The original draft of the California ESMC was an omen of how the American left was inexorably falling under the shadow of "Corbynization". For them, and for that narrative, the revised ESMC presented a large problem. What does one do when one's favored ogre appears to have turned over a new leaf?

The answer, if a widely cited Tablet Magazine article by Emily Benedek published earlier this week is any indicator, is simply to lie about it.

Much of the article simply presents generic complaints about "critical race theory" or rehashes content from the initial draft which had already been removed, in order to suggest that the curriculum continued to explicitly demonize Zionism and Israel. Plenty of credulous readers bought the message -- Bari Weiss, for example, linked to the article with a searing indictment of American Jewish leadership: 

"California's schools are mandating the erasure of Jews and the acceptance of anti-Zionism. I blame every single American Jewish leader who didn't bang on about this every single day. Every single one."

The problem? The current draft does not, as best I can tell, even mention the word Zionism or anti-Zionism. It's not present. And the reason it isn't present is because of a bevy of American Jewish leaders who did successfully bang the drum on this and now are having their hard work erased. Nice work.

But the reason why Benedek focuses on the old drafts becomes clearer when you look at what she has to say about the current one. In one of the few passages that speaks on this subject, Benedek writes that in the new draft

[t]wo lessons have been offered about Jews. One, following crude CRT dogma,  teaches that Mizrahi Jews coming to the United States from Arab lands were mistreated by “white” Ashkenazim. The other suggests that Jews of European descent have white privilege.

The first claim is simply a lie, and a lie that generated a furious reaction from the Mizrahi Jewish advocacy group Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA). JIMENA had invested extensive time and energy into helping develop the ESMC's Mizrahi Jewish unit, and they were not pleased to see their efforts so cavalierly misrepresented. They were doubly-displeased that Benedek didn't even deign to reach out to them to learn about the unit they helped construct. They have asked Tablet to issue a correction, but so far the magazine does not appear to have obliged.

The second claim relates to sections of the curriculum which discuss how Jewish racial identity is malleable and how some Jews have conditional White privilege. The intersection of Jewishness and Whiteness is an area I'd like to think I know a little about, and what the ESMC is saying is true -- and more than true, important for understanding how antisemitism continues to operate. As the ESMC notes, "conditional" whiteness is always revocable, particularly when Jews refuse to assimilate or insist on maintaining ourselves as a distinctive people. Recognizing that, and recognizing how Jewish racial status is malleable such that Jews can sometimes be treated as "White" and other times not, is essential if students are to understand how Jews who look like me can and do face continued antisemitic oppression even as in other contexts we might be able to access some of the prerogatives of Whiteness. To be Jewish in America is to be allowed to attend the all-White schools in the segregated south while simultaneously being targeted by the KKK as the ultimate threat to the White race. In short, our whiteness, and access to the privileges thereof, is inconsistent and shifting -- or, we might say, conditional. 

Yet for the ESMC's effort to present this nuanced position in good faith, Benedek echoes other critics in accusing it of being tantamount to Nazi propaganda. No good deed, indeed. 

But that isn't the worst of it. Having struggled to point to anything concrete in the current (as opposed  to older, abandoned) drafts of the ESMC that is antisemitic, Benedek finally appears to identify a whopper of an example in this paragraph:

As a result of the outpouring of criticism of the first ESMC draft, in August 2019, Superintendent Thurmond ordered a revision. A second draft was completed in August 2020 and was immediately criticized for simply moving objectionable material to the appendices and footnotes. In the current, third draft, released in December, some of the most offensive material was actually moved back in. For example, an historical resource was added with the following description of prewar Zionism: “the Jews have filled the air with their cries and lamentations in an effort to raise funds and American Jews, as is well known, are the richest in the world.”

That last quote is quite shocking, and if it were presented approvingly in the ESMC it'd be worthy of condemnation. And precisely because it was so shocking, I went in search of it, wanting to see if there was any context or explanation that might justify it. But my efforts stymied by a more fundamental problem: 

The quote isn't there.

I, along with several other readers, searched high and low for much of the day trying to find where this quote was. It did not appear to be anywhere in the ESMC. And we couldn't find it on google either, so we couldn't even figure out the initial source. Finally, Benedek gave us a clue: She cited line 11180 of the ESMC's "Appendix A", offering sample lesson plans for various units. A bit strange to see it located in an appendix, since it was cited as a case where offensive material was taken out of the "appendices and footnotes [and] ....moved back in" to the main text, but at least we now knew where to look.

Except, it wasn't there either. Line 11180 is part of a string citation to additional handouts and materials that might be consulted. That line specifically was a cite to Ameen Rihani's essay  (published in the 1920s) "Deserts of Fact and Fancy," though it didn't quote any passages from it. But while the quote wasn't in the ESMC itself, maybe it could be found inside Rihani's essay? No again. The words are not present in Rihani's essay either. So what on earth was Benedik talking about?

After several hours of sleuthing, we finally figured it out. The words were not in the ESMC. And they weren't in the "Deserts of Fact and Fancy" article cited in the ESMC. Rather, the material appeared in a different article, not cited or referenced anywhere in the ESMC, that happened to be printed in the same volume as "Deserts of Fact and Fancy" -- albeit 30 pages away. There, finally, we'd uncovered the big offense of the ESMC third draft.

If it wasn't so unethical, it'd be hilarious. Over eleven thousand lines deep into one of the appendices, someone -- no doubt frantically searching for something to hang their hat on in order to continue portraying the revised ESMC as an antisemitic document -- clicks on the alternate link provided for the "Deserts of Fact and Fancy" article (since the first is behind a paywall; if one read it on the original site, incidentally, it's clear that the quote is not present) and then, finding nothing of note in the essay itself, decides to browse through the entire newsletter it appeared in before finding a completely unrelated article with offensive material. Is that offensive material quoted in the ESMC? No. Is it contained in an article cited by the ESMC? No again. Who cares! Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Of course, there's virtually no chance that any actual student would ever come across the quote. It is not, contra Benedek, part of the curriculum, nor is it included in the resources cited in the curriculum. And if there are K-12 students who not only actually look up the fourth entry on the additional readings list, but also proceed to read all the other articles which share a volume with the suggested supplements, then frankly I tip my cap to the Ethnic Studies Curriculum for developing such voracious overachievers.

But the fact that one had to dig so deep into the weeds to find something objectionable in (or more accurately, not in) the ESMC is, in its perverted way, another testament to just how well the Jewish community did in securing necessary reforms. We should be taking a victory lap. And we should be taking down the names of those who would rather see anything else than a world where Jews are, in fact, fairly included and treated in Ethnic Studies.

Explicit Mizrahi Zionism and the California Ethnic Studies Curriculum

In Jewish Currents, Gabi Kirk has a long piece on the antisemitism controversy over the California Ethnic Studies curriculum (last year I wrote on the matter here). It's a wide-ranging issue and a wide-ranging essay, but (in keeping with my prior contribution) I want to focus on the specific issue of Sephardic/Mizrahi inclusion.*

Here is what Kirk says when she reaches that angle of the story:

Complaints about the [proposed Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum] aren’t coming solely from white Ashkenazi Jews; Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewish groups have also claimed the curriculum leaves out their experiences. Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA)—which is also an explicitly Zionist group—claimed in multiple letters to the CDE that the draft ESMC “portray[s] Arabs as a homogenous, Muslim group,” and “excludes and erases the experiences, perspectives, and voices of diverse Middle Eastern communities.” (JIMENA did not respond to requests for comment for this piece.) California is home to a large Mizrahi Jewish population; Los Angeles is home to the largest Iranian-Jewish population in the US. 

Have you ever fixated on one word in a passage, and just felt it inexorably press layers of meaning onto you? That's me with "explicitly" (as in JIMENA is "also an explicitly Zionist group").

Throughout Kirk's essay, the Jewish organizations criticizing the draft ethnic studies curriculum were pretty much always referred to as "Jewish Zionist". Nobody was ever referred to as "anti-Zionist" -- only the Zionists needed the perpetual modifier attached to them. It's the Zionists versus the unmarked neutrals. But of all the groups mentioned -- from the AJC to the ADL to AMCHA -- only JIMENA was "explicitly Zionist".**

And I started wondering -- why explicitly? What was that word doing? How was JIMENA explicitly Zionist in a way its peers were not? To be sure, JIMENA is Zionist in the same way that most Jewish organizations are, in the same way that most Jews are. I'm quite familiar with them, and I know what role Zionism plays in their organizational orientation. JIMENA is an organization that was formed to represent the interests and the stories of Sephardic/Mizrahi Jewish refugees whose communities in the Arab and Muslim world were decimated in the decades surrounding the establishment of Israel. It is Zionist because (a) most of the community it represents is Zionist and (b) in its estimation, its mission and values are furthered through some iteration of Zionism. But Zionism is not its raison d'etre. It does not even appear in JIMENA's "About" section.

One would be hard pressed to explain how JIMENA is notably "explicit" in its Zionism in a way that, say, the AJC is not. And what would "non-explicit" Zionism look like? If it's not "explicit", is it "covert"? "Hidden"? It starts to look pretty lose-lose, pretty quickly.

The almost assured truth is that the word "explicitly", here, is redundant in terms of cognitive content. It is not actually meant to distinguish JIMENA from the AJC; it does not add information. Its purpose is more affective -- meant to convey a mood of danger, or of shamelessness. It reads like an "explicit lyrics" stamp slapped on an album: these Jews need a warning label. It's similar to how one sometimes sees groups or speakers called "openly" or "avowedly" Zionist. Taken literally, one might ask "as opposed to?" But the purpose of the modifier isn't really to add new content as it is to tut at the brazenness of it all. How very dare they. These are not respectable Jews. They flaunt. If there is a reason why "explicitly" got attached to JIMENA in particular, it was as a red flag for the unwary reader who might otherwise be inclined to credit the worries of the Mizrahi community.

There is something that I think is worth saying about the manner in which the Zionism of Mizrahi Jews is often cast and denigrated in these tones -- as brazen, audacious, flamboyant, even obscene. It's late, and I'm tired, and others can pick this ball up if they want to. But it is something I've noticed before, and I was not surprised to see it here.

* There's a separate issue burbling up regarding a column on this issue written by a certain disgraced Jewish journalist in the Jewish Journal. I have no desire to give this writer any more attention, so I'll just say that the disgraced journalist is disgraced for a reason and that it's a further disgrace that they are still being published in respectable outlets.

** Though the letter was hosted on JIMENA's website, it actually had ten other co-signatories, all California-based Sephardic/Mizrahi Jewish organizations including five synagogues. They go unmentioned in Kirk's essay (are they "explicitly" Zionist too -- whatever that means?). By comparison, in the next paragraph Kirk contrasts JIMENA's letter with "others [who] trace the difficulty of imparting Mizrahi history to Zionism itself." The link goes to an essay hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace (a far more "explicitly" anti-Zionist organization than JIMENA is "explicitly" Zionist) and was signed by two people, one of whom lives in Indiana. Nonetheless, Kirk spends roughly twice as much time on (and extends much more sympathy to) the analysis of this duo. That later in the essay she quotes a proponent of the draft ethnic studies curriculum complaining about "tokenizing" is more than a little rich.

Post-Thankful Roundup

I was thankful on Thanksgiving, but now the holiday is over and I'm back to being misanthropic.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles Kate Manne (congrats on her baby, by the way!).

I'd find these complaints about how the right is rewriting Mizrahi history to suit its political agenda more compelling if the left hadn't completely abandoned this arena for years (with occasional exceptions for hopelessly idealized histories that are equally political, just with different motivations).

A new survey on British antisemitism is out and making waves. I think several of their methodological choices are questionable, to say the least, which prevents me from endorsing its conclusions without reservation. That's unfortunate because there is some interesting data in there, but it's occluded by the authors' own manifest ideological biases. I might write separately on this.

Shocking-not-shocking, part one: A Jewish member of the McGill student government was given an ultimatum to either withdraw from a trip to Israel or resign (she's doing neither, and daring the body to impeach her). Shocking-not-shocking, part two: A non-Jewish student government member going on the same trip was weirdly overlooked and given a pass.

Ohio legislators introduce bill threatening life imprisonment for any woman, girl, or doctor who has or performs an abortion. "Abortion", here, includes not reimplanting an ectopic pregnancy, which is currently not medically possible.

Anti-Vaxxers make headway in Samoa; dozens of people die of measles in Samoa.

Is there a word -- presumably, a German word that's four words smashed together -- for the distinct feeling of anger one gets at a person or object precisely because one knows one can't reasonably be angry at that person or object? Inquiring minds would like to know.

"Pinkwashing", Hen Mazzig, and the Silencing of Mizrahi Jewish History

I have mixed feelings about Hen Mazzig. But I have unambiguous feelings about the justification SJP Vassar just gave for protesting his talk on "The Indigenous Jews of the Middle East: Forgotten Refugees." at Vassar College the other day. It really demonstrates the impossible toxicity of the manner in which SJP seeks to police Jewish -- and often especially minority Jewish -- voices.

The author, Ezra Mead, begins with the nominal affirmation that "[t]he stories of Mizrahi Jews and their struggle both outside and within Israel deserve attention." But by contrast, he argues, "there is no room for 'diverse viewpoints'" or "'free exchange of ideas'" around Israeli military actions in the Palestinian territories.

But of course, Mazzig's talk was not offering [SEE UPDATE BELOW] any viewpoint ("diverse" or otherwise) on the occupation or Israeli military policies, it was -- again -- a talk on "The Indigenous Jews of the Middle East" (i.e., Mizrahi/Sephardic Jews), and he was going to tell the story of his own families dispossession in Tunisia and Iraq that ultimately led them to come to Israel. Mead is engaging in a non-sequitur -- unless, of course, Mead thinks that the mere fact that Mazzig is an Israeli Jew who is not openly contemptuous of his state's existence automatically makes anything he chooses to speak upon an apologia for Palestinian dispossession.

Which is, of course, exactly what he thinks.

It is no surprise, then, that Mead also accuses Mazzig of "pinkwashing", for I've sometimes described "pinkwashing" as encompassing nothing more than being "gay, Jewish, and not visibly burning an Israeli flag". Again: Mazzig's talk was on the history of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East (with a particular focus on his personal family history). It's far from clear that he was going to offer any significant discussion of his sexuality, specifically -- it is certainly a part of his identity he is quite open about, but it did not seem to be the direct focus of the talk itself. But no matter: a gay Jew talking about anything Jewish- or Israel-related is presumed to be and intrinsically coded as part of a plot. You know Jews -- they're only after that one thing.

The fact of the matter is that SJP protested this talk because Mizrahi Jewish history is an uncomfortable subject for them. It does not fit comfortably in the boxes that anti-Zionists (or Zionists, for that matter) wish to lay out for it. Mazzig's talk probably wasn't speaking directly to the IDF or the settlements or the occupation or military operations in Gaza. But it would speak very directly to the brute fact that the most tangible social accomplishment that has occurred under an anti-Zionist banner has not been the enfranchisement of Palestinians (even in circumstances where they live under anti-Zionist political jurisdictions) but the massive dispossession and virtual eradication of ancient Jewish communities throughout the Middle East.

The last thing the SJP wants to do is own that history. So they obstruct that conversation by re-narrating Mizrahi Jewish political narratives generally as being right-wing apologias for Israeli state action no matter what their substantive content is, presumably with a narrow carve-out for those few Mizrahi Jewish activists whose politics are suitably harmonious with SJP's preconceived political commitments about Israel -- i.e., the ones in which they don't have to reckon with what anti-Zionism has tangibly, brutally, concretely meant for that community.

"There is no 'free exchange of ideas' to be had about forced dispossession and ethnic cleansing" indeed.

UPDATE: Hen says that at his talk "I did speak about the occupation and voiced my opposition to it and discussed Palestinians." My guess -- again, given the title -- is that this was not the primary focus of the talk (nor did it have to be!), but perhaps I am mistaken. The broad point remains (if anything, it is strengthened given that Hen contra his SJP "interlocutors" is not "ignoring" Palestinian issues): Mizrahi Jews, Hen Mazzig included, are entirely within their rights to narrate their own history without pausing every forty-five seconds to say "and by the way, the occupation is terrible".

On the California Ethnic Studies Controversy

Soon, if you haven't already, you will likely hear of controversies relating to the draft model ethnic curriculum guidelines recently promulgated by the California Department of Education. The LA Times recently editorialized against them as a jargon-laden PC smorgasbord, and much of the Jewish community has also rallied against the curriculum's almost complete exclusion and erasure of Jews, Jewishness, and antisemitism (alongside its promotion of BDS). The California Legislative Jewish Caucus released a letter expressing its deep concerns with the curriculum, including the somewhat explosive allegation that the omission of Jews was not a mere oversight but rather was "intentional" on the part of the curriculum drafters and reflective of their particular "political bias".

There's also a related movement by the California Middle Eastern Jewish community, led by JIMENA, that is protesting against the specific omission of Middle Eastern/Mizrahi Jews from the "Arab American Studies" curriculum (see their "call to action").

The public comment period remains open; I actually submitted comments several days ago. Mine focused on the Mizrahi Jewish issue; while I was in conversation with JIMENA on this question, my comments were my own and submitted in my personal capacity.

Anyway. In an undoubtedly futile effort to contextualize this controversy, which I am sure will soon explode into the press as "the Jews vs. Ethnic Studies!", I offer the following quick thoughts:

• None of the major interventions I've seen from the Jewish community have opposed the Ethnic Studies mandate passed by the California legislature. This is not a case of Jews opposing Ethnic Studies; "the Jews vs. Ethnic Studies" frame, tempting as it is, is incorrect. 
• If anything, this is a case of Jews seeking inclusion within Ethnic Studies. Their objection is rather that the draft curriculum erases Jews from the Ethnic Studies pantheon -- an erasure that, if the CLJC letter is correct, was not an oversight but rather malicious in character. 
• The most unifying "ask" by the Jewish intervenors has been to ensure that antisemitism and Jewish ethnic identity gets its fair share of attention within the Ethnic Studies curriculum, whether it is in a model course of its own or at the very least due attention in the draft "survey" course.
• That this is a call for inclusion, not exclusion, is even more important to stress in the Mizrahi Jewish case. Jews from places like Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt have every right to be included in an "Arab American Studies" curriculum; that curriculum is as much theirs as it is anyone else's. The assumption that their objections come "from the outside" is a form of antisemitic otherization, nothing more.
• In the wake of the debate over H. Res. 246, I have a sneaking suspicion that we're going to see some quick pivots from "if government is allowed to express its negative opinion of BDS in a non-binding resolution, free speech in America is dead!" to "if government doesn't explicitly endorse BDS in its K-12 model curriculum, free speech in America is dead!" Maybe I'm too cynical. But we'll see.

If you want to offer your own comments, you can download the form here. I suggest reading JIMENA's call to action for some suggested do/don'ts so you can understand what the community does and does not want from its allies on this issue (DO: "Be respectful – no bashing Ethnic Studies"; "Share how the Model Curriculum personally impacts you as a student, parent, educator, or concerned Jewish resident of California." DON'T: "Attack the State of California or the Board of Education for passing legislation requiring the State to implement Ethnic Studies Curriculum"; "Attack state officials or communities referenced in the curriculum – such as Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims.").

Fraud Squad! Roundup

In a meeting, I got a phone call from my bank about potentially fraudulent transactions on my credit card. Had I recently ordered $50 worth of fast food pizza? No, I hadn't -- and so the account is frozen, and presumably the charges will be reversed.

An hour later, upon returning to my desk, I had the bizarre joy of seeing a confirmation from Domino's promising me that my "pizza is on the way [to Houston, Texas]!"

Anyway, long story short: I'm getting pizza for dinner tonight.

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Jenny Singer of the Forward interviews Young Gravy, a Black Jewish rapper (and GW student). It's a really interesting and worth your time (I'm saying that not just because I think I played a role in putting the interview together!).

I think I missed this when it came out, but a Texas court struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act's adoption rules this past fall, saying that act's preferences for Indian children to stay with Indian families was racially discriminatory against non-Indians. The Judge, incidentally, was Reed O'Connor -- the same guy who just struck down Obamacare. He's certainly setting himself up as the go-to-guy for tip-of-the-spear conservative judicial activism.

Alabama was all set to execute a Muslim inmate -- but refused to allow a Muslim chaplain to be present with him during the execution (they did offer a Christian chaplain, which unsurprisingly the inmate did not consider to be a satisfactory substitute). 11th Circuit stays the execution due to the "powerful Establishment Clause claim" (and plausible RLUIPA claim). Alabama is appealing to the Supreme Court.

A new poll finds that over half of Israeli Jews agree that the controversial "nation-state" law must be either abandoned outright or fixed to confirm the state's commitment to democratic equality for all citizens.

A Cameroonian official has apologized for threatening an ethnic minority group by comparing them to Jews in pre-WWII Germany, namely: "In Germany, there was a very rich community who wielded all economic power .... They (the Jews) were so arrogant that the German people were frustrated. Then one day, a certain Hitler came to power and put them in the gas chambers."

I have no takeaways from the Likud primaries except celebrating Oren Hazan's imminent departure from the Knesset. Goooood riddance.

Iraqi Jews commemorate family members who were "disappeared" by state secret police.

What We Like About Each Other

Daniel Gordis has an interesting piece in Bloomberg about a co-existence program that brings together Palestinian and Israeli teenagers in the Gush Etzion area (which is inside the West Bank, just south of Jerusalem).

Aside from the substantive content of the piece, there were two tertiary elements that stood out. One is the notation that Gush Etzion had Jewish residents prior to Israel's establishment -- these Jews were expelled when Jordan took over the territory in the wake of Israel's independence war. Many of the current settlers in that territory descend from families which were forced to flee.

That sort of story is rarely raised. And to be clear, in a large sense for me it doesn't matter -- I've long maintained that part of a permanent settlement between Israel and Palestine will likely include a proviso that not everyone gets to live on the precise patch of land they'd most prefer, and that applies to Jewish families whose roots in Gush Etzion go deep as much as the descendants of Palestinian refugees who fled pre-67 Israel during the Nakba. But it is nonetheless a complicating narrative in a region where simplicity is too often craved, and I think that's important.

The other interesting portion came at the very end:

“I have another question,” an Israeli teenager asked her Palestinian counterparts at a recent meeting. “Is there anything about our culture that you actually like?”

The Palestinian kids were quiet for a moment, and then they laughed. “We love your music,” they said. Specifically Eyal Golan, an Israeli rock star who sings in Hebrew, but in a Middle Eastern, almost Arabic-sounding style. “We don’t understand the Hebrew; but we listen to him all the time; we know all the words by heart.”

The way this is framed by Gordis, one might think Golan -- an Israeli who sings "in a Middle Eastern, almost Arabic-sounding style" -- is appropriating culture that isn't his (think of consternation regarding Israeli Jews selling hummus, or wearing a keffiyeh). Yet as one might have suspected, Golan is himself a Middle Eastern Jew -- his family hails from Morocco and Yemen. So when he sings in a "Middle Eastern" or "Arabic-sounding" style -- that's his style. He has equal claim to as compared to any other person from Yemen or Morocco.

Anyway, as I said, these are tertiary points. The article is pretty light, all told, but worth a read nonetheless.

Meeting Day Roundup

Today was a big meeting day for me (I was basically continuously talking with people from 10 AM to 3:45 PM -- lunch included). But it was fun! The conversations were nice and very productive. I met somebody new, got mentored by my adviser and mentored two undergraduate advisees. All in all, a good day.

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My friend Sarah Levin explains why, as a Mizrahi Jewish women, she did not feel comfortable marching with the Women's March this year. Particularly given how the debate over the Women's March has often been perceived to break down as "White Jewish women" versus "Middle Eastern/POC women", Sarah's perspective regarding Mizrahi erasure is an important one that needs consideration.

In the course of defending excluding all Israelis from the country, the Malaysian Prime Minister also explains why he so frequently indulges in naked antisemitism: "when I say only the 'Zionists,' people don’t understand. What they do understand is the word 'yahudi' or 'Jews.'" Oh, I bet they do.

Orin Kerr flags a Third Circuit which raises an interesting qualified immunity question: how long after the release of an opinion does the legal holding of that opinion become "clearly established". My instinctive view is "immediately" (or, at least, immediately after the mandate issues). But that may well be colored by my view that qualified immunity is basically a set of special privileges given to government officials to break the law that aren't extended to everyday citizens.

Buzzfeed publishes a report (apparently originally printed in a Swiss magazine) claiming that two Jewish political operatives were originally behind the campaign to vilify George Soros; a JTA article expresses skepticism about the timeline.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) apologizes for a 2012 tweet where she accused Israel having "hypnotized the world" to blind global actors to the Jewish state's "evil". The apology was proximately prompted by this column from Bari Weiss, explaining the antisemitic provenance behind the "hypnotized" language; Weiss thanked Omar for her apology and extended an open invitation to her to write on the issue in the New York Times op-ed section.

End of the Year Roundup

I know what you're thinking: It's not the "end of the year". The end of the year was almost a week ago!

But Blogger thinks you're wrong. If you look at the right-hand column of archived posts, it counts anything written from the week of December 30 through January 6 as being written in 2018.

And there's more: In both 2016 and 2017, I apparently wrote exactly 229 post. This post? This one right here? This should be post number ... 230.

That's right: an overtime victory for 2018's productivity.

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Israel has officially announced it will seek $250 billion dollars in compensation from other Middle Eastern countries who expelled their Jewish populations in the wake of Israel's independence.

Good to see D.C. statehood get more traction in the House.

Five Jewish teenagers were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the stone-throwing death of a Palestinian woman. Cases of Jewish terrorism targeting Palestinians tripled in 2018.

This feels like something the Joker would do: colorful balloons carry explosives sent from Gaza into Israel (the bomb was safely defused with no injuries).

Meanwhile, here in Berkeley, a man has been arrested after bringing a fake bomb covered with antisemitic writing into our campus police department.

Tyler Cowen: speech regulation policies on private media platforms (like Facebook or Twitter) can be scalable, efficient, and consistent -- pick two. Put differently: a small website can efficiently manage a consistent moderation policy. But a large website (like Twitter) must either invest tremendous sums into moderation (far more than is cost-effective) or settle for a patchwork and inconsistently applied system that's largely ineffective and makes everyone angry.

UPDATE: Oh dang -- joke's on me! Apparently, today counts as the first day of 2019. Which means that 2018 -- like 2017 and 2016 -- will go down as having exactly 229 posts written.

That's kind of cool in its own right. I guess.

Post-Bacchanalia Roundup

I had my bachelor party this weekend in Chicago. That sounds wilder than it was -- my fiancee and I have the same core friend group (we all went to college together), so we rented an AirBnb and spent the weekend as a group. We did split off Saturday to do our own things (mani/pedis for the gals, an escape room for team boy -- which we completed with seven seconds to spare), but by and large it was a non-traditionally gender-unified event.

Still a blast though.

Anyway, here's some stuff that's gone on in the interim.

* * *

In Foreign Policy, Jacob Levy has a neat essay on the philosophy of my great-grandadviser (the Ph.D. adviser of the Ph.D. adviser of my Ph.D. adviser), Judith Shklar.

Also in FP, a discussion of a possible Israeli-Palestinian confederation -- the first articulation of an outcome to the conflict outside the "classic" two-state solution model which I've found remotely compelling.

Labour's antisemitism policy under Corbyn has basically been "fuck you, Jews" in so many words, but I believe this is the first time a prominent Jewish Labour politician has explicitly said "fuck you" back to him.

Iraq has a long Jewish history, which is memorialized in a giant archive of Jewish artifacts. These artifacts were removed for safekeeping following the U.S. invasion, and unsurprisingly Iraq now wants them back. Problem: virtually no Iraqi Jews live in Iraq anymore, and they want the archives somewhere they can actually access them. For the record, this is a great example of the sort of problem intersectionality was designed to illuminate.

D.C. Circuit upholds funding structure whereby FERC gets its budget from fees assessed to natural gas pipeline projects it approves (against environmental challengers who say that incentivizes them to keep approving pipelines). The more interesting part of the case is a bit buried though -- the court concludes that Pennsylvania's Environmental Rights Amendment does not create an individualized liberty or property interest in a clean environment cognizable under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Meanwhile, the Seventh Circuit concludes that refusing to give an incarcerated transwoman medically-necessary hormone therapy -- and later, forbidding her from taking those hormones herself when she's released on parole -- can give rise to a "deliberate indifference" to medical need claim.

Man calls the police on a Black man over a basketball foul. No, seriously. What's his hashtag going to be? I vote #HardPickHal.

Term Limited Roundup

My last class meeting is on Wednesday. After that (and grading finals), I'm free of teaching obligations for the next two (two!) years. All I have to do in that time is write a dissertation. Should be easy-peasy!

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I've been meaning to share this outstanding essay by C. Thi Nguyen on "echo chambers", and how we discount information from "the other side", for some time now. It's really, really good.

Several Labour MPs, including Luciana Berger, give heart-wrenching descriptions of the antisemitism they continue to face in British society. J.K. Rowling comes in with an assist (though the article doesn't link to her best moment).

Great conversation in Slate by several Black writers about being Black in White spaces in America. Starbucks, Waffle Houses, golf courses .....

J Street is the future of Democratic Party pro-Israel work. How do I know? Because on the one hand, Ben Cardin was welcome there, despite being a high-profile opponent of the Iran Deal and a backer of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act. And on the other hand, Ben Cardin's message at J Street was basically in line with the broader progressive Zionist camp. Those who want to keep excluding J Street from the pro-Israel camp do so at their own peril.

The L.A. Times has an interesting piece on Latinos joining the Border Patrol (note: Border Patrol and ICE are distinct agencies). The Border Patrol either is now or soon will be majority Latino in personnel.

You know you're spending too much time following American antisemitism when a new story breaks about an antisemitic professor at Knox College and you're like "I bet I know who!" (my guess was "the guy who said that Michael Twitty wants 'to be everything but [his] African sel[f]' because Twitty is a Black Jew". I guessed right).

Sarah Jones interviews Michael Kimmel on deradicalization and reintegration of former White Supremacists. Also apropos: San Francisco anti-racism trainings that are for White Men only. Good example of "owning your shit" and not demanding that POCs serve as educators, or bad example of White Fragility and refusal to tolerate discomfort? You decide.

Are the Koch-brothers (the famous right-libertarian billionaires pumping money into academia and think tanks) spearheading a new insertion of paleo-con anti-Israel ideology back into the political right?

Two interesting pieces on Mizrahi Jews and the ongoing failure to fully grapple with their differentiated history vis-a-vis European/Ashkenazi Jews. The first centers on the documentary series "The Ancestral Sin", regarding how Mizrahi Jews were systematically marginalized by bigoted (largely secular) bureaucrats in Israel's early days. The second is a call for Mizrahi Jews to be given an equal seat at the table in Jewish conversations today.

"I'm in a Book -- No, Not Because of That!" Roundup

The political theory class moves onto its feminism unit. I thought about recommending my students read Kate Manne's fantastic book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny -- after all, I'm in it! Upon reflection, telling my students that I'm "in" a book about misogyny may be a bad idea unless I provide considerably more context about the nature of my inclusion (I was discussant when she presented a chapter of the book at a Berkeley workshop; she was also generous enough to cite to my "Playing with Cards" article).

* * *

New Voices (a periodical promoting young Jewish writers) has a piece on Mizrahi Jews trying to find space for their stories in generally-Ashkenazi-dominated campus Jewish spaces.

Study: Middle School students (of all races) prefer teachers of color. Suggestive that implicit biases aren't as prevalent among tweens and young teens? Or that teachers of color who manage to overcome racialized barriers and mistrust to reach and keep their positions are particularly talented?

Oregon judge suspended after, among other things, putting up a picture of Hitler in his courthouse's "Hall of Heroes" (he also refused to marry same-sex couples, tried to use his judicial status to intimidate a youth soccer referee, and allowed a felon whose case he was adjudicating to handle a firearm in his presence).

BDS activists in Spain are suing an anti-BDS watchdog for "intimidation" stemming from the latter's successful legal efforts to overturn BDS ordinances passed in various Spanish municipalities. A judge is allowing the lawsuit to proceed. While there's something unnerving about a suit claiming that the counterparty winning discrimination suits constitutes a form of "discrimination", I try not to jump to conclusions about the meaning of pre-trial rulings in foreign legal cultures, because I have no idea what the relevant legal standards of review are in (in this case) Spain. So grain of salt.

Trump Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo is deeply tied to anti-Muslim bigots. There's a special place in hypocrisy hell for those in the Jewish community who went all-in on Tamika Mallory for her ties to Louis Farrakhan last week who back Pompeo this week (RJC, looking at you).

Professors in the Geography Department at the University of British Columbia successfully pressure their own students to cancel a gala that would've been held at the campus Hillel space. The gala would not (to my knowledge) have been Israel (or Jewish-related). Hey, I remember when we went through this at Brown!

Today in Middle Eastern Jewry Roundup

For whatever reason, an outsized number of interesting stories about Middle Eastern Jews are currently occupying my browser. I don't have time to write on them individually, so ... roundup!

* * *

A formerly-Islamist, now secular Tunisian political party places a Jewish candidate at the top of its list.

Interesting story of an Iranian Jew-by-choice, currently seeking legal status in America.

Libyan Jews worry that new American agreement restricting importation of ancient artifacts from that country will -- in effect -- ratify the expropriation of their property. This, incidentally, is a great example of "why intersectionality needs to include the Mizrahi case."

A step away from Middle Eastern Jews, but still germane: an interview with the Palestinian Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace.

North African Jewry and the Holocaust

Haaretz has an interesting piece up on the general failure to include North African Jews in our narratives about the Holocaust (despite the fact that Jews in lands occupied by Germany were interned in forced labor camps and later deported to death camps). The article runs through a variety of reasons why these stories aren't told (ranging from straight-forward Ashkenormativity, to cultural misunderstandings by largely European Jewish chroniclers of the Holocaust, to attempts by leftist Mizrahi activists to minimize the salience of the Holocaust to their own cultural narratives out of fears that it might shine light on pre-Independence Zionist ideologies within their community).

One thing I can recommend, at least on the cultural side, is the movie The Wedding Song, which is set in Tunis during World War II and traces the relationship of a Jewish girl and her Muslim friend as the Nazis began more aggressively targeting the local Jewish population. I saw the film at a screening sponsored by JIMENA -- Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa -- and it was quite illuminating.

Post-Turkey Roundup

Back from seeing the family in Rhode Island. But what is Thanksgiving without leftovers?

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Is Donald Trump boosting a conspiracy website arguing that Jews run the world still news? I think it's still news.

Right-wing website hires a woman to pose as a survivor of sexual assault by Roy Moore in an attempt to embarrass the Washington Post. Unfortunately for them, the Post is a real newspaper that actually does fact-check, so they figured out her scheme. Maybe she should've called Bernie Bernstein?

Tamar Zaken writes on Mizrahi Heritage Month (aka, November): "We cannot define the Mizrachi heritage in terms of expulsion or destruction."

The New York Jewish deli owned by a Yemeni Muslim.

Marty Lederman looks into the fun statutory issues governing who's actually running the Consumer Financial Protection Board right now.

"It Could've Been Worse" is the Ultimate Non-Sequitur

Israel Bonan writes on the history of Egyptian Jews and the significant oppression -- culminating in violence and expulsion -- that characterized their experience in the 20th century.

It's a reply to Eyal Sagui Bizawe, who also wrote about the 20th century history of Egyptian Jews. Bizawe's column is somewhat peculiar, since it doesn't rely deny the reality of historical oppression so much as it seems cranky that it's being talked about as a form of significant oppression. It's replete with logic like "well, yeah Jews were expelled from Egypt, but not all of them so ... why should we call it 'expulsion'?" Or "yes, there was violence directed at Jews and Jewish neighborhoods, but 'pogrom' -- that's overselling it, no?"

Basically, Bizawe seems to think it's a sort of trick, or a form of dirty pool, for Egyptian Jews to argue that a significant (not the only, but a significant) component of their recent social experience was discrimination by the Egyptian state and society. It's unfair, it's reactionary, it's harboring a closet right-wing agenda. None of these contentions are particularly persuasive, and Bonan's column does a good job refuting them. But read them both and decide for yourself.

Avi Gabbay Doo!

Avi Gabbay is the new head of Israel's Labor Party, defeating former Labor head and former Defense Minister Amir Peretz in a run-off (both advanced past current Labor chief Isaac Herzog, who placed third in the initial round of voting). Gabbay is a political novice who is not currently in the Knesset, although he did formerly serve as Environmental Protection Minister.

I don't really know a lot about Gabbay's politics, so I won't say anything more there. But I did want to point out that the run-off between Gabbay and Peretz featured two Israelis of Moroccan descent. That's especially noteworthy given Labor's long history as the redoubt of the old Ashkenazi elite in Israeli society -- a feature which is not unrelated to Likud's rise to power starting in the 1970s and to political dominance since the end of Ehud Barak's tenure as Prime Minister in 2001.

So congratulations to Gabbay, and here's hoping that he can help reinvigorated a genuine liberal alternative in Israel.