What Happened Today: April 11, 2022
The end of France’s party system; Who needs to buy a house, anyway?; My anti-Zionist rabbi
The Big Story
France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron, and his right-wing nationalist challenger, Marine Le Pen, took the top two spots in the country’s national elections on Sunday, meaning that they will now compete in a runoff election on April 24—and that the established political parties that ruled France for most of the past half-century have collapsed. The two parties that have traditionally led France’s government, the left-wing Socialists and conservative Republicans, together garnered less than 10% of the votes. By comparison, Macron, who has positioned himself as a center-right reformer, received 27.6% of the vote, while the far-right Le Pen got 23.4% and the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, got 22%—all three saw their vote counts go up compared to when they ran against each other in 2017. When Le Pen and Macron faced each other in a runoff in 2017, the result was a blowout win for Macron, with his votes soaring in the second round, due in part to a united opposition to Le Pen that may no longer hold in the French electorate.
While Le Pen was once a leader of the quasi-fascist National Front Party founded by her father—himself a former candidate for the French presidency and a well-known Holocaust denier—she has rebranded herself with a populist anti-immigration platform that has successfully co-opted some popular left-wing economic policies and has proved well-liked in France’s rural villages and among working-class citizens who have been most impacted by rising gas prices and inflation. While Macron has retained his lead among high-income and educated urban voters, Le Pen outperformed him on Sunday in every age category except voters 65 and older. Le Pen also seems to have benefited from the attention-getting candidacy of Eric Zemmour, the far flashier and even more confounding far-right candidate of Algerian Jewish background, whose presence made her seem relatively sober and moderate by comparison. Macron retains a slight lead over Le Pen in the latest polls, but the current president will have a harder time running as the “hope and change” candidate after four years in power that have turned many French voters against him.
In The Back Pages: The Self-Righteous Idolatry of the Anti-Zionist Rabbi
The Rest
→ While rising mortgage rates are making it harder for individuals to buy new houses in the United States, professional real estate investors are swallowing up a rising percentage of new home construction, which they can then convert into rental properties. The Wall Street Journal provides a sample statistic that illustrates the scale of the increase: Out of all real estate purchases made by professional rental investors in the third quarter of 2019, only 3% were brand-new homes, but by the fourth quarter of 2021, more than 25% were. These investors, with some $89 billion in capital available to them, are especially attractive to developers because they buy in bulk and can weather the rising mortgage rates. Rental property owners contend that potential home buyers being priced out of the market isn’t necessarily a bad thing since some prefer to rent and keep their options open, but the consolidation of properties by mega owners has driven up rental markets as well. “In the Southwest, rents are going up double digits, and they have been going up double digits for a while now,” an analyst from Burns Real Estate Consulting LLC told the Journal.
→ Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is aimed at ending the U.S.-dominated world order, the country’s powerful foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said in an interview aired Monday on Russian television. Faced with the failure of its initial plans to rapidly conquer Kyiv and install a new Moscow-friendly client government, Russia has narrowed its operational aims to capture full control of the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine on the shared border between the two countries, but at the same time, it appears to be ramping up its rhetoric about the global nature of the conflict.
Read it here: https://www.rt.com/russia/553674-lavrov-military-operation-us-dominance/
→ With both Russia and Ukraine now repositioning forces for a showdown in Eastern Ukraine likely to lead to numerous major battles, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is pushing Western nations to increase their shipments of military equipment to Ukraine. But while a number of countries have signaled their support for Ukraine, Zelensky is asking for the kinds of heavy weaponry, including tanks and anti-aircraft batteries, that they have so far been reluctant to provide. The flat, wide-open topography of Eastern Ukraine will tend to favor the far larger conventional Russian army because it denies the smaller Ukrainian forces the ability to employ ambushes and other tactics preferred in asymmetrical conflicts.
→ Retailers across the United States are beginning to ration the sale of baby formula, which has seen a 29% decrease in supply due to production and distribution issues, ingredient shortages, and a recent recall from Abbott, one of the largest formula makers in the country. The supply woes began in 2021, with COVID-19-related global shortages hampering producers’ abilities to source essential ingredients and adequately staff operations. Then, in February this year, the Federal Drug Administration began investigating reports of formula-fed babies contracting Cronobacter infections, which are very rare and cause severe illness in infants; the FDA found that four babies had come in contact with the bacteria, which it traced back to Abbott’s plant in Sturgis, Michigan. All products made in that plant have now been recalled, deepening a supply shortage that impacts more than a million children in the United States.
→ Another way to look at the French elections: Voters most impacted by rising gas prices are more likely to support Le Pen.
→ Shanghai’s 26 million residents, who are currently imprisoned in their homes under China’s “Zero-Covid” policy, are running out of food and beginning to rebel. The government has kept residents locked inside for two weeks, barred from leaving their homes even for essential supplies like food, and deliveries of basic food staples have slowed. Shouting from apartment windows and protesting in front of supermarkets, the city’s residents are on the brink of starvation, according to one report, and are posting videos on Weibo, China’s social media app, decrying the government’s restrictive policies. “We want supplies,” one video shows people chanting, leaning out of their windows and banging pots and pans. In response to the protestors crying out for food, the Chinese government is sending drones across the city telling hungry citizens to “control [their] soul’s desire for freedom” and comply with the “Zero-Covid” restrictions.
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→ As Israel faces its largest wave of domestic terror attacks in years, with four deadly assaults in the past few weeks alone, the country is also engaged in a territorially expansive war against Iran. Since 2017, Israel has conducted more than 400 air strikes against Iran and its allies, hitting targets in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and inside Iran itself. This shadow war, called by Israeli officials the “war between the wars,” is largely focused in Syria, where Iranian influence dominates and Tehran trains, equips, and finances local fighters, including Hezbollah. While the war between the wars has been going on for several years, it ramped up last year when several drones left air bases in Iran carrying weapons to Palestinian fighters in the West Bank—a more direct move to arm Israel’s enemies than Iran’s typical strategy of proxy patronage, and a sign of the growing importance of drones in the future of this conflict. Israel recently published satellite photos of Iranian drone bases, cautioning Iran against expanding its drone program, and this past February, a drone base on Iranian soil was bombed, leading to the destruction of hundreds of drones.
→ Despite a raft of sanctions, Russia’s profits from energy sales are soaring, with the earnings expected to reach almost $321 billion—up more than a third over its energy sales from last year. While economic sanctions have been severe in other areas, effectively disconnecting the Russian government and average Russian citizens from the international trade system, the country’s all-important energy sector, which Europe relies on to keep the heat on in the winter, has not been significantly impacted.
Tablet contributor Clayton Fox on what Yom Kippur is like after your rabbi declares himself an anti-Zionist
On March 30, Rabbi Brant Rosen of Tzedek Chicago, a synagogue on the heimish North Side of the city, made the unusual announcement that his congregation had “just voted to adopt anti-Zionism as a core value.” The proclamation arrived within days of 11 murders in a wave of terrorist attacks across Israel. On April 7, three more Israelis were killed on Dizengoff Street in the heart of Tel Aviv in this new wave of violence. It’s not often that an established synagogue declares its antipathy against the Jewish state as a core part of its identity—but then again, this wasn’t out of step for Rabbi Rosen, who’d been working himself up to this very moment for the better part of the past decade.
As it happens, I’ve known Rabbi Rosen since before “I was a man.” I grew up in Skokie, Illinois, and attended the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in neighboring Evanston, where Rabbi Brant held the rabbinate. Back then, he was, I suppose, a kind of liberal Zionist. I didn’t have much of an impression of him, other than that he seemed kind and Jewish. In 2002, when I became a bar mitzvah, Rabbi Brant led the service. In his notes on my d’var (which I recently read again), he seems reasonably sympathetic to Israel.
By the time Rabbi Brant left JRC in 2014, my father and I had heard through the grapevine that he’d become a radical pro-Palestinian activist, and in our family, “Rabbi Brant” became a catchall for a certain kind of Jew we simply could not understand. When I moved back to Chicago this past year, I couldn’t help but go back to the source. I wanted to know: Who are these people? What even is a “non-Zionist” synagogue during the most spiritually elevated time of the year?
To try to find the answer, I attended Tzedek’s 2021 High Holidays services over Zoom.
The High Holidays are my favorite time of year. They feel meaningful and personal in a way that no other holidays, religious or secular, do. Wherever I am in relation to my Judaism, I know that sometime in September or October, I will be called to assess my soul, no matter how brutal the accounting. In his opening remarks on Rosh Hashanah, it seemed Rabbi Rosen was on a similar path. “The High Holidays at its core allows us to step out of time, to reboot in a sense to affirm that we would start anew, to look back and look forward,” he said. “It’s this liminal in-between time that is inherently sacred time, and it’s also a time to think seriously about how we are accountable to one another and what we owe to each other and what we owe to the world.”
I thought, Who cares if we fundamentally disagree about Jewish destiny? We’ll endure the accounting together, as Jews. These days are about the spirit, not national identity. Things quickly took a turn, however, during the rabbi’s introduction of the portion on Hagar and Ishmael. Using the most obvious inference available—that Abraham and Sarah casting out Hagar and Ishmael is the biblical version of the contemporary conflict—he said, “It is our sacred obligation to see and respond to the children of Gaza, to their parents, and to all who cry out to us from the wilderness.” Of course, the rabbi was referring to the May 2021 conflict between Israel and Gaza, and he read from an LA Times piece about the terror endured by Gazan families. He said nothing of the deaths Israel suffered in the conflict.
Before the mishebeirach, commenters wrote suggestions for who was in greatest need of healing: the children of Gaza, the Afghan people, and trees lost in forest fires—none were for the people of Israel. Soon after, the rabbi invited one congregant to offer a prayer for the courage to “dismantle systems of oppression”, and another to read a poem about Jubilee that contained the line “Rights to private property are no defense for profiteering off of death and poverty.” Finally, it was time for the rabbi’s sermon, which made the point that vaccine advocacy was comparable to pikuach nefesh, the injunction to, above all, save a life. “That means fighting misinformation is pikuach nefesh. Advocating for vaccine mandates is pikuach nefesh. Making vaccines available to underserved populations that lack access to health care is pikuach nefesh.”
By the time we reached the shofar service, the cognitive dissonance was pulsing through me. “We sound the shofar for liberation,” Rabbi Brant said. Where, I wondered, do my fellow service attendees believe the tradition of the ram’s horn comes from? Yonkers? Encino? Why continue to sound the shofar at all if they were going to sever all ties to the land of Israel, from which it came? …
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Clayton Fox is a former Tablet journalism fellow and has also written for Los Angeles Magazine, Real Clear Investigations, and the Brownstone Institute. Follow him on Twitter @clayfoxwriter.