I have recurrent knee pain, that flares up apparently randomly and can be so debilitating that at its crest I can't even walk. It usually comes and goes over the course of a day or two (the "unable to walk" part might last a few hours, though less if I take some painkillers and/or wear my knee brace).
I also was recently diagnosed as borderline asthmatic. I actually have an inhaler, though I've used it probably less than a half dozen times in my life.
Anyway, last night, at around 3 in the morning, both the asthma and the excruciating knee pain hit at the exact same time: I couldn't breathe, and I could barely hobble my way into the bathroom to get some Aleve.
Long story short, I slept three hours last night and am a bit cranky. So you get a roundup.
* * *
The women's wave isn't just an American thing: The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting article on Arab women running for office in Israel.
Antisemitism and the birth of Jewish Studies.
The RNCC has cut an ad for Jim Hagedorn (running for Congress in southern Minnesota -- the district my in-laws live in, as it happens) claiming his opponent is "owned" by George Soros. Subtle. Meanwhile, Rep. Matt Gaetz also posted a wild conspiracy theory (later boosted by the President) accusing Soros of giving money to members of a migrant "caravan" so they would "storm the border [at] election time."
Also on Soros, Spencer Ackerman provides a good history about how a Soros-like figure has virtually always played a central role in antisemitic social movements.
This was published prior to the Israeli Supreme Court ruling allowing Lara Alqasem into Israel to study, but it overlays with the point I made in my column: Israeli academics have (correctly) interpreted the government's attempt to keep Alqasem out as a "declaration of war" against them.
Newt Gingrich calls for the expulsion of all Muslims who "believe in Sharia" from America. But, if I can channel Trump v. Hawaii, we can hardly call this sort of thing "rank religious bigotry" based on nothing more than the fact that it obviously is.
Nylah Burton has a good column up on the weaponization of Louis Farrakhan against Blacks (and particularly Black Jews). I might have more to say on this, but I think the core points -- which in no way are apologias for Farrakhan's despicable bigotry -- are good.
Friday, October 19, 2018
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Israeli Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Lara Alqasem
Very good news. And, at least in terms of how the opinions were excerpted in Haaretz, they didn't pull punches either.
"Since the appellant's actions do not raise satisfactory cause to bar her to entry to Israel, the inevitable impression is that invalidating the visa given to her was due to the political opinions she holds," read the verdict. "If this is truly the case, then we are talking about an extreme and dangerous step, which could lead to the crumbling of the pillars upon which democracy in Israel stands," the verdict continued.
"The Law of Entry to Israel is intended to protect the state's sovereignty, and the public's safety and security. It does not have a component of penalty, or revenge for previous bad behavior," Justice Neal Hendel said.
"Despite the obstacles in her way the appellant insists on her right to study at the Hebrew University. This conduct is not in keeping, in an understatement, with the thesis that the she's an undercover boycott activist," he continued.
"The Interior Ministry has openly admitted that it does not have any evidence of the appellant's engaging in boycott activity since April 2017, except for mysterious 'indications' whose essence hasn't been clarified and regarding which no evidence has been submitted," Neal noted.
"The material submitted regarding the appellant's activity in the SJP organization shows that even at that stage the boycott activity was minor and limited in character," Neal added. "There's no doubt the SJP cell indeed supported boycotting Israel – and this position must be roundly condemned. It is also presumable that the appellant, who played a role in the cell and for three years was one of its few members, was partner to this unworthy activity. However, it is impossible to ignore the cell's sporadic and relatively minor character. In itself, it certainly was not one of the prominent boycott organizations and it is doubtful whether the appellant could be seen as filling the criteria [required in the law?] even when she had a position in it."
Neal continued, saying that "alongside the random indications of the appellant's involvement in BDS activity during her studies, it is impossible to ignore the testimonies of her lecturers about her complex approach, the curiosity she displayed toward Israel and Judaism and her readiness to conduct an open, respectful dialogue – which is in stark contrast to the boycott idea."
"The struggle against the BDS movement and others like it is a worthy cause. The state is permitted, not to say obliged, to protect itself from discrimination and the violent silencing of the political discourse. It may take steps against the boycott organizations and their activists. In this case, preventing the appellant's entry does not advance the law's purpose and clearly deviates from the bounds of reasonability," Neal concluded.
Justice Anat Baron said that "there was no place to deny the appellant the entry visa she had been granted, because clearly she doesn't now and hasn't for a long time engaged in boycotting Israel, not to mention engaging in 'active, continuing and substantial' work in this matter. The decision to deny the appellant's entry visa is unreasonable to the extent that it requires intervention."
"Since the appellant's deeds do not constitute sufficient cause to ban her entry to Israel, the inevitable impression is that her visa was denied due to her political views. If this is indeed the case, then this is an extreme, dangerous step, which could lead to the crumbling of the supporting pillars on which Israeli democracy is built," Baron said.
"The appellant's very desire to be part of the academic studies in Israel is contrary to the idea of imposing a boycott on Israel, not to mention an academic boycott. This decision itself could even cause damage to Israel's image, thus attaining the opposite goal of the one intended by the legislator," Baron continued.
"We don't know what's in anyone's heart in general and what's in the appellant's heart in particular and how she'd act in the future, and after she returns to her country. But these considerations are irrelevant to our case, because according to the law we must focus on the appellant's acts in the present – and not on her opinions, thoughts or speculations about her future," Baron concluded.
Justice Uzi Vogelman said that "a call to boycott Israel was published by the SJP organization, of which the appellant was a member, and not by the appellant herself."
"The law was intended to ban the entry of people expected to spread the boycott doctrine during their stay in Israel…the appellant's case does not qualify for this clause, since there's no argument that she has ceased her activity in the SJP," he continued.
"It appears that in the concrete circumstances of this case the appellant's studies in the Hebrew University will help to bolster Israeli academia's struggle against the boycott," Vogelman concluded.Can't ask for much more than that. Threat to academic freedom? Check. Utter lack of compelling evidence against Alqasem? Check. Counterproductive against the boycott? Check. Massively disproportionate response to someone like Alqasem? Check.
Honestly, I needed some good news this week. So this was a relief.
I don't know enough about the Israeli judiciary to give any reads on the political leanings of the three judges who heard Alqasem's case. For what it's worth, Justice Hendel was born in the US, while Justices Vogelman and Baron are both sabras. Moreover, Justice Baron lost a son to a suicide bombing attack in 2003 -- she certainly needs no persuasion regarding Israel's actual security needs.
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Issues? This is an Election!
I got a phone call today from a canvasser regarding the California Assembly race in my district between Buffy Wicks and Jovanka Beckles (I'm not going to say which side they were calling on behalf of, as that would distract from the point of the post).
I was actually kind of glad to get the call, since I'm undecided in the race (both are Democrats, the candidate I voted for in the primary didn't advance). Moreover, while each candidate has a pretty clear tribal identity, so to speak (Wicks is the Clinton-Obama candidate, Beckles is the Sanders-DSA candidate), it had seemed to me that on the vast majority of issues that were pretty much identical -- or, at the very least, I hadn't heard a lot that differentiated them on an issue basis.
So I asked the canvasser: I said that it seemed like both candidates were quite similar, and I was curious what were some issues where they were differentiated from one another.
And boy, did that question seem to throw him for a loop.
Now, that's mildly unfair of me, since again it seems that on the majority of major issues they're very close together (after the call, I did some more research and this Berkeleyside article gives some key points of differentiation).
But still, "how the two would vote differently in Sacramento" was clearly not on this guy's list of prepared talking points. He kept on trying to go to resume, or fundraising, or "tribe", or personal dislike (e.g., calling the other candidate "slick" -- that affirmatively turned me off, since I'm sick of Dem-on-Dem violence in cases where it is obvious that both candidates are fine).
Each time, I had to repeat that what prior jobs the candidates had held, or who endorsed them, or who was a "fighter", were not "issues"; how were they different on the issues?
The one he was able to give me was their divergent stances on Proposition 10 (concerning local authority to enact rent control ordinances): Beckles supports it (giving greater authority to local government), Wicks opposes it. And I thanked him for that, and said I would look into that issue -- since again, it reflects an actual issue-based difference between the candidates.
But yeah, it was for me at least a little bit of a depressing experience. One might hope that "how the candidates differ on the issues they'll face once in office" would be a sizable factor in backing one candidate over another (and, to be fair, maybe in a race where there were more sizable differences between the candidates, it would take on greater salience). Alas, apparently not.
I was actually kind of glad to get the call, since I'm undecided in the race (both are Democrats, the candidate I voted for in the primary didn't advance). Moreover, while each candidate has a pretty clear tribal identity, so to speak (Wicks is the Clinton-Obama candidate, Beckles is the Sanders-DSA candidate), it had seemed to me that on the vast majority of issues that were pretty much identical -- or, at the very least, I hadn't heard a lot that differentiated them on an issue basis.
So I asked the canvasser: I said that it seemed like both candidates were quite similar, and I was curious what were some issues where they were differentiated from one another.
And boy, did that question seem to throw him for a loop.
Now, that's mildly unfair of me, since again it seems that on the majority of major issues they're very close together (after the call, I did some more research and this Berkeleyside article gives some key points of differentiation).
But still, "how the two would vote differently in Sacramento" was clearly not on this guy's list of prepared talking points. He kept on trying to go to resume, or fundraising, or "tribe", or personal dislike (e.g., calling the other candidate "slick" -- that affirmatively turned me off, since I'm sick of Dem-on-Dem violence in cases where it is obvious that both candidates are fine).
Each time, I had to repeat that what prior jobs the candidates had held, or who endorsed them, or who was a "fighter", were not "issues"; how were they different on the issues?
The one he was able to give me was their divergent stances on Proposition 10 (concerning local authority to enact rent control ordinances): Beckles supports it (giving greater authority to local government), Wicks opposes it. And I thanked him for that, and said I would look into that issue -- since again, it reflects an actual issue-based difference between the candidates.
But yeah, it was for me at least a little bit of a depressing experience. One might hope that "how the candidates differ on the issues they'll face once in office" would be a sizable factor in backing one candidate over another (and, to be fair, maybe in a race where there were more sizable differences between the candidates, it would take on greater salience). Alas, apparently not.
Friday, October 12, 2018
Tab Reduction is Stress Reduction Roundup
I've been very stressed these past few days. It's the usual mix of personal issues combined with the persistent fact of the world teetering on the brink of collapse. My appetite has gone, I haven't been sleeping well -- if it wasn't for the escape of Historical Murder Simulator: Greece, I don't know where I'd be.
Of course, none of this has stopped me from reading the internet. And here's a taste of what's been on the browser:
* * *
Shais Rishon (aka MaNishtana) has a new book out -- a semiautobiographical text about a Black Jewish American Rabbi.
Jon Chait on why the rise of non-liberal socialism might be good for liberalism. Not sure I'm convinced, but it was an interesting read.
The Cleveland Indians are retiring the "Chief Wahoo" mascot. Good riddance. Now, the Washington Redskins stand alone and unchallenged for the title of "most obviously racist representation in professional sports". (The article did tell me a bit of trivia I hadn't been aware of: Apparently, the Cleveland Indians were named in honor of Louis Sockalexis, the first American Indian professional ballplayer who played three seasons for the then-Cleveland Spiders from 1897-99).
Top Corbyn ally tries to push head of Jewish Voice for Labour -- a fringe-left Jewish group formed to provide Jewish cover against broad-based Jewish outrage over Corbynista antisemitism -- to run for parliament in one of the most heavily Jewish seats in the country. At a candidate event, prominent Jewish community members (including journalists) banned from attending because they "misrepresent people, events, or facts". Protest outside the event includes someone trying to burn an Israeli flag ... that was being worn around someone's shoulders. Just another day.
Good article, bad title: In the Forward, Moshe Krakowski explores the nuanced and complicated posture Orthodox Jews take towards Israel and Zionism.
ADL explains how Soros-talk can be antisemitic talk. It's good, but certain examples of "left politics are a Soros backed conspiracy" were oddly omitted....
Israeli appellate court upholds ban on entry for Lara Alqasem. Guess my column didn't persuade. She may appeal to to the Supreme Court. Also worth noting: a good piece on the Academe Blog regarding Israeli academia rallying behind Alqasem, and a statement from the Alliance for Academic Freedom (which I signed) urging Israel to reverse this ill-advised and illiberal decision.
In happier news, Congress just passed a bill which would rename the federal courthouse building in Minneapolis after my late judge, Diana Murphy. Judge Murphy was the first women to serve on the Eighth Circuit when she was appointed in 1994 (as of 2018, that number has risen to ... two), and served nearly 40 years on the federal bench.
Of course, none of this has stopped me from reading the internet. And here's a taste of what's been on the browser:
* * *
Shais Rishon (aka MaNishtana) has a new book out -- a semiautobiographical text about a Black Jewish American Rabbi.
Jon Chait on why the rise of non-liberal socialism might be good for liberalism. Not sure I'm convinced, but it was an interesting read.
The Cleveland Indians are retiring the "Chief Wahoo" mascot. Good riddance. Now, the Washington Redskins stand alone and unchallenged for the title of "most obviously racist representation in professional sports". (The article did tell me a bit of trivia I hadn't been aware of: Apparently, the Cleveland Indians were named in honor of Louis Sockalexis, the first American Indian professional ballplayer who played three seasons for the then-Cleveland Spiders from 1897-99).
Top Corbyn ally tries to push head of Jewish Voice for Labour -- a fringe-left Jewish group formed to provide Jewish cover against broad-based Jewish outrage over Corbynista antisemitism -- to run for parliament in one of the most heavily Jewish seats in the country. At a candidate event, prominent Jewish community members (including journalists) banned from attending because they "misrepresent people, events, or facts". Protest outside the event includes someone trying to burn an Israeli flag ... that was being worn around someone's shoulders. Just another day.
Good article, bad title: In the Forward, Moshe Krakowski explores the nuanced and complicated posture Orthodox Jews take towards Israel and Zionism.
ADL explains how Soros-talk can be antisemitic talk. It's good, but certain examples of "left politics are a Soros backed conspiracy" were oddly omitted....
Israeli appellate court upholds ban on entry for Lara Alqasem. Guess my column didn't persuade. She may appeal to to the Supreme Court. Also worth noting: a good piece on the Academe Blog regarding Israeli academia rallying behind Alqasem, and a statement from the Alliance for Academic Freedom (which I signed) urging Israel to reverse this ill-advised and illiberal decision.
In happier news, Congress just passed a bill which would rename the federal courthouse building in Minneapolis after my late judge, Diana Murphy. Judge Murphy was the first women to serve on the Eighth Circuit when she was appointed in 1994 (as of 2018, that number has risen to ... two), and served nearly 40 years on the federal bench.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey Initial(?) Thoughts
I've been playing AC: Odyssey over the past few days (I am a big fan of the series). And what a time it has been! I actually don't know if these are my "initial" thoughts, because I have only a very weak sense of how far I've actually gotten into what appears to be a gigantic game (for orientation, I've just finished Perikles' initial set of requests in Athens).
But anyway, here are my scattered comments (some very mild spoilers might appear):
* It's been said before, but this game owes a huge debt to Witcher III. That's a compliment -- Witcher III is one of my favorite games of all time, and I've often gone into game stores and asked "what's a game that's kind of like Witcher III"? Odyssey is more than "kind of like Witcher III"; it is precariously close to a reskin (right down to the musical cues).
Again, that's a good thing.
* I'm playing as Kassandra, and I find her to be super-likable. I think they really did a great job with her. Word is that she's the better voice-acted of the two protagonist choices, and from clips I've seen of Alexios, I'd agree. That said, when you encounter Alexios as Kassandra, he basically sounds like a half-literate cave-person (that's due to specific elements of his background, not bad acting); and I'd be genuinely curious to hear half-literate cave-Kassandra as well.
* I'm enjoying the entire storyline, but the Cult of Kosmos questline in particular is so far a blast. It's also fun to be playing this while enrolled in a political theory program -- while AC games are always basically "murder your way through history", there's something especially tickling to have a buddy who's studying Kleon and be able to be like "oh, you work on Kleon? I just slaughtered somebody for him in my game!"
* Is the map (I can't believe I'm saying this) too big? I don't know, but we might be getting close. One major problem is that there aren't quite enough fast travel points for my taste. The easiest fix would be to make towns and cities fast travel locations (in addition to the usual synchronization points). As it is, it can take a long time to get places.
* I'm not wild about timed quests (they stress me out), and in particular too many of them force you to return to quest-giver when you're done -- which is a problem when you've strayed halfway across the world. I get it from an immersion perspective -- what, a reward magically appears in your pocket? -- but (particularly given the aforementioned issue of a giant map coupled with sparse fast travel points) it's often just not worth it to slog back out to some middle of nowhere cabin in the woods just to report you've killed five sharks somewhere. Suggestion: Quests received at message boards should also be redeemable at any message board around the world.
* While I've been harping on the map, I do want to say that the "exploration mode" works, and works surprisingly well. Just a touch of extra work without ever feeling overwhelmed. Definitely a good call.
* Some gameplay mechanics feel a bit under-explained. Even now, I'm not entirely sure what attacks I should dodge (and how) versus which I should parry. The result is that combat is pretty button-mashy.
* There's something a bit weird and sad about having a million different types of gear built into the game, of which 99.9% will never be used because why would you replace your legendary outfit? Even rare equipment is pretty much pointless as a category, and what is the purpose of a Level 20 common sword?
* Sadly, the naval experience -- which had been a strength of the series since its introduction in AC3 -- is probably the weakest aspect of the game here. Naval combat isn't particularly interesting, and serves mostly as a hassle that interrupts the even greater hassle of having to sail halfway across the planet to get to your next objective.
* Overall, though, this is a very strong entry into the series -- right up there with some of the all-time best. Great job from Ubisoft -- keep it up!
But anyway, here are my scattered comments (some very mild spoilers might appear):
* It's been said before, but this game owes a huge debt to Witcher III. That's a compliment -- Witcher III is one of my favorite games of all time, and I've often gone into game stores and asked "what's a game that's kind of like Witcher III"? Odyssey is more than "kind of like Witcher III"; it is precariously close to a reskin (right down to the musical cues).
Again, that's a good thing.
* I'm playing as Kassandra, and I find her to be super-likable. I think they really did a great job with her. Word is that she's the better voice-acted of the two protagonist choices, and from clips I've seen of Alexios, I'd agree. That said, when you encounter Alexios as Kassandra, he basically sounds like a half-literate cave-person (that's due to specific elements of his background, not bad acting); and I'd be genuinely curious to hear half-literate cave-Kassandra as well.
* I'm enjoying the entire storyline, but the Cult of Kosmos questline in particular is so far a blast. It's also fun to be playing this while enrolled in a political theory program -- while AC games are always basically "murder your way through history", there's something especially tickling to have a buddy who's studying Kleon and be able to be like "oh, you work on Kleon? I just slaughtered somebody for him in my game!"
* Is the map (I can't believe I'm saying this) too big? I don't know, but we might be getting close. One major problem is that there aren't quite enough fast travel points for my taste. The easiest fix would be to make towns and cities fast travel locations (in addition to the usual synchronization points). As it is, it can take a long time to get places.
* I'm not wild about timed quests (they stress me out), and in particular too many of them force you to return to quest-giver when you're done -- which is a problem when you've strayed halfway across the world. I get it from an immersion perspective -- what, a reward magically appears in your pocket? -- but (particularly given the aforementioned issue of a giant map coupled with sparse fast travel points) it's often just not worth it to slog back out to some middle of nowhere cabin in the woods just to report you've killed five sharks somewhere. Suggestion: Quests received at message boards should also be redeemable at any message board around the world.
* While I've been harping on the map, I do want to say that the "exploration mode" works, and works surprisingly well. Just a touch of extra work without ever feeling overwhelmed. Definitely a good call.
* Some gameplay mechanics feel a bit under-explained. Even now, I'm not entirely sure what attacks I should dodge (and how) versus which I should parry. The result is that combat is pretty button-mashy.
* There's something a bit weird and sad about having a million different types of gear built into the game, of which 99.9% will never be used because why would you replace your legendary outfit? Even rare equipment is pretty much pointless as a category, and what is the purpose of a Level 20 common sword?
* Sadly, the naval experience -- which had been a strength of the series since its introduction in AC3 -- is probably the weakest aspect of the game here. Naval combat isn't particularly interesting, and serves mostly as a hassle that interrupts the even greater hassle of having to sail halfway across the planet to get to your next objective.
* Overall, though, this is a very strong entry into the series -- right up there with some of the all-time best. Great job from Ubisoft -- keep it up!
Big Media David: Lara Alqasem Edition
I was planning on writing a blog post about the Canary Mission file on Lara Alqasem -- the American student currently being refused admission to Israel on grounds of past BDS activity. That activity is supposedly documented in her Canary file, and it is a marvel to behold: a 1,500 word dossier, of which all but 70 words are on actions or statements or conduct by people other than Lara Alqasem. All they have on her is that she was (a) a member, then President of her school's Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, and (b) once was "involved in an event" advocating the boycott of Sabra Hummus.
The remainder of the file, the other 1,430 words of it, is a smorgasbord of sprawling guilt-by-association. University of Florida SJP posted a video which featured a speaker who said a thing which bit the cat that ate the goat…it’s chad gadya, but for Palestinian advocacy.
Anyway, I was going to write that post, but then Haaretz asked me to do a column on the Alqasem case more generally -- so I folded it into that. You can read the finished product here: basically, my big point is that BDS and the right-wing Israeli government are in a tacit alliance with one another against liberal Israeli institutions (like academia) -- so it's no surprise that they've united around the position "Lara Alqasem should not be studying at an Israeli university."
Nor is it, contrary to popular belief, "counterproductive" -- at least, not if you understand which each side is trying to produce. If you think the goal of the Israeli government is to change the minds of its critics and undermine BDS, or if you think the goal of the BDS movement is to try to effectuate progressive change in Israel to the betterment of the Palestinian cause, then yes, targeting Israeli universities for isolation is counterproductive. But if the goal is to squeeze the life of these institutions and their liberal peers, and make it so the only choice is between opposing "River to the Sea" ideologies, then everyone is behaving quite productively.
The sad thing is though that I think the column has been scooped -- the bigger story than anything I might say is that Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens co-wrote a column in the New York Times condemning Israel's decision to exclude Alqasem. That's more interesting and revealing than my quite predictable jeremiads.
The remainder of the file, the other 1,430 words of it, is a smorgasbord of sprawling guilt-by-association. University of Florida SJP posted a video which featured a speaker who said a thing which bit the cat that ate the goat…it’s chad gadya, but for Palestinian advocacy.
Anyway, I was going to write that post, but then Haaretz asked me to do a column on the Alqasem case more generally -- so I folded it into that. You can read the finished product here: basically, my big point is that BDS and the right-wing Israeli government are in a tacit alliance with one another against liberal Israeli institutions (like academia) -- so it's no surprise that they've united around the position "Lara Alqasem should not be studying at an Israeli university."
Nor is it, contrary to popular belief, "counterproductive" -- at least, not if you understand which each side is trying to produce. If you think the goal of the Israeli government is to change the minds of its critics and undermine BDS, or if you think the goal of the BDS movement is to try to effectuate progressive change in Israel to the betterment of the Palestinian cause, then yes, targeting Israeli universities for isolation is counterproductive. But if the goal is to squeeze the life of these institutions and their liberal peers, and make it so the only choice is between opposing "River to the Sea" ideologies, then everyone is behaving quite productively.
The sad thing is though that I think the column has been scooped -- the bigger story than anything I might say is that Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens co-wrote a column in the New York Times condemning Israel's decision to exclude Alqasem. That's more interesting and revealing than my quite predictable jeremiads.
Monday, October 08, 2018
Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume XLIX: Taylor Swift Endorsing Phil Bredesen
There's this weird element of contemporary pop culture where, at any given moment, there's a celebrity that seems inexplicably hated (it's almost always a woman, and that part sadly is quite explicable).
Anne Hathaway was it for awhile, and I could never figure out why. What's wrong with Anne Hathaway? She seems lovely! Lena Dunham certainly fit the bill for a bit. And then there was Taylor Swift -- who had the extra misfortune of not just being hated seemingly randomly by the masses but also being involuntarily made into a White Supremacist mascot. Ouch.
But now Tay Tay has made a very prominent endorsement in the 2018 midterms -- Phil Bredesen, Tennessee's former Democratic governor, who has very quietly pulled into the lead in his bid to flip the open seat from red to blue.
You can imagine the Nazis are pissed. You can also imagine who they blame.
I can't get the screenshots here (follow the link), but here are two excerpts of comments floating around far-right message boards:
Anyway, fist-bump for team Jew for successfully "bluepilling" Swift (whatever that means) and to Taylor, hey, "shake it off" (whatever that means).
Anne Hathaway was it for awhile, and I could never figure out why. What's wrong with Anne Hathaway? She seems lovely! Lena Dunham certainly fit the bill for a bit. And then there was Taylor Swift -- who had the extra misfortune of not just being hated seemingly randomly by the masses but also being involuntarily made into a White Supremacist mascot. Ouch.
But now Tay Tay has made a very prominent endorsement in the 2018 midterms -- Phil Bredesen, Tennessee's former Democratic governor, who has very quietly pulled into the lead in his bid to flip the open seat from red to blue.
You can imagine the Nazis are pissed. You can also imagine who they blame.
I can't get the screenshots here (follow the link), but here are two excerpts of comments floating around far-right message boards:
“This looks so ghost written. Ever notice how every celebrity seems to be reciting the same exact script and even use the same exact wording. Not that I’m excusing Taytay, fuck her. I just noticed how she sounds exactly like Chris Evans and all those other faggots who suddenly try to get political. Their tweets always read as if some faggy Jew wrote it for them.”
[...]
“This is Soros trying to bluepill [sic] us by kidnapping /our princess/ they must have blackmailed her or something. We need to save her.”On that second one, I feel compelled to point out that under Brit Hume rules there's nothing antisemitic there since the poster only said "Soros" and not "Jews". Good thing, too, because if we actually were willing to recognize Soros for the obvious dog-whistle that it is, who knows how many mainstream Republicans would get caught up!
Anyway, fist-bump for team Jew for successfully "bluepilling" Swift (whatever that means) and to Taylor, hey, "shake it off" (whatever that means).
Sunday, October 07, 2018
The Impossibility of Speech Disruption
Last week, I went to a talk at UC-Berkeley by James Loeffler on the Zionist history of the architects of post-WWII human rights law.
In the middle of the talk, there was a disruption.
Now you might think that "disruption at Berkeley of a talk on Zionism" would be from some sort of pro-Palestinian or anti-occupation activist -- but in this case, you'd be wrong. The disrupter instead was a disheveled old White man who stood up in the middle of the talk and started rambling incomprehensibly about Mammon and Christ and the coming day of judgment and some 500 year old campaign of resistance which either Jews were a part of or Jews were the adversary of (it really was hard to follow).
In a sense, this was the "ideal" disruption because it is entirely unsympathetic. There's no political controversy that skews our prejudices, there's no uncomfortable dissenting view that may need space for airing. On the ledger of "ensuring the speaker can speak" and "ensuring the audience can participate", every entry fell in favor of silencing the protester as quickly and decisively as possible.
Which is why I found it interesting that, even in this case, there really wasn't anything the event organizers could reasonably do to end the disruption in a timely fashion. We were pretty much at his mercy for as long as he wanted to talk. The organizers walked up towards him and sort of vaguely gestured at the exits, which he ignored; eventually a different organizer got a microphone and asked him to leave and let people listen to the talk, which he also mostly ignored. Eventually, he made his way down to the front and out the door (never not talking), started to walk out (to cheers), briefly walked back in (to boos), and then finally exited once again. But there was no real doubt that he could have kept going indefinitely, at least until some form of security arrived to forcibly remove him.
And that's the interesting thing about such disruptions: even in a case like this, where one is wholly unsympathetic to a protester who is adding no intellectual or social content to the event whatsoever, if he withdraws social cooperation and just refuses to leave when asked, there's really nothing anyone can do short of the physical. And that, in turn, will no doubt feel like an escalation and an overreaction -- the protester literally dragged out of the room -- even in a case like this, much less in one where some people might have sympathy for the protester.
And in a way, that dynamic is what is being relied upon in these sorts of protesters. Our society relies on certain implicit norms of social cooperation (such as, if you're asked to leave an event you're disrupting, you walk out under your own power). Where that cooperation is withdrawn, society isn't powerless, but it becomes a lot cruder a lot more quickly -- and the revelation of the crudeness is often the point of the protest. But the point of using the above example is to stress that this is the reality in any social case -- it isn't something unique to a particular political or social worldview. Any social institution relies on implicit cooperation as a substitute for physical power as against any sort of challenge -- it's not something unique to the good guys or the bad guys.
In the middle of the talk, there was a disruption.
Now you might think that "disruption at Berkeley of a talk on Zionism" would be from some sort of pro-Palestinian or anti-occupation activist -- but in this case, you'd be wrong. The disrupter instead was a disheveled old White man who stood up in the middle of the talk and started rambling incomprehensibly about Mammon and Christ and the coming day of judgment and some 500 year old campaign of resistance which either Jews were a part of or Jews were the adversary of (it really was hard to follow).
In a sense, this was the "ideal" disruption because it is entirely unsympathetic. There's no political controversy that skews our prejudices, there's no uncomfortable dissenting view that may need space for airing. On the ledger of "ensuring the speaker can speak" and "ensuring the audience can participate", every entry fell in favor of silencing the protester as quickly and decisively as possible.
Which is why I found it interesting that, even in this case, there really wasn't anything the event organizers could reasonably do to end the disruption in a timely fashion. We were pretty much at his mercy for as long as he wanted to talk. The organizers walked up towards him and sort of vaguely gestured at the exits, which he ignored; eventually a different organizer got a microphone and asked him to leave and let people listen to the talk, which he also mostly ignored. Eventually, he made his way down to the front and out the door (never not talking), started to walk out (to cheers), briefly walked back in (to boos), and then finally exited once again. But there was no real doubt that he could have kept going indefinitely, at least until some form of security arrived to forcibly remove him.
And that's the interesting thing about such disruptions: even in a case like this, where one is wholly unsympathetic to a protester who is adding no intellectual or social content to the event whatsoever, if he withdraws social cooperation and just refuses to leave when asked, there's really nothing anyone can do short of the physical. And that, in turn, will no doubt feel like an escalation and an overreaction -- the protester literally dragged out of the room -- even in a case like this, much less in one where some people might have sympathy for the protester.
And in a way, that dynamic is what is being relied upon in these sorts of protesters. Our society relies on certain implicit norms of social cooperation (such as, if you're asked to leave an event you're disrupting, you walk out under your own power). Where that cooperation is withdrawn, society isn't powerless, but it becomes a lot cruder a lot more quickly -- and the revelation of the crudeness is often the point of the protest. But the point of using the above example is to stress that this is the reality in any social case -- it isn't something unique to a particular political or social worldview. Any social institution relies on implicit cooperation as a substitute for physical power as against any sort of challenge -- it's not something unique to the good guys or the bad guys.
Thursday, October 04, 2018
Why I Feel Bad Roundup
Are you watching "I Feel Bad"? I'm excited for it -- not the least because it features British-Indian-Israeli-Jewish actor Brian George. The conceit of the show is Sarayu Blue's character going through all the things in her daily life that make her feel bad (like "I'm turning into my mother"). So in honor of that, here are some of things in my life making me feel bad!
* * *
If the Ben Wittes who wrote that bracing Atlantic article explaining why, even though he knows and respects Brett Kavanaugh, he couldn't vote to confirm him was possessed by a demon, he'd have written this Eli Steinberg article on why, despite (in the very barest possible sense) "believing" Ford he still thinks the only way to "return to normal" and "get[] politics out of the pursuit of justice" is to vote to confirm.
Iran's Supreme Leader uses clips of Aly Raisman, among others, to argue that if women dressed more modestly (namely, wore a hijab) they wouldn't be sexually assaulted. That sound you hear is Raisman preparing to break another world record, this time for longest and loudest continuous cussing out of a single human being.
The Canary Mission -- the "pro-Israel" blacklisting site of (mostly young) people who are too-associated with BDS or Palestinian solidarity politics (read my extended thoughts on them here) has very closely guarded its funding sources. But the Forward found one of the donors -- and it's the San Francisco Jewish Federation. (Why I feel slightly better: the Federation concluded that it's funding guidelines were violated and promised not to allow such donations in the future)
More Canary! Here's a Zionist professor noting that he appears on the Canary blacklist despite opposing BDS, simply because he's also opposed certain proposed legal anti-BDS countermeasures (I wonder if I'm on there too?).
An American student of Palestinian ancestry was blocked from entering Israel to study at Hebrew University. Shades of the Michigan letter of recommendation case, except obviously 98% of people are scrambling to invert their position 180 degrees. Oh, and the Israeli ministry that excluded the student (who obtained a visa from the American Israeli consulate in Miami)? It apparently relied on reporting from ... you guessed it: Canary!
Jonathan Cohn reports on one of those annoying political realities that makes academics' and wonks' heads hurt: Bernie Sanders' "Stop BEZOS" bill was both utterly idiotic as policy, and yet likely responsible (in substantial part, at least) for Amazon's announced $15 minimum wage. It's not just "bad policy = good politics". It's that "promoting bad policies is good politics that sometimes can grease the path to good policies"! For anyone who cares both about good political and policy outcomes and really doesn't want to be a hack, that's a recipe for a big ol' frown-y face.
* * *
If the Ben Wittes who wrote that bracing Atlantic article explaining why, even though he knows and respects Brett Kavanaugh, he couldn't vote to confirm him was possessed by a demon, he'd have written this Eli Steinberg article on why, despite (in the very barest possible sense) "believing" Ford he still thinks the only way to "return to normal" and "get[] politics out of the pursuit of justice" is to vote to confirm.
Iran's Supreme Leader uses clips of Aly Raisman, among others, to argue that if women dressed more modestly (namely, wore a hijab) they wouldn't be sexually assaulted. That sound you hear is Raisman preparing to break another world record, this time for longest and loudest continuous cussing out of a single human being.
The Canary Mission -- the "pro-Israel" blacklisting site of (mostly young) people who are too-associated with BDS or Palestinian solidarity politics (read my extended thoughts on them here) has very closely guarded its funding sources. But the Forward found one of the donors -- and it's the San Francisco Jewish Federation. (Why I feel slightly better: the Federation concluded that it's funding guidelines were violated and promised not to allow such donations in the future)
More Canary! Here's a Zionist professor noting that he appears on the Canary blacklist despite opposing BDS, simply because he's also opposed certain proposed legal anti-BDS countermeasures (I wonder if I'm on there too?).
An American student of Palestinian ancestry was blocked from entering Israel to study at Hebrew University. Shades of the Michigan letter of recommendation case, except obviously 98% of people are scrambling to invert their position 180 degrees. Oh, and the Israeli ministry that excluded the student (who obtained a visa from the American Israeli consulate in Miami)? It apparently relied on reporting from ... you guessed it: Canary!
Jonathan Cohn reports on one of those annoying political realities that makes academics' and wonks' heads hurt: Bernie Sanders' "Stop BEZOS" bill was both utterly idiotic as policy, and yet likely responsible (in substantial part, at least) for Amazon's announced $15 minimum wage. It's not just "bad policy = good politics". It's that "promoting bad policies is good politics that sometimes can grease the path to good policies"! For anyone who cares both about good political and policy outcomes and really doesn't want to be a hack, that's a recipe for a big ol' frown-y face.
Wednesday, October 03, 2018
On the Latest Academic Hoax
A new academic hoax story has broken, and it's bigger than ever before.
Three scholars wrote twenty papers, none of which contained the arguments the authors believed (and all of which contained arguments the authors considered to be ridiculous) and sent them off to journals in the "grievance studies" set. By the time they had to pull the plug on the hoax, seven had been accepted, six were either still under review or under some form of "revise and resubmit", and six were rejected outright.
This project was an expansion on an earlier hoax where a gibberish paper called "The Conceptual Penis" was published in a pay-to-publish journal. The present effort distinguished itself both in the number of papers written and in the decision to submit to what the authors called highly-ranked journals in their disciplines. On that latter note, it's hard to assess -- once you start getting into the sub(-sub-sub)field weeds, what really counts as "highly-ranked"? -- but at least a couple of the journals they scored with are recognizable names (Hypatia, in particular, was a good get).
It's also true, as any observer of peer-reviewed scholarly literature can tell you, that a lot of peer-reviewed scholarly literature even in top journals is dreck. So the fact that the authors were able to get arguments that are (or they viewed as, anyway) dreck published is not itself surprising; though perhaps it gives insight into exactly what and how dreck gets through the process.
Nonetheless, I think there are some important limitations on what one can draw from this "study", including significant ethical ramifications in how the "data" was presented. One might say I'm being overly credulous in even treating this project as one that seeks to earnestly improve the quality of academic publishing standards (hint: if that's your goal, sneeringly referring to your targeted disciplines as "grievance studies" is a bad way to start). But, since we should be self-reflective about the quality of writing and reasoning in academia, I'll take it on its terms.
First, the limits on the conclusion. The authors' methodology was to take arguments that they figured would be appealing to the editorial staff of a given journal but which they, personally, found to be outlandish, and see if they could get them published.
They say that proves a serious malfunction in the peer-review process. I say "haven't they just passed an ideological Turing test?"
An ideological Turing test measures one's ability to mimic the beliefs of the "other side". You "pass" if you successfully convince members of that side that you really are one of them. So let's say I, a liberal, adopt a pseudonym and submit an article to Breitbart. I do my best to make it look, feel, and sound like a Breitbart-style conservative article. Now clearly, I wouldn't believe what I was writing about. The key question is whether they'd recognize the sham: would they say "this sounds like what a liberal thinks a conservative sounds like" (which is, indeed, what it actually is) or would they believe that this is an actual conservative writing? If the latter, then I've passed the test.
The thing is, nothing about passing the Turing test, on its own, demonstrates the falsity of the beliefs or arguments successfully mimicked. Someone on Twitter (I can't remember who) suggested the case of a young-Earth Creationist who submits an article to a biology journal that "mimics" tenets and presumptions of mainstream biological science. If his "hoax" succeeds, would we say "aha! The biological sciences are hopelessly corrupted, to be taken in by this prankster!" No -- we'd say that the author has, albeit disingenuously, written an actual good argument (that he happens not to believe). Likewise, if I successfully spoof Breitbart, I doubt they'd take that as decisive evidence that they've gone off the rails.
The case for why these papers are different, then, can't simply turn on the fact that (a) the authors don't believe the arguments they made and (b) they were nonetheless accepted. There has to be something else in the argument that makes them objectively bad, such that it represents a failure (beyond the fact of the disingenuous motives of the author) for the journal to have accepted it. So what might these be?
This is hard to assess, because the authors don't link to the full papers (the accepted versions have, unsurprisingly, now all been retracted) and because their summaries are by design written to make their claims sound as outlandish as possible. But at least in some cases this isn't facially self-evident.
Take the paper they got into Hypatia. Its thesis is "That academic hoaxes or other forms of satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship are unethical, characterized by ignorance and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege." One certainly understands the extra-dose of gleeful "gotcha-ness" the hoaxers enjoyed in getting this paper into Hypatia. But it's hardly the sort of article whose "wrongness" transparently stands out such that reviewers should have obviously known, on face, that it was ridiculous. After all, one could absolutely believe that satirical critiques of this sort of scholarship are unethical and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege (the "characterized by ignorance" is, I concede, at least arguably performatively contradicted by the ability of the authors to sufficiently effectively mimic these arguments such that they got their papers published. But even then, that would just show that one prong of the element was, after the fact, demonstrated to be falsified).
Ditto their Fat Studies paper on fat bodybuilding. Again, the article isn't accessible anymore, but if the basic thesis is that there could be various ways to present "fat" bodies as (in the authors' words) "legitimately-built bodies" worthy of attention and praise, even now I won't say that is a transparently ridiculous assertion. Think of what the ESPN Body Issue has done on this score, for example -- quite a few of its models, at the very least, undermine the notion that "fat" and "athletic" (or even "muscular") are mutually exclusively categories (quoth one of the athletes, a Major League pitcher: "As a baseball player, if I'm pitching 35 times a season, seven innings a pop, 100 pitches a game, I need some fat. I need some extra meat on my body."). And to the extent the "obvious wrongness" is based on the thesis being "positively dangerous to health", I call foul both because it oversimplifies what the research actually shows regarding the linkage between health and what is deemed "fat" in contemporary American society, and because "mainstream" bodybuilding very obviously also doesn't represent the apogee of healthy living either.
Again, I'm not saying that either of these claims are clearly right. But they're not, at least as presented, transparently wrong such that nobody (not just not-the-authors) could find them believable or worth engaging with.
Another potential reason why we could say that reviewers "failed" in not recognizing the wrongness of the article is where there is outright falsification of data. This is something they (apparently) did in the "Portland dog park" paper (they claim to have "tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality"). Maybe a good reviewer should have recognized that this seemed suspicious. But here I'd say that peer review is actually quite bad at catching this sort of outright fabrication (political science had its own scandal on this score not too long ago). Perhaps unsurprisingly, peer review works best on the presumption that the author is earnestly presenting genuine arguments obtained by honest means. Our peer-review system would be even more dysfunctional than it already is if the first question reviewers asked is "is this paper lying to me?"
And that moves me to the ethical qualms I have in how the hoax authors have presented their findings -- most notably, in how they treat the peer reviewer comments. Each of the papers they submitted -- including those which were rejected -- comes with a selection of peer review comments, all of which are positive. The idea, presumably, is to demonstrate that even their worst papers that didn't get accepted nonetheless were not treated with the sneering dismissal they deserved.
There are two problems with this presentation. First, I think it is actually capturing trends in peer-review to be more constructive, charitable, and supportive towards the papers under consideration -- all good things. One of the reviewers quoted (who had recommended rejecting the article) explained his more positive feedback as an attempt to "buy in" to the paper and provide constructive comments explaining why the article itself didn't work without discouraging the author from the field entirely. It is, I think, a good thing to read articles in their strongest possible light -- to try to think of the best interpretation of the claims the authors are trying to make rather than the most nefarious. This is a practice that hoaxes, in particular, exploit -- they gain their force precisely in the knowledge that their readers will commit the terrible sin of trying to take them seriously.
The second problem with the way the reviewer comments were presented is simultaneously more and less serious. Simply put: if the hoaxer's goal really was to provide a pathway for identifying what is and isn't "working" in these academic disciplines (and I concede that may be far too optimistic), then there is no justification for not including the negative or critical reviewer comments that (presumably) explained why papers were not accepted. Partially, this is simply a matter of misrepresentation -- only giving the positive comments but not the negative ones oversells how receptive readers were to these pieces.
But more importantly, the part of me that wanted to earnestly take this hoax seriously as a genuine effort to constructively critique certain academic disciplines was the most thirsty for learning the content of the negative reviews. What is it that gets a paper rejected in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (or what have you)? Clearly, it isn't a wild west where anything goes so long as you mimic the right politics (the authors -- somewhat begrudgingly -- admit that their project conclusively falsified that hypothesis). Consequently, figuring out where the borders are, what raises flags and what doesn't, is actually incredibly important to the extent the project is actually meant to have any sort of constructive edge. That these weren't included is powerful evidence about what the ambitions of the hoaxers really were. So it's a more serious critique to the extent I take the hoaxers seriously as trying to have a constructive impact on academic publishing; and a less serious critique to the extent that ascribing such seriousness of purpose is absurd.
In any event. I don't need persuading that academic publishing includes a lot of terrible work, and I don't need persuading that there are certain common markers as to what gets terrible work published. But this hoax overshoots the mark -- mostly because its goal isn't really to build a better scholarly mousetrap but rather to grind certain ideological axes.
My recommendation, therefore, is revise and resubmit.
Three scholars wrote twenty papers, none of which contained the arguments the authors believed (and all of which contained arguments the authors considered to be ridiculous) and sent them off to journals in the "grievance studies" set. By the time they had to pull the plug on the hoax, seven had been accepted, six were either still under review or under some form of "revise and resubmit", and six were rejected outright.
This project was an expansion on an earlier hoax where a gibberish paper called "The Conceptual Penis" was published in a pay-to-publish journal. The present effort distinguished itself both in the number of papers written and in the decision to submit to what the authors called highly-ranked journals in their disciplines. On that latter note, it's hard to assess -- once you start getting into the sub(-sub-sub)field weeds, what really counts as "highly-ranked"? -- but at least a couple of the journals they scored with are recognizable names (Hypatia, in particular, was a good get).
It's also true, as any observer of peer-reviewed scholarly literature can tell you, that a lot of peer-reviewed scholarly literature even in top journals is dreck. So the fact that the authors were able to get arguments that are (or they viewed as, anyway) dreck published is not itself surprising; though perhaps it gives insight into exactly what and how dreck gets through the process.
Nonetheless, I think there are some important limitations on what one can draw from this "study", including significant ethical ramifications in how the "data" was presented. One might say I'm being overly credulous in even treating this project as one that seeks to earnestly improve the quality of academic publishing standards (hint: if that's your goal, sneeringly referring to your targeted disciplines as "grievance studies" is a bad way to start). But, since we should be self-reflective about the quality of writing and reasoning in academia, I'll take it on its terms.
First, the limits on the conclusion. The authors' methodology was to take arguments that they figured would be appealing to the editorial staff of a given journal but which they, personally, found to be outlandish, and see if they could get them published.
They say that proves a serious malfunction in the peer-review process. I say "haven't they just passed an ideological Turing test?"
An ideological Turing test measures one's ability to mimic the beliefs of the "other side". You "pass" if you successfully convince members of that side that you really are one of them. So let's say I, a liberal, adopt a pseudonym and submit an article to Breitbart. I do my best to make it look, feel, and sound like a Breitbart-style conservative article. Now clearly, I wouldn't believe what I was writing about. The key question is whether they'd recognize the sham: would they say "this sounds like what a liberal thinks a conservative sounds like" (which is, indeed, what it actually is) or would they believe that this is an actual conservative writing? If the latter, then I've passed the test.
The thing is, nothing about passing the Turing test, on its own, demonstrates the falsity of the beliefs or arguments successfully mimicked. Someone on Twitter (I can't remember who) suggested the case of a young-Earth Creationist who submits an article to a biology journal that "mimics" tenets and presumptions of mainstream biological science. If his "hoax" succeeds, would we say "aha! The biological sciences are hopelessly corrupted, to be taken in by this prankster!" No -- we'd say that the author has, albeit disingenuously, written an actual good argument (that he happens not to believe). Likewise, if I successfully spoof Breitbart, I doubt they'd take that as decisive evidence that they've gone off the rails.
The case for why these papers are different, then, can't simply turn on the fact that (a) the authors don't believe the arguments they made and (b) they were nonetheless accepted. There has to be something else in the argument that makes them objectively bad, such that it represents a failure (beyond the fact of the disingenuous motives of the author) for the journal to have accepted it. So what might these be?
This is hard to assess, because the authors don't link to the full papers (the accepted versions have, unsurprisingly, now all been retracted) and because their summaries are by design written to make their claims sound as outlandish as possible. But at least in some cases this isn't facially self-evident.
Take the paper they got into Hypatia. Its thesis is "That academic hoaxes or other forms of satirical or ironic critique of social justice scholarship are unethical, characterized by ignorance and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege." One certainly understands the extra-dose of gleeful "gotcha-ness" the hoaxers enjoyed in getting this paper into Hypatia. But it's hardly the sort of article whose "wrongness" transparently stands out such that reviewers should have obviously known, on face, that it was ridiculous. After all, one could absolutely believe that satirical critiques of this sort of scholarship are unethical and rooted in a desire to preserve privilege (the "characterized by ignorance" is, I concede, at least arguably performatively contradicted by the ability of the authors to sufficiently effectively mimic these arguments such that they got their papers published. But even then, that would just show that one prong of the element was, after the fact, demonstrated to be falsified).
Ditto their Fat Studies paper on fat bodybuilding. Again, the article isn't accessible anymore, but if the basic thesis is that there could be various ways to present "fat" bodies as (in the authors' words) "legitimately-built bodies" worthy of attention and praise, even now I won't say that is a transparently ridiculous assertion. Think of what the ESPN Body Issue has done on this score, for example -- quite a few of its models, at the very least, undermine the notion that "fat" and "athletic" (or even "muscular") are mutually exclusively categories (quoth one of the athletes, a Major League pitcher: "As a baseball player, if I'm pitching 35 times a season, seven innings a pop, 100 pitches a game, I need some fat. I need some extra meat on my body."). And to the extent the "obvious wrongness" is based on the thesis being "positively dangerous to health", I call foul both because it oversimplifies what the research actually shows regarding the linkage between health and what is deemed "fat" in contemporary American society, and because "mainstream" bodybuilding very obviously also doesn't represent the apogee of healthy living either.
Again, I'm not saying that either of these claims are clearly right. But they're not, at least as presented, transparently wrong such that nobody (not just not-the-authors) could find them believable or worth engaging with.
Another potential reason why we could say that reviewers "failed" in not recognizing the wrongness of the article is where there is outright falsification of data. This is something they (apparently) did in the "Portland dog park" paper (they claim to have "tactfully inspected the genitals of slightly fewer than 10,000 dogs whilst interrogating owners as to their sexuality"). Maybe a good reviewer should have recognized that this seemed suspicious. But here I'd say that peer review is actually quite bad at catching this sort of outright fabrication (political science had its own scandal on this score not too long ago). Perhaps unsurprisingly, peer review works best on the presumption that the author is earnestly presenting genuine arguments obtained by honest means. Our peer-review system would be even more dysfunctional than it already is if the first question reviewers asked is "is this paper lying to me?"
And that moves me to the ethical qualms I have in how the hoax authors have presented their findings -- most notably, in how they treat the peer reviewer comments. Each of the papers they submitted -- including those which were rejected -- comes with a selection of peer review comments, all of which are positive. The idea, presumably, is to demonstrate that even their worst papers that didn't get accepted nonetheless were not treated with the sneering dismissal they deserved.
There are two problems with this presentation. First, I think it is actually capturing trends in peer-review to be more constructive, charitable, and supportive towards the papers under consideration -- all good things. One of the reviewers quoted (who had recommended rejecting the article) explained his more positive feedback as an attempt to "buy in" to the paper and provide constructive comments explaining why the article itself didn't work without discouraging the author from the field entirely. It is, I think, a good thing to read articles in their strongest possible light -- to try to think of the best interpretation of the claims the authors are trying to make rather than the most nefarious. This is a practice that hoaxes, in particular, exploit -- they gain their force precisely in the knowledge that their readers will commit the terrible sin of trying to take them seriously.
The second problem with the way the reviewer comments were presented is simultaneously more and less serious. Simply put: if the hoaxer's goal really was to provide a pathway for identifying what is and isn't "working" in these academic disciplines (and I concede that may be far too optimistic), then there is no justification for not including the negative or critical reviewer comments that (presumably) explained why papers were not accepted. Partially, this is simply a matter of misrepresentation -- only giving the positive comments but not the negative ones oversells how receptive readers were to these pieces.
But more importantly, the part of me that wanted to earnestly take this hoax seriously as a genuine effort to constructively critique certain academic disciplines was the most thirsty for learning the content of the negative reviews. What is it that gets a paper rejected in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (or what have you)? Clearly, it isn't a wild west where anything goes so long as you mimic the right politics (the authors -- somewhat begrudgingly -- admit that their project conclusively falsified that hypothesis). Consequently, figuring out where the borders are, what raises flags and what doesn't, is actually incredibly important to the extent the project is actually meant to have any sort of constructive edge. That these weren't included is powerful evidence about what the ambitions of the hoaxers really were. So it's a more serious critique to the extent I take the hoaxers seriously as trying to have a constructive impact on academic publishing; and a less serious critique to the extent that ascribing such seriousness of purpose is absurd.
In any event. I don't need persuading that academic publishing includes a lot of terrible work, and I don't need persuading that there are certain common markers as to what gets terrible work published. But this hoax overshoots the mark -- mostly because its goal isn't really to build a better scholarly mousetrap but rather to grind certain ideological axes.
My recommendation, therefore, is revise and resubmit.
Sunday, September 30, 2018
Why Left Anti-Semitism?
Below is the written version of the talk I gave at SF Hillel earlier today. They invited me to speak on the subject of left anti-Semitism after reading my article on Open Hillel's intervention in the litigation over antisemitism at San Francisco State University. I asked if I could specifically speak on the question "Why Left Anti-Semitism?", and this was the result (I've added some hyperlinks where useful for context).
* * *
I was invited here to talk about “left anti-Semitism.” This makes sense: It is a topic I’ve written about frequently, including in the context of the ongoing controversies at S.F. State and at Berkeley. So it’s an issue that I’m comfortable talking about and which I feel is important to talk about.
But on another level, some might ask: why left anti-Semitism? Why, right now, should that be our specific focus?
I have an answer to that question, and I’ll get to it in a few moments. But it is a valid question to ask—for a variety of reasons, but I’ll lead with the one that casts the largest shadow:
In the United States, in 2018, the anti-Semitism most likely to put a bullet in my brain comes from the right.
It sometimes seems as if that obvious yet terrifying truth is overlooked. We are living in an America and a world seeing a surge—and mainstreaming—of right-wing antisemitism the likes of which haven’t been seen in my lifetime. A White Supremacist stabbed to death a gay Jewish college student in southern California. A man carves swastikas into his rifle and then killed 17 people at a Florida high school that is 40% Jewish. Printers at UC-Berkeley have been hacked into to spit out Nazi iconography; just one of a flurry of similar incidents occurring at colleges across the country.
By contrast, as of today, the death toll attributable to intersectional feminists remains firmly at zero. So why left anti-Semitism?
And it’s not just violent extremists. Right-wing anti-Semites are alarmingly mainstream. Many of you know of the American Nazi who’s running for Congress as a Republican in Illinois’ 3rd congressional district—perhaps that one can be excused, since his primary was uncontested in a deep blue district. But it’s harder to overlook Steve King, the Congressman from Iowa whose openly White supremacist rhetoric (“we can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies”; “demographics are our destiny”) is paired with regular and unapologetically retweets of Nazis and other right-wing extremists. Or Steve West, who thinks “Hitler was right” and who just won a contested GOP primary for a Missouri state house seat. Or Jim Hagedorn, who said Joe Lieberman voted for the Iraq war because he’s Jewish—he’s favored to win the race in Minnesota’s swing 1st district, which happens to be the one where my wife grew up and my in-laws still live. These things may feel distant for those of us in the Bay Area—but they’re not so distant for all of us.
So why left anti-Semitism? That question invites another: What is the relationship between institutional Jewry and the left?
The other day, I was contacted by a Jewish media professional hawking a new service providing “talking points” on matters of anti-Semitism and Israel. He told me that I “should consider them a consensus view across an extensive spectrum of North America’s Jewish community.” Of the groups he listed as participating in the project, not a single one represented the Jewish left. And I’m not talking about Jewish Voice for Peace—I’m talking about the Zionist left: J Street, Ameinu, Third Narrative, Americans for Peace Now, Partners for Progressive Israel—none were there (also noteworthy, none of the groups were associated with the non-European or non-Ashkenazi Jewish community either). I had to tell this guy that the “spectrum” of American Jewish life does not extend from the right all the way to the center. But too often, that’s been the reality—and it’s a reality that I shouldn’t have to say is deeply unrepresentative of the demographics of the actual American Jewish community (much less the young community Hillel serves on campus). Some would suggest that it is this non-representativeness that is the real answer to the question “why left anti-Semitism?”
At this point, the question “why left anti-Semitism” starts to overlap with another truth which the institutional Jewish community needs to face: Too often, in our community, we police the left to the letter while letting the right run wild.
Sometimes that policing is quite literal: the Forward broke the story the other day that the Israel on Campus Coalition, in partnership with Hillel, had been conducting clandestine surveillance of left-wing Jews on campus—an allegation which, if true, would represent an appalling betrayal of trust and abdication of mission. But it runs deeper than that. In Hillel we see it in the application of the standards of partnership. These standards are meant to establish a minimum baseline of civil and equitable principles that all Hillel community members are expected to follow. And in the course of their implementation, there have been countless cases of tension with left-wing students being judged and scrutinized and checked to make sure they don’t step a toe over the line. But the one time that a Hillel chapter even contemplated applying its standards of partnership to a right-wing speaker, last year at Princeton—the national organization couldn’t issue an apology fast enough. The message was evident: these rules bound the left. They don’t apply to the right.
It’s not just Hillel either. In our Jewish world, a commitment to the two-state solution is an absolute redline for the left—but nobody seems to mind the Zionist Organization of America openly flouting it on the right. In our Jewish world, it is absolutely beyond the pale to ever compare Jews or Jewish entities to Nazis or Nazi collaborators—unless you’re our ambassador to Israel. Then the President of the ADL will, on national television, dismiss it as a “stray comment” that it wasn’t his “job” to challenge.
And on that I have to say: many young Jews in the Bay Area have had the experience of being compared to Nazis because we stake out a left-Zionist position on campuses and in communities where even that is considered an unforgivable sin. We’ve nonetheless dug in our heels and stood our ground in defense of an Israel that is secure and democratic, a homeland for Jews and a state where all citizens are equals. And so it is impossible to overstate the sense of betrayal, when the nominee for the highest ranking American official in Israel was one who had said we were “worse than Kapos”, that the President of the ADL went on national television and said that it wasn’t any of his business. He sold us out. And each and every one of us knew that if it some left-wing adjunct professor of anthropology had called certain young Jews “worse than Kapos”, the ADL would have been all over it. But since it came from right, and targeted the left, it got a pass.
The message young liberal Jews have consistently gotten from our own community is that if we come under attack from a right-wing source with even a modicum of political influence, we’re on our own. And it hurts. It hurts to know, from repeated experience, that our community doesn’t have our backs. When accounting for the rise of groups like Open Hillel and IfNotNow (to say nothing of JVP), I don’t think mainstream Jewish organizations have internalized or reckoned with just how wounded, how abandoned, the community of young progressive Jews feels by those who supposedly represent them.
To be clear: we should support the two-state solution, and push back against those too eager to dispense with it. We should say Nazi comparisons are beyond the pale, and I agree with the IHRA antisemitism definition in thinking that such rhetoric is per se antisemitic. And I’m okay with Hillel having standards of partnership, to ensure community members engage equitably and respectfully with one another. But these principles and standards cannot cut one way. And too often, they do, and young liberal Jews notice. And so, in this moment, they might also ask “why left anti-Semitism”, and wonder if focusing on that, right now, is part of this same misbegotten pattern.
So why left anti-Semitism? I promised I had an answer to that question—and I should hope so, since as I mentioned I’ve devoted a considerably part of my career as a scholar and writer to discussing it—and I do have an answer. And that answer is just this:
For many us—for most of us (of course not all of us)—the left is our home. This is where our commitments lie, this is where we make our political stands. The liberal, progressive community is our community, is our family, and of course it is reasonable for us to pay extra attention and exhibit extra concern for what is going on in our own house. Yes, it’s true that anti-Semitic violence in the United States emanates predominantly from the political right. But I’m not a part of the political right, and I harbor no expectations out of the political right. The anti-Semitism that obstructs me from participating in causes, or joining movements, or fighting battles that are very much my own is far more likely to stem from the political left.
Framed in this way, the question “why left anti-Semitism” almost looks insulting. It treats Jews as if we have no stake in the left, as if it was not ours. But Jews do not come to the left as strangers. We have roots here, we have commitments here, and we have as much right as anyone else to lay claim to being part of the left. When people express befuddlement (or worse, rage) at Jews caring so much about left anti-Semitism, they implicitly deny our standing as insiders to that political community.
Progressive Jews often stand in a posture of perpetual probation—always under suspicion, always under review, always viewed as a potential Fifth Column such that if we do raise objections, it is not read as a family member laying claim to the narrative of their own community, but as a saboteur who has revealed themselves as one of the enemy all along. And so left anti-Semitism always comes with a double dose of betrayal: the first being turned upon by those we thought were our friends, the second being the realization that the betrayers don’t even recognize it as a betrayal—it never occurred to them that we were part of their group—that we were friends—to begin with.
So there’s my answer to “why left anti-Semitism”: it’s because Jews are part of the left, and we have every entitlement to care about the future of our own political community in which many of us have invested so much. Now you’ll notice that this is a contingent observation: it applies to those Jews who are part of the left, and while most Jews in America broadly identify as left-of-center, not all do. And that’s fine! Jews come in all political shapes and sizes, and while most are some form of Zionist and some form of left-of-center, deviation from that norm—whether it comes in the form of being a far-left anti-Zionist or a right-wing Trump backer—should not in any way be thought to detract from one’s Jewishness.
But without prejudice to those who break from the mold, I address the Jewish majority—broadly left-of-center, broadly Zionist. And the basic idea here is one that Rabbi Angela Buchdahl ably expressed in her Rosh Hashanah sermon just a few weeks ago: there is a special role in fighting anti-Semitism on your side. Among your allies. Those on the left do and should legitimately pay special care to anti-Semitism in their own ranks. And since most Jews are, broadly speaking, “on the left”, most Jews have every right to be especially concerned with anti-Semitism on the left, among our allies.
Yet here too, there is something that needs to be said about “allies”. To lay claim to the legitimizing power of fighting anti-Semitism “among your allies”, you actually have to be an ally. We can’t keep trotting out who marched with Martin Luther King in the 1960s—a chestnut which, as one prominent African-American Jewish activist observed, is starting to border on "Party of Lincoln" territory. If our best examples of participating in progressive social movements came a half-century ago, that’s a problem. We have to actually be in the room, putting in the work, today.
But if it is true that Jewish groups have more work to be done to be allies, it’s also the case that Jewish non-presence “in the room” is not purely attributable to apathy or closet conservatism. It also stems from conscious strategies of exclusion; indeed, it is a key feature of left anti-Semitism that it tries to lock Jews out of the room. It’s true that some Jews were late to join up with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s also true that one of the earliest supporters of that movement, Rabbi Susan Talve, faced a concerted push from groups like Jewish Voice for Peace to muscle her out of the room—under the repulsive hashtag #RealTerrorist no less [Update: On further research, this needs some clarification. I'd say it is fair to characterize JVP as part of the movement trying to exclude Rabbi Talve, but they did not use the #RealTerrorist hashtag. They did, however, very pointedly decline to take a position on that hashtag -- saying it was "not a conversation we wish to have".].
The paradox of left anti-Semitism is that it indicts Jews for allegedly not showing up, and then pulls out all the stops in order to prevent Jews from showing up. It condemns Jews for not joining the struggle, and then it condemns Jews for asserting that the struggle is ours.
This is no accident. Decisions are made by, and authority is vested in, the people in the room. We’ve seen so many cases—at the Chicago Dyke March, at the Creating Change LGBT conference, at a civil rights fair here at S.F. State, in academic and cultural institutions across the world—of trying to lock Jews (or, at least, the “bad Jews”, which ends up covering most Jews) out of the room. The fact of the exclusion hurts, but it is not just sadism at work here. When groups mobilize to try to lock other Jews out, there are also trying to diminish the authority of those Jews to register claims demanding collective attention. When Jews—or the wrong Jews, the non-hand-picked Jews—aren’t present, then other voices can fill the gap to talk about Jews without listening to Jews. British sociologist David Hirsh has worried that a whole generation of leftists are being taught that Jews are the enemy, outside the community of the good. This project demands that Jews not be admitted into the spaces and organization and communities within which we could performatively contest that label, and instead take on the role of a friend. It is no wonder that our presence is resisted so.
So much anti-Semitism—left and right—is about degrading the authority and credibility of Jews to make claims. The most straightforward instances are also the most familiar: the persistent drumbeat that when Jews speak we’re part of a cabal, or a conspiracy, or an Israeli plot; that we’re lying, or deluded, or acting in bad faith; that we’re Hasbara shills or “crying anti-Semitism”; that we’re pawns of Soros or only interested in shielding Israel from all criticism. Each of these are examples of anti-Semitism taking on an epistemic dimension—it undermines Jews as witnesses and testifiers, as even candidates to possess knowledge that others might have a duty to heed. And the effort to exclude Jews and Jewish groups from progressive organizations and movements is part of this same dynamic. Directly, it impedes Jewish ability to speak for ourselves and to participate in conversations and causes we have very real stakes in. Indirectly, it sabotages our standing as members of our community—writing us out of spaces and places that are very much ours, and recasting us as strangers, enemies, and saboteurs.
The temptation, sometimes, is to walk away. But this isn’t really an option. For starters, where would we go? If the left is our home, then I paraphrase Du Bois: “I would not leave it if I could, I could not leave it if I would.” The right has no real place for us—even in the left’s worst moments, like we’re seeing now in the UK, the choice remains the Labour that snuggles up to Hamas versus the Tories who cozy up to Orban. More often, the choice is between a Trump and a Clinton, and if someone is making that decision by reference to left anti-Semitism, the only possible response is “why?”
In any event, the whole point of that opening soliloquy was that it is not objective danger but rather our familial and ideological bonds to the left that makes its iterations of anti-Semitism sting so badly—a woundedness that can only come from genuine attachment. The right isn’t a home for Jews for the same reason it’s never been a home for the Jews—and it is liable to get worse before it gets better.
But it’s also wrong to walk away because it plays directly into the hands of the anti-Semites seeking to drive us out. If they want to purge the Jews, why should we do their work for them? Why should we cede ground and space that we have every right to stand upon? Make them earn their inches.
“We are here and this is ours”—that was the rallying cry of Loolwa Khazzoom, an Iraqi-American Jewish feminist who organized the first anthology of Middle Eastern Jewish women writers. It also works as a rallying cry for the left-of-center Jewish majority when challenged as to why we care about left anti-Semitism. We care because we are here on the left, and we care because the left is ours as much as anyone else’s. And we shouldn't bow to anybody on either score.
* * *
I was invited here to talk about “left anti-Semitism.” This makes sense: It is a topic I’ve written about frequently, including in the context of the ongoing controversies at S.F. State and at Berkeley. So it’s an issue that I’m comfortable talking about and which I feel is important to talk about.
But on another level, some might ask: why left anti-Semitism? Why, right now, should that be our specific focus?
I have an answer to that question, and I’ll get to it in a few moments. But it is a valid question to ask—for a variety of reasons, but I’ll lead with the one that casts the largest shadow:
In the United States, in 2018, the anti-Semitism most likely to put a bullet in my brain comes from the right.
It sometimes seems as if that obvious yet terrifying truth is overlooked. We are living in an America and a world seeing a surge—and mainstreaming—of right-wing antisemitism the likes of which haven’t been seen in my lifetime. A White Supremacist stabbed to death a gay Jewish college student in southern California. A man carves swastikas into his rifle and then killed 17 people at a Florida high school that is 40% Jewish. Printers at UC-Berkeley have been hacked into to spit out Nazi iconography; just one of a flurry of similar incidents occurring at colleges across the country.
By contrast, as of today, the death toll attributable to intersectional feminists remains firmly at zero. So why left anti-Semitism?
And it’s not just violent extremists. Right-wing anti-Semites are alarmingly mainstream. Many of you know of the American Nazi who’s running for Congress as a Republican in Illinois’ 3rd congressional district—perhaps that one can be excused, since his primary was uncontested in a deep blue district. But it’s harder to overlook Steve King, the Congressman from Iowa whose openly White supremacist rhetoric (“we can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies”; “demographics are our destiny”) is paired with regular and unapologetically retweets of Nazis and other right-wing extremists. Or Steve West, who thinks “Hitler was right” and who just won a contested GOP primary for a Missouri state house seat. Or Jim Hagedorn, who said Joe Lieberman voted for the Iraq war because he’s Jewish—he’s favored to win the race in Minnesota’s swing 1st district, which happens to be the one where my wife grew up and my in-laws still live. These things may feel distant for those of us in the Bay Area—but they’re not so distant for all of us.
So why left anti-Semitism? That question invites another: What is the relationship between institutional Jewry and the left?
The other day, I was contacted by a Jewish media professional hawking a new service providing “talking points” on matters of anti-Semitism and Israel. He told me that I “should consider them a consensus view across an extensive spectrum of North America’s Jewish community.” Of the groups he listed as participating in the project, not a single one represented the Jewish left. And I’m not talking about Jewish Voice for Peace—I’m talking about the Zionist left: J Street, Ameinu, Third Narrative, Americans for Peace Now, Partners for Progressive Israel—none were there (also noteworthy, none of the groups were associated with the non-European or non-Ashkenazi Jewish community either). I had to tell this guy that the “spectrum” of American Jewish life does not extend from the right all the way to the center. But too often, that’s been the reality—and it’s a reality that I shouldn’t have to say is deeply unrepresentative of the demographics of the actual American Jewish community (much less the young community Hillel serves on campus). Some would suggest that it is this non-representativeness that is the real answer to the question “why left anti-Semitism?”
At this point, the question “why left anti-Semitism” starts to overlap with another truth which the institutional Jewish community needs to face: Too often, in our community, we police the left to the letter while letting the right run wild.
Sometimes that policing is quite literal: the Forward broke the story the other day that the Israel on Campus Coalition, in partnership with Hillel, had been conducting clandestine surveillance of left-wing Jews on campus—an allegation which, if true, would represent an appalling betrayal of trust and abdication of mission. But it runs deeper than that. In Hillel we see it in the application of the standards of partnership. These standards are meant to establish a minimum baseline of civil and equitable principles that all Hillel community members are expected to follow. And in the course of their implementation, there have been countless cases of tension with left-wing students being judged and scrutinized and checked to make sure they don’t step a toe over the line. But the one time that a Hillel chapter even contemplated applying its standards of partnership to a right-wing speaker, last year at Princeton—the national organization couldn’t issue an apology fast enough. The message was evident: these rules bound the left. They don’t apply to the right.
It’s not just Hillel either. In our Jewish world, a commitment to the two-state solution is an absolute redline for the left—but nobody seems to mind the Zionist Organization of America openly flouting it on the right. In our Jewish world, it is absolutely beyond the pale to ever compare Jews or Jewish entities to Nazis or Nazi collaborators—unless you’re our ambassador to Israel. Then the President of the ADL will, on national television, dismiss it as a “stray comment” that it wasn’t his “job” to challenge.
And on that I have to say: many young Jews in the Bay Area have had the experience of being compared to Nazis because we stake out a left-Zionist position on campuses and in communities where even that is considered an unforgivable sin. We’ve nonetheless dug in our heels and stood our ground in defense of an Israel that is secure and democratic, a homeland for Jews and a state where all citizens are equals. And so it is impossible to overstate the sense of betrayal, when the nominee for the highest ranking American official in Israel was one who had said we were “worse than Kapos”, that the President of the ADL went on national television and said that it wasn’t any of his business. He sold us out. And each and every one of us knew that if it some left-wing adjunct professor of anthropology had called certain young Jews “worse than Kapos”, the ADL would have been all over it. But since it came from right, and targeted the left, it got a pass.
The message young liberal Jews have consistently gotten from our own community is that if we come under attack from a right-wing source with even a modicum of political influence, we’re on our own. And it hurts. It hurts to know, from repeated experience, that our community doesn’t have our backs. When accounting for the rise of groups like Open Hillel and IfNotNow (to say nothing of JVP), I don’t think mainstream Jewish organizations have internalized or reckoned with just how wounded, how abandoned, the community of young progressive Jews feels by those who supposedly represent them.
To be clear: we should support the two-state solution, and push back against those too eager to dispense with it. We should say Nazi comparisons are beyond the pale, and I agree with the IHRA antisemitism definition in thinking that such rhetoric is per se antisemitic. And I’m okay with Hillel having standards of partnership, to ensure community members engage equitably and respectfully with one another. But these principles and standards cannot cut one way. And too often, they do, and young liberal Jews notice. And so, in this moment, they might also ask “why left anti-Semitism”, and wonder if focusing on that, right now, is part of this same misbegotten pattern.
So why left anti-Semitism? I promised I had an answer to that question—and I should hope so, since as I mentioned I’ve devoted a considerably part of my career as a scholar and writer to discussing it—and I do have an answer. And that answer is just this:
For many us—for most of us (of course not all of us)—the left is our home. This is where our commitments lie, this is where we make our political stands. The liberal, progressive community is our community, is our family, and of course it is reasonable for us to pay extra attention and exhibit extra concern for what is going on in our own house. Yes, it’s true that anti-Semitic violence in the United States emanates predominantly from the political right. But I’m not a part of the political right, and I harbor no expectations out of the political right. The anti-Semitism that obstructs me from participating in causes, or joining movements, or fighting battles that are very much my own is far more likely to stem from the political left.
Framed in this way, the question “why left anti-Semitism” almost looks insulting. It treats Jews as if we have no stake in the left, as if it was not ours. But Jews do not come to the left as strangers. We have roots here, we have commitments here, and we have as much right as anyone else to lay claim to being part of the left. When people express befuddlement (or worse, rage) at Jews caring so much about left anti-Semitism, they implicitly deny our standing as insiders to that political community.
Progressive Jews often stand in a posture of perpetual probation—always under suspicion, always under review, always viewed as a potential Fifth Column such that if we do raise objections, it is not read as a family member laying claim to the narrative of their own community, but as a saboteur who has revealed themselves as one of the enemy all along. And so left anti-Semitism always comes with a double dose of betrayal: the first being turned upon by those we thought were our friends, the second being the realization that the betrayers don’t even recognize it as a betrayal—it never occurred to them that we were part of their group—that we were friends—to begin with.
So there’s my answer to “why left anti-Semitism”: it’s because Jews are part of the left, and we have every entitlement to care about the future of our own political community in which many of us have invested so much. Now you’ll notice that this is a contingent observation: it applies to those Jews who are part of the left, and while most Jews in America broadly identify as left-of-center, not all do. And that’s fine! Jews come in all political shapes and sizes, and while most are some form of Zionist and some form of left-of-center, deviation from that norm—whether it comes in the form of being a far-left anti-Zionist or a right-wing Trump backer—should not in any way be thought to detract from one’s Jewishness.
But without prejudice to those who break from the mold, I address the Jewish majority—broadly left-of-center, broadly Zionist. And the basic idea here is one that Rabbi Angela Buchdahl ably expressed in her Rosh Hashanah sermon just a few weeks ago: there is a special role in fighting anti-Semitism on your side. Among your allies. Those on the left do and should legitimately pay special care to anti-Semitism in their own ranks. And since most Jews are, broadly speaking, “on the left”, most Jews have every right to be especially concerned with anti-Semitism on the left, among our allies.
Yet here too, there is something that needs to be said about “allies”. To lay claim to the legitimizing power of fighting anti-Semitism “among your allies”, you actually have to be an ally. We can’t keep trotting out who marched with Martin Luther King in the 1960s—a chestnut which, as one prominent African-American Jewish activist observed, is starting to border on "Party of Lincoln" territory. If our best examples of participating in progressive social movements came a half-century ago, that’s a problem. We have to actually be in the room, putting in the work, today.
But if it is true that Jewish groups have more work to be done to be allies, it’s also the case that Jewish non-presence “in the room” is not purely attributable to apathy or closet conservatism. It also stems from conscious strategies of exclusion; indeed, it is a key feature of left anti-Semitism that it tries to lock Jews out of the room. It’s true that some Jews were late to join up with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s also true that one of the earliest supporters of that movement, Rabbi Susan Talve, faced a concerted push from groups like Jewish Voice for Peace to muscle her out of the room—under the repulsive hashtag #RealTerrorist no less [Update: On further research, this needs some clarification. I'd say it is fair to characterize JVP as part of the movement trying to exclude Rabbi Talve, but they did not use the #RealTerrorist hashtag. They did, however, very pointedly decline to take a position on that hashtag -- saying it was "not a conversation we wish to have".].
The paradox of left anti-Semitism is that it indicts Jews for allegedly not showing up, and then pulls out all the stops in order to prevent Jews from showing up. It condemns Jews for not joining the struggle, and then it condemns Jews for asserting that the struggle is ours.
This is no accident. Decisions are made by, and authority is vested in, the people in the room. We’ve seen so many cases—at the Chicago Dyke March, at the Creating Change LGBT conference, at a civil rights fair here at S.F. State, in academic and cultural institutions across the world—of trying to lock Jews (or, at least, the “bad Jews”, which ends up covering most Jews) out of the room. The fact of the exclusion hurts, but it is not just sadism at work here. When groups mobilize to try to lock other Jews out, there are also trying to diminish the authority of those Jews to register claims demanding collective attention. When Jews—or the wrong Jews, the non-hand-picked Jews—aren’t present, then other voices can fill the gap to talk about Jews without listening to Jews. British sociologist David Hirsh has worried that a whole generation of leftists are being taught that Jews are the enemy, outside the community of the good. This project demands that Jews not be admitted into the spaces and organization and communities within which we could performatively contest that label, and instead take on the role of a friend. It is no wonder that our presence is resisted so.
So much anti-Semitism—left and right—is about degrading the authority and credibility of Jews to make claims. The most straightforward instances are also the most familiar: the persistent drumbeat that when Jews speak we’re part of a cabal, or a conspiracy, or an Israeli plot; that we’re lying, or deluded, or acting in bad faith; that we’re Hasbara shills or “crying anti-Semitism”; that we’re pawns of Soros or only interested in shielding Israel from all criticism. Each of these are examples of anti-Semitism taking on an epistemic dimension—it undermines Jews as witnesses and testifiers, as even candidates to possess knowledge that others might have a duty to heed. And the effort to exclude Jews and Jewish groups from progressive organizations and movements is part of this same dynamic. Directly, it impedes Jewish ability to speak for ourselves and to participate in conversations and causes we have very real stakes in. Indirectly, it sabotages our standing as members of our community—writing us out of spaces and places that are very much ours, and recasting us as strangers, enemies, and saboteurs.
The temptation, sometimes, is to walk away. But this isn’t really an option. For starters, where would we go? If the left is our home, then I paraphrase Du Bois: “I would not leave it if I could, I could not leave it if I would.” The right has no real place for us—even in the left’s worst moments, like we’re seeing now in the UK, the choice remains the Labour that snuggles up to Hamas versus the Tories who cozy up to Orban. More often, the choice is between a Trump and a Clinton, and if someone is making that decision by reference to left anti-Semitism, the only possible response is “why?”
In any event, the whole point of that opening soliloquy was that it is not objective danger but rather our familial and ideological bonds to the left that makes its iterations of anti-Semitism sting so badly—a woundedness that can only come from genuine attachment. The right isn’t a home for Jews for the same reason it’s never been a home for the Jews—and it is liable to get worse before it gets better.
But it’s also wrong to walk away because it plays directly into the hands of the anti-Semites seeking to drive us out. If they want to purge the Jews, why should we do their work for them? Why should we cede ground and space that we have every right to stand upon? Make them earn their inches.
“We are here and this is ours”—that was the rallying cry of Loolwa Khazzoom, an Iraqi-American Jewish feminist who organized the first anthology of Middle Eastern Jewish women writers. It also works as a rallying cry for the left-of-center Jewish majority when challenged as to why we care about left anti-Semitism. We care because we are here on the left, and we care because the left is ours as much as anyone else’s. And we shouldn't bow to anybody on either score.
Friday, September 28, 2018
Court Enjoins Arizona Anti-BDS Law
A federal district court has enjoined Arizona's anti-BDS law, saying that it likely violates the First Amendment.
This was the litigation I spoke to NPR about, and I remarked there that Arizona's representations in court of what the law actually did seemed far narrower than what was actually contained in the text. The judge here certainly agreed -- she flatly rejected Arizona's attempt to rewrite the law to forbid only a "total" boycott of Israel, and highlighted portions of the statutory text that swept considerably broader.
My main thesis when talking with NPR was many of these laws were passed to score ideological points and so were not drafted with particular care to ensure that they pass First Amendment scrutiny. Those chickens are now certainly coming home to roost.
One question that to me remains open is if Arizona (or another state) could prohibit a state contractor from boycotting Israel in the course of their fulfillment of the contract. The case in Arizona, for example, dealt with an attorney whose (solo practitioner) firm did pro bono work for state prisoners, but who sought to boycott certain companies implicated in settlement activities. His boycott doesn't really intersect with his work for the state, but to the extent that the Arizona law required him to certify he didn't boycott Israel even in his personal capacity in order to receive a state contract, the court here held that was an unconstitutional condition violating his First Amendment rights.
But suppose instead Arizona said "what you do on your time is your business, but you have to certify that you won't boycott Israel in your capacity as a state contractor" (e.g., he couldn't refuse to provide representation to an Israeli-American prisoner, or he couldn't refuse to use some court software program on the grounds that he objected to its manufacturer's ties with the Israeli government)? Would that be permissible? I think it is, at the very least, a much stronger case, as it is more directly tied to the government regulating its agents behavior as workers rather than as citizens. The government has a strong interest in ensuring that its contractors qua contractors, at the very least, actually do their jobs in the manner prescribed. There is a large difference between the government seeking to limit an everyday citizen's (who happens to have a federal contract) ability to boycott HP products as a means of protesting Israel, and the government seeking to limit (say) it's own procurement officer from doing the same in his capacity as a state employee.
That said, even this version wouldn't be a slam dunk: there is significant potential for ambiguity in when a given (boycotting) action is taken "in your capacity as a state contractor". For example, if our attorney doesn't buy HP products because his firm boycotts Israel, is the failure to have an HP printer a boycott taken in their capacity as a state contractor? What if he buys a new printer during the course of his contract?
My instinct is that in neither case would the action be covered -- unless part of his contract tells him to "buy a printer", then the act of purchasing one is not one taking in his capacity as a state contractor. But the First Amendment's concerns about chilling speech thrives on cases of ambiguity, so I still consider this an open question.
In any event, the Arizona law we have doesn't get us close to that scenario, because the Arizona law is not a law that was drafted carefully to try to avoid First Amendment problems but rather one that written sloppily to make a political point. And if you're a Jewish institution unhappy with the political imagery associated with having prominent anti-BDS laws struck down as trampling upon constitutionally protected freedoms, it might be worth rethinking how confident you are in either the ability or the interest of right-wing legislators and apathetic state bureaucrats to invest in drafting and implementing these laws with the sort of care and precision necessary to survive legal scrutiny.
This was the litigation I spoke to NPR about, and I remarked there that Arizona's representations in court of what the law actually did seemed far narrower than what was actually contained in the text. The judge here certainly agreed -- she flatly rejected Arizona's attempt to rewrite the law to forbid only a "total" boycott of Israel, and highlighted portions of the statutory text that swept considerably broader.
My main thesis when talking with NPR was many of these laws were passed to score ideological points and so were not drafted with particular care to ensure that they pass First Amendment scrutiny. Those chickens are now certainly coming home to roost.
One question that to me remains open is if Arizona (or another state) could prohibit a state contractor from boycotting Israel in the course of their fulfillment of the contract. The case in Arizona, for example, dealt with an attorney whose (solo practitioner) firm did pro bono work for state prisoners, but who sought to boycott certain companies implicated in settlement activities. His boycott doesn't really intersect with his work for the state, but to the extent that the Arizona law required him to certify he didn't boycott Israel even in his personal capacity in order to receive a state contract, the court here held that was an unconstitutional condition violating his First Amendment rights.
But suppose instead Arizona said "what you do on your time is your business, but you have to certify that you won't boycott Israel in your capacity as a state contractor" (e.g., he couldn't refuse to provide representation to an Israeli-American prisoner, or he couldn't refuse to use some court software program on the grounds that he objected to its manufacturer's ties with the Israeli government)? Would that be permissible? I think it is, at the very least, a much stronger case, as it is more directly tied to the government regulating its agents behavior as workers rather than as citizens. The government has a strong interest in ensuring that its contractors qua contractors, at the very least, actually do their jobs in the manner prescribed. There is a large difference between the government seeking to limit an everyday citizen's (who happens to have a federal contract) ability to boycott HP products as a means of protesting Israel, and the government seeking to limit (say) it's own procurement officer from doing the same in his capacity as a state employee.
That said, even this version wouldn't be a slam dunk: there is significant potential for ambiguity in when a given (boycotting) action is taken "in your capacity as a state contractor". For example, if our attorney doesn't buy HP products because his firm boycotts Israel, is the failure to have an HP printer a boycott taken in their capacity as a state contractor? What if he buys a new printer during the course of his contract?
My instinct is that in neither case would the action be covered -- unless part of his contract tells him to "buy a printer", then the act of purchasing one is not one taking in his capacity as a state contractor. But the First Amendment's concerns about chilling speech thrives on cases of ambiguity, so I still consider this an open question.
In any event, the Arizona law we have doesn't get us close to that scenario, because the Arizona law is not a law that was drafted carefully to try to avoid First Amendment problems but rather one that written sloppily to make a political point. And if you're a Jewish institution unhappy with the political imagery associated with having prominent anti-BDS laws struck down as trampling upon constitutionally protected freedoms, it might be worth rethinking how confident you are in either the ability or the interest of right-wing legislators and apathetic state bureaucrats to invest in drafting and implementing these laws with the sort of care and precision necessary to survive legal scrutiny.
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
How To Infuriate With Scales
The University of Chicago Law School's grading scale goes from 155 to 186.
For awhile, it was 55 to 86, but employers kept assuming that our tip-top students were actually getting middle-to-low Bs. So they added a "1" to it, on the theory that completely opaque is better than affirmatively misleading.
Of course, within that 155 to 186 range, we still break up grades into the traditional As, Bs and Cs (180 - 186 is an A, 174 - 179 is a B, and so on). So the actual choice of numbers in the scale is pretty much arbitrary -- as the casual introduction of the "1" aptly demonstrates.
I was thinking about this while reading a story of a Florida teacher who was, the headline tells us, "fired for refusing to give students credit for homework not turned in". District policy was to give a 50 for unsubmitted homework; the teacher instead gave such assignments a zero, and so she was terminated.
The story is meant to be a lesson about participation-award style administrators and overly entitled post-millennial brats expecting credit even where they didn't do any work. As the teacher put it, "we have a nation of kids that are expecting to get paid and live their life just for showing up and it's not real."
But I read the story and just thought "aren't they just making a 50 a 0?"
The thing about the traditional 0 - 100 grading scale is that pretty much nobody uses the entire scale. As are (roughly) 90 - 100, Bs 80 - 89, Cs 70 - 79, Ds 60 - 69, and Fs -- a failing grade -- are anything below that, but for all intents and purposes 50 - 59. The bottom half of the scale is pretty much never used (save for something like right/wrong multiple choice tests -- but even those are frequently curved up). I don't think I've ever given a grade between 1 and 49 in my entire life.
So, in effect, the district's policy is simply formalizing what is probably already the functional practice: a grading scale of 50 - 100, where 50 is the lowest grade (reserved for, say, not turning in the assignment at all, or otherwise completely bombing it). Making 50 the bottom of the scale isn't any different (and doesn't represent any more coddling) than placing the bottom at 55, or 155.
Indeed, I think the formal 50 - 100 scale is just better. Assuming I'm right that the bottom half of the 0 - 100 scale is never used except for zeros in the case of simply not doing the assignment, then the primary function of that scale is to massively overweight not turning an assignment (getting a 0) as compared to failing it for another reason (which, presumably, would earn you between a 50 and a 59). It's the equivalent of a five letter grade difference. Whether that's appropriate or not is a normative question, and while I don't think it is beyond argument my instinct is to treat failing grades roughly alike. There is a difference between simply not turning in an assignment and turning in a failing quality assignment, but for me that difference exists inside the bandwidth of a normal F grade (it's the difference between, say, a 50 and 58).
But I doubt that the normative dispute is actually driving anything. I'd wager that all the sense of outrage here is an artifact of the perceived scale -- the idea that students are still getting "credit" for undone work -- which is based on the misapprehension that the numbers on the scale translate into some sort of objective percentage. The advantage of a 155 to 186 scale is that it doesn't delude anyone into thinking it represents anything but an a set of more-or-less arbitrary markers denoting cut-offs between As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs.
Likewise, if the district announced it was switching to a 0 - 50 grading scale (where 0 - 9 is an F, 10 - 19 is a D ... etc.), I doubt anyone would care -- even though it was mathematically doing the exact same thing as having a 50 - 100 scale. Ditto if the scale was 25 - 75, or if it was 0 - 100 but every 20 points represented a different grade (so 80 - 100 was an A, 60 - 79 a B ....). None of those are actually different from one another, and none, I think, would provoke any sort of outrage.
Of course, things are probably not quite that neat (especially if the district hasn't abolished below-50 grades outright). Still, I wonder if the teacher -- so aggrieved at being forced to "give credit" for incomplete work -- actually understands that the real issue here isn't about objective "credit", but about arbitrary scales. I don't want to say she doesn't -- I don't have enough information to conclude that -- but the story as presented doesn't make me wholly confident that she does either.
For awhile, it was 55 to 86, but employers kept assuming that our tip-top students were actually getting middle-to-low Bs. So they added a "1" to it, on the theory that completely opaque is better than affirmatively misleading.
Of course, within that 155 to 186 range, we still break up grades into the traditional As, Bs and Cs (180 - 186 is an A, 174 - 179 is a B, and so on). So the actual choice of numbers in the scale is pretty much arbitrary -- as the casual introduction of the "1" aptly demonstrates.
I was thinking about this while reading a story of a Florida teacher who was, the headline tells us, "fired for refusing to give students credit for homework not turned in". District policy was to give a 50 for unsubmitted homework; the teacher instead gave such assignments a zero, and so she was terminated.
The story is meant to be a lesson about participation-award style administrators and overly entitled post-millennial brats expecting credit even where they didn't do any work. As the teacher put it, "we have a nation of kids that are expecting to get paid and live their life just for showing up and it's not real."
But I read the story and just thought "aren't they just making a 50 a 0?"
The thing about the traditional 0 - 100 grading scale is that pretty much nobody uses the entire scale. As are (roughly) 90 - 100, Bs 80 - 89, Cs 70 - 79, Ds 60 - 69, and Fs -- a failing grade -- are anything below that, but for all intents and purposes 50 - 59. The bottom half of the scale is pretty much never used (save for something like right/wrong multiple choice tests -- but even those are frequently curved up). I don't think I've ever given a grade between 1 and 49 in my entire life.
So, in effect, the district's policy is simply formalizing what is probably already the functional practice: a grading scale of 50 - 100, where 50 is the lowest grade (reserved for, say, not turning in the assignment at all, or otherwise completely bombing it). Making 50 the bottom of the scale isn't any different (and doesn't represent any more coddling) than placing the bottom at 55, or 155.
Indeed, I think the formal 50 - 100 scale is just better. Assuming I'm right that the bottom half of the 0 - 100 scale is never used except for zeros in the case of simply not doing the assignment, then the primary function of that scale is to massively overweight not turning an assignment (getting a 0) as compared to failing it for another reason (which, presumably, would earn you between a 50 and a 59). It's the equivalent of a five letter grade difference. Whether that's appropriate or not is a normative question, and while I don't think it is beyond argument my instinct is to treat failing grades roughly alike. There is a difference between simply not turning in an assignment and turning in a failing quality assignment, but for me that difference exists inside the bandwidth of a normal F grade (it's the difference between, say, a 50 and 58).
But I doubt that the normative dispute is actually driving anything. I'd wager that all the sense of outrage here is an artifact of the perceived scale -- the idea that students are still getting "credit" for undone work -- which is based on the misapprehension that the numbers on the scale translate into some sort of objective percentage. The advantage of a 155 to 186 scale is that it doesn't delude anyone into thinking it represents anything but an a set of more-or-less arbitrary markers denoting cut-offs between As, Bs, Cs, Ds, and Fs.
Likewise, if the district announced it was switching to a 0 - 50 grading scale (where 0 - 9 is an F, 10 - 19 is a D ... etc.), I doubt anyone would care -- even though it was mathematically doing the exact same thing as having a 50 - 100 scale. Ditto if the scale was 25 - 75, or if it was 0 - 100 but every 20 points represented a different grade (so 80 - 100 was an A, 60 - 79 a B ....). None of those are actually different from one another, and none, I think, would provoke any sort of outrage.
Of course, things are probably not quite that neat (especially if the district hasn't abolished below-50 grades outright). Still, I wonder if the teacher -- so aggrieved at being forced to "give credit" for incomplete work -- actually understands that the real issue here isn't about objective "credit", but about arbitrary scales. I don't want to say she doesn't -- I don't have enough information to conclude that -- but the story as presented doesn't make me wholly confident that she does either.
Monday, September 24, 2018
Dinosaurs and Israel/Palestine
Have you ever met a five-year old who knows everything about one very specific thing?
Dinosaurs is a common candidate, but it also might be trains, or cars, or baseball. But we'll go with dinosaurs for our example.
You can talk to this kid, and he doesn't know the alphabet, or his address, or how to spell his name. But get him on dinosaurs, and suddenly he's using words like "pachycephalosaurus" and can tell you the dietary habits of every creature that lived in the Triassic period. Something about dinosaurs just causes him to collect knowledge like a packrat -- even though, underneath it all, he's still a five-year old with a five-year old's tiny five-year old brain. It's less knowledge than it is an obsession. And so, as fun as it is sometimes to listen to them talk breathlessly about the preferred habitat of the stegosaurus, it isn't really reflective of anything.
Very often, Israel/Palestine is "dinosaurs" for adults.
Obviously, there are plenty of people who do (really) know a lot about the issue, who have thought hard about Israel/Palestine affairs and given it the care and attention it deserves.
But for some reason, it is also true that there are seemingly infinite people who can't tell you their state's capital yet who know (or think they know) everything about it. They may not be able to tell you where the United Nations is located, but they can give you a six hour sermon about the 1922 partition plan or the relevance of the drafting history of U.N. Resolution 242 as it pertains to the final status of the West Bank. They haven't ever heard of John Locke, but they have intimate familiarity with Haj Amin Al-Husseini's public speeches or Ze'ev Jabotinsky's personal correspondence, and boy howdy do those letters tell you everything you need to know about Zionism or anti-Zionism in 2018.
It's a marvel to watch, in its way. And it exists on both sides, which means that internet spectators can, whenever the mood strikes, watch two figures with a combined nine emojis in their Twitter profiles go to war over whether Gaza is "occupied" under the legal framework set out by the Hague conventions.
But, underneath all that "knowledge", they still don't really know anything. It's an obsession, not knowledge. I've never once seen the sort of breathless recitation associated with this type result in a productive conversation. Not once. It's adults playing with their dinosaur dolls.
Dinosaurs is a common candidate, but it also might be trains, or cars, or baseball. But we'll go with dinosaurs for our example.
You can talk to this kid, and he doesn't know the alphabet, or his address, or how to spell his name. But get him on dinosaurs, and suddenly he's using words like "pachycephalosaurus" and can tell you the dietary habits of every creature that lived in the Triassic period. Something about dinosaurs just causes him to collect knowledge like a packrat -- even though, underneath it all, he's still a five-year old with a five-year old's tiny five-year old brain. It's less knowledge than it is an obsession. And so, as fun as it is sometimes to listen to them talk breathlessly about the preferred habitat of the stegosaurus, it isn't really reflective of anything.
Very often, Israel/Palestine is "dinosaurs" for adults.
Obviously, there are plenty of people who do (really) know a lot about the issue, who have thought hard about Israel/Palestine affairs and given it the care and attention it deserves.
But for some reason, it is also true that there are seemingly infinite people who can't tell you their state's capital yet who know (or think they know) everything about it. They may not be able to tell you where the United Nations is located, but they can give you a six hour sermon about the 1922 partition plan or the relevance of the drafting history of U.N. Resolution 242 as it pertains to the final status of the West Bank. They haven't ever heard of John Locke, but they have intimate familiarity with Haj Amin Al-Husseini's public speeches or Ze'ev Jabotinsky's personal correspondence, and boy howdy do those letters tell you everything you need to know about Zionism or anti-Zionism in 2018.
It's a marvel to watch, in its way. And it exists on both sides, which means that internet spectators can, whenever the mood strikes, watch two figures with a combined nine emojis in their Twitter profiles go to war over whether Gaza is "occupied" under the legal framework set out by the Hague conventions.
But, underneath all that "knowledge", they still don't really know anything. It's an obsession, not knowledge. I've never once seen the sort of breathless recitation associated with this type result in a productive conversation. Not once. It's adults playing with their dinosaur dolls.
Sunday, September 23, 2018
An Alarmingly Late Realization (About Rings)
You know that game people play, where they say some really obvious mistaken belief they held until were alarmingly old?
Well, I just recently discovered mine.
In The Lord of the Rings, there are various scenes where Frodo puts on the One Ring. In the mythology of the movies (and books), the One Ring makes its wearer invisible to ordinary mortals (say, orcs searching nearby) but quite visible to the ring's master Sauron. Moreover, we are told, the ring "wants to be found" -- it exerts a power over its owner, tempting its holder to wear it so that Sauron knows where it is so that he can get it back.
Anyway, in these scenes Frodo puts the ring on, and then encounters the terrifying gaze of Sauron, at which point he struggles to take it off. He pulls at the ring, which seems to resist him until finally with a great yank he pries it loose. And for all my life, I assumed Frodo was struggling because the One Ring was resisting him.
But now that I, for the first time in my life, wear a (wedding) ring, I've realized the more banal truth: rings -- of all kinds, even ordinary mortal wedding bands -- kind of require a bit of yanking to get off one's finger.
It just never occurred to me -- until age 32 -- that rings required effort to remove under perfectly normal circumstances.
Well, I just recently discovered mine.
In The Lord of the Rings, there are various scenes where Frodo puts on the One Ring. In the mythology of the movies (and books), the One Ring makes its wearer invisible to ordinary mortals (say, orcs searching nearby) but quite visible to the ring's master Sauron. Moreover, we are told, the ring "wants to be found" -- it exerts a power over its owner, tempting its holder to wear it so that Sauron knows where it is so that he can get it back.
Anyway, in these scenes Frodo puts the ring on, and then encounters the terrifying gaze of Sauron, at which point he struggles to take it off. He pulls at the ring, which seems to resist him until finally with a great yank he pries it loose. And for all my life, I assumed Frodo was struggling because the One Ring was resisting him.
But now that I, for the first time in my life, wear a (wedding) ring, I've realized the more banal truth: rings -- of all kinds, even ordinary mortal wedding bands -- kind of require a bit of yanking to get off one's finger.
It just never occurred to me -- until age 32 -- that rings required effort to remove under perfectly normal circumstances.
Tuesday, September 18, 2018
Keeping the Important Questions in Mind
The recent allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, and the argument regarding whether what a "17 year old, presumably very drunk kid" might have done (e.g., sexually assault a fellow student) should have a bearing on his Supreme Court nomination, raise many questions that are important to think about. But some of these questions are more important than others.
Here's an example of an important question:
Here's an example of an important question:
(1) Should a person who committed a sexual assault as a teenager, and who faced the appropriate legal consequences and has otherwise accepted responsibility for their act, be completely barred from all social and economic opportunities and permanently stripped of their basic participatory rights as citizens (e.g., to vote) for the rest of their life?Here's an example of a much less important question:
(2) Should a person who committed a sexual assault as a teenager, who has faced no tangible consequences whatsoever at any point in their life and who never acknowledged responsibility, not be given a seat on the single highest judicial body in the country?And here's an example of a question so utterly unimportant that it's baffling it'd even be asked:
(3) Should we spend any time puzzling through question #2 if we haven't, as a society and in our structure of criminal law and economic practice, unequivocally answered "no" to question #1?Answer key: (1) No (2) Yes (3) No
Monday, September 17, 2018
Marvel's Spider-Man! Initial Thoughts
I've been playing Marvel's Spider-Man for the past few days, and it is blast. Some quick thoughts:
- While the web-swinging dynamic remains a little opaque to me -- I rely on button-mashing more than I'd like, and precise landings on small platforms is a skill I've yet to master -- swinging around New York is still an exhilarating experience.
- It also helps that it is New York. Not "Gotham", not "Bew Bork". Spider-Man as a character really is tied to a sense of place (for good reason -- as one wag put it, if Spider-Man lived in, say, Greensboro, he'd be restricted to fighting crime in a 3-block radius downtown) and the game is perhaps the best representation of a real-life city that I've ever experienced.
- The combat system, which emphasizes getting and staying in the air, represents an actually fresh take on the fun but somewhat-worn Arkham/Assassin's Creed/Shadow of Mordor beat-em-up model. Still kind of button-mashy, but I feel like I've gotten the hang of it and am dying a lot less frequently than I did in the early going.
- The game mostly looks beautiful -- occasionally I saw some rough textures on some cut-scene characters (Mr. Li, to be precise), but overall it is very sharp.
- J. Jonah Jameson is now a right-wing talk radio host, which is a good spin on his character. One of the most interesting parts of his portrayal is that his (expressed) beef with Spider-Man is basically that his presence as a Superhero is directly responsible for criminals escalating into supervillain-ery. Why do I find that interesting? Because it's, more or less, the posture the Christian Bale-era Batman films took towards that character, to much critical admiration.
- While there is plenty of similarities to the Arkham games, the tone is so different (understandably, Spider-Man and Batman are very different characters). In particular, this game has a brightness and cheeriness to it that Arkham could never have sustained. Ironic, given that Bruce Wayne is a billionaire and Peter Parker is teetering on the edge of homelessness (and Peter can see your dead parents, Bruce, and raise you a dead uncle, so don't even try to play that card).
Anyway, the game is a ton of fun, and I highly recommend it.
Friday, September 14, 2018
What the New York Democratic Primary Results Mean
Well the New York primaries are in the bag, and Andrew Cuomo smoked Cynthia Nixon by a 66/34 margin. The Cuomo-aligned candidates also won the downballot statewide races: Tish James soundly defeated two opponents to win the nomination for Attorney General, and Kathy Hochul held off a very spirited challenge from Jumaane Williams for the Lieutenant Governor's nod.
The news wasn't all bad for progressive challengers -- six of the eight turncoats in the IDC (a group of renegade Democrats who caucused with, and gave control of the state senate to, Republicans) lost last night. And most-scrutinized-state-senate-candidate-in-history Julia Salazar soundly defeated incumbent Martin Dilan (who was not IDC, but was viewed as a relatively conservative figure).
I had registered my predictions for some of these races, and I'd give myself a solid A- on my performance. Sure, "Cuomo will trounce Nixon" and "Felder over Morris" were chalk picks, but I give myself a little more credit for calling Salazar's comfortable win over Dilan (which I've heard described as "stunning" but which I was very confident in). My big miss was underestimating the IDC bloodbath (I set the over/under on IDC losses at "two"), but that's an area I'm happy to be proven wrong.
But enough about me. What are the larger implications of yesterday's results?
1. There really is some genuine anti-Democratic establishment sentiment coursing through the deepest-blue turf.
There have been more than a couple locales where candidates the left has been deeply excited about have won by either knocking off incumbents or beating more establishment-oriented candidates -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the obvious one, along with Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, and last night Julia Salazar in Brooklyn. All of these races occurred in very similar types of district -- urban, very blue, cosmopolitan, and highly diverse. That's why Salazar's victory didn't surprise me -- her district fit the profile for where candidates like her have done very, very well this cycle.
2. This sentiment, so far, is not translating to Democratic politics on a broader -- statewide or larger -- basis.
While progressive insurgents have certainly won some high-profile successes, they've also been rather limited in scope. This is the flip-side of the "very similar types of district" argument: the left wave hasn't really gotten any momentum outside of these very friendly, urban environments. It's not just that Nixon lost last night -- a Nixon victory was always a long-shot. But it is quite notable that Nixon actually didn't improve on Zephyr Teachout's 2014 performance against Cuomo -- despite garnering a lot more media attention and working in a far more favorable political environment.
This isn't to say progressives haven't notched some victories in statewide races -- Ben Jealous in Maryland and Andrew Gillum in Florida certainly qualify. But Democratic incumbents on a state level -- Senators and Governors -- have had no trouble turning back progressive challengers.
It's important not to overintepret either of the above against each other. On the one hand, there really is a noticeable shift in Democratic politics occurring in the types of locales where Ocasio-Cortez or Salazar are winning. It's more than idiosyncratic, and it's wrong to dismiss it. On the other hand, it is a shift that so far is confined -- it isn't all places or all Democrats (there's an annoying heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to some progressive analyses of, e.g., New York, wherein Julia Salazar's victory shows that what the people really want is Democratic Socialism, and Andrew Cuomo's victory shows that the Democratic Party is hard at work suppressing what the people really want, Democratic Socialism).
3. For the most part, primary challengers are doing their job.
My view on primaries is that they should serve two important purposes. First, punish bad guys. And second, push incumbents to adopt better positions. On that score, I'd say that the results in New York were a rousing success.
Start with the latter metric. No, Nixon didn't win, but she absolutely pushed Cuomo to adopt a raft of more liberal positions, and that's almost as much of a victory as if she'd actually assumed office (one could argue that, given Nixon's lack of actual political or administrative experience, it's a better outcome. A savvy political operator like Cuomo pushing progressive policies may well accomplish more than a well-meaning but inexperienced novice like Nixon). That's the thing about establishment politicians -- if the established wisdom shifts, they'll follow right along.
And on the "punishing bad guys" front, the IDC bloodbath is beautiful political justice. Moreover, I do think that Nixon's campaign helped bring attention and energy to that campaign too (notably, while many of the IDC incumbents occupied districts that were of the left-friendly type I identified above, there was more diversity there -- David Valesky lost his Syracuse area seat, for example, and IDC leader Jeffrey Klein represents a mixed district encompassing parts of the Bronx but also Westchester County). Six Democrats who deserved to lose, lost. And I highly doubt the two IDC survivors will return to similar shenanigans in the future.
The interesting thing about primary challenges is that they can win even if they lose. Sometimes, entrenched incumbents need a scare put in them. A close primary fight keeps them honest, and ensures that they stay inline with where Democratic politics are going.
So overall, I consider last night to have been a heartening display. Sure, there are some incumbents who survived when I might've rather watched them go down in flames. But there were some instances of righteous retribution and, perhaps more importantly, those who survived the ordeal will emerge wiser for it. I think 2018 will be a very good year for progressive politics in New York -- in part because of who won, but maybe in large part based on who came to fight.
The news wasn't all bad for progressive challengers -- six of the eight turncoats in the IDC (a group of renegade Democrats who caucused with, and gave control of the state senate to, Republicans) lost last night. And most-scrutinized-state-senate-candidate-in-history Julia Salazar soundly defeated incumbent Martin Dilan (who was not IDC, but was viewed as a relatively conservative figure).
I had registered my predictions for some of these races, and I'd give myself a solid A- on my performance. Sure, "Cuomo will trounce Nixon" and "Felder over Morris" were chalk picks, but I give myself a little more credit for calling Salazar's comfortable win over Dilan (which I've heard described as "stunning" but which I was very confident in). My big miss was underestimating the IDC bloodbath (I set the over/under on IDC losses at "two"), but that's an area I'm happy to be proven wrong.
But enough about me. What are the larger implications of yesterday's results?
1. There really is some genuine anti-Democratic establishment sentiment coursing through the deepest-blue turf.
There have been more than a couple locales where candidates the left has been deeply excited about have won by either knocking off incumbents or beating more establishment-oriented candidates -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the obvious one, along with Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, and last night Julia Salazar in Brooklyn. All of these races occurred in very similar types of district -- urban, very blue, cosmopolitan, and highly diverse. That's why Salazar's victory didn't surprise me -- her district fit the profile for where candidates like her have done very, very well this cycle.
2. This sentiment, so far, is not translating to Democratic politics on a broader -- statewide or larger -- basis.
While progressive insurgents have certainly won some high-profile successes, they've also been rather limited in scope. This is the flip-side of the "very similar types of district" argument: the left wave hasn't really gotten any momentum outside of these very friendly, urban environments. It's not just that Nixon lost last night -- a Nixon victory was always a long-shot. But it is quite notable that Nixon actually didn't improve on Zephyr Teachout's 2014 performance against Cuomo -- despite garnering a lot more media attention and working in a far more favorable political environment.
This isn't to say progressives haven't notched some victories in statewide races -- Ben Jealous in Maryland and Andrew Gillum in Florida certainly qualify. But Democratic incumbents on a state level -- Senators and Governors -- have had no trouble turning back progressive challengers.
It's important not to overintepret either of the above against each other. On the one hand, there really is a noticeable shift in Democratic politics occurring in the types of locales where Ocasio-Cortez or Salazar are winning. It's more than idiosyncratic, and it's wrong to dismiss it. On the other hand, it is a shift that so far is confined -- it isn't all places or all Democrats (there's an annoying heads-I-win-tails-you-lose quality to some progressive analyses of, e.g., New York, wherein Julia Salazar's victory shows that what the people really want is Democratic Socialism, and Andrew Cuomo's victory shows that the Democratic Party is hard at work suppressing what the people really want, Democratic Socialism).
3. For the most part, primary challengers are doing their job.
My view on primaries is that they should serve two important purposes. First, punish bad guys. And second, push incumbents to adopt better positions. On that score, I'd say that the results in New York were a rousing success.
Start with the latter metric. No, Nixon didn't win, but she absolutely pushed Cuomo to adopt a raft of more liberal positions, and that's almost as much of a victory as if she'd actually assumed office (one could argue that, given Nixon's lack of actual political or administrative experience, it's a better outcome. A savvy political operator like Cuomo pushing progressive policies may well accomplish more than a well-meaning but inexperienced novice like Nixon). That's the thing about establishment politicians -- if the established wisdom shifts, they'll follow right along.
And on the "punishing bad guys" front, the IDC bloodbath is beautiful political justice. Moreover, I do think that Nixon's campaign helped bring attention and energy to that campaign too (notably, while many of the IDC incumbents occupied districts that were of the left-friendly type I identified above, there was more diversity there -- David Valesky lost his Syracuse area seat, for example, and IDC leader Jeffrey Klein represents a mixed district encompassing parts of the Bronx but also Westchester County). Six Democrats who deserved to lose, lost. And I highly doubt the two IDC survivors will return to similar shenanigans in the future.
The interesting thing about primary challenges is that they can win even if they lose. Sometimes, entrenched incumbents need a scare put in them. A close primary fight keeps them honest, and ensures that they stay inline with where Democratic politics are going.
So overall, I consider last night to have been a heartening display. Sure, there are some incumbents who survived when I might've rather watched them go down in flames. But there were some instances of righteous retribution and, perhaps more importantly, those who survived the ordeal will emerge wiser for it. I think 2018 will be a very good year for progressive politics in New York -- in part because of who won, but maybe in large part based on who came to fight.
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
The Rutgers Antisemitism Investigation Isn't About Free Speech, But it is About "Free Speech"
Last week, the Department of Education announced it was reopening an investigation into alleged antisemitism at Rutgers University. This has led to some consternation -- see this very skeptical New York Times article or this statement of condemnation by J Street -- and the usual fretting that it represents an attack on "free speech". The case is being looped into larger discussions about the Antisemitism Awareness Act, the State Department/IHRA antisemitism definition, and when anti-Israel sentiment crosses into discriminatory antisemitism generally.
But the Rutgers case is a very different animal than how it's being portrayed. The legal (as opposed to factual) questions it poses do not appear related to any disputes about the ASAA or the State Department definition, do not implicate free speech concerns at all, and really should not be controversial to anyone who thinks rules against antisemitism are anything more than pro forma.
Let's start with J Street's statement:
And that's a problem, because while the J Street statement invokes the scary prospect of government regulators stepping in to "ban" speech, from what I can tell (and unfortunately I haven't been able to get my hands on the letter DoE civil rights head Ken Marcus sent reopening the investigation, so I'm relying on media reports) the Rutgers investigation isn't investigating or targeting anyone's speech at all. And neither does it (or at least must it) rely upon the State Department/IHRA antisemitism definition to get its wheels going.
As it is being reported, the renewed investigation of Rutgers looks at only one incident: allegations that a pro-Palestinian event, initially advertised as free and open to the public, began charging admission fees upon perceiving that many of those seeking entrance were Jewish and/or Israeli (and accordingly committed either ethnic or national origin based discrimination). The key bit of evidence is an email by one of the organizers saying "We need to start charging because 150 Zionists just showed up!" but that “if someone looks like a supporter, they can get in for free" (this email wasn't considered in the initial agency decision, hence why the matter is being reopened). The argument is that, in this context, "Zionist" stood in for "Jewish" (or "Israeli").
Now, whatever else you want to say about this allegation, it simply isn't a free speech case. Questions about when "speech" becomes a form of discriminatory harassment are among the most difficult ones courts and civil rights agencies have to grapple with. There are cases like that -- ones where, e.g., Jewish students are alleging that a given speaker's words (whether directed at Israel or something else) created a hostile environment that interferes with their full and equal access to a public good. And those cases really do raise genuinely difficult and nettlesome free speech questions.
But this case isn't one of them. The DoE is not investigating any claim that the speaker at this event said certain bad words about Israel or Jews which qualify as discriminatory. The investigation is into a much more run-of-the-mill form of discrimination: Charging differential rates to Jews versus non-Jews, or hiking prices because too many Jews were showing up, is discrimination in its most uncomplicated and unproblematic guise. It just cannot be the case that J Street thinks that requiring public events to not hike prices when the Jews show up constitutes "silencing" of anti-Israel speech.
Now, of course, while hiking prices because too many Jews are showing up is definitely discriminatory, it is entirely fair to say that the email quoted above, in the abstract, does not provide unambiguous evidence that this is what happened. The argument in favor, as Marcus expressed, runs thus:
[A parallel example might help illustrate. A "Men's Rights" organization on campus hosts an anti-feminist speaker known to be controversial. People start to arrive before the speech, and this initial group is predominantly -- though not exclusively -- male (and, perhaps, people generally known by the organizers to be sympathetic to the speaker). But a few moments later, a huge crowd of women arrive in line to hear the talk. An organizer panics, and sends an email: "we need to start charging -- 150 feminists just showed up". Is this sex discrimination? I think plausibly. The organizer doesn't actually know the political orientation of the new arrivals. What he sees is their gender, and then makes an inference regarding their politics (and their favorability towards the speaker) based on that, which is used to justify raising prices. To me, that'd be sex discrimination. And it'd still be sex discrimination even if a few "cool girls" were involved in the hosting of the speaker].
"Zionist", of course, doesn't always equal "Jewish". But sometimes it does, and frequently enough so that in cases like this it's worth looking into as a possibility. And in particular, there are elements in the record here that make it especially likely that "Zionist" was functioning as "Jewish" (similar reasoning is how we can infer that Jeremy Corbyn was using "Zionist" as a stand-in for "Jewish" when he spoke of people who'd lived in England "all their lives" and yet didn't understand "English irony"). The reliance on visual perception -- how does one "look" like a Zionist without "looking" like a Jew -- significantly strengthens the inference that the Jewishness of the prospective attendees was doing dispositive work.
The basic principle -- that "Zionist" sometimes can be used as a code for "Jew", and that consequently the naked use of the word "Zionist" doesn't act as a definitive defense against an antisemitism claim -- should not be controversial and is something I can't imagine J Street actually disagrees with. If one needs the State Department definition of antisemitism to operationalize that principle, that's a huge point in favor of codifying the definition -- but I actually don't think the State definition is necessary to get us there, because again, the structure of the antisemitism claim here actually isn't that complex (here in particular I wish I had Marcus' letter, as I'm curious what work the State Department definition is purportedly doing for the investigation).
Still, perhaps it does illustrate what I've sometimes termed the "cleansing power of anti-Zionism" -- the inversion of the classic "not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic" argument into the much more robust "if something is framed as criticism of Israel, then ipso facto it is not antisemitic." That move is one that it is very important to check, and the ease at which people fall into that groove is perhaps strong evidence of why a more rigorous definition of antisemitism absolutely is required.
Now, I've been treating these allegations as if they were affirmatively established, and they're not. It's possible the email in question wasn't written by an event organizer, or that if it was written it wasn't the cause of the decision to charge for admission, or that there is some other evidence that the Jewish or Israeli character of the prospective attendees was irrelevant to how the pricing change proceeded. My (very) quick glance at the record suggests that some of these defenses might have legs. But there is a huge difference between dismissing this complaint because (say) the email in question didn't cause the pricing change, and dismissing it because in concept the pricing change could not have been antisemitic because the email used the word "Zionist" rather than "Jewish". That's a spectacularly dangerous precedent to set, and so it's disappointing that J Street seems willing to go down that road in a statement that doesn't even seem to recognize the stakes on the table.
Put another way, it's entirely reasonable to contest the alleged facts here. But there are to my eyes only two substantive legal questions at issue:
The answer to both of these has to be yes. It would be really, really bad if a civil rights agency answered "no" to either of these questions, which means it's really important that, however the investigation ultimately is resolved, it makes clear that it is not giving such a negative answer.
Finally, I want to circle back to the "free speech" focus. Again, on substance the Rutgers investigation just doesn't have anything to do with speech. Either the organizers hiked prices in response to perceived Jewish attendance, in which case it is a straightforward case of antisemitism, or they didn't, and it isn't. Speech just doesn't come into play. Which raises the question: Why did J Street and others instinctively run to that well?
There's recently been a raft of scholarship on what's been called the "New Lochnerism" or "First Amendment Lochnerism". For those of you who haven't suffered through law school, Lochner was a turn-of-the-century Supreme Court case which stands in for a judicial era where courts repeatedly struck down progressive economic and social regulations. For decades, popular democratic legislation protecting workers was strangled by a deeply activist Supreme Court's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's due process requirements. The "New Lochnerism" perceives a similar trend today with respect to the First Amendment, which is also slowly being weaponized to undo progressive electoral accomplishments recast as forms of compelled speech. Janus (public-sector union agency fees) is one prominent example, Citizens United (campaign finance) is another, Masterpiece Cakeshop (anti-gay discrimination) is a third.
Discrimination law is particularly vulnerable to this line of argument, because discrimination claims almost always implicate expressive values. I've been saying that the Rutgers case clearly isn't about speech, but a clever philosopher could reframe it that way with little trouble: "I dislike X group, and the way I express my dislike for them is by charging them more money if they want to attend my events." Or "I express my dislike by refusing to hire them" or "I express my dislike by refusing to do business with them." If one accepts that frame, pretty much all anti-discrimination law represents a First Amendment threat: one is being forced to associate with people one would rather not, and one is foreclosed from acting based on specific (discriminatory) motives when other viewpoints are entirely permissible bases for action.
Fortunately, courts have not taken things that far. But the New Lochnerism suggests a growing trend in that direction, and the hysteria over the Rutgers case fits right inside of it. In my writings on antisemitism and discrimination law more broadly, I've emphasized how certain patterns of discourse about antisemitism reflect broader conservative legal trends that threaten a raft of progressive priorities -- not just an antisemitism, but on anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-Islamophobia (the interpretation that encompasses Jews under Title VI and gives the DoE jurisdiction over the Rutgers case in the first place is the same one that enables anti-Muslim bigotry to be covered), and other bases as well. That "progressives" don't recognize or don't care about these parallels is either remarkably short-sighted or remarkably dangerous.
The Rutgers case isn't about free speech -- there is no free speech interest in raising prices because you're worried too many Jews will be in the room otherwise. But it is about "free speech", the totemic invocation that anytime, anywhere, anyway that outgroups allege they face discrimination, what's really happening is a form of silencing. It's a powerful argument, and therefore a tempting argument -- even in cases like this, where it doesn't remotely fit the facts. But that doesn't make it a good argument. It leads to a very particular, and very unlovely, end point.
There are discursive tropes which suggest that White people are being "silenced" by overbearing, overexpansive, all-encompassing accusations of racism. These tropes in turn support a backlash against anti-racism efforts across the board. There are also tropes which suggest that men are being silenced by overbearing, overexpansive, all-encompassing accusations of sexism; these support a backlash against anti-sexism efforts across the board. And there are identical tropes which suggest that non-Jews are being silenced by overbearing, overexpansive, all-encompassing accusations of antisemitism; these, too, power a backlash against counter-antisemitism efforts globally.
There isn't necessarily perfect overlap between those who find these various tropes appealing. But they're all based on the same principle, and together they all entrench a particular moral and legal vision of anti-discrimination law that is hobbled to the point of impotency. One can't indulge in the one without getting all the rest.
But the Rutgers case is a very different animal than how it's being portrayed. The legal (as opposed to factual) questions it poses do not appear related to any disputes about the ASAA or the State Department definition, do not implicate free speech concerns at all, and really should not be controversial to anyone who thinks rules against antisemitism are anything more than pro forma.
Let's start with J Street's statement:
The initial Rutgers investigation into an event held by a Palestinian group on campus was triggered by a complaint from the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) — an ultra-right group that has sought to suppress virtually all activities critical of Israeli government policy, and which regularly traffics in anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim bigotry. The complaint was thoroughly investigated and dismissed by the DOE in 2014. Its reopening is not about upholding civil rights or a serious effort to combat anti-Semitism, but about advancing a right-wing agenda that seeks to silence open discussion and debate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To do so, the Trump administration intends to wield a controversial definition of anti-Semitism that equates criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism — and which was never intended for use on college campuses.... At J Street, we strongly oppose anti-Semitism in all of its forms. We work to challenge ill-informed criticism of Israel and Zionism — including on college campuses, through the efforts of our student movement J Street U. We strongly believe that such criticisms can and must be treated as constitutionally-protected free speech — not banned and punished by Congress or the executive branch.As you might expect, I have no quarrel with how ZOA is described here. But it is notable that the statement gives zero details on what the investigation is, you know, investigating. Instead, it just vaguely complains about a chilling effect on free speech, and asserts its opposition to any efforts to "ban and punish" such speech -- along with a shot at the State Department/IHRA "definition" of antisemitism which they likewise accuse of silencing "criticism of Zionism" (I'll sidebar here and say no, the State definition does not "equate criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism" -- indeed, it does not mention "Zionism" at all -- and given the central role that canard is currently playing in the UK Labour antisemitism disaster-show it's not a good look for J Street to just casually drop in on the side of the Corbynistas).
And that's a problem, because while the J Street statement invokes the scary prospect of government regulators stepping in to "ban" speech, from what I can tell (and unfortunately I haven't been able to get my hands on the letter DoE civil rights head Ken Marcus sent reopening the investigation, so I'm relying on media reports) the Rutgers investigation isn't investigating or targeting anyone's speech at all. And neither does it (or at least must it) rely upon the State Department/IHRA antisemitism definition to get its wheels going.
As it is being reported, the renewed investigation of Rutgers looks at only one incident: allegations that a pro-Palestinian event, initially advertised as free and open to the public, began charging admission fees upon perceiving that many of those seeking entrance were Jewish and/or Israeli (and accordingly committed either ethnic or national origin based discrimination). The key bit of evidence is an email by one of the organizers saying "We need to start charging because 150 Zionists just showed up!" but that “if someone looks like a supporter, they can get in for free" (this email wasn't considered in the initial agency decision, hence why the matter is being reopened). The argument is that, in this context, "Zionist" stood in for "Jewish" (or "Israeli").
Now, whatever else you want to say about this allegation, it simply isn't a free speech case. Questions about when "speech" becomes a form of discriminatory harassment are among the most difficult ones courts and civil rights agencies have to grapple with. There are cases like that -- ones where, e.g., Jewish students are alleging that a given speaker's words (whether directed at Israel or something else) created a hostile environment that interferes with their full and equal access to a public good. And those cases really do raise genuinely difficult and nettlesome free speech questions.
But this case isn't one of them. The DoE is not investigating any claim that the speaker at this event said certain bad words about Israel or Jews which qualify as discriminatory. The investigation is into a much more run-of-the-mill form of discrimination: Charging differential rates to Jews versus non-Jews, or hiking prices because too many Jews were showing up, is discrimination in its most uncomplicated and unproblematic guise. It just cannot be the case that J Street thinks that requiring public events to not hike prices when the Jews show up constitutes "silencing" of anti-Israel speech.
Now, of course, while hiking prices because too many Jews are showing up is definitely discriminatory, it is entirely fair to say that the email quoted above, in the abstract, does not provide unambiguous evidence that this is what happened. The argument in favor, as Marcus expressed, runs thus:
“In other words, the visual perception of a group of ‘150 Zionists’ referenced in the email could have been rooted in a perception of Jewish ancestry or ethnic characteristics common to the group,” Marcus wrote, adding that it was unlikely organizers polled each of the 150 entrants on their views regarding Israel. “In cases such as this, it is important to determine whether terms such as ‘Zionist’ are actually code for ‘Jewish.’”
The letter also noted that some students who reported being charged had a Jewish appearance (like wearing a yarmulke, for example).Basically, while it's not clear how the organizers would know that attendees looked "Zionist", they perhaps could tell that the prospective attendees looked Jewish -- because they had on religious garb, for example, or perhaps had Hebrew-language clothing. Consequently, it is fair to infer that what really triggered the email was the Jewish (or Israeli) appearance of the guests, not their alleged Zionism (or put more finely, the organizers saw a bunch of unfamiliar Jews, figured they must be Zionists, and responded by raising prices). And if that inference holds up, then one has a very straightforward case of antisemitic discrimination.
[A parallel example might help illustrate. A "Men's Rights" organization on campus hosts an anti-feminist speaker known to be controversial. People start to arrive before the speech, and this initial group is predominantly -- though not exclusively -- male (and, perhaps, people generally known by the organizers to be sympathetic to the speaker). But a few moments later, a huge crowd of women arrive in line to hear the talk. An organizer panics, and sends an email: "we need to start charging -- 150 feminists just showed up". Is this sex discrimination? I think plausibly. The organizer doesn't actually know the political orientation of the new arrivals. What he sees is their gender, and then makes an inference regarding their politics (and their favorability towards the speaker) based on that, which is used to justify raising prices. To me, that'd be sex discrimination. And it'd still be sex discrimination even if a few "cool girls" were involved in the hosting of the speaker].
"Zionist", of course, doesn't always equal "Jewish". But sometimes it does, and frequently enough so that in cases like this it's worth looking into as a possibility. And in particular, there are elements in the record here that make it especially likely that "Zionist" was functioning as "Jewish" (similar reasoning is how we can infer that Jeremy Corbyn was using "Zionist" as a stand-in for "Jewish" when he spoke of people who'd lived in England "all their lives" and yet didn't understand "English irony"). The reliance on visual perception -- how does one "look" like a Zionist without "looking" like a Jew -- significantly strengthens the inference that the Jewishness of the prospective attendees was doing dispositive work.
The basic principle -- that "Zionist" sometimes can be used as a code for "Jew", and that consequently the naked use of the word "Zionist" doesn't act as a definitive defense against an antisemitism claim -- should not be controversial and is something I can't imagine J Street actually disagrees with. If one needs the State Department definition of antisemitism to operationalize that principle, that's a huge point in favor of codifying the definition -- but I actually don't think the State definition is necessary to get us there, because again, the structure of the antisemitism claim here actually isn't that complex (here in particular I wish I had Marcus' letter, as I'm curious what work the State Department definition is purportedly doing for the investigation).
Still, perhaps it does illustrate what I've sometimes termed the "cleansing power of anti-Zionism" -- the inversion of the classic "not all criticism of Israel is antisemitic" argument into the much more robust "if something is framed as criticism of Israel, then ipso facto it is not antisemitic." That move is one that it is very important to check, and the ease at which people fall into that groove is perhaps strong evidence of why a more rigorous definition of antisemitism absolutely is required.
Now, I've been treating these allegations as if they were affirmatively established, and they're not. It's possible the email in question wasn't written by an event organizer, or that if it was written it wasn't the cause of the decision to charge for admission, or that there is some other evidence that the Jewish or Israeli character of the prospective attendees was irrelevant to how the pricing change proceeded. My (very) quick glance at the record suggests that some of these defenses might have legs. But there is a huge difference between dismissing this complaint because (say) the email in question didn't cause the pricing change, and dismissing it because in concept the pricing change could not have been antisemitic because the email used the word "Zionist" rather than "Jewish". That's a spectacularly dangerous precedent to set, and so it's disappointing that J Street seems willing to go down that road in a statement that doesn't even seem to recognize the stakes on the table.
Put another way, it's entirely reasonable to contest the alleged facts here. But there are to my eyes only two substantive legal questions at issue:
- Does hiking admissions prices based on the perception that too many Jews are attending an event qualify as anti-Jewish discrimination; and
- Can, in concept, "Zionist" be seen as a stand-in for "Jewish" when assessing whether a given act was discrimination against Jews?
The answer to both of these has to be yes. It would be really, really bad if a civil rights agency answered "no" to either of these questions, which means it's really important that, however the investigation ultimately is resolved, it makes clear that it is not giving such a negative answer.
Finally, I want to circle back to the "free speech" focus. Again, on substance the Rutgers investigation just doesn't have anything to do with speech. Either the organizers hiked prices in response to perceived Jewish attendance, in which case it is a straightforward case of antisemitism, or they didn't, and it isn't. Speech just doesn't come into play. Which raises the question: Why did J Street and others instinctively run to that well?
There's recently been a raft of scholarship on what's been called the "New Lochnerism" or "First Amendment Lochnerism". For those of you who haven't suffered through law school, Lochner was a turn-of-the-century Supreme Court case which stands in for a judicial era where courts repeatedly struck down progressive economic and social regulations. For decades, popular democratic legislation protecting workers was strangled by a deeply activist Supreme Court's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's due process requirements. The "New Lochnerism" perceives a similar trend today with respect to the First Amendment, which is also slowly being weaponized to undo progressive electoral accomplishments recast as forms of compelled speech. Janus (public-sector union agency fees) is one prominent example, Citizens United (campaign finance) is another, Masterpiece Cakeshop (anti-gay discrimination) is a third.
Discrimination law is particularly vulnerable to this line of argument, because discrimination claims almost always implicate expressive values. I've been saying that the Rutgers case clearly isn't about speech, but a clever philosopher could reframe it that way with little trouble: "I dislike X group, and the way I express my dislike for them is by charging them more money if they want to attend my events." Or "I express my dislike by refusing to hire them" or "I express my dislike by refusing to do business with them." If one accepts that frame, pretty much all anti-discrimination law represents a First Amendment threat: one is being forced to associate with people one would rather not, and one is foreclosed from acting based on specific (discriminatory) motives when other viewpoints are entirely permissible bases for action.
Fortunately, courts have not taken things that far. But the New Lochnerism suggests a growing trend in that direction, and the hysteria over the Rutgers case fits right inside of it. In my writings on antisemitism and discrimination law more broadly, I've emphasized how certain patterns of discourse about antisemitism reflect broader conservative legal trends that threaten a raft of progressive priorities -- not just an antisemitism, but on anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-Islamophobia (the interpretation that encompasses Jews under Title VI and gives the DoE jurisdiction over the Rutgers case in the first place is the same one that enables anti-Muslim bigotry to be covered), and other bases as well. That "progressives" don't recognize or don't care about these parallels is either remarkably short-sighted or remarkably dangerous.
The Rutgers case isn't about free speech -- there is no free speech interest in raising prices because you're worried too many Jews will be in the room otherwise. But it is about "free speech", the totemic invocation that anytime, anywhere, anyway that outgroups allege they face discrimination, what's really happening is a form of silencing. It's a powerful argument, and therefore a tempting argument -- even in cases like this, where it doesn't remotely fit the facts. But that doesn't make it a good argument. It leads to a very particular, and very unlovely, end point.
There are discursive tropes which suggest that White people are being "silenced" by overbearing, overexpansive, all-encompassing accusations of racism. These tropes in turn support a backlash against anti-racism efforts across the board. There are also tropes which suggest that men are being silenced by overbearing, overexpansive, all-encompassing accusations of sexism; these support a backlash against anti-sexism efforts across the board. And there are identical tropes which suggest that non-Jews are being silenced by overbearing, overexpansive, all-encompassing accusations of antisemitism; these, too, power a backlash against counter-antisemitism efforts globally.
There isn't necessarily perfect overlap between those who find these various tropes appealing. But they're all based on the same principle, and together they all entrench a particular moral and legal vision of anti-discrimination law that is hobbled to the point of impotency. One can't indulge in the one without getting all the rest.
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