#anti bari weiss

[icedsodapop]

I don't expect Jerry Seinfeld to care about hurting other people's feelings, after all, I expect nothing more from someone who supports genocide:

[jewelleria]

“The tragedy of the pro-Palestinian campaign is that because it is so deeply rooted in these moral cartoons and serves the emotional and psychological needs of these extraordinarily privileged people who live in these moral cartoons—and not the actual needs of Palestinians—is that it primarily hurts Palestinians.”

— Haviv Rettig Gur, The Gathering Storm

[jewelleria]

Jewish person here! I’ve spent my life in Jewish schools and communities, my mom is a historian, and my partner is a rabbi. Jewish history is quite literally my favorite thing to learn about and discuss—not just because it’s interesting, but because it’s my history. So I like to think I know what I’m talking about.

This is a super interesting question, and its answer is incredibly complicated. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll split it into three parts: what, when, and why. Hopefully I’ll be able to cover all your questions that way.

I. What is antisemitism?

According to most dictionaries, antisemitism (sometimes spelled anti-Semitism) is a “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.”

This definition alone is packed with a TON of history, and holds meaning that might be missed by people who didn’t grow up familiar with the concept or with Judaism as a whole.

It’s important to note what differentiates Judaism from other religions. Judaism, to put it simply, is an ethnic religion, as opposed to a universalizing religion. We make this distinction, and avoid calling it simply a religion, to set it apart from other belief systems like Christianity and Islam. Judaism is an ethnic religion because it relies on heredity and being part of a specific ethnic group (i.e. it must be inherited with the exception of strict conversion laws). Christianity and Islam are universalizing religions because they can be practiced by anyone within the universal population—they actively look for members (i.e. proselytize) and are not restricted to a specific race, ethnicity, or group of people.

With that being said, I’m going to correct the most common definition of antisemitism. It should be defined as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, AND racial group.” Jews are all three. We are a religion, an ethnicity, and a racial group.

Antisemitism is racism against Jews. The reason there is no specific type of hatred reserved for universalizing religions like Christianity and Islam is because there is no Muslim race or Christian race. There is only the Muslim religion, and the Christian religion. It’s impossible to be racist against a system of religious beliefs, but you can be racist against a specific group of people with their own system of religious beliefs (Jews). For more on Islamophobia, read this post.

II. When did it start?

Antisemitism is often called “the world’s oldest hatred.” This phrase is used so often that it’s sort of lost its meaning at this point. A more apt description would be that antisemitism is as old as the people it targets, and for proof of this, you don’t have to look much further than the Bible itself.

Many assume that the Jewish people began with Abraham, but I would argue that’s not entirely true. Yes, we are descended from him, but so were the founders of Christianity (Jesus) and Islam (Muhammad). With Abraham came the beginnings of the Jews as a family and as a tribe. We only became a people, a nation, much later.

Here’s a super quick rundown of that family tree in case you didn’t know.

JEWS: Abraham ➝ Isaac (first son) ➝ Jacob (later renamed Israel) ➝ Jacob’s twelve sons, later formed into twelve tribes for each son, one of whom was Judah ➝ the Israelites, aka the Judaic/Jewish people

CHRISTIANS: Abraham ➝ Isaac (first son) ➝ Jacob ➝ Judah ➝ Israelites, one of whom was Jesus, a Jew who was originally named Yeshua (Joshua).

MUSLIMS: Abraham ➝ Ishmael (second son) ➝ Ishmaelites, one of whom was Muhammad, who proselytized and gained followers of Islam.

So how did Jacob’s large family, with his twelve sons and many grandchildren, become a nation? When did the descendants of Abraham become the Jewish people?

Answer: while they were in Egypt. The biblical story of the Exodus starts with the journey to Ancient Egypt made by Jacob and his family. They needed to escape the famine that was destroying their homeland of Canaan, which is located in what is today the state of Israel. Exodus 1:1-5 tells us, “These are the names of the sons of Israel who came to Egypt with Jacob, each coming with his household: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah; Issachar, Zebulun, and Benjamin; Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher. The total number of persons that were of Jacob’s issue came to seventy, Joseph [the eleventh son] being already in Egypt.”

So they came down to Egypt as a family. Time passed, and while the oldest generation—that of Jacob and his twelve sons—died, their children “multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). The verse then says that a new Pharaoh rose over Egypt that did not know Joseph (the previous Pharaoh had appointed Joseph as viceroy of Egypt, and was therefore okay with Joseph’s father, brothers, and family living in his kingdom).

The point of saying that the new Pharaoh didn’t know Joseph, and therefore didn’t know the Jewish tribe/family, is to illustrate that he harbored no attachment whatsoever to these people. The new Pharaoh says to his advisors that “the Israelite people are much too numerous for us. Let us deal shrewdly with them, so that they may not increase; otherwise in the event of war they may join our enemies in fighting against us and rise from the ground” (Exodus 1:9-10). The rest of this story is known by many—after Pharaoh’s declaration, the Jews are oppressed and forced to suffer through centuries of slavery.

It’s important to note the usage of Hebrew words here. Before this, the Israelites are only ever referred to as “benei yisrael”—the sons of Israel (Jacob), a family unit, a small tribe. But in verse 1:9, a new word appears: “am” (עם). It has no exact translation, but the closest approximation in English might be “nation” or “people” as it’s translated in the verse. This is the very first time that the Jews are referred to as a nation. This is the end of them as a family, and the beginning of them as a people.

It is also the very first time that antisemitism appears. It can certainly be argued that Jewish Biblical characters were unfairly targeted because of their heritage in the Bible before this instance—but I would argue that antisemitism did not truly exist until this moment.

Why? Because antisemitism is not just hatred of Jews because they are Jews. It is hatred of Jews that is rationalized.

It is an opposition to Jewish existence that is validated by governments, by leaders, and by society as a whole. Pharaoh has no rational reason for his argument. He brings no evidence or logic to his claim that the Jews could ally with his enemies to destroy him—they never said anything to hint that they wanted to. There is nothing in the Bible that points to their motivation for settling in Egypt being a desire to destroy Egypt itself. It’s completely irrational, and yet it’s accepted as a valid reason, and Pharaoh goes on to enslaved and ethnically cleanse the Jews from Egypt uncontested, and continues to do so for centuries.

Antisemitism started here. It started when Pharaoh treated his motion to exterminate the Jewish people as a rational one that was for the greater good of his empire, when instead it was simply a decision that was motivated by irrational fear, persistent hatred, and pure evil.

When the Jewish nation was born, so was antisemitism. The hatred reserved for Jews is as old as the Jews themselves.

III. Why is it so widespread and commonly accepted?

As I said, Pharaoh was able to validate his beliefs by cloaking them in rationality. He feared that the Jews would overthrow him simply because they were large in number. Let us deal with them shrewdly, he reasoned to his advisors. It would serve us best to be wise, to rise and kill first, to wipe them out before they can do the same to us.

It was disguised as logical, strategic, and reasonable, when in fact it was the exact opposite.

In Ancient Egypt, antisemitism was a precaution, a preventative measure. In the Spanish Inquisition, it was a way of rooting out heretics against Christianity to ensure that the Spanish monarchy was able to rule unopposed. In Nazi Germany, it was the Final Solution to the “problem” that Jews posed to the otherwise purely Aryan society under Hitler’s rule.

And today, it’s the idea that Israel—the only Jewish state—is committing genocide, and therefore must be wiped out.

Antisemitism, said Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l, is a virus. It mutates. It uses the highest possible authority in a given society to justify itself, and because of that, it’s accepted and supported.

“In the Middle Ages,” said Rabbi Sacks, “it was religion. So we had religious anti-Judaism. In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science. So we had the twin foundations of Nazi ideology, Social Darwinism and the so-called Scientific Study of Race. Today the highest source of authority worldwide is human rights. That is why Israel—the only fully functioning democracy in the Middle East with a free press and an independent judiciary—is regularly accused of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, apartheid, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and attempted genocide.”

These accusations, like those levied against us by Pharaoh so long ago, are thrown about as though they are rational. Today they are disguised as persecution of Zionists, not Jews, and are presented with logic, articulation, and assertiveness. “Zionism is a supremacist, racist ideology,” today’s social justice warriors insist. They perpetuate lies about history, including but not limited to claiming that Jews and Arabs coexisted peacefully in the land before 1948 (false), that the Zionist militia kicked out thousands of Arabs unprovoked (false), that the early Zionists only wishes for Palestinians to be exterminated (false)… so on.

Zionism is seen as evil because it’s a political movement that hinges on keeping Jews safe from the persecution that the rest of the world has gleefully put us through without consequence for centuries. It’s opposed because the colonialist powers of the Middle East have somehow convinced Western Leftists that true decolonization—the creation of the state of Israel—is evil, and that their version of decolonization—so-called “freedom fighting” in the form of massacring, raping, and killing civilians—is what we should all be striving for.

Antisemitism is a fundamental denial of the Jewish right to exist alongside everyone else as equal citizens within civil society. It denies us the basic rights afforded to humankind by Western liberal democracies: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, so on.

Antisemitism, at its core, is put into practice by taking whatever society deems to be the number one problem it faces (in today’s case, the existence of Israel), blaming the Jews for said problem, and using that blame as justification to wipe out an entire nation.

Sometimes it’s obvious. It was certainly obvious under Hitler’s regime—and that is even more obvious in hindsight, now that we can bear witness to the systematic extermination of six million Jews in the span of six years.

But sometimes it’s hidden. Rabbi Sacks argued that Anti-Zionism is the antisemitism of our time. He puts this startling and incredibly widespread belief into words: “The ultimate weapon of the new antisemitism is dazzling in its simplicity. It goes like this. The Holocaust must never happen again. But Israelis are the new Nazis; the Palestinians are the new Jews; all Jews are Zionists. Therefore the real antisemites of our time are none other than the Jews themselves.”

Put into words, it seems preposterous. Today, as members of a free society that allows us to express ourselves however we want, it’s impossible to imagine that people can genuinely believe things like this. But they do, and they always have.

The modern antisemite insists that they are not antisemitic, just anti-Zionist. But they fail to recognize the meaning of Zionism—the belief that Jews have a right to self-determination in a Jewish state—and its absolute necessity. Jews have never been welcome in any other place. We have been expelled, persecuted, systematically murdered by the million, and scapegoated. We have been allowed to live in every country and every nation and every empire, and then subsequently told by those governments—every government—that we are no longer welcome, and seen violently to the door.

So what’s the reason for all this? It’s simple: there isn’t one.

Yes, on the surface one can argue that antisemitism comes from a need to blame, from a collective society’s inability to accept their own failures, or from a sheer intolerance for difference—because goodness knows the Jews are different. But these are not reasons. They don’t get to the very essence of why antisemitism exists, and why it still persists, even in the modern and apparently accepting societies we’ve created.

I can’t answer the question of why. No one can. But I will say this: antisemitism is a disease. It doesn’t just affect Jews—it affects everyone. It infects and destroys the society that allows it to spread. Any society that allows, accepts, justifies, supports, or turns a blind eye to antisemitism is a society that has already begun its slow decline.

How do I know this? Well, I don’t exactly need to spend much time backing up this claim, considering the overwhelming amount of historical evidence that proves it. Ancient Egypt in the Passover story, the Achaemenid Empire in the Purim story, Ancient Greece and Rome, the First and Second Crusades within the Christian Latin Church, the Inquisition under the Spanish Monarchy, Imperial Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Nazi Germany and the Third Reich, and the Soviet Union—all of these empires, thought by their rulers and sometimes their subjects to be eternally unshakable, are gone. All reduced to nothing but bad memories, and all guilty of systematic persecution, attempted genocide, and discrimination against Jews.

Historically, when an empire turns to blaming others for its failures—whether the objects of that blame are the Jews or not—that is a sign that said empire is failing.

Bari Weiss, in a lecture delivered late last year, said, “When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.”

Rabbi Sacks, too, said something similar, several years before the October 7th massacre: “The appearance of antisemitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown.”

“It is a symptom of a much deeper crisis,” Weiss continued in that same speech, “one that explains how, in the span of a little over 20 years since September 11th, educated people now respond to an act of savagery not with a defense of civilization, but with a defense of barbarism.”

There is no reason for antisemitism. To ascribe a reason to something is to lend it legitimacy. No matter how hard we try to find one, antisemitism will never have a reason. It’s a horrifying phenomenon that persists in every generation. It seeps through the cracks of every society and tears it down from the inside, enacting revenge on its perpetrators, and leaves the survivors—the Jews—to pick up the pieces of their destroyed lives in the ashes of yet another fallen civilization.

It has destroyed and ended countless lives, and not just Jewish ones.

But it also gives us hope. Because (and this might sound absolutely insane, so bear with me) antisemitism is the very reason the Jewish people are still here.

There is a song that we sing every year, on the night of Passover, our most well-known holiday. It finds its origins in the Mishna, the first major collection of Jewish oral tradition, and is usually translated from Hebrew as follows: “And this is the promise that has stood for our ancestors and for us: it is not only one [people] that has risen up against us to destroy us. Rather, in each generation, they rise up against us to destroy us—but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand.”

Now, this is not a dogmatic declaration of faith as some might claim it to be. It’s not a minimization of the horrors of antisemitism, either. It’s a song of hope.

This is the promise that has stood for our ancestors and for us means that with every threat that we faced and every persecutor we outlived, our will to survive grew stronger. It shows us that, as horrific and devastating and tragic it has been, we need antisemitism. Without it, we wouldn’t be here.

A stiff-necked people, indeed.

Can someone who is NOT a zionist tell me why Jewish people have so much conspiracy and hate? when did it start and why? how and why did it spread?

Preferably someone who is jewish or really knows what theyre talking about answer

[nebraskaenergy]

The Week in Anti-Semitism

Monday, Megym fired some more volleys in defense of America and in fact Britain. She fires true and I put it here because I can’t say it better. Along that line, every time I see these vermin on the streets (and yes, I too include the police) I am reminded of a piece of graffiti in the Union when I was in college, it goes, Workers of the world arise, So that we may more easily gun you…

[muddypolitics]

(via GOP Megadonor Harlan Crow Gave $500,000 to Bari Weiss to Start 'Anti-Woke' Nonprofit)

Here is an extremely cursed sentence: Billionaire and Clarence Thomas benefactor Harlan Crow donated $500,000 to Bari Weiss—one of two journalists Elon Musk handpicked to report out the “Twitter Files” and founder of the “independent” transphobia-peddling outlet The Free Press—to start an “anti-woke” nonprofit.

horrible people working together to marginalize those that are “different” from them...

[babypanther95]

"While racists or homophones or misogynistic see themselves as punching down, anti-Semites often perceive themselves as punching up. In the eyes of the racists, the person of color is inferior. In the eyes od the misogynist, the woman is something less than human. In the eyes od the anti-Semite, the Jew is... everything. He is whatever the anti-Semite needs him to be.

Anti-Semitism successfully turns the Jews into the symbol of whatever a given civilization defines as it's most sinister and threatening qualities. When you look through this dark lens, you can understand how, under communism, the Jews were the capitalists. How under Nazism, the Jews were the race contaminators. And today, when the greatest sins are racism and colonialism, Israel, the Jew among the nations, is being demonized as the last bastion of white, racist colonialism - a unique source of evil not just in the region but in the world. Whatever role 'the Jews' are needed foe, well, that is the part they are forced to play.

The logic of anti-Semitism is very different from the logic of xenophobia or racism. It is jot just a form of hatred, one that happens to be directed against Jews rather than against lesbians or Koreans or left-handed people. It is a grand unified theory of everything. As the father of modern French anti-Semitism, Edouard Drumont, put it in his 1886 book La France juive, three years before he founded his country's Anti-Semitic League: 'All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.'"

- Bari Weiss *How to Fight Anti-Semitism*

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 8/27/2024

every fucking time i step outside the apartment i get smacked in the face with a wet blanket of heat and humidity. this is my second summer in the swamp WHY am i so startled every single time

listening

both off my spotify recommended list: 2 Mello's dead leaves, a funky little instrumental that sounds like driving somewhere with fitful AC when it is so hot the leaves are dropping off the trees.

TV Girl's Taking What's Not Yours is not a song i wholeheartedly enjoy, but the sample of Nixon saying "I am not a crook!" has been stuck in my head all week. and stickiness in the head is the main criteria for a tuesdaysong. i don't know anything about this band but my brother said "you WOULD be the typical TV Girl listener". so that information is now available to everyone.

indie pop with indie frontman voice (get well soon). actually. no. this singer reminds me of shelby the worm from adventure time. plus distinct funk overtones. 70% of the song by volume is a hip-hop-ified sample of an anti-pirating PSA. i think i would probably like this when i am less depressed.

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reading

really great breakdown of what the fuck is happening with Telegram and why conservatives are so riled up about it.

The quick version of how Telegram became a part of the culture war goes something like this. In April, Uri Berliner, who was then a senior business editor at NPR, alleged a widespread culture of woke at NPR in Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. This led to weeks of discussion about NPR on Twitter and in the right-wing blogosphere. During this saga, several right-wing bloggers attacked NPR’s current CEO and President Katherine Maher, who was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization that has been repeatedly attacked by conservatives, Elon Musk, etc. for allegedly having a liberal bias. Maher is also a member of the Signal Foundation’s board of directors. 

this fascinated me as an engineering/infrastructure disaster in process. thanks longreads

Nearly wherever you look, border politics in the United States is animated by a persistent myth: that with enough money and willpower, you could eventually seal off the countries from one another, like apartments that share a 1,954-mile wall. One way to describe decades of militarization on the border is that it serves to make Mexico invisible to residents of the United States. The same might be said of cross-border industrial development: porous to money and airplane parts, hardened to everything else. Straddling one of the busiest land crossings in the world, the Tijuana River offers a stubborn rebuttal, a reminder that both sides of the border constitute a single place. Once the poop is in the water, no amount of barbed wire can get it out.

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watching

i have watched about a movie a day this week and nothing has like. hit.

The Sisters Brothers (2018, dir. Audiard) was simply not the vibe i was looking for. somewhere between coen brothers and peckinpah. not that i am expecting all movies to have an easily portable moral message delivered to me fortune-cookie style in a silent-film dialogue screen right before the credits play, but what was this About. what was the Story being conveyed to me. this was like an episode of the twilight zone where rod serling goes "damn well that was fucked up" except i went in expecting like. a drama. it's a beautiful movie with great acting except they forgot to put a feature-length-movie plot in it.

Omega Doom (1996, dir. Pyun) is such a strange thing. a cyber-Yojimbo with Rutger Hauer. takes place almost completely within one blasted, snowy little town plaza. Rutger Hauer got "shot in the program" during the great human/robot war and it turned him good.

i think it was marketed very poorly, bc it is NOT an epic science fiction thriller. it was made for about five dollars and is a very talky, meandering, weird little cyber-western. as is the case for all movies with female robots, a lot of weird anxieties about women. i think it would have been way more interesting with a completely genderflipped cast? like push that concept all the way! watching mr hauer mow down a lot of fembots was not the most pleasant experience for me as an alleged woman.

not as good as A Fistful of Dollars but compels me more.

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playing

hello this is very important. the fallout classic collection will be free on epic starting thursday. thank you for your time.

new major genshin patch this week so i will not shut up about that for a bit. as of time of drafting this i am down to TWENTY SEVEN map markers and fully half of them are card game opponents i haven't beaten.

i want to be a point and click adventure game girl so bad but i am afraid i do not have the point and click adventure game temperament. i am having fun with The Silent Age, a little postapoc thing with a time travel mechanic, but only through heavy reference to a walkthrough. this was free on epic last march and i kind of get why? it was published in 2012, wasn't part of a series and didn't have ongoing monetization, and reviewed well but doesn't have a ton of replayability. probably a great windfall for the studio of like $10k, im curious how many people actually downloaded it during its free week. the kind of self-contained game i personally am glad exists in the world but don't want to pay money for.

some good graph humor.

some good osha humor.

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making

i love to acquire a container. this tiny little pearlescent blue avon bath oil holder (i thought was a vase in texas thrift but that explains why it was horrifyingly sticky) now holds my double pointed needles and other knitting bits and bobs so they're not buried at the bottom of the vase with the regular needles

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

By Cameron Cawthorne , Andrew Mark Miller 

A vocal anti-Israel activist, who has made several donations to Rep. Rashida Tlaib's, D-Mich., House campaigns, mourned the assassination of a top Hamas leader on Wednesday, saying his "martyrdom is not in vain."

Zahra Billoo, a disgraced former Women's March leader and the executive director of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in San Francisco, took to social media after it was reported that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran, Iran, prompting Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to vow "revenge" for the attack.

 "Never say that those martyred in the cause of Allah are dead—in fact, they are alive! But you do not perceive it," Billoo said in the first part of her post, appearing to quote the Quran. 

"Tonight, we mourn Ismail himself but know his martyrdom is not in vain," she continued, using a controversial phrase pushed by anti-Israel activists to mean the elimination of Israel. "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."

Zahra Billoo, left, an ally of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., mourned the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. (Fox News)

"I mourn yesterday’s martyrs because I can see the horrific path killing peace negotiators leads to," Billoo added in a follow-up X thread, accusing Israel of a "genocide."

Billoo's initial post immediately drew backlash from social media users, with some people mocking the Quran quote and saying the Hamas leader is definitely "not alive." 

"Probably important to remember this, too, whenever you see the name CAIR," journalist Bari Weiss said.

Billoo, who has donated almost $1,000 to multiple Tlaib campaigns, has been a lightning rod of controversy in recent years over her anti-Israel rhetoric, which led to the left-wing Women's March board severing ties with her in 2019 after only serving two days. She posted a 25-post Twitter thread at the time blaming her ouster on an "Islamophobic smear campaign" and "right-wingers."

[mariacallous]

When Matt Williams founded a research center for the Anti-Defamation League in 2022, he vowed to “ruthlessly and systematically test” what the organization does. Antisemitism was on the rise, and he wanted the Center for Antisemitism Research to scientifically study what could work to stop it.

The creation of the center, he believed, represented an admission that one of the world’s most prominent voices against antisemitism had been operating with little evidence.

“I would go a step further and say the ADL wants to be a serious nonprofit, measured on our social return on investment, but by a lot of measures, we’ve not been doing well,” Williams said in an interview, citing spiking antisemitism, rising extremism and the erosion of democratic norms around the world. 

The ADL established the new center amid mounting pressure from funders and trustees, he added. “The level of tolerance for having no solutions is low right now,” Williams said. “Our Board of Trustees is very serious about ruthlessly holding us accountable to whether or not we’re solving the problems that we set out to solve.”

Here’s how the person recently elected as ADL’s board chair put it: “Flagging and monitoring and measuring antisemitism is important, but by itself will not reverse trends towards extremism, bias and radicalism in American or global society,” Nicole Mutchnik said in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 

Now, with a staff of nine and about 70 affiliated researchers at universities around the country, the research program overseen by Williams is starting to flex its scholarly might. It recently unveiled, for example, the first scientific study in decades that focuses on anti-Jewish discrimination in hiring.  

Previous studies by the center showed that antisemitic attitudes are more strongly correlated with conspiratorial beliefs than any other factor. So, now, it has partnered with a team of university researchers to examine whether correcting misinformation can make a difference.

“We’ve found that we have a better shot at reducing antisemitism by teaching people how to deal with misinformation and disinformation than we have with much of the anti-bias work that we’ve done previously,” Williams said. “Thinking of antisemitism as a digital literacy problem as opposed to a civil rights problem is a big change for ADL.” 

Alarm about antisemitism in recent years has driven a doubling of donations to the ADL, topping $100 million in 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available. It has also sparked the creation of dozens of new organizations and initiatives, including some that are directly critical of the ADL’s approach or are trying to fill perceived gaps.

Many, including Bari Weiss, author of “How to Fight Antisemitism,” prescribe embracing Judaism and Jewish pride. Others are looking to tech for solutions. At least one group focuses on naming and shaming alleged antisemites online. Author Dara Horn says the answer lies in deemphasizing the Holocaust and educating the public about living Jews and their culture. Jewish communal organizations have also poured millions of dollars into physical security measures at schools, synagogues and other Jewish institutions.

The Biden administration in 2023 published a plan featuring hundreds of detailed recommendations, many of which are modeled on ADL’s platform. The plan proposes, for example, streamlined hate crime reporting at all levels of law enforcement and more accommodation for Jewish religious observance in the workplace. 

On the right, the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther proposes a government crackdown on anti-Israel groups once Donald Trump returns to the White House.  Meanwhile, left-wing groups like Diaspora Alliance and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice say that effectively responding to antisemitism requires building solidarity with Palestinians and other groups they view as oppressed.

Even as viewpoints and tactics vary, there’s a consensus in the Jewish community that fighting antisemitism must mean more than sounding the alarm about the issue. As a result, the search for evidence-based solutions, grounded in social science research, is starting to gain traction. 

“We need to be moving more research resources into what’s working and what’s not working,” Holly Huffnagle, the U.S. director for combating antisemitism at the American Jewish Committee, said in an interview. “Many of us in the Jewish world are talking about this.”

Huffnagle said the AJC, considered a peer to the ADL in terms of size and legacy, doesn’t currently sponsor academic, peer-reviewed research, but that such a program could transform the work of her organization.  

“If we find that our interventions aren’t working we need to be comfortable and competent to move away from what we were doing in the past,” she said. “Do we have information about what’s actually changing hearts and minds?”

To help answer that question, a pair of political scientists specializing in a field they call “deep canvassing” are using a grant from the ADL to research what kinds of narratives about Jews, when presented to people, can be effective at reducing prejudice. The researchers, David Broockman from the University of California, Berkeley and Josh Kalla from Yale University, have previously demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique in the context of bias against transgender people. 

For their new study, the researchers made two-minute video clips featuring eight types of narratives about Jews and showed them over the internet to an audience of about 23,000 survey respondents. 

Watching all eight narrative types led to a drop in prejudice, but some had a much stronger effect than others. For example, bipartisanship — a video showing both Donald Trump and Joe Biden condemning antisemitism — proved more impactful than a video depicting a fictional Jewish character suffering, but far less impactful than a video that presented the suffering as the result of discrimination.

Another sign of the awakening underway is the spate of new university programs focused on the study of antisemitism. Gratz College, a Jewish institution for higher education in Philadelphia, now offers a master’s degree in the topic. New York University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Toronto have all made recent investments in the field of “antisemitism studies.”

Ayal Feinberg, a political scientist and the creator of the antisemitism master’s degree at Gratz, believes that many more such programs should have been in place long ago. What made the need suddenly apparent to many more people, he said, was the wave of anti-Israel protests and the spike in antisemitism in the United States after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. 

“Post 10/7, many people in this space were caught with their pants down, and they’re rushing to invest in meaningful interventions that reduce antisemitism,” Feinberg said in an interview. “But those interventions don’t really exist because there hasn’t been a field that has been systematically devoted to developing them.”

As Feinberg, whose quantitative research is sponsored by the ADL’s new center, builds out the field through a dedicated discipline, there’s also a crop of professors from established academic areas such as economics, political science, and sociology who are newly interested in studying antisemitism.

The number of scholars has sharply increased and so has their caliber, according to Williams.  He gave the example of Dean Karlan, a prominent economics professor at Northwestern University and former chief economist of the United States Agency for International Development. 

“That’s the quality of research we’re getting as a partner nowadays, which frankly, is not what it would have been five or 10 years ago,” Williams said. 

The ADL’s sponsorship of individual academics comes amid a contentious time for the group’s relationship with institutions of higher education. As college campuses have become the epicenter of the activist movement seeking to end U.S. military aid to Israel and cast Israeli actions in Gaza as a genocide, the ADL has assertively involved itself in hot-button debates about where to draw the line on free speech. The group says it wants to protect Jewish students from harassment and threatening behavior from pro-Palestinian protests. As part of that mission, it’s been adversarial with universities, accusing administrators of failing to stand up to antisemitism and putting out a contentious “report card” grading schools on their response to it.

But through Williams and his team, the organization has also been trying to better understand what exactly is happening on campuses and why the situation there seems worse than in other contexts. An ADL-sponsored study by a University of California, Irvine professor concluded that increased antisemitism on campus is found where there are fewer allies on campus — and not necessarily where there are more antisemites or where there’s a campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.  

“There’s more tacit allowance for antisemitism in public because there are fewer bystanders who are willing or disposed to intervene,” Williams said. “The perceived social cost of it is much lower than elsewhere and that’s more predictive for us than the presence of an SJP on campus.”

Any perceived gaps between ADL’s messaging and its research findings can leave Williams’ program — and scholars it partners with — vulnerable to questioning and criticism. That’s partly the reason that many observers are viewing what he’s doing as daring and risky, even if they are supportive. 

“There is a risk of blurring the line between advocacy and scholarship in a moment in which institutional credibility is low and society is very polarized and everything politicized,” said James Loeffler, a historian and the director of the Jewish studies program at Johns Hopkins University. “And then the research won’t be accepted — it will be seen as advancing a political point of view.”

Williams’ own career as a scholar might have gone in a different direction if he weren’t convinced of the pressing danger of recent antisemitism. 

He completed his doctoral training as a behavioral social scientist at Stanford University in 2012, and after working on various research projects he ended up at the Orthodox Union. As the largest kosher certification agency in the world, the Orthodox Union generates millions of dollars in revenue, most of which is allocated to charitable causes. Williams crafted a data-driven research program to help the organization spend those funds more impactfully. 

He had also long maintained an interest in the study of prejudice, which Williams traces in part to his uncommon family background: His paternal grandfather, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, married a Sephardic Jewish woman from Morocco. 

In 2019 Williams, who grew up in an observant Jewish family in Atlanta and had always been aware of how his background set him apart, encountered data showing that Americans were becoming less tolerant of difference. Two recent events underscored this finding: neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, followed by the deadly attack the following year on Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh.

After each of those events, the ADL sprung into action, tapping its roster of experts to explain the outbursts of violent antisemitism to the public. But in private conversations Williams was having with the group, one of the world’s most prominent organizations fighting hate and extremism was coming to a realization that would have been awkward to publicly acknowledge: It didn’t understand antisemitism or how to combat it nearly well enough. A new paradigm was needed. 

“We were under-resourced when it came to actually thinking about antisemitism,” Williams said. “The ADL had sort of become more of a civil rights organization, and we started, especially after Charlottesville, realizing we need more resources on antisemitism. And the person who hired me was sort of like, ‘It’s bizarre that we don’t have this.’”

That person was Adam Neufeld, ADL’s chief operating officer, who “saw the need to develop new theories of change and test them empirically,” Williams said.

When the Center for Antisemitism Research was launched about two-and-half years ago, the name alone was enough to pique the attention of historians who study antisemitism and American Jewish history. In the initial decades after World War II, American Jewish groups, including the ADL, invested heavily in academic research into the sources of antisemitism. 

“There was a sense back then that social science would be able to improve people’s lives — that humanity could be perfected by applying scientific research models to social problems,” said Pamela Nadell, a historian at American University and the author of the forthcoming book, “Antisemitism, an American Tradition.”

With the help of grants from Jewish groups, social psychologists, sociologists, and other scholars investigated how antisemitism was connected to totalitarianism, religion and other forms of racial and ethnic stereotyping. It was an organized attempt to understand the psyche of antisemites. 

To that end, the ADL commissioned public opinion research hoping to understand the nature of bias — whether it was correlated, for example, to age or education. 

Historians don’t really know why or when exactly the investment in such research ended, in part because the ADL has not yet made its archives especially accessible to scholars, at least compared to groups like the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and B’nai B’rith International, which have either handed off materials to a library or created their own open repository, in some cases even digitizing large parts of their collections.

According to Williams, the ADL’s research program petered out by the 1980s because the threat of antisemitism was seen as declining. “Most people generally had positive attitudes about Jews, incident rates were – by most accounts – much lower, the clamoring for real, tangible solutions was less,” he said.

At the time in the United States, the older the average person, the more likely they were to have antisemitic attitudes. There was no stronger demographic correlation than that of age and antisemitism, and a 1992 ADL study noted “the steady influx of younger, more tolerant Americans into the adult population” as the main factor driving declining antisemitism since 1964. It almost seemed like the country was aging out of the problem.

By 2014, in Williams’ telling, the kind of intense antisemitism that was thought to belong to the past was rearing its head once again and, eventually, accelerating so much that the ADL needed to revisit its old strategy around social science research.

“I would say that the major distinction is that we’re working on interventions more than describing the phenomenon,” Williams said, comparing his generation to the researchers of the post-World War II boom. “But, also, you can’t really do one without the other. We do stand on their shoulders.”

In responding to a press inquiry from JTA, the head of the ADL rejected the idea that the ADL founded the Center for Antisemitism Research out of a new or reawakened commitment. 

“At ADL, we always have sought to ground our work in evidence and to shape our approaches based on research,” the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a written response to a series of questions. “We have been tracking antisemitism for decades, measuring attitudes and tracking incidents, and the insights gleaned from this work has helped to inform and shape policies and programs.”

But Greenblatt also acknowledged that recent events are forcing deep changes in the ADL. 

“Nothing will ever be the same after 10/7,” he said. “And so, at ADL, it forced us to step back, look in the mirror and ask hard questions about how we reached this point — and what we are going to do differently in response.”

He continued, “In all honesty, I think every Jewish organization should be undertaking this kind of process in light of 10/7. For ADL, that meant taking a beat and examining our policies, evaluating our programs, endeavoring to measure the efficacy of our activities, and making hard decisions based on what we learn. The Center for Antisemitism Research has helped us to do this.”

The ADL’s introspection over the past few years has come amid growing criticism that mainstream approaches to fighting antisemitism aren’t working. And attacks on the ADL have come from both the right and the left. 

The right has tended to blame the ADL for being too soft on the pro-Palestinian movement or for getting distracted from its core mission of defending Jews by progressive ideas about race and identity. 

The ADL has also been affected by a distrust washing over society of legacy institutions, especially ones perceived by the right as having a left-wing bias. Founded in 2018, an organization called StopAntisemitism has positioned itself as a grassroots alternative to the establishment. Diving head first into the chaotic fray of social media, the group quickly amassed followers whom it sicced on a flurry of targets it accused of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel behavior. 

In some regards, the mainstream has shifted to the right when it comes to fighting antisemitism. When Kenneth Marcus and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law began using aggressive legal tactics to fight antisemitism on college campuses years ago, many Jewish communal leaders rejected his efforts. Nowadays, they are far less likely to tell Marcus that his tactics are counterproductive or that he’s conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism — instead, they are starting to partner with him on lawsuits. 

Meanwhile, on the left, the ADL is often accused of caring about antisemitism mostly insofar as it can be used as a weapon for its pro-Israel advocacy. Rooted in the concept of intersectionality, the left argues that all forms of oppression are intertwined and therefore must be resisted in tandem. One result of that thinking is a critical focus on a certain type of rhetoric from the ADL — for example, when Greenblatt morally equated anti-Zionist groups with white supremacists or when he seemed to liken the Palestinian keffiyeh to the Nazi swastika, though he later clarified that he doesn’t think the keffiyeh is a hate symbol. 

A group that exemplifies this critique is the Diaspora Alliance, which says that Jewish fears are being exploited for pro-Israel purposes at the expense of democratic norms protecting civil society and free speech. Emma Saltzberg, the group’s U.S. strategic campaigns director and a critic of the ADL, accuses Greenblatt of engaging in rhetoric that often undermines what she sees as the valuable expertise of the organization’s technical staff. She anticipates the same dynamic with the ADL’s new research agenda. 

“I think it’s possible for good things to come out of research funded by actors with questionable political agendas,” Saltzberg said in an interview. “At the same time, Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s spokesperson and leader, has demonstrated consistent disregard for the organization’s own in-house experts, so academics who associate themselves with the organization do risk damage to their reputation as serious researchers.”

Williams defended Greenblatt, rejecting the notion that his public statements served to undermine the organization’s technical work. Williams said he works with a range of researchers who don’t agree with the ADL on everything and that he doesn’t lose sleep over people whose opposition to the group is intractable. He also said, however, that given how challenging Greenblatt’s job is, there’s always room for the ADL to improve.

“There’s absolutely work that we could do to acknowledge — just to give you one example — the reality that there are a lot of people who take up anti-Israel positions out of a real humanitarian commitment and dedication,” Williams said. “Acknowledge it, and at the same time present the evidence that many people are being hurt in ways that single them out as Jews because of presumed support, let alone overt support, for Israel.”

Williams’ work at ADL has only just begun, but he’s already reached one profound conclusion in the fight against antisemitism. 

“The big takeaway,” he said, “is that we can actually reduce it.”

[beardedmrbean]

NPR has suspended Uri Berliner, the senior editor who published a bombshell essay a week ago that claimed that the publicly funded outlet has “lost America’s trust” by approaching news stories with a left-wing bias.

NPR media writer David Folkenflik revealed on Tuesday that Berliner beginning on Friday was suspended for five days without pay. Folkenflik, who reviewed a copy of the letter from NPR brass, said the company told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets — a requirement for NPR journalists.

NPR called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again.

Neither NPR nor Berliner immediately responded to requests for comment.

Berliner is a dues-paying member of NPR’s newsroom union, but Folkenflik reported that the editor is not appealing the punishment.

Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has worked at NPR for 25 years, called out journalistic blind spots around major news events, including the origins of COVID-19, the war in Gaza and the Hunter Biden laptop, in an essay published Tuesday on Bari Weiss’ online news site the Free Press.

The fallout from the essay sparked outrage from many of his colleagues. Late Monday afternoon, NPR chief news executive Edith Chapin announced to the newsroom that executive editor Eva Rodriguez would lead monthly meetings to review coverage.

The fiasco also ignited a firestorm of criticism from prominent conservatives — with former President Donald Trump demanding NPR’s federal funding be yanked — and has led to internal tumult, the New York Times reported Friday.

NPR’s new chief executive Katherine Maher defended NPR’s journalism, calling Berliner’s article “profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning,” The 42-year-old exec added that the essay amounted to “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”

Folkenflik said Berliner took umbrage at that, saying she had “denigrated him.” Berliner said he supported diversifying NPR’s workforce to look more like the US population at large. Maher did not address that in a subsequent private exchange he shared with Folkenflik for the story.

The fiasco soon put the spotlight on Maher, whose own left-leaning bias came to light in a trove of woke, anti-Trump tweets she penned.

In January, when Maher was announced as NPR’s new leader, The Post revealed her penchant for parroting the progressive line on social media — including bluntly biased Twitter posts like “Donald Trump is a racist,” which she wrote in 2018.

That hyper-partisan message was scrubbed from the platform now known as X, but preserved on the site Archive.Today.

It’s unclear when Maher deleted it, or if its removal was tied to her new gig.

Other woke posts remain on Maher’s X account. In 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged, she attempted to justify the looting epidemic in Los Angeles as payback for the sins of slavery.

“I mean, sure, looting is counterproductive,” Maher wrote on May 31, 2020.

“But it’s hard to be mad about protests not prioritizing the private property of a system of oppression founded on treating people’s ancestors as private property.”

The next day, she lectured her 27,000 followers on “white silence.”

“White silence is complicity,” she scolded. “If you are white, today is the day to start a conversation in your community.”

The NPR job is Maher’s first position in journalism or media.

She was previously the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco-based nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia, after holding communications roles for the likes of HSBC, UNICEF and the World Bank.

Maher earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies from New York University, according to her LinkedIn account, and grew up in Wilton, Conn. — a town that her mother, Ceci Maher, now represents as a Democratic state senator.

[justinsentertainmentcorner]

Aja Romano at Vox (06.14.2024):

In the last few months, Jerry Seinfeld — the comic whose eponymous sitcom perfected consciously apolitical nattering about the mundanity of modern life — has repeatedly popped up in the media because of his weightier opinions. During and after the promotional cycle for his recent Netflix movie Unfrosted, a comedy about Pop Tarts that divided critics and snagged few viewers, Seinfeld ruffled audiences on the left and repeatedly won accolades from the right with headline-grabbing comments on everything from student protesters to toxic masculinity. Many of these comments are the typical “comedian bashes woke audiences” shtick we’ve heard so often in recent years. His Seinfeld co-star Julia Louis-Dreyfus recently addressed this rhetoric in an interview with the New York Times magazine, stating that she’s wary of comedians who complain about “political correctness.” “To me, that’s a red flag,” she said, “because it sometimes means something else.”

Typically, the more comedians protest the intrusion of politics into comedy, the more they themselves start sounding awfully political. That’s what we’re seeing now with Seinfeld, who has for years bemoaned political correctness and whose public profile has become more complex since the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel. While more and more celebrities began to publicly advocate for a ceasefire on behalf of Gaza, Seinfeld continued to vocally support Israel, including a solidarity visit to the country in December. This has led to ongoing backlash and public protest against him — criticism Seinfeld has frequently reframed as antisemitic. In an interview with incendiary anti-woke provocateur Bari Weiss, he suggested the criticism was “silly” and misguided since comedians “really don’t control anything.” He also pivoted to domestic concerns like his nostalgia for “real” men, “dominant masculinity,” and the absence of “an agreed-upon hierarchy” in society — which, he implied, is why we have road rage. This notion of comedy and politics as separate is one Seinfeld clearly holds sacrosanct. To Weiss, he stated that the only rule in comedy is “Is it funny?” adding, “Nobody cares really about anything else.”

Of course, people care greatly about the “anything else”; it’s why comedy as an art form has constantly faced censorship, blacklisting, and backlash when it gets too stridently political — as it often does. Seinfeld seems to want to pretend that he is fully apolitical, taking a kind of “who, me?” approach to the idea that he’s a political person. It’s a position he’s adopted repeatedly over the last decade, all while complaining regularly about “political correctness.” He’s explicitly brought this “harumph, kids too woke” rhetoric into his comedy shows, like his lackluster 2020 Netflix standup special 23 Hours to Kill.

[...] It’s reminiscent of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has tainted her legacy with a campaign of transphobic hate, all while depicting her justifiably upset critics as an angry mob. Like Rowling, Seinfeld’s current politics are intruding on fans’ enjoyment of his past and present work. Like Rowling, Seinfeld’s doubling down on his anti-woke opinions has metastasized into other revanchist takes, like the desire to return to an outmoded, Mad Men-era masculinity. And like Rowling and other tarnished popular figures such as Elon Musk, Seinfeld doesn’t seem prepared to handle online discourse and criticism.

In recent months, Jerry Seinfeld has rode the train of “anti-woke” sentiments, alongside his shilling for the Israel Apartheid State.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bari Weiss

Published: Apr 22, 2024

For a second, imagine that black students at Columbia were taunted: Go back to Africa. Or imagine that a gay student was surrounded by homophobic protesters and hit with a stick at Yale University. Or imagine if a campus imam told Muslim students that they ought to head home for Ramadan because campus public safety could not guarantee their security.

There would be relentless fury from our media and condemnation from our politicians.

Just remember the righteous—and rightful—outrage over the white supremacist “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “The Jews will not replace us.” 

This weekend at Columbia and Yale, student demonstrators did all of the above—only it was directed at Jews. They told Columbia students to “go back to Poland.” A Jewish woman at Yale was assaulted with a Palestinian flag. And an Orthodox rabbi at Columbia told students to go home for their safety.

Demonstrators on these campuses shouted more chic versions of “Jews will not replace us.” At Columbia they screamed: “Say it loud and say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here.” At Yale they blasted bad rap with the following lyrics: 

Fuck Israel, Israel a bitch / Bitch we out here mobbin’ on some Palestine shit / Free Palestine bitch, Israel gon’ die bitch / Nigga it’s they land why you out here tryna rob it / Bullshit prophets, y’all just want the profit

These campus activists are not simply “pro-Palestine” protesters. They are people who are openly celebrating Hamas and physically intimidating identifiably Jewish students who came near. We are publishing the accounts of two of those students—Sahar Tartak and Jonathan Lederer—today.

Students—all of us—have a right to protest. We have a right to protest for dumb causes and horrible causes. At The Free Press, we will always defend that right. (See here and here, for example.)

It is not, however, a First Amendment right to physically attack another person. It is not a First Amendment right to detain another person as part of your protest. And while Americans are constitutionally protected when they say vile things, like wishing upon Jews a thousand October 7s, we are certainly free to criticize those who say them. We are also free to condemn institutions dedicated to the pursuit of truth who have abandoned that mission, and who stand by and do nothing meaningful to stop scenes like the ones of the past 48 hours.

The students who support terror have given in to madness. Refusing to condemn them is madness.

There are courageous students who see that madness clearly. Please read these essays by Jonathan Lederer and Sahar Tartak.

--

[eretzyisrael]

by David Propper

A smiling Jerry Seinfeld waved off anti-Israel protesters who accused him of supporting genocide as he exited an event on the Upper East Side Sunday night, according to footage.

The New York City comedian was heckled after he left an event at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan that featured former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press.

“Genocide supporter, you support genocide,” one protester yelled at Seinfeld, who gave a quick wave before getting into the back seat of a black SUV that was surrounded by NYPD officers, according to footage obtained by The Post.

3Jerry Seinfeld was jeered by anti-Israel protesters following an event on the Upper East Side.FreedomNewsTV

The protesters continued to shout at Seinfeld before the SUV pulled away.

“F–k you, you support genocide,” the demonstrator seethed.

[bostonwalks]

  Eve Barlow, Noa Tishby, and Bari Weiss...took part in a panel discussion moderated by award-winning news broadcaster Jamie Gutfreund and hosted by Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, as part of the organization’s annual State of the Union event. The panelists analyzed how social media has allowed the proliferation of anti-Jewish sentiment and disinformation about Israel, and what the public can do to stop it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?:

A group of students assembled on the University of Texas at Austin campus to call for an end to the war in Gaza. They did not engage in violence. They did not disrupt classes or occupy administrative buildings. They set up tents on a lawn. They were met with a militarized response, ordered by Governor Abbott, and supported by University administrators. Students and journalists were arrested. Greg Abbott is one of many on the right that has bemoaned the death of free speech on campus. He signed a law to protect such speech in 2019. And then he calls for peaceful protestors to be arrested. So how can Abbott justify such a reversal to his call for free speech? The protestors are anti-semitic, he says. Really? How does Abbott and the police wading through the crowd know the students are anti-semitic? Because, as Dave Weigel points out, Abbott has broadened the definition of anti-semitism to incorporate support for a Palestinian state. Any protest for this cause is, therefore, anti-semitic, and therefore worth contravening his commitment to free speech, which, lets face it, was never meant to be especially binding.1

The absurdities that follow are almost funny. The University of Austin, the pretend university launched by IDW types like Bari Weiss, is preparing its “Forbidden Courses” for the summer. It stands silently by as the actual University of Texas at Austin is censored, safe in the knowledge that they are regime-approved. You don’t have to be blind to the real cases of anti-semitism in America to be troubled by accusations of anti-semitism to shut down the most visible protests to a military response that has become increasingly unpopular.

[...] There are the protests, and what the people off campus want to turn the protests into: sites of disorder and violence, a basis by which to discredit and control campuses, a reason to fear leftists radicals, and a campaign issue in the presidential election. For them, the George Floyd protests of 2020 were events of failure, of an insufficient will to crack down on dissent. (Though police did indeed crack down). They want the police to intervene aggressively, and with a sense of righteousness that comes from claiming to be on the right side of history. It does not matter if students are not engaged in meaningful violence or property damage. It does not matter if the worst forms of anti-semitism are occurring off campus, by non-students.

[...] These critiques serve two purposes. First, they erase the subject of the protest. The fundamental question of whether the protestors have a point is elided. Next time you read an opinion piece about protests on campus, ask yourself, did the author engage in the basic question of whether the war should continue, and whether the US government should continue to provide arms for it. It says something truly profound about the blinkered view of the American pundit class that they only way they can understand a real war is through their own worn culture war framings. They squint just enough to be outraged by the fact that students are protesting but refuse to engage in a discussion of what the students are protesting about.

Second, they serve to delegitimize the university itself. I’ve written about the tactics of delegitimzaiton, deconstruction and control before in the context of the administrative state, but it applies just as well to universities. As the work of political scientist Dan Carpenter points out, public organizations win autonomy based on building positive reputations; they lose that autonomy when they become viewed as incompetent or immoral. Creating reputational damage is a necessary precondition to justify removing autonomy from institutions. The narrative of a woke or disorderly campus justifies removing faculty or student input on who leads the institution, of legislators or donors establishing the contents of the curriculum. Those pushing that narrative will use any campus event to further it. Far too many people who should know better have gone along with it. This is one of the ways that what is happening on campuses now links to the campus speech wars, the censorship of speech related to race and gender, and removal of DEI offices, and the erosion of faculty and student governance. Universities, as a community, are permitted less and less to manage themselves based on their values. They will not be trusted to find the right balance. Ask yourself, is society better off with Elise Stefanik’s vision of higher education?

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and the people who are habitually up in arms about campus free speech and antisemitism are themselves eroding campus free speech and enabling antisemitism by their actions supporting the removal of pro-Palestinian protesters from college campuses.

[gothicprep]

i'm listening to "the witch trials of jk rowling" so you don't have to. i'm morbidly curious and i want to see where they're going with this, and like to listen to podcasts while i chug through work.

one thing that is probably worth pointing out is that this was produced by "the free press" which is bari weiss's editorial publication. so, given that, the angle that this is probably going for is the encouragement of open dialogue and discouragement towards reliance on partisanship/tribalism. i'm also pretty familiar with bari and get the sense that she's being honest in her commitment to nuance in a way that someone like elon isn't, so i'm taking that into consideration.

the first episode of it is mostly jkr talking about her life when she began writing harry potter and her reaction to how it caught on. she shares more details about her abusive ex husband, and talks about the incongruity of dealing with public attention while having an abusive ex husband still fixated on you. it also probes her psyche as to why she thinks her accomplishments are specifically a feminist endeavor, detailing her backstory as a single mother who wasn't making a lot of money, the fact that "jk" is a pen name manufactured so young boys wouldn't be discouraged from reading her books, and how her abusive marriage is in the backdrop. timeline wise, it takes you to roughly 2000. it doesn't get into her views on gender, sex, and politics.

the second episode is, in my opinion, pretty good. it talks about how the 90s were somewhat of a prototype of present-day american culture wars. it brings up the rodney king riots, the controversy over hip-hop, the anti-psychiatry sentiment, the boom in wicca, columbine, and how these things empowered fundamentalist christians. what i really liked about it is that it brings up two things about columbine that are reliably memory-holed – the public freakout that took place when it was reported that the killers took antidepressants, and the religious martyrization of cassie bernell. megan phelps-roper talks to some lawyers who litigated harry potter related book banning cases. it's intercut on occasion with joanne talking about the book bans, but she's a secondary character to what's being laid out.

my big concern with all this is that megan phelps-roper is a memoirist and essayist, not a journalist. i don't get the impression from her that she's willing to challenge an interview subject as fit for a journalistic piece. some of her questions sound like they were redubbed in post-production, and i read that as her not being a good interviewer.

i'm also curious about where this will go, because so far, it draws a lot of connections between joanne's politics and the arguments of prior unsubstantiated freakouts and christian fundamentalism, and that reflects on her poorly.

i'll post updates on tuesdays/wednesdays as the episodes release depending on when i get around to listening to them, and i'll let you know.