Reading, Watching 09.15.24
Reading, Watching 09.15.24
Failures, Fabulous and Otherwise
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching. Hope you enjoy!
Usually these round up posts are not strictly topical, but I feel have to remark briefly on the shameful and dangerous situation developing in Ohio. Make no mistake, this is the pure incitement of racial hatred with the potential to lead to serious violence. They are inciting a pogrom. It’s the kind of politics many of us feared would take hold when Trump appeared on the scene. Between Springfield and the Darryl Cooper episode on Tucker Carlson, we can see the essential character of the American right today. This is what they believe and this is how they practice politics. And this is why it’s not hyperbole or hysteria to bring up the question of fascism. Many of us detected the strains of ugly nationalism in Vance’s convention speech. Now I think we are vindicated. My friend Jamelle Bouie writes about it in his newsletter better than I can:
In waging rhetorical war on the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, Vance has clarified the meaning of his convention speech. It does not matter, to Vance, that these Haitian newcomers came here legally, under the Temporary Protected Status program. It does not matter that they filled a valuable need. It does not matter that they reversed a slow collapse that has already sapped the life from so many former industrial towns. It does not matter that they work hard and seem eager, by all accounts, to establish themselves as productive members of the community.
What matters to Vance is who they are, where they come from and what they look like. They don’t belong to this soil, he might say, and therefore they don’t belong. Right now, the most Vance can do to wage this war is use his words. I shudder to think what might be possible if he had the authority of the state to wield as well.
Much of the world is rightly focused on the catastrophe in Gaza, but Israel has also increased the tempo of its repression in the West Bank. Jewish Current reports that, “Under the guise of “destroying terrorist infrastructure,” as one Israeli military official put it, Israel destroyed an estimated 70% of the city’s critical infrastructure, including water, sewage, and electricity lines, as well as commercial buildings, medical facilities, and residential areas.”
And speaking of Jewish Currents, Gideon Lewis-Krauss in the New Yorker has a long profile of that remarkable little magazine:
The Jewish literary critic Alfred Kazin once wrote, “The ‘people of the book’ are now the people of the magazine.” By the middle of the twentieth century, American Jews had developed an almost compulsive habit of starting periodicals. They were characteristically quarrelsome and delusionally self-confident, certain that their parochial disagreements would prove relevant to the wider culture. For early generations of Yiddish radicals, these arguments revolved around the Communist Party. In 1946, Party members founded Jewish Life, a journal that ritually commemorated the birthday of Stalin, ran ads for “holiday rates” at Catskills retreats, and included interminable essays denouncing the “Big Lie” that antisemitism existed in the Soviet Union. By the fifties, however, Stalin’s crimes could no longer be rationalized. The grand tradition of Jewish politics is patricide, the historian Yuri Slezkine has observed, and by then magazines such as Commentary and Dissent had been founded by a new generation eager to repudiate their parents. Jewish Life was rebranded as Jewish Currents, and it withdrew into shame and recrimination.
I’m not recommending this article just because I’m mentioned, but I’m one of two people mentioned, the other being my buddy Sam Adler-Bell, who are said to make up part of a “renewed Jewish left.” I gotta say: I’m flattered, but I’m afraid I have to kind of disclaim the role as characteristic member of this mishpocha. I’m not an activist or a politician; I’m not trying to shape or even be a part of any political movement. I am Jewish, a fact which does inform my writing, and my sympathies are left-leaning—I think I’m more of a “lefty” than a “leftist,” if that makes sense—but there are many others who deserve to be mentioned in this context before me. And although I admire the comrades at Jewish Currents and think they are making a valuable contribution, I think I have a lot of differences with their approach. Still, the piece is great.