Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LIX: The European Super League

Recently, there was an announcement that several major European soccer teams were going to form a "super league". Now, I'm just going to tear off this band-aid -- I'm not European, and I don't really follow soccer. So I'm probably going to butcher what this means, and I don't care enough to do real research to find out. But as far as I can tell, the super league would diverge from the general promotion/relegation system common in European leagues. Instead, most of the participating teams would be permanent members of the league regardless of how they perform -- akin to the how professional sports leagues operate in the U.S. (where, no matter how woeful the Pirates are, we're stuck with them in the MLB indefinitely).

Anyway, the Super League announcement was controversial with, well, everyone, and it looks like the league is pretty much dead in the water. But its very short life still left time for people to assign blame to the proper parties:

In several posts, the writers blamed Jews for the situation. One user wrote: “Notably, most of the owners of these ‘big' football clubs pushing for a Super League are Jews, including Roman Abramovic [sic] and the Glazers…..Jews are ruining football, they don’t give a f**** about the Gentile fans..”

Roman Abramovich is the owner of Chelsea FC, one of the clubs due to take part in the new league, while the Glazers are the American family who owns Manchester United. Joel Glazer is said to be the vice-chairman of the new Super League. Tottenham Hotspur, chaired by Daniel Levy, is also one of the founding clubs.

Another Twitter user wrote: “All this talk of the European Super League. It’s jew rats behind it. All money grabbing c***s. It’s no wonder that people hate them as much as the muslims.”  This post was illustrated with a vicious and common antisemitic cartoon.

In another post, a user wrote: “Them 3 fat AMERICAN C***S YOU F***ING BASTARDS. And as for that Jew levy your family should have been gassed”. Someone else declared: “Hey Zionists it’s not all about money you suckers“.

Last one is a fun example of clearly using "Zionists" to mean Jews! 

Tablet Mag Needs To Learn How To Link to a Source

Tablet Magazine has another article up about ethnic studies, titled "Getting Rich in the Diversity Market." The title, I assume, is tongue-in-cheek, since given the number of articles they pump out on the subject I can't imagine there's anyone this side of Bari Weiss making more money on "the diversity market" than Tablet Magazine.

Last time we checked in on Tablet's reporting on this beat, they published an article that nakedly fabricated evidence in order to portray the latest draft of the California Model Ethnic Studies curriculum on as antisemitic. An interesting fact about that article was that it didn't actually link to the curriculum documents it was nominally criticizing, forcing readers to go on a winding solo journey to actually pull up the material in question and discover for ourselves just how blatantly the article misled us.

Alas, all that's old is new again in the latest article. One of the article's targets is a "Racial Literacy Curriculum" by an organization called Pollyanna, which they seek to argue is antisemitic. Here's what Tablet says about the curriculum:

This curriculum includes a unique view of nearly every educational discipline, such as in sixth grade history where children discover that the essence of Nazism was not the destruction of European Jewry but the rise of “whiteness.” Pollyanna’s main coverage of the Jewish experience is reduced to an odd and passing reference to the “Eastern European Hebrew” race.

They provide no link, but the relevant document appears to be this. So, what's the context? Here's the actual quote:

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, as large groups, or a “wave,” of low-income immigrants entered the U.S. from other parts of Europe, new racial classifications emerged, such as the “Northern Italian” race, the “Southern Italian” race, and the “Eastern European Hebrew” race. Through pseudoscientific assessments, including the measurements of people’s cranial features and “intelligence” tests, these groups were erroneously deemed inferior, as the Celts had been. 

Wow! The curriculum is talking about racist immigration restrictions that targeted Jews (among others), and, in not-so-odd fashion, these restrictions used pretty blatant racist language! What, exactly, is objectionable here (maybe Tablet wants a trigger warning first)?

Can anyone say that, reading the Tablet article, the impression they'd have gotten regarding the "odd and passing reference to the 'Eastern European Hebrew' race" would be within 500 miles of what the curriculum actually said? No, of course not. Earlier in the article the author states that the curriculum he's citing (but not linking to) was "reviewed by Tablet", which suggests that an editor signed off on this blatant misrepresentation. Disgraceful.

The curriculum also does not appear to really say anything about "the essence of Nazism", because the curriculum is self-consciously focused on the American development of race and racism, not European -- hence why the only passing mention of Nazism relates to shifts in speaking of a "Saxon" race to a "Nordic" race. But there's no claim I can see that suggests that this is the most important thing to learn about Nazism -- it's just that the curriculum focuses on the American context, which is entirely appropriate. Again, the Tablet article's presentation is just wildly out of sync with the content.

At this point, one has to wonder if the failure to link to primary source documents in circumstances where it's obvious that doing so would undermine the author's ideological ax is intentional. It happened in the California ESMC article, and it's happening again here. 

It is bad enough to read an article and not feel confident that the author's summary of another source is accurate; it's absolutely infuriating to have to set off on a lonely trek to find the source for oneself because Tablet can't hold itself to basic standards of internet professionalism.

It Is Not "Shocking" To Ask Judges to Obey Governing Precedent: On Jones v. Mississippi (and Miller and Montgomery)

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court in Jones v. Mississippi ruled 6-3 that states can sentence juveniles to life without parole so long as the underlying state statute does not mandate such a sentence. While prior decisions (Miller v. Alabama and Montgomery v. Louisiana) suggested that juvenile offenders could only be sentenced to life without parole if they are "incorrigible", the Jones Court held that these precedents do not require the sentencing court to actually make any findings on that point. So long as the court had the discretion to consider the mitigating factors associated with youth, the constitutional mandates set out in Miller and Montgomery are satisfied. In Jones, the result of this holding is that an inmate who committed his crime at the age of 15 and whose conduct since incarceration has seemingly decisively proven that he is not incorrigible but in fact can and has reformed, will -- absent executive clemency -- spend the rest of his life in prison.

Justice Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion -- the irony of him declaring it permissible to permanently expel a man from society for youthful wrongdoings was not lost -- and at the conclusion seemed to acknowledge that the rule he declared was harsh and perhaps even unjust to Jones. This made me think of my recent article "Sadomasochistic Judging", where I explored how judges acknowledge and lament the pain their rulings cause as a means of securing legitimacy for those rulings. Josh Blackman, though, was very unhappy to see Justice Kavanaugh make these allusions at all. "The Supreme Court should focus on its own business, and let the other branches of state government do their jobs. Stay in your lane."

I am on the record as being strongly in favor of judges making statements of this form, and I won't rehash all my arguments on the subject here. But I will make one point that might be an important clarification regarding my thesis in "Sadomasochistic Judging". One could mistakenly read my article and think I am criticizing judges for a form of hypocrisy or bad faith when they wring their hands about the seeming cruelties they impose. I'm not. The problem I articulate is that judges confuse the pain they wrought for proof of legitimacy, and so come to seek out painful rulings even when they're not legally compelled. Given how badly the Court butchers its legal reasoning in Jones (see below), I don't think its unfair to hypothesize that's part of what's happening here.

That said, assuming that we don't think judges will never have to mete out injustices in order to stay within the law -- and I don't think that -- then judges have to either acknowledge the injustices they enforce or ignore them. Choosing the latter may well replace "sadomasochistic judging" for plain old sadistic judging: judging where it is believed that the judges actively desire the pain they cause for its own sake, or are at least indifferent to it. That, I think, would be disastrous for the legitimacy of the courts. If Justice Kavanaugh (or any other justice) believes that his servitude to the law requires him in a given case to be a dealer of cruelty, the absolute least we can ask out of him is that he acknowledge what he's doing. This is not "virtue signaling" nor "checking one's privilege" nor any of the other tired buzzwords Blackman attributes to Justice Kavanaugh. It is having his eyes open to reality.

But Justice Kavanaugh's nod to the human costs of his decision is not Blackman's only bone to pick. In a separate post he also takes aim at a particular line in Justice Sotomayor's dissent, one that he claims to have "shock[ed]" him when he read it. Here's the offending passage:

For present purposes, sentencers should hold this Court to its word: Miller and Montgomery are still good law. See ante, at 19 ("Today's decision does not overrule Miller or Montgomery"). Sentencers are thus bound to continue applying those decisions faithfully. Thankfully, many States have already implemented robust procedures to give effect to Miller and Montgomery. In other States, the responsibility falls squarely on individual sentencers to use their discretion to "separate those juveniles who may be sentenced to life without parole from those who may not." Montgomery, 577 U. S., at 210. Failing to do so violates the Eighth Amendment. 

Huh? What is shocking about this? As Sotomayor observes, the Court explicitly upheld Miller and Montgomery. These cases are still good law. So yes, obviously lower courts are "bound to continue applying these decisions faithfully." That's vertical stare decisis 101.

Blackman explains his shock as follows:

Justice Sotomayor has opened an entirely new front in the battle over stare decisis: if the Roberts Court is unwilling to formally overrule a precedent, then lower courts should still follow those decisions "faithfully." Truly, this proposition is remarkable. Justice Sotomayor is inviting trial courts to engage in a judicial resistance of Jones. Yes, I used the phrase judicial resistance. Unless the Court is willing to bite the bullet and formally overrule the precedent, judges should still follow a rejected-reading of Montgomery and Miller. The antidote to stealth overruling is stealth underruling: lower courts should quietly fail to give a new Supreme Court precedent its fairest reading, in order to preserve a now-rejected reading of an older precedent.

Respectfully, I think this is the sort of passage a faithful exponent of constitutional interpretation can be legitimately shocked by. If the Supreme Court says flatly "we are not overruling, but rather applying, a precedent", lower courts absolutely should still follow those precedents "faithfully". It would be remarkable to suggest anything otherwise. To be clear, I don't deny that sometimes courts overrule cases sub silentio, or that long evolutions in law can make a prior precedent so anomalous that it seems to drop out of the doctrine and eventually ceases to be followed. But that's not what happened here. Jones did not ignore Montgomery and Miller, it did not even criticize them. It claimed to be faithfully applying them. The fairest reading of Jones is that it means what it says: Montgomery and Miller remain fully binding on lower courts.

In Blackman's defense, part of the problem here is that while Jones claims to be following Montgomery and Miller, it really makes hash out of both. In this, Justice Sotomayor (and Justice Thomas, I suppose), are correct -- the rule in Jones is ludicrous as a purportedly faithful application of these prior precedents. But nonetheless, the case says what it says, and lower courts are bound to take it at its word, which means they have to figure out how to harmonize Montgomery and Miller with Jones -- applying them all faithfully.

What does that mean? Montgomery told us that while "Miller did not impose a formal factfinding requirement", this "does not leave States free to sentence a child whose crime reflects transient immaturity to life without parole. To the contrary, Miller established that this punishment is disproportionate under the Eighth Amendment." Justice Kavanaugh, in a show of tremendous bad faith, quotes the former part of the passage ad nauseum while ignoring the latter entirely save for a buried footnote. But again, lower courts have the holdings they have. There still is a distinction between "those juveniles who may be sentenced to life without parole [and] those who may not" -- language from Montgomery that Justice Kavanaugh says he is applying and enforcing in Jones.

The best -- possibly only -- way to harmonize Jones, Miller, and Montgomery is that sentencing courts are not permitted to "sentence a child whose crime reflects transient immaturity to life without parole" (Miller and Montgomery -- these are the juveniles in the "who may not" category), but that so long as the sentencing court is given discretionary authority to consider the constitutionally-mandatory mitigating factors (such as incorrigibility), it will be (irrebuttably?) presumed that they did consider such factors and determined they do not apply to the child if they decide to impose such a life-without-parole sentence -- even if the sentencing court makes no explicit or implicit findings on the question (Jones). This is no doubt why Justice Kavanaugh keeps stressing that what he's rejecting is a demand that sentencing courts make a "separate" factual finding of incorrigibility (in his opinion "separate", in relation to "factual finding", appears close to twenty times). The relevant "finding" is permitted to be and assumed to have been merged entirely into the court's declaration of the sentence -- no "separate" analysis, whether implicit or explicit, is required.

To be sure, the effect of Jones even read this way is to make Miller and Montgomery effectively unenforceable. But an unenforceable rule is still a rule, it just relies on the relevant actors to police themselves in adherence of it -- or put differently, it requires that such actors behave "faithfully". 

Again, as a claim of being a mere application of Miller and Montgomery, Jones makes a mockery of legal reasoning. It does not apply the prior precedents, it hollows them out. So any attempt to harmonize these precedents is going to generate tension, because in terms of its legal reasoning Jones is barely better than gibberish. If there are portions of Jones which seem to suggest that lower courts are permitted to simply ignore the mandates in Miller and Montgomery, all that demonstrates is that Jones is at war with itself, and in particular the parts that swear up and down that Miller and Montgomery remain perfectly intact. Shoddy reasoning by SCOTUS leads to unclear guidance for lower courts.

Still, the Supreme Court in Jones could have overturned Miller and Montgomery. It didn't -- not just "formally", but explicitly. It was very emphatic that it didn't. Blackman's opening statement -- that "Going forward, Justice Kennedy's 5-4 progressive decisions should no longer be treated as precedential," even where they are not overturned, is not an option lower courts are permitted to indulge themselves in. Justice Kennedy's decisions, progressive or otherwise, 5-4 or otherwise, are precedential up to and until the Supreme Court says otherwise. 

Lower courts are not empowered to do the Supreme Court's wetwork for it. The lower courts' obligation is to follow all the active, binding precedents faithfully. What that means in this context, in practice, is that lower courts, when given the discretion to decide whether to sentence a juvenile to life without parole, are obligated to mete out such a decision only when it is compatible with the holdings set out in Miller and Montgomery, even if they know that thanks to Jones nobody will be looking over their shoulder to check on their work.

One final note. Blackman raises the following hypothetical, which he says is "invit[ed]" by Sotomayor's dissent:

Let's say a sentencer declines to sentence a juvenile defendant to LWOP because the defendant is not incorrigible. That decision can be baked into the broader element of "discretion." Could an appeals court reverse a sentence, because the Supreme Court held that incorrigibility was not required? Of course not. A factor may not be required, but a judge, in his discretion, can still consider that factor. In other words, sentencers can get away with ignoring Jones, and probably will.

This I think gets Jones entirely backwards. Miller and Montgomery set out some constitutionally-mandatory limits on when LWOP can be imposed on a juvenile offender. Jones says that the only constitutional enforcement-mechanism for these rules that the sentencing judge must be given discretion to consider the issue. If a sentencing judge, in using that discretion, determines that a juvenile defendant is not incorrigible and so declines to impose the LWOP sentence, that's doing exactly what Jones (and Miller and Montgomery) say she should be doing. If the judge believes the defendant is not incorrigible but acted with "transient immaturity" yet sentences him to life without parole anyway, defying Miller and Montgomery secure in the knowledge that Jones will insulate her decision from review, that's thwarting the logic of Jones (not to mention Miller and Montgomery). Ironically, such a judge would not even be reading Jones faithfully, to say nothing of Miller or Montgomery. 

Jones is predicated on the belief that, so long as the sentencing judge is given discretion to consider the constitutionally-mandatory factors "necessary to separate those juveniles who may be sentenced to life without parole from those who may not," the judge will consider these factors -- whether they make any "separate" findings or not. A judge who simply refuses to engage in that consideration, knowing that there's no possibility their exercise of "discretion" can be reviewed, is behaving in bad faith. And Justice Kavanaugh alludes to that very point in footnote seven, where he raises the possibility that "if a sentencer considering life without parole for a murderer who was under 18 expressly refuses as a matter of law to consider the defendant’s youth ... then the defendant might be able to raise an Eighth Amendment claim under the Court’s precedents." Of course, any judge who is not an idiot will quickly learn that if he wants to completely ignore the nominally mandatory requirement that they consider the factors related to the offender's youth before imposing LWOP, all he needs to do is say nothing -- an option the Court expressly endorses in Jones. This is why Jones renders Miller and Montgomery a practical nullity. But we could and should still say that a judge who did that -- who exploits the option the Supreme Court gives him to defy without consequence the rules set out in the Supreme Court's binding precedent -- is not acting "faithfully."

It is doubtful that such a faithless judge will be paused by Justice Sotomayor's dissent either, of course. And I can't even claim to be "shocked" that they won't be. But I perhaps still can be shocked to see a legal professional openly object to a judge's straightforward admonition that lower courts should apply precedents faithfully. Miller and Montgomery and now Jones are all binding law, and lower courts now are tasked to make something edible out of the hash that is Kavanaugh's majority opinion.

Reflections on Being Victim of a Scam

Earlier this week, I bought a bunch of Lego sets that appeared to be on sale -- four "Star Wars" sets, and one "Harry Potter" set.

Yesterday, I realized that what I had actually done is fall for an internet scam. The website I bought from has already disappeared. I will not be receiving any Legos.

I've already disputed the charge and canceled the credit card I used. But it was an interesting experience, being a scam victim -- I think for the first time? -- and I wanted to share some of the thoughts I've been having.

To begin, I feel like falling for an internet scam is my decisive induction into being old. Even more than sore knees or a cantankerous attitude towards kids these days, there's no coming back from this. You get duped by an online sale, you're officially old. My only consolation is that, if I'm going to be the sort of old man who falls for online scams, at least those scams will involve Lego sets.

I found the (scam) site via a Facebook ad. I honestly don't know what to make of that fact. I admit that, perhaps naively, I assumed that ads on Facebook were from at least credible businesses, which is why I didn't initially harbor much suspicion about the sale. Was my assumption reasonable?  Did Facebook fail in its duties to me by putting that ad on its site? Or is it impossible for Facebook to effectively screen out the grifters and scam artists from its official, sponsored ads? I genuinely don't know. My instinct is that this reflects poorly on Facebook. I knew better than to click some banner ad on a random site that says "Lego sale!" For whatever reason, I believed that official, sponsored, promoted Facebook ads were more legitimate.

The site itself looked professional enough. The prices were pretty deeply discounted, but it looked like the sort of one day flash sale one often sees from normal online retailers -- that didn't actually raise any flags. If anything, I was more suspicious of the "base" price -- I figured that it was set artificially high so that the "sale" looked like a deeper cut than it was. In any event, it seemed like a good opportunity to buy a bunch of Lego sets which otherwise would be pretty expensive on the cheap, so I splurged. Type in my credit card number; give them my mailing address, and soon bathe in Lego.

I did get a receipt from the site, albeit a pretty vague one that didn't include any indication about when my items would ship or even what they were. It did tell me not to worry that the seller was listed as a person's name rather than the name of the website. These were my first red flags. Last night, I decided to log on to the website to check the status of my order, and wouldn't you know it but the website has disappeared without a trace.

That was the first point I thought "oh, I've been scammed." But that thought immediately pressed up against reflexive denial -- "no, this must be a mistake." What generated that thought? Partially, it was probably humiliation -- I didn't want to admit I'd been so easily duped. But the larger instigator, I realized, was something else: I really was excited about those Lego sets. If it was a scam, I wouldn't be getting the Legos. If I denied it was a scam, I could still think I would be receiving the Legos. Admitting I'd been scammed meant resigning myself to the fact that this thing I was happy and excited about would not come to be. And that was really, surprisingly hard. It felt like an affirmative choice to give up on happiness.

The power of that sentiment -- and the fact that it did have a hold on me even though the evidence that this was a grift job was overwhelming -- surprised me and made me pause to reflect. I suspect that something like this is true of anyone who's taken in by a con artist or a grifter, including a political con artist. One gets hooked initially because one likes what they're (claiming to be) selling. Bring back American jobs, laying low big business elites, draining the swamp -- take your pick. These goods get sold but are never shipped. And when they don't arrive, there is a strong instinct that it must be coming, it must be coming soon, it must be around the corner, because if you admit it's never coming -- oof. That's terrible, to cut the strings on hope. All the more so when what you're hoping for is something a lot more vital than a Lego set.

So yes, I can very much imagine people denying the evidence before their eyes; indulging in denial because it allows them to hold onto the happy, hopeful feeling that drew them to the grifter in the first place. It takes discipline and, in some ways, courage, to cut the cord and acknowledge "I was scammed. The goods are never going to arrive."

"There comes a point in every plot where the victim starts to suspect; and looks back, and sees a trail of events all pointing in a single direction. And when that point comes, Father had explained, the prospect of the loss may seem so unbearable, and admitting themselves tricked may seem so humiliating, that the victim will yet deny the plot, and the game may continue long after."

The GOP is Going To Get Worse Before It Gets Better

Here's my scary/controversial hypothesis of the day:

Right now, the national elected GOP is a moderating influence on the American conservative movement.

I say that fully accounting for folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, Louie Gohmert, Josh Hawley, and Lauren Boebert. Even accounting for them, the nationally-elected GOP cadre, taken as a whole, is more moderate than the overall American conservative movement. Which is terrifying, given just how radically extreme the nationally-elected GOP cadre is (see the above list). The reason it's a scary hypothesis is precisely because the current national elected GOP should never be a moderating influence on anything. It is a party utterly and completely out-of-control. And yet, when you compare them to the people they're representing -- oh boy, can it get even worse.

The Republican caucus flirts with just abandoning democracy outright, the Republican base has already signed the prenup. The Republican caucus contemplates creating a new "Anglo-Saxon" caucus, the Republican base thinks the absence of one is the greatest civil rights travesty of our time. The Republican caucus tip-toes around whether George Floyd was murdered, the Republican base would call Derek Chauvin's conviction a lynching except that might suggest they admire it.

We are, in short, nowhere near rock-bottom. Party officials aren't always 100% aligned with the rank-and-file, but the latter certainly exhibits a strong gravitational pull on the former. The pull on the GOP is to move even further to the right than it is now. We're going to see more persons who to any sane observer would be seen as rock-ribbed conservatives be primaried out, or retired and replaced, by open and avowed extremists. We're going to see more ambitious GOP pols try to separate themselves from the back by going deeper and deeper into the rabbit holes of open racism, White supremacy, antisemitism, and conspiratorial authoritarianism of all stripes.

It's going to get far worse before it gets better.

Margin Call Review

A few days ago, my wife and I watched Margin Call. It's a movie I had oddly never heard of until last week -- oddly, because it got very strong reviews and had a pretty glittering cast including Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, and Zachary Quinto.

Margin Call is set over roughly 24 hours at a nameless Wall Street firm that understands the economy is slowing down and is in the middle of massive layoffs. After the head-chopping is complete, a young analyst (Quinto) realizes that his now-former boss (he was among those laid off) was on the cusp of discovering a massive flaw in the firm's risk exposure model. Basically, one bad day (and plenty of bad days appear to be coming) and the firm could go entirely bankrupt. The rest of the movie takes place over roughly the next 24 hours, as the powers-that-be in the firm race to figure out how to liquidate their toxic position before the music stops and save the company.

Notice I didn't add "without crashing the economy." The economy is going to crash -- that's a given. The only question is who will tip the first domino, and the logic is that if the firm is the one to set off the panic, it will incur the least in the way of losses. There isn't much in the way of remonstrating that the firm, insofar as it is significantly responsible for the coming economic crisis, should be the one to face the consequences.

I've been reading over the past few days about the problem of "bad coherence" -- where a system hangs together and makes internal sense, and all the players' decisions are justifiable and sensible within the broader architecture of the surrounding structure, but because the structure itself is toxic justifiable, sensible, and reasonable decisions are morally terrible. Margin Call does a wonderful job illustrating that problem. One reviewer said, and I agree, that the film is significantly stronger because of how it doesn't moralize -- there are little in the way of "greed is good!" speeches or mustache-twirling about how they're the kings of Wall Street and the peasants can get wrecked.

To the contrary, the firm's internal functioning is in some ways admirable if one forgets what it's in service of. The relatively junior analyst who discovers the problem isn't met with a lot of chest-thumping about how he's just a kid and who-does-he-think-he-is -- his bosses (all the way up to the CEO) take him seriously and pretty rapidly react to the problem as a problem. There's no shooting of messengers. The firm certainly views all of its cogs as expendable, but it can get away with it because if the cogs agree to be expended they know they'll be handsomely rewarded and if they try to maintain their dignity in any way they'll be crushed. The closest thing the film has to a comedic through-line is the company's desperate attempts to find Quinto's old boss, who they just laid off (and whose phone they unceremoniously shut off) -- not to apologize, but so that they can pay him an obscene sum of money to sit quietly in a room for the next day and not spill the beans about the "problem" and thus ruin the firm's liquidation strategy. He initially doesn't want to cooperate -- not because he actively wants to screw the firm, but he certainly isn't in the mood to do them any favors either. But eventually he yields, because the choice is between getting a ton of money for doing nothing (when he's just lost his job) or having the firm blow up his entire severance and healthcare package. Some choice.

Hell, even when it came to how they handled the layoffs, my wife basically whistled and called it "textbook".

But the result, again, is mostly "rich people stay rich and avoid consequences". Plenty of people at the firm will lose their jobs, but they're mostly lower-level grunts who -- again -- are receiving giant cash payouts if they agree to pay ball. The surrounding economy is going to enter a crisis, but that's accepted as part of business -- economies sometimes crash, the feeling goes, and there's no profit in going down with the ship. The film relentlessly constructs a vise where any opportunity for anyone to display a little personal dignity, or pro-social tendency, is shown to be ultimately futile and counterproductive -- and it does it without marking any of the characters as sociopaths. An impressive feat indeed.

Anyway, I highly recommend this movie. It's a tight, quiet thriller that deserved more attention than it got (or maybe it got plenty of attention and I'm just oblivious. Either way).

Building Treehouses with Cuomo

The big story today is that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo allegedly complained about campaigning on Sukkot by saying, referring to Orthodox Jews, "These people and their f***ing tree houses." The quote is anonymous and as yet uncorroborated; Cuomo denies having said it.

In response, Josh Blackman wants to revisit the question of whether Gov. Cuomo's pandemic restrictions, while facially neutral, should be seen as motivated by animus against (Orthodox) Jews. He clearly means this as a gotcha -- "Under TrumpLaw (which may have expired on January 20), this statement would be fair game to understand Cuomo's animus." Of course, under the view Blackman successfully pushed in Trump v. Hawaii -- the actual TrumpLaw -- this statement could not be used to infer animus even for legislative enactments that were explicitly characterized as targeting a given religious group. Hypocrisy cuts both ways. That said, the way the Court has been treating religious animus in the pandemic cases compared to Trump v. Hawaii suggests that TrumpLaw really was just TrumpLaw -- albeit not quite in the way Blackman means. 

But for my part, there is no gotcha: I am perfectly willing to say that, if the statement is accurate, it is absolutely valid evidence that can be used to demonstrate Cuomo has acted with discriminatory animus towards Jews. And I suspect one would be hard pressed to find liberal commentators who'd disagree on this. Certainly, deep and abiding loyalty to Cuomo isn't going to be giving anyone much pause on the principle of the matter.

Speaking of hypocrisy, although the quote is anonymous (and denied) Blackman says flatly at the start of his post that he's making an exception to his general belief that anonymous press accounts sharing negative stories about politicos should be viewed with skepticism. Instead, he comes right out and says that this skepticism extends to quotes about Republican politicians only. "I take far more seriously negative coverage of Democrats in an institution like the Times. The editors would not slip up on a quote like this." This is impressively brazen. For my part, I think major newspapers like the Times are generally professional and so generally can be given a fair amount of credence when they run anonymous quotes like this, no matter who the subject is (though of course that doesn't mean they'll always get everything right). But if one takes a dimmer view of the professionalism of the mainstream media, then I'll just say that if one thinks that folks of the Times' social milieu could not be suckered into running an undersourced quote that reflects badly on Andrew Cuomo because of their latent political sympathies, then one really doesn't understand where New York politics are right now. I'm not saying the Times would run a hit job on Cuomo. I am saying that, if they were the sort of institution prone to running hit jobs, Cuomo very much would be towards to the top of their list.

How to treat a very offensive but also anonymous-and-denied quote also relates to the final note in Blackman's post -- a swipe at the ADL. The ADL "awarded Cuomo the highest honor in June 2020. Yet, as of the close of business, neither ADL nor its President has said a word about Cuomo's remarks." To the extent that the ADL didn't race out with a comment right away, I suspect that is almost assuredly because, unlike Blackman, they are not going to take an unsourced anonymous quote that Cuomo denies as gospel sight unseen, at least not without talking with Cuomo and his office first.

From my vantage, the quote seems plausible -- Jewish "friends" notwithstanding, Cuomo seems like exactly the sort of asshole who'd say something like this and think it's okay because he has many Jewish friends. And as I said, I trust the Times' general professionalism more than Blackman does. But given the close relationship the ADL has with the governor's office in New York, I neither find it weird nor offensive that the ADL is deciding to its own due diligence before commenting. 

Finally, it's hard to read the ADL comment outside of the shadow of Jonathan Greenblatt very publicly calling for Tucker Carlson's firing from Fox for promoting the White Supremacist "Replacement Theory". I've seen some conservatives appallingly cite this as proof of the ADL's liberal bias as opposed to the ADL rightfully calling out an extreme case of White Nationalist thinking embedding itself in mainstream conservative institutions. Blackman concludes by saying that he "will have much more to say about ADL and anti-semitism in due course"; perhaps he will address this then. But I hope in doing so he recognizes that there's simply no comparison between the ADL waiting to verify an anonymous quote compared to calling out Tucker Carlson for openly promoting White Supremacy where everyone can see it on national television.

The National Review's Conservative Case for White Disenfranchisement

"I need to find a New Yorker so I can justify this whole pro-slavery stance I've backed myself into."

I pity The National Review sometimes. Most right-wingers these days don't feel the need to justify their positions; owning the libs is reason enough. But it is the National Review's job is to put a respectable face on contemporary conservative priorities which are in no way respectable. They try their best, but in their brave efforts they end up painting themselves into some pretty cramped ideological corners.

Take, for example, Georgia's new experiments in blatant voter suppression. This initially yielded Kevin Williamson coming flat out and asking "why not fewer voters" -- might it not be good for there to be fewer but "better" voters? Of course, few, if any, of Georgia's proposals to suppress the vote have anything to do with making the rump remaining electorate "better" -- unless, I suppose, the best voters are the ones who can stand in line for three hours without food or water without collapsing or, better still, had the wisdom not to reside in a neighborhood with such long lines to begin with. But Williamson's definition of "better" has nothing to do with being informed and everything to do with "demographically more likely to vote Republican" -- raise the voting age to thirty, not, say, tests of accurate political knowledge.* Remember when William Buckley said "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty"? Ah, the memories.

Anyway, despite widespread mockery, the conservative intelligentsia wasn't ready to let this one go without a fight. Their next gambit was to attack the entire idea of majoritarian democracy because, and I kid you not, they claim that under "pure" democracy we had Jim Crow and slavery -- two institutions  that were, shall we say, rather famously not committed to pure democratic enfranchisement. But again, even if we take the argument on its own terms, none of the proposals states like Georgia are putting forward would have done anything to check against the abuses of Jim Crow -- if anything, they'd have helped more firmly entrench it. That's obvious once one remembers that the laws Georgia is pushing today are the spiritual successor to Jim Crow, which also used tightly crafted nets of facially "neutral" laws whose mixture of known and desired disparate impacts and biased "discretionary" enforcement in order to maintain a dominant White majority electorate. If one's argument is that it's justified to limit the franchise in order to prevent a democratic (or "democratic") majority from entrenching White Supremacy, you're not making an argument for voter ID laws or for raising the voting age to 30 or for indirect elections of Senators or anything on the GOP's wishlist. The voters you'd have to stop from voting, in this hypothetical justification, are run-of-the-mill White people.

So, I wonder, is that the National Review's new position (quite a ways distant from the position they took at the time)? That the proper response to White Supremacy in the America in the 1960s (and onwards) is to systematically deprive White people of the franchise?

I'm dubious. But alas, such is the position they've backed themselves into.

* Which, to be clear, would also be a terrible and undemocratic idea. However, the reason that Williamson doesn't back it isn't because it's terrible and undemocratic, but because it's terrible and undemocratic in a way that might hurt the electoral prospects of contemporary Republicans, which is the only actual motivator here.

The Pleasant Surprise of the Biden Administration

Joe Biden has set out a muscular, progressive agenda.

This has come as a surprise to some people, particularly those on the leftier edge of the party, who thought Biden would simply be an extension of Third Way Clintonism and were despondent over what they assumed was a guarantee of four years of anemic faux-progress.

But what's most surprising to me* is that we're actually seeing some of these leftier folks acknowledge the pleasant surprise. More and more, they're not dismissing what Biden's doing, they're not pooh-poohing it with "both parties are the same." They're admitting that Biden has been far better than they anticipated.

We saw this shift first, I think, when it came to the COVID stimulus bill. A couple of people certainly lapsed into reflexive Eeyore-ing, complaining that the $1.9 trillion bill wasn't bold enough or expansive enough or was worthless without the minimum wage increase. But most people, including those on the left, recognized that it was in fact a B.F.D.. It probably helped that Biden did not let the GOP tie him knots with endless delay disguised as "negotiating". Biden made it clear that he learned the lesson of the Obama years on that front: if the GOP wants to get onboard with a popular bill, lovely, but he's not going to get himself mired in a political bog for months in a futile effort to make Susan Collins vote for an inferior bill.

The early days of the Biden administration are a vindication for the persons who saw him, not as a "moderate" or a "progressive" figure, but as a party figure. Joe Biden has historically aligned himself with the middle of the Democratic Party. As the Democratic Party has shifted left, Biden has shifted left too. And that, we should say, is to the credit of folks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have done great work in pushing the conversation left in the context of being Democrats (as opposed to in the context of smirking about how Democrats are worthless).

The team is coming together. It doesn't mean everything will be perfect -- it never is -- but it is coming together, and it's getting stuff done.

* My version of being surprised by Biden adopting a progressive agenda was definitely Terry McAuliffe's tenure as governor of Virginia, where he was just way better than I think anyone could have anticipated ex ante.

ACES Wild

Last we encountered the "Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies" (ACES), they were pushing fabricated evidence and wild screeds against "critical race theory" in a failed attempt to derail the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum after it was reformed in accord with tremendous efforts by a range of California Jewish (and non-Jewish) organizations.

Now they're back in action, and this time their target is California's new draft Mathematical Framework. What horrors are contained inside? Let's look!

The first draft of the California Mathematics Framework is out for review, and it includes as a resource "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction," a guide that labels teaching practices like "addressing mistakes" and  "focus on the right answer" as "white supremacy culture."

This is critical race theory.

This is discrimination. 

(Is this "critical race theory"? Nope, not going to get sucked into that).

Unfortunately, as was the case in the ESMC debacle, we are given only the thinnest possible citations to the primary sources for the alleged offending content. The link to the CMF draft goes to a website offering a thirteen chapter document, all in separate files, comprised of hundreds of page, with no indication of where in the morass the "Pathway" document is included. The link to the Pathway itself, for its part, goes to a site that contains five separate documents, again totaling hundreds of pages, with nary a clue as to where this language about "addressing mistakes" might be found. All of this, I suppose, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, I may not be a math expert, but I have gotten familiar enough with the strategies of ACES and its friends to know better than to accept what they say on faith. So I went in search of this resource and this language, to see if it is as scary and offensive as they say.

I want to begin with some good news: unlike the Ethnic Studies case, ACES and its allies do not appear to have completely fabricated the inclusion of the putatively offensive material. Congratulations, ACES! This is a big step forward for you as an organization, and you should give yourself a hearty pat on the back.

Alas, if we ask for more than "not fabricated" and stretch all the way out to "not abjectly misleading", things get dimmer.

Start with the CMF draft. From what I can tell, the section they refer to (where the Pathway document is "included as a resource") is on page 44 of chapter two (lines 1010-13). Here, in its totality, is what's included:

Other resources for teaching mathematics with a social justice perspective include... The five strides of Equitable Math.org: https://equitablemath.org/

That's it (The website "Equitablemath.org" is titled "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction"). It is mentioned, unadorned, in the "other resources" conclusion -- and as far as I can tell, nowhere else. Wowzers. I can feel the racial divisiveness cracking up from here.

One thing I'll observe on this is that often times one hears critics of "critical race theory" (or whatever random buzzword they're using today to connote "scary left-wing idea with a vaguely identity-politics kick") say that their problem isn't that the idea is included, but only that it's indoctrinated -- it's not one perspective of many, it's the only perspective on offer. This protestation was always rather thin -- the many many bills banning "critical race theory" are decidedly not about ensuring viewpoint diversity -- and one sees just how hollow it is here. The raw, unadorned inclusion of the Equitable Math resource -- as part of a broader whole, not even quoted from directly -- is too much for these people to tolerate. This is not about ideological heterodoxy. This is about censoring ideas, full stop.

But maybe Equitable Math is such an awful or inane document that it would be wrong to include it, even as one resource among many. The way it's described, after all, makes it sound like Equitable Math is a group of hippies saying "2+2 = 4 is the white man's answer, man! Fight the power!" Is that what's happening? Is this a fever dream of post-modernism where nothing is true and everything is permitted?

Once again, I had to dig for myself to figure out where this content was so I could see it in context. The answer appears to be the first document on the site, titled "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics", on pages 65-68. Do they deny that there are such things as "right" answers in math? No: "Of course, most math problems have correct answers," but there are math problems (particularly word problems, but also data analysis) that can be interpreted in different ways that yield different "right" conclusions, and students and teachers should be attentive to that possibility. Do they say one should never "address mistakes"? No again, but mistakes should not simply be called out flatly but rather used as "opportunities for learning" with an emphasis on building on what the student does understand to lead them to recognize what they misapprehend.

I don't teach math, obviously, but there are many occasions where I'll say "such-and-such is the doctrinally correct answer -- but if we look at the problem from this other vantage, doesn't this other position become more plausible?" So when the Equitable Math site suggests, as an alternative to obsessive focus on the one correct answer, classroom activities like " Using a set of data, analyze it in multiple ways to draw different conclusions" -- well, that doesn't seem weird to me. Certainly, as someone who is also trained as a social scientist, I can say confidently that it's quite valuable to anyone who has seen how the same dataset can be deployed by different people with different priors to support different agendas.

Even more than that, the suggestions around "addressing mistakes" resonate with how I try to teach in my classrooms. Sometimes my students say something wrong. When they do so, for the most part I don't say "bzzzt" and move on; instead I try to guide them to the correct answer by having them unpack their own thinking. There's a lot of "I see what you mean by [X], but suppose ..." and ask questions which hone in on the problems or misunderstandings latent in what they're saying. And eventually they get there, hopefully without feeling like they've just been put inside an Iron Maiden for daring speak up. 

Admittedly, I've never thought of what I'm doing as "dismantling White supremacy" -- I just viewed it as good pedagogy. But then again, that's kind of what I've always thought when asked about such subjects -- we act as if there's this deep magic to fostering equity and inclusion in the classroom, when really it's employing the basic strategies of being a good teacher, one of which is declining to engage in a measuring contest where you prove you know more than the student does. Obviously I know more than the student does. I don't need to prove anything. So if they say something wrong, I do not gleefully pounce on them for it, I do my best to build on what they do know to get them to a position of right. Is that so outrageous?

Finally, ACES in its tweet identifies one other area of crazy-lefty-craziness in this resource: "the incorporation of 'Ethnomathematics'". What does that mean? They don't say, correctly surmising that fevered imaginations will produce something far worse than anything they might quote. So I'll do the quoting for them (this comes from page 8):

Center Ethnomathematics: 

• Recognize the ways that communities of color engage in mathematics and problem solving in their everyday lives. 

• Teach that mathematics can help solve problems affecting students’ communities. Model the use of math as a solution to their immediate problems, needs, or desires. 

• Identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views. 

• Teach the value of math as both an abstract concept and as a useful everyday tool. 

• Expose students to examples of people who have used math as resistance. Provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance.

I know, I know -- we're all going to pitch a fit about challenging "capitalist views". But apart from that, this seems ... very normal? We all know, to the point of cliche, that a barrier to getting kids interested in math is that they fail to see how it's useful to them or "in the real world". So they advise that math be taught in a way that resonates with real world experience. And likewise, sometimes, for some people "in the real world", math can feel like an enemy (think "am I just a statistic to you?"). So figure out ways to name that and challenge that. For the most part, "ethnomathematics" just reads as a particular social justice gloss on "being a good teacher", as applied to teaching in diverse communities.

Now perhaps one disagrees with these concepts as pedagogical best practice. I'm not a math teacher, I'm not going to claim direct experience here. But that goes back to the intensity of the backlash -- that these ideas need to be banned, that they are outright dangerous and unacceptable and neo-racism. Can that be right? Surely, these ideas are not so outlandish that we should pitch a fit about their being (deep breath) single elements of an 80 page document which is itself part of a five part series being incorporated as a single "see also" bullet point in the second chapter of a thirteen chapter model state framework. Seriously? That's where we're landing? That's what's going to drive us into a valley of racial division and despair?

It's wild. The people engaged in this obsessive crusade to make Everest size mountains over backyard anthills are nothing short of wild.

Big Media David: On the JDA and Not Calling Things Antisemitic

I have a new column in Haaretz on the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism and, in particular, on the need for its backers to actually use it call things antisemitic (not just use it to call things not antisemitic). It is in many ways an expansion on my last post, but for a more popular audience.

I want to be clear though that I don't view the JDA as an enemy. My fondest hope for this column is that it convinces a large cluster of JDA signatories to band together and send a statement to Bristol University of the form: "FYI? David Miller is exactly who we mean when we talk about antisemitism operating under the guise of 'criticism of Israel'." I think that would be a very helpful intervention, and perfectly aligned with the JDA's text. But the thing is, they have to do it -- they can't just say it could be done consistent with the JDA.

Focusing on What Is versus What Isn't Antisemitism

A good definition needs to do two things. It needs to tell you what a concept is, and it needs to tell you what a concept is not. But these two requirements are not equally weighted. Most definitions focus primarily on the former. A dog is a four-legged mammal of the species C. lupus etc. etc. Such a definition is primary concerned with avoiding false negatives -- ensuring that all the entities which are dogs are identified as dogs. A definition that focuses inordinately on what a dog is not -- a dog is not a cat, a dog is not a building, a dog is not a rock, and so on -- would normally be quite weird. If we saw a definition of taking that form, our most likely inference would be that there had been a significant problem with false positives -- people calling things "dogs" that were not.

As with dogs, so too with antisemitism. A definition of antisemitism needs to tell us what is antisemitic, as well as what isn't. But if the discourse is weighted too heavily towards the latter, it is fair to draw the inference that the primary problem the definition is seeking to grapple with is one of false positives -- things being called antisemitic that are not, in fact, antisemitic.

In terms of text, the new Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism is 2:1 weighted in terms of what antisemitism is. It would be manifestly unfair to say the text doesn't speak on that subject. But in terms of its public reception -- how it is being presented to the public, and how it is being pitched by its defenders -- it is being seen as an intervention predominantly concerned not with telling us what is antisemitism but with telling us what isn't. This Slate article in praise of the JDA by Dov Waxman and Joshua Shanes -- both of whom are friends of mine -- focuses almost exclusively on this angle. The JDA is superior to IHRA because of what it doesn't call antisemitism, because it allegedly avoids false positives that might result from the IHRA definition. Omer Bartov's defense of the JDA in Haaretz sounds in similar notes: the JDA is "vital" because IHRA "has been used, perhaps contrary to the intention of some of its authors, to stifle any biting criticism of Israel and its policies." The JDA, we're told, wouldn't do that -- it would result in fewer things being called antisemitic, (hopefully by) stopping fraudulent or abusive claims.

Importantly, alleged overinclusion is not the only basis on which one could criticize IHRA. It is entirely possible to find fault in IHRA for being underinclusive as well -- false negatives rather than false positives. For example, I've regularly promoted the Nexus antisemitism document as holding the advantage over IHRA in that it captures cases where social conditions are antisemitic -- it is the only document that can explain why a Kosher slaughter ban is antisemitic, for example. If I'm right, this is a claim that the Nexus is preferable to IHRA because it can do more rather than do less.

But the JDA isn't being pitched that way. Its advantages are not presented in terms of being able to accurately call things antisemitic in cases where previously we could not. Its advantage is framed almost exclusively in terms of stopping people from calling things antisemitic when they previously could. In this, David Hirsh sadly is on to something when he says:

The new efforts are not about fighting antisemitism; they're about fighting efforts to fight antisemitism. 

They're not about standing with Jews against antisemitism, they're about standing with antisemites against accusations of antisemitism.

That's overstated. But again, it's on to something. The JDA's main impact, thus far, has not been to assist in fighting against antisemitism. It has not been used, for example, to help rally people who'd otherwise be ambivalent to forthrightly call out David Miller as an antisemite (Yair Wallach, a JDA signatory, accurately notes that IHRA hasn't been effective at this task either. Still, it would do wonders for the JDA's rep if its signatories came together to forthrightly say "this guy is an antisemite"). There have been almost no cases I've seen where someone has said "before the JDA, we could not reliably identify A B and C as antisemitic, but now we can." Almost entirely, the discourse has been the opposite: "before the JDA, people were incorrectly identifying X Y and Z as antisemitic, and now we can stop them." So it isn't wrong for people to infer from this discourse that the JDA is motivated primarily because of fears of false positives -- that the major problem in antisemitism discourse is that we're calling too many things antisemitic when we shouldn't be.

This feature of the JDA almost certainly explains why several unabashed antisemitic figures -- Richard Falk, Jackie Walker, Yvonne Ridley -- have been eager in its praise. They understand the JDA's practical function as part of the "fight against the fight against antisemitism," even if (to quote Bartov) this is "contrary to the intention of some of its drafters." It does little good to cite specific language in the JDA that would indicate their pleasure is misplaced, anymore than the language in IHRA that insists upon context-specific inquiry is doing much to stop folks citing IHRA for sweeping, context-free declarations that everything and its mother is antisemitic. The issue isn't the text, the issue is the symbol. And the JDA, as a symbol, is being seen as a banner for those who think the problem with antisemitism is that we're labeling too many things antisemitic -- the fight against calling things antisemitism, rather than the fight against antisemitism itself.

A New Challenger Approaches!: Evaluating the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism

Yet another antisemitism framework has emerged, with the release of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA) signed by around two hundred Jewish Studies scholars. This, of course, comes rapidly on the heels of the Nexus document on antisemitism (of which I was one of the drafters), meaning we now have two new antisemitism frameworks standing as potential complements (or alternatives) to the venerable IHRA definition.

The other day I made a handy table summarizing the similarities and differences between the three definitions. That was designed to be a pretty straightforward, "just the facts" presentation. But I also want to give my evaluative judgment on the Jerusalem Declaration in comparison to IHRA and Nexus (I wrote more on the Nexus document, specifically, in this post). Obviously, the fact that I was a Nexus author means I have a dog in this hunt, though I don't view these definitions as in competition with one another. And likewise, I don't have direct knowledge of the background and genesis of the Jerusalem Declaration in the same way I do for the Nexus document -- some of my comments will be based on inference and speculation. So take them with however much salt you think is appropriate.

This is a somewhat long post, divided roughly into three parts. First, I address differences in the orientation of the JDA compared to the other frameworks -- who wrote it and who their audience is. Second, I examine the JDA's relationship to IHRA -- particularly IHRA as a symbol of (depending on who you ask) rallying against antisemitism or creating toxic policing of discourse on Israel -- and how that is mediating the reception (both positive and negative) of the JDA. Finally, I address where the JDA is substantively different from the other frameworks and where it isn't. Likewise, I identify a few important areas that neither the JDA nor IHRA address that are included in the Nexus document: the inclusion of conditions (alongside attitudes and behaviors) as a potential form of antisemitism, recognizing and objecting to the practice of routine and reflexive dismissal of antisemitism claims, and addressing how Jews who take the "wrong" (however defined) position on Israel see their Jewish identity denigrated or denied -- a form of harassment that especially targets Jews of Color.

I. The JDA's Orientation

At the outset, there are a few core differences in the orientation of the JDA in comparison to the Nexus document -- who wrote it and what it is targeting. The JDA has more of a European center of gravity, whereas the Nexus is more American; the JDA is primarily endorsed by academics, whereas the Nexus document was geared more towards "community leader" sorts. Obviously, these are generalizations -- the JDA has American signatories, the Nexus document had academics involved (such as myself). But I think these broad-stroke differences exert a noticeable impact in terms of what is and isn't prioritized, and who was and wasn't sought to be "included" in the definition.

In particular, the JDA seems to have been very invested in coming up with a definition that could get non- or anti-Zionists onboard alongside at least liberal Zionists (getting a document signed by Susannah Heschel and Richard Falk is no mean feat!). In doing so, the JDA gives the non-Zionist contingent a few very big wins: it expressly declares BDS not antisemitic, and it more or less declares calls for the dissolution of Israel to be not antisemitic (the constraint is that any alternative polity that is envisioned must be one that protects "the right of Jews in the State of Israel [or, I imagine, its hypothetical successor] to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews"). The Nexus document, by contrast, had as its target audience (more or less) the median American Jew -- envisioned as a Biden-style Democrat who identifies as broadly Zionist and pro-Israel but has his or her fair share of criticism. Accordingly, the Nexus doesn't speak directly on BDS, implicitly judging it by the other standards in the document, and contains a more robust defense of the right of Jewish self-determination than is present in the JDA (it is notable that challenging Israel's "right to exist" is viewed as antisemitic by an extremely wide consensus of American Jews -- more so than almost any other issue). 

The JDA's audience is thus simultaneously broader and narrower than the Nexus': it reaches non-Zionist activists for whom it is exceedingly important that challenging Israel's existence as a Jewish state not be labeled antisemitic, but in doing so it may have language that's a veritable poison pill for rank-and-file Jews (at least in the US). The Nexus document was meant to be a viable set of guidelines for a Democratic administration that would let them handle antisemitism controversies while avoiding obvious shoals and pitfalls. The JDA (and I think this is true even if one agrees with it on its merits) would be more likely to provoke controversy simply because of its explicit language on BDS and its position that denying Jewish self-determination in Israel is not necessarily antisemitic. The JDA is I think more valuable as a tool of public discourse than something that could be "adopted" by a particular organization, especially (say) the Democratic Party (and the JDA is quite explicit that it is not meant to be adopted or codified as any explicit legal tool).

II. The Symbolism of IHRA

Speaking of provoking controversy, another defining feature of the JDA is its explicitly antagonistic posture towards IHRA. The Nexus document sought to position itself as primarily an interpretive resource -- a complement where IHRA was vague or incomplete (as Jonathan Jacoby put it, IHRA is the Mishnah and Nexus is the Gemara). The JDA, by contrast, is very much taking aim at the king. As I mentioned in my post on the Nexus document, IHRA has taken on such symbolic weight that one can generate almost reflexive support and opposition for a given initiative simply by presenting as a challenge to IHRA, and that's definitely occurring here. People who hate IHRA are cheering the JDA simply because it's the "anti-IHRA", even when their own conduct would seemingly be obviously indicted under the JDA's definition. As noted above, Richard Falk is a signatory even though he's endorsed materials which seem to cleanly fall under categories the JDA deems antisemitic. Jackie Walker praised the JDA too even though her antisemitism likewise would be covered by the JDA. It's doubtful that such persons are backing the JDA as a mea culpa for their past misconduct; rather, they see the JDA as a counter to IHRA's putative "weaponization" of antisemitism and endorse it on that basis. If or when the JDA does get cited to label them as antisemitic, I suspect they will be just as dismissive as they've been in the past. 

Arguably, then, just like IHRA there is a risk that the JDA will be "applied" in a purely symbolic manner divorced from its actual textual mandates. Just as IHRA's language insisting that context matters has been roundly ignored, one can easily imagine persons accused of antisemitism "citing" the JDA for the blithe retort that "criticism of Israel is not antisemitic" while disregarding language in the JDA which arguably encompasses their particular "critique". As always, one suspects the most important interpretive canon in accepting or applying any definition of antisemitism will be the overriding principle "me and my friends are not antisemitic."

The hegemony of IHRA's symbolism doesn't just afflict the JDA's defenders. IHRA's advocates also have gotten so invested in the importance of IHRA as a marker for "taking antisemitism seriously" that they are often unwilling to recognize IHRA has quite a few serious gaps and ambiguities. The core definition itself is nearly useless ("A certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews" -- what does that mean?), and the illustrative examples, while helpful as far as they go (and IHRA itself says they only go so far as to be cases which "could, taking into account the overall context," be antisemitic), are significantly underinclusive even leaving aside IHRA's relative lack of guidance on what "context" can be used to assess whether any given speech or behavior that abuts one of the examples actually is antisemitic. As a symbolic gesture where a given organization says "we care about antisemitism", IHRA can stand alone (in large part because for that function it doesn't matter what IHRA says). As an actual substantive tool for identifying antisemitism, IHRA needs to be expounded upon, and that is a task that (in different ways) both the Nexus document and the JDA attempt to tackle.

Unsurprisingly, I prefer the Nexus' approach of not directly trying to overthrow IHRA but rather fine-tune, calibrate, and direct it. I have no desire to undermine the symbolic importance of IHRA, but I very much have an interest in alleviating the very real gaps and shortfalls present under any honest reckoning with IHRA's text. Even still, if I'm being honest I suspect that the JDA will prove more influential than Nexus simply as a function of polarization. The people who blame IHRA for creating a toxic atmosphere around antisemitism want something that directly challenges it. The people who are basically content with the way antisemitism discourse has proceeded around IHRA will stick with it, without seeing the need for modification. Even if substantively the Nexus does the best job of filling the pitfalls and potholes in IHRA while representing a vision of fighting antisemitism that aligns with the median American Jew, the seemingly inexorable pull of polarization will drive people into the arms of either IHRA or anti-IHRA (which is to say, JDA).

III. Substantive Similarities and Differences Across the Frameworks

You might have noticed that the above analysis actually doesn't concentrate that much on the actual substantive differences between the three antisemitism frameworks. One reason for that is that, as my table illustrates, there are fewer differences between them than one might guess from the heated nature of the JDA and IHRA's reception. Certainly, it is fair to focus on the areas where the definitions depart -- that's what should determine whether one prefers one over another -- but that focus can overshadow the significant agreement in a large set of cases regarding what is antisemitic amongst all three frameworks. All agree that criticism of Israel can be antisemitic insofar as Israel is a Jewish institution (and thus none indulge in the tritely true but banal point that "Judaism and Israel are not the same thing"), all agree that criticism of Israel is not always antisemitic, all agree that "tropes" (variously worded) are an important feature of antisemitism, and all agree that notions of Jewish collective responsibility for alleged Israeli misdeeds are antisemitic.

What are the key differences? I've mentioned two already: IHRA and Nexus both consider denial of Jewish self-determination rights to be antisemitic, while the JDA seemingly does not; and IHRA and Nexus don't speak specifically on BDS, while the JDA expressly says it is not antisemitic. These are both significant. BDS is a well-known third rail in Jewish politics, and Nexus' "strategic ambiguity" (to put it uncharitably) on the question is an attempt to traverse a cliff the JDA eagerly dives off. Likewise, as noted above the "Israel has no right to exist" position is one on which there is almost unrivaled Jewish consensus regarding its antisemitic character, so the JDA's dissident position here is risky indeed.

Beyond those two issues (and putting aside any nitpicking one can do about phrasing or word choices), the other big departure I see in the JDA is that it explicitly says that "double standards" are not antisemitic, whereas IHRA says they are. The Nexus tries to take a middle position here, agreeing that double standards are antisemitic but refusing the simplistic argument that any time Israel is concentrated on or even "singled out" in a discrete case that is evidence of a double-standard (as I've argued, AIPAC "singles out" Israel -- is that antisemitic? Of course not). The JDA's rejection of including "double standards" likely stems from the view that this language has been particularly abused by right-wing zealots who argue that essentially any Israel-critical activity that does not simultaneously tackle the entire world is per se antisemitic. That notwithstanding, the JDA's dismissal of double standards as even a potential form of antisemitism seems clearly incorrect. Disparate treatment -- treating likes unalike -- is perhaps the closest thing there is to the paradigm case of discrimination and it'd be simply weird for antisemitism to stand alone in not including this very intuitive case. If one can subject Jews or Jewish institutions to different standards than other comparable actors in global affairs without it being labeled "antisemitic", you've created a loophole you can drive a truck through.

It is also important to flag a group of important components of antisemitism that are found only in the Nexus definition and are not present or discussed in either IHRA or the JDA. The first is that the Nexus definition is the only one which considers certain social conditions (on top of behaviors or attitudes) to be cases of antisemitism: specifically, those conditions "that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life." I lobbied very hard to include this language, and in some ways I think it is the single most important point in Nexus' favor compared to other frameworks. Ironically enough (given that the Nexus document is nominally limited to the Israel case), the inclusion of this language is why the Nexus document is probably the only framework of the three which could explain why a proposed ban on Kosher slaughter would be antisemitic -- it does not fall within any of either IHRA or JDA's examples, but it would represent a social condition which "significantly impede[s] [Jews'] ability to participate as equals" in European society. Understanding antisemitism as not just a set of attitudes or behaviors but as a state of social affairs better aligns antisemitism with emerging understandings of racism and other forms of oppression, all of which have dedicated considerable attention to understanding inequality at least partially in those terms.

The second inclusion in Nexus not seen in the other frameworks is an acknowledgment of the epistemic antisemitism that occurs when Jewish claims regarding antisemitism are reflexively or cavalierly dismissed. The so-called Livingstone Formulation, where claims of antisemitism can be immediately brushed off by claiming they're actually attempts to "silence criticism of Israel," is one of the primary mechanisms through which Jews are impeded in their ability to be treated as valid and viable claim-makers in public discourse. Here, too, recognition of this practice as a form of antisemitism aligns antisemitism with other forms of oppression where it has been well-acknowledged that these sorts of reflexive dismissals are themselves manifestations of racism, sexism, or what have you (as in the infamous and ubiquitous "race card" retort). The opening entry of the Nexus definition is decisive on this point: "All claims of antisemitism made by Jews, like all claims of discrimination and oppression in general, should be given serious attention" -- which is not to say automatic acceptance, but not immediate eye-rolling dismissal either. Neither IHRA nor the JDA address this issue -- IHRA probably wasn't thinking about it at all, and the JDA it's fair to assume includes a good number of stakeholders who are at least sympathetic to the notion that antisemitism claims are regularly abused and so need tighter policing.

The final major feature of Nexus not found in its compatriots is an acknowledgment of a particular type of antisemitism that targets Jews for having the "wrong" view on Israel, at which point their status as Jews is called into question. Rudy Giuliani claiming that he's "more of a Jew" than George Soros is a high-profile case here. But the importance of including this as a form of antisemitism stemmed from the way in which this sort of marginalizing rhetoric is especially likely to be deployed against Jews of Color, who regularly are assailed as being "fake" or "lesser" Jews (even by non-Jews!) if they deviate from an imagined proper or correct Jewish standpoint on Israel. The Nexus document accordingly recognizes that "denigrating or denying the Jewish identity of certain Jews because they are perceived as holding the 'wrong' position (whether too critical or too favorable) on Israel" is a form of antisemitism, and I can say that language was included in specific recognition of dynamics one increasingly sees on social media where JOCs have been subject to brutal and persistent harassment along this exact dimension. It is a recurrent failing of Jewish efforts on antisemitism that we often are not thinking intersectionally -- and so the discrete experiences or problems faced by, e.g., Jewish women, or Mizrahi Jews, or Jews of Color, as Jews are overlooked or not incorporated. I'm sure the Nexus document can still improve on this front, but I am proud that it made at least a step in the right direction.

DC Statehood Is Not Going To "Backfire"

Noah Feldman has a truly idiotic -- and I don't say that lightly, but it's bad -- column arguing against DC statehood because it might "backfire" against Democrats by increasing partisan polarization. Others have done the requisite line-by-line refutation. I'll just reiterate my earlier observation that one of the virtues of DC statehood is that, in comparison to other forms of political "hardball" by congressional Democrats, it is relatively immune from partisan retaliation. What are Republicans going to do -- add Wyoming as a state? It's already a state! As it happens, for oh-so-mysterious-reasons there aren't a bunch of non-voting disenfranchised American territories overwhelmingly populated by White folk lying around that Republicans could give statehood too the next time they win back control of Congress. 

What Can Be Done About a Problem Like Peter?

The other day, the Washington Post published a story about a kerfuffle at Richmond's Virginia Commonwealth University, where the Jewish Studies program invited Peter Beinart to give a talk, prompting backlash from Jewish community organizations who contend VCU's Israel-related programming is one-sided. Beinart, of course, has very publicly evolved from hawkish New Republic editor to dovish two-state solution supporter to his current position rejecting two-states and backing a single-state solution "from the river to the sea" with equal rights for all inhabitants.

My first thought on reading the article was to stake out my general position of absolutist academic freedom: if the relevant officials at VCU want to invite Beinart to speak, there should be no attempt at forcing cancellation of that speech, regardless of whatever opinion I might have about Peter Beinart or his politics.

My second thought, which I viewed as consistent with the first, is that so long as it doesn't take the form of seeking cancellation of the talk, the local Jewish community is entitled to express its discontent that Beinart was invited to speak -- again, regardless of whether I do or don't share their opinion that Beinart is objectionable.

Putting those two thoughts together, though, made me wonder: what is and isn't in-bounds for how the local Jewish community can object to Beinart being invited to speak? I've written before my view about how academic freedom is a constraint on remedies, which raises the question of what "remedies" remain in play and unconstrained? (I was particularly curious about this because I think the WaPo article was somewhat ambiguous on exactly what the local Jewish leaders were and weren't trying to do here).

This question is not, to reiterate, about whether it is proper "on the merits" for the Jewish community to object to Beinart being invited to give a talk. For the most part, the analysis I'll be running through would, I think, be applicable to any speaker who is controversial amongst a particular section of the broader community. So if Peter Beinart doesn't resonate as a valid example, feel free to substitute a different hypothetical speaker that might.

The one wrinkle here is that the VCU's Jewish Studies program appears to be integrated into and a part of the Richmond Jewish community in a way that most university programs are not vis-a-vis any particular segment of the local community -- it is not "just" an academic program, it is also part of the "fabric" of Jewish life in the area both for Jewish students at VCU and for Jews in the Richmond area (for example, front and center on the program website is a series of links to "other Jewish resources" available in the Richmond area; and it appears historically local Jewish community organizations have helped sponsor and support departmental programming). This I think is somewhat common for Jewish Studies programs in cities and towns with a real but not massive Jewish population -- often, the university is the place where speakers and programs on Jewish life occur not just for students and faculty but for the whole community, and there is greater interaction between non-academic communal organizations and departmental leadership than probably is present in, say, the Physics Department. Consequently, it's fair to say that the community has at least somewhat more specific of an interest in the content of the department's programming, albeit not an interest that would override general academic freedom protections.

Let's start with some obvious (to me, anyway) cases. It would clearly not be okay to try and get VCU administrators (or, even more clearly, state officials) to cancel the talk. That's a straight up-and-down academic freedom violation -- a definite no-no. On the other hand, local Jewish organizations clearly are entitled, if they wish, to pull their sponsorship of the event -- if they don't want their names attached to this speech, that's their prerogative. Likewise, if the local JCC or synagogues wanted to offer their own programming featuring speakers with different ideological commitments than Beinart's, that would be clearly be okay.

Okay, those are the easy cases. What else?

One thing the article mentioned is a request that Beinart not speak solo but be situated as part of a panel or with another speaker to "balance" his viewpoint. As several academics quoted in the article observe, the idea that every academic speaker needs to be "balanced" with someone representing the "other side" is not a standard that is observed anywhere else in academia -- the vast majority of talks are "solo" affairs; to the extent "balance" is desired it occurs via the aggregation of all the events and discourses available to students and not measured atomistically in each event. (It's also notable here that this standard -- if taken seriously, which I'm not convinced it's meant to be -- suggests that anytime a university department invites a Zionist speaker to campus, it should be forced to pair them up with an anti-Zionist activist for "balance"). The right to invite a speaker also includes the right to decide the context in which the speaker presents, whether as a standalone lecture, as part of a panel, in a debate, or something else. I would say, then, that any effort to get VCU administrators to alter the design of the event in a manner not desired by the inviting program (e.g., forcing them to add another speaker) also would be an academic freedom violation and is out-of-bounds.

My "impermissibles" thus far have involved seeking to have university administrators (or other high-ranking officials) alter or cancel Beinart's speech. But suppose the effort was not to force a cancellation from on high, but rather to convince the person responsible for the invitation in the first place (here David Weinfeld, the chair of the program on Jewish Studies) to change his mind and retract the invitation. Is that different? My instinct is that so long as the effort solely is comprised of moral suasion (and doesn't carry any tangible or intangible threats of professional retaliation, for instance), that's in-bounds. Who to invite for a speech is an exercise of discretion; it is entirely appropriate for community members to assert that the decision-maker made the wrong call, and there is no sin in the decision-maker ultimately being persuaded that he or she did make the wrong call. 

The issue in this case is that such an effort would almost certainly be unsuccessful -- Weinfeld knew what he was doing when he invited Beinart, he certainly was not unaware of the arguments for and against him as a speaker and so the fact of communal opposition probably won't represent new information likely to change his mind. But we can imagine a different case where a bright-eyed but somewhat clueless university actor wanted to invite a prominent Jewish speaker to campus, saw Peter Beinart was one, and invited him wholly unaware of the negative reaction it would prompt from the community they thought they were serving. In such a circumstance, it's possible that a communal backlash could prompt a reassessment by the appropriate decision-maker; in such a case I'm not sure that these efforts or the result would be inappropriate. One could say this still is a case where outside pressure results in an academic talk being cancelled, but academic freedom recognizes a very strong distinction between the university dean forcing John Doe to cancel his event because of external pressure, and John Doe coming to his own conclusion that he made a mistake when scheduling a given event and changing his mind.

Another possibility involves Jewish communal organizations going to the administrators, not to cancel or even modify the event, but to encourage the university to host additional Jewish programming that takes a different view from that adopted by Beinart -- circumventing, if necessary, the Jewish Studies program which (we'll stipulate for sake of argument) is only inviting speakers from one "side". My instinct is to say this is in-bounds as well, insofar as it represents a remedy of "more speech, not enforced silence", though it's possible once I become a full-time academic I'll develop stronger feelings about university administrators stepping onto the turf of particular programs or departments in order to implement their own judgment on what is a "good" or "balanced" program on matters they don't have any especial expertise in. And of course, this proposal is very much adjacent to the "force the program to offer a balance" remedy which I said is not okay. There is a difference between a dean creating his or her own program which brings in certain speakers who would not be invited by a given professor in the relevant department and the dean forcing a department to alter its own program to match the dean's desires, and while I think that difference is an important one, I also recognize it is a thin one.

This illustrates a more fundamental problem: the lines between the permissible and impermissible, while perhaps clear enough in theory, can become very blurry in practice. If the local JCC meets up with the university president on the subject of Beinart's talk, it's probably difficult to know whether they're trying to get the talk altered (not okay) or get the university to commit to additional programming to supplement the talk (probably okay). Statements of communal discontent that do not contain explicit threats of substantive retaliation nonetheless can be read that way and may be intended to be read that way; but also can be alleged to represent such a threat even if the objectors do everything in their power to scrupulously disavow such an intent.

The fact that there are remedies available to disaffected Jewish communal organizations that do not violate academic freedom, it turns out, may be more true in concept than in reality. On the theoretical level, I feel relatively comfortable in saying it is appropriate and permissible for Jewish communal organizations to try and convince the university to host additional programming or to persuade Weinfeld he "got this one wrong" and retract his invitation, while it would be impermissible for them to try and have the university administration to outright cancel or modify Beinart's event over the objection of the man authorized to invite him. But once one leaves the level of austere theory, the permissible and impermissible often are going to look very much alike. It is, of course, easy for such groups to make demands which are clearly in no way compatible with the university as a place of academic freedom. But it is also possible for them to seek other remedies which, while nominally permissible, may well look like (by sincere and opportunistic interpreters alike) efforts to suppress academic freedom. How to navigate these complex shoals is a question I'm not sure I have an answer to.

The Nexus in the Shadow of IHRA

For over a year now, I've been part of a task force (known as "Nexus") seeking to provide greater guidance on the intersection of antisemitism and discourse about Israel. Our first major document went public this week, offering a definition of antisemitism and principles guiding when discourse about Israel is, and is not, antisemitic. It's already getting some coverage.

I'm very proud of what we in the task force put together. It was very much a long labor, but the document we produced is one that I think could be of great service in providing badly-needed guidance and support to those concerned about antisemitism and invested in the fight against it. One thing the work especially underscored for me was the challenge of a document "written by committee", which always will entail compromises and elisions that differ from what I would have written as a solo author; this means there will inevitably be particular word choices or phrasings that can be subjected to potshots as unideally put. But I've realized that's baked into the cake of writing a document that's designed to represent a group consensus; it's not going to be avoidable. It certainly gave me considerable more empathy for other contentious documents written by collectivities (such as, say, the California Ethnic Studies model curriculum).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, but to my mind unfortunately, much of the early commentary on the Nexus document places it in competition with the venerable IHRA antisemitism definition. Those who dislike IHRA were quick to cheer the Nexus document as a challenger, those who like IHRA were immediately suspicious that our goal was to kneecap IHRA. Yet I can honestly say that IHRA was not at the forefront of our minds when we began this project. To the extent the Nexus document has a relation to IHRA, I agree with Jonathan Jacoby (chair of the task force) when he described IHRA as the mishnah and Nexus as the gemara. We're providing commentary and clarity; a complement, not a replacement.

IHRA, of course, began as a working tool to aid data collectors in documenting instances of antisemitic activity in European countries. It has since been pressed into far more contentious service, not because it was designed to shoulder that burden, but because it was the only tool available. In doing so, IHRA began to take on significant symbolic weight, as support and opposition began to reflect a broader orientation towards antisemitism and its relationship with Israel. To support IHRA was to affirm that antisemitism was a serious problem and that criticism of Israel often veered into antisemitic territory. To oppose IHRA was to hold that legitimate criticism of Israel was often falsely squelched by being labeled antisemitic and that much of the discourse about antisemitism was overblown. Support for and opposition to IHRA rapidly coalesced around the symbolic dimension, with little investigation into whether IHRA-qua-IHRA actually was contributing to resolving and/or exacerbating the underlying problems.

One upshot of this symbolization of IHRA is that, despite our best efforts, it's really hard to make a contribution to the space of "defining antisemitism" without it being assessed in the shadow of IHRA. I think this is very unfortunate, because IHRA was never intended to be the last word on the subject and very much should not be viewed as the last word on the subject -- an assessment which in no way requires one to think that IHRA is some monstrous force or even is a net negative. Compare the "core" antisemitism definition in IHRA with the opening of the Nexus document. Here's IHRA:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

I am not the first person to observe that this tells us virtually nothing. "A certain perception of Jews" -- well, which perception? This is almost useless as a means of declaring what is and is not antisemitism. Contrast the Nexus definition:

Antisemitism consists of anti-Jewish beliefs, attitudes, actions or systemic conditions. It includes negative beliefs and feelings about Jews, hostile behavior directed against Jews (because they are Jews), and conditions that discriminate against Jews and significantly impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life.

This is far more detailed and precise than the IHRA definition. It's not that there's no room for argument about whether a given activity, e.g., constitutes an "anti-Jewish belief". But it certainly provides more guidance than IHRA's "a certain perception". And one might notice that in important respects the Nexus definition is more expansive than IHRA's, in that we do not look only to "perceptions" of Jews but also tangible conditions that might be implemented regardless of whether the instigating actor holds any particular "perception" of the Jewish people.

For example, consider the recent decision in the EU judiciary permitting bans on Kosher slaughter. This was roundly condemned by Jewish organizations worldwide, but one would struggle mightily to label it "antisemitic" under the IHRA definition -- it doesn't fall under any of the illustrative examples, and it doesn't seem to stem from any particular "perception" of Jews. By contrast, even though the Nexus document is intentionally focused primarily on the Israel case, our definition explains why such bans could be validly labeled antisemitic -- they would "significantly impede [our] ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life." I don't think we're betraying IHRA's spirit to make this extension, but it is a good thing for Jews that this additional gloss now exists.

The other major frame we've seen applied to the Nexus document is that it is more permissive of "anti-Israel" criticism than IHRA is. I don't know if that's necessarily the case -- I think again one could view the Nexus document as providing commentary and exposition upon IHRA's own declarations that "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic" and that even its illustrative examples are merely cases which "could, taking into account the overall context" be antisemitic. But it certainly is the case that we are more explicit than IHRA is in labeling certain forms of anti-Israel activity (including some activity that might be objectionable on other bases) not antisemitic.

One of our guiding principles here, albeit not expressly stated, is that we didn't want Israel-only "one offs" in the understanding of antisemitism.  A given activity, practice, trope, etc., neither becomes nor ceases to be antisemitic just because it is applied against Israel. Instead, "Whether speech or conduct about Zionism and Israel is antisemitic should be based on the standards for speech or conduct that apply to antisemitic behavior in general." IHRA, for instance, has as one of its examples comparing Israel or Israeli policy to Nazism. If this is antisemitic, under the Nexus framework it should only be because comparing Jews or Jewish entities to Nazism generally is antisemitic -- including, for example, calling liberal Jews "kapos" or "Nazi collaborators". For my part, I'm okay with that extension; I think it generally (and not just in the Israel case) raises a pretty glaring antisemitic red flag to call a Jewish actor a Nazi. But ensuring that the rule is even-handed prevents opportunistic usage, and that's a good thing -- people who want to continue calling liberal Jews kapos should as a consequence be forced to sacrifice their ability to condemn Israel-Nazi comparisons as antisemitic.

A similar motivation explains our gloss on the issue of "double-standards". We agree that treating Israel differently than other nations, "using standards different than those applied to other countries," is a form of antisemitism. But we also say that the mere fact that a given group focuses more on Israel than on other countries does not suffice to prove a "double-standard." Again, this is because the latter requirement would be impossible to apply even-handedly. AIPAC, ZOA, NGO Monitor, APN, Adalah, the American Task Force on Palestine -- all of these focus on Israel more than other countries, and that's their prerogative. It is neither weird nor sinister for a Jewish or Palestinian organization to devote more attention to human rights issues in Israel compared to China or the Crimea or Zimbabwe, and nobody actually thinks otherwise. One can, I think, fairly contrast the case of AIPAC or Adalah with, say, the UNHRC -- a body which would struggle to articulate a neutral reason for focusing overwhelmingly on Israel but does so anyway. There the antisemitism objection carries significantly more force. Again, the Nexus document provides additional gloss and detail that can help fairly instantiate the IHRA rule, avoiding opportunistic deployments where the mere fact that a Palestinian organization is talking predominantly about Palestinian issues is held out as an antisemitic "double-standard".

Finally, while the nexus between Israel and antisemitism often focuses predominantly on "left" critiques, it was important for us to articulate practices on the right with relation to Israel which have subjected many Jews to antisemitic abuse or harassment. It is antisemitic, we said, to "Denigrat[e] or deny[] the Jewish identity of certain Jews because they are perceived as holding the 'wrong' position (whether too critical or too favorable) on Israel." This is something that many liberal Jews (and in particular many Jews of color) have experienced, sometimes from other Jews, often from non-Jews, and it absolutely should be viewed as a form of antisemitism. Again, this is a principle that can and should be applied even-handedly and not as an Israel-only one-off. There certainly are cases where Jews have seen their identities challenged or deemed "fake" because they're allegedly too pro-Israel, and that should be viewed as antisemitism (and/or racist) as well; likewise, there are instances where Jews are alleged to be "fake" Jews because of their "wrong" political opinions on issues that have nothing to do with Israel -- I'm fine with the extension to that context too. Non-Jews, in particular, have no business policing the identities of Jews based on their (usually wrong and inevitably blinkered) opinion about what ideology Jews "should" have. Being clear on this point helps remedy a recurrent problem in too much antisemitism discourse -- rules which have only a left-wing application. If it's wrong to subject Jews to purity tests to demonstrate their "left" enough, it's wrong to subject Jews to such tests to ensure they're not too far left.

All of this, hopefully, shows how the Nexus document can be useful in the fight against antisemitism. We did not intercede in order to kneecap IHRA, but neither do we think IHRA is so comprehensive to be the last word. We set out to provide greater detail and context in assisting persons of good faith in navigating the intersection of Israel discourse and antisemitism, and I think we've made a valuable contribution. Of course, our document shouldn't be the last word either -- but it does, I think, move the conversational ball forward.