Why Did the JDA Exonerate David Miller?

A few months ago, I described the David Miller controversy as the JDA's "test case": would it ever be used to declare a contested case of commentary on "Zionism" to be antisemitic, or would it only be used to level "not guilty" verdicts? Shortly thereafter, it was revealed that an internal investigation by the University of Bristol into Miller's antisemitism had entirely exonerated him -- largely relying on the JDA to do so. The JDA critics cried vindication.

Now, two signatories of the JDA -- Yair Wallach and David Feldman (the latter is a JDA co-author) -- have written to explain why they think that was incorrect and a misapplication of JDA. They make reasonable arguments for why Miller's conduct should have been viewed as antisemitic under the JDA framework. However, they observe, a definition is only as good as those applying it -- Labour, after all, didn't become  instantly free of antisemitism simply after adopting IHRA. The JDA, too -- any definition, really -- can only be so resistant against interpreters determined to see no evil.

This is a fair point. But I think a little more reflection is needed. Reading Wallach and Feldman, one might get the sense that the exoneration of Miller was simply a matter of bad luck: the university picked the wrong actor to conduct its internal inquiry, who did a bad job reading the JDA and so came to incorrect conclusions. A better reader who exhibited more careful, lawyerly interpretive skills would have come to the right conclusion: that Miller was, under the JDA framework, antisemitic.

I agree that texts alone will provide only moderate, if any, constraints on poor reading. And I agree that the JDA, fairly read, very much can provide support for why Miller was antisemitic. But Wallach and Feldman do not grapple with the cultural meaning of JDA which I think clearly is germane to why it was used, as its critics predicted it would be, as a tool of exculpation. 

As a cultural phenomenon, JDA was introduced to the world as a corrective against the overzealous labeling of things as antisemitic. The "problem" JDA was there to correct was the presumed assumption by IHRA and its adherents that "criticism of Israel is antisemitic"; it corrected this (among other ways) by sharply delinking "Jewishness" and "Zionism" and declaring itself a sentinel against their wrongful conflation. In a real sense, the JDA was less concerned about protecting Jews from antisemitism than it was protecting non-Jews from being (wrongfully) accused of antisemitism. It's not that the former wasn't important, but the latter was what JDA believed was missing from antisemitism discourse and addressing that problem was accordingly the document's value-added. Nearly all of the JDA's marketing and public reception centered around this function, and it was accordingly taken up as the standard by people whose primary orientation towards antisemitism is that of Bruce Robbins: "The real issue here is anti-Semitism; that is, accusing people of it." 

JDA defenders will no doubt argue, as Wallach and Feldman do, that the text of JDA belies any claim that it is unconcerned with what is antisemitic and that, properly applied JDA very much can and does offer resources which can support a guilty verdict as much as a not-guilty one. This is true, but only in the same way that IHRA also has textual resources which could be used to forestall its use as a blunt cudgel against any harsh criticism of Israel. Those cynical of the practical relevance of those textual provisions in assessing whether IHRA actually is enabling or disenabling productive discussion on antisemitism should recognize a similar potential problem in JDA. In either case, the text isn't really what's important; it cannot explain the definitions' actual use. Hence, upon JDA's release I predicted:

[J]ust 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".

And indeed, that does seem to be what happened here.

To the extent that Wallach and Feldman view the failure to identify Miller's antisemitism as antisemitism as a failing, then, it will not do to simply run back to the text and say "but a good interpreter would read this provision differently." It's not really about the text, and it's not really about reading comprehension skills either.

The simple way of identifying the problem is this: on an epistemic level, the JDA looked at how antisemitism discourse proceeded in certain center-to-right Jewish and Zionist spaces and treated the primary problem of antisemitism as one where people where too quick to believe, to listen, to conflate, to say "yes". In "correcting" those mistakes, it overlooked entirely a parallel form of antisemitism discourse, prevalent in many non-Jewish (as well as Jewish left) spaces, where people were eager to dismiss, to brush off, to endlessly dissect, to say "no". The JDA has, perhaps unintentionally but very much predictably, become the standard for the latter branch of the discourse. To a large extent, the JDA would be seen as a failure if it regularly and in high-profile contested cases rendered "guilty" verdicts -- this would falsify the core epistemic assessment which indicted IHRA and supposedly demanded the JDA's adoption in the first place (that in high-profile contested cases too many people are being adjudged guilty of antisemitism when they are, in fact, falsely accused).

It is not accidental nor idiosyncratic, then, when JDA is read and interpreted in a fashion that maximizes its function as an exculpatory tool. Those who read it that way aren't reading it badly, they're just reading it in the context of how it was presented to the world. Since the JDA is a corrective to overuse of antisemitism, it is hardly a misreading when readers adopt a canon of construction where all ambiguities should be resolved against a finding of antisemitism. 

If JDA proponents want to head off those readings, they cannot simply ask for people to be better or more educated readers. They'll have to take aim at the golden calf of their epistemic camp, and decisively declare that the problem of antisemitism is not just "accusing people of it", the problem is as much (if not -- dare I say -- more so) reflexive denials of it. Unless and until the JDA forthrightly tackles that aspect of how we talk about antisemitism, no amount of careful reading will stop the JDA from being almost exclusively seen as and used as a means of exonerating anyone and everyone from antisemitism.

Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?

I've been reflecting over the past few days about why it is that BDS/anti-normalization causes such existential panic amongst diaspora Jews -- more so, I'd wager, than it does for Israelis. I've written, of course, about how such movements frequently result in considerable regulation and injury to diaspora Jews who actually can be effectively subjected to external policing, so that's part of it. But as I think about it more, the fear comes from a much deeper place. What we fear is living in a community or a polity where people simply do not care what Jews think, and are content to speak upon Jews without being much concerned about Jewish contributions to the conversation.

As is the case in many such fears, this is not an injury that only the Jews have experienced. To take one adjacent example: the Trump "peace plan", constructed as it was with virtually no Palestinian input, was an effort to resolve the issue of Palestine without being especially concerned with what Palestinians had to say on the subject. Unsurprisingly, they were not so keen about being viewed as dispensable to the process of an Israeli-Palestinian accord; in addition to predictably producing a slanted deal, it was also taken -- rightfully so -- as a form of disrespect and degradation. The "deal" was always going to be stillborn, for that reason alone.

In Israel and Palestine, there are plenty of people who cling to the notion that they can "resolve" the conflict without remotely engaging with the perspective of the other, or actually coming to some sort of accord. For Israelis, this is the intoxication of power -- they have the land and the guns and the status quo high ground, and this is the prerogative of dominion. For Palestinians, there is the fundamentalism of despair -- if a negotiated deal is impossibly out of reach and we're stuck in the realm of fantasies, then why not be a maximalist? There's no opportunity cost to going for broke if there is no next-best alternative being passed up, because there aren't any actual alternatives being passed up at all. And of course, for both camps, the allure of unilateralism is bolstered by a resolute sense of righteousness -- why should we have to give an inch to them, when we are right and they are wrong? Where is the justice in being forced to make concessions to the wrongdoer?

Those who adapt this view may, as Abe Silberstein writes, respond to claims that they're being unrealistic by portentously insisting that they are "resisting hegemonic limitations on what is possible." They're not, and most people, at the end of the day, recognize the unyielding if not always convenient truth that a permanent solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict will have to entail some sort of accord or agreement between both parties. Neither side will be able to impose a lasting solution to the situation by force of will alone. Even if you think a two-state solution is dead in the water, a binational state would be roughly 50/50 Jewish and non-Jewish; such a state could only function if there is not just nominal but robust commitment to coexistence and mutual recognition. Neither party is going anywhere, which means that whatever the final status of the land is -- be it marriage or divorce -- it will still involve some agreement on how to live together, each party (if only via necessity) attentive to what the other thinks.

But things are different in the diaspora. Here there are not, objectively speaking, all that many Jews. Here, to imagine a world where one no longer need to speak to or think about Jews is not to imagine something impossible or even implausible. It is quite possible, at least in certain communities and spaces, to have a perfectly pleasant, happy, and functioning existence without any meaningful Jewish contribution whatsoever, and so a situation where Jews are not part of one's community is not necessarily a harbinger of dysfunction or chaos.

The BDS/anti-normalization cadre has made a calculated decision that it does not need to hear Jewish contributions. This is not the same thing as saying it actively does not want Jews. It is, for the most part, perfectly happy to have Jews aboard as passengers for the ride. It just means that this movement does not feel as if it has failed or is endangered in any particular way if it doesn't secure Jewish buy-in, and so if it turns out that it is a movement operating mostly independent of Jewish contribution, that does not represent a problem. 

• Morally, this calculation manifests as a view that the correct moral answer to the Israel-Palestine question is "Israel is wrong from root to branch", and while it'd be nice if Jews got onboard the righteous train, their failure to do so does not in any way modulate the right answer to the moral question (which exists entirely independent of what Jews think on the subject). 
• Politically, it is an assessment that their practical campaigns do not need Jewish presence or agreement in order to be functional; they can accomplish what they want to accomplish even if it is perfectly well-known they're doing it over howls of Jewish objection. 
• Finally, interpersonally, it carries an implied belief that there is no real loss felt to the extent one's circle is purged of (most) Jews -- our absence does not register as a cost, or at most is an acceptable one. Relationships with Jews are dispensable.

This belief represents a radical reimagination of the contemporary liberal political landscape -- it is very much not the status quo in the Democratic Party. Right now, the mainstream moral position amongst liberals is that a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be one that is acceptable to both sides; there is no party for whom it is right to simply see crushed.* Right now, it mostly remains the case that political legitimacy on matters of Israel depends on some amount of non-trivial Jewish buy-in -- it is not the case, as is often alleged, that this buy-in is withheld unless one goes all-in for Likud, but it is true that consensus Jewish redlines against extreme anti-Israel positions do roughly track the line between reputable and disreputable Democratic politics. Democrats believe that hearing from Jews (not just from us, but us too -- "necessary" is not "sufficient") and securing Jewish buy-in is necessary to come to the right decisions on Israel, and that hearing from Jews is necessary to come to politically viable decisions on Israel.

Most importantly, the degree to which Jews are imbricated into the fabric of mainstream liberal politics means it would actually be really hard, on a national level, to extricate oneself from ties and relationships with Jews without immense cost. To a far greater degree than any other diaspora nation, Jews are present all over the place in contemporary Democratic politics -- in Congress, in interest groups, among staff, in policy workshops, and in coalitions. To ask your average Democratic politician to detach themselves from any Jew whose views fail to line up with this radical reimagination is to ask them to divest themselves of countless rooted, meaningful attachments, built over years, which will not be dislodged so easily. These relationships are absolutely not dispensable, and as SunriseDC found out, that degree of embeddedness and entrenchment is quite resilient to challenge. 

Yet, unlike in Israel-Palestine, here in the US this radical reimagination is not an impossible reimagination. It is possible to conceive of. Most clearly, the people pushing this reimagination believe that hearing from Jews and securing buy-in from Jews is not necessary to develop morally correct postures on Israel. And as a matter of politics, the necessity of Jewish buy-in may be true on a national level, but it won't hold in every district or locality (there just aren't enough of us), to say nothing of the advantages in staking out a passionate minority position. Moreover, there is a difference even in how, say, Ilhan Omar orients to the Jewish community -- she does, however haltingly and ineffectually, try to engage with us -- and, say, what I've been seeing out of Imani Oakley (from whom antipathy towards engagement with Jewish community appears to be central to her political identity in a way that is unrivaled by any member of Congress I can think of, Squad absolutely included). I know little about the Newark-area district Oakley is running in (as a primary challenger to Donald Payne, Jr.) or about whether Oakley has any real shot at winning, but certainly she senses that overtly positioning herself in this way is not necessarily toxic.

Finally, the imbrication of Jews across liberal politics is true now, but it is not an inevitable fact of nature. So the reimagination begins by chip, chip, chipping away at the ability of Jews to enter into the room freely -- an ideological litmus test here, a campaign against interfaith work there, all serving to gnaw away those interpersonal connections which serve as hedges preserving relationships where political necessity fails. It is a tide lapping at a cliff-face, and the erosion can be slow even as the progress is steady. The DSA maybe can't expel Jamaal Bowman, and Bowman ("given his community") will not ditch his Jewish constituents so easily -- but what would be high cost in the case of Bowman is low cost when it comes to a city councilor in Des Moines or state representative in Raleigh. Old bonds die hard, but new institutions and spaces and visions that lack decades of accreted history will find it much easier to promulgate norms obstructing the development of new ones. Chip, chip, chip -- intervene to stop the connections from forming at the point of conception, and the roots won't be wide or deep enough to serve as a check if and when there is a moment of reckoning.

Cherrie Moraga wrote years ago of how "so often the women seem to feel no loss, no lack, no absence when women of color are not involved.... This has hurt me deeply."** The Jewish terror is that this reimagined politics is one where it is not even felt as a loss if Jews are not present. Ironically, as much as Israel is the fulcrum for the politics' development, as a much as those who promote it insist to high heavens they're just talking about Israel and Zionism, not Jews, it is Jews-not-in-Israel who will feel the brunt of it, because it is they who are actually in a position to be excluded from communities and spaces and places which had been and otherwise would be their own.

Again, it is not that, for those who promote this reimagination, Jewish absence is an affirmative good, necessarily. It's just that the absence isn't seen as a bad; it is not a failing that needs to be rectified. The people who promote this politics would be happy if Jews sign up for the ride, but they aren't going to adjust themselves a half-inch if Jews instead are registering complaints or seek to alter the trajectory. We are permitted to be passengers (or, perhaps, ballast), but not helmsmen. They don't need us, they will not accommodate us, and their assessment of their own path is implacably indifferent to whether it results in our presence or absence. That is a scary thought indeed.

 * Outside of the liberals, and until recently among many liberals, it was the case that many did believe exactly this -- just of Palestinians: they were the bad guys, and a "just" solution is one where they're punished, to hell what they think of it. I won't say that turnabout is fair play, but the howls of protest demanding "nuance" and acknowledgment of "both sides' legitimate claims" from many Jewish organizations do present a dissonant juxtaposition with the happy acceptance of the decidedly unnuanced and one-sided accounts of the conflict that prevailed for many years to the benefit of Israelis.

** Cherrie Moraga, "Refugees of a World on Fire," Forward to the 2nd ed. of This Bridge Called My Back (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1983), 33

A Matter of Opinion at NYU

The NYU Review of Law & Social Change, a secondary law journal at NYU, has announced it will be implementing an academic boycott of Israel (it has been condemned by the NYU and NYU law administrations). In doing so, it said two things which should be juxtaposed -- not hard, since they remarkably come in successive paragraphs. First:

[The journal will boycott] Academic activities, projects, or publications “based on the false premise of symmetry/parity between the oppressors and the oppressed or that claim that both colonizers and colonized are equally responsible for the ‘conflict’ . . . .” We find such efforts to be “intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible forms of normalization” that must be boycotted.

Second:

The academic boycott is an institutional boycott “[a]nchored in precepts of international law and universal human rights,” and “rejects on principle boycotts of individuals based on their identity (such as citizenship, race, gender, or religion) or opinion.” [emphasis added]

So the journal won't boycott a scholar based on his or her "opinions", except insofar as their "opinion" takes the form of proposing ill-defined "symmetry", in which case it "must be boycotted". Roger that.

In fairness, the journal is quoting from the PACBI guidelines here, so its incoherence is not fully its own.

Anyway. Among the calls of the journal is for NYU to shut down its longstanding collaboration with Tel Aviv University, and it says it will refuse to participate in any programs which are "convened or cosponsored" by TAU or other "complicit Israeli institutions" ("complicit", here, is a three-syllable word for "all", albeit with some inchoate amount of room for fudging attached). Query what would happen if NYU Law simply had all of its affiliates (no need to single out Tel Aviv University -- NYU Abu Dhabi, Madrid, and all the rest can play too) provide some pro forma contribution to cosponsor all its events for the year? Could be interesting.

We Chose This

I was in middle school when Columbine happened.

At the time, it felt like a national watershed. In hindsight, I actually don't know the degree to which Columbine stood out from other school shootings, versus whether it just happened to be "the" big shooting that occurred in the formative part of my life where I began paying attention to such things. Maybe for people born a few years earlier or a few years later, a different school shooting was "the" shooting. Lord knows we don't lack for choices.

Nonetheless, I remember thinking then that obviously Columbine was going to prompt us to do something about gun violence. There was no chance that our collective response to that tragedy would be to do nothing. As a kid, you believe adults are interested in protecting you. Perhaps as an adult, without strong evidence to the contrary, you also believe other adults will take the steps necessary to ensure children aren't being gunned down in schools or in streets.

But, more than 20 years later, our response to school shootings has indeed been: essentially nothing. We can't say we're still "working on it", or that we're still processing. At this point, it is fair to say America has made a conscious choice as a polity that we find school shootings to be an acceptable price to pay in exchange for allowing guns everywhere.

Twenty years after Columbine, nobody can pretend as if we don't know the consequences of our choices. We chose to let Oxford happen. We'll no doubt choose to let the next one happen too. There is nothing surprising or shocking or even unexpected happening anymore. Each of these deaths is attributable not just to the loathsome gunmen who pull the triggers, but to choices we've made collectively as a community. We are committed to an open highway of free, unfettered access to guns, and these bodies are the change the NRA throws into the tollbooth on the way.

The Sovereign's Grace, Kosher Food, and BDS at UofT

A BDS resolution passed by students at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus is in the news, primarily because of one interesting wrinkle: it specifically addresses the matter of Kosher food sources. In particular, while the resolution sweepingly targets goods, services, and events which it deems implicated in Israeli apartheid, it offers a narrow carve-out for Kosher food products if "no alternatives are available." The specific policy language is this:

Efforts should be made to source kosher food from organizations that do not normalize Israeli apartheid. However, recognizing the limited availability of this necessity, then exceptions can be made if no alternatives are available.

The resolution was, for what it's worth, sharply criticized by the President of the University.

I do want to focus on this Kosher food issue, though, because it raises some interesting issues. The specter of the student government policing how Jewish students gain access to Jewish food -- seeking to ensure that Jews obeying the dictates of their faith do so in a way that satisfies a political litmus test set by the student union -- understandably rankles many Jews on campus (not the least because one suspects there are sharply different opinions between the student government and the median Jewish student about what it means for a food organization to "normalize Israeli apartheid"). Yet, at one level, this language was almost certainly meant as a conciliatory gesture -- an accommodation meant to alleviate burdens placed on Jewish students by the resolution by treating Kosher food options more leniently and opening the possibility of exemption. There is history here: a few years ago the UofT graduate student union made headlines for refusing to support Kosher food access on campus, on the grounds that the campaign was allegedly incompatible with BDS commitments. This was highly embarrassing for the union, which was forced to issue an apology. I strongly suspect that this provision of the new resolution was meant to avoid, or at least, ameliorate, the prospect of a repeat. I can even imagine the student union being surprised and hurt that their kind-hearted, magnanimous gesture is being thrown back in their face with such revulsion.

And yet. Often times, supporters of BDS lean so hard on the trite truism "Israel and Judaism are not synonymous" that they begin to act almost as if any connections between the two are wholly  idiosyncratic and coincidental. It can end up verging on the comical: "Israel is related to Judaism? Why, I had no idea -- in any event, that interesting factual tidbit, which never occurred to me until just now, certainly has nothing to do with anything I'm doing." But increasingly, it is becoming impossible to overlook the obvious fact that BDS commitments, interpreted expansively, necessitate significant regulation of Jewish political, social, cultural, and religious life, including aggressive and systematic policing of which Jews are okay to talk to or work with. The SunriseDC fiasco was one manifestation of this, the AMP position paper seeking to establish rules regarding when it is okay to collaborate with Jews is another. The myth that "BDS" will or perhaps even could be pursued in such a way that only incidentally and idiosyncratically affected Jews qua Jews (as opposed to "Zionists" or "settlers" or "occupiers") is collapsing.

Even if in the minds of the resolution drafters they were resolutely thinking about Zionists, Zionists, Zionists, and not Jews, Jews, Jews; there was no avoiding the reality that in practice the brunt of the impact would be felt far more in the latter capacity than in the former. Indeed, while virtually none of the entities which support BDS are in a position to impose regulatory burdens on the Israeli state, they absolutely can regulate their local Jews, and so it is the local Jewish community that in practice will predictably be the main venue through which these campaigns actually regulate conduct (I am hardly the first to note that BDS does far more to injure diaspora Jews than it does to harm Israel in any concrete way, let alone motivate Israel to alter its conduct). Who is most likely to have a speaker, or a food product, or a program, that potentially runs afoul of the guidelines (and who is most likely to have their speakers/foods/programs checked and rechecked and placed under the finest microscope to ensure they satisfy the relevant political litmus tests)? It's the local Jewish groups (and not just on matters that directly relate to Israel, either). The effect of these mandates is to place Jewish groups under constant, humiliating surveillance and interrogation to ensure they're not stepping out of line ("Wanna support the miners--what's your position on Zionism?" Or for a campus example, just ask Rachel Beyda). 

Critics sometimes argue that if the Jewish community in North America is that tied up with the Jewish community in Israel, that's an "us" problem. But it is simply not reasonable or feasible to expect the Jewish community writ large to wholly disentangle itself from a place where nearly half the world's Jewish population (and well more than half of the non-European Jewish population) lives and which is central to Jewish religious worship, history, and culture -- particularly given the depth of the "disentanglement" demanded (whereby nearly any connection whatsoever is sufficient to be deemed "complicit" or "implicated"). And again, that sort of insistence on a sweeping and dare I say revolutionary reorganization of Jewish public life is necessarily one that represents a "significant regulation of Jewish political, social, cultural, and religious" affairs. Even if one supports that revolution, and even one supports it so fervently that one is fine with it taking place via external non-Jewish compulsion, at the very least those making this demand cannot plausibly hold to the comforting myth that "we're not talking about Jews". They are, inescapably, and Jews are not doing anything unfair or unreasonable in calling it what it is (a few proponents of the revolution -- some Jewish, some not -- are open in saying "yes, we are targeting the Jews for compulsion because the Jews need and deserve to be compelled", and at the very least I appreciate the honesty).

History provides many examples of edicts placed upon the public whose effects would be to make Jewish public life difficult or potentially impossible. And sometimes, the sovereign in his grace would agree to the possibility of dispensation or exemption for Jews, or at least worthy Jews or sufficiently well-connected Jews, or for the Jews who impressed him and garnered his favor. Much of Jewish political history has been the project of begging for the establishment of these exemptions, begging for them to actually be effectuated, and then begging for them not to be removed or retired when the sovereign's mood changed. And on the one hand, the prospect of these exemptions existing is better than them not being available at all. On the other hand, their presence really hammered home the degree to which the Jews were at the mercy of the sovereign's whim; it illustrated in stark tones who was the law-maker and who was the supplicant subject.

The UofT clause on Kosher food is heir to this tradition. The broad sweep of the resolution risks making Jewish qua Jewish life on campus intolerable (there is a reason why the Nexus definition of antisemitism specifically includes as a species of antisemitism "conditions that discriminate against Jews and impede their ability to participate as equals in political, religious, cultural, economic, or social life."). The law-makers in their beneficence thus offer the possibility of an exemption, if those seeking it come with the right amount of supplication and prove their worthiness by demonstrating to the student union's satisfaction that there is absolutely no "alternative". How gracious! But in its grace, it actually lays bare something previously obscured. In so many words, what the student union is doing is developing an official bureaucratic apparatus whose job specifically is to regulate and oversee Jewish religious life -- with no question regarding who ultimately holds the power and who comes in as a mere petitioner.

Ironically, when there was no exemption at all it would be perhaps easier to cling longer to the myth that the impact on Jews qua Jews is mere idiosyncratic coincidence. The drafters surely would concede that there might be some people who might happen to be inconvenienced by the resolution and it just so may happen that some number of them (who can really say how many) might be Jewish -- but such is life! These things happen! Here, by contrast, the prior history of the Kosher food issue meant that the student union here finally had to admit to itself "yes, thinking about Israel and Zionism means also thinking about Jews" (lack of definitional identity notwithstanding). And in doing so, and in actually being somewhat responsive to that thought, it made visible the actual power dynamics in play that perhaps previously could be denied.

Journalistic Defectors

One of the more dangerous players in contemporary discourse -- or at least one of the types that makes me the most nervous, anyway -- are people who are trained as journalists, who know the forms of the genre, but now are working consciously and intentionally as advocates.

Adam Kredo -- he of Kamala Harris' pot-gate -- is one example. Before joining the Washington Free Beacon, he was a relatively well-respected "neutral" journalist working for the Washington Jewish Week. Now, nobody confuses what he does for the Beacon as dispassionate journalism (except maybe Kredo, who claimed -- apparently with a straight face -- that at the Beacon he remains a straight news reporter who is "not in the opinion biz"). Nonetheless, there's little question that Kredo is more effective as a purveyor of partisan hit pieces precisely because he knows how to write an article in a way that follows journalistic conventions. Get quotes from alternative sources, ask subjects for comments (that they're damned if they do and damned if they don't is a bonus), do much of the heavy narrative lifting not by direct accusation but in terms of presuppositions and framing -- it works in a way that more direct propaganda doesn't. I suspect the "news-ier" side of Fox News (not Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, but the parts that present themselves as straight coverage) fits this mold too.

On the other side of the street, one can see similar characteristics at Jewish Currents. Again, many of the people writing for Currents have clear talent as journalists, and their stories track journalistic conventions. They aren't obvious agitprop. But they're great examples of how, if you know what you're doing as a journalist, you know how to push every convention to the limits of its tolerance band in a way that gets you to something pretty close to agitprop while still looking on face like a regular investigation. If every choice of framing is meant to accentuate one side's story, if every presupposition of the relevant political climate or social atmosphere reaffirms a particular point of view, if every inference or interpretation is just a little credulous to the right people and cynical to the wrong ones, the result is an article in which all the constituent elements are defensible as fair but the net result is intentionally one-sided (their piece on Ritchie Torres I think works as a decent example of what I mean).

I've sometimes said that the "evil" version of me would make a good press secretary, because I think I'd be very good at spinning effectively. This is a version of that -- if you're a journalist, you know how the narrative machine works, and knowing how it works you also know how to break the machine. And as parts of a political toolkit this is very effective; arguably even necessary, even as it is also intentionally manipulative and kind of hackish. The reason "evil" me is a Press Secretary rather than actual me is that in real life I don't have the stomach for that sort of work. Which is not the same thing as saying that either I or the people I admire are perfectly virtuous or fair-minded in how we relate to our own interlocutors. We have times our biases shine through too. But there is, I submit, a difference between unknowingly being swayed by one's personal biases, or even a temporary lapse acknowledged as a wrong, and knowingly and self-consciously trying to align one's work product with one's biases to the maximum extent possible.

In any event, I suspect the people who do this are in fact decently self-conscious about what they're doing -- they don't (contra Kredo) actually think they're not engaged in opinion; they're relatively open about their agenda. Press them, and they might say something like "all news coverage has a political agenda behind it; the difference is that we are self-conscious about it, whereas the people who think they're doing straight news are more likely to be unconsciously parroting orthodox Pablum without recognizing that's a view too." And I have some sympathy for that critique, actually. We all could stand to be more reflective on what our biases and presuppositions are. But I also think there is a difference between actually trying to understand issues on their own terms and be fair to subjects one is covering, versus just going through the motions of it because "hey, everyone has an agenda right?" Such is the curse of many liberal values (objectivity, neutrality, even-handedness, etc.): they're simultaneously impossible to achieve, and yet things are so much worse when people stop even trying to achieve them.

Demystifying the very much non-neutral "mainstream" coverage norms need not necessarily take the form of "replicating those norms, but intentionally and in service of a different political program." But in practice, it often does, and the result is I think work product that is very slick, very effective for its chosen audience, and very dangerous for the project of fair-minded discourse.

AMP Presents: Chicken Soup for the Zionist Infiltrator Soul

Some of you are familiar with the name David Miller, a British academic widely denounced for antisemitic conspiracy mongering from his erstwhile perch at the University of Bristol. Perhaps the most notorious, if also darkly hilarious, entry into his antisemitism portfolio was when he denounced Jews and Muslims making chicken soup together as a "Trojan horse for normalizing Zionism."

Of course Israel have sent people in to target that, to deal with that. Particularly through interfaith work … pretending Jews and Muslims working together will be an apolitical way of countering racism. No, it’s a Trojan horse for normalising Zionism in the Muslim community. We saw it in East London Mosque for example, where East London Mosque unknowingly held this project of making chicken soup with Jewish and Muslim communities coming together. This is an Israel-backed project for normalising Zionism in the Muslim communities.

More than perhaps anything else, this subjected Miller to well-deserved mockery and scorn -- the poster child for "anti-Zionist" antisemitism taken to its fanatical extreme.

Now, the organization American Muslims for Palestine put out a position paper on when it is appropriate for Muslims to collaborate with Jews that pretty much crystallizes the Miller view into a policy document.

The title of the paper is "AMP's Report on Working with Zionist Organizations", but they are otherwise quite clear that this is actually a series of litmus tests for Jewish groups, specifically -- the opening line of the document is "This memo is intended to provide the American-Muslim community with a set of criteria by which to determine whether or not to work with various Jewish organizations." 

On that question, of whether Muslims should or should not work with Jewish organizations, the answer AMP gives can be summarized as "virtually never, with virtually none of them". It concludes with a literal good Jew/bad Jew list where the former includes JVP, IfNotNow, and a couple of organizations whose memberships effectively overlap entirely with JVP/IfNotNow, and the latter includes ... well, basically everyone else -- including the ADL, AJC, Hillel, local JCRCs, and local Jewish Federations. Also sitting in the "bad" category are most local synagogues, which the report characterizes as sitting in a "gray area" -- the vast majority should probably be avoided or at most handled with a Hazmat suit, but AMP does do the favor of linking to a helpful list of JVP-approved acceptable synagogues which are "safe" to collaborate with. The list numbers about two dozen. In total. In the entire United States. Thanks, guys.

Much could be written about this document, along many dimensions. I did have to smile when I saw that they intentionally were modeling their call for exclusion on Hillel's "standards of partnership" -- well-played (and yes, this position paper does serve if nothing else as an indictment of the more fundamentalist interpretations of those guidelines). Less amusing was the insinuation -- echoing Miller -- that the "American Jewish establishment" is actually comprised of "front groups" run out of the Israeli foreign affairs ministry, an especially egregious form of antisemitism that even the JDA denounces (B.7). Finally, it was noteworthy to see AMP expressly characterize these "standards of partnership" as emanating out of and required by the BDS movement -- no longer limited to Israel itself, or members of Israeli society, now BDS guidelines surrounding "complicity" in Israeli wrongdoing serve to demand extirpation of Jewish groups in America too. Again, it was always obvious that the train has no brakes -- this was always the final destination of that particular ride.

But perhaps the most interesting part was when AMP tries to answer the question of "if these organizations are so sinister, why is it that they reach out to the Muslim community in the first place?" Here AMP really channels its internal David Miller:

There are a few reasons for [Jewish organizations'] continued attempt at collaboration--all of which involve using the Muslim community to further their own political agendas. [emphasis added]

One of the core reasons that Zionist organizations continue to engage the Muslim community is that it provides these organizations with cover for their bigotry. When accused of Islamophobia for example, they can point to previous work with the Muslim community as evidence against those claims....

In addition to providing themselves with cover, Zionist organizations use these opportunities to infiltrate the Muslim community. Doing so serves several purposes. Firstly, it allows them to pursue a policy of “containment through other means.” By having to engage with these organizations, the Muslim community’s time and resources are deployed away from more serious efforts and from the real issues, in turn preventing the community from achieving its real priorities. Additionally, by generating a conversation around topics such as Israel’s right to exist or terrorism, they’re generating a conversation that was otherwise not present and infusing the community with an agenda item that was not there in the first place--further dividing and redistributing precious resources and muddling the narrative.

[Finally], infiltration of the Muslim community gives bad actors the opportunity to work towards defusing American Muslim commitment to Palestine....

It is notable that AMP explicitly commits to the notion that these efforts at engagement are always taken to be in bad faith, done for sinister agendas and ulterior motives masked by an insincere desire for dialogue or community-building. There are no good faith initiatives that falter in the face of an allegedly incommensurable value conflict; rather, it's you know the Jews -- they're only after that one thing. It is one thing, after all, to accurately observe that persons or groups accused of bigotry will often point to prior good acts they've done vis-à-vis the harmed group as apologia or mitigation. It is quite another to suggest that Jews cynically try to stockpile a resume of good deeds as a preemptive strike to justify future wrongdoing, and that warding function is the actual motivation.

If AMP really had the courage of its convictions here, they could accommodate the prospect that many if not most of these Jewish organizations have perfectly sincere desires to develop relationships; to listen, teach, and learn from one another. The argument would be that, while these motives are themselves noble and salutary, the importance of this issue is such that redlines have to be drawn even if the result is ostracizing people who really do seem nice enough -- an unfortunate consequence of an essential political program. But AMP cannot resist the temptation to speak in terms of monsters and ogres -- a crusade against evil that establishes by definition that anyone skewered must be an evildoer, and now we do return fully to Miller's "Zionist chicken soup" outlook on life -- shrieking to anyone who will listen that the most innocent of things masks terrible, nefarious purposes. One has to think here they might have self-sabotaged: the sort of person who is inclined to believe this histrionic accounting of what the Jews are after probably wasn't racing to collaborate with Jewish organizations to begin with; the presumed target audience (of Muslims who have been working with, or are considering working with, Jewish organizations) may be less likely to find this ghoulish description resonant. 

Of course, one ambition of a paper like this is to head off the sorts of intercommunal engagements that would conclusively demonstrate the presuppositions of this paper are absurd. It is easier to justify "don't talk to the Jews" if one believes the Jews only talk to infiltrate and manipulate, and it's easier to believe Jews only talk to infiltrate and manipulate if one doesn't talk to the Jews. Conveniently self-insulating, that. In fairness, it may be that certain sorts of positions (on Israel or Palestine or Jews or whomever) may become more difficult to hold after engagement. But my view has always been that, while there is no obligation to simply agree with members of outgroups on any given issue, a position that is so fragile that it cannot even survive an encounter with Palestinians or Israelis, or Jews or Muslims, is probably not a position worth defending to begin with.

It seems clear that one thing AMP is trying to do here is mirror (what it takes to be) the Jewish model on policing Israel discourse inside the community -- closing ranks around a unified voice that is tightly bordered around anti-Zionist norms, with dissidents tarred as threats to communal unity at best, sellouts at worst. Again, the reference to Hillel's standards of partnership is not just a rhetorical gotcha. That said, the paper stands out for its extreme, uncompromising approach to relations with the Jewish community -- one shot through with antisemitic stereotyping and ultimately, if it were successfully enforced, incompatible with just and equitable relationships between our communities. If AMP is replicating anyone here, it is not even Hillel, it's ZOA.

But we should ask: is AMP's attempt to freeze out coordination and cooperation between Muslims and (nearly all) Jews is a reflection of newfound power, or is a reflection of newfound weakness? That is, is the AMP paper the result of an emboldened pro-Palestine movement that now sees the realistic opportunity to go for broke and establish new rules and norms entrenching its influence and locking out opposition? Or is it reflective of anxiety over a corroding position, a rear-guard initiative to try and hold the line on norms of belief and conduct that they see collapsing?

I can see the case for either story. The "emboldened" story would hold that the positions on Israel and Palestine AMP wants to hold are, if not predominant, then are at least now mainstream enough such that one can present and defend them in unadulterated, uncompromising form. Elements of pro-Palestinian activism which for years were simply complete non-starters -- things like BDS, advocating dissolution of Israel outright, presenting all Israelis are illegitimate colonizers -- now are slowly transitioning out of the activist hardcore and into "regular" journals, political debates, and campaigns. Whereas in years past the groups like AMP were not strong enough to be able to credibly threaten dissidents and defectors with punishment (What would the threat be? Ostracism from a fringe organization with no significant political sway?), now there is both sufficient internal unity and sufficient external influence to be able to extract actual costs, and the AMP position paper is a formal attempt at declaring that these penalties will be paid. AMP's paper is, under this view, a sign of a movement coming into its own and transitioning from fringe to at least semi-mainstream, with a new ability and desire to flex its muscles (and, perhaps, a desire to turnabout what it sees as its own unjust exclusion and marginalization for many years at the hands of the American Jewish community).

The "anxiety" story, by contrast, suggests that AMP is responding to a perceived decay in norms of unity and uniformity around revanchist anti-Zionism that they are trying to shore up. Developments like the Abraham Accords are fostering increased curiosity amongst Muslims to engage and interact with Israel on a basis that, while certainly not uncritical, is perhaps less overtly antagonistic than AMP would like. A Muslim woman was the national head of J Street U; the Muslim Leadership Initiative continues apace. Even the Lara Alqasem case, while mostly presented (correctly) as an example of attempted Israeli state repression, was also a case where the former head of a campus SJP chapter decided to enroll in a graduate program at an Israeli university (BDS supporters, while not passing up the opportunity the denounce Israeli malfeasance, also were clear in their dismay at Alqasam's flouting of BDS mandates). Much of the rhetoric in the AMP paper -- appeals to unity, concerns about losing a united front, fretting of being distracted or taken into infighting -- is the language of a group which feels like it is losing rather than gaining ground. Under these circumstances, AMP's position can be seen as a response to threat -- an attempt to retrench weakening norms which no longer were deterring "bad behavior" (much in the same way Hillel's partnership guidelines were themselves responsive to a perceived deterioration in what was previously seen as uniform Jewish student support for Zionism). 

Although these two stories seem competitive with one another, there is a sense in which they both carry some truth. Attempts to impose ideological uniformity and crackdown on dissident voices are most common in periods of transition, as old orders and understandings fizzle but new ones have not yet been fully developed. While it is true that some mechanisms for squelching dissent requires some amount of power, it also is the case that groups on the fringe can often afford to maintain ideological conformity precisely because there are no opportunity costs to doing so. One cannot give up opportunities for power or influence that weren't available to begin with, and one cannot fracture a movement that is too small to develop significant cleavages. Any small group that starts to rise in influence experiences these growing pains; there is a freedom in being tiny and insignificant which contracts rapidly once true pluralism emerges (and you can play for true stakes on the table).

Social movements, I've long argued, "moderate as they mainstream". This is a tendency that immensely frustrates the original hard core of the movement which views this moderation as a form of selling out. It is simultaneously the case that the success of the pro-Palestine movement is why we'll see more folks like Jamaal Bowman in Congress sharply criticizing Israeli policy and floating conditioning foreign aid to Israel, and the case that, when people with Jamaal Bowman's views enter in Congress, they're more likely to do things like visit Israel or vote for Iron Dome right alongside sharply criticizing policy and floating conditioning aid. As we're seeing right now with Rep. Bowman, trying to resist the pairing of the former with the latter is why one sees such aggressive efforts to slam the door and draw the redline. But again, this dynamic trades on both increased power and increased weakness: power in that one's views matter (politically speaking) to mainstream actors in a way that they didn't in years past; weakness in that playing in the mainstream pool means that one is subjected to influences and pressures and relationships that previously were purely hypothetical.

I do not know enough about AMP to venture whether it is even capable of successfully promulgating norms of engagement within the American Muslim community that are akin to the (real or imagined) norms that have long existed within the American Jewish community. But the broad strokes of the move here are familiar. This sort of uncompromising call for ideological conformity is neither wholly coming from a position of strength nor of weakness. It is in a very real sense more extreme than what one would publicly see articulated in years past, but partially that stems from a panic that this sort of extremism is unsustainable -- it is a myth, a "happy" fantasy, to think that the relationship of American Jews to American Muslims can be redirected so it flows only through JVP. Ultimately, just as Hillel was never going to be able to successfully clamp down on Jews thinking more critically on Israel and on Palestine (no matter what its high-level machers might want), I suspect that AMP also will not actually be able to stem the tide of Jews and Muslims working together, learning together, dialoguing together, and, perhaps, coming to a new and jointly resonant vision of justice about Israel and Palestine together.

Dying, and Mourning, Politically

One of my greatest nightmares is that a loved one of mine will die "politically". What I mean by that is that their death will occur as part of something political or politicized. A terrorist attack would be a prime example; dying during a protest would be another. When a loved one dies, all one wants to do is grieve; and be surrounded by those who join and support you in your grief. But unlike dying in, say, a car accident, a political death doesn't allow that.  One cannot, truly, be left alone to grieve. One is forcibly kept in the center of an ongoing political maelstrom at the precise moment when one most deserves respite.

The most obvious horror is that some people might minimize or even justify your loved one's death, and they might do it to your face. Even if they don't directly target you, in a political death there will inevitably be people on the "other side", and they aren't going to just pack it in and call it quits because your loved one died (the thing about dying politically is that typically yours is not the first death attached to that politics). And then there are the people who are on your side, or who present themselves as such; they might try to recruit you as a symbol for a particular cause or banner. Suddenly, your tragedy is their debating point. If one does "want" to enlist in a given political project, the effort one must expend to make sure one does it right is mental energy one simply doesn't have -- which won't stop others from judging you; which wouldn't stop me from judging myself.  Or maybe one actually rejects the politics of those claiming to speak on your behalf; the act of repudiating those who are supposedly standing in solidarity with you would be delicate under the best of circumstances -- try to imagine balancing it in the absolute worst of circumstances.

It's a horrifying thought. And the worst part is that these terrible things the mourner is subjected to aren't, for the most part, even wrong. Political deaths are political, and the politics of political deaths don't pause because your loved one dies. While there are certain cruelties -- taunting, mocking, crowing -- that could be justly labeled beyond the pale (not that this labeling does much to deter anyone), it is not realistic for the world to stop thinking about the political issue your circle has just unwillingly punctuated. The world continues when a loved one dies a normal death too, but at least it typically has the decency to ignore you for awhile. In a political death, the world continues its path straight through you. I don't know how people handle it. It strikes me as one of the worst things I can possibly imagine.

Radicalizing on Guns

If you were to ask me the one issue I think I've "radicalized" on over the past few years, it'd probably be the issue of guns. A few years ago, my view on guns would be sort of a standard soft-liberal answer: I have no issue with guns per se, but we need common-sense regulation (assault weapons ban, background checks, and so on), and while I'd vote for any of these reforms if I were a member of Congress, it isn't an issue that would exercise me that much. Now, I find myself returning over and over to "guns are one of the central problems" holding up a host of important and salutary social reforms, such that if we don't tackle the scourge of widespread gun possession, we'll never get anywhere. So in that sense, I've radicalized on guns more so than on maybe any other issue. 

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think of guns as being a common "the issue" where people are being radicalized right now. Certainly, plenty of people have held very strong views on guns and gun control for a long time. But when I think of the issues where you see people talk about a really sharp swing in their views over the past few years from a starting position of "not really something I have strong feelings on", I think of things like "abolition" or "Israel/Palestine" or "anti-wokeism" or "anti-capitalism". Guns, for lack of a better way of putting it, seems to be socially speaking in a similar position to where it was several years ago -- or if there is movement, it's the typical jockeying for position around the margins.

How did I get here? I grew up in the era where school shootings were a major part of the public discourse (I was in middle school when Columbine happened), and that "discourse" was probably the main point of intersection between myself and guns as a kid. I did not grow up in an area where gun ownership was common (I don't think I knew of anyone who owned a gun), nor in an area where gun violence was a regular feature of life (though the "beltway sniper" rampage occurred while I was in high school); my personal experience with guns consisted entirely of firing one once while at sleepaway camp. As I recall my earliest views on guns, they were much as described above -- supportive of common-sense limits, but coupled with some amount of nervousness about meddling with part of the Bill of Rights.

Fast forward into adulthood, and for the most part guns remained marginal to my thinking. I read some books about the importance of armed self-defense to the civil rights movement, which I found interesting and modulated my thinking on the issue somewhat. I also came across the "Top Shot" reality TV competition series, which I viewed as a useful peek into what I took to be the healthy version of American gun culture. I still identified with a vague liberal gun control outlook, and indeed, as a lawyer, my pro bono practice actually centered around work for the Brady Campaign. I even applied for a job with the Brady Campaign -- but I withdrew after the interview, precisely because I felt that if you worked at Brady you should be a "true believer", and I didn't consider myself to be one on the matter of guns.

What changed? First, it was thinking through how to reduce the footprint of potentially-violent police interactions in our lives. For example, noticing how often violent police encounters occur in the aftermath of traffic stops, one might ask "why does the guy who gives tickets for turning right on red need to be armed and dangerous"? Recognizing that some officers may need to be armed for their jobs, could we not disarm our traffic cops?

Of course, part of the reason why traffic cops are armed as if they're infiltrating a violent drug cartel is because we've enlisted traffic policing into a convenient workaround to negate the Fourth Amendment -- it's not about traffic laws, it's about finding some ticky-tack rolled through a stop sign excuse to pull someone over so one can search them for drugs. But in part (and these are not unrelated), it's because we know there is a solid chance that the driver of the car is armed, and potentially the sort of armed man who thinks that turning-right-on-red is his God-given right as an American so don't tread on me, and police officers never want to be a situation where they are outgunned by a civilian. The proliferation of guns in the civilian population means that there needs to be a counter-proliferation in the police population.

And the knowledge that anyone one encounters could be armed with death-dealing firearms also predictably impacts how police officers treat ordinary policing encounters. Reading a steady drumbeat of qualified immunity decisions involving police violence, often (though not always) against unarmed victims, it becomes very clear how much both constitutional doctrine and policing policy operate under the shadow of a view where everyone around the police is a potential threat. This is the "warrior cop" mentality: A nervous twitch or a furtive glance has to be viewed as a potential precursor to drawing a gun, because, well, there are a lot of guns out there, and officers are only human. "What would you have them do?" But if that's the question, it's a question that presupposes a rider "What would you have them do in a country where guns are everywhere and anyone could be packing?" To the extent that rider is what generates the hapless and helpless inability to respond to the problem of "police keep killing people in situations where it was eminently avoidable", then the rider reflects the problem. The judicial system and much of our political reaction has not-altogether-unreasonable sympathy for the position well-meaning officers are placed in, even as that sympathy itself is demonstrative of a broader systemic failing.

This extends beyond policing. As Charles Pierce put it, the proliferation of firearms throughout the populace "transforms any mass event into a potential firefight." Guns being everywhere means any public outing now is potentially life-or-death -- all the more so ones that have controversy or heated passions. When Ta-Nehisi Coates said that he'd "rather die by shooting than live armed",  he was getting at the notion that in order to have a gun on you during an active shooting, you'd need to live armed. The gun doesn't just teleport into your hand in the moment of need, it needs to be on your person as you live your life -- including when you're playing with your baby, including when you're drunk, including when you're depressed, including when you're furious, including when you've just had an emotional argument with your ex. To have a gun on you during a shooting is to have a gun on you in those moments too. But when guns are everywhere, we all to some extent have to live that life -- or least, live on the far side of it. All of us now, when encountering the belligerent drunk at the bar or the depressed just-laid-off coworker or the furious protester or the incensed ex-boyfriend, now have to wonder -- on top of everything else -- "are they armed"? The mere act of living in public becomes a sort of haunted house -- we're all forced to eye each other warily and wonder if they're going to get us (which, for some of us, then becomes "so I better get them first").

And every time I look for a solution to this, I run into the brick wall of "it won't work unless we tackle the gun epidemic". Focus on those who actually engage in gun violence? Doesn't resolve the prospective anxiety of not knowing who is a potential threat, and doesn't have anything to do with the problem of extra-twitchy officers shooting at unarmed individuals. Disarming (non-specialized) police? It'll never happen in circumstances where police officers can reasonably say that they are liable to encounter armed individuals not just in specialized raids on violent cartels but in their ordinary beat work. Get rid of qualified immunity? As much as courts overuse rhetoric like cops being forced into "split-second decisions", some of this is a matter of symptom rather than cause; we know from too many experiences that juries have sympathy for officers who are reacting in the face of uncertainty in a world we know is awash in dangerous firearms. Criminal liability? Same problem: the panicked uncertainty of "anyone could be a danger" doesn't mesh well with guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; once the gun is in hand, it's too easy to imagine "wouldn't I panic in a similar fashion?" And maybe if there gun wasn't in hand, the panic would be the same, but the result wouldn't be.

The ultimate tragedy is that the sort of response that recognizable, non-monstrous humans make when feeling threatened -- not barbarians, not sociopaths, but people we can see ourselves in -- is one that, when one has a gun, often will result in people being maimed or killed. And the more guns there are, the tighter hair-trigger we'll all be on vis-à-vis feeling threatened. Guns -- both their actual presence, and the pervasive knowledge that they could always be present -- raise the stakes of confrontation to intolerable levels. It's a one-way ratchet, and there's no way down from it save by clearing guns off the street.

Hence my new radicalism. I don't need to believe that everyone who owns a gun is a secret militia member or yahoo or has some toxic masculinity fetish going on. And while it is abundantly clear that the humanizing sympathy towards persons who respond violently to feeling threatened is very much mediated by race, the core problem would persist even if it could be somehow deracialized (which, of course, it can't). The problem with guns is not that gun owners are not "law-abiding", and so it cannot be resolved by more stringently enforcing laws about guns. The problem is that, particularly in highly pluralized and polarized society, there is no way to preserve a functioning public square when everyone knows everyone else is capable of dealing death at a moment's notice; when every fight and every protest and every confrontation and every moment of negative emotion has immediate life-and-death stakes. That's not civilization, that's Hobbes' state of nature. Remember the old saw about "God made Man, Sam Colt made 'em equal?" Hobbes' state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short because it presents a state of affairs where all people are fundamentally equal in their ability to kill one another. Entering civilization was supposed to remove us from that hell. Instead, we've recreated it.

The Interesting Prospective Aftermath of Jamaal Bowman and the DSA

While I don't actually harbor ill-will towards Rep. Jamaal Bowman, I admit to feeling just a bit of schadenfreude when I heard he was facing expulsion from the DSA for the mortal sin of ... voting for Iron Dome and visiting Israel and Palestine. "I never thought the insignificant gnats would nip at my face ....!" indeed. Anyway, the DSA's national political committee is now saying that addressing Bowman's misconduct is its "highest priority" (a revealing choice of prioritization, to be sure), but it will seek to meet with Bowman's office before deciding on any sanctions.

I do admit to being intrigued at how this will play out. First thing's first: Bowman does not need (if he ever did) the DSA. He's safe in his district without them, they don't do much for him politically (indeed, I suspect that of all squad members, Bowman is the one whose base is least DSA-tied, with the possible exception of Ayanna Pressley). So the extent to which he decides to placate them is not going to be significantly dictated by political calculations -- it will be fairly thought of as reflective of his own beliefs, residual loyalty, affinity, and so on. In other words, while that doesn't mean that any response to DSA other than "f--- off" is inappropriate, if he decides to placate the DSA, it's not because he's been backed into a political corner.

In any event, there are broadly speaking three types of responses Bowman could give to DSA's demands here (albeit these are more a spectrum than hard-and-fast divides). He could fully give in, admitting error and committing to holding the DSA's hard line in the future, choosing the DSA and effectively jettisoning any relationship he'd have with the bulk of Jewish constituents and national Jewish organizations. He could try to walk some middle line -- throwing some placating bones towards DSA while not committing to shifting tangible positions on Israel in the future -- in an attempt to straddle both sides. Or he could stand his ground, defending his position and holding his own line about what the right progressive stance towards Israel and Palestine is, without much regard to making DSA happy.

The first move would be the most straightforward: the DSA would claim victory, Jewish organizations would be infuriated. It'd definitely be news, and it'd show the DSA has the ability to flex, but I'm not sure there'd be much interesting to say about this other than that it would communicate to any future politician who is DSA-curious that they will not be permitted to take anything but the most uncompromising position on Israel if they want to stay in the tent. Again, that'd be a serious development, but not one I have much to say about. I think it is fair to say that taking this step would permanently sabotage Bowman's relationship with the bulk of mainstream Jewish organizations, so there isn't a lot of use of gaming out potential responses here. The response would be "you're dead to us."

The second move is always the politician's temptation, but I doubt it would work here. Trying to stand in the middle will most likely satisfy neither side; he'd just make everyone angry at him. It's possible that DSA is looking for a face-saving way of keeping Bowman in the tent, but more likely than not any resolution that'd be seen as acceptable to them would be viewed as betrayal by the mainstream Jewish community, and vice versa.

So to some extent, I merge the second and third move together, insofar as I expect both would result in Bowman taking serious fire from the DSA (up to and including expulsion). Maybe he can form a support group with Liz Cheney. Again, I don't think Bowman needs the DSA to be politically successful, so this is not going to threaten his career in any way. But what I'm most interested in is how the rest of the "squad" would respond if the DSA turns its guns on Bowman. Do they stand up for him? Do they take public steps to affirm him as a valuable comrade? Or do they let him twist? It's never been fully clear the degree to which Squad members' relationship with the uncompromising left vanguard embodied by the contemporary DSA is one of true believers; this would give us an interesting glimpse into their headspace. Defending Bowman would suggest that they find DSA's antics to be obnoxious purity politics that is less ideologically helpful than it is a thorn in their side (it would also demonstrate loyalty to a friend); it wouldn't necessarily entail breaking with the DSA but it might prompt the DSA to take that step itself (or back down). If they stay silent, it would suggest they either are tacitly okay with this sort of hardball play from the left, and/or that they fear the backlash they'd endure from their far-left base for whom anti-Israel politics are ride-or-die issues.

It is often asserted that those inside these sorts of highly-regimented, orthodox political movements secretly hate the sense of compulsion -- the knowledge that if they step a toe out of line the penalty is ostracism and expulsion -- but they tolerate it out of fear that if they criticize, well, they'll be targeted for ostracism and expulsion. Sometimes that's true, though there are plenty of people who are probably fine with the constant hunt for heretics (at least until the gnats come for their face). In any event, right now the Squad is independently powerful enough that it could survive -- and survive without too much trouble -- attempts by the DSA to enforce this sort of iron-fisted discipline around Israel. The big question is whether they want to -- and that aftermath is one I'm interested in watching play out.

Antisemitism is a GOP Growth Opportunity in Minority Communities

When Marjorie Taylor Greene found herself approvingly quoting Nation of Islam conspiracy theories and noting the "common ground" between the GOP and the NoI, many laughed. Others pointed out that the synergy should not surprise: there really is a lot of common ground between the two. Conspiratorial antisemites should flock together. It is hardly a surprise that Louis Farrakhan has had his share of praise for Donald Trump; nor should it shock that one of Trump's most prominent Black advisors, Omarosa Manigault, tried to do outreach connected the Trump administration to Farrakhan. When one looks at the younger generation of "Blexit" style Black conservative leaders who are exciting the contemporary Republican Party, antisemitism is often part and parcel of their appeal. Omarosa was one example. Candace Owens -- she of the infamous apologia for Hitler -- is another. Mark Robinson, the new Lieutenant Governor of North Carolina and a rising star in the state GOP, has the Jewish community in a near-panic after a bevy of antisemitic (and otherwise bigoted remarks) which he has not retracted -- the most blatant being the claim that the movie Black Panther was the project of an "agnostic Jew" whose sole agenda was "to pull the shekels out of your Schvartze pockets." Similar trends have been observed among Latinos in Miami -- a crucial "battleground" community whose unexpectedly shift back to the right in 2016 and 2020 has kept that state in the Republican column.

An underappreciated reality is this: antisemitism is one of the most obvious avenues for the GOP to make inroads in communities of color. To be sure, this is all relative -- we're talking about how to move from 10% of the Black vote to 15% of the vote; the vast majority of Black Americans are not antisemitic and are not going to be swayed over to the GOP side of the ledger by antisemitic appeals. Still, the Hirsh/Royden paper measuring antisemitic attitudes in the American population specifically found a massive spike among young conservatives, and specifically young conservatives of color (Latinos and African-American). I've joked that this finding has "something for everyone" partaking in the debates over where antisemitism is most threatening (the left is happy it can blame the right, and the right is happy it can blame Black people). But their finding really does have significant implications for where the "low hanging fruit" is for Republicans trying to bolster their vote share in minority communities, and it is very likely the GOP will start explicitly chasing that vote sooner rather than later.  

The obvious truth about someone like Louis Farrakhan is that he is a conservative figure and his ideology is far more harmonious with the right than the left. The same is true for others in the Black community who share Farrakhan's broader outlook. This obvious truth has been obscured, partially by the idiosyncratic reasons that Farrakhan and his NoI have connections to some on the progressive left, partially because the brand of conservatism he represents (deep mistrust of public institutions, xenophobic fear of contamination by "outsiders", conspiratorial ravings about the true powers governing society), when racialized through a Black perspective, often present White people and America as the "institutions" or "outsiders" or "powers" that are indicted. But on the latter, particularly, as the GOP has gotten increasingly comfortable with overt and often violent anti-government rhetoric, there are more and more opportunities for overlap here. Railing against "the CIA" or "the FBI" or "the banks" or the "globalists" -- those words will sound very similar coming out of either camp, and will likewise resonate similarly no matter who is speaking them. Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing nothing more than recognizing what was already before her eyes. And to the extent that attacks on "Whites" seems to be an insurmountable hurdle, well, redirecting those attacks onto the Jews is a prime opportunity for "compromise" that can satisfy both parties (Eric Ward's seminal "skin in the game" article expressly identified this in exploring how he, as a Black man, could enter far-right spaces -- the presumed common ground and foundation for alliance that could unify Black Americans and the far-right was explicitly that of antisemitism).

Again, Farrakhan is not representative here -- this post is not about how the GOP will win majorities of the Black community. I'm just saying that, however large this sector is in the Black community, it is a sector that is ripe for  As the GOP gets more explicitly captured by folks like Marjorie Taylor Green, these commonalities are going to become more apparent and become more tempting to leverage. And anyone who thinks that genuine concern or fair-feeling for Jews is going to stop Republican strategists from pushing that button is out to lunch. It is, simply put, too tempting a target. The overlap is already present, the votes are there to be had, and the Republican Party has no scruples to speak of when it comes to converting hateful rabble-rousing into electoral success.

The "Rigorous" Case Against Teaching More Students More Math

California is in the process of updating its statewide framework for Mathematics education, and unsurprisingly there is controversy -- controversy that will strike many observers as having striking similarities to the recent flare-ups about "ethnic studies" in the state. Monica Osborne in Newsweek has a concise summary of the position of opponents (largely summarizing the objections made in this open letter). There are the de rigueur drive-bys against the curriculum becoming too "political" and non-"neutral", to the point at which it is allegedly not even "mathematics" anymore -- I actually addressed some of those objections in a prior post. But the main objection is claiming that the new math framework abolishes (or at least sharply discourages) "accelerated" or "advanced" math classes, doing disservice to students who genuinely are "gifted" in a misguided nod towards "equity".

One thing I will say is that the open letter (perhaps learning from the Ethnic Studies debacle, where a refusal to do basic citation led to outright fabrications being bandied about by curriculum opponents) does everyone the helpful service of citing its sources so one can see where, exactly, the Mathematics Framework allegedly does say the things its critics contend it is saying. It isn't perfect -- for example, the letter claims that the Framework "[e]ncourages keeping all students together in the same math program until the 11th grade and argues that offering differentiated programs causes student 'fragility' and racial animosity (Ch. 1, p. 15)"; but I wasn't able to find either the "keeping all students together" claim or the "racial animosity" claim on that page (as for the "fragility" point, which was mentioned, it is interesting to note that -- perhaps contrary to one's intuition reading that word out of context -- the claimed "fragility" is that of the gifted students who come to "fear times of struggle in case they lose the label"). Nonetheless, it is tremendously helpful in assessing these claims that they are consciously linked to particular portions of the draft framework. Kudos for that!

Having said that, what do we make of how the new framework addresses issues like "tracking" and "giftedness" and other like practices? To some extent, there seems to be the usual "talking past one another" that one finds in controversies such as this; the State Board explicitly denies that the new framework removes programming to serve "gifted" students, or eliminates "accelerated" classes. But clearly they are attempting to make some alterations that are designed -- I think it is fair to say -- to de-emphasize the degree to which math education is sharply divided between the naturally-gifted "haves" and the hapless "have-nots". Are those modifications salutary? Do they underserve brilliant minds? Or are they increasing access to rigorous mathematical education for all students?

I want to digress for a moment to talk about my own journey through mathematics education. I am not, to be clear, a math teacher (though I am a teacher, and so to that extent have practitioner-level experience with pedagogy in general). I also never considered myself, and to this day do not consider myself, "good at math" (a label which to some extent makes this debate more interesting to me). This is so even though under any objective metric I was actually very good at math -- I got a 720 on my math SAT and a 4 on my AP Calculus exam. That's quite good, especially for someone who always considered himself "bad at math"!

My recollection of how math education occurred at my (high-performing, suburban public) school is that between sixth and seventh grade students made a single, fateful choice. They could enroll in advanced math -- that would put them on track to take advanced calculus (multi-variable calculus) by twelfth grade. They could enroll in honors math -- that would put them on track to take regular calculus in twelfth grade. Or they could enroll in some form of "basic" or "remedial" math, in which case they would not be on track to take calculus at all.

Notice that this single choice at age 12 basically laid out the entirety of one's mathematical education for the next six years. There was essentially no moving up the ladder once one made the choice (there was theoretically the possibility of falling down the ladder, although that was a terrifying prospect that kept many a "gifted" student awake cramming at night). For my part, I chose the middle ("honors") route -- I didn't think of myself as "good at math", so the top path wasn't for me, but I was a conscientious student, so I wasn't going to go the bottom route either. And from that point forward, my path was set; and to a large extent so was my self-identity vis-a-vis math. Despite the fact that I objectively was perfectly capable of doing well at math (again, check those SAT and AP scores), I always viewed myself as not a math guy -- the people who were taking the advanced classes; they were the ones good at math. As someone who tends to think very verbally, I never connected with math, never fully saw its usefulness to someone like me and with my interests.

This persisted even after I graduated high school. Carleton had a math/science distribution requirement, which I skirted as best I could with classes like "Science and Society" or "Conservation Biology" (which basically was a semester of taking pleasant hikes through nature). The political science department did require one to take a statistical methods sequence, which I satisfied by taking (1) the lowest level stats class the school offered and then (2) a "methods" class where I resolutely avoided doing any of the hard statistical analysis by deliberately choosing a research question where I found no correlation between my variables (so no need for robustness checks). When I got to graduate school, there was no way in hell I was going to touch the methods classes (which were not required for political theorists) -- that was way to advanced for little ol' anti-math me. I can't quite say I "regret" not taking them -- even now, the thought of it fills me with dread -- but I can say that lacking the ability to conduct independent empirical research is probably the biggest gap in my scholarly toolset dividing the sorts of scholarship I'm interested in doing from that which I'm capable of doing, and I do regret that.

Thinking back on it, it is simply insane that this entire mathematical-education arc was more or less set in stone via a single decision made when I was twelve. That's nuts! All the more nuts since it ended up becoming quite obvious that I was perfectly capable of learning advanced math; the choice made then did not map onto any "natural" capacity I did or did not have. I can fully accept that some other students at twelve might have had more fire in the belly for math than I did at the time, and that in turn could suggest different styles of teaching math to them than would have been appropriate for me. But to lock either of us into a particular rigid track at that age, telling us "you will go exactly this high, and no further" (and "you can go lower, but only if you cop to being a disgraceful failure") seems absolutely absurd.

It was remembering that personal trajectory that informed my read on what California is proposing. The core of their argument is, more or less, "all or nearly all students are capable of learning high-level math, and so making decisions in middle school that lock students in or out of taking high-level math classes at the end of high school is both unnecessary and foolish". Instead, we should restructure math education so that there are many different pathways that offer the opportunity for more students to end up enrolled in high-level math courses -- the choice you make at twelve shouldn't be your destiny. And likewise, we should recognize that "calculus" is not the only example of "high-level" math -- it is one, but not the only one. The current system is defined by the "race to calculus", where success is defined solely by whether and how fast one gets to the calculus class of the math sequence. This was certainly my experience -- the advanced students got there in 11th grade (then took an extra class of advanced calculus senior year), the middle group I was in get there in 12th grade, and the bottom group doesn't get there at all and is thus looked down upon. We actually had an AP Statistics class offered as well, but I honestly do not recall who even took it -- it was definitely seen as the "lesser" math class, even though in retrospect a strong knowledge of statistics would have been far more useful to me than the calculus class I did take. But it did not lie on the rigid trajectory of the math sequence, which meant it was implicitly downgraded as the off-ramp for the failures.

Math education, even more so than other disciplines, is addicted to the "cult of the genius", where we can identify relatively early on certain students as naturally gifted and others as hapless drones, and sort them into appropriate tracks based on those assessments. The California Framework suggests that this cult, like many cults, is not backed by empirical evidence -- one needn't be a gifted genius to learn high-level math, and working on the assumption that one does need to be such a genius means providing decidedly suboptimal math education to the median California student. We could be successfully teaching more students more math, but we don't because we somehow decided that we can sort the geniuses from the worker bees at the tweenage years and after that we just let nature take its course. It is unsurprising that these gut-check instincts about who is a "genius" track the usual lines of social hierarchy and stereotyping, but that is just the tip of the problematic iceberg.

The reformulation proposed by the California framework is not to prohibit strong, enthusiastic math students from being able to pursue their interests. For those students, it suggests that optimal math education is not defined by racing them to calculus as soon as possible, but may entail giving them more opportunities to explore more elements of math in greater depth or rigor. Moreover, by broadening the pathway that leads to high-level math, we reduce the sometimes overwhelming pressure that falls upon these student where if they struggle anywhere they are a failure and have sacrificed their future. It stands to reason that there will be plenty of "gifted" students for whom algebra clicks easily and for whom geometry is a nightmare. The status quo assumes that anyone who happens to be good at that type of math that is prevalent in grade seven will likewise sail through all the other math concepts at a similar pace. It would be better if we recognized that all students likely will have some parts of math they find easy or which naturally connects (or which they just enjoy more), and other areas they find difficult and need more time on (or just find profoundly uninteresting), and that acknowledging the latter does not come at the cost of giving up one's chance to take upper level courses. The rigidity of the current framework doesn't serve "advanced" students even on its own terms. It locks them into a rat race with only one destination and exceptionally high stakes for failure. It is not a good thing that strong math students at my high school essentially could not take AP Statistics even if that interested them more than AP Calculus.

But the bigger reform being pitched is that, for the average California student, the math sequence being offered isn't rigorous enough. It knocks too many students off the path of taking advanced math classes at far too early a point. Pluralizing the sequence of math classes and making it so that many students -- not just those identified as "stars" as tweens -- are in position to take advanced coursework in the field is a step towards stronger math education. It is step towards teaching more students more math at a higher level -- an unambiguously good thing, as far as I'm concerned.

In this, Osborne's reference to the opportunities wealthier families have to place their children in bespoke math "enrichment" programs actually proves the opposite of her point. It is unlikely, after all, that all or even most of the students who enroll in such programs are "geniuses". But that's the point -- they don't have to be: give them access to advanced programming, and they're perfectly capable of learning the material, because this education is not the province of geniuses but of ordinary students. The lesson California draws from those programs is that most of their students, "genius"-labeled or no, can and should have access to strong, rigorous mathematical education. So they should reorient their math education away from rigid, imprecise sorting at young ages, and instead think in terms of providing a plurality of pathways to get as many students as possible to advanced classes. Rich parents get this already; they can provide their kids with advanced instruction regardless of how they're labeled as tweens. This is powerful evidence that the rest of the public school system should follow suit.

What may be true is that California is trying to at least diminish the obvious hierarchy within math, where we can say the students who took multi-variable calculus their senior year are better than the those who only took AB calculus are better than those who didn't take calculus at all (recall my high school, where taking AP Statistics was a sure mark of being a lesser student). Reorienting the math curriculum so that many different end points (calculus, statistics, formal modeling, and so on) are all rigorous and robust means consciously trying to blur hierarchical lines that say one of these ends is "higher" than the others. If the most important part of math education is providing for status-differentiation -- being crystal clear about who are the elite students and who are the normies -- then this is a loss. It is, we should be clear, a very different loss from depriving "gifted" students of the opportunity to learn advanced math -- they're still learning it, they if anything have more choices on exactly what arena of advanced math they want to concentrate on, but they are not simply by virtue of staying on the top rung of the ladder they climbed at age twelve automatically viewed as superior math students to their peers. There is good ground to believe that it is that loss --the status loss, not the educational loss -- which is what's motivating much of the anger at the reform (how can I guarantee I'll get into Stanford unless everyone knows I'm better than my classmates who weren't imprecisely identified as math geniuses as a tween?). 

But California is making a conscious decision to trade having clear ordinal hierarchical ranking for giving more students more rigorous math instruction than they have now. That, to me, sounds like a good trade. And to the extent it isn't -- the problem isn't that the new curriculum lacks rigor or ambition, or tries to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. It is because it is sincerely committed to doing more for more students that the framework is generating this animosity.