Sigal Samuel on the Jews of Color Conference

Sigal Samuel (@SigalSamuel -- follow her) provides powerful reflections on the recent conference for Jews of Color (including Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews). I highly encourage you to read it. There's a lot to be said about it. Some of it is heartening -- it was obvious that for many participants this conference filled a significant void in their Jewish experience which is overwhelmingly dominated by European Ashkenazim. Some of it is disheartening -- Samuel relates how Jews who identified as pro-Israel or Zionist did not feel comfortable voicing those opinions (progressive inclusiveness only gets you so far), and notes the marked absence of Israeli Jewish participants which (in the words of one of the few Israelis in attendance) created an "America-centric" program. Some of it is uncertain, like the promise from an executive at a prominent Arab-American organization that Mizrahi Jews are welcome in her group (are they welcome if they're Israeli-American Mizrahi Zionists who challenge the prefigured understanding of what "Arab" self-determination means? If so, that would be a huge step towards genuine allyship).

Samuel's account makes it clear that this was a conference of a particular political vibe -- lots of talk of "privilege" and "triggering" -- and so one can shake one's head about whether it is truly representative of Mizrahi, Sephardic, or Jews of Color as broader communities. But if one is to register that complaint, one has to interrogate why it was the leftist branch of the community which organized the conference, and why the "representative" Jewish establishment has failed to do so. One can't complain about a slanted conference if one isn't having any conference at all.

It seems that, by and large, this conference was a success, and I'm happy to report that fact. It should be followed up with more. More meetings, more organizing, more latitude, more perspectives. If one is worried that voices outside the ultra-left are uncomfortable in this space, organize spaces where they too feel free to speak. If you're unhappy about the paucity of Israeli voices in this conversation, then put in the work to get more Israelis to the table. Put in the work, or don't complain when others don't do the work to your liking.

I've been hoping for some time to organize a conference on non-European and non-Ashkenazi Jews here at Berkeley (albeit probably more academic than activist-y). It's a daunting task, but it would help shed light on a daunting struggle. I wouldn't see it as a response to this event but the next step following from it. As far as I'm concerned, a thousand flowers should bloom, and Jews of all backgrounds and all political persuasions should have a home in the Jewish community to voice their perspective.

BDS, Snitching, and Solidarity

Peter Beinart had a column a few days ago which tried to explain the Jewish BDS community in terms of personal morality versus Jewish solidarity. It's better than it sounds, given how conditioned we are to think that morality should trump solidarity. Beinart's point was that simply acting according to one's personal conscience will necessarily fray the bonds of communal fraternity. When Jews elect to cut off large swaths of the Jewish community from the currents of political conversation, they are making a choice that carries consequences they should be prepared to accept. He analogizes it to "calling the cops on your drug-addicted brother." Maybe it really is for his own good. But you can't necessarily expect your family to love you for it.

I think the analogy is decent. But I'd add one more element: It's like calling cops on your drug addicted brother, when those cops are part of an institutionally-biased system.

If one thinks about the "stop snitching" movement, the motivating force behind it isn't that crime is okay when black people do it. Rather, it is based on the sense that each time one brings the police into a community of color, one is allocating power over black bodies to an entity which does not necessarily have the well-being of those bodies at heart. Maybe the cops show up and they're great -- they resolve the problem, they mete out justice justly, and people feel content. Maybe they don't -- they come in guns blazing and kill someone, or they slap your "drug-addicted brother" with a charge that carries an outrageous mandatory minimum. The point is, it's not up to you. It's up to them. And they aren't accountable to you.

One does not have to full-throatedly endorse "stop snitching" (and I don't) to understand that this reality makes calling the police a decision with significant gravity in communities of color. It's not just about making sure wrongdoers get punished. It's also about handing over yet more power to external actors who -- not always, but often enough -- use that power to oppress. Each call to the police is a roll of the dice, and the caller isn't just (or often even primarily) gambling with his own life.

BDS is similar. BDS, we can stipulate, responds to real Israeli wrongs (it also sometimes concocts Israeli wrongs, but there are real and serious wrongs too). And it responds to those wrongs by appealing to external authorities to (literally) sanction the Jewish wrongdoers. These authorities are not Jewish, are not accountable to Jews, and have historically proven themselves to be not particularly invested in treating Jews as equals. BDS amplifies the power non-Jews exercise over Jews, and under conditions of anti-Semitic domination that is a decision that always carries with it gravity. I made this point in more detail when critiquing the "Zionist BDS" case forwarded by Steven Levitsky and E. Glen Weyl

[T]he sequence of events Levitsky and Weyl hope to see happen is that a bunch of people boycott Israel in order to exert pressure that will change the status quo vis-a-vis the Palestinians; Israeli policymakers feel the pinch and adopt policies desired by Levitsky and Weyl; and then the conflict is resolved and the boycott dissolved. That middle step has a big problem, which is that the authors fail to explain why Israeli policymakers will be responsive to the expressed desires of Levitsky and Weyl specifically as against other boycotters who -- by their own admission -- are seeking to send a very different message and have very different objectives.... 

And this is where the claims that the authors are not signing up for the BDS movement fall apart -- not because they secretly share the same motivations, but because their entire program depends on leveraging the BDS movement proper to make their own boycott sufficiently expansive so as to compel an Israeli response. The whole reason why Levitsky and Weyl don't see themselves as two cranks yelling at clouds, but actually engaged in a potentially consequential political project, is that it is not just them but all these other people boycotting Israel too. But it is "all these other people", not Levitsky and Weyl, who will dictate the message sent by the boycott campaign. The only function of Levitsky and Weyl will be to boost the signal of the BDS movement as a whole; their idiosyncratic expressive desires won't come across and won't dictate Israel's response.... 

Levitsky and Weyl certainly will object that by talking about non-Jews exercising coercive authority over a Jewish institution in the context of critiquing their column, I'm acting as if they are not Jewish (that they're the non-Jews seeking dominion over Jewish lives). But that misses the point. Levitsky and Weyl are absolutely Jewish -- but once again, they're not the ones who will be holding the leverage in the event their boycott movement succeeds. It will be a non-Jewish institution that is in a position to make demands, whether that be the United States, or the EU, or the UN, or Israel's Arab neighbors, or the PA, or PACBI, or someone else. It may be the case that a boycott will successfully force Israel to listen, but there is no plausible universe where a boycott will force Israel to listen to progressive Jews. The best progressive Jews could hope for is that whatever non-Jewish third party which ends up holding the cards will exhibit policy preferences mirroring those of progressive Jews. History suggests that this is a dim hope.

The difference between group solidarity and simple chauvinism is that the former is seeking to undermine a broader structure of dominating power. One thing BDS does is that it amplifies the global historical trend of placing decisions about Jews in the hands of non-Jews. This is a power that has typically not been exercised justly, and solidarity is justified as a means of resisting that domination and reasserting a self-determination right that has, for Jews, not generally been acknowledged. Palestinians have experienced the same thing, which is why there can be no just solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that does not provide them space for genuine self-determination, free from Jewish and Israeli control (this, in short, is why I'm a committed two-stater).

To be sure, one can't go all in on one or the other. A world in which we simply obeyed the dictates of our community would be dead if not fascist, a world in which we threw off all communal bonds in favor of our own personal moralities would be chaotic and anarchic. What Robert Cover would call the imperial and paedaic attributes of our lives must be kept in careful balance.

And so the point isn't that Jews must always be entirely inward forcing because any appeal to the goyim means reinscribing anti-Semitic domination. But it does mean recognizing that reality as an ubiquitous fact of Jewish standing in the global community. It is always one of the stakes on the table. It might not always trump. But it always must be taken seriously.

Staying Classy in San Diego

I'm happy to announce I'll be spending this month guest-blogging at The Faculty Lounge. I may still post independent content here -- we'll see how things go -- but I'll certainly be sure to provide pointers to any content I put up over there. I opened my stint with a reflection on the talk I gave (with Analucia Lopezrevoredo) this past Monday at San Diego State on Mizrahi Jews and intersectionality. It's a bit of a heavy opener, but I've never been afraid to come out swinging.

Rate That Apology(/Apologies?), Part 5: Naz Shah

The latest in the ongoing torrent of anti-Semitism scandals to hit the UK relates to Bradford West MP Naz Shah. Shah actually started off the in good graces of the Jewish community for knocking off the truly odious George Galloway to take her seat. But this week bloggers uncovered several social media posts where she, among other things, called for Israel to be moved to the United States (the "transportation costs" would be less than the cost of foreign aid to Israel), said that Zionism was a tool to "groom" Jews to exercise power over other countries, and complained that "the Jews are rallying to" an online polls regarding the Gaza conflict.

She's been suspended from the party. And she also delivered an apology published in the Jewish News.

I am sorry. 

For someone who knows the scourge of oppression and racism all too well, it is important that I make an unequivocal apology for statements and ideas that I have foolishly endorsed in the past. 

The manner and tone of what I wrote in haste is not excusable. With the understanding of the issues I have now I would never have posted them. I have to own up to the fact that ignorance is not a defence. 

The language I used was wrong. It is hurtful. What’s important is the impact these posts have had on other people. I understand that referring to Israel and Hitler as I did is deeply offensive to Jewish people for which I apologise. 

When the “Gaza-Israel” conflict happened I played an active role in highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people, attended demonstrations to stop the bombing and called for equality in media reporting of the issues. 

Feelings were running high across the world and Bradford was no different. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I’m shocked myself at the language I used in some instances during the Gaza-Israel conflict. 

For this I apologise. 

Since winning the seat of Bradford West I have made conscious efforts in areas around integration, building bridges and community development, in particular around Muslim and Jewish relations. Indeed one of my very first visits was to my local synagogue.  

Only last week I was learning and sharing over an interfaith Passover seder with Reform Movement Senior Rabbi Janner-Klausner, Vice Chair of Conservatives Friends Of Israel Andrew Percy MP and  others at the rabbi’s home. We all read from the Haggadah and learnt more  about Passover. 

I have been asked to consider joining the APPG, (All Party Parliamentary Group) on British Jews because of the work I’m doing locally, which includes building relations through my local synagogue. 

If politicians put their hands up when they get something wrong it would help to restore faith in politics. I hope that by writing to those who I have hurt, I am practicing as I preach and calling myself out. 

For those that I have caused hurt to, particularly the Jewish community, my constituents, friends and family, I sincerely hope my intentions and actions from here on in will win back your trust and faith in me. 

For my part I promise to have open and honest  conversations about such issues  and invite others to do that with me.

This isn't bad. Normally at this stage I'd do an in-depth analysis of the content and arrive at a rating, but this a rare circumstance where the content of the apology is not the most interesting matter to discuss.

Because this wasn't the only apology Shah considered.

Buzzfeed broke the news that Shah had also drafted an apology message that would have deployed far stronger language and commitments than what was found here.

Although the structure and much of the language remained the same in the published statement, Shah went much further in the draft apology seen by BuzzFeed News. 

That draft included this admission: “I helped promote anti-Semitic tropes. This was totally wrong.” 

But the line was dropped from the published version along with another mention of “anti-Semitism”. 

The draft statement – in which Shah talked at length about her personal shame regarding the comments and pledged her full commitment to fighting prejudice – also included a passage in which she said she wanted to take part in “an intersectional struggle, one where the concerns of Jewish individuals and communities are taken seriously and anti-Semitism is not dismissed out of hand or ignored”. This did not appear in the final version. 

Other sentences deleted from the draft included an apparent admission by Shah of a widespread problem of anti-Semitism among left-wing campaigners and deep concerns about the spread of “toxic conspiracy theories, group-blame and stereotyping”. 

“We on the left must stop procrastinating and tackle oppression within our own ranks, especially anti-Jewish oppression,” the draft said. The sentence did not appear in the published version. 

A reference to “Nazi Germany” was also changed to “Hitler”, prompting mockery from the editor of the Jewish Chronicle. 

“I accept that referencing Israel in a comparison to Nazi Germany was not only wrong, but totally inaccurate,” said the draft statement. “My other social media posts were also deeply offensive to Jewish people.” 

In the final version this appeared as: “I understand that referring to Israel and Hitler as I did is deeply offensive to Jewish people, for which I apologise.”

Initial reports suggested that this latter draft was rejected by Labour Party HQ, but apparently it was only circulated internally to Shah's office. Which raises the question: Why she didn't elect to use it?

Because the language in the Buzzfeed article was very strong. It's pretty close to exactly what I would look for an apology. It doesn't flinch from the problem, it doesn't seek to isolate it, it doesn't seek to excuse it, and it promises concrete steps to tackle it that begin with the very radical act of taking Jews seriously. Had Shah come out swinging with those words, I'd have said she'd done more than demonstrate contrition. She'd have identified herself as potentially a great ally in the fight against anti-Semitism.

But for some reason she elected to go a more timorous route. And again, it's not that the apology she did give was terrible. I probably would have given it a solid if unspectacular grade. In particular, it did seem to possess the quality that was missing in the last apology I rated: the recognition that there was a gap in her knowledge, that to do right by Jews she needed to know more than she did, and a promise to try and fill that gap. But knowing what was initially on the table, it can't help but be a disappointment.

Still, published or not, Naz Shah has offered up a template of what genuine introspection over anti-Semitism on the left might look like. And I think the Jewish community should take advantage of that. If they approach Shah, it should be on the terms of the draft. Is she willing to include Jews in an intersectional struggle? Is she willing to challenge those who don't want "the concerns of Jewish individuals and communities [to be] taken seriously" and do think anti-Semitism claims can be "dismissed out of hand or ignored"? Will she tackle the "toxic" conspiracy theories that run wild about Jews? Will she demand that her party stop procrastinating on these issues?

The jury is still out, obviously. I will say that our efforts to combat anti-Semitism cannot only be about finding the evildoers and excising them from the community. There must also be efforts at reform, about getting people to change their minds, about taking people who once would happily endorse the mass deportation of Jews to America and turning them into allies. We shouldn't be sentimental about it, but we shouldn't dismiss it as a possibility either. It's possible that Naz Shah could become a genuine and valuable ally to have. The Jewish community has every right to be skeptical; as she acknowledged in her (published) apology it is up to her, in word and deed, to "win back your trust and faith in me." But maybe she will. And that would be itself a victory worth celebrating.

Grade: N/A, scoring contaminated by the presence of the alternative draft.

Why Chris Van Hollen Won

Last night, Chris Van Hollen defeated fellow DC-area representative Donna Edwards to become the Democratic nominee for Maryland's Senate seat. Since Maryland is a deep blue state, that means he is likely to become Maryland's next Senator.

The race was hard-fought. Both are staunch progressives. Van Hollen is a white man, Edwards is a black woman. Van Hollen is more of an establishment type, Edwards has more of an insurgent flavor. Ultimately, Van Hollen won by 14 points -- 53% to 39%.

What accounts for Van Hollen's win? The Nation put up its take on the matter, which is worth reading. But as a native Marylander who has followed both Van Hollen and Edwards throughout their careers, and who has supported each from their very first congressional primary, I think I can provide some more fine-grained analysis. The short version, though, is this: Donna Edwards is a fine progressive and a fine politician. But Chris Van Hollen is the type of political talent that only comes along a few times in a generation. He won because he is very, very good at what he does.

A bit of background on the candidates. Chris Van Hollen was born in Karachi, Pakistan to diplomatic parents, and came up through the ranks of the Maryland state legislature. I first became aware of Van Hollen in 2002, when he was running in the Democratic primary to challenge my incumbent congressional representative, Connie Morella (R). I remember that race distinctly because I was very excited at our prospects of beating Morella that year -- because "she's being challenged by a Kennedy!" The Kennedy in question was state delegate Mark Shriver, and he started the race as a front-runner (as Kennedys are prone to do in Democratic primaries). But as I did more research, I became more and more impressed with Van Hollen. The guy is smart, a true policy wonk. That might be enough to make me swoon, but of course being a wonk is only one attribute of an ideal politician. You also want someone who can actually get things done -- a legislator, a dealmaker. And you also, of course, want someone who can connect with the voting population, who cares about what everyday people think and can sell his proposals on the ground. A lot of politicians only have one of these skills. Very good ones have two. Chris Van Hollen has all three. I sensed that in 2002, and jumped ship to support him in the primary, which he won (and then did unseat Morella in the general). And my instincts have been 100% confirmed by his tenure in the House, where he has been both a staunch progressive and a guy who gets things done.

Donna Edwards emerged on the political scene in 2006, when she challenged a Democratic incumbent -- Albert Wynn -- in Maryland's 4th congressional district. Wynn was out-of-touch, perceived as in the pocket of big business, and way too conservative for his district. Edwards barely lost the 2006 primary, but came back to rout Wynn in 2008 and entered Congress. I was glad to see her -- again, it is a good thing when staunch progressives replace out-of-touch conservatives. And the fact that she was the first black woman elected to Maryland's congressional delegation was worth cheering for too. In Congress, Edwards' voting record has been nearly identical to Van Hollen's -- unabashedly progressive. But as befits someone who came to power by challenging an incumbent in her own party, Edwards has been more of a confrontational figure. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and it has certainly helped her popularity in some quarters. But it does mean that she -- and even her backers will concede this -- did not build up the same level of relationships as did Van Hollen and was less concerned with the nuts and bolts of getting things through Congress. In a sense, she's much like Bernie Sanders -- great at rallying a crowd, but less concerned with the in-the-weeds work of making things happen.

Chris Van Hollen has been laying the foundation of a Senate bid for a long time. And that meant he had been cultivated allies throughout Maryland for years. There's a reason why most of the Democratic establishment lined up behind Van Hollen, and there's a reason why most of the establishment that didn't stayed out entirely (for example, only three members of the Congressional Black Caucus endorsed Edwards, the caucus as a whole stayed neutral). It's because he had spent years putting in the time and effort to work Marylanders of all stripes and all backgrounds. He didn't just rely on his progressive record in the abstract, strong as it was. He put in the work.

There's another thing to remember about the "establishment" support Van Hollen earned in Maryland. Maryland is unique state in American political life. There are six states in the U.S. where more than 25% of the population is Black. Maryland is one of them. The other five are Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. One of these states is not like the others. One of these states is solid blue. There are many states where the state Democratic Party has a large and influential Black base. And there are many states where the state Democratic Party effectively runs the show, because the state is reliably Democratic. Maryland is the only state that is in both column "a" and column "b". And what that means is that Van Hollen being backed by Maryland's Democratic establishment meant getting a lot of backing from a lot of powerful Black officials. And that, ultimately, is what proved to be the difference.

The easy way of putting this is by noting that Van Hollen did better among Black voters (Edwards won them 2:1) than Edwards did among White voters (Van Hollen took them 3:1). But, while true, even that's misleading. There are two main knots of Black voters in the state of Maryland: Prince George's County and Baltimore City. PG County is Edwards' base, and she ran up the score there (as Van Hollen did in his base of Montgomery County). But Baltimore was neutral turf -- neither one represented the city in Congress. And in Baltimore Edwards barely got over 50% of the vote, even though the city is 2/3 African-American.

Edwards remarked at some point -- I think it was in her concession speech -- that it is not enough for Democratic politicians to parachute into Black churches the Sunday before election day and call it a day. And she's right! And the reason that Chris Van Hollen won, ultimately, is that he didn't do that. He had been working with the Black community, and many other communities throughout Maryland, for years -- in all the small and miniature ways that don't make headlines but do add up come election time.  He put in the work. And if there's another White progressive out there who's hoping to follow in the footsteps of Bernie Sanders, he or she could do better than to look to Chris Van Hollen on how to earn the support of a diverse community, not just assume it as a birthright.

Kansas' Same Day Reversal

When I was an appellate clerk on the 8th Circuit, we decided the case of United States v. Bruguier, 703 F.3d 393 (8th Cir. 2012). The case involved the interpretation of a sexual assault statute applicable to Indian reservations, specifically, a provision that prohibited a person from "knowingly"

(2) engag[ing] in a sexual act with another person if that other person is — 

(A) incapable of apprising the nature of the conduct; or

(B) physically incapable of declining participation in, or communicating unwillingness to engage in, that sexual act....

The question was whether the "knowingly" requirement only applied to "engaging in a sexual act" (one had to know one was engaging in such an act) or also applied to the subsection (one had to know that the victim was incapable of consent). By a 2-1 vote, the court decided that the knowledge requirement only applied to the former, and therefore upheld Bruguier's conviction.

There's nothing remarkable about that -- except that on the same day, a different 8th Circuit panel considered the same issue and came to the exact opposite conclusion in United States v. Rouillard, 701 F.3d 861 (8th Cir. 2012). Two opinions, released on the same day, with contradictory legal rulings. It was, to say the least, unusual.

But it wasn't an accident. Under normal circumstances, a prior panel decision binds a later one. But once the judges become alerted that two different panels were considering an identical challenge at the same time (and coming to opposite conclusions), it seemed silly to determine the law based on who managed to rush their opinion out first. Instead, we released the opinions on the same day, with the understanding that the case would go en banc and be decided by the whole court.  Which we did -- and in a 6-5 vote (could it be any closer?), the court decided that knowingly applied to both sections of the law -- one could only be convicted of sexual assault under this section if you knew that you committing a sexual act and knew that the person was incapable of consent.

I didn't think that story could be topped. But the Kansas Supreme Court just outdid us -- releasing a constitutional ruling, and then overturning that ruling in the same day. The cases involved a Kansas statute which requires certain felons to register with the state -- including those who were convicted of crimes before the registration act was passed. The question was whether this was an ex post facto law. The first decision said yes. And then that decision was subsequently overruled the same day. Both rulings were by a 4-3 vote.

This bizarre circumstance occurred because of a vacancy on the Kansas Supreme Court. The first case was briefed and argued while the seat remained vacant, and the Court had tapped a district court judge to sit "by designation" to fill the slot. He was in the majority that determined that the registration law was unconstitutional. But the second case was argued after the vacancy had been filled, and that judge switched sides -- reversing the ruling that was handed down that day.

Putting aside whatever one thinks about the proper application of stare decisis in such a case (let alone the right legal outcome), this has to rank as one the more bizarre legal turns of events I've ever come across. At least our court's mutually-contradictory opinions were released by design. This, by contrast, gives off the feeling of complete arbitrariness.

"An Intersectional Failure" Comes to SDSU Tonight

7 PM tonight at San Diego State University, Analucia Lopezrevoredo and I will be presenting a talk based off our Tablet article "An Intersectional Failure: Situating Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews in Contemporary Jewish Discourse" (we've retitled it from the original). Details on the event are here, and it is open to the public if any readers are San Diego denizens. This is actually the first time I've been specifically invited to give a talk like this, so I'm excited to see how it goes.

The Master's Tools versus The Master's House

"The master's tools," Audre Lorde wrote, "will never dismantle the master's house." It's one of her more famous lines. I appreciate the appeal. I appreciate the poetry.

I've just never been convinced that it's right.

For starters, what tools aren't the master's? One of the perks of being master, it seems, is that one can grab any or all of the tools. Even if the slaves develop a tool of their own, the masters have proven quite adept at appropriating or co-opting it to preserve and ratify their own regime. "Color-blindness," for instance, didn't start off as one of the master's tools -- it was a radical attack on the very structure which underwrote slave power and white supremacy. A century and a half of ideological drift later, and now colorblindness is the ultimate master's tool.

Or take race itself. Lorde's essay is focused on the need to take race and racial identity (among other things) seriously if we are to remedy structures of racist exclusion. I couldn't agree more -- but isn't race the ultimate master's tool? It was the original instrument used to forge our system of racial supremacy itself. And again, I agree with Lorde that it would be impossible to tear down that structure without utilizing race as a central category of analysis. But that gets us to the opposite position: The master's tools are the only way to dismantle the master's house.

I was reflecting on this point when thinking about why I'm so committed to using the tools of progressive analysis against the problem of anti-Semitism, when so often those tools have been employed to justify, legitimize, and ratify anti-Semitic domination. One cannot be a progressive Jew today and not hear the sing-song snickers of the Jewish right calling you a deluded fool -- "why bother? What does the left have to do to prove they're not your friend?"

At one level, this betrays a naivete of the Jewish right, for the conservatives aren't their friends either. But I don't necessarily disagree with them that "the left", as constituted as a largely non-Jewish social movement, is not a friend of the Jews. It's long become clear to me that for the most part, people only care about anti-Semitism when the victims are people they like, and will excuse it when it happens to people they don't like. This isn't really different from how I view anti-racism commitments -- it's no accident that progressives don't seem to care about racism directed at Clarence Thomas, and it's no accident that conservatives seem to care about racism only when it's directed at Clarence Thomas. Most people are at most fair-weather friends. "Allies", primarily, exist in the mythical space that develops when a group's high-salience members and activities are generally liked by the ally.

The reason I use these tools, then, isn't because of some belief that the people who developed them or who mostly use them today are my friends. I use these tools because they work. Because they provide a more robust and realistic account of discrimination and oppression than their competitors, and anti-Semitism desperately needs to accounted for in a robust and realistic manner. If Jews ceded every instrument that had helped construct the edifice of anti-Semitic domination, we'd left with a rather pale and impotent toolbox. Why on earth would I be foolish enough to handicap myself so?

Lorde's essay, for example, makes a powerful argument for why the perspective of women like her -- and not just her, not simply a token -- is indispensable to doing progressive analysis right. If we're worried that people now feel they can exclude or marginalize Jewish voices (or at least, all but a few token Jewish voices who will tell non-Jewish audiences what they want to hear about Jews), this is an important tool in our toolkit. When progressive writers asked us to look at modern associations and to see how norms of exclusion and oppression are often woven into their histories without ever having been excised -- well, more than a few academic disciplines could stand to be reminded of that vis-a-vis the Jews. When progressive writers urged the broader community to stop reflexively assuming that all discrimination claims were just minorities "playing the race card", goodness knows that's a norm Jews are well accustomed to.

I am not a panglossian. I don't know if anti-Semitism will be cured in my lifetime, or even if we will see a net change in the right direction. But I do know that if anything is going to dismantle the house of anti-Semitism, it will be the tools the left has pioneered -- not because the left hasn't mastered anti-Semitism too, but because I believe we can use the tools better to liberate us than others can use  them to oppress us.

The Stanford Anti-Semitism Experiment, Part 3

Stanford's student council has unanimously passed its resolution condemning anti-Semitism. Now, one can always be skeptical of these resolutions -- as a student in the UK noted, they can come off as box-checking rather than a genuine attempt to grapple with the injustice -- but on my read of the text it is strong enough. The decision to not just mandate yearly anti-Semitism training, but enlist the ADL to assist in the project, is particularly welcome. The decision to recognize "the collective rights to self-determination of the Jewish people that are no different than any other people" is also very good.

There was nothing in there that directly or indirectly tackled the blood libel or the propensity to promulgate such conspiracies, which is a shame given that this apparently holds appeal to at least one Stanford professor, but I suppose that was a long-shot. While there was no specific mention of the comments by a Stanford senator earlier regarding the legitimacy of debating "Jewish power", he had already been censured by the senate and the resolution preserves the language he objected to condemning "the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions."

Rate that Apology, Part 4: Something Smells at Harvard Edition

At an event hosting former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a Harvard Law student stood up and asked her why she was so "smelly." Given the historical usage of the smelly, odorous Jew as a trope in anti-Semitic discourse (and the inappropriateness of asking such a question at an academic event), the student (who remains anonymous) has been roundly condemned by (among others) Dean Martha Minow, the Jewish Law Students Association, and the Middle East Law Students Association. Now the student has offered the following apology:

“I am writing to apologize, as sincerely as I can via this limited form of communication, to anyone who may have felt offended by the comments I made last week. To be very clear, as there seems to be some confusion, I would never, ever, ever call anyone, under any circumstances, a “smelly Jew”. Such a comment is utterly repugnant, and I am absolutely horrified that some readers have been led to believe that I would ever say such a thing. With regards to what I actually did say, I can see now, after speaking with the authors of this article and many other members of the Jewish community at HLS, how my words could have been interpreted as a reference to an anti-Semitic stereotype, one that I was entirely unaware of prior to the publication of this article. I want to be very clear that it was never my intention to invoke a hateful stereotype, but I recognize now that, regardless of my intention, words have power, and it troubles me deeply to know that I have caused some members of the Jewish community such pain with my words. To those people I say, please reach out. Give me an opportunity to make it right. I will assure you, as I have already assured many, that had I known it was even possible that some listeners might interpret my comments as anti-Semitic, there is absolutely no chance that I would have uttered them. I trust that those that know me and have engaged with me on a personal level will not find this at all difficult to believe. Many members of the Jewish community—some of whom hold strong differences of opinion with me—have reached out to me on their own to let me know that they did not interpret my words as anti-Semitic, because they know me well enough to know that that is not at all consistent with who I am as a person. I want to thank them and any others who have given me the benefit of the doubt, and I am writing this note in the hopes that more of you will do the same. I say this, however, fully cognizant of the fact that no amount of writing can serve as a substitute for genuine human interaction. So please, if there remains any doubt at all, do take me up on my offer above and reach out so that I can make this right to you on a more personal level.”

So we'll start with the positive -- the whole "words have power" thing, and the acknowledgment that subjective intent is not the be-all end-all of offensive speech. I suppose apologizing "to anyone who may have felt offended" is better than "I apologize if you were offended" but still not as good as "I apologize for my offensive remarks." I'm interested in the line at the end where he says that "no amount of writing can serve as a substitute for genuine human interaction." I think that's right, and I think there is something to be said for offering to interact with concerned students on a personal level. However, there were some reports that the student asked the "smelly" question as a means of protesting Livni's presence without dignifying it with an actual substantive question. Such genuine human interaction.

In any event, though, this apology to my ears is missing one very simple thing. Orlando Battista famously wrote that "an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it." So what was the error here? If it was the use of the word "smelly", I actually believe the student when he says he was unaware of the anti-Semitic cadence of the term, would not have used it had he known about it, and will not do so in the future. In that sense, you could say he has corrected his error.

But the thing is, I don't think the error was in using the term "smelly". The fact that he wrongfully thought that calling Livni "smelly" would not be anti-Semitic shows that his instincts regarding what is and is not anti-Semitic are not as reliable as he had thought they were. That was his error -- he was speaking confidently about Jews and Jewish institutions without really knowing about them. The apology should have had two more lines:

I will assure you, as I have already assured many, that had I known it was even possible that some listeners might interpret my comments as anti-Semitic, there is absolutely no chance that I would have uttered them. However, I have now learned that my intuitions regarding what is and is not anti-Semitic are not as robust as I had thought. Clearly, this is an area I need to learn more about and one in which I need to reassess the reliability of my own intuitions and assessments, and I resolve to do so immediately.

This would correct the genuine error, which is not in my view a simple matter of verbiage. What was revealed in this event was that this student didn't know as much as he thought he did about Jews -- about our history, our experiences, and our oppression. That revelation should have more wide-reaching ramifications than simply dropping the word "smelly." Doing that is cheap grace, it costs the student nothing, and so I have no doubt he's glad to do it. Reassessing some of his more tightly-held attitudes about Jews and Jewish institutions? That's costly grace; something I've looked for in cases like these yet rarely found. But that would represent a genuine apology.

Grade: 5.5/10

Reflexive UN Votes

I often hear people complain about the United States "reflexively" voting against any UN resolution critical of Israel. I think such complaints are overstated -- at the very least, they should explain which part of the Negroponte Doctrine they object to -- but there is a certain abstract sense to them. There's no reason to think that every resolution that is critical of Israel is worth voting against.

But it is telling that there is no equal ire -- indeed, no commentary at all -- on the 150 countries or so who "reflexively" vote for any UN resolution critical of Israel, no matter how outrageous or even outlandish. Those decisions are just taken to be part of the diplomatic fabric of the universe, I suppose. Here's the latest one that got through a UNESCO committee:

 A UNESCO resolution does not recognize a Jewish connection to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount and calls Israel an “occupying power.”

[...] 

The resolution, which condemns Israeli actions in eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, accuses Israel of being an “occupying power,” of “planting Jewish fake graves in other spaces of the Muslim cemeteries” and of “the continued conversion of many Islamic and Byzantine remains into the so-called Jewish ritual baths or into Jewish prayer places,” according to Israeli newspaper reports.

It also criticizes Israel for its decision to build an egalitarian prayer area in the Western Wall Plaza and for “illegal measures against the freedom of worship” at the “Muslim holy site of worship.” The resolutions refers to the cities of Hebron and Bethlehem as solely Muslim, and raps Israeli control over the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb, both in Hebron.

Maybe the United States would be more inclined to favor an "even-handed" approach at the United Nations if "even-handedness" had even the most trivial constituency in its favor in Turtle Bay. But since it doesn't, it doesn't bother me too much that we have basically decided to write that august institution off when it comes to resolutions related to Israel.

Pluralistic Ignorance: Gay Marriage, Racism, Israel, and Anti-Semitism

I vaguely remember the first time I thought about gay marriage as a political issue. I was either in middle school or early high school (so around the year 2000). As I recall it, my main thoughts on the matter were:

1. I couldn't think of any particular reason to oppose it; and
2. Supporting gay marriage was, descriptively, a fringe position that was outside the bounds of mainstream political discourse.

Being 14 years old or so, the second point was enough to at least keep me quiet on the matter. Who wants to be a non-serious outsider?

A few years later, of course, things had changed. Well before Obergefell, gay marriage crossed over into being at least a plausible political position -- one that people in my circle could openly avow without embarrassment or fears of being shunned or excluded. And once that happened, reason #1 was left alone and asserted itself without trouble. I never looked back.

I suspect that many people experienced an evolution like mine. Most people are reticent to radically break from their social neighbors -- not necessarily something to be proud of, to be sure, but descriptively accurate. And it's not simple bandwagoning -- the privately held position is genuine, but it just doesn't manifest until we are confident that expressing the position won't cause us to be expelled from our relevant social groups. Of course, the "relevant social group" would differ from person to person. The sorts of signals which demonstrate that a position is no longer fringe in legal academic circles, differ from those which provide the same message to judicial elites, versus to Democrats, versus to Mississippians. Nonetheless, I think a story of this sort accounts for the astonishingly rapid shift in attitudes about gay marriage over the course of only a few years. From 2001 to 2015, support for gay marriage gained a whopping 38 points (from net-negative 22% to net-positive 16%).

One way of formalizing the story I just told is through the lens of pluralistic ignorance. Pluralistic ignorance exists when people may personally reject a given social norm but sharply overestimate the degree to which their fellows support it. So I personally have no problem with gay marriage, but I assume all my neighbors do (and many of them, privately, are thinking the exact same thing). Since people frequently won't articulate opinions they believe are unpopular within their peer group, this can result in the maintenance of archaic social norms even when many people privately would be fine with abandoning them. It also explains why, under the right circumstances, these norms can disintegrate with astounding rapidity. If some peer members do articulate the supposedly taboo "dissident" opinion and nothing bad happens to them, then it opens the door for everyone else to articulate their own true views.

 The example I just used is a happy one -- people rapidly changing their minds to favor gay equality. But pluralistic ignorance does not always dam up progressive social reform. A few months ago, I told a story about racism and the Donald Trump campaign that moves to a very similar beat. I hypothesized that a significant swath of Americans had learned to cover up their racial prejudices under the belief that such views would be seen as unacceptable by their fellows. If they expressed them, they would be ostracized and shunned (perhaps by the ever-mythic "PC police"). And then Donald Trump came along and said all of the outrageous, biased, bigoted, racist things these covert racists had been yearning to yell out themselves.

...And nothing happened. Sure, the media fulminated and Trump's opponents cried foul. But it didn't sink Trump's campaign. If anything, it strengthened it. There certainly was no social banishment, no exile to the fringe corners of outcasts and misfits. Instead, the racists found that there were in fact plenty of people who believed the same things they did, that they held a non-trivial swath of public opinion and political power. And once they realized that, the dam broke. All that suppressed racial ressentiment came pouring out in full force and fury, shocking even conservative political pundits. The outlook which had been the joke, the province of fringe lunatics, suddenly was looking like the dominant force in one half of America's two-party system.

This pluralistic ignorance story may apply to views on Israel as well. CNN may have overstated things when it declared that "Bernie Sanders Smashed the Israel Status Quo" -- as J.J. Goldberg and Gershom Gorenberg, among others, has pointedly observed, Bernie lies well within a perfectly recognizable strand of contemporary Israel advocacy that has never been troubled by "criticism of Israel" -- but it was hardly entirely wrong either. In academia, the rise of BDS is perhaps a more clear demonstration of the effect. It's less about whether they win or lose, and more about signaling that positions on Israel hitherto regarding as extreme -- challenging its entire existence, declaring the entire Jewish national project to be a form of illicit domination -- are not in fact fringe ones. Anti-Israel activists like to tell a story about how marginalized and muzzled they are, but in many ways they're experiencing the exact opposite -- they can give their blood libel spiel, spout vicious anti-Semitic slurs, even falsify their data, and they'll still have a loud and raucous band of petition-signers ready to have their backs. Just like the formerly covert racist who attends the Trump rally and discovers that he was not, in fact, exiled to become a complete social outcast, the extreme anti-Israel activists have discovered that there is a place for them in mainstream discourse. And that means that all those who were privately outraged that Jews dared have a state to call their own but assumed such thoughts could not be expressed aloud, now have an accepted public outlet for their fury. Ressentiment rides again.

And what of outright anti-Semitism (which, of course, is distinct from hostile attitudes towards Israel but certainly often comes clothed in anti-Israel garb)? While it is standard-issue nowadays to claim that anti-Semitism is over, that Jews have officially won the anti-discrimination game (look at how well we poll!), there is a potential pluralistic ignorance story to be told here as well. If it is widely assumed that it's "not okay" to hate on the Jews, then most people will not admit to doing so. The question is -- what happens if that consensus is broken? If people express anti-Semitic attitudes, is it viewed as unacceptable? Does it shatter their reputation, the way it is so often assumed to do?

Right now, things stand on uncertain ground. A Stanford student leader says it is important to consider whether Jews really do control the banks and media -- but then again, the reaction by his peers was clear and unambiguous (yet, on the other other hand, will there be any reputation lost for the Stanford professor who wants people to get their news from blood libel advocates?). An Oberlin professor posts a slew of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and the university administration seemed barely able to muster up a response. But then a majority of Oberlin faculty did sign a letter denouncing them. But a significant minority of the faculty pointedly refused to do so, expressing "outrage[] at the irresponsible hostility drummed up against [Karega] as a scapegoated target." And round and round we go.

Pluralistic ignorance is by its nature a very speculative story to tell (at least projecting forward). And it depends on the peer groups one inhabits -- liberal college activist groups or conservative white nationalist communities are not every community (and it's worth noting that even in those communities pluralistic ignorance might manifest in its own way -- for example, progressive college students might feel compelled to sign on to far harsher condemnations of Israel than they personally feel are warranted because they jointly assume that is the norm position among progressive college students). But it is one reason I don't think one can rely on the stability of a "norm" against racism or anti-Semitism. It's possible it reflects genuine egalitarian commitments, free from misconceived notions about the attitudes of their peers. But it's possible it doesn't. And if not, the constructed edifice of respect and equality can all come tumbling down very, very quickly.

People Who Object To Basic Norms of Academic Integrity Shouldn't Be Academics

Academia requires some very basic norms for it to function. Don't falsify data. Don't plagiarize sources. Don't misquote sources. Label your graphs. Use consistent metrics within a single graphic or chart.

Take the requirement that one use consistent metrics when labeling a graphic. This is a very basic norm of academic integrity, the sort of thing you learn in middle school. If I'm creating a chart of "Nobel Prize winners by country", we might reasonably question whether winners of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel should count. But it is obvious that I should disclose my decision, and it is even more obvious that I can't say "they count for Russia but not for any other country." Likewise, if I'm doing a series of charts on the subject (say, one for each decade), I can't alternate between counting the Economics prize for the 1971-80 graph but not for the 1981-90 graph. And I certainly can't do any of that without disclosure -- making it clear that "I counted Russian winners of the Economics prize but not those from other countries" and/or "I included the Economics prize winners for the 1971-80 decade but not for the 1981-90 decade".

Adherence to rules such as these does not end academic disagreement. It does not even end a significant share of academic disagreement. It does not even end a significant share of academic disagreements that stem from the fact that academics, too, sometimes make terrible, misleading, biased arguments that show them off to be hacks. Playing by the above rules excludes a tiny, tiny sliver of outright academic misconduct. It doesn't make one a good researcher or even a competent one. It is the bare minimum requirement for counting yourself among the community of academic scholars.

Last month, McGraw Hill withdrew a textbook because it contained a series of inaccurate maps that purported to show changes in Jewish versus Palestinian land possession over the course of the mid-20th century. Jewish Voice for Peace has a letter signed by several professors protesting that decision. It provides a convenient list of academics whose graphical representations we now know shouldn't be trusted. In all honesty, it provides a convenient list of academics who shouldn't be in academia.

Now, before we go into the details of the map series at issue, let's step back a bit. Suppose you are a conscientious academic who wanted to create a map series showing changes in "Palestinian land" and "Jewish land" over the course of the 20th century. The first thing you would do, obviously, is decide what metric you're using -- that is, what is the criteria through which lands are labeled "Jewish land" or "Palestinian land."

One possibility is "de jure authority": land is "Jewish land" if a Jewish state (i.e., Israel) exercises de jure sovereign authority over it, and is "Palestinian land" if a Palestinian state exercises de jure sovereign authority over it. The resulting map series might start before WWI and show that, at that time, none of the land was Jewish or Palestinian -- it was all under Ottoman authority. In 1946 it would all be under British control. Following Israel's War of Independence we would finally see some "Jewish land", alongside Jordanian and Egyptian land (as they exercised sovereign authority over the West Bank and Gaza strip), but still no "Palestinian land" (since a Palestinian state exercising de jure sovereign authority had yet to emerge). After 1967, all of the land in question would be Jewish land (and then some, if the date we picked included the years when Israel controlled Sinai). By 2000, though, the Palestinian Authority, would have (arguably) begun exercising sovereign authority over portions of the West Bank (and, for a time, Gaza) -- and so the map would adjust to remove those spots from "Jewish Land" and instead label them "Palestinian Land."

Of course, "de jure sovereign control" is not the only way to measure changes in Jewish versus Palestinian land. Another possibility is to look at private land ownership -- who owns the deed to particular parcels of land. This would be more difficult, but it's still theoretically doable. And we'd see some land owned by Jews, and some land owned by Palestinians, and some owned by neither (because its owned by a third party, or because it is state- rather than privately-controlled), and we could see how those proportions evolved over time. We could also do a map series defining whose land it is by reference to various international proposals that purport to allocate various lands to one group or the other. Any of these could be justified, so long as we were clear which we used and did not mix-and-match different metrics willy-nilly.

Importantly, doing this would not remove questions of interpretation or even bias. For example, if you started the "de jure control" map in 1975 and moved it to the present, it would look like the Israelis had actually ceded large swaths of territory to various groups, including the Palestinians. That would craft a very different, and arguably misleading, story compared to what emerges if you started the map series in 1946. By contrast, if you skip over the year 1975 entirely, you ignore a significant Israeli expansion in territory that it later contracted from, and that too could be said to be misleading. Likewise, the choice of one metric rather than another could be challenged for all sorts of reasons. As I said above, obeying the basic rules of academic integrity does very little to eliminate sources of academic controversy and disagreement. It is the bare minimum we can truly demand out of anyone who calls themselves a scholar.

Having said all of that, here are the maps that were challenged:

If it is hard to see, the green is labeled "Palestinian land" and the blue "Jewish land". The maps cover four periods --1946, 1947 (the Partition Plan), 1949-67, and 2000.

Pulling these maps, in all honesty, should not have been a controversial decision no matter what views you have on Israel and Palestine. The issue isn't that they tell an inconvenient story or pose difficult questions about the occupation. It isn't even that they are "misleading" or "biased" (though they are those things too). The issue is very straightforward: they don't use a consistent metric for what counts as "Jewish" and "Palestinian lands" (they also didn't disclose what metrics they did use -- presumably because doing so would have by necessity forced disclosure of how the metrics shift). That is flatly unacceptable for an academic work. Full stop.

Of course, since the metrics aren't disclosed, it isn't 100% clear what actually does provide the basis for why any individual plot of land on any given graph is consider "Jewish" or "Palestinian." But I think I can pretty well parse it out:

• The right-most graphic (2000) seems to label as "Palestinian land" that land which is under the de jure control of the Palestinian Authority. And it shows as "Jewish land" the land that is under the de jure control of Israel. So it looks like we're getting a series showing who had de jure control of what land at what time. That's great!

• Moving left, the next graph (1949-67) shows as blue "Jewish land" all the land under Israeli control during that time period. So far so good. But the green "Palestinian land" is not territory under control of a Palestinian sovereign. Those territories, at that time were under Egyptian and Jordanian sovereignty. The metric for "Palestinian land" now has switched from "land under Palestinian sovereignty" to "land not under Jewish sovereignty". Technically, one could say that's still the metric in the first graph (land that is or isn't under Israeli de jure control). That'd be more than a little shady (why should land under Jordanian control be labeled "Palestinian land"?), but I suppose technically it's not an inconsistency.

• The next map shows the proposed 1947 partition plan. It has nothing to do with who has de jure control over anything. Neither Jews nor Palestinians had sovereign authority over any of that land at that time -- it was under British dominion. We've completely left the realm of "de jure control" for both Jews and Palestinians alike.

• The final map, in 1946, is the most difficult for me to parse. It's obviously not about de jure control (again, it was entirely in British hands at the time). From what I can tell, it labels as Jewish land any land under private Jewish ownership -- a completely new metric. And is the green then "any land under private Palestinian ownership"? Nope -- the green is "everything else." Like the 1949-67 map, it's not even an internally consistent metric (let alone consistent across the four graphics).

In short, we have an inconsistent (and unlabeled) hodgepodge of standards, ranging from "private ownership" to "de jure control" to "international proposals" to "anything that isn't 'Jewish land'". There is no basis -- none -- for supporting this as a remotely valid piece of academic scholarship. If a student gave me these graphics, I would probably fail them, and I'd at least consider reporting them for academic misconduct (though I'd likely end up just  giving them a stern talking-to). If a professor defends it, they're basically saying that they can't be trusted to present information in accordance with basic standards of academic integrity -- or at best, that they can't identify basic academic malpractice in cases where the sources appear to advance to their preferred political outlooks. That any professor of any ideological outlook would stand in support of this is a disgrace to our entire profession.

The Id, The Ego, and Israel's Democracy

At the Times of Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur has a fascinating if sprawling piece on the state of Israeli democracy and the Israeli left. One of his claims is that the weakness of the Israeli left stems from its failure to engage in the sort of solidaristic politics that has generally characterized Israeli political identity since its founding. To the extent that's true, it strikes me as plausible explanation. There are absolutely critiques to be had of solidarity politics, but I understand its genuine appeal (one that is hardly restricted to Israelis). Likewise, he argues that given the general impotence of the Israeli left, the reason why the Knesset has not in fact passed all of the horrible anti-democratic bills one periodically sees popping up on the nightly news is that the Israeli right is blocking them. The left likes to claim credit, but in a parliamentary democracy these laws live or die based on their support in the majority coalition. And that strikes me as correct as well too.

Underneath Rettig Gur's narrative, however, is a story about the Israeli right -- one that is implicit in his story but isn't explicitly told. It presents a right-wing that is, at some level, in contradiction with itself. In many ways, the stability of Israeli democracy, under the narrative he provides, depends on this contradiction -- on the right blocking anti-democratic proposals that emanate from the right. The question is whether this contradiction can stand.

One of my perennial observations about Israeli politics concerns the lifecycle of right-wing Likud lawmaker. They enter the Knesset for the first time as firebrands, promoting extreme resolutions and uncompromising conservative views. The more time they spend in parliament, the more they moderate -- presumably, something about governance makes them recognize that their simple activist slogans aren't actually realistic or operationalizable. Eventually, they either take on the role of elder statesmen in the Party or bud off to form the latest centrist flash-in-the-pan (Shinui, Kadima, Yesh Atid, Kulanu...). Then they're replaced by new hotheads, and the cycle continues.

Rettig Gur's narrative buttresses this supposition. Over and over, he goes back to the same narrative -- yes, conservative Israeli lawmakers propose extreme laws. But they don't really want them to be enacted. They symbolically have them pass a first read to rile up the left, then acquiesce to letting them be swapped out for more moderate versions. They deliver fiery speeches about staying true to principles, then quietly submit to the demands of coalition leaders. They rail against an anti-democratic supreme court but never actually interfere with its constitutional authority.  When one of their wild proposals does end up passing "by accident", it ends up embarrassing even the authors (who "seemed more horrified at its successful passage into law than at its swift cancellation.").

The image one gets from this is of an immature adolescent who loudly proclaims his rebellious intentions but secretly craves structure. For all the fulmination against the rules and the authorities and the parents who just don't get it, he's well aware that these elder institutions are the only things standing between himself and some truly dire consequences. It's like the guy who fronts for a fight by yelling at his bros "don't hold me back!" Everyone knows that the last thing he wants his for his mate to actually let him go.

There's a degree to which this is a comedic farce. Unfortunately, in America we're witnessing the end of the play, and it's no laughing matter. For years the Republican Party had exactly these dynamics: backbenchers could put forward all the outrageous bills they wanted, and after a few loud hearings they'd quietly die in committee. Tea partiers were allowed to run wild on the campaign trail -- but don't worry, the party will decide the nominee. Ever-more extreme positions were ginned up to rally the base and get headlines, but there was nothing really to worry about -- everyone knows it's just for attention.

Until it wasn't. Until the minders stopped being minded. Until the id finally did break loose. And then we got Donald Trump.

Our one saving grace is that this colossal cock-up is occurring in our minority party -- the one which has won a national plurality exactly once in the past 24 years. In Israel, it's happening on the majority side that has been dominant in Israeli politics for the last two decades, in a parliamentary democracy which lacks the levers we have for the minority to exercise restraint. Donald Trump may destroy his Party, but he's unlikely to destroy the country because he can't get elected. What happens if the extremist cauldron bubbling on the Israeli right flank finally does boil over and takes control of the majority coalition?

The dynamic Rettig Gur describes on the Israeli right isn't a sustainable one. Relying on the right-wing to indefinitely continue this dance -- riling up its hotheads and then counting on their elder statesmen to douse them off -- is a dangerous proposition. And Israel has far less room for error than America does.

The Stanford Anti-Semitism Experiment, Part 2

Last week, I wrote on a Stanford student senator who, during a debate over a proposed resolution condemning anti-Semitism, argued that it was not anti-Semitic to contend that "Jews control[] the media, economy, government and other societal institutions." That episode has mostly wrapped up as the Senator has dropped his re-election bid, though it remains to be seen whether the student Senate can pass a resolution on anti-Semitism that is acceptable to the Jewish community on campus.

And on that score, they may have a new datapoint to consider -- this time on the faculty side of things. David Palumbo-Liu is a comparative literature professor whom I've run across before -- this Huffington Post article where he attributed Palestinian stabbings of Israelis to "an on-going campaign to desecrate and destroy holy sites that anchor non-Jewish peoples to their faiths", including an alleged conspiracy to replace the al-Aqsa Mosque with a new Jewish Temple. That was enough for me to recognize that we had a hack conspiracy theorist on our hands, and I didn't think much more of it.

Anyway, this past week in a Salon article,  Palumbo-Liu went even further. In suggesting alternative media sources readers should rely upon for accurate Mideast reporting (because the mainstream media is biased, as we know), he endorsed  Alison Weir "If Americans Knew" organization. For those of you who don't know, IAK is a group that has, among other things, argued that Jews really did ritually murder Christian children to drink their blood during Passover. Weir has also justified anti-Semitism by saying that the Jewish "race" has been "an object of hatred to all the peoples among whom it has established itself," regularly appeared on neo-Nazi and white supremacist media programs, and, most recently, objected to the Merrick Garland nomination on account of Judge Garland's Jewish faith. IAK's anti-Semitism has been sufficiently overt to garner condemnation not just from the Anti-Defamation League, but also by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation (more on that in a moment).

After public outcry, Palumbo-Liu removed the reference to IAK from his article with the following message:

While the organization If Americans Knew, which was previously listed here, provides much useful information from reliable, neutral sources, I disagree with many of the public comments of its director. I have removed the original reference to prevent any confusion.)

On Twitter, that played out like this:

I disagree with many comments made by Alison Weir of IAK. I do not believe she represents all of what IAK does.

— David Palumbo-Liu (@palumboliu) April 12, 2016

Shorter @palumboliu : If you discount the "Jews drink Christian blood at passover" thing, IAK is well worth reading!https://t.co/FhuzKM7fpc

— David Schraub (@schraubd) April 12, 2016

Does Palumbo-Liu agree that IAK has engaged in anti-Semitism? Sure doesn't seem like it. There's no condemnation here at all: I "disagree" with my girlfriend regarding the merits of the movie Gran Torino, and in any event Palumbo-Liu can't even bring himself to say what it is he so blandly "disagrees" with. Certainly, he makes it clear that whatever "disagreements" he might have with IAK does not negate the reliability of the group as a whole. Who's to let a little blood libel disturb our credibility judgments?

There honestly isn't that much more to say on this event directly: A Stanford Professor thinks that an organization nearly-universally regarded as anti-Semitic is an important resource for persons looking for an accurate perspective on Israel, and Salon in turn thinks that an academic with those views provides a worthy contribution to its readers. That's depressing, but pretty straightforward.

But there are two more points I want to make. The first regards the role of the JVP condemnation of Weir in all of this. As I noted at the time, the JVP condemnation of Weir was itself quite mealy-mouthed (and they haven't been able to hold to it with consistency, either). They did seem to think, though, that their credibility as an organization that virtually never calls anything anti-Semitic would mean that their normal allies would give them credence here. This hypothesis was falsified rather quickly, and this event proves the point yet further. As soon as JVP strays from its box as the Jews who reassure non-Jews that they're totally not anti-Semitic -- that is, as soon as they do try to label anything anti-Semitic -- they become just as unreliable and uncredible as any other Jewish group. Palumbo-Liu, after all, had also listed JVP as another one of the organizations worth listening to -- but not, apparently, worth listening to when they call someone that Palumbo-Liu likes anti-Semitic.

Which moves me to the next point. Palumbo-Liu, I have no doubt, thinks he has reliable instincts on anti-Semitism. As usual, I don't quite understand the foundation of that sentiment, but what I'm curious about here -- and this is a serious question -- is whether there is anything that would falsify that proposition to him? Clearly, "supporting things most Jews deem anti-Semitic" wouldn't do it. And apparently, "supporting organizations even groups like Jewish Voice for Peace label anti-Semitic" won't cut it either. So what would? My suspicion is that the answer is: "nothing". David Palumbo-Liu's stance as a reliable arbiter of what is and is not anti-Semitic is axiomatic -- unchallengeable by anyone or anything (no doubt if we try, it's just another Zionist Jewish smear).

Professor Palumbo-Liu might be past helping in terms of accurately appraising the reliability of his own instincts. But we -- the collective we, including the Salons and the Nations and the Huffington Posts that publish him -- still can make that assessment. We can still look at him and his revealed instincts and ask ourselves: Is this guy credible? Is the perspective he's offering one worth sharing? Is his contribution one grounded in assessments and appraisals that are considered, fair-minded, egalitarian, and respectful?

We can still do that. And, in turn, the way we answer those questions reveals something about ourselves -- our own instincts, our own sensibilities, and, ultimately, our own credibility.

Boos and Cheers from Bernie's Harlem Crowd

As many of you know, Bernie Sanders fielded a question at a rally in Harlem yesterday where he was asked about the "Zionist Jews run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street." Obviously, this is a very distressing thing. It's not the first anti-Semitic question Bernie has received this campaign, and it probably won't be the last. And I have to say -- as much racist vitriol as I can remember Barack Obama experiencing over the last eight years, I can't remember him getting a question quite like this at one of his own rallies. That this happened is an important testament to the ongoing salience of anti-Semitism in American political life. It falsifies the "nobody would ever say that about Jews" (the ultimate anti-discrimination winners) trope that is so common in American public discourse. Far be it from me to discount that.

I also understand Yair Rosenberg's frustration that Sen. Sanders' response was not as impassioned in denouncing anti-Semitic bigotry as it could have been, though I am also sympathetic to the difficult predicament Bernie was in. It is "easy", in some sense, for politicians to condemn bigotry against groups not their own -- but when they start tackling prejudice against their own people, they're immediately going to be hit with labels like "whiner", "special pleading", and so on. It's why Barack Obama must tread lightly around race, why Hillary Clinton can't be too loud about sexism, and why Bernie Sanders has to keep a low-profile on anti-Semitism. To be clear, Yair is well aware of these restrictions -- I'd wager we only disagree on proportions (I generally am sympathetic to the catch-22 Bernie was in, with a residual sense of unhappiness at Bernie's relatively muted response; Yair is unhappy with Bernie's relatively muted response, with a residual recognition that he was in a difficult situation).

But one thing that hasn't been commented on, which I think also deserves recognition, is the reaction of the largely Black, Harlem crowd Bernie was speaking to when the anti-Semitism occurred. As soon as the anti-Semitism became evident (it was "Zionist Jews" that was the giveaway), the crowd erupted in boos. When Bernie proudly proclaimed his Jewish heritage, the people cried out in cheers. When the questioner attempted to persist in making anti-Semitic remarks, he was drowned out with chants.

There is, as everyone knows, a particular narrative about resurgent anti-Semitism in the African-American community. It goes beyond the banal assertion that there are Black anti-Semites (which there obviously are, as this event demonstrated). It contends that the Black community is particularly anti-Semitic, and that as a community it is at best indifferent to Jewish suffering and at worst revels in it.

Over and over again, this hypothesis has been falsified. When Reps. Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard drew the ire of the Jewish community, both were kicked out of office by their predominantly Black electorate. When Nikki Tinker ran a Jew-baiting campaign to primary out Rep. Steve Cohen (a Jewish congressman representing a majority-black district in Memphis), she got trounced. When Charles Barron's open anti-Semitism won him the endorsement of David Duke in an open New York congressional race ("It's a new morning in America when a white supremacist and a black nationalist can join hands in a shared hatred of Jews."), he was throttled by Hakeem Jeffries. Over and over again, the (very real) anti-Semitic wing of the Black community has vastly overestimated its support among Black voters writ large. And over and over again, the Black community as constituted by its voting public demonstrates in word and deed that they will, in fact, be there for the Jewish community when we need them.

And so I was pleased to note the headline JTA selected for covering this story: "Bernie Sanders’ expression of Jewish pride wins cheers in Harlem." Indeed, and while it is worth pointing out and taking seriously the anti-Semitism and it's worth interrogating why Bernie had to give such a modulated response to it, this is something worth pointing out too.

The Stanford Anti-Semitism Experiment

The Stanford student council is in the process of considering a resolution condemning anti-Semitism. During its deliberations, one senator, Gabriel Knight, objected to language that would have identified claims that "Jews [control] the media, economy, government and other societal institutions" as a form of anti-Semitism. He contended that this was "not anti-Semitism":

“[The clause] says: ‘Jews controlling the media, economy, government and other societal institutions’ [is] a feature of anti-Semitism that we theoretically shouldn’t challenge,” Knight said. “I think that that’s kind of irresponsible foraying into another politically contentious conversation. Questioning these potential power dynamics, I think, is not anti-Semitism. I think it’s a very valid discussion.”

As Yair Rosenberg points out, the reaction by the Stanford community has been markedly better than the muted hand-wringing we've seen at other campuses when faced with anti-Semitism controversies. There have been widespread public outrage, calls for Senator Knight to resign (or lose re-election), a rescission of endorsement from the Stanford newspaper, and a powerful editorial by Winston Shi in the Stanford Daily unequivocally condemning anti-Semitism that is well worth a read.*

I want to write on this event, though, because I think it keenly illustrates some thoughts I've had about the intersection of Jews and "whiteness" as a concept. Were I to try and reconstruct what Sen. Knight was thinking when he said those words (perhaps overgenerously, but I think it's a good thing to at least try to consider the views of others in their strongest light). it would go something like the following:

It is standard practice in opposing racism and white supremacy to note the power and significant control white people have over entities like the media, economy, government, and other societal institutions. So how can it be that the same argument made all the time with respect to white people generally -- and acknowledged to be valid and progressive in that case -- suddenly becomes a form of bigotry when applied to a particular class of white people (i.e., the Jews)? Indeed, we frequently see white people try to deny they possess this power and instead take on the role of the victim; how is this any different.

From the Jewish perspective, by contrast, the argument runs thusly:

It is a standard form of anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish bigotry to argue that Jews have power and control over entities like the media, economy, government, and other social institutions. So why should such claims suddenly cease to be anti-Semitic simply because they cloak themselves in the garb of "anti-racism" or "progressivism"? Indeed, historically speaking there is no oddity in such a connection; anti-Semitism of this form has not just occasionally but frequently manifested precisely in this way -- leftist self-identification and all.

Hopefully this example at least illuminates the sense of talking past one another that was evident in this debate. Senator Knight sees himself as talking about Jews the same way he talks about any other similarly situated group. It is implausible, he thinks, that his motivations suddenly shifted from licit to illicit in the Jewish case, when he's making the same exact same argument he's always made. And meanwhile, from the Jewish vantage point, Senator Knight is talking about Jews the same way anti-Semites have always talked about Jews. It is implausible, we think, that the political valence of the remarks shifted from illicit to licit simply because Senator Knight thinks of himself as an egalitarian, non-prejudiced sort.

That said, I think there is more to be said here than simply dueling narratives talking past one another. What we need to do instead is look at the intersection of "Jew" and "white" as categories, seeing how placing them in relationship with one another creates something unique and hard to spot if one simply takes them in isolation. 

The conflict between the narratives laid out above, of course, rests on the idea of Jews as a class of white people. There are quite a few things we could say about this directly -- the complex racination of even European Ashkenazi Jews, the difficulties presented by the existence of Jews of color, the complicated case posed by Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. I'll leave those important issues aside for now, and instead accept the more modest point that the image of the Jew, in the relevant public imaginary, is taken to be a white person.

In theory, that shouldn't tell us that much about the standing of the Jew qua Jew. Jews who are white would enjoy white privilege, to be sure, but that wouldn't translate into a Jewish privilege, any more than Sen. Knight's status as a man (with male privilege) translates into a "black privilege". In the latter case, the absurdity is evident -- the fact that some black people have privilege along other dimensions of their identity (they are blacks who have privilege) does not create a distinct "black privilege". Indeed, we would probably recognize that blackness significantly modulates an "unmarked" (read: white) male privilege.

Yet for Jews, it seems things are different. The whiteness of Jews doesn't yield the unremarkable kyriarchical observation (that people are privileged along certain axes and subordinated along others). The prototypical whiteness of Jews goes further -- it assimilates the Jewishness. This is how, in Senator Knight's narrative, we can make the jump from being able to talk about the power and influence held by whites qua whites to justify the same discourse regarding Jews qua Jews.

Why do Jews seems particularly vulnerable to this particular elision? Here is where taking seriously the Jewish narrative becomes important. Part of the historical discursive pattern of anti-Semitism is the notion of Jewish hyperpower -- that we are dominant, tyrannical, world-controlling figures. Anti-Semitism isn't just people who hate Jews, it's people who think they're oppressed by Jews -- who place Jews into the role of the oppressor class (there is a reason why anti-Semitism has been often called "the socialism of fools"). It is easy to see how a concept like "whiteness" -- bound up as it is in its own history of dominance and power -- would intersect with this particular anti-Semitic stereotype in a particularly pernicious way. What emerges is an inversion of the general kyriarchical framework -- instead of seeing Jewishness as being a source of disadvantage distinct from privileges yielded by whiteness (indeed, one that likely modulates -- though does not erase -- "white privilege"), Jewishness is taken to accentuate the privilege. Jews are not just white, they are the paradigm or epitome of whiteness.

From here, we are in a position to respond to the first narrative directly. Why is it the case that the "same argument" deployed against "other whites" becomes invalid as against white Jews? Well, in part, its because as argued above it isn't quite the same -- there is a jump being made here. But more importantly, the argument is different because intersecting the categories of "Jew" and "white" creates a social position that is not, in fact, assimilable into "white" as a simple category (this is the basic insight of intersectionality). It is not surprising that the impact would be different (and it helps to adopt the progressive standpoint of thinking that more matters here than subjective ill-intent), nor is it surprising that we'd miss certain important elements if we are not attuned to the basic Jewish narrative about what arguments like these mean.

So what lessons can we glean? Well, for starters, concepts like intersectionality are actually really useful tools for a full understanding of issues of oppression and discrimination given our complex and multi-layered identities. Beyond that, though, is the importance of recognizing the value of perspective, of not assuming that one already knows what one needs to know about the group one is talking about. The problems in Sen. Knight's statements are clear enough once one takes the Jewish vantage point seriously, and moreover, I'd like to say they tell us something important about the other related concepts in play here as well (like "whiteness" or "privilege"). There is a useful epistemic humility worth developing regarding our intuitions regarding outgroups whose perspectives are simultaneously often not aired and often not viewed as needing to be aired in ordered to have a conversation about them (I won't quote Christine Littleton or George Yancy again, but, you know, here they are). That's true across the board, but it is perhaps worth special emphasis with respect to Jews because Jews are often particularly (and wrongly) assumed to have already been heard -- if not overheard -- in the dominant discursive strains.

In a sense, these are not anything remarkable to persons versed in current progressive understandings of discrimination and inequality. Do intersectional analysis. Take seriously the perspective of the other. And so on. But I think we are getting a glimpse of why these seemingly unremarkable concepts -- which one would think would be, if not second nature, then at least readily recognizable by your average contemporary progressive advocate -- seem to have trouble penetrating in the Jewish case. The particular cocktail of anti-Semitic stereotypes -- whether by luck or design -- seems mixed precisely to immunize it from these otherwise powerful critical counters. That's unfortunate. But there isn't much to be done about it except to insist, with as much vigor and clarity as we can, upon making the connections.

* With respect to Shi's editorial, I do have to digress and observe again -- since this is important to say when prompted by one's allies as much as one's adversaries -- that "hate speech" and "free speech" is a false binary. On the one hand, hate speech is a form of (hateful) free speech. And on the other hand, that something is free speech does not immunize it from condemnation; the response to Sen. Knight's comments -- including Shi's editorial and the calls for Knight to resign or be voted out of office -- are exactly the sorts of challenging counterspeech that one would hope would constitute the response to free-yet-vile speech.