Shortly after you receive this email, you will receive another one: the introduction to the new incarnation of this newsletter, which will be housed at The Atlantic, my new journalistic home as of today. From this point forward, the bulk of my journalism will be appearing right here—in your inbox and in the pages of The Atlantic.

The team at The Atlantic has worked diligently to ensure that this transition is perfectly seamless for you, my regular readers, which means that there’s nothing you need to do. Going forward, you will simply receive these newsletters from the new Atlantic address, instead of from this Substack. (They might go to your “Promotions” or even Spam folder at first, so keep an eye out!)

Now, for most people, this newsletter will be a subscription offering. That means that after the debut month of free posts, most of the content will go behind The Atlantic paywall, and be reserved for their paying subscribers. But you are the exception.

Anyone subscribed to this newsletter—free or paying—will be getting a complimentary yearlong digital subscription to The Atlantic. Yes, the entire site! Your subscription begins at the start of December, and will be attached to the email with which you subscribe here. (Meanwhile, I’ve paused all paying subscriptions here at Substack, and you’ll be moved from the free Atlantic list to the paying list after the trial month ends.)

As I said, there’s nothing you need to do to keep receiving this newsletter. But there is something you can do to help this newsletter: spread the word! The success of this new project depends on it reaching as many people as possible who’d benefit from it. If you know anyone who’d appreciate the weekly reporting, profiles, and analysis I produce—and I’ve got a lot planned for the next month—please send them my way.

Thank you as always,
Yair

As you may know, Sabbath-observant Jews are forbidden from working on the holy day, and this prohibition extends beyond manual labor to using things like electricity. Unsurprisingly, this can create problems, and not just when you are running for vice president of the United States. What happens if the lights go off—or if the air conditioning needs to be turned on during a heat wave? The traditional solution to these problems has been the so-called shabbos goy—a generous gentile who performs these tasks when observant Jews cannot.

Today, the shabbos goy is in the news again due to the recent passing of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Growing up in the Bronx, the future four-star general not only served as a shabbos goy for the local Jewish community, but picked up some fluency in Yiddish. Reflecting on this act of kindness today in Tablet, Supreme Court litigator Nathan Lewin recalled another national icon who shared a similar interfaith experience.

Back in 1965, Lewin was serving in the U.S. Solicitor General’s office when President Lyndon Johnson appointed the celebrated Black jurist Thurgood Marshall to the post. (Marshall, of course, would go on to become the first African-American Supreme Court Justice.) Lewin was soon tasked with introducing himself—and his unusual religious practices—to his new boss. He recounts:

I began by telling Marshall that I was an Orthodox Jew who observed the Sabbath. Since the holidays were approaching, I thought I had better mention those, too. So I continued, “In addition to Saturdays, I can’t work on the Jewish holidays, and they are coming soon. First there is the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, and then comes the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur.”

At this point, the judge interrupted. “Yes, and then there’s Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah.” I almost fell over. “That’s right,” I said, and added, “But how do you know that?”

“Easy,” Marshall replied, “I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore. In fact, I made some money by turning off lights in homes there on Friday nights.”

Read the whole thing to learn how Marshall’s experience with the Jewish community explicitly influenced one of his rulings on religious liberty.

Elsewhere…

My friend, Washington Post columnist, and noted newsletter subscriber Jake McAuley recently published a book about the fate of Jewish art collectors in France during the Holocaust. This may not sound like gripping reading, but I assure you that this arresting excerpt of the book—about “how France betrayed the very Jews who placed their faith and fortunes in its ideals and culture”—will change your mind. You can read the excerpt here and buy The House of Fragile Things here.

In the New Journal at Yale, Zachary Groz chronicles the remarkable tale of what happened in 1976 when Yale discovered that it had been harboring a Nazi on its faculty.

A Song For Shabbat

By my lights, singer-songwriter Josh Washawsky has been quietly crafting some of today’s most intriguing new Jewish music. His pre-pandemic album, Chaverai Nevarech, was actually an inspiration for some of my own compositions. This week, he quietly released seven more songs, all drawn from the sabbath liturgy. You can find it wherever you get your music, and listen to the first track—Yedid Nefesh—below:

Shabbat shalom,
Yair

The floor is yours.

Read more

The Rabbinic Pro-Vaccination PSA You Didn’t Know You Needed

This week, a group of Orthodox rabbis from New York’s Five Towns and Rockaway area released a powerful PSA encouraging their communities to get vaccinated. Come for the message, stay for the hats, the accents, the one rabbi doing his part in full sermon voice, and the South African rabbi named Ya’akov Trump:

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

Powerful pro-vaccination PSA today from Orthodox rabbis in New York: "The ribono shel olam [creator of the world] has given us a precious gift. It's called the covid-19 vaccine." "Unvaccinated people die! They die." "What's the shaylah [question] over here? Are we playing games?"

7:18 PM ∙ Sep 1, 2021

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As the son of an Orthodox rabbi, this is basically the perfect microtargeted content for me. But given the many religious references and Yiddishisms sprinkled throughout the video, I suspect many of you only understood half of what was said. So here’s a little glossary explaining most of the terms, which help illuminate the message:

“Ribono shel olam”: Creator/master of the world
“Simchas”: Joyous communal occasions
“Genug shoyn”: Enough already!
“What’s the shaylah?”: What’s the question?
“Rachmana litzlan”: God forbid
“Ve-rapoh yerapeh”: A reference to Exodus 21:19, seen as the biblical mandate for the medical profession
“Davening in shul”: Praying in synagogue
“Yeshivos, Batei Knesiyos, Batei Midrashos”: Religious schools, synagogues, and study halls
“Take achrayus for your neighbor’s health, as well as your own”: Take responsibility
“‘Nafshoseichem’ is in the plural”: A reference to Deuteronomy 4:15, “Be very careful for your own sake,” understood as a commandment to take care of one’s health, but which is written in plural in Hebrew, and thus interpreted here to refer to one’s entire community
“Gedolei yisroel”: The great rabbinic scholars of the generation

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Can Jews Be Antisemitic?

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible.

-Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1843)1

Karl Marx was ethnically Jewish, though his father converted to Christianity. When a Jewish person or someone with Jewish heritage expresses anti-Jewish ideas, is that antisemitism? It’s a question that understandably puzzles many, but as history and scholarship attest, the answer is clearly yes. From the Middle Ages until the present day, there are plenty of examples of people perpetuating antisemitism despite being Jews themselves.2

My latest antisemitism explainer video unpacks this phenomenon and some of the reasons behind it:

Making Friends on the Internet

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

Excited to see where this is going

11:17 PM ∙ Aug 30, 2021

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This guy stopped writing back, presumably because he had to go change his water tank.

The number of Nazis I can troll is directly proportional to the number of people subscribed to this newsletter. I don’t make the rules, it’s science. Sign up for a free or paid subscription today.

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Elsewhere…

Rachel Rosenthal, “But What If I’m Not Ready?”: “Perhaps the person who is most unworthy to beseech God is the one is certain that they are worthy. Humility allows us to see our weaknesses, and acknowledging those weaknesses is what allows us to strive to change and do better.”

Thank you for reading this edition of my newsletter. If you liked what you read and want to support this work, please do share and subscribe, and consider upgrading to a paying subscription.

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In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, the polling firm Gallup asked Americans for their opinions about the Jewish victims of European antisemitism. The results still shock today: 54% of Americans said that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault.” 11% said it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, 65% of Americans blamed Europe’s Jews for their own abuse. Such stark figures make it a lot easier to understand how the Nazi genocide happened in the first place, and why it met so little international resistance.

This might seem like ugly but ancient history, largely irrelevant to our present reality. It’s not. In 2018, CNN found that nearly 1 in 5 Europeans believed that antisemitism was “a response to the everyday behavior of Jewish people.” And those were just the ones who openly admitted believing this to a pollster. In 2015, after a series of deadly antisemitic attacks in Europe, a noted presenter on Swedish Public Radio suggested—in an eerie echo of Gallup’s pre-Holocaust poll—that “the Jews themselves have ... responsibility in the growing anti-Semitism that we see now.” She went on to suggest that “a lot of people” think that Israel is the cause of such antisemitism.

This lie that refuses to die is the subject of the latest video in my antisemitism explainer series. Because if we’re going to beat back antisemitism, we need to understand why attempts to pin the prejudice on its victims are so egregiously wrong—logically, historically, and morally.

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I want to expand on the allegation that Israel causes antisemitism, because this misconception is common even among well-meaning people today. In the aforementioned 2015 Swedish public radio broadcast, the host suggested that “a lot of people” believe that the Jewish state causes anti-Jewish violence. In attributing this belief to many Europeans, she was undoubtedly correct. The 2018 CNN survey found that 28% of Europeans agreed that Israel caused anti-Jewish bigotry in their countries. Even the head of Human Rights Watch recently implied that the Jewish state caused anti-Jewish attacks in Britain.

The consequences of this widely accepted narrative are clear and disquieting. In 2018, a survey by the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights found that an astonishing 79% of European Jews felt that they’d been blamed for “something done by the Israeli government.” And the more societies legitimize the idea that Israel causes antisemitism, the more they incentivize people to assail local Jews for Israeli actions.

In reality, however, the notion that “Israel causes antisemitism” is a fundamental misunderstanding of how bigotry works, and simply a more sophisticated way of blaming victims for their own abuse. Let me explain with a rough analogy, paraphrasing something I’ve written in The Atlantic:

If you are flattened by a grand piano that falls from the sky, the cause of your death is the grand piano. But obviously, the actual cause of your death is the person who chucked it out the window and onto your head. This is the difference between a proximate cause and a root cause.

When Jews on the streets of Europe are beaten up while Israel battles Hamas in Gaza, the fighting overseas is the proximate cause of the antisemitism. But the root cause is the hateful ideology of the bigot, who holds every Jew responsible for whatever any other Jew in the world might do, and uses this to justify violence against them. This is how racists think about minorities. In their fevered imagination, all Muslims are accountable for the perceived bad acts of any other Muslims, all Black folks are responsible for the perceived bad acts of any other Black people, and so forth. This warped worldview is the root cause of racism, not the actions of members of the targeted community. Take away this ideology, and the bigotry goes away. By contrast, Israel could disappear tomorrow but the racist outlook would remain and continue to cause antisemitism, just as it did for centuries before Israel existed. Until people learn to treat Jews and other minorities as individuals, and not as racist stand-ins for their entire group, bigotry against them will persist. That’s because it’s the ideology, not Israel, that causes the problem.

The idea that the Jewish state fundamentally causes antisemitism, then, is simply a more sophisticated restatement of the idea that Jews themselves cause antisemitism. Neither is true, and neither should be excused.1

Jews don’t cause antisemitism. Antisemites do.

Elsewhere…

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

Nothing like some light summer reading

6:18 PM ∙ Aug 24, 2021

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The top book in that pile is an advance copy of Dara Horn’s forthcoming People Love Dead Jews, which you will want to preorder immediately. Expect to hear more about it in this newsletter.

I recently took over Tablet’s flagship podcast Unorthodox to talk about my antisemitism video series, how we can have smarter conversations about anti-Jewish prejudice, and why watching these videos is a good way to support my retirement plan. Listen to the whole thing here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for reading this edition of my newsletter. If you appreciated what you learned and would like to support this work, please be sure to share and subscribe, and consider upgrading to a paying subscription.

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There are two ways to participate here. Option A: Click the headline above to go to the web page for this email, and post your questions there in the comments.…

Read more

Now that we’ve laid down some fundamental principles in the initial videos, we’re able to get into some more complicated and downright weird stuff. In the second half of the series, you’ll meet a bizarre ho…

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That’s what today’s video is about. It goes without saying that there is no way I could possibly settle all the permutations and implications of this question in a single video. And so I didn’t try. Instead, I attempted to show that while we might think that this subject is so controversial that we can’t agree about any of it, there are actually a bunch of basic principles and ideas that most folks do agree upon.

We can agree that Israel is a country with actual policies, and those policies—like any other country’s—warrant criticism, including harsh criticism. We can agree that no criticism of Israeli policy justifies vandalism and violence against Jewish people around the world, any more than criticism of Muslim states and groups in the Middle East justifies attacks against Muslims around the world. We can agree that simply taking classical antisemitic conspiracy theories—“the Jews control the government/media/economy”—and replacing “Jews” with “Israelis” or “Zionists” is still antisemitism. And so on.

Watch the whole thing below. I hope it will become a useful resource for the many decent and thoughtful people trying to have this difficult conversation in a decent and thoughtful way.

Now, despite my best efforts to find a workable consensus, I’m sure people of goodwill will still take issue with my choices. These are difficult questions, and I welcome both questions and criticism, so feel free to share either, including in our Ask Me Anything for paying subscribers next week.

Speaking of which, after sorting out some technical difficulties, I’ll be sending out early access to the final three videos in this series to paid subscribers tomorrow. So be sure to sign up if you’d like to get in on that.

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How the Coronavirus Saved Vilna’s Historic Jewish Cemetery

Back in January 2017, I reported on an alarming effort to pave over one of the vestiges of historic Jewish life in Europe:

For centuries, the city of Vilna (today Vilnius) was the center of Jewish life in what was then known as Polish-Lithuania. By the turn of the 20th century, the Lithuanian capital boasted over 100 synagogues, an array of Jewish newspapers, and scores of other cultural and religious institutions. It played host to the famed Gaon of Vilna, one of Judaism’s spiritual giants, and also to the socialist Bund, the secular Jewish labor movement.

Today, after the Holocaust, little is left of that historic Jewish community, which once comprised half of Vilna’s population, but now constitutes less than 1 percent of it. One remaining vestige of the city’s illustrious past, however, is its old Jewish cemetery, in which “a galaxy of eminent European rabbinic scholars and authors” were buried, as one leading scholar put it. Yet compounding tragedy upon tragedy, the Lithuanian government, reportedly with European Union funding, is preparing to build a $25 million convention center on the site.

In response, an alliance of local Jews and preeminent Jewish historians has taken up the cause of saving the cemetery.

In April 2017, these scholars and activists produced a short documentary pressing their case:

This debate had implications far beyond one Jewish cemetery in Lithuania. As Shnayer Z. Leiman, one of the world’s preeminent Jewish historians, put it to me, “there’s a much larger issue at stake here, and that is whether any government can at will destroy a Jewish cemetery. Once you allow this in Vilna—and there are those who allowed it—it’s going to happen everywhere. Every government’s going to say, ‘Well, not only did they do it, they got paid by the E.U. to do it!’ Anytime they want to, they can express the law of eminent domain and even destroy Jewish cemeteries. They’re not going to destroy a Christian cemetery, but Jewish cemeteries, why not? Who’s going to complain? So the stakes are very high. What’s at stake is really the future of all Jewish cemeteries in Europe in particular, or anywhere where the Jewish population dwindles and the government feels it can just walk in and do whatever it wants.”

But even as protest continued, the project moved slowly but inexorably forward. That is, until this week, when Lithuania announced that it was finally shelving the project. They did not do this, however, because building a convention center over a historic Jewish cemetery was an awful thing to do. They did it because they determined that the center wasn’t worth the financial investment, since the coronavirus had depressed travel and tourism.

I have no further comment.

Thank you for reading this edition of my newsletter. If you liked what you read and want to support this work, please be sure to share and subscribe—or upgrade to a paying subscription.

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Tommy Vietor @TVietor08

Check out @Yair_Rosenberg's video series on the history and origins of antisemitism. He is brilliant and funny, and these videos are important and worth your time. Watch them. Share them. Learn something.

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

OK, now for the good stuff. The first video from the antisemitism explainer series is now live! You can watch and share it here: https://t.co/8SztKzxd17

7:00 PM ∙ Aug 4, 2021

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David French @DavidAFrench

Please check out Yair's series. It's excellent.

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

Today, I’m proud to share the result with you. The series consists of six videos, each providing straightforward answers to difficult questions about antisemitism that many people have, but are afraid to ask.

7:47 PM ∙ Aug 4, 2021

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Senator Jacky Rosen @SenJackyRosen

With acts of hate growing at an alarming rate, video explainers like @Yair_Rosenberg's are a welcome resource in the fight to educate against antisemitism.

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

It’s both a crash course for a general audience, and a serious attempt to reground our broken antisemitism conversation in principle rather than partisanship. I hope it will serve as a resource for both Jews and non-Jews seeking to untangle and rebut this vexing bigotry. https://t.co/89O12WbU6B

8:00 PM ∙ Aug 4, 2021

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To be fair, not all the reviews have been positive:

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

The first video in my explainer series about antisemitism is now being dislike-bombed and mass reported by white supremacists, largely from 4chan. If you want to see what has them so triggered that they don't want anyone else to see it, watch here: youtube.com/watch?v=FAJfdd…

2:00 PM ∙ Aug 6, 2021

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Can’t please everyone, I guess.

But more seriously, a key goal of this series is to reframe our antisemitism conversation in terms of principle, rather than partisanship, so I’m gratified to see that the work has spoken to people from different backgrounds. Now the real test begins, because the next videos tackle more controversial questions, like the latest one: Whose fault is antisemitism?

This question is constantly used to derail serious efforts to fight antisemitism, because partisans inevitably answer it by pinning the prejudice on their opponents. By offloading blame for anti-Jewish bigotry onto their enemies—religious, political, ideological—many people avoid dealing with the issue among their friends and allies. By making antisemitism someone else’s problem, it’s no longer their problem.

But as this video documents, antisemitism does not have one simple source, and no community is immune to its ideas. The best way to beat the bigotry, then, is to focus on rebutting antisemitic sentiments regardless of their source, and to confront them in your own community where you have influence and credibility—not just in someone else’s where you don’t.

I hope you’ll watch the whole thing and share it with those who need to see it. And here’s the first video, in case you missed it:

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The Smear Campaign Against a Biden Administration Muslim Nominee

You may notice that I keep referencing the “toxic partisan discourse” surrounding antisemitism. But what exactly do I mean by that? Here’s an example from the headlines.

You’ve probably never heard of Dilawar Syed. He was nominated months ago to serve as deputy administrator of the Small Business Administration by President Biden. You might think that the appointment of a little-known bureaucrat to a largely technocratic position would be uncontroversial. But you would be wrong, because Syed is a Muslim and has been involved in Muslim political advocacy groups.

As a result, as Politico reported today, Syed’s nomination has been held up for over five months by a group of Republican senators over his alleged anti-Jewish and anti-Israel animus. These guilt-by-association allegations are sourced not to statements made by Syed, but to a moderate Muslim political group he has worked with.

Now, if you read the Politico article about this antisemitism controversy, you will be somewhat confused, because not a single Jewish organization is quoted making any such complaints. That’s because no significant Jewish group has done so, but many non-Jewish Republicans have.

In fact, mainstream Jewish organizations have explicitly come out in defense of Syed, who by all accounts seems to have a healthy personal relationship with the Jewish community. In a rare public intervention, the American Jewish Committee declared back in July:

American Jewish Committee (AJC) does not normally take positions on nominees requiring Senate confirmation. However, accusations around Dilawar Syed’s nomination based on his national origin or involvement in a Muslim advocacy organization are so base and unamerican that AJC is compelled to speak out.

Syed has been an active partner of the San Francisco Jewish community, including taking part in a program for the national Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council, co-convened by AJC. He traveled to Israel with the Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco and has been involved in other Muslim-Jewish dialogue efforts.

The unsupported accusation that somehow Jewish businesses or those with ties to Israel may not fare as well under Syed’s leadership in the Small Business Administration (SBA) has no factual grounding. Indeed, he has specifically disavowed support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks the dissolution of Israel. In a question for the committee record, Syed stated, “Let me unequivocally state that I do not support BDS. Throughout my career, I have supported engagement with Israeli business. I have personally conducted business with Israeli companies and have mentored entrepreneurs based in Israel.”

Syed is also being attacked for his involvement with Emgage, an organization with which AJC has made common cause on a number of shared policy issues. While AJC often disagrees with Emgage on matters related to Israel, its advocacy is done in the great American tradition of respectful public debate. AJC rejects the charge that simply an affiliation with Emgage would reflect negatively on an individual, organization, or agency.

The American Jewish Congress also put out a bipartisan statement along these lines. Many other Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, have weighed in similarly.

In other words, what is actually going on here is that partisan Republican legislators are using manufactured charges of anti-Jewish animus as an excuse to hold up a Democratic nominee. What most Jews actually think is immaterial to them, because this was never about Jews in the first place. For these Republicans, as for many partisans, antisemitism is not a malevolent force to be fought, but a convenient cudgel to be used to bash political opponents. Of course, there’s a term for people who use antisemitism for their own advantage, and it’s not “friend of the Jews.” Maybe they ought to watch my videos!

Elsewhere…

I talked to Jewish Insider about the goals of my antisemitism video series, and what we often get wrong about anti-Jewish prejudice.

Michael Pershan, last seen as the author of the hilarious “The Talmud Responds to Alice Walker,” has a thoughtful essay today in Tablet about how witnessing the public kosher slaughter of a lamb as a high school student helped him talk to his own kids about death many years later.

Thank you for reading this edition of my newsletter. If you liked what you read and want to support writing like this, don’t forget to share and subscribe. And if you’re already a subscriber, please consider upgrading to a paying subscription to help me do more of this important work.

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Before the pandemic, I used to crisscross the country and speak to people interested in understanding and combating anti-Jewish prejudice. But it always felt like fighting a losing battle. I could only be in so many places at once, and couldn’t possibly address all the communities that sought guidance on this subject. So starting nine months ago, I embarked on an ambitious project to change that.

Working with the talented production team at Unpacked, a clearinghouse for online Jewish video content, I began scripting and designing a web series about antisemitism. Today, I’m proud to share the result with you.

The series consists of six videos, each providing straightforward answers to difficult questions about antisemitism that many people have, but are afraid to ask. It’s both a crash course for a general audience, and a serious attempt to reground our broken antisemitism conversation in principle rather than partisanship. I hope it will serve as a resource for both Jews and non-Jews seeking to untangle and rebut this vexing bigotry.

Now for the good stuff. As of this email, the first of these videos is now live. A new one will be released every Wednesday morning through September, but if you’re a paying subscriber to this newsletter, you’ll get advance access to the entire series tomorrow. Be sure to sign up and upgrade your subscription here:

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Here’s the first video and the full line-up of coming attractions:

1. Why is antisemitism still such a problem today? Didn’t it go away after the Holocaust?

2. Whose fault is antisemitism? (August 11 | Author’s Intro)

3. Is criticizing Israel antisemitic? (August 18 | Author’s Intro)

4. Do Jewish people cause antisemitism? (August 25 | Author’s Intro)

5. Can Jews be antisemitic? (September 1 | Author’s Intro)

6. Why should I care about antisemitism? (September 9)

Obviously, these are big questions, and they won’t be resolved in a YouTube clip. But my goal with these videos is not to end the conversation, but rather to provoke more productive conversations. If this series inspires folks to dig deeper into the subject of antisemitism, have better arguments about it, and come up with better approaches than I did, then it will have been a great success.

And this is only the beginning. Crunching such complicated concepts into short videos necessarily entails simplification. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t say everything I wanted or address every potential question or criticism. So look out for feature articles expanding on the themes of the series, annotated scripts with additional arguments and source materials, and much more in the days ahead.

Meanwhile, if you like the first video, please share it! With your help, we’ll be able to reach many of the people who most need to see this.

Again, if you’d like early access to the entire series, be sure to sign up or upgrade to a paying subscription. It’s support like this that helps me continue to produce projects like these.

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Welcome to a special all-antisemitism edition of this newsletter. Don’t worry, we’ll be back to our more uplifting coverage of topics like Israel/Palestine and American politics soon enough. In the meantime, scroll down if you want to see an exciting sneak peak at my forthcoming video series tackling big questions about antisemitism.

Aren’t All Czars “Antisemitism Czars”?

Earlier this month, social media got a chuckle out of a Newsweek op-ed published by Ellie Cohanim, the former U.S. deputy envoy for combating antisemitism. The piece’s title: “The Time Has Come for a Domestic Anti-Semitism Czar in the U.S.” The response was predictable:

Jonathan Chait @jonathanchait

I wish I could go back a few generations and ask my ancestors what they think of the term "Anti-Semitism Czar"

Ellie Cohanim @elliecohanim

My new op-ed: The time has come for a domestic Anti-Semitism Czar in the U.S. | Read: via @Newsweek cc: @iwf https://t.co/wWpK1k5kWk

8:03 PM ∙ Jul 1, 2021

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Catherine Rampell @crampell

@jonathanchait they'd probably assume the guy's responsibilities were different

8:14 PM ∙ Jul 1, 2021

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Peter Beinart @PeterBeinart

they might find the term redundant

Jonathan Chait @jonathanchait

I wish I could go back a few generations and ask my ancestors what they think of the term "Anti-Semitism Czar" https://t.co/PEpd6FahQu

8:58 PM ∙ Jul 1, 2021

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But the good-natured ribbing over the awkward appellation had the unintended consequence of obscuring an important point made by the piece: contrary to what many believe, the U.S. does not have a domestic official charged with tackling antisemitism.

What the country does have is a “special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism,” a position which was recently upgraded by Congress to ambassador level. But this is a State Department office charged with combating antisemitism abroad, not policing the problem at home. Few people realize this. In fact, the intramural Jewish debates over who should fill this role have largely taken place over how a given candidate might approach American antisemitism—despite the fact that this would not be their job! All of which is to say: To the extent that American Jews think that such a role is warranted, they ought to be lobbying for it to be created.

That said, while the idea of an “antisemitism czar” has obvious appeal, it also has some political drawbacks that become clear upon closer consideration, and that I suspect make it a hard sell. Such a person—“the Supreme Golem,” perhaps?—would inevitably be tasked with making extremely difficult calls about anti-Jewish prejudice, from responding to prominent people who engage in it to untangling anti-Israel rhetoric from anti-Jewish rhetoric. Not everyone will agree on these sensitive subjects, and every intervention risks becoming a political distraction for a given American administration. It’s a lot easier to have a diplomat tasked with quietly fighting antisemitism overseas than it is to have an official charged with constantly raising the issue domestically. And Jews themselves may not like having one person appointed to speak for them on the issue, depending on their worldviews. (To understand why, just look at the former deputy envoy who wrote the original op-ed above, whose politics and conception of antisemitism certainly differ from my own.)

So, should there be an antisemitism czar? And if yes, what should we call them? Hit me with your best responses and I’ll share the winners in a future edition. The newsletter has a fair amount of congressional readership, so you never know who might take the idea and run with it…

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Coming Soon: Antisemitism (And What To Do About It)

If elected as antisemitism czar, I will not serve. But as mentioned previously in these pages, I’ve been working for nearly nine months on a punchy video explainer series on antisemitism that straightforwardly answers big questions about anti-Jewish prejudice that many have, but are afraid to ask. And we now have a release date!

The series will premiere on August 4, and rest assured, when it’s out, you’ll be some of the first to know. Until then, here’s the first minute of the entire production, which sets the stage for what’s to come:

As ever, if you’d like to support this and all my other work, please consider sharing, subscribing, or upgrading to a paying subscription. Thank you.

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Today is Tisha B’av, the day of mourning which commemorates numerous national tragedies in Jewish history, beginning with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It’s an occasion with much to teach us, whether we are Jewish or not, but whose lessons are often misunderstood. Here is my effort to recover one of them.

“What do you think about baseless hatred?” This is not the sort of question most academics are used to being asked, let alone by reporters. But at this time of year, when Jewish tradition mourns the destruction of the First and Second Temples, it’s exactly the sort of query regularly put to Hebrew University’s Isaiah Gafni, a preeminent historian of rabbinic Judaism. That’s because the rabbis of the Talmud famously attributed some of these tragedies to sin’at chinam, or baseless hatred among Jews, which brought about divine punishment.

Now, Israeli journalists are not really interested in Gafni’s scholarly opinion of the term. “What they’re trying to say,” he observes in one of his lectures, “is that there’s as much sin’at chinam now as there was then.” In other words, the reporters want to use Gafni and his academic credentials to bolster their critique of contemporary Israel and its people, who are deeply divided along factional lines. But he refuses to play along. “I’ve really gotten sick of that question, and I usually try to answer now saying: ‘I really don’t know, because I am not plagued with sin’at chinam. The people that I hate really deserve it!’” He chuckles. “Usually they kind of hang up on me. This is not what they wanted.”

But Gafni’s seemingly unserious riposte makes a serious point. “No one is ever guilty of sin’at chinam,” he notes. “It’s always the other person that’s guilty of hating me.” Our own animosities are always justified in our eyes; it’s only hatred harbored by others that we consider groundless. A quick glance at modern political invocations of the charge of sin’at chinam perfectly illustrates Gafni’s principle: for many Jewish ideologues, sin’at chinam is the perpetual sin of other people, specifically those they disagree with.

“The true face of the fascist purveyors of sin’at chinam,” declares a blogger for the London Jewish Chronicle, are “the settlers and their great pretender friends.” Of course, for a sympathizer of the Israeli settler movement, sin’at chinam was evident when “those Jews who did move trailers onto hills within their existing towns were dislodged by the IDF.” In the eyes of hawkish pro-Israel advocates, the dovish group J Street promulgates baseless hatred. Yet some of the liberal lobby’s supporters believe they have found the true purveyors of sin’at chinam: right-wing Zionist organizations. “We will show that sin’at chinam will soon be a way of the past if our voices have anything to say about it!” proclaim the progressive Women of the Wall, who advocate for women’s religious rights at the Western Wall. “Stop practicing sin’at chinam, baseless hatred, and you will find it mysteriously vanishes. It’s easy to have peace and unity — just pray with us, and don’t try to change us,” admonish their conservative opponents, a group called Women for the Wall. And so on.

Obviously, I have my own sympathies in each of these debates. But to indulge them here would be to miss the point. Nothing could be further from the spirit of Tisha B’av, today’s national day of mourning, than using its moral vocabulary to impugn others. In fact, when it comes to explaining the root causes of the destruction of the Temple, the Talmud teaches the very opposite lesson: that we must root out baseless hatred within ourselves.

“The destruction of Jerusalem came about through a Kamzta and a Bar Kamzta,” declares the Babylonian Talmud. A “certain man,” the rabbis recount, had a friend named Kamtza and an enemy named Bar Kamtza. This individual threw a party, and sent his servant to invite the first man. But the messenger erred and instead brought the host’s soundalike foe, Bar Kamtza.

And so, in full view of the many rabbis in attendance, the host ejected Bar Kamtza from the festivities, even after he offered to pay for the entire party rather than face such public humiliation. Embittered by this experience, and particularly incensed at the rabbis who stood by while he was shamed, Bar Kamtza slanderously denounced the Jews to the Roman emperor, setting in motion the conquest of Jerusalem.

What’s striking about this origin story is that it apportions blames to the people recounting it, namely, the rabbis who did not intervene at the party. The host of the affair, the ostensible culprit, is never even named. While the Talmudic sages could easily have pinned the entire episode on him, they chose instead to share the blame themselves. National tragedy, in the traditional Jewish understanding, is not an opportunity to assert our own sense of superiority, but to foster a spirit of self-critique. As the Mussaf prayer every new month reminds us, “because of our sins, we were exiled from our land.”

On Tisha B’Av, of all days, we are not meant to point to flaws outside ourselves, however apparent they may be, but rather to examine those within. After all, we can never truly know the minds and motivations of others. The only baseless hatred we can diagnose is our own.

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This piece is a revised version of one that appeared in Tablet in 2013.

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A reminder that we’ll be doing our monthly Ask Me Anything for paid subscribers tomorrow. Sign up or upgrade your subscription to join us.

I often get asked who I read and why. It’s a good question, especially with so much material out there competing for attention. My answer is this: I try to read people who tell me something I didn’t know, even when I don’t agree with what they said. There are lots of writers who do an elegant job telling me things I already know or believe. There are far fewer who teach me something new every time. Adam Serwer of The Atlantic is one of those writers.

He is also a day 1 subscriber to this newsletter (#35, I checked!), and someone whose thinking has shaped my own. Many know him for his writings on Trump and race in America, but do not know that he is also an incisive thinker on questions of Jewish community and identity, and someone for whom Judaism is an inextricable part of his life and work.

On the occasion of the publication of his now New York Times bestselling book, The Cruelty is the Point, we sat down to chat about everything from the origins of antisemitism, to the untold story of American Jewry’s debate over slavery, to whether Jesus Christ did karate.

YR: My first question is actually not about any specific piece in the book, but about your intellectual method, which is the thing that draws me to your writing again and again. In essence, you consult the past in order to understand the present. You are constantly situating the arguments you’re making about where we should go in discussions of where we’ve been. And I think in an ideal world, a lot of journalism would do that. But in practice, we live under incredible industry pressures and deadlines, and this is just extremely difficult. So I’m curious about how you approach that. What does it look like to study the things you study, and then figure out how you want to write about them?

AS: I spend a lot of time reading books on subjects that I’m interested in, but the ethos of looking to the past came from two places. First, there was my former boss [Mother Jones editor] David Corn, who said, “the news is what people have forgotten, not just what people don’t know yet.” I think that with journalists, there’s a natural tendency to privilege new information at the expense of old information, without recognizing sometimes that readers may not have that full context.

Then there was my friend and former colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I just really admired the way that he used to excavate history to talk about the present. I came to think of it as like a map. History is a map: it’s how we locate ourselves, and we follow it to the present. It can tell you where you might be going, and maybe where you should be going. I feel very fortunate that we have so many tremendous historians doing the work to build the sort of cartography of the American past that I followed in the process of writing this book. That’s basically the philosophy behind it: to try and give readers a sense of where we came from, so we know why we are where we are.

One example where this method is clearly applied is the essay “The Jewish Divide,” where you situate debates today among the American Jewish community—about liberalism, about American democracy—in the context of the American Jewish debate over slavery. I appreciated this piece, and not just because I’m cited in it, but because it tells the honest story of the struggle between Jews who were in favor of slavery and Jews who weren’t. This isn’t the comforting mythology that American Jews sometimes tell ourselves about our role in abolition and civil rights, but I thought it actually honored those who chose right all the more. After all, if the correct course was obvious, and everyone in the community was already doing it, what exactly was so courageous about championing it?

In this respect, the essay has one anecdote which serves as its frame: a controversy between two rabbis over abolition, one for and one against. I’d never heard of them before reading your book. Are there any other things that are not in the essay—stuff that you came across when you were researching the Jewish divide over slavery—that you wish more people knew about?

Oh, yeah, there’s a great anthology called Jews in the Civil War and it’s so fascinating. When I was looking for people to illustrate this divide, I found so many interesting examples. There’s a story in there about a Jew who rides with John Brown as he’s participating in these violent conflicts in Kansas over slavery. You could see this being a TV series. There’s a Jew who worked for The Liberator. At the same time, because of the nature of the migration of Jews to the United States, there are a lot of Jews in the South and they have come to accept the color line as a fact of American society, which is much more accepting of them than Europe was. And then there are actual Jewish senators who draw antisemitic attacks from the abolitionists who are otherwise right on the major issue of the day. [YR: Early on, the essay cites some eyebrow-raising examples of antisemitic attacks leveled by noted abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.]

It’s just so interesting to me because the debate in the Jewish community over abolition very much mirrors the sort of debate that is happening in America over the Civil War, which is this question of what does it mean to have a democracy? Who is included?

I feel like it’s a part of Jewish history that is generally not discussed for some of the reasons you mentioned. It doesn’t paint the Jewish community in a totally favorable light. But what it does do, in my view, is that it demystifies this myth of American Jews having some sort of supernatural quality, either in a negative or positive way. These are just people who are acting according to what they believe their values and interests are and should be. That mirrors the larger conflict in the United States, but it also shapes the kind of Jewish pluralism that emerges from it.

So it was a lot of fun to look at these areas of Civil War and Reconstruction that I have typically written about in other contexts and look specifically at the Jewish community’s experience of these conflicts, and also to hopefully show people something new that they were not aware of.

In a certain sense, we come in after these questions were settled, or so we think. And so we don’t actually know how we got here. And sometimes that means we forget some of the values or the way to express those values that were needed to win that argument in the first place.

Right.

As its name implies, “The Jewish Divide” is about divisions: among American Jews, among Israeli Jews, between Americans and Israeli Jews, and also between the outlooks of the American right and left towards the Jewish people. And the essay engages in criticism of pretty much everybody. Your own sympathies are clear, but you also don’t shy away from critiquing those you identify with both ideologically and religiously. At points, you critique the Jewish community and our approach to Israel—obviously, the right-wing approach to Israel, but also to an extent the traditional left-wing Jewish approach to Israel. And then you also talk about the progressive left and its approach to antisemitism and critique that as well, writing that “a left that treats anti-Semitism the way the American right treats racism, as a largely imaginary phenomenon exaggerated by bad-faith actors, is a left that has failed to oppose bigotry in all its forms.”

This interests me tremendously whenever I see any writer doing it, because it’s unusual, necessary, and hard. Our own communities are the ones that are most likely to listen to us, which is why this kind of criticism can be the most important. But voicing it is also agonizing. To be heard, you need to speak from a place of love and genuine concern, not self-righteousness and superiority. And you need to somehow convey that in words. And so I’m curious, when you write criticism of communities you identify with, whether it’s talking about the American Jewish community or the progressive community in the United States, how do you approach that?

I struggle with it. I must have rewritten that paragraph 30 million times. I think it’s hard for everyone to criticize the people that they align with, especially in the era of social media, because I think people rationally understand themselves as being part of a community. And if you criticize that community publicly, you might get excommunicated, in which case, you have no protection.

As I mention in the book, this is one reason why I respect Never Trump conservatives. They’re an easy target for liberals because of their past records, but I consider them very brave precisely because to formally excommunicate yourself in that way is to relinquish your friends, your community, and your financial opportunities, and I think people are way too glib about this. “You get slots on MSNBC!” That’s not a really a replacement for community, for belonging. And so I tried very hard to be precise in that piece. I’m sure there are flaws in it. I’m sure that there there will be criticisms, and I understand that and that’s fair.

“Antisemitism … is not something that is inherent to right or left, because it so predates the modern conception of both, and is such a part of the Western intellectual inheritance. It’s just not something that you can immunize yourself from as a result of having correct beliefs.”

I think that in particular when it comes to antisemitism, it’s always important to maintain an understanding that it is not something that is inherent to right or left, because it so predates the modern conception of both, and is such a part of the Western intellectual inheritance. It’s just not something that you can immunize yourself from as a result of having correct beliefs. I wanted to ensure that people understood not to think, “if I support Israel, that means I’m not an antisemite,” or “I am a big left winger, that means it’s impossible for me to be antisemitic, because I oppose bigotry, not like those other guys.”

Obviously, you could write an entire book about that alone. But that was one of the arguments I wanted to make sure came across in the book.

I had a question about exactly this. In the introduction to your essay on Louis Farrakhan and the leaders of the Women’s March, “The Cruelty of Conspiracy,” you write that it’s a mistake to try to process antisemitism in contemporary political or ideological terms. It doesn’t come from socialism, or capitalism, or Christianity, or Islam or whoever, because antisemitism was around long before any of those movements existed. And you illustrate this very well, as usual, with historical citations that make this point inescapable. But if antisemitism doesn’t come from any of these movements that later incorporated and reflected it, what in your view do you think it actually comes from?

There’s a historian named David Nirenberg who has a book called Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, which is just a really fascinating overview of anti-Judaism as an ideology from the ancient world to the present. And in it, you’ve got Greek writers in Alexandria, Egypt, writing things that sound like alt-right shitposts from 2015. It sort of blows your mind, like, how is this this old? It’s kind of like the idea of race—it’s a weird historical accident that has come to define large parts of our history. As with racism, I don’t think it is an inevitable part of our society. But I do think that it’s hard to understand how to extract ourselves from that intellectual prison without understanding how we got there in the first place.

We’ve talked about this before, but you’ve had a pretty interesting life and actually experienced some interesting antisemitism yourself. How has that informed and shaped your thinking?

My father worked for the State Department, and he was stationed in Italy for six years in a period of my childhood. And I think my first memory of encountering antisemitism is sort of a funny one, so I’ll tell it. I must have been seven years old, and my parents were sending me to this karate place in Rome. And this lady was like, “Qui si fa il karate come voleva Jesu Christo,” which means, “Here we do karate as Jesus Christ wanted!”

[laughs]

Which even at seven, I was like, you know, I don’t think Jesus had a lot to do with karate, but that’s just me.

Growing up in that kind of environment, there were just assumptions about Jews and Jesus, that we’re all very familiar with, that you encounter in your daily life. If you are an American Jew and you’ve lived most of your life in the United States, and you are not Orthodox—the trappings of Judaism are not visible on you—it is possible to go through life in America and think that antisemitism is not a big deal, and nobody ever encounters it. But I encountered it when I was a kid, in part because of where I lived. And it certainly shaped my assumptions about how serious it is and how much it lingers in the rest of the world, even though it might not for people who attend Temple Sinai in Washington, DC.

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I have one Israel question that I will impose on you. Something that I really liked in “The Jewish Divide” essay was a very simple passage that probably felt unremarkable to you. You write that “Most American Jews support Israel but disapprove both of the current Israeli government and of Trump’s policies on Israel; a foreign policy toward Israel that catered to the preferences of the majority of American Jews would be significantly to the left of the one that exists today.”

This is one of those true things that is self-evident to people who know anything about the Jewish community, but is almost entirely absent from the public discourse of people talking about the Jewish community. So you get these constant invocations of something like the “Jewish Lobby” or Jewish political influence, as though (a) most Jews can agree on anything, and (b) to the extent that those Jews agree on something like Israel, that agreement is reflected in the non-Jewish policy consensus, when it almost certainly is not. In reality, as you write in the piece, American Jews are much more critical of Israel, and much more supportive of territorial compromise with the Palestinians, than American gentiles. We have polling data that shows this. And yet this refuses to penetrate.

This is a rant of mine, but the idea that the 2% of America that’s Jewish controls America’s Israel policy, rather than the 98% of Americans who are not, is not just problematic and conspiratorial, it’s also just obviously wrong, and poor political analysis. Yet this assumption sort of shambles on zombie-like, among both Israel supporters and critics. And this has really bad consequences for Jewish people who get spoken over and punished for a fantasy version of themselves that doesn’t exist.

I think that’s right.

I feel like I’ve been banging my head against this wall for some time in my own writing, and so was wondering, how does one break through? How does a minority group that is very small, by definition, get a majority to see itself as it is, rather than as it’s constructed?

I think that part of the issue here is that there is a moral force in being able to speak in the voice of American Jewry. And so both [non-Jewish] people who are critical of Israel and the occupation, and people who are uncritically supportive of Israel, want to be able to say that they are speaking with the voice of the Jewish people. And we know that [laughs] that voice is a cacophony of varied opinions. And so it is not really possible to say that we all speak with one voice.

I think the length and seeming interminability of the occupation has understandably created a large amount of anguish among American Jews, regardless of their position on the subject, because they want to see the Palestinians have full political rights, and they do not want to see them suffer. So there is a sort of political argument over who gets to speak for American Jews that often just ignores the complexity of how American Jews actually feel on the subject. And so in the piece, I was trying to communicate that that complexity exists, without substituting my voice and my position, which I know is a very left-wing position for other people, and which is why I relied substantially on public opinion surveys, because I didn’t want to make that mistake of saying, “I am speaking for American Jews here and my view is everyone else’s view.”

OK, here’s a less heavy question. You signed a bunch of copies of your book and posted a picture of it. Most people look at that photo and notice stuff on the bookshelf and things like that. I noticed your Hebrew tattoo. Can I ask what the story is behind it?

Adam Serwer 🍝 @AdamSerwer

Signing some books over at local DC area indie @Loyaltybooks!

6:16 PM ∙ Jun 29, 2021

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So I can talk about it a little bit. I will say that it is a Torah verse [from Jeremiah] that has a specific emotional meaning for me, and I got it after wading through interpretations of Jewish law regarding tattoos, and concluding that the prohibition applied to the names of deities and not necessarily inscribing on the skin itself. Now, I know that’s controversial. But that’s how I justified it to myself.

Yeah, there’s lots of folk mythology about about tattoos, like, “if you have a tattoo you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery,” which is nonsense. Speaking of folk mythology, in the book, there’s this parenthetical line that I love about the blood libel [the ancient accusation that Jews used gentile blood in their rituals] which simply says, “not that it matters to antisemites, but blood isn’t kosher.”

Right. It’s one of the things that always drives you crazy—the whole concept of the blood libel is impossible, just as a religious tenet, because we can’t consume blood. It’s an absurdity, but a terrible and unfortunate one.

It’s both funny and morbid and gets to the question of whether one can laugh about some of this stuff.

If we couldn’t, what would we laugh about?

Exactly. That conveniently brings me to my final question, which is about your outlook. You write about the darker side of the American story and you also write about people who fought against it. How do you maintain your optimism and your vision for the future while doing this?

There’s two ways. One is that I find a lot of inspiration in the people who were brave enough to speak out against the injustices described in the book at the time, people who were willing to tell the truth, at a time when society was unwilling or was not prepared to accept that truth. But also, I am humbled by the sacrifices of people who came before me to make sure that I could live the life that I live. I’m speaking specifically here about my grandparents and my parents. But I also mean that in a broader sense of the people who fought to ensure that I could enjoy the rights that I have, as a human being and as an American.

I think we all fall into sadness, sometimes, and hopelessness, but I feel like it would be a dishonor to them, if given what they faced I did not pick myself back up in those moments, because of everything that they had to go through to make sure that I could be where I am.

My thanks to Adam for taking the time out of his busy book tour to chat. If you liked what you read, you can find lots more like it in The Cruelty is the Point. And if you like conversations like these on topics like this, please be sure to subscribe to the newsletter:

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A quick housekeeping note: We’ll be having our monthly Ask Me Anything chat for paying subscribers on Thursday, July 15. We’ll tackle our usual uplifting mix of politics, religion, antisemitism, and whatever else is on your mind, such as whether Israel’s outgoing president Reuven Rivlin was actually just a character played by Mandy Patinkin:

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

This is kind of amazing. Now that Israel's president Reuven Rivlin is leaving office, Israel's security service released a photo showing how they disguised him so he could walk among the general public. Take a look:

2:01 PM ∙ Jul 7, 2021

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The Palestinian Vaccine Fiasco

Ever since Israel began its world-beating coronavirus vaccination drive, it has faced pressure to help vaccinate its Palestinian neighbors. Critics argued that Israel was legally obligated to provide for the healthcare of those under its occupation, while the country’s officials maintained that vaccination fell under the purview of the Palestinian Authority, in accordance with the Oslo Accords. To my mind, both sides were partly correct: while Israel technically did not have a legal obligation to facilitate Palestinian vaccination, it clearly had a moral one. Needless to say, this was not the position taken by the Netanyahu government, despite the entreaties of Israel’s own health experts.

But all that changed when Israel’s new government took power. Just days into its tenure, it announced that it would be transferring 1.2 million vaccines to the Palestinian Authority. This seemed like the rare positive-sum policy that would benefit both peoples. Until it all fell apart. You probably haven’t heard much about this story, but you should, because this failure will have deadly consequences for real people. Today in Tablet, I have a detailed report unpacking why this happened, what can be learned from it, and what might still be done to help those in need. Here’s the start:

On Wednesday, an Israeli plane landed in Seoul carrying 700,000 Pfizer coronavirus vaccines. The batch was part of a strategic swap between the Jewish state and South Korea. The doses involved were due to expire at the end of the month, which meant that they would have likely gone to waste in Israel—whose population is mostly vaccinated—but would be quite valuable in South Korea, which is struggling to raise its relatively meager vaccination rate. And so, in exchange for Israel’s vaccines, South Korea agreed to trade its upcoming Pfizer order—estimated to arrive between September and November—to Israel. In this way, both countries will get what they need when they need it most.

The exchange is a win-win for Israel and South Korea—and a lose-lose for the Palestinian people, who were originally supposed to receive these very vaccines in the exact same arrangement with Israel. But thanks to a bad faith anti-vax campaign—enabled by feckless political figures, inept international media coverage, and partisan activism—the deal was capsized shortly after it was announced.

This public health disaster deserves a lot more attention than it has received, because it reveals the pathologies that continue to prevent progress in the region, and because, quite simply, it’s going to get people killed. If policymakers want to prevent that from happening, and stop fiascos like this from repeating themselves, they need to understand how this one transpired.

Read the rest in Tablet to see how conspiracy theories, partisan posturing, and media failure created the perfect storm that blew up a rare win-win collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians.

The short version: Palestinian political extremists successfully fomented a social media backlash against the Israeli vaccines, and the Palestinian Authority capitulated rather than stand behind doses they knew would save lives. At the same time, both human rights NGOs and the international media failed to accurately report what had happened, and so the Palestinian leadership never faced any pressure to change course—and even now is leaving vaccines on the table. The affair is another reminder that the underlying problems that plague the region didn’t go away simply because Netanyahu did, and will take serious effort to resolve. Read the whole thing here.

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

I have just been made aware of the best user profile on the internet

9:04 PM ∙ Jun 18, 2021

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The Interfaith Peace Activism Behind Israel’s New Government

Last month, when I spoke with Tommy Vietor on Pod Save the World about the unusual composition of Israel’s new government, I noted that there had been a “media failure” surrounding Mansour Abbas, head of the United Arab List party. Abbas led his faction into the Israeli coalition—the first Arab party to join one—and in the process made himself the most powerful Arab politician in Israeli history. Yet despite his centrality to recent developments, Abbas had received little coverage, which did not seem tenable for much longer. As I said to Tommy: “I hope every international paper is prepping a giant profile on Mansour Abbas.”

This week, the New York Times began to rectify this oversight, with an informative article by Patrick Kingsley about the religious peace-building movement that influenced Abbas, and the Jewish allies who joined him on his journey. In a region when religion is often posed as the problem, the piece is a reminder that it is also integral to the solution.

Coming Attractions

This is going to be a big month for the newsletter, as I already have a couple more editions lined up for you, including an interview you won’t want to miss. If you haven’t already subscribed—or want to upgrade your subscription—now is a great time:

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Thank you for reading this edition of my newsletter. If you liked what you read and want to support this work, please be sure to share it with your friends and subscribe.

And if you haven’t signed up yet, or would like to upgrade your subscription, there’s still time to do it before we run out of slots. (We will not run out of slots.)

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(Also, while I like to poke the Times, it does great work like this retrospective on Netanyahu’s career by outgoing Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger.)

As some of you know, I have a general “no podcast” rule, simply because I don’t have enough time in the day to join all those who invite me, and I can’t bring myself to pick and choose among them. But on occasion, I break this rule to join the great Tommy Vietor on Pod Save the World and discuss whatever crazy things just happened in Israeli politics. Last week, we tackled everything from the new Israeli government and its leaders, to Netanyahu’s plan to capsize them, to how to pronounce my name. You can hear our conversation here, starting at 46:42. Be warned, though: if you’re one of those people who listens to podcasts on double speed, you might want to … not do that here.

Netanyahu’s Next Act

While Israel’s longest-serving prime minister may have been ousted earlier this month, he isn’t going anywhere, and has already set in motion the machinery for his return to power. Today in Tablet, I have an in-depth piece about Netanyahu’s grand plan to delegitimize and sabotage Israel’s new government, both at home and overseas:

The fact that Netanyahu ultimately gave way to his opponents, however begrudgingly, puzzled those who expected him to evoke his own January 6 moment. But this misunderstands Israel’s longest-serving leader entirely. Netanyahu doesn’t want to destroy the country. He intends to rule it.

…Unlike Trump, an incompetent and capricious con man, Netanyahu—like many other conservative nationalists—has a plan and a vision for his country’s success. He sees his current exile not as his end, but as a temporary setback that he will soon overcome. There’s no need to bring down the system, in other words, when you intend to run it again. Netanyahu remains Israel’s opposition leader, waiting in the wings to resume office should the current government fall.

To that end, Netanyahu has already set in motion the machinery for his return. His two-pronged effort to sabotage the new Israeli government at home and abroad began in the Knesset on the same day it was sworn in.

Read the whole thing to learn how Netanyahu has already begun undermining the new Israeli government’s standing with both the Biden administration and the Republican party—and why anyone who is counting Bibi out is sorely underestimating him.

Words of Note

Historian of Reconstruction Eric Foner: “The history of America is not the history of freedom and it’s not the history of slavery. It’s the history of the battle over those things.”

Israeli foreign minister and alternate prime minister Yair Lapid, in the inaugural speech he didn’t get to deliver: “The real divide in Israeli society isn’t between left and right. The real divide is between moderates and extremists. Those who want to build and those who want to destroy. We will not let the extremists destroy the State of Israel. We will not let hate control us. Violent racists do not become patriots just because they wrap themselves in a flag. They will not define for us what it means to love Israel.”

PS: I deserve better trolls

Thank you for reading this edition of my newsletter. Got any other creative spellings of my name? Feel free to send them to yair.netanyahu@gmail.com. If you liked what you read and want to support this work, please be sure to share it with your friends and subscribe:

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That said, there are some issues that require more in-depth discussion than even memes can provide. To tackle that part of the social media conversation, I did a Q&A with Graham Vyse at The Signal about how Twitter has a tendency to forge the false appearance of consensus among elites, and thus make it harder for them and ordinary people to challenge preconceptions and uncover the truth.

If you’re wondering why so many smart thinkers and journalists have been wrong on so many big things in recent years—from the viability of Trump’s 2016 candidacy, to the origins and virulence of the coronavirus, to the strength of Biden’s 2020 campaign—understanding Twitter’s role is a big piece of the puzzle.

The whole thing is behind a paywall, but here are a few snippets to whet your appetite:

What we’ve seen over the past four years or so, coinciding with the Trump administration, is a greater recognition of social media’s negative effects. I often see Twitter, not creating problems but intensifying preexisting human tendencies. It’s not that Twitter created the tendency to forge a false consensus based on social pressures among elites, for example. It’s just that Twitter made it a lot easier to do it, enforce it, and raise the cost for dissenting from the popular consensus on a given issue.

…It’s well understood by media critics like Jack Shafer and Ben Smith that journalists are social creatures who exist at journalistic outlets and in journalistic communities where they’re influenced by their peers and the prevailing narratives. If you’re writing about a particular topic in your newspaper, you have to write in such a way that your editor will like, publish, and hopefully promote you. This incentivizes covering issues in the exact same way as the last people who did it. Similarly, if all the journalists at cocktail parties in Washington, D.C., are talking about issues in a particular way, there are particular grooves in which conversation will go.

But your ability to see things sometimes comes from distance. I’ve looked back on some of the bigger misses in my political prognostication on, say, Israeli politics, and almost always they were because I was too plugged in to what journalists were saying.

Those dynamics all predated Twitter. You could, in theory, disconnect yourself— geographically and otherwise—from the consensus in the past, but now everybody is on Twitter, and Twitter is the consensus. It influences what you think and what you feel you can and can’t say. It becomes this mass socialization mechanism for journalists. That’s how you end up with all sorts of ill effects and big misses.

One instance of a faux consensus fostered by Twitter about the Jewish community:

Another example of false consensus comes from my own area of expertise: on Twitter, Jews who are anti-Zionist—by which I mean Jews who are critical of Israel’s existence, not Jews who are critical of its policies—are vastly overrepresented compared to their numbers in the real world Jewish community and the data we see in surveys. So if you are a well-meaning non-Jew attempting to understand what Jews think about Israel, and why they might think it’s important, you will be largely misled if you get most of your information from Twitter.

On how more information is not necessarily better information:

Twitter enables certain events to be followed more closely and granularly, but also much less accurately. When you’re getting a firehose of information from a mass shooting or war zone—and there isn’t a journalist or anybody professional vetting the information, contextualizing it, and figuring out what’s authentic and what’s being misrepresented and propagandized—you can be misinformed while thinking you’re more informed.

What the real problem is when journalists tweet:

Twitter encourages us to comment on everything going on, whether or not we know anything about it. The real issue isn’t journalists tweeting about their areas of expertise but rather journalists tweeting about things they’re not experts about. If you get exposed for not knowing what you’re talking about, that inevitably is used to discredit good work you’ve done.

Why it’s bad that we’ve yoked our public discourse to Twitter, and why it’s time to consider breaking the habit:

Twitter is structurally resistant to nuance and complex thinking, because it only allows you to say something in 280 characters. Of course you can add another tweet to your thread, but someone might not see that one. Because tweets are designed to be pithy, it’s hard to fit in competing ideas and wrestling with them. It’s not just true of Twitter. You don’t have much opportunity to do it in an Instagram caption or on TikTok either. It can be done, but you’re fighting the platform itself to do it. I always say there’s a reason that someone like Donald Trump, who never had a complex thought in his entire life, loved Twitter so much.

Vyse: But you’re saying that this online platform where so much elite conversation about politics and journalism is taking place—which probably shapes journalism coverage more than any other platform—is “structurally resistant to nuance and complex thinking”?

Rosenberg: It was necessary for all those elites to be plugged into Twitter 24-7 for the four years from 2016 to 2020. The person governing their country—the most powerful person in the world—was plugged into Twitter. That required us to be there and pay attention to everything he said. Now that he’s not there anymore, people need to consider whether we should unplug. We can start thinking about whether this is the place we want to have our public civil discourse and highest-level discussions.

We’re really having a conversation about linguistics. The core insight of linguistics as a field is that the way language is constructed—the way people talk and express themselves—affects how they perceive and think about themselves. Twitter is an idiom. It’s a way of talking, with specific rules and limits like any other language. It affects our self-perception and how we live our lives and shape our society, but no one has really deconstructed it.

There a lot more in the full Q&A at The Signal, for those inclined to subscribe or sign up for their free daily digest that features conversations like these. And, straight from today’s headlines, here’s another interesting example of how social media distorts our perceptions of other people’s opinions:

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

The full @voxdotcom / @DataProgress poll on Biden and Israel is very interesting! It shows that on this issue, as on so many issues, Biden is basically in the sweet spot for his party, which doesn't quite align with activist sentiment on social media. filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/…

1:19 PM ∙ Jun 8, 2021

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One way that I’m able to buck the consensus when necessary is knowing that I have the support of readers like you, regardless of what anyone on Twitter or elsewhere might say. As always, if you’d like to foster this work, you can do so here by signing up or upgrading your subscription:

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Upcoming Event

On Thursday evening at 8pm Eastern, I’ll be participating in an online panel discussion about Upheaval, a new documentary about former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, which you can stream here. While the starting point will be the film, the plan is to use its themes as a springboard to discuss some very contemporary issues, from the abiding reality of antisemitism to the fate of Zionism. We’ll also be taking some questions from the audience. Those interested can RSVP for free here.

Well, this is awkward

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

Now what am I supposed to do with this giant pile of ham

Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

Premier kosher certification agency in America clarifies that it did not, in fact, certify packages of ham that mistakenly included their logo and went viral on social media. https://t.co/XuwkMTQzKL

3:37 PM ∙ Jun 8, 2021

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Yair Rosenberg @Yair_Rosenberg

They say Netanyahu is a divisive politician, but he did bring together some pretty unusual allies ... to kick him out of office. Pictured: Yair Lapid, secular leader of Israeli opposition, Naftali Bennett, settler party head, and Mansour Abbas, leader of Islamist Arab party Raam.

8:03 PM ∙ Jun 2, 2021

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A month ago, in this newsletter, I outlined what Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid would have to do to replace Benjamin Netanyahu. Last night, he did it. My latest in Tablet explains everything you could possibly want to know about this new proposed government, what obstacles it still needs to overcome, who would be in it—including Israel’s first Arab coalition partner—and what it means for Israel’s future. The short version:

To put it very roughly, it’s like replacing Donald Trump with Liz Cheney, but if Cheney couldn’t pass anything without the assent of Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, and Mitt Romney, and if she would later get replaced with Chuck Schumer. This is not necessarily a recipe for effective governance, but it’s also nothing like a right-wing government.

The long version, which explains what this actually means, and tackles everything from how Biden might approach this government to what the coalition portends for the future of Arab-Jewish collaboration in Israeli politics, is here.

Read the whole thing, and do share it if you find it more helpful than other analysis out there. And of course, if you feel you’ve gained more insight into these issues here than from more general outlets, please considering subscribing to support this work. Thanks as always.

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Thank you for reading this edition of my newsletter. My goal is to explain complicated topics like these in plain English, without simplification or condescension. If you liked what you read, and want to support this work, please do share and subscribe:

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