The Redemption of Noa Argamani

The Israeli military announced today that it had successfully rescued four hostages from Hamas captivity, including Noa Argamani. Argamani was a particularly high-profile hostage because video of her abduction was one of the first pieces of footage Hamas released after October 7, showing her pleading with her captors "don't kill me!" as she was taken from the Nova music festival massacre and separated from her boyfriend (whose whereabouts remain unknown).

The Israeli operation which freed Argamani and her compatriots also reportedly killed approximately two hundred Palestinians, according to Hamas figures. These, as always, do not distinguish between civilian and military casualties; we can safely assume there is plenty of both (it is apparent that there was a significant military presence guarding the hostages).

Two days after October 7, I quoted Noa's father Jacob saying the following:

Let us make peace with our neighbors, in any way possible. I want there to be peace; I want my daughter to come back. Enough with the wars. They too have casualties, they too have captives, and they have mothers who weep. We are two peoples to one Father. Let’s make real peace.

That quote came at the bottom of a post titled "What Will You Say 'No' To?" It was a warning to Israel supporters that they needed to decide, then and there, what sort of response or retaliation would not be justified in the wake of Hamas' attack, citing specifically Yoav Gallant's threat to starve out Gaza's population. There's plenty that Israel justifiably could do in response to Hamas' attack, but what would we not support Israel doing? What is too far? What must be taken off the table?

Was it not unfair to level that demand mere days after October 7? Maybe it was, though if Jacob Argamani could think along the above lines, then I'd argue so could anyone. Unfair or not, however, I said that we had to think about those questions then, because 

we just witnessed in real-time a catastrophic failure to grapple seriously with this question on the part of those who've pledge to stand with Palestinians and Palestine. Suddenly forced to decide whether, in the wake of occupation and besiegement, a Palestinian response of "a systemic campaign of house-to-house kidnappings, rapes, and executions" is a valid one, we saw far, far too many individuals unable to say "no" (or at least, say it with any level of decisiveness). This failure stems directly from the tempting broth that assures us that, if the provocation is severe enough and the injury severe enough, no amount of "response" could ever be disproportionate. And so we see that, if you refuse to let yourself think that anything could be "too far", there's no end to the depths of hell you may find yourself apologizing for.

Eight months later, that post is deeply embittering to read. None of this had to happen. Most obviously, October 7 didn't have to happen and the hostages didn't need to be taken. Yet even now, writers like Adam Shatz cannot help themselves in describing the "exuberance" over October 7 as a "prison breakout," "a daring assault on Israeli bases that devolved into hideous massacres" (it did not "devolve" into anything; the sowing of terror and death amongst Israel's civilian population was the primary tactical goal of the operation -- there is essentially no evidence that the primary or even significant targets of Hamas' operation were military bases). Likewise, the warnings to the Israelis that their righteous fury over October 7 did not license the imposition of an indiscriminate siege and turning the entire Gaza Strip into a free-fire zone fell on deaf ears, and now the entire nation is on trial for genocide.

Nobody paid heed, and nobody has seemed to have learned anything. In the months that followed October 7, there were innumerable opportunities to turn off this path, with plenty of blame to go around for why we didn't, but the main culprit is simple: both Israel and Hamas want this war to keep going. Obviously there are some conditions where they'll accept peace; but those conditions are quite far apart, and so for the most part they're both happy to keep the war going rather than deal with the fallout of an actual deal. 

So now tens of thousands of people are dead, and for what? Noa Argamani is home, but Noa Argamani started at home! Noa Argamani being home was the world on October 6! We're back to where we began, except with unfathomable death and destruction and trauma for uncountable numbers of people.

I'm happy and relieved and overjoyed that Noa Argamani has returned home -- the redemption of Noa Argamani is an unqualified and unadulterated good. But that joy is tempered by the fact that none of this had to happen at all. We could have lived in a different world.

A Jewish Studies Purge at UC-Irvine?

There's a brewing controversy bubbling up at UC-Irvine, where Jewish students are protesting the decision to terminate the contract of a popular lecturer who had been teaching a class on Jewish Texts under the auspices of the campus' Center for Jewish Studies. The lecturer, Daniel Levine, is a Rabbi affiliated with the campus Hillel chapter. There are two open letters currently circulating in support of Levine and condemning his termination, you can read them here and here.

There are a lot of moving parts here, and situations like this almost always have lots of little nooks and nuances that can be hard for an outsider like myself to spot. But here's my best attempt to summarize what appears to be going on.

The Center for Jewish Studies is not an independent department at Irvine. It is run as a minor out of Irvine's humanities division and is specifically overseen by the Department of History. Levine is not a permanent member of the faculty, but he was by all accounts a popular teacher who was well-liked and respected by the campus' Jewish community. The official rationale for his non-renewal is that two new tenure-track hires with interests in Jewish Studies mean that his course can be taken over by permanent faculty members, offered every other year. The Jewish students counter that the new faculty members' specific subject-matter expertise does not seem tailored to the Jewish Texts course; further, they believe that Rabbi Levine would have been able to maintain teaching the class on a yearly (rather than biannual) basis.

But there's a bigger issue lurking. Among the demands of UC-Irvine pro-Palestine protesters has been for the university to cut ties with "Zionist" organizations and individuals. The chair of Irvine's history department, Susan Morrissey, is part of the Faculty for Justice in Palestine group which has endorsed these demands. The suspicion amongst the Jewish students is that Rabbi Levine was ousted from his position as a backdoor means of instantiating these demands. This fear is amplified by the fact that both of the new hires appear to be, at the very least, very sharp critics of Israel -- one was a leader of Jewish Voice for Peace at UCLA, and both are signatories to a letter written three weeks after the October 7 attack demanding (among other things) "the end of all U.S. funding to Israel immediately." In essence, the students believe that Morrissey effectively instituted a purge -- replacing a Jewish Studies lecturer who was embedded in the campus Jewish community but (or perhaps, and therefore) was tainted by his association with Hillel and "Zionism" with alternatives who would be less effective in serving the Jewish community (and the community of students interested in the Jewish Studies minor) but were more ideologically congenial and aligned with the political demands of Prof. Morrissey and the pro-Palestine protesters.

None of the above is incontestable. The public explanations from the powers-that-be at Irvine might be entirely on the level. It is far from uncommon that the sorts of considerations that drive faculty hiring and teaching assignments (particularly at a large research university) do not align with what undergraduates believe or expect should motivate who ends up in the classroom. Other than the tidbits identified above, I have no specific knowledge regarding either of the two new tenure-track hires at Irvine; they may be able to cover Levine's class with aplomb. And certainly, there is nothing intrinsically odd about replacing an external part-time lecturer with a tenure-line faculty where possible.

Nonetheless, it is abundantly clear that the Jewish Studies contingent at Irvine has ample reason for both mistrust and discontent. From their vantage, they're losing a great teacher and community member with inadequate replacement, for reasons that seem inscrutable, in a context where their very discipline and their broader standing in the Irvine community seem to be threatened by powerful forces, including the very campus leaders who made the decision at issue here. When a powerful university actor says they support doing a thing (here, cutting ties with the "Zionists"), and then that actor does something that is to say the least compatible with that thing (terminating Levine's appointment), observers are entitled to infer that the thing happened for the reasons that the actor publicly articulated. That isn't dispositive, but its certainly probative, and nobody can or should fault the students for not buying that Morrissey is acting for neutral and purely professional reasons.

In essence, Morrissey put herself in a position where she lost the presumption of trust that might normally accord to decisionmakers in her role. No matter what the "truth" is (which may be unknowable), we have a situation where deep damage has been done to the Jewish Studies minor and the relationship between its overseers and the community it purports to serve. It is clear that, to say the least, the Jewish Studies community does not feel as if the powers-that-be who made the decision to terminate Levine and who are guiding the new direction of the Jewish Studies minor are receptive and responsive to the views of the most-affected stakeholders (maybe if they occupied someone's office? But alas, the hypocrisy trap....).

In any event, at minimum, the Jewish Studies students and the broader Jewish community at Irvine are entitled to more receptivity from Professor Morrissey; to believe that her orientation towards them is not one of hostility and that she views them as a stakeholder to be engaged with, not an obstacle to be overcome. If she cannot restore that relationship of trust, then it may indeed be better if the Center for Jewish Studies be moved into a different portfolio, with leadership that can do the job that she cannot.

The Exceptions Aren't Exceptional, They're Just Bad

A few days ago, an academic journal run out of the University of Minnesota apologized after informing a would-be contributor from Israel that it was refusing to consider submissions from scholars affiliated with Israeli universities.

Today, the Columbia Law Review website is down, reportedly due to the publication of an article by a Palestinian legal scholar on the "Nakba" that occurred in the wake of and as part of Israel's war of independence and its establishment as an independent state. We're still getting details, but the word is that the law review's board of directors (comprised of faculty and alumni) sought to overrule student editors who wished to publish the piece and, failing to do so, took down the website.

I've really found valuable and thoughtful Paul Horwitz's comments on cases like this, and so too here. In particular, I agree with him that it's not right to refer to the Columbia incident as part of a Palestine "exception" to free speech or academic freedom, not because it isn't a breach of academic freedom norms (it certainly seems to be), but because it isn't especially exceptional -- whether we're focused narrowly on Israel and Palestine (as the Minnesota case, above, illustrates) or more broadly on "controversial" topics and issue areas.

I am certainly disturbed by the action of the CLR leadership in simply eliminating the entire article, along with the website, even if it is eventually published. The notion that there is a unique "Palestinian exception" to free speech norms or academic freedom is absurd, in light of numerous other occasions on which writers, editors, publishers, and others have engaged in censorship and self-censorship on numerous hot-button subjects over the years. But I am hardly comforted by the possibility that it is one more exception. And it would be no more comforting if the exception were better seen as a general "controversial subject" exception.

It is quite clear that speech that is harshly critical of Israel quite regularly faces sanction and obstruction that does not comport with free speech or academic freedom norms. But that's not an exception, that's an instantiation of a larger part that free speech and academic freedom norms have many fair-weather friends and so find themselves under serious pressure on the regular. This isn't to say that they don't do important work -- they do, and a lot of speech that probably would be suppressed ends up being permitted because these free speech principles do carry a lot of weight. But the notion that they are impenetrable juggernauts who only rarely and idiosyncratically find themselves challenged is just not true. One reason I try to defend these norms so vigorously is precisely because I recognize that their fragility is the norm, not the exception.

In general, I think I have a more positive outlook towards student-edited law journals than Paul does, and so generally take a dim view of any sort of faculty or administrative meddling in journal affairs (the notion that a faculty or alumni-comprised committee has any role beyond, perhaps, the most soft-touch advisory capacity, in determining what articles the Columbia Law Review does or doesn't publish is absurd to me). So it should come as no surprise that I also strongly agree with Paul that even if there were reasons to think that the student editors acted in a fashion that departed from their own normal rules or processes in accepting this article (which may or may not be true), any interventions that hypothetically might have been justified cannot take the form of an ad hoc, last minute decision to pull the piece from publication altogether.

Indeed, assuming that this article is slated to be part of CLR's print volume, I'm not sure what the board of director's end game is here -- are they going to pulp the entire issue? Even if the article is bad, wrong-headed, offensive (and I haven't read it, so it may be none or all of these things), I see no reason why any of those (for better or worse not especially exceptional) sins cannot be addressed via the normal mechanisms of academic inquiry and response. Prior restraint is not the right move. And if the Columbia board did what it is alleged to have done here, it is shameful and outrageous -- no less so if it is not "exceptional".

UPDATE: The Columbia Law Review board has issued a statement explaining why it took down the website. On my read, nothing they say justifies the decision. The only thing that's potentially eyebrow-raising is the claim that the piece was not selected via the normal article-selection process. But this probably (though not certainly) has less than meets the eye: it is hardly unheard of for a law review to solicit a piece outside the normal article-selection channels, which easily could be (but really shouldn't be) called a departure from the "usual processes of review or selection." For example, when I was a law review editor most pieces went through the articles committee (which I was on), but our book review editor had essentially carte blanche authority to solicit book reviews on his or her own initiative. While there might be some valid basis for complaint if this article was unusually sequestered from (actual, extant) norms and practices of how articles move through the CLR process, such problems do not to my mind justify the extraordinary remedy of taking down the website. The short version is that even if (and this not clear) there are valid process-based objections to what (some members) of the Columbia Law Review did here, that does not mean that taking down the website is an appropriate remedy. As Alexandra Lahav wrote in a thoughtful thread, sometimes events transpire such that there just isn't a way to "preserve the status quo ex ante."

One thing that hasn't been mentioned but which I think may be lurking in the background here is the recently announced boycott of Columbia University graduates by a suite of right-wing judges who've made very clear their intention to inflict collective punishment on the Columbia community for (real or perceived) bad behavior by particular actors. Threats like this understandably could make members of the Columbia Law Review who were not part of (and were not given the opportunity to be part of) the publication decision especially sensitive -- they have reasonable basis to fear they will be held responsible and retaliated against for choices they did not make and might not have even been aware of. I'm sympathetic to those students, but ultimately, the people who have put them in that position are the judges and other actors who have decided to endorse indiscriminate academic blackballing as a political tactic. As much as these students are being put in an unfair position -- and they are -- the board should not have cowered in the face of this blackmail. The principles of academic freedom are too important to be allowed to yield even in the face of a credible threat of external retaliation -- this is true when the boycotters are right-wingers furious about pro-Palestinian advocacy, and it's true when the boycotters are left-wingers livid about Israeli inclusion.

Contested Presuppositions in Classroom Assignments

This is a pedagogy question for my fellow professors.

While not necessarily completely unavoidable, an essay prompt will often encode certain presuppositions into a writing assignment. In a class on the Holocaust, an assignment asking students to "explain how Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews" builds in an assumption that Nazi propaganda did dehumanize Jews (we take that it did for granted, and ask only for the process to be explained).

That example is, I think reasonably innocuous -- few (I think) would view such an essay prompt to be out-of-bounds even if we could imagine a perhaps still-broader question ("evaluate the degree to which Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews" -- but query whether that question actually necessarily will yield the same pedagogical results as the original). 

But I've written before on the dangerous power of presuppositions, and we can of course imagine other encoded presuppositions that are considerably more problematic. Consider in an American politics class: "Explain how the election of Donald Trump in 2016 damaged the American political fabric and weakened our constitutional democracy." This, I think, would be an inappropriate essay prompt (even though I happen to agree with the encoded presuppositions: Trump's election did damage our nation's political fabric and did weaken our constitutional democracy). The presuppositions are ones under active political dispute; it feels unfair and biased to structure the assignment so as to prevent (or at least significantly obstruct) a student from contesting the premises. And this isn't necessarily just a problem with individual assignments either -- entire classes can struggle with what they presuppose.

One might think the answer is that teachers should try to avoid contested presuppositions altogether. As it happens, my assignments I think do largely (albeit unintentionally) avoid this problem: my large class exams are issue-spotters based on invented fact patterns, and my seminar writing assignments are extremely open-ended research and reaction papers. Nonetheless, I recognize that for many teachers and classes there is value in being more specific, and stipulating certain presuppositions can be necessary as a means of diving deeper into a given domain. Returning to our Holocaust class, one can absolutely see the value of an assignment like this: 

"Nazi Party propaganda played an important role in dehumanizing Jews in the German imagination. Read the attached Der Sturmer article, identify three dehumanizing tropes it employs, and explain why they may have been effective in successfully dehumanizing German Jews."

Again, this assignment builds in a host of presuppositions -- that Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews in general, that this particular article did so as well (in at least three different ways) -- and it somewhat demands that students "pick a side" (by making the arguments why the examples were effective as tools of dehumanization). But while I can see the importance of permitting any of these presuppositions to be contested, I also see the pedagogical value of bracketing that contest and asking students to make more specific appraisals.

The question, then, is where one draws the line. What makes this assignment pedagogically valid (which I think it is), whereas the "Trump damaged America" one pedagogically suspect (which I also think it is)? Surely, it is not a valid defense of the Trump assignment to say "sure, I can see the value of contesting whether Trump in fact damaged the republic, but here we're going to bracket that debate and just stipulate that he did so we can dive into the mechanisms in more detail."

My sense is that while even contested presuppositions cannot be taken off the table entirely, as professors we have a professional responsibility to be extremely judicious in how we use them, because they're incredibly tempting vectors to insert our own political judgments under the guise of pedagogical depth. That sort of standard ("be extremely judicious") is one I simultaneously love and hate: I dislike it because it's vague and doesn't provide guidance, but I like it because it emphasizes that there isn't any substitute for actually trying to be virtuous and contain our bad impulses -- the lack of a hard rule means we're the guardrail against a political free-for-all. 

But curious for input from my fellow profs on this. Is this something you've thought about?

(I was inspired to think on this by this story of a DePaul adjunct who was removed from her microbiology teaching position after offering an optional assignment where students were asked, in the context of Israel's attack on Rafah, to "communicate the impacts of genocide on human biology, and the creation of a decolonized future that promotes liberation and resists systemic oppression," including "describ[ing] the specific ways in which institutions are complicit or actively engaged in supporting ethnic cleansing/genocide." The assignment prompt contains a host of contested presuppositions -- and note again that "contested" doesn't mean "false", see my Trump example -- though there arguably were other issues as well involving disciplinary scope. But in any event, I deliberately wrote this post to try and abstract from that particular incident and see if there were more general intuitions we might be able to bring to the table on questions like this.)

Talking Antisemitism (and Islamophobia) in Eugene

Earlier this week, I traveled down to Eugene to give two talks (one for students and the general public, the other for faculty and staff) on Islamophobia and antisemitism with Hussein Ibish.

I don't have any truly wild stories to report. We did have one disruption (to which I remarked "we beat the spread!") -- for those of you keeping score, it was a "pro-Israel" disruption -- but he was escorted out with relatively little incident. But overall, the audiences seemed engaged and happy to have us. I had two students separately stop me on the street well after the event was over to say how much they appreciated the event, one of whom was a leader of the campus chapter of J Street U, which was responsible for a very thoughtful letter regarding issues related to the campus encampment and Israel/Palestine questions more broadly that I encourage you to read.

Speaking of which, the university reached an agreement with protesters to disband the encampment while we were out at dinner. One of the administrators involved in the negotiations was on a text chain dealing with some of the issues while we ate! Living history, indeed.

All that said, the most exciting that happened was probably seeing if my Nissan Leaf could travel from Portland to Eugene on a single charge (answer: yes, but we were at 6% when we arrived at the hotel and 2% when we got home). I also started to come down with a cold on the second day (which I'm only just starting to pull out of now), so that was unpleasant. But for the most part, this felt like a successful event in front of a receptive audience that was happy to hear people try to tackle difficult issues about antisemitism and Islamophobia with rigor and care. I'm grateful to the University of Oregon community for having us, and I hope that they found it to be as fruitful and productive as I did.

Gerrymandering as Constitutional Entitlement

I haven't had the chance to read the Supreme Court's decision today in Alexander v. South Carolina, where the 6-3 Republican majority radically circumscribed the ability to bring racial gerrymandering claims in circumstances where (as often will be the case) there is significant overlap between racial and partisan gerrymandering. I was struck, however, by Nicholas Stephanopolous' analysis which suggests the Court's new rule is functionally that a racial gerrymandering plaintiff must "submit an alternative map showing how the state could maintain its plan’s current partisan balance while fixing the alleged racial gerrymandering," In other words, if an alleged racial gerrymander results in a 6-1 GOP/Democratic House map, plaintiffs must show that there is an non-racially gerrymandered map that also yields that same partisan split.

Alexander is the latest case to emerge out of the gibberish that is Rucho, and the impossibility of disentangling racial gerrymandering (nominally unconstitutional) from partisan gerrymandering (effectively permissible) under conditions of extreme racial polarization. Where there is near-complete overlap between "Black voters" and "Democratic voters", how does one decide if a congressional map which packs all the Black/Democratic voters into a single misshapen district is a "racial" or a "partisan" gerrymander? 

The logic behind the majority position in Alexander is that if one can't create a map that yields the same partisan end goal as the map being challenged, that suggests that the status quo map was chosen not for racial reasons, but rather because it better effectuated the goal of partisan gerrymandering that would otherwise be impossible to achieve. "We didn't draw the districts this way because it drew all the Black voters into a single district; we drew them this way because it was the only way to get the desired political slant."

But this gets things exactly backwards. Even assuming that partisan gerrymandering is constitutional (and it's worth noting that technically, Rucho doesn't say that -- it says it is a political gerrymandering claims are non-justiciable political questions, which is not the same thing), it is not a constitutional requirement that states must be allowed to do it under any circumstance. The more natural conclusion is that if you can't successfully engage in a partisan gerrymander without engaging in racial gerrymandering, then sorry, you don't get to partisan gerrymander (or at least don't get to do so to the same extent). The rule against racial gerrymandering places a limit on the ability to partisan gerrymander.

The majority's rule, by contrast, treats partisan gerrymandering as a constitutional entitlement. Any constitutional rule or principle which disenables a state from engaging in partisan gerrymandering to the fullest extent it desires must yield. Otherwise clearly impermissible and unconstitutional conduct becomes licit if it is the only way a state can implement its God-given right to gerrymander.

This is not the first time the Court has made this mistake. I flagged a similar error in the Court's Glossip opinion relating to Eighth Amendment challenges to state execution protocols. The Court there said that a prisoner challenging an execution protocol as cruel and unusual punishment cannot prevail simply by showing that the state's procedure is barbarous or tantamount to torture. The prisoner must also identify a valid execution protocol, accessible to the state, that he would deem permissible. What happens if there is no such protocol -- if all the methodologies available to the state would be agonizingly painful? The logic of Glossip is that in that case, the state is allowed to torture prisoners to death, because the state simply has to be allowed to execute people.

In both cases, the Court is making a basic mistake, conflating constitutional permissibility with constitutional entitlement. It's obvious when you think about it. The state is permitted to try and solve crimes. The state is not allowed to violate the Fourth Amendment, even if doing so would allow it to solve more crimes than if the Fourth Amendment was not enforced. If the state said that, for every claimed Fourth Amendment violation, a defendant must provide an alternative policing protocol that would allow it to solve as many crimes as if it were permitted to violate the Fourth Amendment freely, and if he can't, then the Fourth Amendment can't be enforced, that would be absurd. The Fourth Amendment places a limit on the ability of the state to solve crimes.

So too here. It might (for sake of argument) be true that capital punishment or partisan gerrymandering are not unconstitutional in the abstract. But that does not imply that in practice there must be a constitutionally-viable pathway to do either of these things. If the state can't figure out a way to conduct an execution that doesn't torture people to death, then it can't execute people. If the state can't figure out a way to partisan gerrymander without engaging in a racial gerrymander, then it doesn't get to do the racial gerrymander. That should be simple. But the Court has elevated the already dubious position that the state is permitted to engage in partisan gerrymandering, or the (somewhat less dubious) position that the state is permitted to provide for capital punishment, and converted these practices into constitutional entitlements. That's not reflective of law; that's reflective of the Court's fanatical dedication to these sorts of policies compelling it to erase the law.

Antisemitism in Oregon, Minnesota, and Beyond

I'm heading to Eugene tomorrow to do two events on antisemitism and Islamophobia at the University of Oregon (one Wednesday evening, one Thursday morning). Both events will be with Hussein Ibish, someone who I've long admired and am thrilled to collaborate with on this endeavor.

So what's going on in the antisemitic America this week? Well, the Minnesota GOP is trying to nominate Royce White to take Amy Klobuchar's Senate seat, in spite (or because) of him criticizing "the Jewish elite" and claiming that Jews use the Holocaust "to provide a victimhood cover for their own corrupt practices." It will shock no one to learn he is a Kanye West defender ("They called Kanye West antisemitic because he was pushing a Black Republican or Conservative message wrapped in the gospel."). And while sometimes the story of these far-right antisemitic GOP pols is that they decide to merge hating Jews with loving Israel, White is very much a hater of both: Israel is, he says, "the lynchpin of the New World Order."

In general, while there's a lot more antisemitism in today's GOP than many give it, er, credit for, Minnesota really does seem to stand out from the pack for the regularity with which antisemites emerge as top-level Republican politicos.

That said, while I think White is DOA against Klobuchar (who has throttled far more serious opponents than he), I am very idly curious to see whether he makes inroads amongst the "uncommitted" cadre that (unlike in some states) did seem to perform disproportionately well against Biden in Minnesota. I think the lefty complaint "Biden is worse than Trump on Israel" (or even "Biden and Trump are the same on Israel") is wildly off-base, it is actually arguable that if your only criteria is "who hates Israel the most", White is "better" than Klobuchar. For people looking for a permission structure, White's status as an African-American man who led racial justice protests in the wake of the George Floyd murder certainly helps. Moreover, the Muslim community in America is not as liberal as people sometimes think, and if there is a contingent of, say, the Somali Muslim community in Minnesota that is really committed to Palestine uber alles, well, this race arguably presents a genuinely interesting choice.

Again, I think that Klobuchar will win quite handily. But it wouldn't surprise me if there were some inroads in communities where Republicans historically have struggled. As I've said before, antisemitism is a major growth opportunity for the GOP in minority communities (not because minorities are especially antisemitic, but because minorities most likely to defect to the GOP are in fact disproportionately prone to be antisemitic), and by accident or intentionally they're starting to realize it.

Oh, and Donald Trump is promising a "unified Reich" if he's elected. So there's that too.

Raises and Inflation

I'm embarrassed to admit that it was alarmingly late in life that I realized that part of the reason workers get (and expect) raises each year is to account for inflation.

In my head, for most of my life, I associated a raise solely with being rewarded for performance and/or seniority. As you advance in your career, you (hopefully) become more effective, take on more responsibilities, develop additional competencies, etc.. That makes you more valuable to your employer, and so in turn, you get more money. It would of course be possible that in bad economic times one's employer might not have the money to give you a raise. But the raise you do get is meant to be an advancement -- it improves you vis-a-vis your position in the year before. By the end of my career, assuming I stay on the same professional arc I'm on now, I should be making more money than at the start of it.

This is one function of a raise. But because of inflation, it's not the only or even initial function. At the outset, a raise is not about advancing you economically compared to the prior year, it's about maintaining parity. Not getting a raise isn't career stagnation, it's actively losing money. If throughout your career you only get a raise equivalent to that year's inflation rate, you've basically never gotten a raise at all.

I'm not realizing anything that isn't obvious. That said, it's been noted that the view that raises are earned based on merit while inflation is imposed is actually a pretty common one amongst American workers, so I wasn't entirely alone on it as an unreflective intuition. The mental uncoupling of wage growth from inflation, in turn, probably causes all manner of misshapen beliefs about the state of the economy and what constitutes reasonable wage growth -- particularly if one (rightly!) thinks that one's real, not just nominal, salary should increase as one gains experience and seniority.

Did You Hear? CUNY Branches Cancel Hillel Yom Ha'atzmaut Events

Two branches of the City University of New York system -- Kingsborough and Baruch -- have apparently canceled Israeli Independence Day events sponsored by local Hillel chapters, citing security risks. In the case of Baruch, administrators reportedly offered alternative venues to the Hillel chapter (which were declined), at Kingsborough, by contrast, the administration reportedly refused to make any arrangements to enable the event to go forward.

CUNY is a public university, so this raises the usual First Amendment problems. While every case is different, there are some clear overlaps between this case (in particular, the citation to "security" concerns) and the cancellation of pro-Palestinian speakers and events justified on similar logic (for example, at USC). This, of course, represents a golden opportunity for people to lob dueling hypocrisy charges at one another ("You were aghast when this happened at USC, but I don't hear you complaining now!" "Yeah, well you were apologizing for this when it happened at USC, but you're aghast now!"). I'm sure that will be a grand old time for everyone.

I do want to make one note on the relative coverage and penetration of this story compared to other free speech debacles related to Israel and Palestine on campus. I haven't seen this story covered outside of the Jewish press. That doesn't mean it won't be later, and I'm not generally a fan of the "...but you'll never see this reported in the mainstream media!" genre of commentary. In part, that's because I think there's massive selection bias in what we claim is over- or under-covered; in part, it's because I think virtually everyone massively overestimates how many stories break through to mass public consciousness at all. In reality, I think different stories gain traction in different media domains, such that a story which might tear through one sort of social or ideological circle might make barely a ripple in another.

That said, in many of the circles I reside in, there is essentially no knowledge that there are any cases of academic censorship of "pro-Israel" voices on campus at all. To be clear, I'm not saying that there are not numerous cases of academic freedom violations targeting pro-Palestinian speakers -- there are a slew of them. But the notion that this is a Palestine exception to academic freedom, rather than something which unfortunately happens in a host of other cases and contexts (including, in the right-slash-wrong environments, to pro-Israel speakers), speaks less to the reality of academic freedom and more to an epistemology of which cases get attention and which don't. There are many academics for whom the Steven Salaitas are known, while the Melissa Landas are not. In other domains and registers, there are different gaps.

Ultimately, it's a variant on "they would say it about Jews, they'd say it about other groups too." The claims of injustice are not wrong, but the claims of uniqueness very often are. How many times have we heard variations on "can you imagine if there was a mob of people harassing and making racist remarks towards any other minority group -- how would universities respond to that?" (As we saw at UCLA, the answer apparently is "they'd sit back and let said mob kick the crap out of their targets"). And at the same time, we've also heard plenty of iterations of "if a university dared cancel a pro-Israel event, it'd be on the front-page of every newspaper for the next month" (so far, no headlines).

So I'll all say is that, if you're of the bent that there's no meaningful suppression of pro-Israel speech in campus environments, and your informational ecosystem (other than me, I guess) didn't alert you to this cancellation at CUNY, you should consider how the former belief might be correlated with the latter lacuna. Other people might have different gaps, and they should contemplate what generates them as well.

On Loving "Campus Jews" While Hating Campus Jews, Part II

A few years ago, I wrote about how many external efforts to express "solidarity" with campus Jews facing antisemitism were defined by their obvious and overt disdain for, if not antagonism towards, campus Jews. What passes for "solidarity," too often, is intentionally and deliberately indifferent to the actual positions and desires of the students they're supposedly coming in to support. As I wrote then:

It is no revelation to say that Jews on campus experience their share of antisemitism, and deserve our support. But one of the more frustrating aspects of that reality is how that "support" often manifests in a fashion that is almost tauntingly unconcerned with what the Jews on campus actually want. "Support", too often, is not support at all -- it is a way for outsiders to exploit a headline or to ride their own hobbyhorses, and the campus Jews themselves are an afterthought....

[T]hose who drive the Hitler truck "in solidarity" do not at all care whether the Jews they "support" find their intervention all that supportive. By golly, Berkeley Jews are going to get this allyship whether they like it or not! And this is hardly an isolated event. Jewish students at the University of Michigan were livid at the Canary Mission putting their campus under the spotlight, complaining that it was making the environment for Jewish students on campus worse rather than better. No matter. Canary Mission's support for campus Jews is cheerfully indifferent to whether campus Jews feel supported.

Outside actors want to come in hyper-aggressive, but when campus Jews express frustration and try to say "you are not helping", they're met with dismissal verging on outrage. The outsiders love and support "campus Jews" as an abstraction, but they find the actual, flesh-and-blood campus Jews to be soft, weak-willed, squishy, and just overall contemptible.

Consider what happened recently at UCLA, where a group of pro-Israel counterdemonstrators (and if ever the phrase "outside agitators" was appropriate, here it is) assaulted a pro-Palestine encampment, leading to some of the most brutal and wide-scale incidents of violence we've seen over the past few weeks. While obviously chains of connection are at this stage blurry, it does seem that the counterprotesters were among the groups being supported by various external "pro-Israel" organizations. Unsurprisingly, the actual Jewish students at UCLA did not feel thankful or more secure by their "supporters" taking this action; to the contrary, it has decimated whatever social standing and moral credibility mainline Jewish students might have possessed with the broader UCLA community. And in the vein, UCLA students issued a statement that was a crystal-clear admonition to their putative "supporters":

We can not have a clearer ask for the off-campus Jewish community: stay off our campus. Do not fund any actions on campus. Do not protest on campus. Your actions are harming Jewish students.

The bold is original. And to be clear: the students who issued these statements are not aligned with the protesters. They identify as Zionists. They don't deny that there has been antisemitism amongst the protesters or on campus in general. That sort of very normie campus Jew is who is trying to communicate the message "you're not helping". And that, sadly, is exactly the sort of campus Jew who historically has been completely and utterly ignored by the rush of outsiders scrambling to demonstrate how much they care about "campus Jews".

In that vein, consider a recently announced academic boycott of Columbia University graduates by about a dozen federal judges, including Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, on the grounds that Columbia has become an "incubator" of antisemitism. Is there any indication that Columbia's Jewish community wants "support" in this fashion? Is there any doubt that they view these judges' announcement as only making their position worse? No and no. But it doesn't matter, because this line of criticism assumes that Judge Ho and company want to help Columbia's Jewish community, when the truth is absolutely the opposite.  The abstract choice to "defend" campus Jews is paired with a palpable disdain for the campus' Jewish community.

This is at least the second time that Judge Ho has led an academic boycott campaign targeting universities on speech grounds (he sure does love BDS!), and much of what I said the last time applies here as well. It's serendipitous, but also no coincidence, that my introduction to my post about Ho's boycott "on behalf of" (but also targeting) Yale conservatives was a story about my own experience enduring harassment that began as misbegotten "solidarity" with me as a Berkeley Jewish student. The troll in question came to hate me because I was a Jew who didn't hate my time at Berkeley, and the only possible explanation for that sentiment in their eyes was that I was a self-hating Jew. 

Here too, one might find it strange that the very students these judges purport to be protecting -- beleaguered Jewish students attending Columbia -- are also covered by the boycott pledge. But this is intentional -- Ho et al fundamentally view any Jew who decides to attend Columbia for any reason as a traitor who deserves what's coming to them. What was then a parallel now is a traced-over line: the "solidarity" with campus Jews actually a thinly veiled form of contempt for any Jew who even slightly deviates from the orthodoxy James Ho wishes to impose upon the Jewish community.

There are, as always, many reasons why a Jewish (or non-Jewish) student might choose to attend to Columbia. Maybe there is a particular program they want to study in, or professor they wish to work with. Maybe they're curious to learn from people whose views are radically different than their own. Maybe they're inspired by the recent election of an Israeli as student body president of one of Columbia's colleges. Maybe they simply don't find the atmosphere as toxic as a bunch of Texas federal judges infer from afar. 

Ot maybe some of them just agree with what one Jewish student said in response to others who urged her to leave Columbia in the face of antisemitism: "It’s very important to stand our ground and show them they can’t force Zionist Jewish students out of their campus."

To any Jewish student who has thought along that line, who has said that they're not going let the risk of bullying or bad actors stop them from getting the best education possible, Judge Ho has a loud and clear message: "Get fucked." He doesn't care about you. He thinks you're absolute scum. In this, he shares a commonality with many of the outsiders who say they're supporting "campus Jews" while raining contempt upon campus Jews. Every Jewish student in America can and should internalize that message loud and clear.

The Visible Elbow of the Protests

Recently, I had occasion to reread Charles Tilly's article "Invisible Elbow." Tilly's basic (oversimplified) thesis is that the "invisible hand" metaphor presumes far too much precision and fine-motor coordination for how social change happens, and misses the degree to which much of human action is a series of halting, try-your-best efforts that have a ton of unanticipated consequences and plenty of errors, followed by error and course corrections as we try to feel our way through to a satisfactory result. As far as the metaphor goes, instead of a delicate hand guiding change, things proceed more like trying to open a screen door with your elbow while holding a full bag of groceries. It's directional, it often works, but it's very imprecise and awkward and sometimes you miss the door and lose the groceries and everything splatters onto the floor.

I was thinking about this idea in relation to the campus protests wracking universities across the country. We've gone in the usual circles of "are they counterproductive", and my standard line on that is that whether a protest is "productive" depends on what it's trying to produce. But to give a bit more color, it seems clear to me that the protests are producing some things -- not always exactly what the protesters want, but also not necessarily orthogonal to their demands or desires either. It's not a hand, and it's certainly not invisible, but there is a visible elbow that's part of a blunt, awkward, jostling process that is creating change. That change is sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes in favor of the protesters, sometimes against, but one can't say the protests are not exhibiting an impact.

For example, one complaint I've heard from the protesting camp is that they're frustrated the media is focused on them rather than on what's happening now in Gaza. I'm not especially sympathetic to that complaint, but I also think they're underselling themselves -- I think the protests are actually doing a bang-up job of keeping the Israel/Gaza war forefront in American's minds at a time when it was starting to ebb a little bit. My template here was Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which riveted the nation's eyes and sparked intense activism ... for a few months. Eventually, though, it became background news as nothing really changed -- not that Russia started behaving better, but it stopped being new and fresh and started being part of the foreign policy normal. The Israel/Gaza war seemed like it was inching toward a similar status, but the campus protests (and the hyper-aggressive Columbia-style response to them) has warded that off for now. I think that has to be seen as a success for the protesters in the aggregate.

At the micro level, the "productivity" of the protests is going to depend a lot on local facts and practices. In some places, it's yielding deals to at least talk about divestment, and these deals in turn are being met with anger by Jewish stakeholder groups who are now asking "do we have to occupy a building to be heard?" My prediction on these meetings is that they will not result in termination of academic exchange programs with Israeli universities (perhaps excepting some symbolic carveouts where entire slates of programs were set to be phased out anyway -- I have to think that's what's happening here). There might be new rules on divesting from weapons manufacturers more broadly that are not structured as Israel-only one-offs but reflect some generally-enforceable decision not to invest in the sector.

It's also likely that in other quadrants the protests might generate broader-based backlash. Protesters appeared to have trashed the library at Portland State University following their occupation, it's hard to imagine that will redound to their benefit. One of Columbia's constituent schools elected an Israeli student body president propelled, it seems, in significant part by backlash to the protesters. And of course, if the protests end up giving a leg up to Donald Trump in the 2024 election -- based on a mix of "fracturing the Democratic coalition" and "independent voters just have an instinctive aversion to the sense of disorder" -- that, too, is a consequence.

On the whole, the protests are a "they" and not an "it" -- they are diverse in methods, tactics, goals, and productivity. They'll accomplish some things and fail to accomplish others, some of what they do is intended and some is unanticipated. Even if there is a "master plan", it's not going to come to fruition -- but that doesn't mean they're moot.

And the final thing I'll say is this: as someone who is generally averse to protest (and always has been -- say what you will, but for me there's no "well back in my day...." aspect to this), if you're unhappy at the conclusion that protesters are even in part driving the forces of social change either on campus or in the world as a whole, then it's incumbent on you to reflect on what other social forces might have filled the void and why they didn't. There's plenty that the protesters say or demand that I strongly disagree with. But I do think it's a positive that the institutions of American government and society are starting to treat Palestinian lives and rights as an integral part of the calculus we use to assess our policy in the Middle East, and to be blunt it's hard for me to say with a straight face that would have happened absent these sort of protest initiatives. If one doesn't like the protesters claiming credit for that shift, then one should have insisted on incorporating those interests into the calculus without the protests having been necessary. There has been a complacency (at best) in Congress for many, many years surrounding Palestinians rights and interests, and it was inevitable that void was going to be filled. If you don't like who is filling it now, ask yourself why the domain had been left empty for so long.

Steinbach's Revenge

My next law review article is on academic speech issues and the regulation of campus protest. You know, taking a break from the fraught topic of antisemitism and shifting over to something placid and uncontroversial. The article was accepted for publication in March, but I did ask my editors if I could make some revisions before we started the editing process due to, er, recent developments (they've been very supportive).

The framing device for my article was the student protests of a talk by Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford Law last year (remember that?). Much of the attention surrounding that incident focused on the behavior of the Stanford administrator on-site, Tirien Steinbach. Steinbach was widely pilloried for her performance, which critics said was insufficiently protective of Judge Duncan's free speech rights and too accommodating towards the protesters. My view was that Dean Steinbach was being unfairly maligned -- she actually did a decent (not perfect, but who is?) job and that people were underestimating the difficult position she was in and the tough cross-cutting pressures that make superficially "easy" free speech issues hard.

I wonder if Steinbach is laughing, just a bit, right now.

A particular claim one saw coming out of the Stanford incident was that the disruptive behavior of the students was attributable to past and present failures by the Stanford administration to respond to illicit protest with a stern hand. Administrative indulgence was akin to tacit support, which emboldened the students to behave even more brazenly later on, and so the cycle went. If the university stopped mollycoddling and just crushed policy-violating protests with an iron fist, the argument went, then they'd send a message to the students that such activities were not okay, successfully deter future disruptions, and restore calm and campus order. Dean Steinbach's relatively conciliatory approach towards the Duncan protest was easily slotted into a villainous role under this narrative: it was a symbol of the limp and weak-willed administrative cowering that was ultimately responsible for "bad" protests.

When one looks at what is happening on campuses today, it's hard not to feel like that argument has been pretty decisively falsified. The current wave of protests and encampments really can be traced back to Columbia, and in particular Columbia President Minouche Shafik's decision to essentially immediately respond to largely peaceful encampments on her campus with a hyper-aggressive police intervention. The result, it turns out, was not that the students were duly chastened and slunk back to their dorms; the result was a cascading series of escalations and counter-escalations at Columbia and the emergence of copycat solidarity protest encampments at universities across the country. Even if one did believe that Shafik had the formal "right" to enact her decisions, it's hard for me to imagine that anyone can call these policies success stories, regardless of whether your metric is protecting free speech, preserving campus order, defending Jewish students, or anything else.

So with the benefit of now getting to see the road-not-taken, maybe Steinbach's choice to take a more conciliatory, non-confrontational approach toward the disruption at Stanford and not immediately resort to "am I formally allowed to call in the police to drag people away" didn't emanate from some personal disdain for freedom of speech. Maybe she was actually a professional who knew what she was doing.  Maybe there are lessons we can learn from her. Maybe the prevailing administrative value in responding to protests should not be reflexive insistence on asserting yourself as the boss.

There's very little for anyone to feel good about regarding what's happening on campus right now (I share Robert Farley's worry that we're rapidly constructing a social framing where "no one can be serious about protesting the war (or countering protests of the war) unless windows are broken and billy clubs bared"), but if anyone deserves to feel the slightest bit of schadenfreudean satisfaction, its Tirien Steinbach.

Campus Antisemitism Monitors Will Fail in Extraordinarily Predictable Fashion

Trying to capitalize on the latest headlines, a bipartisan group of legislators is seeking to create government "antisemitism monitors" that will be dispatched to colleges and universities across the country. Fail to meet their scrutiny, and colleges could lose gobs of federal funding.

If enacted, this policy will fail in spectacular fashion. How do I know? Because we have a template in state anti-BDS laws, which backfire in similarly predictable ways. The problem is that while it's conceptually possible to craft valid and legitimate anti-BDS legislation, in practice the laws will be enforced by some mixture of apathetic mid-level bureaucrats, terrified associate deans, and hotshot headline-chasing politicians. Put that cocktail together, and the result is such lovely headlines like "homeless hurricane victims can't get disaster relief until they sign anti-BDS pledge."

Indeed, if the antisemitism monitors do come into play, I can predict exactly the scenario that will go down shortly thereafter at Any College, USA.

1. A student group invites some Palestinian poet to give a talk;
2. Canary Mission or similar digs through the poet's instagram and finds a post where they say something that many people might find troublesome: "from the river to the sea" or "the Zionist state will be dismantled" or something of that ilk.
3. They shriek that this is a violation of IHRA and federal law and the university risks losing all its federal funding unless it acts.
4. Some associate dean for student affairs panics and cancels the talk.
5. There's a massive backlash from the students (possibly including protests) as well as various academic freedom/civil liberties watchdogs who call the cancellation out as censorial bullshit.
6. Pro-Israel/Jewish groups make surprised-Pikachu face at how they once again somehow became the poster child for heavy-handed campus censorship. Who could have predicted? (Answer: Everyone. Everyone could have predicted).

And for all the grousing about "only the Jews don't get ..." X Y or Z protections on campus, it's worth noting that no other campus minority currently has a monitoring program like this. A good rule of thumb for whether one is advisable here is if one also would support a similarly empowered and emboldened "anti-racism" or "anti-Islamophobia" monitoring program. If your answer is something along the lines of "while racism and Islamophobia are serious problems, I don't trust the implementation and I'm worried about the possibility of abuse and/or chilling free speech" -- congratulations! You've identified the exact reasons why such a program is inadvisable for antisemitism as well.

The Other Reason American Jews Are Distancing Themselves from Israel

The topic of American Jews and Israel growing apart is an omnipresent one in Jewish circles -- a fear I've seen raised for as long as I can remember. Obviously, we're hearing more about it now, particularly as younger Jewish voices become increasingly prominent in protests against Israel and Israel's war in Gaza. But the fear is not new, and there is a familiar rhythm to it.

But while the discussion about the growing gap between American and Israeli Jewry almost inevitably is framed against the backdrop of Gaza and the occupation and settlements, I want to make an entry to this discussion that has nothing to do with Palestine, but whose impact is I think very important and very underrated. Admittedly, given all that's happening in Palestine, that feels almost absurdly self-centered. All I can say to that is that the fraying connection between American Jews and Israel is an important topic, and this is an underdiscussed element of that topic. I offer it not to the exclusion of explanations that are premised on genuine moral or political sentiments about Palestine, but as a complement to them.

So, without further throat-clearing, here is my claim as to one reason American Jews are increasingly distancing themselves from Israel: 

The Israeli establishment is increasingly deeply, openly contemptuous of American Jews.

Again, we can bracket everything having to do with Palestine and Palestinians. There's plenty to talk about there, but I won't talk about it here. Whenever one talks about diaspora Jewish grievances against Israel, one is immediately met with the claim that the diaspora has no claim to speak on matters of "security" in a country they don't live in. There's plenty one could say to that, but fine, we'll leave "security" aside.

Instead, we'll start with a fact that has nothing to do with security: most American Jews are not Orthodox. We're Reform or Conservative (if affiliated at all). But these denominations of Judaism -- the denomination most American Jews identify with -- are not treated equally in Israel. Indeed, they are subject to heaps of contempt, scarcely recognized as Jews at all.

This has tangible consequences. We talk a lot about interfaith families, but there are many Jewish families whose status as Jews in Israel is in doubt. What happens when their matrilineal lineage might be traced back to a woman who had the temerity to convert under the oversight of the Jewish community most American Jews live in? Non-Orthodox conversions are barely recognized even for purposes of the law of return, and that begrudging acceptance doesn't extend to other aspects of Jewish personhood. How insulting, for American Jews to be told that the way we're Jewish isn't good enough to be fully recognized as Jewish in the eyes of Israel.

Insulting -- that's too mild. I can speak for myself here: my wife is Jewish. Her conversion was done under the auspices of the Jewish tradition through which I've lived my entire life. She lives a Jewish life. She celebrates Jewish holidays. She volunteers for Jewish non-profits. As far as I'm concerned, she's as Jewish as I am. To question her Judaism necessarily -- can only -- be based off a denigration of my Judaism. To hear that my Jewish wife, and through her our Jewish children, would not be treated as fully Jewish in a Jewish state is fury-inducing. Every time I think about it, I am filled with rage. How many of us are in similar circumstances? How many of us see our or our loved one's disrespected as Jews by the state that claims our fidelity on the basis of shared peoplehood?

There's more: half of all Jews are forbidden from praying as equals at one of our religion's holiest sites. Try to hold an important religious rite -- your child's Bar Mitzvah, say -- at the Western Wall, and you risk being attacked by an angry mob. It is very much in the realm of argument that the median American Jewish family would face more official, state-sponsored discrimination as Jews in Israel than they would in America.

And that doesn't get into the constant thumbs in the eye the Israeli government seemingly loves to give to the American Jewish people. Netanyahu's speech before Congress. Bragging that they prefer the support of Evangelical Christians over diaspora Jews. The constant ooze of contempt and disdain is impossible to ignore.

A few days ago, a college friend of mine wrote a post about the increasing gap between American Jewish sentiment and pro-Israel politics leaving Zionism with "nowhere to go". He has always been anti-Zionist, and so was of course delighted at the development. But one observation he made for why the trend seemed to be accelerating was that American Jews were increasingly discovering they simply had nothing in common with Israeli Jews. We're fundamentally two different peoples. There's no special bond between us, no particular reason to care more about them (or them us) beyond whatever general humanistic feeling we might have to any other group of people half the world away.

He said this with triumph. Many others will view it mournfully. And to some extent I think he necessarily overstates the case, if only because familial ties unite many (though not all) of us. Even for the rest of us, the severing of a sense of peoplehood is grave and painful, and won't be done easily. As much as some pretend otherwise, diaspora Jews disassociating themselves from Israel is not a free action. It hurts. The whole point of bonds like this is that they persist and endure through difficult and challenging times; they are not meant to be transitory expressions of instrumental alignment. But when a member of your family (literal or figurative) doesn't treat as if you are special, as if you are a member of a special circle of care and concern, that exerts a continual and powerful centrifugal force. Eventually, it will pull (some of? all of?) us apart.

And this problem is not one that can be resolved by the normal proposed solutions. It isn't a matter of young Jews lacking "education" on what's happening in the Middle East. It isn't caused by Jews lacking connection to their Jewish heritage (unless we buy into the notion that Reform and Conservative Jews Don't Count). It isn't attributable to a desire to "fit in" with the cool crowd or following the latest social media trend. It can't be laid at the feet of "Critical Race Theory" or "intersectionality" or whatever buzzword will be screamed across Algemeiner headlines next week. The brute truth is that American Jews are being hammered, again and again and again, with just how little the Israeli establishment thinks of us.

I'm not saying anything especially new here. Six years ago I wrote in the Forward that "Israel doesn't care what American Jews think." (the median social media response I got from Israelis to that column was "you're damn right we don't, and also, fuck you for saying so."). And again, I'm not trying to discount the degree to which Israel's unjust treatment of Palestinians under occupation genuinely, legitimately, and viscerally offends many Jews. 

But what I speak of here is a powerful negative force, and it is not getting better. And at any time, but perhaps especially under times of strain and stress, such a force will have its predictable effects.

"Us Too-ism" at USC

You've probably heard about a brewing free speech incident at USC, where the provost canceled a planned speech by the student valedictorian that pertained to prior pro-Palestine/anti-Israel content on her social media profiles (I've seen conflicting reports on what was "her words" versus words on sites she was linking to). The USC administration insists that it is not opposed to the student's speech per se, but rather had vague "safety" objections. 

To that end, my main comment is that (a) the "safety" concerns smack of pretext and (b) if there are actually safety concerns sufficiently extreme so as to make it impossible for a South Asian Muslim student to deliver a speech, that is a five-alarm fire crisis for the state of free speech at USC that should be addressed with exactly that level of urgency. But again, my strong suspicion is that "safety" is a red herring here, and this is really USC preemptively bowing to pressure from various pro-Israel groups (some on campus, presumably some alumni/external actors as well) demanding the cancellation. I also endorse Paul Horwitz's thoughts on this (not just because he kindly links to some of my own recent work on campus speech regulation).

To me, though, the effort by some Jewish groups to cancel this student's speech smacks of what I've termed "us too-ism". "Us too-ism" is when one group that has a colorable claim of being marginalized or oppressed sees some sort of movement, practice, or trend that is demanded by or responsive to the needs of another marginalized group and reflexively demands that they receive it as well ("us too!"). The problem with "us too-ism" is that it's almost entirely reactive. It isn't motivated by some organically-generated understanding of what a group actually desires or what it feels it is lacking; it rather stems from a more abstract "this is how society shows it is responsive to oppressed groups, we are oppressed, therefore we must get this" logic. That this imagining of how other groups are being responded to is often caricatured or stereotyped only exacerbates the problem. If the metric for our equality is solely a 1:1 matching of what other groups are thought to get, and what other groups are thought to get is grossly exaggerated or misimagined, then what will be demanded by the "us too" contingent will inherently be unreasonable or excessive precisely because it's demanding mimicry of a "response" that largely exists in the minds of the "us too-ers".

In my other post, for example, I analyzed the "us too" concept with respect to the "Jewface" allegations surrounding non-Jewish Steve Carrell playing a Jewish character in the movie "The Patient". The rise of the "Jewface" complaint, at least with respect to male actors (I acknowledged Jewish women may be differently situated), did not seem to me to stem from an organic complaint of how Jews were being represented in Hollywood, or even a more inchoate sense of offense. Rather, it seemed to primarily be a copycat of complaints surrounding racial representation in cinema: racial minorities had been complaining about White actors being cast to play non-White characters as a form of racism, and that sufficed to mean that Jews should complain about non-Jewish actors being cast to play Jewish characters as a form of antisemitism.

The USC case, I think, may stem from something similar. Some Jews perceive, rightly or not (for my part, I think the perception is overstated albeit not stemming from nowhere, but again, it's the perception that matters here), that other minority groups demand and often receive the cancellation of "offensive" speakers at campus events and that receptivity to this demand is taken as a litmus test for the degree to which the campus is responsive to the minority group. Hence, Jews who also feel vulnerable on campus decide that they are entitled to this same treatment, and the degree to which the campus is receptive to their demands is the yardstick by which they can determine if their oppression is treated with equal seriousness compared to other campus groups making analogous claims.

As should be clear by now, I think this is a very bad way of going about things. I think the "perceived" demands of other groups are often in fact misperceived, and I think the purely reactive framework of us too-ism ends up occluding very important and necessary steps of self-reflection regarding what we actually want and what would actually make us feel secure on campus. It's hard to argue that the cancellation of this speech at USC has made Jewish students -- even those who do view their safety as Jews as intricately bound up in their Zionist self-identification -- any safer, and it's hard to argue that cancellation of the speech is actually a proportionate response to what harm (if there is any) this student might have caused. But again, "us too-ism" doesn't consider any of that -- its analysis starts and ends at what it imagines other analogous groups are getting, and so it can't surprise that the resultant conclusions are shallow and misdirected.

The Submission is the Point

The Venice Biennale is an annual art exhibition designed to showcase the work of artists around the world. Open to exhibitors from any country with diplomatic relations with Italy, the event includes an official Israeli exhibit -- a fact which has unsurprisingly drawn the ire of those demanding a complete cultural boycott of Israel.

This year, though, there was a bit of a twist on that tale: the Israeli representative, Ruth Patir, elected to close her own exhibit until "a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached."

Patir -- who has been a regular participant in pro-ceasefire/anti-Bibi protests in Israel -- is not characterizing her decision as endorsing a boycott of Israel, which she emphasized she opposes, and I think we should respect her framing of her own actions. Much like with Natalie Portman, there's no reason to think that Patir does not know or understand the choices she's made.

But I don't really want to focus on the what Patir did, exactly. Rather, I want to take a look at how her decision was received by those who were demanding the removal of the Israeli exhibit. Consistent with the above, it would not be right to say that Patir was joining the boycotters. But it certainly seems like her actions were aligned with what the boycotters seem to want. 

Yet their reaction is, well, I would say it is very interesting and very revealing. What it reveals, in particular, is how the goal of this campaign is very clearly not to create a space where Israelis come out in opposition to the violent practices of their government, or more broadly one that creates space for an imagined future where Israelis and Palestinians relate to one another as equals. They do not see Israelis as potential partners even in an imagined futures. They see Israelis as enemies who must be made to submit. The submission, above all else, is the point.

Here's how they characterize Patir's decision vis-a-vis their campaign:

“The artistic team of the Israeli pavilion has retreated as a direct consequence of widespread pressure and our collective campaign.”

Note the framing. Patir "retreated" in the face of "pressure". She did not, under this telling, voluntarily align with -- even partially -- the effort to end the war in Gaza. She is not an example of someone stepping out from an (under this telling) benighted framework to see the essential need to speak out. She did not even make a volitional choice on her own. She was forced, coerced, compelled to back down. That's the victory -- not "Israeli publicly demands ceasefire", but "Israeli publicly forced to yield."

And having secured the dominant position, are the boycotters magnanimous in their claimed victory? Not at all. Her will may have been bent; but it must be broken. Referring to the fact that the closed exhibit can still be seen through the windows, the boycotters make clear that Patir remains firmly in the camp of an enemy to be crushed:

The Genocide Pavilion has been forced to respond to 24,000 signatories who condemn the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in Gaza but, contrary to the artistic team’s claims, they have not withdrawn, the pavilion has not been closed. 

ANGA reiterates its demand to shut down the pavilion in its entirety.

ANGA does not applaud empty and opportunistic gestures timed for maximum press coverage, and leaving video works on view to the public....

Leave aside the almost absurd richness of complaining about "gestures timed for maximum press coverage" (how is that a bad thing in this context?). The boycotters will not be satisfied until it is clear that Patir has yielded, that her choices are not her own, that what happens to her is something imposed upon her against her will. It is not elevating the call for a ceasefire, it is not even (really) the closure of the exhibit, that was desired here. It is the submission that is the point, and that has not yet adequately been achieved.

This type of politics rings familiar. It called to mind Justice Alito's contradictory desire "to bludgeon the legal community into freely accepting his preeminence." It's not enough for him to prevail on the formal terrain of saying what the law is, the legal community must yield to his superiority. I saw a similar dynamic in some circles of the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign -- when it looked like he was on the path to victory, some of his backers looked ecstatically at the prospect that the Democratic Party establishment would be forced to "bend the knee". They were less excited about winning the Democratic primary than they were about defeating the Democrats. The submission of the enemy was the point.

This politics, fundamentally, demands not just victory but domination over the enemy. And as a result, it cannot tolerate -- it is infuriated by -- possibilities of agreement or reconciliation from the putative enemy. Often, the substantive issues supposedly being fought over are besides the point. If you wonder why some parts of the left can't seem to take "yes" for an answer, this is why: for Democrats to simply agree to some progressive proposal, without it being seen as somehow wrested from the party over its most primal objections, deprives these persons of the visceral sensation of domination -- it cheats them of their victory. So the framing will never be "I'm happy that they've moved closer to what I want," it can only ever be "they've retreated as a direct response to our pressure and collective campaign." The submission of the enemy was the point.

That's what's happening here in Venice. Some might naively argue that the message of the boycotters to Patir's decision is "counterproductive" -- why are they responding with such hostility and negativity towards an Israeli who is publicly stepping forward to demand a ceasefire? But as I often say, what's counterproductive depends on what you're trying to produce. If what you're trying to produce is more Israelis recognizing the imperative of a ceasefire, a collective change in Israeli outlook to alter the current bloody course, then yes this response might be counterproductive. But if what you're trying to produce is a world in which Israelis are stripped of autonomous choice entirely, are no longer in a position to self-determine at all or even be one agential part of a broader collective movement, then the boycotters' choice of action is entirely productive -- Ruth Patir's choice to close her exhibit, precisely because it was her choice, is just as threatening to that vision and equally must be crushed.

And just so we're clear: there's an Israeli parallel to this horrible political approach. There's a significant channel of right-wing Israeli thought which insists that peace can only occur when Palestinians acknowledge they've been beaten, that they've lost. From that position of submission, Israel can impose a new state of affairs that is vaguely and magnanimously promised to be just. But no deal can be reached under any terms if it is a deal made amongst equals, because the very notion of Palestinian equality is incompatible with them accepting they've been thoroughly defeated. Indeed, the whole idea of a deal that's agreed to by the Palestinians itself becomes automatically suspect -- if they agree, then it was not imposed, and if it was not imposed, then there was not truly submission.

But if your politics demands submission on a national or collective level -- Israelis or Palestinians as a whole forced to yield, forced to accept dominance, it is almost by definition not going to be one that actually is centered around equal respect for all. At most, it will promise to magnanimously dole out justice (more than they deserve) onto the vanquished party once it is well and clear that they are vanquished. But the vanquished will not be seen as candidates for equal participation in the future community. Indeed, any efforts they might make to participate -- even in ways that might superficially suggest they are aligned with one's own vision of what just equality might look like -- will only confirm that they have not fully submitted, and must be crushed further. The submission is the point.

To reiterate, this sort of toxic politics is not unique nor does it fully characterize the desires of either pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian actors. But it does seem like this particular campaign in Venice is one whose politics take this form of demanding complete and total Israeli submission above and to the exclusion of all else. And the results are exactly what one would expect.