Grieving Alone (But Not Entirely Alone) After Michigan

You might recall my post after the attempted synagogue massacre in Michigan, where I wrote that I had basically become numb to such attacks. Even though my baby attends a preschool program very similar to the one that was in session at Temple Israel, I realized that I had mentally "priced in" the possibility of such an assault. It didn't shock me; it barely affected me. I already knew things like that might happen.

There is a common line one hears from more humanitarian-inclined anti-Zionists, condemning attacks like we saw in Michigan on the grounds that they make the Zionist's point (that Jews will never be safe in the diaspora, that our only hope for security lies in an armed fortress of our own). Antisemitism hurts the Palestinian cause. I've always hated this line. For starters, I'm dubious of its truth as an empirical matter. The antisemites, after all, posit that antisemitic terrorism will not harden Jewish resolve, it will cow Jews into submission. Are they wrong? That's an empirical question, not an article of faith. More broadly, antisemitism is one of the most powerful tools of social mobilization the world has ever seen. It is not only not implausible that antisemitism might help those social movements which can successfully harness it, it would be weird if it didn't. The real question is whether anti-Zionists will oppose antisemitism even where it helps their cause. The jury is still out there.

But the more I think about it, the more I think this entire framing -- that antisemitic attacks in the diaspora are what push diaspora Jews to cleave to Zionism -- is slightly off-kilter. For me at least, it is not the attack itself that causes that sort of recoil. It's the response of the public to the attack.

Like a 10/7 in miniature, most people responded to the Michigan assault exactly appropriately -- with horror, grief, and condemnation. Good, and it's good not to overlook the fact that the humane majority was humane. 

But there was a small but vocal slice of individuals, often self-styled pro-Palestinian "progressives", who were insistent that the synagogue was a fair and justified target. And then there was another small but somewhat larger slice of individuals who bent over to explain why the first slice could not be called antisemitic -- uncouth, emotional, un-PC, anything but antisemitic -- and were in fact the primary victims of a smear machine which had the temerity to use the dread slur "antisemitic".

Far more than the attack itself, that's the response that makes me despair. I can accept (maybe I shouldn't accept, but I do) that bad things might happen to me as a Jew. But it is a horribly alienating sensation to feel certain that, if something bad did happen to me, a large chunk of political energy will be dedicated to explaining why I had it coming, to poring over my social media feeds to find "evidence" that I'm one of the bad ones, and to being aghast and appalled that anyone would be so gauche as to find any of this antisemitic.

The anti-Zionist counterproposal to policing and militarism and wall-building as a response to antisemitism is "safety through solidarity". Yet it is ironic that in spite of this rhetorical commitment, solidarity is the last thing they extend. Josh Yunis had a provocative post the other day, where he observed the following:

Antizionists (including antizionist Jews) like to observe – with a feigned helplessness, as if observing a passing cloud – the “inevitable” correlation between increased antisemitism in the diaspora and the actions of the state of Israel. But if we lived in a world in which antizionists were successfully making the case for their worldview, anti-Jewish hatred would decrease or remain steady in spite of Israel’s actions abroad. Antizionists would be springing into action, forming protective rings around synagogues and organizing multi-faith solidarity rallies after each new anti-Jewish atrocity, in which they proclaim that “in spite of our strong, even visceral disagreement on Israel, we want Jews of all kinds, regardless of their views on Israel and Palestine, to know that they are welcome in our communities.” (Surely by now, they’ve had enough time to internalize this lesson and organize such efforts.)

And yet: when was the last time you saw a self-identified antizionist show up at a vandalized kosher restaurant to help clean up its windows, broken in the name of a Free Palestine? Or clean the swastika graffiti off the wall of a synagogue? What we get instead from this camp is the usual dissembling, in which defenders of anti-Jewish harassment rifle through the dumpster for some kind of receipt that indicts this Jew and that Jew for having failed to sufficiently distance themselves from Israeli crimes.

The most compelling antizionist argument imaginable would be to point at the news and tell Jews, “see, even when Israel does horrific things, you are safe here.” But of course, the reverse has happened. It’s one thing for the movement to be doing the valiant work of trying to keep Jews safe, albeit unsuccessfully; it’s another entirely to not even try. Each new retreat to the same old talking point about the regrettable, but inevitable correlation between Israeli policy and antisemitism is itself evidence of a movement that isn’t really interested in trying. On the contrary, each new instance of anti-Jewish violence is trotted out not as a pained expression of their movement’s failures, of the need to do better – of asking “where did we go wrong?” (such hand-wringing questions are de rigueur for leftist Jews when it comes to Zionism) – but as a barely-veiled threat: here’s what happens when you don’t distance yourself from Israel – and you can expect a lot more of where that came from.

That possibility Yunis alludes to, of unconditional love and support, stands out because it is simultaneously so obvious and so fanciful. Of course one could do that. And of course it's actually the opposite happening. The energy here isn't actually around promoting solidarity, it's around justifying abandonment -- here's why you should shun synagogues, here's why you must expel Jewish organizations, here's why the Israeli food truck must be kicked out, here's why the Jewish lesbians can't march with us. The fact that I cannot even imagine any of these people "showing up at a vandalized kosher restaurant to help clean up its windows" -- that is what feeds the sense that the diaspora will never be there for us.

One of the first bad October 7 takes I responded to -- less than a week after the attack -- was a truly wretched essay by Gabriel Winant urging progressives not to grieve the Jews slaughtered by Hamas. Winant's argument was not exactly "these were settlers and colonizers and so had it coming." It was rather that grief over dead Israeli Jews is the fuel for Israel's genocidal machine, so we must resist our humanist impulses lest we feed the beast. My basic critique of the argument was that it was terrible causal inference -- the Israeli response to October 7 would not materially change by whether the broader world grieved or didn't grieve, so one might as well do the humanist thing and grieve. But I also wrote:

If there is even the slightest truth in Winant's framework, it is not that Israel transmutes grief into power. It's that Israel transmutes grieving alone into power. The impetus behind Zionism -- I've been in enough of these conversations to speak confidently here -- is not (just) that bad, dreadful things happen to Jews. It's that bad, dreadful things happen to Jews and Jews are the only ones who will ever care. The only people who will grieve dead Jews are Jews; the only people who will rally to the defense of threatened Jews are Jews; the only people who will feel empathy (or anything at all, really) towards frightened or traumatized Jews are Jews; the only people who will erect fortresses to protect Jews are Jews; and so ultimately the only people who can be entrusted to protect and ensure the lives of Jews are Jews. It is not grief alone, but grief alone, that fuels these instincts.

Taken from that vantage point, the scenes of collective global grief over dead Jews represent what might be the closest thing Israelis can get to a non-violent catharsis for their trauma -- the knowledge that Jews aren't actually alone, that others do care when we are pricked and bleed. If you want something that might actually sap the machine of violence and vengeance of some of its forward momentum, that's by far your best bet -- not enforced loneliness, but unconditional embrace and empathy in the moments where it is needed most.

As I said, the contretemps following Michigan felt like a miniature version of what we saw post-10/7. Thankfully, the Michigan attack was largely thwarted and had no casualties other than the attacker, but that also made the alienation from the aftermath come into sharper relief.  Once again, we're confronted with the fact that in our moments of intense pain and fear the response from a non-trivial segment of our peers will be to explain why we deserve it, and the response from another segment will be to bend over backwards to explain why the true victims are their friends in the first segment who are oh-so-unfairly being maligned. With regard to Winant, I argued that even if he personally wasn't quite saying "the Jews got what was coming to them," the appetite for his argument came largely from those who "desperately don't want to accede to the overwhelming power of 'Who can begrudge tears for those lost to violence?' [and who want] an excuse, an apologia they can wield to begrudge, begrudge, begrudge." The sheer amount of energy and enthusiasm dedicated to propping up that horrible point is itself proof of the problem.

Again, I don't want to exaggerate the prevalence of these sorts of responses -- they are and remain a distinct minority compared to most people responding with basic human empathy. But if one is looking for a causal chain that ends in "and here's why diaspora Jews still believe in Zionism", I think these responses are more germane than the attack itself.

I'll close with one more thought. When New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned antisemitic remarks from prominent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa in the wake of the Michigan attack, he took some serious heat from the more irredentist wing of the pro-Palestinian movement who, of course, presented him as a traitor even as they mocked the idea that Mamdani's words would put him in the good graces of the "Zionists" (the possibility that Mamdani might not be doing this for credit, but because he actually believes it, is apparently beyond consideration). There were some Jewish voices that sought to poo-poo Mamdani's words since condemning Abulhawa's obvious antisemitism -- among other things, she's been promoting neo-Nazi "noticer" accounts and said no Israeli or Jew (she specifically clarified she didn't care if the two were conflated) should "feel safe anywhere in the world" -- was "the bare minimum". Arguable, but that's not the point. 

The point was that, although Mayor Mamdani clearly has substantial, deep-felt disagreements with many (if not most) Jews on a matter of deep personal importance to him, he was saying that those disagreements do not matter in the context of a larger threat to Jewish safety and equal standing. He was committing himself to the protective ring, he was saying that no matter what Israel does over there he won't compromise on keeping Jews safe here. That's laudable. That's meaningful. I disagree with Mamdani on some important things, he disagrees with me on some important things. But the reality is he's performing the actual hard work of solidarity -- extending even to those who aren't in his political camp, even to those who represent a very hostile audience -- and that really does stand out as deserving considerable credit.

The 1001 Faces of the Permacold

Nathaniel is in daycare, and I have a cold.

This is a sentence that is true today, was true the first week we sent Nathaniel to daycare, and has been true virtually every day in between.

I had heard about the permacold -- that as a parent you just spend the first X number of years of your child's life sick as he brings every single mildly transferable virus home with him. I had heard about it, but didn't quite believe it. Nathaniel stayed home with us for his first year, so he wasn't really affected, and so neither were we. It was all rumor and legend. And just as we miraculously missed the travails of having a baby who wouldn't stay asleep, maybe we'd miss this too. Maybe all the terribles of raising a little one are rumors and exaggeration!

Nope. This one hit. And the interesting bit about the permacold is that it makes you vividly aware of all the different types of colds one can have (because one is essentially speed-running them in a rapid and never-ending cycle). Sometimes you have a dry cough, and sometimes it's a productive cough. Sometimes you're congested beyond belief, and sometimes your nose won't stop running. Sometimes your throat is scratchy, and sometimes it's swollen. Sometimes your teeth hurt, and sometimes you snore just from breathing. It's not that any of these symptoms are novel or unfamiliar, exactly. It's just that normally they're spaced out weeks or months apart. To oscillate between all of them in 24 hour shifts is very disorienting.

And the bonus irony is that Nathaniel is basically unaffected by any of the diseases he vectors into the house. He coughs and sneezes and has a runny nose, but it never really bothers him all that much. It's mom and dad who are shambling around the house like the night of the living dead. Even when he gets sent home from daycare for something more serious, like pink eye or hand-foot-mouth disease, we're the ones who really end up suffering while his behavior barely changes at all. Objectively, I know that's far better than the alternative. Subjectively, it's tough not to feel a twinge resentful.

Jill was out tonight to see a play, so I got to put Nathaniel to bed (Jill and I share the nighttime routine, but the very last part of it is Jill's time). He hadn't gotten the best nap in (and the nap was late -- from 4:15 - 5:15), so I was a bit nervous. But I did my best solo version of the nighttime winddown process, and Nathaniel was very obliging. I gave him his kisses and told him how much I loved him, and he snuggled up against me and rested his head on my chest. I put him down to sleep, and he went right down, and all is right in the world -- no matter how much I cough.

Pricing In Synagogue Attacks

I first heard of the attack on the Temple Israel Michigan synagogue from one of my students after my morning class. The attack has been variously described as a "shooting" or a "car-ramming" attack; from what I can tell the terrorist had a ton of explosives in his car that he was hoping to set off via crashing his vehicle into the synagogue building. He was shot dead by security, and thankfully he seems to be the only fatality.

It's been reported that the synagogue also runs a preschool that was in session at the time of the attack. I, of course, am also the parent of a baby who currently attends preschool/daycare at his synagogue, under a set up that is very similar to that of Temple Israel. We also have security posted outside the building on a daily basis; we also have a gate set up one needs to "swipe" into (twice!) in order to access the interior of the building. 

It is very, very easy to imagine that our synagogue and our preschool could have been the target of this attack. In fact, the other day I was idly imagining (in the way parents do) just such an attack on my synagogue, in circumstances where Nathaniel was present. And what was striking to me about my thought process -- both in the imaginative space, yesterday, and in responding to the very real attack in Michigan, today -- was how numb I felt to it. It should feel terrifying. I should be terrified. But my reaction was alarmingly muted, as if I've just "priced in" the possibility of attacks like this. This is what it means to live as a Jew.

I don't know. I can't say I mourn not feeling overwhelmed by crippling anxiety and fear. But also, what does it say about me that I'm past feeling anxious and fearful? And this isn't, to be clear, a sound assessment of actuarial risk -- that would give me too much credit. It's something more quiescent -- an atrophication of any sense that security and safety is something I could ever expect to have for me and my family. That feeling -- or lack thereof -- well, I don't think it's a good thing.

David's First Math Problem

Last night, I had a math problem.

Sort of. Not really. I'm not saying it's a hard math problem, or an interesting math problem. It may be a profoundly weird way to look at a math problem, and the way I solved it may be a really silly and convoluted solution to the math problem. But it stuck with me until I just had to tackle it -- and I haven't done any real math in about twenty years.

Okay, let's get to it.

At an auction, the amount an item sells for is known as the "hammer price". But it is not necessarily the case that either the buyer pays, or the seller receives, the hammer price. Rather, there is both a buyer's premium (BP) and a seller's premium (SP) that is calculated as a percentage of the hammer. The buyer pays the hammer plus the BP; the seller receives the hammer minus the SP. In other words:

• Final buyer's price = Hammer + (Hammer x BP)
• Final seller's final return = Hammer - (Hammer x SP)

Imagine two different auction premium models. In the first, the buyer pays no premium (BP = 0), and the seller pays a premium of 50% (SP = .5). In the second, the buyer pays a premium of 30% (BP = .3) and the seller plays a premium of 20% (SP = .2). Assuming the final buyer's price remains constant, which model is better for the seller?*

The answer is obviously the second -- but not by as much as might appear at first glance. Since the buyer pays no premium in the first model, they'll pay a higher hammer price than in the second, which partially offsets the first model's higher seller's premium. It's just not enough. To give an example, for a buyer willing to pay $130 for an item:

• In model one, the item would hammer for $130 (130 + (130 x 0)). The seller would get half of that, or $65 (130 - (130 x .5).
• In model two, the item would hammer for $100 to yield the same final buyer's price of $130 (100 + (100 x .3)). The seller would get 80% of the $100 hammer, or $80 (100 - (.2 x 100)).

So model two is better than model one for the seller by a ratio of 16/13 (80/65 = 160/130 = 16/13).

That was not the math problem.

I looked at that number: 16/13. And I thought, that's an ugly number. It expresses out to 1.23076923077 -- yuck!** Moreover, it's an ugly number that, at first glance, has relatively little to do with the relatively nice numbers we saw in the inputs -- .3, .2, .5. Where on earth did 16/13 come from?

16/13, I knew, was not just the ratio that applied to the particular example buyer's price I chose ($130). It was the ratio for any buyer's final price fed into these two premium models. The seller's return would always be 16/13 times higher in model two compared to model one.

What I wanted was (and this was the math problem) was to write some sort of equation or proof that would spit out that ugly 16/13 number, not just for one particular buyer's price but generally.

Now all of this thinking occurred last night, in bed, right around when the daylight's savings time switch happened. It was pretty unproductive.

But this afternoon, I decided to actually take out a pen and paper and really see if I could do this. Here were my steps.

Fb = Final Buyer's Price

Fs = Final Seller's return

H = Hammer.

(1) Fb1 = H + (H x 0) = H

(2) Fs1 = H - (H x .5) = Fb1 - (Fb1 x .5) = .5Fb1

Since The Final Buyer's Price in the first model is just the hammer, we can substitute it in for the hammer in calculating the first model's Final Seller's Return. The Seller pays a 50% premium, so they receive half the Final Buyer's Return aka half the hammer price.

(3) Fb2 = H + (H x .3) = 1.3H

(4) 10Fb2 = 13H, divide both by 13 --> (10/13)Fb2 = H

Not as neat as the first model, but that also lets us express H as a function of Fb2.

(5) Fs2 = H - (H x .2) = .8H

(6) Fs2 = .8((10/13)Fb2 = (8/13)Fb2

(7) Fs2 = (8/13)Fb2 and Fs1 = (1/2)Fb1.

But by stipulation, Fb1 and Fb2 are the same (the buyer is paying the same final price in each model). Meaning:

(8) The ratio of Fs2/Fs1 = (8/13)/(1/2), multiply those by 2 and you get (16/13)/1, or just 16/13.

Tada!

And listen: maybe you're good at math. Maybe you do math all the time. I'm not and I don't. I did not enjoy math in school, and I have generally avoided math as an adult. Indeed, I've written about my complex relationship with my own math educational trajectory, which while not exactly a tragedy was not exactly a triumphant tale either. So I felt very good about being able to work this out, and to stretch some muscles that had lain dormant for quite some time -- even though to be honest I'm still not entirely sure why this particular hypothetical sunk its claws into me so.

Yay me!

* If you're wondering where these two "models" came from, model two represents the rough premiums charged by a standard commercial auction house, and model one represents a charity auction where returns are split 50/50 between the consigner and the charity beneficiary. My initial inquiry was to ask just how much the consigner is losing by doing the charity auction (with the answer being "they are losing, but not as much as they might think upon seeing that steep 50% seller's premium").

** In hindsight, while writing this post, I realized that just by flipping the ratio -- 13/16 -- it would be at least a little less ugly (13/16 = .8125).

The Shock Has Passed, the Awe is Gone

One of the Trump administration's earliest and most vicious power abuses was its attempt to sabotage law firms who it viewed as tied to Trump's adversaries, targeting the firms with outrageous and draconian restrictions on everything from their ability to meet with federal agencies to their license to enter federal buildings. It was an existential threat to these firms' businesses if allowed to go through, and some firms, famously, caved in. 

But others fought, and won injunctions against the administration's unlawful retaliation. And today, the report is that the Trump administration is quietly dropping its appeal of those rulings. It is a victory for rule of law, and for the law firms that understood the actual demands of the moment beyond the most transient instinct for self-preservation.

The timeline of events here is instructive, offering hope and, I'd argue, a lesson. From their first week back in power, the Trump administration came out storming with a cavalcade of some of the most radical attacks on the American constitutional order that have been seen in my lifetime. It was shocking, and people and institutions were shocked. They'd never witnessed anything like this. Many were still reeling from an election they weren't expecting to lose. They didn't know how to respond. And the Trump administration exploited that shock and that awe to spend months just running over the institutional guardrails that should have existed to keep them in check. The law firm submissions were part of that story, but it was much larger than that. Media companies, universities, even the Democratic leadership was left floundering at best, trying to negotiate a panicked surrender at worst.

But now the tide is turning. Once again, the dropped initiative against the law firms is just one part of a larger story. The initial blitzkrieg is grinding to a halt. A dazed opposition has regained its footing. Resistance is mounting. Even the Supreme Court maybe is starting to recognize, just a little bit, that its constitutional role is not to act as the highest rubber stamp in the land. The shock has passed, the awe is gone. People are fighting back, and they are winning. And while nobody should expect the Trump administration to just slink away quietly (even if that's what they did do in this appeal), at the very least it's no longer a romp. They're in for a fight now, and it's a fight we can and will win.

This is not an exculpation of those who turned tail and ran. It is a praise of those who remained steadfast -- a few law firms, sure, but far more importantly ordinary American citizens in places like Minneapolis and Chicago and Portland who planted their feet and said no. Their continued faith and grit is what allowed others to rally and reestablish themselves. They are heroes. May their names ever be sung in our victory speeches.

That's the hope. Here's the lesson. The Trump administration's goals are evil. But the strategy -- of coming out the gates storming, front-loading as much aggressive policy content as possible, as fast as possible -- was a sound one. It worked. Yes, it bred backlash -- eventually. But much of the damage "accomplishments" they wrought is already well-entrenched. The lesson here is Machiavelli's, and I flagged it when the Supreme Court did something similar in loading up its most extreme right-wing agenda all at once in 2022.

[I]f you feel compelled to take certain actions that you know are unpopular, or will engender backlash -- do them all, do them early, and do them all at once.

Do not try to spread them out. Do not feel the need to pull back on some to balance the others. Do not hem and haw with baby steps. Do everything you want to do early, and immediately. The backlash will come, but the backlash won't be materially different between one outrageous thing and ten outrageous things. Spreading them out just creates new moments of fresh anger. Purported sops won't make people forgive in the moment.... Get them all out of the way in one fell swoop.

This was a lesson I argued Democrats should internalize, though it was already too late for them in 2022.

Democrats needed to do big things. Those things would be controversial. Talking them out indefinitely in a bid for a compromise that would never occur only would bleed resources (ask Barack Obama how that went with the ACA). Better to slam them through at the start. Voting rights, anti-gerrymandering, DC statehood, BBB, protecting abortion rights. Yeah, these things would be controversial. They wouldn't be any less controversial if they're spread out in drips and drabs. Do them all, do them together, weather the storm, and then spend the rest of your time consolidating your position. 

That would still be my basic advice if Democrats retake the Oval Office in 2028. By the end of the first week, I'd want to a complete pro-democracy package (including DC statehood) on the president's desk. I want to see prominent Republicans and ICE leaders who've committed crimes frog-marched in handcuffs. I want the corporate executives who approved "settlements" for Trump's frivolous lawsuits indicted for bribery. I want to see public resources and opportunities expressly redirected away from companies and firms who caved to Trump, and towards those who showed backbone, to show that there are penalties to being a quisling. I want the DOJ to announce an anti-corruption task force geared at identifying all the money stolen from the American taxpayer by the Trump family and clawing back as much of it as possible, and I want them to name and shame the Supreme Court as among the primary obstacles to providing accountability for their crimes. I want to uncover the corrupt insiders who bet on the lives of American servicemembers and have their identities blasted across every newspaper in America in advance of their trials. Do it all, do it fast, weather the storm, then consolidate your position.

Does the backlash to Trumpism discredit this strategy? I don't think so. For starters, a Democrat administration hopefully would not have the same proportion of incompetent and corrupt lickspittles undermining its progress at every turn -- it's not clear to me that the same level of backlash would emerge. Indeed, I suspect Trump's hyper-aggression was initially popular in a political climate where many people just have an inchoate desire to see some inchoate powerful "them" receive comeuppance. That instinct can be harnessed by Democrats, but, you know, without resort to random street kidnappings.

But even if there is a real backlash, again -- the brute truth is that Trump "accomplished" a lot in his shock and awe period. Those accomplishments are vicious and evil and destructive, but they're going to prove more terribly durable than they have any right to be. Democrats, too, should try to entrench big victories, even if it does generate adverse political winds. Those winds will come regardless -- that's how politics work. You might as well try to accomplish what you can -- and there's a lot that needs accomplishing.

UPDATE: Now Trump's lawyers are trying to undo their motion to dismiss. This does not undermine my assessment that the Trump war machine is sputtering to a halt.

The Totenkopf is Part of Platner's Appeal

A new poll out of the University of New Hampshire has Graham Platner opening up a giant lead over Gov. Janet Mills (64/25) in the Democratic primary to challenge Maine Senator Susan Collins. Platner also leads Collins by a greater margin than does Mills.

It's a startling show of resiliency from a man whose campaign seemed DOA once it was revealed he had gotten a big ol' Nazi tattoo on his chest. And lest we think that was some sort of one-off, just today Platner boosted the message of a prominent neo-Nazi radio host when the latter identified war with Iran as "the only thing Republicans and Democrats have both given a standing ovation for" (Platner added "As always, there’s one thing that brings Republican and Democratic politicians together: sending other people’s children to die in stupid wars in the Middle East.").

As the possibility of a Platner victory, post-Totenkopf, is sinking in, we're starting to see more folks from what we might call the intelligentsia of the "insurgent" wing of the Democratic Party trying to raise the alarm on him. The line I'm hearing most often is that Platner will become "another Fetterman" -- a politician initially promoted by the populist wing of the party, whose appeal traded significantly on coding as a manly-man to Democrats desperate to shed their elitist, East Coast, alternative, intellectual, left-wing (...) image, who became one of the Democrats most likely to cross party lines and back conservative initiatives. 

It's an ironic charge, given that one of Fetterman's chief sins to this clique is that he is among the few diehard Bibi-or-bust Democrats remaining, and Platner is a loud and harsh critic of Israel. To the extent the allegation is that Platner will turn out to be an AIPAC darling, I'm dubious. But if the claim is more broadly that Platner is highly liable to align with conservative populists at the expense of Democratic priorities, it's quite plausible -- and, it must be said, quite compatible with retaining his loud and harsh anti-Israel politics. His fate is not to become Irving Kristol, but to become Tucker Carlson.

As this last-ditch rally against Platner develops, though, I've been thinking about the old "the party decides" line that people thought until too far late in the day would stop Trump from being nominated in 2016. In this case, though, "the party" I have in mind is not the organizational Democratic Party, but rather the aforementioned insurgent intelligentsia that's trying to claw back support for Platner from what is largely their own rank-and-file. They've relentlessly promoted a vision of Democratic politics that is almost entirely front-loaded into a particular aesthetic of being a "fighter", and now they've found it's spiraled out of their control. And in particular, one thing I think they still haven't wrapped their heads around is the real possibility that Platner's antisemitic associations are a selling point for him. They're not something he's had to overcome, they're part of why -- in the context of this particular "I'm a fighter, I'm tackling the powerful, I'm beholden to nobody" aesthetic -- Platner is as popular as he is.

Amanda Marcotte, for instance, uses the fact of Platner's success-notwithstanding-Nazi-ties to complain not about the Democratic branches backing Platner, but of the Democratic establishment that has aligned with Mills. "It really says a lot about how the Democratic establishment is failing to meet the moment that Platner is a contender.... Running Mills was political malpractice." The implication, here, is that Platner is only succeeding because Democrats thirsting for a true "fighter" didn't have another option other than a geriatric old biddy; they're so desperate that they'll even back the Nazi-adjacent dude if the alternatives are so poor. 

Problem #1 with this argument is that Platner was not the only alternative to Mills in the race; Marcotte's account doesn't explain why Platner specifically became the popular alternative. Problem #2 is that while Mills is certainly old, there's no evidence that she doesn't take the positions or adversarial attitude towards Republicans that we supposedly want -- her only actual sin is her age, the other problems are just imputed to her by virtue of her date of birth. Platner's ascendence is directly related to this conflation, where a "vibe" of being "fighter-ly" matters more than one's actual record, beliefs, or policies. Can we really be surprised when Platner's support is not dinged by complaints relating to his record, beliefs, and or policies? Folks are reaping what they've sown here.

Much like with conservatives and Trumpism circa 2016, it's clear that there is a substantial cadre of political professionals who thought -- quite sincerely -- that they could play with currents of populist rage but also keep them under control, in part because they assumed that of course people didn't really want overt nativism or White supremacy or antisemitism or what have you. And the problem is, it turns out that a lot of people wanted exactly that. The "party" tried to hit the brakes, and nothing happened. It was a complete misjudgment of where the center of gravity was, alongside a complete misjudgment of how intolerable pure rancid bigotry would be.

We have gone through a long, long period of certain people ranting about the DNC rigging primaries and all incumbents are bought and paid for by special interests and every Democratic leader is a spineless weasel shrinking violet ... etc., etc., onward to infinity. A lot of the "smarter" people who indulged in that rhetoric didn't mean it literally. It was a tool to harness popular rage, which they would deploy with scalpel-like precision to knock out the sclerotic old guard to be replaced by better (but still savvy) operators like themselves. The problem is that when that rhetoric sinks in far enough, it never gets deployed with scalpel-like precision. It can't. It metastasizes quickly and uncontrollably, and any effort to restrain it flops as it is perceived as yet another instance of the Big Bad "Them" trying to assert control over and squelch the true voice of the people.

And at the risk of spiking the football, of course antisemitism would be at the center of this. A central component of antisemitism is how it places Jews, in the public imagination, as the paradigm-case of the small elite class of riggers and cheaters who pull puppet-strings behind the scenes. In this light, Platner being perceived as antisemitic Jewish accentuates, rather than undermines, his appeal as someone who will fearlessly take on ... the elitist class of riggers and cheaters pulling puppet-strings behind the scenes. Couple that with the other central feature of epistemic antisemitism -- this simmering fury that there's so much that "they" won't let you say, that you're Not Allowed To Say, that we all know are true and are secretly thinking but Your Life Will Be Over if you say it -- and there is a frankly orgasmic pleasure in letting that cauldron boil over and pour out all the thoughts they've been suppressing for years that they now feel license to say. That's what we're seeing now, more than anything: an outright ecstasy amongst people who finally, finally, feel free to not care what Jews think when they think about Jews. Maybe that's why we seem to have gone from zero to ninety so fast. Once again, cf. Trump: the reason why Trump's overt bigotry didn't seem to hurt him the polls is that a lot of people wanted more than anything else to be able to say all of those horrible things, things that they'd been told and believed would destroy their lives and careers and marriages and future if they ever said out loud, and for it to be okay. When Trump said it and it didn't spike his political career, the freedom he promised -- the freedom not to care what "they" think -- was absolutely intoxicating.

Again, I absolutely believe that many of the "smart" people who promoted this sort of approach didn't mean for this to happen, and thought quite earnestly that of course they (they personally and they-the-voters) would not conflate "elitist class of cheaters" with "Jews". Nonetheless: that's exactly what happened. They misjudged the center of gravity dramatically. They underestimated the appeal of antisemitism, which they were sure was good and well-buried, and only being dredged up now as a tired refrain of a baiters and hustlers who had no other refrain to offer. They were wrong. The "hustlers" were right. And the "smart" people, once again, found they can't stop the train.

That's why I'm very pessimistic about arresting the currently accelerating antisemitic trends, particularly in a context where progressive politics are moving towards an aesthetic populism questing for whoever can provide an outlet for our seething, incandescent rage. It's not even that the rage isn't understandable -- of course it is -- but when it swallows up every other political instinct it necessarily leads to bad places (a downward spiral I'm familiar with in part because of how I've seen it afflict elements of the Jewish community dealing with Jewish anger). 

It's very clear, as Adam Serwer wrote today, that too many people (including left-identified people) are looking for an excuse "to indulge in the transgressive pleasure of public bigotry as a little treat." Platner's Nazi affiliations are exactly that sort of transgressive treat, and until we understand that they are part of his appeal for regular voters -- not Tiki-torch neo-Nazis, but ordinary Americans -- we're not going to wrap our heads around the scope of the actual problem.

Mayweather Pacquaio II Announced

Well, it's happening. Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao are set to rematch their 2015 fight, which Mayweather won by unanimous decision. The match is scheduled for September 19th in Las Vegas, and will be carried by Netflix.

Like any red-blooded boxing fan, I hate this. Mayweather (50-0, 27 KOs) and Pacquiao (62-8-3, 39 KOs) are both pushing fifty years old. To say neither is in their prime is an understatement. The fight defines soulless cash grab (and I would know). Rumors have abounded that Mayweather, in particular, has gotten into money trouble, and with the first fight grossing over $400 million dollars, this smacks of a way to get one or both gentlemen's bank account back into the black.

In terms of the fight itself -- well. After all the hype and hullabaloo surrounding the first fight, Mayweather ended up winning quite handily. And while some of that has been chalked up to Pacquiao being injured ahead of the match, I genuinely believe that in their primes and at their peak, Floyd Mayweather was a better fighter than Manny Pacquiao. I was not surprised at the outcome then, and had they run it back a year later with a fully recovered Pacquiao, I would have expected much the same result.

But as I said -- we are now nowhere near anyone's prime. And to the extent either fighter has even gestured at remaining active in the sport, it's Pacquiao. After dropping a clear decision to Yordenis Ugas in 2021, Pacquiao came back to fight Mario Barrios to a draw last year. Sure, Barrios may be someone who a prime Pacquiao would've torn apart, but he's a real fighter, not a total pushover, and Pacquaio at least could still keep up with him. Mayweather's last sanctioned fight (against Conor McGregor) was in 2017, his last fight against an actual boxer was against a basically shot Andre Berto in 2015, and his last fight against an opponent who had any chance of challenging him was ... Manny Pacquiao. Mayweather's been feasting on exhibition-circuit joke fights for a decade, but it's been a long time since he's had to do anything halfway serious in the ring.

The reality is that, while we've got some idea what this version of Manny Pacquiao has for us, we have no idea how much Floyd Mayweather Jr. has left in the tank. During his career Mayweather was known if nothing else for always being in fantastic shape. He may have liked to flash cash and showboat in the runup to fights, but he never let the distractions distract him. Is that still true at 49? Is he fully present? Is he taking this fight because he genuinely wants to be back in the ring and feels he's capable of putting on a show, or because his debts finally piled higher than his pride? (And that doesn't get into the more basic question of whether, even if Mayweather genuinely still has the hunger, is his body still there?)

I'm not interested in this fight. As a boxing fan, it offends me that the most attention our sport gets are these senior circuit tours and whenever Jake Paul steps into the ring. Terrence Crawford deserves all the attention and money of this fight twice over.

But if there is one thing I can say in its favor, it's that I'm genuinely not confident who will win. I guess that's something.

Malinowski Warns About AIPAC Malinowski-ing Other Malinowskis

A few weeks ago, there was a shock upset in the Democratic special election primary for New Jersey's 11th congressional district. The frontrunner, former U.S. Rep. Tom Malinowski, was long regarded as a pro-Israel moderate. But he faced an avalanche of AIPAC-funded opposition because he signaled willingness to condition aid to Israel.

As is AIPAC's wont, its spending against Malinowski did not generally relate to Israel -- they funded ads attacking him from the left (as allegedly pro-ICE), for instance. But the result of their intervention was perhaps unexpected -- it did not elevate a more orthodox pro-Israel contender to the top of the polls, but rather resulted in a further-left and far more Israel-critical Democrat (Analilia Mejia) surging to victory.

I've written quite a bit about this outcome on Bluesky, of which the basic summary is that AIPAC's conduct will have the effect of (and may be intended to have the effect of) squeezing out moderate pro-Israel Democrats who nonetheless find Bibi-or-bust to no longer be tenable, and the main beneficiaries of that squeeze-out will be more Squad-like progressive critics like Mejia. That AIPAC has defended its spending spree in the NJ-11 notwithstanding this result suggests that they are actually fine with sacrificing mainstream pro-Israel Democrats in favor of more sharp Israel critics. 

Why? My speculation is that someone like Malinowski represents a more immediate threat to AIPAC's monopoly over "pro-Israel" politics. A Jewish individual who is very attached to Israel, but is repulsed by the extremism that typifies the current Israeli government, is more likely to be willing to defect from AIPAC to a Malinowski type than to a Mejia. Way back in my Tablet Mag days I wrote about how Jewish conservatives had an incentive to shrink the pro-Israel tent if it meant solidifying its control over the content of that tent, and this is an example of that. So while I don't think AIPAC believes the NJ-11 outcome is a positive, exactly, it isn't as much of a negative as one might think. More than anything else, AIPAC wants to sabotage the emergence of any political movement that couples care and concern for Israel, its legitimate security needs and democratic prerogatives, with care and concern for Palestinians, their legitimate democratic aspirations and human rights entitlements.

And so my ultimate takeaway was pretty simple: "[I]f you at all think of yourself as in the lane of 'I care about Israel but they, and we, need to change course substantially to align with basic liberal values', AIPAC is your mortal enemy trying to destroy your movement." And while they "will not succeed in stemming the tide of Democrats who no longer are willing to kowtow to any and all Israeli abuses," they "may succeed ... in ensuring that the new Democrats who win elections don’t have any residual affinity for Israel at all."

Anyway, that was my perspective. But I was pleased to see today that Malinowski has published an essay suggesting he basically endorses my view.

Late last year, an AIPAC official told me that the organization was concerned by a statement I had made that the United States should make case-by-case judgements about Israeli requests for military aid, based on what is happening on the ground (a standard I would apply to all U.S. partners, including Ukraine and Taiwan). He added: “Some of our members are also concerned you’ll be influential in Congress” because of my past foreign policy experience.

The implication was that AIPAC considered a small challenge to its hard line of unconditional support for the current Israeli government from someone like me to be scarier than electing a person hostile to the very concept of Zionism, but to whom Democrats might not listen.

But if AIPAC’s definition of “pro-Israel” now demands blind a embrace of and funding for policies that even most Americans with a lifelong commitment to Israeli security cannot in good conscience support—like the violent expulsion of West Bank Palestinians from their homes—and if it requires smearing even the most moderate elected officials who ask questions about those policies, the number of Americans (and the number of members of Congress) who pass its test will be too small to sustain any kind of relationship with the Jewish state.

And he also suggests what I suggest, which is that Democrats need to be explicit in treating AIPAC as what it is -- part of the opposing MAGA coalition. 

But Democrats are not without leverage here, if they have the guts to use it. For one thing, these special interest organizations need to maintain at least the illusion of bipartisanship. AIPAC is a case in point. Its biggest donors are pro-Trump billionaires, but most of its members are Democrats. If Democratic leaders collectively were to refuse its support, instead of letting it pick off candidates one by one, AIPAC would face a crisis of identity and legitimacy. Democrats running for Senate and for president, who will have the resources to match whatever super PACs throw at them, should lead the way in rejecting endorsements and telling these groups they don’t want their help.

On that note, retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) -- another venerable Jewish Democrat occupying the pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace lane -- has pulled her endorsement of a fellow Democrat running for a (different) Illinois House seat because she's accepted AIPAC money. It's taken a couple cycles, but AIPAC's brand is increasingly toxic amongst Democrats -- and that's a problem wholly of their own making.

Everywhere and Nowhere

Phoebe Maltz Bovy has an interesting column up on yet "another anti-Zionist Jewish literary manifesto" that's circulating in Canadian literary spaces. 

The theme of the manifesto is a familiar one: that there is "no room in the Jewish literary establishment for work that sees Palestinians as human, their grievances as legitimate, their oppression horrific, their resistance justified." The writer presents the world as drowning in a particular sort of novel about Jews, one "lamenting the antisemitism on university campuses when that antisemitism is actually just pro-Palestinian sentiment," a superindulgence that is choking off other (better, more important) stories about Palestinian rights.

On this point, Maltz Bovy notes that the manifesto author doesn't actually cite examples of the offending books he has in mind (despite the fact that they are apparently so omnipresent that they deserve an "enough is enough" jeremiad). And then she makes an important observation, one that I want to pick up on:

In thinking ahead to future books coverage, I recently found myself combing all summer 2026 publications available to Canadian readers, in search of Jewish content, preferably but not necessarily Canadian. Search terms came up short, as they will so I went for full, painstaking combing. And there was almost nothing Jewish, along with nothing-nothing Canadian Jewish. (I have since learned I may have missed a children’s picture book that ticks both boxes. My apologies.)

The books that are everywhere are actually nowhere.

This is reflective of a point I've observed before -- a mismatch between a widespread perception (even among many Jews) that Jews are everywhere in our culture, to the point where we are dominating the space and sucking out the oxygen, and a reality that Jews are frequently nowhere -- not represented in the places they supposedly dominate, not especially heard at all. Even if you think about Hollywood, there are of course a ton of Jewish writers and actor ... but a lot fewer Jewish stories than one might think. In my White Jews article, I wrote that

the politics of Jewish invisibility is predicated on a presumption of Jewish omnipresence. Jews are not heard from because everyone assumes they have already heard from Jews—heard enough, perhaps heard too much, perhaps it is time to allow others to talk. Because Jews are thought to be everywhere, the possibility that there is in fact a gap or quietude around Jews becomes almost inconceivable. After all, if there is one thing Jews are not, it's "quiet."

If you're Jewish, everyone is going to think you're centering yourself if you say anything at all. There's no escaping it.

That Train Is Arriving On Schedule

One of my recent hobbyhorses has been to raise the alarm at one of the single most self-destructive trends I've witnessed in contemporary Jewish political activism: the pivot away from coalitional work with allies to tackle all forms of hatred and bigotry in favor of a far narrower focus on purely Jewish concerns. 

This move is sometimes justified with the rhetoric of "put your own mask on before helping others", the idea being that the threats Jews face now are simply too acute for us to divide our attention and allocate resources to the needs of our peers. But this new Look Out For Number One strategy is staggeringly short-sighted, for a host of reasons. 

The one I've mostly concentrated on is that it fails to account for the obvious fact that Jews are a small minority, and if we're justified in ignoring the needs of others to concentrate solely on our own self-interest, others are justified in doing the same to us. In a democratic system where one needs 51% of the vote, and Jews are ~2% of the population, that is an obvious losing strategy.

But Paul Horwitz flags another problem (that again, should have been obvious from the get-go): allowing hatred for other minority groups to seep into the political mainstream inevitably ends up bolstering antisemitic hatred as well. As he puts it:

Unsurprisingly, given their opposition to anything like liberal pluralism and religious freedom, when unhinged Christian nationalists start going after one faith, it’s rare that they will stop there. A good deal of the time, they won’t have started there either.

Horwitz's hook is a recent incident involving Carrie Prejean Boller, then serving on President Trump's Religious Liberty Commission, haranguing Jewish witnesses about their views on Israel/Palestine and defending antisemitic conservative activists Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson (Prejean Boller was later removed from the commission but refused to resign herself, saying she would "would rather die than bend the knee to Israel"). There was a fair amount of conservative shock to find gambling in their establishment, but Horwitz notes that the conservative "religious liberty" ecosystem that Prejean Boller is a part of and that reflects the membership of Trump's commission has long promoted Islamophobia of the most rabid sort (see, e.g., the hearings over the "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act"). The antisemitism that is coming further into focus now is the natural extension of the Islamophobia that has been prominent and largely unchallenged for many years now. Indeed, research has consistently found that the best predicator of antisemitic views is whether the subject holds other racist and bigoted views targeting other minorities.

Again, none of this is surprising. It is the flip side of the advice Fanon got from his philosophy teacher: "When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you." For us Jews, we might say the same thing: "When you hear someone insulting the Muslims pay attention; he is talking about us." The point being that, if you're looking to head off antisemitism, you can't afford not to care about other tides of bigotry and illiberalism that may be cresting. The "people who sincerely adhere to these views," Horwitz observes, "are hardly going to be satisfied with one enemy or one minority to threaten and deny basic constitutional rights." Even where they didn't start by talking about Jews, they'll get there. That train, as a different wise commentator put it, is never late.

The Big 4-0

I turned 40 yesterday.

As in so many things, my emotions are a mix of "the world is a trainwreck" and "my very narrow slice of it is great." I have a great job, a great family, a great house in a great city. I'm raising a great baby. I'm financially secure. If the looming specter of fascism wasn't darkening my doorstep, I'd have no complaints at all!

My wife turns 40 later this year, and she has for quite some time now been insistent that her forties will be her best decade. I've never been quite as convinced that same will be true for me. It is cliche to say "I don't feel forty; I still feel young" -- but I do. Not, you know, in terms of being able to ski or stay out late or not have random body parts start hurting for unknown reasons. And there are plenty of areas where I've always been an old soul crotchety old man. But in terms of exuberant enthusiasm? Or in terms of enjoying feeling taken care of? Or just liking video games and Star Wars and Legos? Or feeling like an up-and-comer who will wow the powers-that-be with his fresh new ideas? I still feel very young. 

And once you're forty, you are not young. There's no getting around it. In your thirties, you can kind of futz about still being a young professional -- forty isn't ambiguous. I feel like I am constitutionally required to lose all knowledge of technology, and never voluntarily listen to a new artist ever again.

But it is what it is. Time stops for no man. I'm lucky that, with a minor false start related to a (turns out wholly unneeded) dentist's appointment, I had a very nice fortieth birthday-day. The more "official" celebrations came around the Super Bowl and this weekend, but yesterday included good food and chocolate cake and quality time with wife and baby and the Olympics. So let's go back to the basics -- I am very lucky. Here's to (at least) forty more lucky years.

The Return of Encystment

I didn't see most of the Super Bowl ads, but one I actually did see was Robert Kraft's latest "blue square" installment addressing contemporary antisemitism. The basic narrative is pretty straightforward: Jewish kid walks down the hall, gets bumped by some bullies, who place a sticky note on his backpack that says "dirty Jew". Jewish kid is mad, but then a (presumably) non-Jewish kid, a student of color, offers his support (and empathy -- "I know how it is"). They walk off together as friends. Scene.

I thought it was okay. It's probably impossible to create a "good" ad on this subject -- it's always going to read at least in part "hello fellow youth" and be intrinsically uncool in that register -- but if we leave that aside it was pretty unremarkable.

And that, of course, means that many people are remarking on it -- particularly on the Jewish right, which over the past few weeks as taken an interesting pivot against fighting antisemitism at all (Bret Stephens' big 92NY speech where he argued for "dismantling" the ADL was the clarion call here). A couple people have asked for my thoughts on this new narrative, and now is as good a time as any.

At one level, the fact that the Jewish right is suddenly uninterested in tackling antisemitism at the precise moment where resurgent right-wing antisemitism has finally become so normalized amongst mainstream conservatives that even the usual hacks can't see-no-evil it is the most obvious convergence imaginable. Fighting antisemitism is a hoot when it's batting the left around, but now that it's Republicans whom one has to stand up to it just isn't fun anymore, is it?

It's almost tempting to leave it there, but I do think there is a little more that should be said. One pattern we're increasingly seeing on the Jewish right is a hostility to Jews being outward-facing, of the entire idea of building relationships and friendships and coalitions with non-Jewish partners and peers. Everything from the ADL's decision to abandon its historically broad-based civil rights mission to the near-reflexive cry that any attempt to situate the fight against antisemitism alongside other forms of bigotry is to "all lives matter" the former is part of this malaise. It stems from a sense that these other groups won't stand up for Jews, and if they won't do their part for us, why should we stand up for them? This wounded grievance doesn't come from nowhere -- I myself once wrote a post titled "Solidarity is for Goyim" -- but for some it has become exaggerated to the point of pathology: the entire prospect of cross-communal support is treated as so outlandish as to be offensive.

In that light, I think what most offended some people about the Kraft ad is that it showed a non-Jew (a non-Jew of color, no less) helping a Jewish peer. That prospect is what the new right-wing narrative dismisses as unrealistic, impossible, a sucker's bet. No wonder it infuriates them so. In a world where there is no hope for Jews to be anything other than hated by non-Jews, the only move is to turn to ourselves.

With that, turn back to Stephens. The narrative Stephens is pushing is that, in lieu of "fighting antisemitism", we should be investing more in the development of a positive Jewish identity -- in things like Jewish education and camps, Jewish media and Jewish religious education. On its own, I have no quarrel with any of these, though I don't think any of these priorities are in conflict with tackling antisemitism. In context, though, Stephens' call should be seen as a call for Jews to turn inward -- to stop focusing on our relationships with others (the negative things they say about us, yes, but also the positive opportunities we have to grow and cocreate together). They, the non-Jews, will never be reliable partners and it is a waste of time and money to pretend otherwise. Instead, let's self-generate our own authentic Jewish identity, without waste or taint from the outside world.

The great Jewish philosopher Albert Memmi had a name for this sort of move: "encystment". Encystment is a sort of self-ghettoization that occurs when the ghetto itself is perceived as providing a shell and shield (albeit a brittle one) against the dangers and anxieties of the outside world. Non-Jews are intrinsically untrustworthy; we have nothing to say to them except to bristle hard enough that they hesitate to attack us. We pull back from relating to others because we assume they will only hurt and endanger us; and instead rely solely on ourselves -- for who else is there to trust? (There's an obvious parallel to the more reactionary strands of Zionism here, on all fronts: the overwhelming sense that the entire world is against us, the fascinating interplay of weakness and strength, the obsession with self-reliance, the intrinsic value assigned to thumbing one's nose at outsiders, all of which generates a self-fulfilling prophecy of auto-isolation).

In the JTA article on the Kraft ad controversy, they quote Liel Leibovitz illustrating this pattern in typically crass fashion: "If I had ten million dollars to spend on a Super Bowl ad, I'd just show a bunch of exploding beepers, dead Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, hot Israeli girls with guns, and the caption 'F–k Around, Find Out.'"* Of course he would. The likes of Liel have no way of relating to the non-Jewish world except via extended middle finger. And so when we juxtapose Liel with Stephens or Shabbos Kestenbaum dinging the ad by saying we should invest in Jewish day schools instead, there is a connection -- don't reach out, don't try to work with others, the world sucks, curl up into your cocoon where it's warm inside.

There is, to be clear, no conflict at all between believing Jews should invest more in Jewish institutions who can help cultivate a positive Jewish identity, and in looking favorably upon the outward-facing coalitions and relationships envisioned by the Kraft ad. Indeed, for many Jews that is the foundation of our positive Jewish identity -- much of what it means to be Jewish, for us, is in how we positively relate to and affect the broader world around us. What we're seeing from Stephens and from the backlash to this ad is a longstanding frustration by the Jewish right with how American Jews have constructed their Jewish identity; a self-construction where a series of liberal values have become imbricated in the meaning of Jewishness itself.

For the likes of Stephens. this is an anathema -- it is not Judaism, it is a substitution of liberalism for Judaism. The concept of tikkun olam, both its centrality to contemporary Jewish identity and the mockery that centrality elicits amongst right-wing Jews, illustrates the point well. When Stephens calls for building positive Jewish identity, he is very much not trying to encourage those Jews who view tikkun olam as central to being Jewish to be more intentional and linking living Jewishly to, say, opposing ICE or preserving reproductive autonomy. What Stephens means is for Jews to abandon such liberal frivolities in favor of being taught how to "really" be Jewish. For Stephens, this is a matter of righting ship. But the Jews who are Jewish in the way Stephens indicts obviously disagree that our Jewishness is a false one, and we understand -- correctly -- that Stephens actually just has contempt for the Jewishness of most American Jews. He is trying to war against the predominant way American Jews have actualized our Jewishness over the past century. 

Without overstating its importance or its quality, this ad is emblematic of a vision of Judaism that has been central to the American Jewish experience for decades -- an acknowledgment of antisemitism, yes, but also an acknowledgment that we are part of a broader community that includes allies who care about us and about who we care in turn, and that this mutuality of care is part of what makes our Jewishness live. The Jewish right hates that vision and they hate the Jews and Jewish institutions who espouse it. So they are using the chaos of the present moment to try and destroy it.

* Liebovitz also wrote "it's almost impossible to imagine a more retarded ad", and I commend the JTA for not letting that slur drop unnoticed. Even better, they flag how Liebovitz's deployment of that term fits into a pattern of right-wing discourse eager to vice-signal how little they care about the equal dignity and standing of other vulnerable groups. (Specifically, JTA wrote "The epithet, which had fallen out of favor, has recently resurged on the right, dismaying people with disabilities and their advocates.").

Terry the Turtle

 

Nathaniel had a milestone this week: his first toy that he's absolutely petrified of.

The toy in question, a birthday gift from his uncle, is a plastic turtle. When you turn it on, it rolls forward and plays a little song. Then, when the music stops, the shapes on it shell pop out (the idea being the baby can put the shapes back in their slots).

The turtle has a few things cutting against it. The motor is a bit loud (particularly when the turtle gets caught on something like a rug), which clashes with the music. But Nathaniel's least favorite part is definitely the pop-out. When that happens, he instantly bursts into tears and makes a beeline for the nearest parental figure for a hug.

We're not alarmed by this -- we know "child is irrationally afraid of innocuous thing" is very normal, even for a baby as level-headed and mellow as Nathaniel. If anything, it's alarmingly cute just how scared he is of this random turtle, since it's actually quite rare anything penetrates Nathaniel's unflappable mien (in true sociopath fashion, I've decided to name the turtle "Terry", short for "terrifying").

Jill and I were wondering, though, how baby toy manufacturers deal with this sort of reaction in testing. Again, it is absolutely normal for babies to react with irrational fear towards something totally innocuous. I'm sure that for every baby that hates Terry, there are dozens who think he's their best friend. But that suggests that, like a pharmaceutical company measuring side effects, toy manufacturers probably have some maximum threshold of terrified baby that's acceptable before a product goes to market, and the idea of that metric is hilarious to me.

Meanwhile, we've stowed Terry away in a drawer. But Nathaniel has found Terry's hiding place and has gingerly started taking him out to play with. We don't turn the power on, and so the scary pop-out doesn't happen (we experimented with it once more, but Nathaniel still hated it), but it's definitely a case of Nathaniel deciding that he is going to confront his fears, and I'm very proud of him for it.

The Nexus in the Shadow of the ADL

Last month, I read an article in the JTA which described the Nexus Project as having been "launched ... as a progressive alternative to the Anti-Defamation League." I found that description interesting, because as someone who had been involved in Nexus since almost its inception, that is very much not how I would have characterized our origin story. In part that's because Nexus' original contribution was more on the debate over defining antisemitism (with IHRA as the foil -- though even there we did not cast ourselves as anti-IHRA). But also, Nexus' original group contained many people who had past or present affiliations with the ADL -- we had no quarrel with them.

It does seem true, though that Nexus is more and more being seen as a mainstream-liberal alternative to the ADL. This wasn't a niche we really sought out directly. Rather, it was a niche that just sort of developed a vacuum adjacent to us when the ADL decided to self-immolate over the past few years (see, most recently, its self-parodically mealy-mouthed statement on ICE abuses in Minnesota, where it calls for "de-escalation on all sides"). The ADL fell apart, and Nexus just was sort of ... there, and so now all of the sudden Nexus is standing in and occupying the role that the ADL used to stand for in the eyes of the mainstream liberal Jewish community.

This arc for Nexus just became even clearer with the story breaking today that a top ADL antisemitism researcher, Aryeh Tuchman, is decamping to join Nexus' new Center for Antisemitism Research. This is a substantial coup and a major mainstream credibility boost for Nexus. It also, I think, inevitably raises questions about ongoing reports about internal disarray at the ADL, with longstanding staff members departing or looking for the exit based on frustration that senior leadership (particularly Jonathan Greenblatt) have turned the organization away from its core mission in pursuit of right-wing accommodationism.

In fairness, both Nexus and Tuchman take pains not to directly fire upon the ADL.

“If we really wanted to repudiate the ADL, it would be hard to argue that the best way to do that was to hire one of their senior researchers,” said Alan Solow, the chair of the Nexus Project’s board of directors. “Our intent wasn’t to make a statement about the ADL. Our intent was to find the best person in the field to build something new.”

[....] 

“I have great respect for the work that comes out of the ADL and the Center on Extremism,” Tuchman said. “This isn’t about repudiating anything I did there. It’s about an opportunity to ask different kinds of questions and to focus exclusively on research in a way that I hope can move the needle.”

Nonetheless, it's hard not to see this as representing a belief that the work the ADL used to do is work it no longer is doing, and that people who hold affinity for the "old" ADL no longer find the ADL the best place to see those values. For example, Solow does take aim at the ADL's recent pivot away from fighting racism and bigotry generally as part of the campaign against antisemitism -- a major shift in the organization's historical mission that has been extremely controversial:

Solow said Nexus views coalition-building with other groups targeted by discrimination — including organizations fighting racism, Islamophobia and threats to LGBTQ and immigrant rights — as central to combating antisemitism, a strategy he noted the ADL has moved away from in recent years.

“That’s a point of departure between us and ADL,” he said.  

Obviously, there are plenty of people who never liked the ADL to begin with. But amongst the Jewish community, there are a lot more who retain affinity for what the ADL used to be and the role it used to play, who are more and more frustrated that the ADL has -- for whatever reason -- elected to dramatically change direction. Those Jews are looking for something to fill the void. And it looks like Nexus is -- however intentionally (or not) -- setting itself to do it.

I even had the thought that ADL : Nexus :: Twitter/X : BlueSky. If you miss "the old place", come over here! For an organization that I (again, speaking as an insider) often gently made fun of as "the other one" between IHRA and JDA, I have to say I am enjoying this "little engine that could" trajectory we're on. Even as the JDA feels played out, outflanked by even more extreme anti-Zionist critics, here comes Nexus establishing itself as the alternative for very much establishment-aligned Jews who nonetheless feel unrepresented by hidebound legacy organizations who don't realize "Bibi or bust" doesn't even play w/their historic base (let alone the next generation).

Germany Boycotting the World Cup?

There's chatter that Germany might boycott the World Cup, as a response to American aggression towards Greenland (among other sins).

I actually don't think this will go anywhere. Certainly, even the talk of it is an embarrassment for FIFA (and so soon after delivering Trump his knock-off Nobel too!). But then, FIFA may be the single most corrupt sports organization on the planet (the only competition I can think of is the International Boxing Association -- amateur boxing's oversight body -- whose leader is a mobbed-up Russian stooge. But they're obviously smaller potatoes than FIFA). They may not be capable of embarrassment.

As a rule, I'm opposed to sporting boycotts, at least as applied to teams. I don't find the argument that participation in international sporting events is some sort of PR coup for the flag-bearer to be especially compelling (the idea that the U.S. women's soccer team is acting to glorify Trump seems ... specious). And I think there is something nice about the countries of the world "coming together in one place for the primary and fundamental purpose of doing something fun and joyous." The norm is that we don't use international sport to pass commentary on a nation's politics or policy, however destructive it may be, and so I oppose sports boycotts for any nation -- the U.S., Iran, China, Israel, Russia, North Korea, you name it.

As for hosting an event, my opinion is the same -- with one substantial caveat. I don't think we should boycott hosts because of the host nation's politics, and I don't buy the notion that hosting represents some sort of glorification of the host. The exception-caveat is where there is credible reason to suspect that the host nation will be exclusionary towards, if not outright dangerous to, its visitors and guests -- the other teams, their coaches and staff, and their fans and spectators. The Trump administration's various visa bans -- now effecting potential qualifiers Iran, Haiti, Senegal and the Ivory Coast -- represent exactly that sort of threat. They are, for me, what make the boycott calls at least worthy of consideration -- not against Team USA as a team, but against the United States as a host.

Indeed, while I assume many will associate the boycott call to various efforts to exclude Israel from international sporting competitions, the closer analogy is actually to host nations which have sought to exclude Israelis from participating in international competitions within their borders. The basic duty of hosting an international sporting event is to be a host. A nation unwilling to do that -- for whatever reason -- is breaching its most essential compact as a host, and so justifies having the privilege of hosting taken away. It is embarrassing that America may now fall into that category. But there is a lot to be embarrassed about in this day and age.

Why Should We View the JDL as a "False Equivalency"?

A few weeks ago, there was a protest in front of a New York City synagogue which was hosting a real estate event featuring, in part, properties in Jerusalem. Pro-Palestine protesters, notably, chanted their support for Hamas ("Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here."), the internationally-recognized terrorist organization responsible for (among other crimes) the massacres on October 7. A smaller group of pro-Israel protesters affiliated with the far-right Jewish Defense League chanted their own racist slogans, including "death to Palestine."

The next day, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani released a statement condemning the pro-Hamas chants: "Chants in support of a terrorist organization have no place in our city." There was some consternation about the supposed delay (of one day), but it appears that time lag occurred because Mamdani was consulting with high-level members of the Jewish community to ensure he got the statement right.

I noticed at the time, though, that the ultimate statement rightfully condemned the pro-Hamas chanting but not the equally appalling that came from the JDL. "We support Hamas here" is a despicable thing to say anywhere, but especially in front of a synagogue. No person of conscience should defend it (it is not surprising that there are several notable left-wing figures who lack any such conscience). But "death to Palestine" is equally rancid and should be equally indefensible. So why was it not included in Mamdani's condemnation?

I suspected at the time that it was left out because some factions of the Jewish community would have denounced its inclusion. Many of these figures would claim that they do not, of course, defend the JDL or chants like "Death to Palestine". But they would present including it in Mamdani's statement as "both-sidesing" or "all lives mattering" or in some other way diluting of the message condemning the pro-Hamas chants. And it seems the reporting bears my intuition out. An earlier draft of the condemnation was going to condemn the Jewish Defense League, but it was removed following protests by Jewish leaders who viewed it as a "false equivalence."

This is rotten. It's not just that complaints about "both sidesing" lack legs when both sides really did chant despicable things. It's also the choice -- and it is a choice -- by certain Jewish leaders to decide that condemnations of pro-Palestine extremists are in some way "diluted" or are less sincere when they come tied to calling out pro-Israel extremists present at the same event. Why should we feel that way? I don't feel that way. In fact, I feel rather ill at the notion that someone might think my equal standing as a Jew is threatened by condemning phrases like "death to Palestine." What does that say about ourselves? What does that say about what we are saying about ourselves, that we make such demands?

This is, I think, the end result of the tremendously destructive road too many Jewish leaders have committed to trotting down, where we have become obsessed with "all lives mattering" or "us too-ism" to the point that anything that even purports to tie Jewish safety to any sort of political universalism or solidarity is presented as an affront. It is not unrelated to the bone-jarringly stupid choice by the ADL (among others) to self-consciously cut itself off from historic allies because antisemitism must be fought alone or not at all. I don't mean to suggest that there are not serious challenges in the relationships Jews have with other communities, historic allies included. But in all of these cases, we are choosing to isolate ourselves. These are not instances where we are being forced out of coalitions or compelled to go alone. We are choosing to believe that the entire concept of allyship is a form of disrespect.

We don't have to think like this. Nobody is forcing us to hear "chants of 'death to Palestine' have no place in our city" and decide it means "Jews are lesser." There's no reason to make that inference, and there are many reasons not to make that inference. And so while at one level I am glad that Mamdani was consulting with and attentive to Jewish community concerns in the wake of the synagogue protest, it is a very bad thing that we've decided our "concerns" compel him not to condemn obviously despicable and indefensible rhetoric from the likes of the JDL. That Jewish leaders -- especially Jewish leaders who do recognize how wretched the JDL is -- think in those terms speaks to rot in our own psyche that we need to address, and quick.

What Are You Going To Do?

You know, as soon as I started reading this Paul Campos post about "respectable" conservatives who, in the event that Trump does (as he has started suggesting) try to cancel the 2026 elections, will inevitably find some way to explain why it isn't so outrageous or unlawful or norm-busting or what have you, I immediately thought "Josh Blackman".

Now, that was before I got to the halfway mark and saw that Blackman's name was, indeed, dropped. And perhaps laying a marker down on Blackman here is akin to bragging about picking a one seed to make it to the Sweet Sixteen of March Madness.

But lay down my marker I shall. I can even hear the formulation he'll use: "I can't bring myself to be mad about ....", followed by a citation to some non-analogous alleged liberal sin that supposedly demonstrates that this is all just part of the game everyone plays, and Democrats are just play-acting at crying foul.

Again, I don't pretend I deserve any credit for a bold prediction here. But Blackman really is just the archetype for this particular brand of hackishness. 

And if it feels unfair to say someone like him would really support nullifying the 2026 elections, that's part of the pattern too -- the whole point is the repeated practice of conservatives rationalizing behavior that, a few months earlier when it seemed inconceivable, they would have treated as outrageous slander to assert conservatives would ever rationalize:

Suppose the Republicans move to cancel or annul the 2026 elections.  What will be the justification from the center-right (the same people who never would’ve dreamed of annexing Greenland but now say it’s kind of a reasonable idea, the same people who never would’ve dreamed of endorsing insurrection but now say . . . the same people who never would’ve dreamed of shooting survivors on a boat but now say . . .)?

 In fact, I'd say this is the ur-story of Trumpism, dating back to his first arrival onto the political scene. As I wrote back in 2016, shortly after his first election: "Much of the conservative movement has spent the last two years slowly transitioning from 'it's an outrageous slander to say that a racist cartoon character like Donald Trump represents the conservative movement' to 'it's an outrageous slander to say that the American conservative movement is "racist" or "cartoonish" just because it adopted Donald Trump as its representative.'" It was not, in the scheme of things, too long ago that "supporting Donald Trump" fell into the category of "something so outrageous of course I, the reasonable conservative, would never do it and only a crazed partisan would contemplate otherwise." Blackman, after all, was on the "Originalists Against Trump" letter, urging that we "deny the executive power of the United States to a man as unfit to wield it as Donald Trump." But once Trump's presidency went from impossibility to reality, well, some people will make their peace with Hitler himself if it keeps the inside the inner circle.

Hand Foot Mouth Cock Sacky

It's been an eventful two weeks. And I'm not even talking about *gestures vaguely* the world.

Last week, Nathaniel started daycare. A few days later, on Thursday, I had my first day of class, and Nathaniel was diagnosed with hand foot and mouth disease -- aka coxsackie. My mom says the latter name "sounds better" than "hand foot and mouth disease". I'm unconvinced. While "hand foot and mouth disease" sounds like a reason to put a cow down, I'm not sure "cock sacky" is much of an improvement.

Anyway, Nathaniel was, as is his wont, completely unbothered by any of this. But it did send him home from daycare.

On Monday I had jury service. I arrived at the courthouse, checked in, found a seat in the holding pen, and then suddenly lost all color and started sweating profusely (I mean, profusely). I stumbled over to the main desk to ask for some water, which they provided ... along with calling the paramedics because "you don't look right." Thus ended David's jury service, and began several hours at the Kaiser Westside ER. Who doesn't love beginning a jury tenure seeing one of their fellows carted out on a gurney? (I actually asked the paramedics if this happened every week -- I kind of assumed that there was always someone who was "sick" and tried to get out of jury service -- but he told me that no, I was his first jury-pool patient).

I started to feel better Tuesday, except that I started to see some weird and painful blisters on my hands. And my feet. And maybe the back of my throat. And now today, on Nathaniel's first birthday, I think "I probably have hand foot and mouth disease." It's his birthday, but he's giving me presents. What a mensch. The bonus irony is that HFMD rarely is symptomatic in adults, but I guess I'm the reason why they hedge that a bit!

So now I'm tip-toeing around the house (not to keep quiet, but to avoid the painful spots on my heels), and thinking deep thoughts like "how does the blister decide to be on that centimeter of my finger, rather than the centimeter directly to its left?" It's not like the blisters are clustered around veins or arteries, or near parts of my body that are either especially high or low use. It all seems very arbitrary. I'm very curious about tracing the physical pathway of the virus load from when it enters my body to when it manifests in blisters in these very particular spots.

Unfortunately, the medical treatment for HFMD seems to boil down to "take a tylenol and buck up", so now it's just a matter of trying to rest and waiting to see if that ambulance ride from the courthouse to the hospital results in a $94,000 surprise medical bill. What fun.

Local Quisling Accused of Drunken Affair with Subordinate

One of the few tiny specks of light in the 2024 election was that voters in my congressional district ousted our one-term Republican incumbent, Rep. Lori Chavez-Deremer, in favor of Democratic challenger Janelle Bynum. Turns out Portland was America's last bastion of normalcy.

Chavez-Deremer parlayed that loss to fall upward into the position of Trump's Secretary of Labor. On face, it was a payoff to the Teamsters for functionally backing Trump not endorsing Harris, since Chavez-Deremer had a somewhat stronger pro-labor background than most Republicans. In reality, Chavez-Deremer has cheerily enacted Trump's agenda of gutting labor protections, thus proving the already-obvious point that even "sympathetic" Republicans are useless when push comes to shove because they'll always ultimately accommodate whatever is the alpha ideology in their party, and right now the alpha GOP ideology towards unions is "bust them up and send the workers back into peonage where they belong."

Aside from that, Chavez-Deremer's most prominent entry into the news came when she publicly backed President Trump's announced military invasion of Portland, making her quite the little quisling. But I woke up today to read reports that Chavez-Deremer is under investigation after allegedly having a drunken affair with one of her Department of Labor subordinates.

"Chavez-DeRemer, 57, has welcomed her alleged paramour at least three times to her DC apartment and twice into her hotel room while traveling, alleges a complaint filed with the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Office of Inspector General last week, which has since begun a probe," said the report. DeRemer "is also accused of drinking in her office during the workday and committing 'travel fraud' by having her chief of staff and deputy chief of staff 'make up' official trips to destinations where Chavez-DeRemer can spend time with family or friends on the taxpayers’ dime."

Additionally, the complaint alleged, Chavez-DeRemer has abused her authority to force department aides to run personal errands for her — an issue that has gotten a number of previous Trump administration officials, like former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, in trouble as well.

Now, nobody should get their hopes up. Alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct are less "scandals" in the Trump administration and more "job requirements." One even wonders if -- her job head-faking towards a "pro-worker" Trump administration policy complete -- she might get tossed overboard to make room for a true believer to really go to town on labor.

But still, every news story that breaks about the brazen corruption, graft, and abuse that characterizes this administration, the better. So I raise my glass to you, Secretary (feel free to raise one or several of your own -- we know you've got them). I hope you've enjoyed your time in DC, because you sure as hell aren't welcome back here.