Oct. 11, 2024: The Extremism of Ta-Nehisi Coates

The woke commissar system at CBS; The IDF and UNIFIL; The Democrats' man problem

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A note to readers: Today’s Big Story is by Ethan Strauss, the author of the House of Strauss Substack. Ethan, along with Seth Barron, will be regularly contributing to The Scroll in the coming months. As always, Scroll Senior Writer Park MacDougald, who authored today’s The Rest section, will remain at the helm.

The Big Story

The fallout continues over Ta-Nehisi Coates and his new anti-Israel book, The Message.

Earlier this week, we covered some of the Soviet-style internal convulsions at CBS after CBS Mornings co-anchor Tony Dokoupil—a convert to Judaism who has children living Israel—lightly pressed Coates over the perceived extremism of The Message, which paints Israel as the Jim Crow South transplanted to the Middle East. Since then, Coates has continued his media tour, appearing on the “Conversations Without Limits” podcast with former Daily Show host Trevor Noah and on The New York Times’ “The Ezra Klein Show,” hosted by Ezra Klein. The problem is that the more Coates talks, the more difficult it is for the prestige media to hide what is in plain sight. 

The Noah interview, in particular, offers the clearest example of why Dokoupil’s allegedly unfair treatment of Coates has raised hackles on the left—thus also providing a skeleton key to understanding the broader fight over Israel in the United States. 

On “Conversation Without Limits,” Noah told Coates that he was “angry” over Dokoupil saying that The Message “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.” “Yo,” Noah said, “I don’t get flabbergasted by much, I genuinely don’t. I sat there, and I was like, what?” The former Daily Show host then made an appeal to moral relativism by comparing the Oct. 7 attacks to the American Revolution. “You can call it the ‘The Boston Tea Party.’ That’s terrorism,” Noah said, “if you remove the context.” (Note: No civilians were murdered, raped, or beheaded in the Boston Tea Party.)

In response, Coates, who does not mention the Oct. 7 attacks in his book, told Noah that he himself might have participated in the attacks, which he analogized to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, were he a Gazan. As he told Noah:

And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty, and the wall comes down. Am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say this is too far? I don’t know that I am.

On Klein’s show, meanwhile, Coates steadfastly refused to countenance any criticism of Hamas: 

Ezra Klein: Hamas has repeatedly done things to make the Israeli right more powerful. Right?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I just can’t accept that.

Klein: Tell me why.

Coates: I don’t know, man. When you start, like, dropping bombs. When you wiped out 2% of the population of people that are caged in. I don’t care what their leadership did. This actually goes back to the October 7th question, because you have lost sight of, completely, of individual life. And I guess, I actually don’t know how you’re different. I was actually sitting here thinking about it, because I want to take what you’re saying seriously.

When Klein says, “I also have a lot of trouble here because I think Hamas knew what it was about to do to its own people,” Coates replies, “I won’t accept that.” (As we’ve reported here at The Scroll, Hamas leaders have said explicitly on multiple occasions that they knew what would happen to Palestinian civilians, that those sacrifices are necessary and noble, and that they would make them again if given the chance.)

As Coates’ media tour expands, it is becoming more obvious that Dokoupil’s true sin was noticing that Coates is, in fact, extreme. Those who cheer Coates’ anti-Israel position simply want his revolutionary view to be massaged into the mainstream. They crave a future where the people on a CBS morning show openly hate Israel just as much as they do. In the meantime, media people who parry with Coates are attempting to find substance and nuance in a topic that Coates himself regards as “simple.” They are attempting to translate extremism into a more palatable product. 

Since Coates first came on the scene in the late Obama years, his role has been to translate the ideas of the radical vanguard into the idiom of the high-status liberals who buy and read his books—thus changing the Overton window for “respectable” political positions. Now Coates is offering a glimpse of an American future in which supporting Israel is highly stigmatized in public life. Yes, there is some pushback from people like Dokoupil, which allows Coates and his allies to play the martyr. But judging by the reaction to Dokoupil within CBS, that future is well on its way to becoming a reality.

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IN THE BACK PAGES: Leonard Cohen’s lesson for Yom Kippur

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The Rest

→While we’re on the subject of Coates, here’s a pretty incredible revelation about the internal identity politics commissar system at CBS News, which apparently governs all the content broadcast on the network. From a Wednesday Dylan Byers report in Puck:

Last Tuesday, while the CBS News leadership was consumed with the network’s vice presidential debate, the issue was elevated to the network’s Race and Culture unit, which was formed in the summer of 2020, amid the George Floyd reckoning, and determines whether the “tone, content, and intention” of any segment or package are suitable for the network’s air. The unit, led by Alvin Patrick, determined that while Dokoupil’s questions and intentions were acceptable, his tone was not. 

Meanwhile, the network’s Standards and Practices division, led by Claudia Milne, determined that Dokoupil had not followed the preproduction process wherein questions are run through Race and Culture and Standards and Practices. The following day, McMahon reached out to Dokoupil directly and informed him that the network would need to address the violation with staff, though she and Roark would spend the next three days deliberating over exactly how to do that. Ultimately, McMahon decided to have Roark announce the violation at the all-hands meeting, which angered a lot of Dokoupil’s friends and acolytes at the network.

To repeat that for those in the back: The “tone, content, and intention” of all content on CBS News must be pre-approved by a “Race and Culture unit” established during the 2020 “reckoning.” Which is something to keep in mind next time you hear that “wokeness has peaked” or that nobody cares about that stuff anymore.

→Israel’s security cabinet met on Thursday night but made “no big decisions” on retaliation against Iran, according an Israeli source quoted in The Times of Israel, who said that “there is a desire from the Israelis to coordinate with the Americans.” Axios reported Thursday that Biden and Netanyahu are closer to a “consensus” on the retaliation, but that Israel’s current plans are still “a bit more aggressive than the White House would like.” At the same time, The Wall Street Journal reports, Tehran is warning Arab nations that Iran could directly attack their oil infrastructure if they permit Israel to use their airspace for an attack on Iranian soil. The White House has reportedly ruled out Israeli attacks on Iranian oil infrastructure, which means that we seem to be back in the realm of what Edward Luttwak has dubbed Obama’s Law: That Iran may attack all and sundry, but none may attack Iran.

→Meanwhile, a pseudo-scandal is brewing about alleged IDF attacks on UNIFIL, the UN’s pseudo-peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon. The Pentagon announced Friday that U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin had warned his Israeli counterpart against harming UNIFIL peacekeepers, following similar remarks from Biden and a joint statement from the leaders of France, Italy, and Spain. Four UNIFIL peacekeepers were wounded by IDF fire in separate incidents on Thursday and Friday, which came after the peacekeepers refused an Israeli request to withdraw at least 5km from the Israeli-Lebanese border. In theory, the mission of the peacekeepers is to “maintain security” along the border—a task at which they’ve failed so utterly than any rational assessment would lead one to conclude that the mission should be disbanded and the peacekeepers sent home. In reality, their role is precisely the one they are playing now: co-locating their forces with Hezbollah in order to constrain Israeli freedom of maneuver.

→Where in the world is Esmail Qaani? The head of the Quds Force, the external operations branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has not been seen in public for several weeks. Early rumors suggested that he had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Beirut last week, but over the past few days, rumors have swirled in the Arab press that the Iranians have arrested Qaani over alleged contacts with Israeli intelligence. A Wednesday report in Middle East Eye, a London-based publication connected to Qatar, said that Qaani was “alive” but “under investigation,” and quoted Hezbollah sources who said that the IRGC has been penetrated by the Israelis. On Thursday, Sky News Arabia reported that Qaani had suffered a heart attack while under interrogation by the IRGC and that his chief of staff was being investigated—also for leaking to Israel. The Iranians, however, aren’t fessing up quite yet. A top IRGC commander told Iran’s Tasnim News Agency on Wednesday that Qaani was “in perfect health” and was in line to receive a military honor from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the days ahead.

→Quote of the Day: 

It has continued to feel as though the ideological goal of reducing the jail population at all costs has conflicted with our emphasis on doing so responsibly and safely, which I am sure is a new boundary in a post-Chesa Boudin era. … Our office will not be used as sharecroppers to a Foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform. 

That’s from an August letter from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office to the MacArthur Foundation, responding to the foundation’s suspension of the final $625,000 installment of $5.2 million in criminal justice reform grant funding given to the city since 2018. According to both the MacArthur letter announcing the grant suspension and the DA office’s response letter, the primary reason for withholding the funds was that San Francisco was failing to meet the “performance goals” set by the MacArthur Foundation. More specifically, the city had failed to reduce the jail population to the “target of 800” agreed to under Chesa Boudin, the radical district attorney who was recalled in 2022 over public safety concerns. 

Read Michael Hartmann and William Schambra’s article on the dispute in Compact here: https://www.compactmag.com/article/when-nonprofits-subvert-democracy/ 

→The Democratic Party’s Problem With Men, a Play in Two Acts:

Act I:

You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that. Because part of it makes me think—and I’m speaking to men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

That’s Barack Obama addressing “the brothers”—i.e., Black men—at a Harris campaign rally last night in Pittsburgh. 

Intermezzo:

This news network is indistinguishable from the [Democratic] Party.

That’s MSNBC producer Basel Hamdan, speaking to an undercover journalist from O’Keefe Media Group in a video released earlier this month. Hamdan added that MSNBC was “doing all they can” to elect Harris as president and that “what her message of the day is, is their message of the day.”

Act II:

I think men are in crisis, actually. I think that plays out in different ways. Not all men are in crisis, of course, and not all men are at home listening to Joe Rogan being angry or being recruited to fascism. Some just need therapy, like we all do. 

That was New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay in a Friday morning appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, in a panel discussion on “masculinity” featuring four women and one man. 

→Image of the Day: 

According to Vogue, this Annie Leibovitz photograph was shot on Oct. 7, 2024—the same day that Donald Trump visited The Ohel to pray for the return of the Israeli hostages and that Harris accused Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis of “playing political games” and being “utterly irresponsible and selfish” for refusing to take her call about Hurricane Milton. DeSantis said that prior to Milton, Harris had not called him once about any storm during her tenure as vice president, and that she has no role to play in coordinating hurricane relief; President Biden later praised DeSantis as “cooperative” and “very gracious.” 

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TODAY IN TABLET:

The Unrepentant Self, by Alter Yisrael and Shimon Feuerman

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Leonard Cohen’s Lessons in Communal Responsibility

What the songwriter’s actions during the Yom Kippur War can teach us today about the Jewish response to tragedy

By Ezra Seplowitz

It was a quiet Shabbat on Oct. 6, 1973. Bernie and Eileen Weinberg were woken up unexpectedly in their small, desert apartment in Beersheba to the sound of a jet whisking overhead toward the Sinai. It was also Yom Kippur, the Shabbat Shabbaton (Leviticus 23:32), the most sublime day of the year, a day when the Jewish people—angelic in their white robes (kittels) and prayer shawls (tallits)—renew their commitment to God. “Ki bayom hazeh … lifnei Hashem titharu,” as it is written in Leviticus 16:30: “For on this day … before God, you shall become purified.”

Despite the consternation in the air, Eileen, Bernie, and the rest of the congregation made their way to the synagogue. As the solemn early morning service faded into a tranquil afternoon beneath the calm October sun, Eileen watched with concern as members of the congregation—after receiving a tap on the shoulder and a whisper in the ear—rushed out of the synagogue. By the conclusion of the afternoon service, only their kittels and tallits remained, draped on the now empty seats. The men who donned them had already boarded Egged buses on their way to the Sinai.

Bernie and Eileen, who would become my grandparents and whom I affectionately call “Bobby” and “Zayde,” left the half-deserted synagogue for the afternoon break. That’s when the sirens blared. Then, the jets roared as they sped to the Sinai. Zayde, an aerospace engineer, described to me how he estimated the time that the planes took to reach the Sinai, complete their bomb runs, and return to the nearby base to refuel. To his dismay, many planes did not return. Unfortunately, many of those who boarded the blue-and-white Egged buses did not return either. Those kittels and tallits remained in the synagogue never to be donned again.

On that same day, as Matti Friedman describes in his book Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, Canadian musical icon Leonard Cohen was living on the Greek island of Hydra, “where he had a refuge in a little white house up the hill from the ferry dock.” After news of the Yom Kippur War reached this paradise in the Aegean Sea, Cohen decided to leave his partner, Suzanne, and baby boy Adam and head to the Sinai. He later described that in his “own tradition, which is the Hebrew tradition … you sit next to the disaster and lament … you don’t avoid the situation, you throw yourself into it.” And so, to the Sinai Cohen went—and in the Sinai Cohen performed.

Friedman describes Cohen’s experience during those few weeks in the Sinai; weeks that served as a microcosm for the macrocosmic transition that Israeli society would later experience. In retrospect, those bloodstained weeks served as the State of Israel’s figurative Yom Kippur; it was a period of reckoning that, by and large, renewed the people of Israel’s commitment to God. For many soldiers, at the helm of the Yom Kippur service was Leonard Cohen. He was their cantor leading the services with hymns such as “Suzanne” and “Bird on the Wire” as well as the yet-to-be-released “Who by Fire” and “Hallelujah.”

At one point in his book, Friedman relays an interview he had with one of the soldiers who was present at a Cohen concert in the Sinai. The soldier said:

What touched me very deeply … was this Jew hunched over a guitar, sitting quietly and playing for us. I asked who he was, and someone said he was from Canada or God knows where, a Jew who came to raise the spirit of the fighters. It was Leonard Cohen. Since then, he has a corner of my heart.

Indeed, it was there in the Sinai that Cohen wrote, in an early draft of his 1974 hit “Lover Lover Lover,” that “[He] went down to the desert to help [his] brothers fight.” Cohen heeded Moses’ enduring call, “Are your brothers to go to war while you stay here?” (Numbers 32:6). He bore a sense of communal—nay, familial—responsibility. He was leading the services amid the congregation.

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Although Cohen—who died in 2016—was not Orthodox like myself, part of why I find this story to be so riveting is the fact that he embodied the traditional Jewish response to war and tragedy. A providential perspective on life events mandates a response to tragedy, especially war. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, a heated debate erupts between young King Hal and a soldier named Michael Williams just before the legendary Battle of Agincourt about this very topic. Williams proclaims to a disguised King Henry that “the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make” for his soldiers who die in battle. Essentially, Williams believes that political and military leaders are responsible for the soldiers who perish in battle. They are—as another Jewish singer, Bob Dylan, lambasted—the “masters of war.” In an attempt to evade such responsibility, the young monarch responds that “the King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers” because “they have no wings to fly from God” and for these guilty men, “war is [God’s] vengeance.” Essentially, the soldiers, with a guilty conscience, are to blame for their demise in battle.

Both of these explanations are certainly not the focal point of the traditional Jewish perspective, nor even a point of significance altogether. Maimonides sums up the Jewish response to tragedy at the beginning of his Laws of Fasts (1:1-4):

It is a positive Scriptural commandment to cry out and sound an alarm with trumpets whenever a tragedy befalls the community … And this procedure is one of the paths of repentance, for as the community cries out in prayer and sounds an alarm when overtaken by trouble, everyone is bound to realize that evil has come upon them as a consequence of their evil deeds … Conversely, should the people fail to cry out and sound an alarm, and instead say, “What has happened to us is merely a natural phenomenon and this tragedy is merely a chance occurrence,” this is the path of cruelty, and such a conception causes them to remain attached to their wicked deeds, thereby ensuring that this tragedy will lead to further tragedies … In addition, it is a Rabbinic ordinance to fast whenever there is a tragedy that befalls the community until they receive compassion from Heaven.

The Jewish response to a communal catastrophe is personal responsibility and communal repentance. To paraphrase one of the rabbinical leaders at Yeshiva University and a personal teacher of mine, Rabbi Mayer Twersky, “The spiritual responsibility for a tragedy is a reflective one; rather, than reflexive. The Jew assumes rather than assigns blame.” Friedman’s masterful account is about a Jew who did just that.

If Shabbat, Oct. 6, 1973, was a day of renewed commitment to the Jewish God, then Shabbat, Oct. 7, 2023, was a day that necessitated a renewed commitment to the Jewish people. The Talmud (Tractate Sukkah 55b) suggests that the 70 bulls sacrificed in the Temple on the first seven days of Sukkot are brought on behalf of the 70 nations. However, the single bull sacrificed in the Temple on the eighth day of Sukkot, which in Israel is both Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, is brought on behalf of the singular nation: the Jewish people. Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi), a seminal biblical commentator from 11th-century France, notes that Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah is also a day dedicated to God. Nevertheless, unlike Yom Kippur, this is not a day about personal relationships with God; it is a day about the collective Jewish people’s relationship with God—a single bull for a singular and unified nation.

In the months preceding Oct. 7, Israeli society was torn in two. And rightfully so. My professor—and Tablet’s editor-at-large, as well as the author of his own book about Leonard Cohen, called A Broken Hallelujah—Liel Leibovitz noted that the debates, protests, and occasional conflicts that erupted throughout Israeli society were about much more than judicial reform; they were about whether Israel is a Jewish state or a state for Jews. Leibovitz posited that “the massive protests preceding Israel’s 75th birthday have resurrected [this] century-old question.” Indeed, the fissures that ran deep through Israeli society and Jewish communities worldwide were reminiscent of the prestate clashes between David Ben-Gurion’s Haganah and Menachem Begin’s Irgun. This question is an important one, and it should not be neglected. It has been and will remain the most contentious issue in the years to come.

Unfortunately, the rift that has emerged out of the differing ideological visions of Jewish statehood has supplanted the necessary unity among Jewish peoplehood. In his memoir The Prime Ministers, Yehuda Avner recalls a speech he attended in which Begin reflected on the Altalena affair several months after it occurred: “I told my men to go quietly, not to resist … ki Yehudim anachnu! [because we are Jews].” Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the famed rabbinic leader of Yeshiva University, suggested that traditionally, Jewish people dance in circles around the Torah on Simchat Torah because every point on the circumference of a circle is equidistant from its center. Begin, a young man in his 30s at the time of the Altalena affair, who attended Soloveitchik’s synagogue in Brisk as a young boy, was certainly inspired by this message. Ki Yehudim anachnu is a recognition that every Jew has an equal radius connecting them from the periphery to the heart and soul of the Jewish people. Thus, the State of Israel was born out of the ideal of Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, and it was reborn on Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah of 2023. A single bull for a singular and unified nation.

This coming Yom Kippur, I will be in Yeshiva University’s synagogue surrounded by my peers. Amid the sobs and wails for the devastating year that has transpired, we will each be asking ourselves the question that Leonard Cohen asked himself 51 years ago: What responsibility do I bear to the Jewish people? It will certainly be a reflective Yom Kippur, not a reflexive one. With one eye toward Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, the hope is that like Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Bobby and Zayde, and Leonard (Eliezer) Cohen, the other eye will gaze inward and respond with the clarion call: “Hineini—Here I am.”