If ever I had sympathy for the plight of "Never Trump" Republicans, it was watching the UK election returns.
Being a progressive, my politics generally align far more with Labour than they would with the Tories. And that would be even without the Conservatives' disastrous embrace of Brexit. Yet like most Jews, I deeply, deeply mistrust Jeremy Corbyn. The last polls of the Jewish vote suggest that only thirteen percent were planning to vote Labour this cycle -- the same proportion, incidentally, as that of Muslims voting for Trump. And even if one thinks that stopping a hard Brexit is the single most important item on the UK agenda -- and I think that's plausible -- the fact that Corbyn himself is at best soft on the issue means that I couldn't even get enthusiastic on that issue.
That said. UK voters don't vote directly for their Prime Minister -- just their local MP. And my sense is that Jewish voters tend to like their MPs (Labour or Conservative) just fine. While several articles in the Jewish press are noting how Labour underperformed in several "bagel belt" districts where anti-Corbyn antipathy might have have saved a few marginal Tory seats, I think it's easy to overstate that story. For starters, for every seat where Corbyn was hurt by the perception that he was tolerant of antisemitism, there may have been another where he was bolstered by the perception that he was standing up to the overbearing Zionists.
But more broadly, I think it's almost certainly true that most people just didn't care about the antisemitism issue. And while that's sobering, it also means that Jewish MPs and their allies actually tended to do fine. Labour critics of Corbynista antisemitism -- like Luciana Berger, Louise Ellman, and Ruth Smeeth -- rode the Labour wave as much as anyone else did. Non-Jewish MPs known for their good relations with the Jewish community likewise saw their margins shoot up as well -- these include Tulip Siddiq, Wes Streeting, and Naz Shah.
Nonetheless, we shouldn't deflect. One of the critical lessons of Donald Trump's success is that all of his supposedly "beyond the pale" characteristics -- the racism, the authoritarianism, the anti-intellectualism -- none of that actually matters. Those of us who had hoped that Election 2016 would be a slap in the face to an increasingly radicalized Republican Party instead watched them learn that they could do all of these things and it was fine. And so, likewise, one of the lessons the left will learn from Corbyn's relative success is that one in fact can completely dismiss and ignore the concerns of terrorized Jews and nobody will care. That's not good. And that's going to have consequences down the line.
It really was an impossible dilemma. Punishing Labour for normalizing antisemitism on the left would mean emboldening isolationist and xenophobic currents rapidly occupying the right -- currents which themselves will invariably lead to antisemitism. Anshel Pfeffer was not wrong in observing that the choice for UK Jews is "Anti-Semitism Today, or Tomorrow?"
All in all, a hung parliament is about the best result I could hope for. While this was certainly an exceeds-expectations performance for Jeremy Corbyn, I admit to being a bit confused at how "getting 55 fewer seats and 800,000 fewer votes than the Tories" counts as "winning". As Matt Yglesias observed, "the left thesis in the US is 'Bernie would've won' not 'Bernie would have lost narrowly to Trump.' That's what Hillary did!" Kept in perspective, I can keep a relatively optimistic view of what happened last night. The main thing Labour successfully accomplished was throwing a serious wrench in Theresa May's efforts to negotiate a hard Brexit. And that is an unambiguously good thing.
Friday, June 09, 2017
Thursday, June 08, 2017
Yet More College Student Entitlement
A student at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is suing her poetry professor and demanding that a court award her an "A" in the class (as well as suspend or fire the teacher).
Man, I am so sick of entitled millennial brats demanding special-snowfl -- what's that?
The student is 59 years old? And her complaint centers around the class being too focused on LGBT poetry?
Ahem. As I was saying: it's about time that someone stood up to PC-culture run amok at our public universities, which are after all funded by taxpayer dollars. Maybe if universities started to treat their students more like customers, we'd see less of these outrageously offensive and triggering classes, and more attention to "improv[ing] a student's welfare".
Man, I am so sick of entitled millennial brats demanding special-snowfl -- what's that?
The student is 59 years old? And her complaint centers around the class being too focused on LGBT poetry?
Ahem. As I was saying: it's about time that someone stood up to PC-culture run amok at our public universities, which are after all funded by taxpayer dollars. Maybe if universities started to treat their students more like customers, we'd see less of these outrageously offensive and triggering classes, and more attention to "improv[ing] a student's welfare".
What is Going on at Fresno State?
There's a brewing controversy at Fresno State, where the university has restarted a search for the Edward Said Professorship of Middle East Studies after determining that the current search -- which had already selected a series of finalists -- had various procedural defects in violation of university guidelines (all the finalists were invited to reapply in the new search). An emeritus professor of Linguistics at the university, Vida Samiian, has publicly alleged, however, that this is all a pretext and that the search was canceled due "a documented campaign of harassment and intimidation ... by Israel advocacy groups" seeking to "derail" the search.
That sounds pretty bad. The problem is that, as my friend Steven Lubet has observed, there is virtually no evidence backing up these allegations. The university administration flatly denies having even been contacted by, much less subjected to pressure from, any outside groups. And Ben Sales at JTA interviewed members of the (relatively small) Fresno-area Jewish community had found that nobody there had even heard of the search, much less agitated against it.
The closest thing to actual evidence that Samiian has in her letter is a few instances of relatively anodyne expressions of concern by Jewish faculty members about how the search was progressing. She histrionically labels these "harassment", but they deserve that label only if it expands to encompass "Jews saying words." And again, none of them speak to any sort of campaign or concerted effort by anyone to have the search canceled (there is one stray reference to "outside" concerns about the search, but again, nobody has presented any proof of any such outside pressure manifesting).
Of course, a complete lack of evidence didn't stop JVP from rapidly circulating a letter taking as fact that the search was canceled "in response to pressures from Israel advocacy groups" who "launched a campaign to cancel the search altogether". Abba Eban once famously quipped that "If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions." So too, it seems, that if JVP circulates a letter saying Fresno State was devoured by a hellmouth and Israel had summoned it, it would amass 500 signatures within the week.
Lubet uses this to coin the term "Occam's BDS razor": the simplest explanation, anytime anything on campus doesn't go precisely the way pro-Palestinian advocates would like, is the interference of nefarious pro-Israel lobbying. We can see how that mentality shook out at Fresno both "vertically" and "horizontally". "Vertically", a few offhand remarks that were critical of the search proceedings got elevated to cases of "harassment". And "horizontally", these few remarks were roped together to form the locus of an imagined conspiracy of intimidation against the entire search. The ease at which these jumps are made is itself illustrative of antisemitism in its structural dimension -- even the tiniest shreds of Jewish public or private discourse immediately metastasize into dark threats of domineering power. Such moves, I have to think, wouldn't fly (or wouldn't fly as easily) were they not so easily slotted into the grooves of antisemitic discourse.
So underneath all of this sound and fury, is there any there, there? It seems supremely unlikely that there was any "pressure" or "campaign" from Israel advocacy groups with respect to this search. But if there is a bare kernel here, I suspect it's something like the following: the administration admits it was too slow to catch onto the procedural shortcomings of the search (lack of approval by a specific department, failure to form the search committee via departmental election, and unauthorized contact and participation by an external member -- likely Samiian). And I doubt that there are many faculty members at Fresno State or anywhere else who care about such things for their own sake. So, it is entirely plausible that the person who alerted the Fresno State administration to these irregularities did so not because of a deep, dispassionate commitment to the faculty handbook, but because of more, shall we say, substantive concerns about how the search was progressing.
One could say, then, that the irregularities were a "pretext", in that nobody would have cared about such procedural failings had the search not been independently controversial. However, it is also fair to observe that the whole reason we have requirements of procedure is precisely to create confidence in faculty searches in circumstances where controversy is expected. Procedures like these matter most in circumstances where one might worry about efforts to "stack" a search committee or otherwise buttonhole it into a particular ideological or political box -- efforts almost certainly made easier when one circumvents normal requirements of faculty election and oversight. More to the point: It is wholly unsurprising that nobody cares about procedural defaults in cases that nobody cares about. We have procedural rules precisely for the cases that people do care about.
My comments in no way should be taken to impugn those persons who were selected as finalists and have gotten caught up in the middle of this controversy. I know nothing about them, and they may well be superb candidates whose virtues would be recognized by a search committee which was operating entirely above board. But surely we can be concerned with the celerity with which a very inside-baseball procedural dispute was elevated -- on the basis of virtually no evidence -- into a grand conspiracy of Jewish intimidation, and the ease with which many bought into it.
That sounds pretty bad. The problem is that, as my friend Steven Lubet has observed, there is virtually no evidence backing up these allegations. The university administration flatly denies having even been contacted by, much less subjected to pressure from, any outside groups. And Ben Sales at JTA interviewed members of the (relatively small) Fresno-area Jewish community had found that nobody there had even heard of the search, much less agitated against it.
The closest thing to actual evidence that Samiian has in her letter is a few instances of relatively anodyne expressions of concern by Jewish faculty members about how the search was progressing. She histrionically labels these "harassment", but they deserve that label only if it expands to encompass "Jews saying words." And again, none of them speak to any sort of campaign or concerted effort by anyone to have the search canceled (there is one stray reference to "outside" concerns about the search, but again, nobody has presented any proof of any such outside pressure manifesting).
Of course, a complete lack of evidence didn't stop JVP from rapidly circulating a letter taking as fact that the search was canceled "in response to pressures from Israel advocacy groups" who "launched a campaign to cancel the search altogether". Abba Eban once famously quipped that "If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions." So too, it seems, that if JVP circulates a letter saying Fresno State was devoured by a hellmouth and Israel had summoned it, it would amass 500 signatures within the week.
Lubet uses this to coin the term "Occam's BDS razor": the simplest explanation, anytime anything on campus doesn't go precisely the way pro-Palestinian advocates would like, is the interference of nefarious pro-Israel lobbying. We can see how that mentality shook out at Fresno both "vertically" and "horizontally". "Vertically", a few offhand remarks that were critical of the search proceedings got elevated to cases of "harassment". And "horizontally", these few remarks were roped together to form the locus of an imagined conspiracy of intimidation against the entire search. The ease at which these jumps are made is itself illustrative of antisemitism in its structural dimension -- even the tiniest shreds of Jewish public or private discourse immediately metastasize into dark threats of domineering power. Such moves, I have to think, wouldn't fly (or wouldn't fly as easily) were they not so easily slotted into the grooves of antisemitic discourse.
So underneath all of this sound and fury, is there any there, there? It seems supremely unlikely that there was any "pressure" or "campaign" from Israel advocacy groups with respect to this search. But if there is a bare kernel here, I suspect it's something like the following: the administration admits it was too slow to catch onto the procedural shortcomings of the search (lack of approval by a specific department, failure to form the search committee via departmental election, and unauthorized contact and participation by an external member -- likely Samiian). And I doubt that there are many faculty members at Fresno State or anywhere else who care about such things for their own sake. So, it is entirely plausible that the person who alerted the Fresno State administration to these irregularities did so not because of a deep, dispassionate commitment to the faculty handbook, but because of more, shall we say, substantive concerns about how the search was progressing.
One could say, then, that the irregularities were a "pretext", in that nobody would have cared about such procedural failings had the search not been independently controversial. However, it is also fair to observe that the whole reason we have requirements of procedure is precisely to create confidence in faculty searches in circumstances where controversy is expected. Procedures like these matter most in circumstances where one might worry about efforts to "stack" a search committee or otherwise buttonhole it into a particular ideological or political box -- efforts almost certainly made easier when one circumvents normal requirements of faculty election and oversight. More to the point: It is wholly unsurprising that nobody cares about procedural defaults in cases that nobody cares about. We have procedural rules precisely for the cases that people do care about.
My comments in no way should be taken to impugn those persons who were selected as finalists and have gotten caught up in the middle of this controversy. I know nothing about them, and they may well be superb candidates whose virtues would be recognized by a search committee which was operating entirely above board. But surely we can be concerned with the celerity with which a very inside-baseball procedural dispute was elevated -- on the basis of virtually no evidence -- into a grand conspiracy of Jewish intimidation, and the ease with which many bought into it.
Tuesday, June 06, 2017
Be AsInsured: Gaza 2014 was a "War"
Last year, I noted a lawsuit filed in California that sought to determine whether the events in Gaza in 2014 -- specifically, rocket fire into Israel -- were part of a "war" or "terrorism". The lawsuit wasn't filed by a human rights NGO, or survivors of the violence, but rather came about in the most mundane possible fashion: an insurance dispute, where a policy excluded coverage for damage due to war, but covered damage due to terrorism.
Anyway, the district court has issued a ruling, and determined that the events in question were indeed a "war". Thanks, insurance industry, for providing helpful clarity on this issue!
Anyway, the district court has issued a ruling, and determined that the events in question were indeed a "war". Thanks, insurance industry, for providing helpful clarity on this issue!
Sunday, June 04, 2017
More Evidence of the Travel Ban's Discriminatory Intent
Following the horrific car ramming and stabbing attacks in London, President Trump tweeted the following:
As I've blogged several times, when it comes to the travel ban we keep seeing rather bizarre arguments which posit that it's somehow unfair to use straightforward evidence of discriminatory intent to establish discriminatory intent. But it isn't. And the fact that President Trump is congenitally incapable of not saying the quiet parts out loud doesn't give him special exemption from the laws of the land.
I haven't been able to find any information on who the suspects were and, more importantly, where they come from. But assuming they were not immigrants from the countries targeted by the travel ban, this tweet is yet more evidence that Trump's intention behind the travel ban is to target Muslims. After all, if there's no link via nationality, then the only thing that connects Trump's travel ban to the London attacks is Islam. That would further confirm what President Trump has publicly insisted -- that his executive order was his effort at targeted Muslims for exclusion from America, dressed up in a way that he thought would pass legal muster.We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2017
As I've blogged several times, when it comes to the travel ban we keep seeing rather bizarre arguments which posit that it's somehow unfair to use straightforward evidence of discriminatory intent to establish discriminatory intent. But it isn't. And the fact that President Trump is congenitally incapable of not saying the quiet parts out loud doesn't give him special exemption from the laws of the land.
Saturday, June 03, 2017
One Eyed Blogger Roundup
Somehow, I scratched my left cornea pretty badly yesterday. Ever managed to get dehydrated simply by your eye tearing up? Now I have!
Anyway, good excuse to clear some stuff off the ol' browser tab:
* * *
Two great columns, one by Adam Serwer and the other by Josh Barro, on the growing conservative embrace of cowardly violence masquerading as toughness.
While we're on the subject, Michelle Goldberg explores the propensity to take angry White voters seriously precisely because they seriously threaten violence if they don't get their way. It might be interesting to tie in this claim to the concerns that at least some segments of the radical campus population do engage politically in this angry, threatening fashion.
Interesting Ha'aretz interview with Jamaica Kincaid -- just your standard-issue Jewish Afro-Caribbean writer residing in Vermont -- after she won Israel's prestigious Dan David Prize.
Buzzfeed profiles atheists living in highly religious societies. It's sobering just how many are in fear of their life.
Donna Minkowitz reflects on how it came to be that "proud self-hating Jew" Gilad Atzmon asked her to blurb his book.
Lauren Post has a piece at the Forward giving the history of antisemitism in the feminist movement. Some of the texts she links to are classics -- including a few I had been intending to read for awhile but hadn't gotten my hands upon.
My old Illinois colleague Suja Thomas in Jotwell reviews some new research on implicit bias and judging. And speaking of new research on implicit bias, remind me to get this book by Jonathan Kahn on the subject when it comes out next fall.
Finally, Heidi Kitrosser has an article in the Minnesota Law Review entitled "Free Speech, Higher Education, and the PC Narrative" which seems well worth reading. If ever there was a term being asked to carry far more weight than it is capable of bearing, it is "PC".
Anyway, good excuse to clear some stuff off the ol' browser tab:
* * *
Two great columns, one by Adam Serwer and the other by Josh Barro, on the growing conservative embrace of cowardly violence masquerading as toughness.
While we're on the subject, Michelle Goldberg explores the propensity to take angry White voters seriously precisely because they seriously threaten violence if they don't get their way. It might be interesting to tie in this claim to the concerns that at least some segments of the radical campus population do engage politically in this angry, threatening fashion.
Interesting Ha'aretz interview with Jamaica Kincaid -- just your standard-issue Jewish Afro-Caribbean writer residing in Vermont -- after she won Israel's prestigious Dan David Prize.
Buzzfeed profiles atheists living in highly religious societies. It's sobering just how many are in fear of their life.
Donna Minkowitz reflects on how it came to be that "proud self-hating Jew" Gilad Atzmon asked her to blurb his book.
Lauren Post has a piece at the Forward giving the history of antisemitism in the feminist movement. Some of the texts she links to are classics -- including a few I had been intending to read for awhile but hadn't gotten my hands upon.
My old Illinois colleague Suja Thomas in Jotwell reviews some new research on implicit bias and judging. And speaking of new research on implicit bias, remind me to get this book by Jonathan Kahn on the subject when it comes out next fall.
Finally, Heidi Kitrosser has an article in the Minnesota Law Review entitled "Free Speech, Higher Education, and the PC Narrative" which seems well worth reading. If ever there was a term being asked to carry far more weight than it is capable of bearing, it is "PC".
Friday, June 02, 2017
More Someones Who Take Free Speech Seriously
Earlier this week I wrote on how the Academic Engagement Network -- a prominent scholarly anti-BDS group -- applauded CUNY for not giving into threats and refusing to cancel Linda Sarsour's scheduled commencement speech. While they obviously disagree with Sarsour sharply on the matter of BDS, they rightly observed that free speech can't be defended only in the cases one agrees with the speech.
Now Emily Shire in the Washington Post has added her name to the list of Zionist, anti-BDS writers who have publicly defended Sarsour's free speech rights. Shire's post is particularly good because it lays out, honestly and fairly, the legitimate reasons one might have for concerns over Sarsour. There are legitimate critiques to be made about Linda Sarsour's politics (there are also bullshit ones, and they're easy to spot as they're almost always the ones shrieking about Sharia law), and they should not be sugarcoated. They're also wholly irrelevant to the free speech question, which is not something reserved for persons free from "legitimate critiques".
Shire's column is principled and fair-minded. I highly encourage you to read it.
Now Emily Shire in the Washington Post has added her name to the list of Zionist, anti-BDS writers who have publicly defended Sarsour's free speech rights. Shire's post is particularly good because it lays out, honestly and fairly, the legitimate reasons one might have for concerns over Sarsour. There are legitimate critiques to be made about Linda Sarsour's politics (there are also bullshit ones, and they're easy to spot as they're almost always the ones shrieking about Sharia law), and they should not be sugarcoated. They're also wholly irrelevant to the free speech question, which is not something reserved for persons free from "legitimate critiques".
Shire's column is principled and fair-minded. I highly encourage you to read it.
Hi, I'm David, and I Don't Drink Almond Milk
Michael Tomasky gives us the latest installment of an everflowering series: crudely caricaturing "coastal elites" while purporting to educate them on middle Americans:
I don't drink almond milk (I've tried it, once, and think it's disgusting). I don't buy fair trade coffee or sip lattes of any variety. I've fired a gun, and while I don't have any real interest in doing it again, I don't begrudge others who do. I have friends from both high school and college who served in the armed forces. I can chat pop culture with the best of them (ask me about my breakdown of Gordon Ramsay shows). There is plenty that I find great about America, and am quite happy to kvell about.
Admittedly, I talk politics a lot (I am a political blogger), and I go to synagogue, not church. But I just got back from a funeral (my fiance's grandmother) which was held at a church in a town of less than 2,000 in rural Minnesota (Goodhue County went for Trump by 18, FYI). I survive such locales just fine. And while I always knew of how important her Christian faith was to her life, when I found out that she had specifically included me in her deathbed prayers, I was deeply moved.
Maybe this feels like protesting too much. But it's not just about me. It's also about the folks here at UC-Berkeley -- yes, hyper-lefty Berkeley -- that falsify that coastal bubble hypothesis.
When I started at Berkeley Law, my most liberal student was an alum of the University of South Carolina, and my most conservative was literally the scion of a wine dynasty. In between I taught decorated combat veterans and the daughter of an inland empire county sheriff. This is typical. UC-Berkeley is one of the world's great public universities, and our students accordingly come to us from all over the state and all over the world. They come from suburban Orange County, yes, but also inland ranch towns and impoverished LA neighborhoods. It is no surprise at all that Berkeley ranks ninth in the New York Times college access index measuring economic diversity amongst enrolled students, nor that UC schools comprise the entirety of the top 5.
So maybe we're asking the wrong questions. We know that students come from a wide range of backgrounds and geographic locations and pedigrees to attend to Berkeley. Indeed, I suspect that more Berkeley students and alumni know a sizeable chunk of folks who grew up in small towns than persons who grew up in small towns know a sizeable chunk of folks who attended schools like Berkeley. And we know that the resulting campus culture here at Berkeley is very liberal. And yes, self-selection plays a part in that, as does the relative ideological uniformity of the faculty. But maybe, just maybe, it's also evidence that when you expose people to a rich tapestry of human diversity encompassing people of a wide range of backgrounds, hometowns, and pedigrees -- the result is a tendency towards liberalism.
The fact is, our students aren't born on the Berkeley campus. Some of them come from those rural towns (in California or elsewhere). Or they don't, but their parents did. Or their best friend. Or their roommate. Or their future spouse. To act like Berkeley students have never met anyone who doesn't eat gluten-free is a grotesque parody of who actually comprises our "bubble".
So of course we should respect each and every part of America -- urban, suburban, and rural, north and south, coastal and middle. But the "coastal elites" who supposedly sniff down upon middle Americans from atop their soy lattes? They weren't born in a Starbucks. They might have been born in that small town in rural Minnesota that they supposedly cannot possibly understand.
[E]lite liberals need to recognize a fundamental truth: All of these people in middle America, even the actual liberals, have very different sensibilities than elite liberals who live on the coasts.
First of all, middle Americans go to church. Not temple. Church. God and Jesus Christ play important roles in their lives....
Second, politics simply doesn’t consume middle Americans the way it does elites on the coasts.... They talk kids, and local gossip, and pop culture, and sports....
Third, their daily lives are pretty different from the lives of elite liberals. Few of them buy fair trade coffee or organic almond milk. Some of them served in the armed forces. Some of them own guns, and like to shoot them and teach their kids how to shoot them. Some of them hold jobs in the service of global capital and feel proud of their work.
Fourth, they’re patriotic in the way that most Americans are patriotic. They don’t feel self-conscious saluting the flag. They don’t like it when people bad-mouth our country. They believe that America is mostly good, and that the rest of the world should look more like America.I find these very frustrating, not because of what they say about middle Americans, but because of what they say about me -- born inside the beltway on the east coast, currently living in the ultimate liberal bubble of Berkeley on the west coast.
I don't drink almond milk (I've tried it, once, and think it's disgusting). I don't buy fair trade coffee or sip lattes of any variety. I've fired a gun, and while I don't have any real interest in doing it again, I don't begrudge others who do. I have friends from both high school and college who served in the armed forces. I can chat pop culture with the best of them (ask me about my breakdown of Gordon Ramsay shows). There is plenty that I find great about America, and am quite happy to kvell about.
Admittedly, I talk politics a lot (I am a political blogger), and I go to synagogue, not church. But I just got back from a funeral (my fiance's grandmother) which was held at a church in a town of less than 2,000 in rural Minnesota (Goodhue County went for Trump by 18, FYI). I survive such locales just fine. And while I always knew of how important her Christian faith was to her life, when I found out that she had specifically included me in her deathbed prayers, I was deeply moved.
Maybe this feels like protesting too much. But it's not just about me. It's also about the folks here at UC-Berkeley -- yes, hyper-lefty Berkeley -- that falsify that coastal bubble hypothesis.
When I started at Berkeley Law, my most liberal student was an alum of the University of South Carolina, and my most conservative was literally the scion of a wine dynasty. In between I taught decorated combat veterans and the daughter of an inland empire county sheriff. This is typical. UC-Berkeley is one of the world's great public universities, and our students accordingly come to us from all over the state and all over the world. They come from suburban Orange County, yes, but also inland ranch towns and impoverished LA neighborhoods. It is no surprise at all that Berkeley ranks ninth in the New York Times college access index measuring economic diversity amongst enrolled students, nor that UC schools comprise the entirety of the top 5.
So maybe we're asking the wrong questions. We know that students come from a wide range of backgrounds and geographic locations and pedigrees to attend to Berkeley. Indeed, I suspect that more Berkeley students and alumni know a sizeable chunk of folks who grew up in small towns than persons who grew up in small towns know a sizeable chunk of folks who attended schools like Berkeley. And we know that the resulting campus culture here at Berkeley is very liberal. And yes, self-selection plays a part in that, as does the relative ideological uniformity of the faculty. But maybe, just maybe, it's also evidence that when you expose people to a rich tapestry of human diversity encompassing people of a wide range of backgrounds, hometowns, and pedigrees -- the result is a tendency towards liberalism.
The fact is, our students aren't born on the Berkeley campus. Some of them come from those rural towns (in California or elsewhere). Or they don't, but their parents did. Or their best friend. Or their roommate. Or their future spouse. To act like Berkeley students have never met anyone who doesn't eat gluten-free is a grotesque parody of who actually comprises our "bubble".
So of course we should respect each and every part of America -- urban, suburban, and rural, north and south, coastal and middle. But the "coastal elites" who supposedly sniff down upon middle Americans from atop their soy lattes? They weren't born in a Starbucks. They might have been born in that small town in rural Minnesota that they supposedly cannot possibly understand.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
The Thirteen Percenters
Yair Rosenberg has a good article up on the deep, deep Jewish antipathy for the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership -- such that just 13% of British Jews plan to vote Labour in the upcoming parliamentary election.
It's a good piece, but I have one minor quibble. To put that 13% figure in perspective, Rosenberg offers the following comparison: "For comparison, 2016 exit polls showed that Donald Trump received 8 percent of the African American vote."
It's not that this is wrong. It's just that there's a much more striking analogy.
Donald Trump received 13% of the Muslim vote this past election.
That seems to drive home the point much more cleanly, no? British Jews view Corbyn the same way that Muslim Americans view Trump. Sobering -- for those who care about those sorts of things, anyway.
It's a good piece, but I have one minor quibble. To put that 13% figure in perspective, Rosenberg offers the following comparison: "For comparison, 2016 exit polls showed that Donald Trump received 8 percent of the African American vote."
It's not that this is wrong. It's just that there's a much more striking analogy.
Donald Trump received 13% of the Muslim vote this past election.
That seems to drive home the point much more cleanly, no? British Jews view Corbyn the same way that Muslim Americans view Trump. Sobering -- for those who care about those sorts of things, anyway.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Some Of Us Do Take Free Speech Seriously
The Academic Engagement Network is a national organization dedicated to academic freedom and, specifically, opposed to the BDS movement. A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at their national conference in Chicago on the subject of challenges the AEN would face in the coming year.
My remarks were straightforward: the main challenge we would face would be to tackle right-wing threats to academic freedom and academic exchange with the same vigor that we address left-wing variants. A principled campaign in favor of academic freedom and academic exchange cannot be a fair-weather friend of free speech. And my keynote example of an issue that we had to speak out on was the Israeli law barring entry to persons who have endorsed -- in whole or in part -- the BDS campaign. Such a law purports to fight BDS, but by foreclosing academics and others from entering Israel on basis of their political ideology it in reality is BDS.
Unfortunately, from laws like this to metastasizing partnership guidelines at Hillel to right-wing calls for divestment from Hebrew University to canceling the concerts of liberal Israeli singers, these forms of "self-BDS" are becoming more common. And they're every bit as offensive to liberal norms as their left-wing counterparts.
That's why I'm pleased to report two bits of news with respect to the AEN:
First, the AEN released a statement commending the City University of New York for not bowing to right-wing pressure to cancel the scheduled commencement speech by Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour. While the AEN made it quite clear that they sharply opposed Sarsour's stance on BDS specifically, they correctly noted that such disagreement could not form the basis for cancelling her speech -- a principled stand that defended academic freedom in the hard case, not just the easy one.
Second, while it has not to my knowledge been posted online, the AEN also just sent a letter to Israeli colleagues decrying the Israeli law prohibiting entry to BDS supporters as a threat to academic freedom and academic exchange, as well as counterproductive to the anti-BDS cause. Indeed, it is quite explicit in drawing the same link I did whereby this law is for all intents and purposes a form of BDS: "[H]ow can we oppose BDS’ divisive and corrosive tactics if Israel is, in effect, openly adopting a similar strategy?"
Both of these positions are correct, and I'm pleased to see the AEN take them. But more than pleased, I'm also proud. Free speech and academic freedom have a great many fair-weather friends -- it's the sort of thing that is often good for me, but not for thee. I associated with the AEN because I believed it had the capacity to resist that temptation and demand that liberal values be protected via liberal means. I'm happy to see my confidence was justified. Kudos.
My remarks were straightforward: the main challenge we would face would be to tackle right-wing threats to academic freedom and academic exchange with the same vigor that we address left-wing variants. A principled campaign in favor of academic freedom and academic exchange cannot be a fair-weather friend of free speech. And my keynote example of an issue that we had to speak out on was the Israeli law barring entry to persons who have endorsed -- in whole or in part -- the BDS campaign. Such a law purports to fight BDS, but by foreclosing academics and others from entering Israel on basis of their political ideology it in reality is BDS.
Unfortunately, from laws like this to metastasizing partnership guidelines at Hillel to right-wing calls for divestment from Hebrew University to canceling the concerts of liberal Israeli singers, these forms of "self-BDS" are becoming more common. And they're every bit as offensive to liberal norms as their left-wing counterparts.
That's why I'm pleased to report two bits of news with respect to the AEN:
First, the AEN released a statement commending the City University of New York for not bowing to right-wing pressure to cancel the scheduled commencement speech by Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour. While the AEN made it quite clear that they sharply opposed Sarsour's stance on BDS specifically, they correctly noted that such disagreement could not form the basis for cancelling her speech -- a principled stand that defended academic freedom in the hard case, not just the easy one.
Second, while it has not to my knowledge been posted online, the AEN also just sent a letter to Israeli colleagues decrying the Israeli law prohibiting entry to BDS supporters as a threat to academic freedom and academic exchange, as well as counterproductive to the anti-BDS cause. Indeed, it is quite explicit in drawing the same link I did whereby this law is for all intents and purposes a form of BDS: "[H]ow can we oppose BDS’ divisive and corrosive tactics if Israel is, in effect, openly adopting a similar strategy?"
Both of these positions are correct, and I'm pleased to see the AEN take them. But more than pleased, I'm also proud. Free speech and academic freedom have a great many fair-weather friends -- it's the sort of thing that is often good for me, but not for thee. I associated with the AEN because I believed it had the capacity to resist that temptation and demand that liberal values be protected via liberal means. I'm happy to see my confidence was justified. Kudos.
Saturday, May 27, 2017
Discriminatory Motives Have Consequences
The 4th Circuit has upheld the injunction against President Trump's anti-Muslim travel ban. Its opinion rests heavily on various statements by the President which evince a discriminatory motive -- over and over again he said that his goal was to target Muslims, and when he became convinced that an explicit Muslim ban was off the table, he conceded that the executive order he issued was a way to effectuate those discriminatory desires via alternative means.
I've already explained why it is normal -- indeed, legally required -- for courts to take President Trump's motives into account when assessing whether his order is discriminatory. You can't take "intent" out of "discriminatory intent." So the 4th Circuit's decision is entirely appropriate and in line with standard legal precedent and reasoning.
But there's another reason why this decision -- and the clear focus it puts upon Trump's discriminatory statements -- matters. Very early on, I suggested that the appeal of Donald Trump is directly tied not just to his various bigoted statements, but to the imperviousness he's demonstrated to any backlash against him for said bigotry.
And that, in turn, is why the 4th Circuit's decision matters. It tells the President and his followers -- using completely normal and unremarkable tools of legal analysis -- that these things do have consequences. In our society, governmental actions taken with a discriminatory motive are constitutionally infirm. When you go out and brag about your discriminatory motive, you put the resulting policy programs at risk. That's a known consequence of that decision; one built into our constitutional fabric promising freedom of religion and equal protection under the law.
So it's no wonder he and his supporters are so outraged. What Donald Trump promised -- the ideal he represented, and for a long time was able to live out -- was a world where bigotry ceased to have consequences. And the orders enjoining his Muslim ban represents the thing they hate the most -- accountability.
I've already explained why it is normal -- indeed, legally required -- for courts to take President Trump's motives into account when assessing whether his order is discriminatory. You can't take "intent" out of "discriminatory intent." So the 4th Circuit's decision is entirely appropriate and in line with standard legal precedent and reasoning.
But there's another reason why this decision -- and the clear focus it puts upon Trump's discriminatory statements -- matters. Very early on, I suggested that the appeal of Donald Trump is directly tied not just to his various bigoted statements, but to the imperviousness he's demonstrated to any backlash against him for said bigotry.
When Donald Trump implies Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, when he suggests that Latinos are all violent criminals, when he legitimizes mass expulsion (or worse) of American Muslims -- maybe he's saying out loud what many people secretly believe but felt constrained in saying. Isn't this the root of the "anti-PC" backlash? "I used to be able to openly degrade women for having a menstrual cycle, but thanks to liberal elites and Feminazis I can't say that anymore! What happened to freedom in America?" The complaint of the anti-PC crowd is precisely that they have to keep quiet that which they'd rather broadcast (and once could broadcast, before we had to actually start listening to the desires of pesky minorities).Deeply rooted in Donald Trump's appeal is that one should be able to say or do racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, Islamophobic, xenophobic (take your pick) things -- and face no consequences whatsoever. There are many people who long for the days when they could exhibit those prejudices and it was simply fine. It didn't matter. And Donald Trump -- for so long entirely impervious to social or political consequence for his own explicit bigotry -- instantiates that dream.
Most people can't say such things anymore, or at least they're constrained in their ability to do so. There are members of traditional outgroups in their workforce (maybe even their boss), or as powerful constituents, or major donors, or simply well-connected citizens. Saying such things comes with real costs, sometimes prohibitive costs. It can lose you your job, or your friends, or your reputation, or your candidacy. And some people resent that deeply even as they quietly stew and keep their true beliefs private.
But Donald Trump is different. He can say these things. He can't destroy his reputation -- he's his own brand. He can't be driven out of the race by outraged donors -- he doesn't need them. He can't lose his job -- he runs his own company. He doesn't have to defer to outraged outgroups -- what can they do to him? For someone with implicit biases, this may not matter -- he's so obviously over-the-top that his positions can't be reconciled with any sort of egalitarian commitment. But for the covertly-biased, he offers up a tantalizing vision where one can say all of those open, overt, explicitly biased things they genuinely believe and it's okay. They don't have to cover it up anymore.
And that, in turn, is why the 4th Circuit's decision matters. It tells the President and his followers -- using completely normal and unremarkable tools of legal analysis -- that these things do have consequences. In our society, governmental actions taken with a discriminatory motive are constitutionally infirm. When you go out and brag about your discriminatory motive, you put the resulting policy programs at risk. That's a known consequence of that decision; one built into our constitutional fabric promising freedom of religion and equal protection under the law.
So it's no wonder he and his supporters are so outraged. What Donald Trump promised -- the ideal he represented, and for a long time was able to live out -- was a world where bigotry ceased to have consequences. And the orders enjoining his Muslim ban represents the thing they hate the most -- accountability.
Friday, May 26, 2017
More Shocking News from the Fair-Weather Free Speech Brigade
Some people didn't want Linda Sarsour giving a commencement address at CUNY. Those people included notorious Islamophobe Pam Geller and alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos. Their protest ended up turning violent, with one counterprotester reportedly surrounded and beaten.
You might remember Milo as the guy whose speech at Berkeley was squelched by violent protests. That set off a lot of talk about free speech -- consider my own remarks condemning said protests. But I was never under illusions that the conservative defense of Milo was really about free speech, let alone that Milo himself was a principled defender of it. One defends Milo speaking at Berkeley for the same reason one defends the Nazis marching through Skokie. The prospect that the speakers themselves don't care about free speech doesn't really factor in.
Meanwhile, a Republican who bodyslammed a reporter just got elected to Congress in Montana. So perhaps we can dispense with the fiction that there exists in the modern conservative movement some deeply rooted commitment to free speech right now that runs beyond partisan politics. As much as commitment to free speech may be decaying on the modern left, it faces just as much threat on the right.
You might remember Milo as the guy whose speech at Berkeley was squelched by violent protests. That set off a lot of talk about free speech -- consider my own remarks condemning said protests. But I was never under illusions that the conservative defense of Milo was really about free speech, let alone that Milo himself was a principled defender of it. One defends Milo speaking at Berkeley for the same reason one defends the Nazis marching through Skokie. The prospect that the speakers themselves don't care about free speech doesn't really factor in.
Meanwhile, a Republican who bodyslammed a reporter just got elected to Congress in Montana. So perhaps we can dispense with the fiction that there exists in the modern conservative movement some deeply rooted commitment to free speech right now that runs beyond partisan politics. As much as commitment to free speech may be decaying on the modern left, it faces just as much threat on the right.
Thursday, May 25, 2017
Today I Got Assaulted
Today, walking to lunch in Berkeley, I was shoved into a wall.
I'm fine, mostly. Some minor scrapes on my wrist and soreness in my shoulder (which took the brunt of the impact). And the lawyer in me needs to say that technically, it was a "battery" and not an "assault".
The man who attacked me was a member of the local homeless population, and I suspect has some form of mental illness (when I called my mom to tell her, her first thought was that it was a protester angry at something I had written on my blog. Leave it to a Jewish mother to instinctively assume that her son must be important enough to be targeted for violence. A nice career aspiration, I suppose.).
Anyway, we were walking past each other on the sidewalk -- me on the building-side, him street-side -- and as we passed he yelled something unintelligible at me and then kind of pushed/body checked me into the wall.
I was in a bit of shock, and didn't really know what to do, so I just kept walking. But looking over my shoulder, I saw him strike another pedestrian behind me, who was much more visibly upset than I was. And unlike me, he had a bunch of witnesses who urged him to contact the police (conveniently enough, all of this happened literally across the street from the UC-Berkeley Police). Once I saw him walk across the street to talk to the officers, I figured I might as well join him. Unfortunately, my co-victim said he had a final exam to take and quickly bolted, so I ended up being the only person to give a statement.
After quickly getting my information, the first thing they asked was whether I wanted to file a formal police report. Since no officer had witnessed the crime, they couldn't arrest the man (who claimed he was "tying his shoelaces" -- no, he wasn't) without a report. I asked what that would entail. One of the officers said that this was misdemeanor assault, and that in all likelihood he'd be cited, spend a few days in jail, and then be released. I asked if he was known to be violent -- if he was a known problem then that'd be one thing, but if this was a one-off I wasn't sure I wanted to make a big deal about it. One officer said he didn't know of any violent behavior the guy had done, but another said that he was on probation and that he was kind of day-to-day -- sometimes in a good mood and smiling, and other days ... more like this.
Ultimately, I decided to file the report (the decisive factor in my reasoning was that he had hit me and another guy). So I got to have my statement taken (along with pictures of my various scrapes and bruises), and chat with several officers in the process.
One of them was very invested in telling me that media coverage of police violence was completely overblown and that it overlooks all the circumstances or reasons why police use of force might be justified. That was academically a very interesting perspective to listen to, mostly because it was coming from a rank-and-file officer who giving his pretty unvarnished vantage (rather than something airbrushed through a PR office tailor-made to persuade liberal college students).
For example, one rationale one often hears from the "stop snitching" movement is that one shouldn't call the police on people because, when you do so, you're calling upon the tools of state violence which will impose that violence in quite predictable ways on vulnerable communities. And this (non-White, I should add) officer basically offered the same analysis -- except from the other side: he was upset that people call the police and then get angry that the police they call sometimes have to use force. "What did you think would happen," he said (my paraphrase), "if you call us, you're saying that the enforcement arm of the government needs to come in and act as enforcers! So don't act shocked and indignant when we do that!" He believed that the act of calling the police was an implicit license for whatever force was needed to protect the innocent, and thought that the public was two-faced in their desire for protection while disavowing the sorts of acts he felt were frequently necessary to facilitate that protection. Or at one point I thought I was being conciliatory and said something to the effect of "I know no officer thinks it's a good day when they have to use force ....", but he interrupted me and said that you don't become a police officer unless you like all aspects of the job, and there are days where he hopes some punk will give him a reason to take him down.
So again -- that was interesting.
Anyway, I asked what the next steps were, and the answer was "likely nothing" -- the case will almost certainly not go to trial, there will be a citation, a few days in prison, and then he'll be released. Which seems about right. This was not some violent superpredator who needs to be locked away for decades sort of deal.
I'll make one other comment, which may "cut against interest" so to speak. In the immediate aftermath, I was thinking that this was the first time I'd really been the victim of a semi-serious crime. But that made me think back further, and remember one time at Carleton where a bunch of bros (almost certainly drunk) were walking past me in a hall and did something very similar -- a sort of unprovoked push/body check as I was walking past. And my thought then wasn't "I've just been the victim of a crime", it was "wow, those guys are assholes!"
Which they were. Physically attacking other people is an assholish (or, potentially, congressional) thing to do. But the distinction does raise the question of why that event was coded as "assholishness" while this one was coded as "crime". And there are perfectly neutral reasons I could give: For one, the Carleton event didn't cause any cuts, scrapes or bruises. For two, I didn't see the Carleton guys do this to anyone else, whereas I did immediately see this guy attack another pedestrian. And for three, here several witnesses specifically urged the (other) victim to contact the police (who were literally within eyeshot) and he did so -- I just followed along to corroborate.
Still, it seems very likely that part of what explains the difference was the social construction or narrative of what constitutes "crime" or "criminal". When relatively privileged college students push someone around, that makes them dicks, bullies, or jerks. When a homeless person who speaks little English does it, that makes them a criminal. The fact is that two people at various points in my life did effectively identical things to me that violated the same formal criminal proscription, and only one of them now has an arrest record for it. And the reason for the divergence is, at least in some part, due to social positionality.
I don't have cutting commentary to add to this. Just an event that happened that I figured I should reflect upon.
I'm fine, mostly. Some minor scrapes on my wrist and soreness in my shoulder (which took the brunt of the impact). And the lawyer in me needs to say that technically, it was a "battery" and not an "assault".
The man who attacked me was a member of the local homeless population, and I suspect has some form of mental illness (when I called my mom to tell her, her first thought was that it was a protester angry at something I had written on my blog. Leave it to a Jewish mother to instinctively assume that her son must be important enough to be targeted for violence. A nice career aspiration, I suppose.).
Anyway, we were walking past each other on the sidewalk -- me on the building-side, him street-side -- and as we passed he yelled something unintelligible at me and then kind of pushed/body checked me into the wall.
I was in a bit of shock, and didn't really know what to do, so I just kept walking. But looking over my shoulder, I saw him strike another pedestrian behind me, who was much more visibly upset than I was. And unlike me, he had a bunch of witnesses who urged him to contact the police (conveniently enough, all of this happened literally across the street from the UC-Berkeley Police). Once I saw him walk across the street to talk to the officers, I figured I might as well join him. Unfortunately, my co-victim said he had a final exam to take and quickly bolted, so I ended up being the only person to give a statement.
After quickly getting my information, the first thing they asked was whether I wanted to file a formal police report. Since no officer had witnessed the crime, they couldn't arrest the man (who claimed he was "tying his shoelaces" -- no, he wasn't) without a report. I asked what that would entail. One of the officers said that this was misdemeanor assault, and that in all likelihood he'd be cited, spend a few days in jail, and then be released. I asked if he was known to be violent -- if he was a known problem then that'd be one thing, but if this was a one-off I wasn't sure I wanted to make a big deal about it. One officer said he didn't know of any violent behavior the guy had done, but another said that he was on probation and that he was kind of day-to-day -- sometimes in a good mood and smiling, and other days ... more like this.
Ultimately, I decided to file the report (the decisive factor in my reasoning was that he had hit me and another guy). So I got to have my statement taken (along with pictures of my various scrapes and bruises), and chat with several officers in the process.
One of them was very invested in telling me that media coverage of police violence was completely overblown and that it overlooks all the circumstances or reasons why police use of force might be justified. That was academically a very interesting perspective to listen to, mostly because it was coming from a rank-and-file officer who giving his pretty unvarnished vantage (rather than something airbrushed through a PR office tailor-made to persuade liberal college students).
For example, one rationale one often hears from the "stop snitching" movement is that one shouldn't call the police on people because, when you do so, you're calling upon the tools of state violence which will impose that violence in quite predictable ways on vulnerable communities. And this (non-White, I should add) officer basically offered the same analysis -- except from the other side: he was upset that people call the police and then get angry that the police they call sometimes have to use force. "What did you think would happen," he said (my paraphrase), "if you call us, you're saying that the enforcement arm of the government needs to come in and act as enforcers! So don't act shocked and indignant when we do that!" He believed that the act of calling the police was an implicit license for whatever force was needed to protect the innocent, and thought that the public was two-faced in their desire for protection while disavowing the sorts of acts he felt were frequently necessary to facilitate that protection. Or at one point I thought I was being conciliatory and said something to the effect of "I know no officer thinks it's a good day when they have to use force ....", but he interrupted me and said that you don't become a police officer unless you like all aspects of the job, and there are days where he hopes some punk will give him a reason to take him down.
So again -- that was interesting.
Anyway, I asked what the next steps were, and the answer was "likely nothing" -- the case will almost certainly not go to trial, there will be a citation, a few days in prison, and then he'll be released. Which seems about right. This was not some violent superpredator who needs to be locked away for decades sort of deal.
I'll make one other comment, which may "cut against interest" so to speak. In the immediate aftermath, I was thinking that this was the first time I'd really been the victim of a semi-serious crime. But that made me think back further, and remember one time at Carleton where a bunch of bros (almost certainly drunk) were walking past me in a hall and did something very similar -- a sort of unprovoked push/body check as I was walking past. And my thought then wasn't "I've just been the victim of a crime", it was "wow, those guys are assholes!"
Which they were. Physically attacking other people is an assholish (or, potentially, congressional) thing to do. But the distinction does raise the question of why that event was coded as "assholishness" while this one was coded as "crime". And there are perfectly neutral reasons I could give: For one, the Carleton event didn't cause any cuts, scrapes or bruises. For two, I didn't see the Carleton guys do this to anyone else, whereas I did immediately see this guy attack another pedestrian. And for three, here several witnesses specifically urged the (other) victim to contact the police (who were literally within eyeshot) and he did so -- I just followed along to corroborate.
Still, it seems very likely that part of what explains the difference was the social construction or narrative of what constitutes "crime" or "criminal". When relatively privileged college students push someone around, that makes them dicks, bullies, or jerks. When a homeless person who speaks little English does it, that makes them a criminal. The fact is that two people at various points in my life did effectively identical things to me that violated the same formal criminal proscription, and only one of them now has an arrest record for it. And the reason for the divergence is, at least in some part, due to social positionality.
I don't have cutting commentary to add to this. Just an event that happened that I figured I should reflect upon.
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Mitch Landrieu on Confederation Commemoration
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu recently decided to take down several city monuments honoring various Confederate leaders. Unsurprisingly, he faced significant pushback for this decision. This is a link to the speech he gave explaining why he did what he did.
It is one of the most powerful and unflinching speeches by a White southerner on the matter of race, the "lost cause", and southern identity that I've ever read. It's not long, and I'm not going to excerpt. Just read it in full.
It is one of the most powerful and unflinching speeches by a White southerner on the matter of race, the "lost cause", and southern identity that I've ever read. It's not long, and I'm not going to excerpt. Just read it in full.
Monday, May 22, 2017
Parodying While Minority: The Burden of "Black and Jewish"
A few weeks ago, I read another article (in the UK's Independent) about the latest set of antisemitism controversies in the UK's National Union of Students. There is a lot -- a lot -- that could be written about antisemitism in the NUS, and most of the article struck me as entirely fair play. But one of their examples was the following:
Both of the black women in the video -- Kali Hawk and Kat Graham -- are Jewish.
It is initially notable that, despite the title of the video being "Black and Jewish", it did not seem to occur to the authors that the artists were, indeed, Black and Jewish. They just assumed that the women were dressing up in foreign cultural attire and mocking Jews. So, as a commentary on the erasure of non-White Jews, this story seems to capture that in a very literal sense. And lest we think this is only a function of an ignorant non-Jewish media source, Algemeiner (which ought to know better) also alluded to Shahid "shar[ing] a video that includes tropes of Jews being stingy and having big noses."
But beyond the failure to recognize the existence of Black Jews, I think there's also a more subtle form of marginalization in play here. It's not that Jews cannot make antisemitic remarks. But jokes like "my ass and nose, they're both big" are hardly far removed from Woody Allen-esque self-deprecation that has long characterized Jewish humor. And such self-deprecation, in turn, has long been a coping mechanism for Jews and other outgroups -- we dissipate the power of hurtful stereotypes by mocking them or applying them tongue-in-cheek.
Yet my strong suspicion is that if you're a minority-within-a-minority, that release valve can be closed off. There's much greater pressure to be, not just hyperauthentic, but hyper-earnest about it all in a way that I can only imagine must be maddening. Again, their participation in a rather ordinary form of self-parody is taken to be not an act of Jewishness but an act of antagonism towards their Jewishness -- in a way I don't think would happen if they had a background and an appearance more like, say, mine.
If, as one might say, certain jokes or mockeries are "ours" (as in I can mock Jewish noses, but you, the goyish reader, most certainly cannot), that raises the question of whether Hawk and Graham are really included in the "our". To the extent their Blackness renders their Jewishness permanently provisional, that functions as an exclusion from the full expression of their Jewish identity. Ironically, the demand that they constantly prove themselves authentic Jews (in a way that, say, I rarely am asked to do) operates to make that request impossible to meet.
Meanwhile, another current NUS officer, LGBT+ Officer Noorulann Shahid, who uses the pronouns they/them, posted a link on Twitter to a comedy video that includes a number of anti-Semitic tropes and said they had “laughed out loud” at the clip.
The video, titled “Black and Jewish”, is a parody of rapper Wiz Khalifa’s song “Black and Yellow” and makes jokes about Jews having big noses and being stingy. It features two black women dressing up in traditional Jewish attire and singing lyrics including “my ass and nose, they’re both big” and “don’t spend no money but you know I’m rich”. The tweet dates from 2012.I remember seeing this video when it came out. I thought it was funny (though not uproariously so), and not particularly offensive. Clearly others disagree. But there's one aspect of this video that was completely overlooked in The Independent's coverage (and virtually all the other stories I've seen):
Both of the black women in the video -- Kali Hawk and Kat Graham -- are Jewish.
It is initially notable that, despite the title of the video being "Black and Jewish", it did not seem to occur to the authors that the artists were, indeed, Black and Jewish. They just assumed that the women were dressing up in foreign cultural attire and mocking Jews. So, as a commentary on the erasure of non-White Jews, this story seems to capture that in a very literal sense. And lest we think this is only a function of an ignorant non-Jewish media source, Algemeiner (which ought to know better) also alluded to Shahid "shar[ing] a video that includes tropes of Jews being stingy and having big noses."
But beyond the failure to recognize the existence of Black Jews, I think there's also a more subtle form of marginalization in play here. It's not that Jews cannot make antisemitic remarks. But jokes like "my ass and nose, they're both big" are hardly far removed from Woody Allen-esque self-deprecation that has long characterized Jewish humor. And such self-deprecation, in turn, has long been a coping mechanism for Jews and other outgroups -- we dissipate the power of hurtful stereotypes by mocking them or applying them tongue-in-cheek.
Yet my strong suspicion is that if you're a minority-within-a-minority, that release valve can be closed off. There's much greater pressure to be, not just hyperauthentic, but hyper-earnest about it all in a way that I can only imagine must be maddening. Again, their participation in a rather ordinary form of self-parody is taken to be not an act of Jewishness but an act of antagonism towards their Jewishness -- in a way I don't think would happen if they had a background and an appearance more like, say, mine.
If, as one might say, certain jokes or mockeries are "ours" (as in I can mock Jewish noses, but you, the goyish reader, most certainly cannot), that raises the question of whether Hawk and Graham are really included in the "our". To the extent their Blackness renders their Jewishness permanently provisional, that functions as an exclusion from the full expression of their Jewish identity. Ironically, the demand that they constantly prove themselves authentic Jews (in a way that, say, I rarely am asked to do) operates to make that request impossible to meet.
Friday, May 19, 2017
You Keep Using That Term, "BDS"....
The Israel Group sent out a message to their listserv warning of BDS starting to emerge at two Israeli universities -- Hebrew University in Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University in the Negev.
At first when I read the article, I was confused. Neither of the two stories -- BGU reportedly hosting an event by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, nor HUJ declining to play "Hatikvah (Israel's national anthem) at its graduation -- constitute a boycott, a divestment, or a sanction. Whatever one thinks of either happening, they're not cases of "BDS".
But then I reread the top of the article, where The Israel Group wrote the following (bold print original):
At first when I read the article, I was confused. Neither of the two stories -- BGU reportedly hosting an event by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, nor HUJ declining to play "Hatikvah (Israel's national anthem) at its graduation -- constitute a boycott, a divestment, or a sanction. Whatever one thinks of either happening, they're not cases of "BDS".
But then I reread the top of the article, where The Israel Group wrote the following (bold print original):
We strongly suggest that donors to Hebrew University immediately redirect their support to other Israeli institutions, and inform Hebrew U. as to why you are doing it.And then I got it -- it was a call for divestment! The BDS link was to the right-wing response to the events. Calls to censor Israeli academic events or to divest funding from Israeli universities based on narrow political litmus tests represents the core of the BDS ideology. And it is indeed alarming to see BDS tactics emerge on the Israeli and "pro-Israel" right -- the Israel Group is sadly not alone in aligning itself with the right-wing BDS campaign. So hopefully principled opponents of BDS will call them out on it and protect academic freedom and independence in Israel -- no matter who happens to be threatening it.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Heighten the Contradictions, Iranian Style!
Remember those annoying Jill Stein voters who "honestly preferred" that Donald Trump win the election because it would inevitably hasten the revolution that brings about the glorious workers' paradise? And remember how we all agreed those people were, in a word, morons?
Elliott Abrams just wrote that column about Iran. And it's just as nauseating.
Elliott Abrams just wrote that column about Iran. And it's just as nauseating.
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
The Blues of Self-Regulation
One of the odder tropes of current conservative discourse related to the possibility of constraining the excesses of the Trump administration is blaming (who else?) Democrats for eliminating institutional checks available to the minority party, like the filibuster. What's weird about this is that if conservatives actually believe that such constraints are important parts of our system of checks and balances, they're absolutely free to restore them. Nobody's stopping them. But the idea that Republicans will self-regulate is seen as transparently absurd by all parties -- Republicans included.
Yet there's an even more fundamental absurdity: the implication that were it not for Democrats changing the rule-in-question sometime in the past eight years, the rule would be there to constrain Republicans. The problem being that, even when Democrats didn't change a rule protecting the minority party, Republicans haven't even blinked before casting them aside the minute they interfered with their partisan agenda. We already saw this with filibusters on Supreme Court nominees (Democrats abolished the filibuster for lower-court nominees, but not SCOTUS). And now GOP Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is proposing that the Senate eliminate the "blue slip" rule, which allows Senators to block judicial nominations in their home states. Democrats had kept that rule despite its use by GOP Senators to obstruct Democratic judicial nominations in the Obama administration. But -- surprise, surprise -- it turns out that whether Democrats keep or change a minority-protective rule has absolutely no bearing on whether Republicans want to keep it.
Yet there's an even more fundamental absurdity: the implication that were it not for Democrats changing the rule-in-question sometime in the past eight years, the rule would be there to constrain Republicans. The problem being that, even when Democrats didn't change a rule protecting the minority party, Republicans haven't even blinked before casting them aside the minute they interfered with their partisan agenda. We already saw this with filibusters on Supreme Court nominees (Democrats abolished the filibuster for lower-court nominees, but not SCOTUS). And now GOP Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is proposing that the Senate eliminate the "blue slip" rule, which allows Senators to block judicial nominations in their home states. Democrats had kept that rule despite its use by GOP Senators to obstruct Democratic judicial nominations in the Obama administration. But -- surprise, surprise -- it turns out that whether Democrats keep or change a minority-protective rule has absolutely no bearing on whether Republicans want to keep it.
Monday, May 08, 2017
Republicans Don't Care about Black People
FiveThirtyEight has an interesting graphic about which groups Democrats and Republicans think face "a lot of discrimination."
Democrats, as one might expect, tend to think that groups who face a lot of discrimination face a lot of discrimination, and groups who don't, don't. Republicans, by contrast, are oddly "egalitarian" in their beliefs. Yes, Christians are on top, because, you know, Republicans, but there isn't a huge gap between them and the rest of the pack. Eyeballing it, virtually all groups clock in between 40-50%.
With one glaring exception. Republicans seem willing to believe that a trans person has it as hard as a Christian or a Muslim is about as likely to face discrimination as the ever-oppressed White. But if there's one thing they're damn sure of, it's that Black people are made in the shade here in the US.
A Very Engaging Weekend
On the first weekend of May, my true love gave to me ....
Five restaurants to eat at;
Four Schraubs/Roddes with us;
Three days in Vegas;
Two stand-up comics;
And her hand to be married!
I'm so happy to announce that Jill and I are officially engaged!
(Many of you are no doubt surprised to hear this. Specifically, those of you who assumed we were already married).
Wedding date is TBD (we've already been together for 10 years -- what's the rush?), but great thanks to her family and my family for all meeting us out in Las Vegas so we could celebrate together.
Five restaurants to eat at;
Four Schraubs/Roddes with us;
Three days in Vegas;
Two stand-up comics;
And her hand to be married!
I'm so happy to announce that Jill and I are officially engaged!
(Many of you are no doubt surprised to hear this. Specifically, those of you who assumed we were already married).
Wedding date is TBD (we've already been together for 10 years -- what's the rush?), but great thanks to her family and my family for all meeting us out in Las Vegas so we could celebrate together.
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