What Happened Today: April 4, 2023
Trump arraigned in Manhattan; Chicago's Latinos could swing the vote; Sri Lanka wants citizens to leave
The Big Story
After turning himself over to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office in lower Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday, former president Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on 34 charges related to an alleged hush-money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016—charges that had already been reviewed by the Justice Department and other offices that declined to pursue an indictment. Shortly before arriving at the courthouse, Trump posted on his Truth Social account, “Seems so SURREAL — WOW, they are going to ARREST ME. Can’t believe this is happening in America. MAGA!” He previously wrote that the trial ought to be moved to Staten Island, the only one of New York’s five boroughs where a majority of residents voted for the former president, as Manhattan was a “very unfair venue” for him due to its liberal tilt.
Trump supporter and Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to organize a rally for the former president outside the courthouse but was drowned out by anti-Trump protestors and ultimately retreated with security to her car, where she conducted press interviews and compared Trump to Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ. Following the arraignment, Trump is expected to return to his Mar-a-Lago residence, where he’s scheduled to give an evening address.
Whether or not Trump is convicted on the charges of falsifying business records related to the Daniels payment—which seems unlikely since prosecutors will have to prove intent in the case—he is also being pursued by New York Attorney General Letitia James on separate civil charges of falsifying financial statements, with a trial set for October, and he’s being investigated for his involvement in attempting to interfere in Georgia’s 2020 election results, for holding classified documents at his home in Mar-a-Lago, and for his actions relating to the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol. The last former president to be arrested was Ulysses S. Grant, when he was reined in for speeding his horse-drawn buggy in 1872.
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-indicted-arrest-arraignment-new-york
In The Back Pages: Aliens
The Rest
Perhaps panicked by the recent discovery of uranium particles enriched as high as 83% in a February IAEA inspection of Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear site, the Biden administration is reportedly talking to European partners and Israel about proposing to the mullahs a possible deal that would temporarily throttle further weapons development. The agreement would cap Iranian enrichment at 60%—weapons grade is 90%—in return for some relief of economic sanctions from the West. But recent reports suggest the Iranians have no interest in the deal unless it involves the full reinstatement of the Obama-brokered Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Meanwhile, Iran continues to strengthen its ties with Russia, including the development of a new bilateral payment system that allows Iran to forgo using the U.S. dollar in trade agreements.
→ Election day in Chicago may come down to the burgeoning Latino vote, which now comprises one-third of the United States’ third-largest city. While establishment candidate and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas has the endorsement of the police unions and the Chamber of Commerce and about two-thirds of the city’s white vote, according to recent polls, his progressive opponent, Brandon Johnson, the favorite of the teachers’ unions, has about two-thirds of the Black vote, which means it may all come down to who can swing the Latino electorate. While Vallas’ campaign appears to be taking a page out of the old Boss Daley playbook with direct appeals to figures of authority in the community, Johnson’s campaign is leaning hard into its progressive bona fides to sway Latino voters. As of last week, Vallas was leading the Latino vote by 11%.
Read More: https://prospect.org/politics/2023-04-03-chicagos-latinos-mayoral-race/
→ Quote of the Day:
When I brought Jewish speakers to campus to address anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, some of my critics branded me a ‘dirty Zionist’ and a ‘right-wing extremist.’
That’s just one of the remarkable revelations from the diaries of Tabia Lee, a Black educator and social justice advocate who was fired from her position as faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza community college in Cupertino, California, where Apple is headquartered. Lee writes in great detail about how her insufficient dogmatism led to her downfall, pointing out, “For those within the critical-social-justice-ideological complex, asking questions, encouraging other people to ask questions, and considering multiple perspectives—all of these things, which should be central to academic work, are an existential danger.”
Read about the whole sordid affair, here.
→ NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Monday that the NATO nations need to commit to non-lethal aid for Ukraine to the tune of $543 million per year, which would move Ukraine “closer to NATO by implementing reforms, by continuing to modernize their defense and security institutions, including fighting corruption, and by moving from Soviet-era equipment, standards, doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines.” Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Finland—which shares the largest European border with Russia—is set to be officially ratified by NATO as the newest member. Since 1990, 13 nations have joined NATO, moving its border 800 miles east.
→ Since the United States began its counterterrorism activities in Africa about 20 years ago, terrorism on the continent has jumped precipitously. In 2002 and 2003, there were a total of 23 casualties related to terrorism on the entire continent; by 2022, counting only Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, that number was 7,900. The unsuccessful fight against terrorism isn’t owed to a lack of investment: So far, at least $500 million has gone to building out the security effort there, including $110 million on a drone base in the city of Agadez, Niger, with annual maintenance costs of $20 million. Meanwhile, a U.N. Development Programme report published this year found that “48 percent of voluntary recruits experienced a specific trigger event” that led them to join extremist groups, and 71% of those said it was due to human-rights abuses by the same governments that are taking massive aid from America. U.S. agencies have also trained military leaders in Mauritania, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Mali who have all gone on to commit coups d’etat, after which they’ve aligned their nations more closely with Russia.
Read More: https://theintercept.com/2023/04/02/us-military-counterterrorism-niger
→ Approximately 10,000 active-duty soldiers in the U.S. Army became obese during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study by the Center for Health Services Research that compared weights for the group in February 2019 to those in June 2021. That brings the total number of obese soldiers to 25% of the force, a finding echoed in a 2020 CDC report that determined 20% of all armed services members were obese. As one soldier put it to us, as part of a Tablet piece in progress, “Let’s just take the greatest military the world has ever seen and have them do absolutely nothing for a quarter of a year. I’m sure they’ll be just as good as they were when we sent them into isolation.”
→ Sri Lanka defaulted on its debt last year, sending 300,000 residents abroad to find work, and in the first three months of 2023, another 73,000 joined them. Now the Sri Lankan government is actually encouraging people to leave, especially those in the public sector, so that they can get them off payroll. At least then, the thinking goes, they might send back remittances in foreign currency. To sweeten the pot, the government is offering public employees a five-year leave of absence, provided they send back $100 to $500 a month. President Ranil Wickremesinghe said, with a hint of dark comedy, that he’s worried soon they won’t have anyone “left to serve up a glass of wine in a hotel.”
→ Blackstone’s $70 billion signature Real Estate Income Trust looks weaker and weaker, which makes us bleaker and bleaker, after new reports surfaced this week that withdrawal requests rose 15% to $4.5 billion in March. Of that, the company approved less than $700 million, telling investors that the withdrawal restrictions are for their own protection. We’ve previously reported in The Scroll on a $562 million real estate bond default that the company suffered on a Finnish commercial real estate portfolio, as well as on the hundreds of eviction lawsuits Blackstone has been pursuing across the country.
→ Tweet of the Day:
This Pesach, remember Jewish prisoners, past and present. We’re off until next week, so we wish you a Chag Pesach Sameach, savory matzo brei, family, laughter, too much wine, and a great tchotchke for the kinderlach that finds the afikomen.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Leonardo da Vinci Was Jewish by Marc Weitzmann
Italian historian Carlo Vecce set out to debunk rumors of da Vinci’s foreign origins, but a newly discovered document changed his mind
The Darkness of Charoset by Alexander Aciman
Recreating my great-grandmother’s long-lost Passover recipe helped me understand how she viewed herself before the family fled Egypt
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.
Aliens
Jews of all types are turning away from their institutions
I’m probably not the guy you’d expect to write the cri de coeur on behalf of alienated Jews. I send my children to a Jewish day school and Jewish summer camps, and neither, as you may imagine, are free. I wake up early each morning and slump over to a little shtiebel, or place of prayer, to daven with my neighbors, and I often return for the afternoon and evening prayers as well. I host a Talmud podcast and spend a few hours each day studying. And for about a decade now, I’ve left my beloved hogs and mollusks behind, committing myself to a life of keeping kosher. I’m not afraid of commitment to Judaism—I relish it. I want nothing more than to affiliate myself with individuals and institutions seriously dedicated to leading robust, curious, and passionate Jewish lives.
And yet. I feel lost—homeless—in the landscape of American Jewish institutional life.
A few years back, my wife and I finally found a synagogue whose spirit of prayer we enjoyed. But we were soon pushed out by community members who informed us—by interrupting its own rabbi during a sermon, no less—that viewpoint diversity would not be tolerated, and that, from that point on, all facets of communal life would be dedicated to promoting the latest progressive pieties. It wasn’t even that we minded politics so much; it’s that we came for God, not the Democratic Party, and God was nowhere to be found.
Onward to another shul it was, where no succor arrived. When Israelis elected a right-wing government, the shul announced that, in response, the congregation will no longer recite the prayer for the State of Israel. A few of us suggested, privately and respectfully, that anyone who truly cared about Israel should always pray for it, especially when it struggles to overcome very real and very troubling domestic challenges. Eager for some guidance, we wrote the rabbi and asked for a meeting. An appointment was scheduled, then postponed, then put off for two years; we await it still. Our voices were neither heard nor acknowledged; we learned about the liturgical decision from a promotional interview in a liberal newspaper.
We would’ve put up with all of this, most likely—written it off to yet another sordid chapter in the glorious Jewish history of communal quibbles and quarrels—had we found anything else worth our while. A Friday night service crackling with ruach, or spirit. An adult education class that challenged and engaged us. A place our kids felt was welcoming and nurturing. Anything, really, that felt like a genuine and warm community. There was none, anywhere. At the shuls we belonged to and at others we sampled, at community centers and programs all over New York, we found nothing but decay: of nerve, of imagination, and of ability to engage folks like us who desperately wanted to be engaged and were willing to pay for it with their money and their time.
Everywhere we turned, even at the dimmest house of worship, we met a few radiant and inspiring Jews toiling for little love or cash to serve the community. Their devotion made us even sadder; much more than us, they deserved better. And everywhere we turned, Orthodox communities of all stripes offered us something very close to the tightly knit community we craved. But, like so many families, ours is a religiously diverse household, with some members more interested in observance and others less so, and we wanted a place where everyone felt comfortable. It broke our hearts every day to learn yet again that such a place didn’t exist.
What did exist were mills. Shuls whose entire business model was waiting for children to reach a certain age and then watching their parents pay dues simply because there was no other way to guarantee them a bar or bat mitzvah. Community centers that offered almost nothing of distinct interest to the Jewish community but knew it could count on Jews to pony up because of luxuries like a swimming pool or a stellar childcare program. Organizations that were quick to solicit donations but very slow to step up when Hasidic Jews were bashed in the streets of Brooklyn or continuously reviled in the pages of The New York Times. These mills all beckoned, and told anyone who wouldn’t buy into their racket that they were part of the problem of Jewish alienation.
So as I read the results of the latest survey, I sighed in relief: For once, the problem isn’t me.
You don’t have to be a political scientist to understand the simple and dismal story the survey, sponsored by the Keren Keshet Foundation and given to Tablet, is telling. Jews do not have a problem with Jewish life, or customs, or traditions, or foods, or culture. They don’t find Jewish history and theology repugnant, and don’t feel that they no longer wish to be part of the story that began at the foothills of Mount Sinai and remains strong today. Instead, the problem is with Jewish institutions. Only 21% of survey respondents have attended synagogue in the past three months—less than half the amount who have prayed to God. What this tells you is not that our people are not connected to Judaism but rather to Jewish organizations too feeble or sclerotic or disinterested or soulless or broken to give us simple Yidn the community we want, need, and are eager to join.
Many of us, hallelujah, are waking up and building our own things. My wife now organizes Thursday evening get-togethers where fellow refugees from Jewish institutional life—more and more of them every week—come to drink and talk about the weekly parsha. And when we at Tablet took over a Manhattan comedy club for a few nights of Hanukkah and invited people to come light the menorah with us, listen to great teachers share short talks, and raise a toast to tradition, we sold out almost immediately. Demand is surging; supply, alas, is limited, with too many resources lying at the hands of people whose most prominent credential is having demonstrably failed to do the thing they promised to achieve.
But while some of us are busy building, many of us can’t. People whose job it is to be mothers and sisters and fathers and sons, to be dentists and lawyers and nurses and teachers, to be good neighbors and good citizens. People who don’t have the specific skills or the time, after a full day at the office and an evening helping with homework and cooking dinner and cleaning up and putting the kids to bed, to do something as herculean as establishing a new shul to cater to our spiritual needs. Even cracking open a Mishna might be a page too far for people who end their nights slumped on the couch, staring at screens, texting friends that they wish they had someplace better and more rewarding to be.
In a few days, we’ll read the Haggadah, and marvel at the line informing us that “in every generation, one is obligated to see oneself as if he or she personally went out of Egypt.” And as we do, we’ll realize, with pain and amazement, that though we’ve come a long way since the days of Moses and Aaron, we haven’t really gotten that far at all.
Writing about the Exodus, Rashi, the greatest of all of the Torah’s interpreters, informs us that only one-fifth of the Israelites chose to march out of the house of bondage. The rest, the overwhelming majority, traded in the oppressive familiarity of slavery for the more unpredictable promise of liberty. The rest, in other words, chose to remain in institutions that were failing them simply because they knew and could imagine nothing better.
Had I been there, would I have been one of the silent and spineless majority, shuffling quietly back to the brick and the mortar while the few and the proud marched out into the wilderness? For years, this nightmarish scenario tormented me, taunting me that maybe I wasn’t as resolved in my commitment to living Jewishly as I’d like to believe. It took years of throwing myself into Jewish communal life and still feeling alienated to realize I was asking the wrong question. I shouldn’t have been scared that there would be a Moses with not enough people behind him; the truly terrifying scenario is a throng of people aching to flee Egypt and no Moses to lead them to freedom.
34 counts of falsifying business records isn’t a mistake. It’s intentional. Trump, Cohen, AIM CEO and Trump CFO arranged to pay hush money thru Cohen. Then paid twice that amount plus $60K to Cohen so he could claim as income and pay income tax making him whole. Trump Organization coded to legal expense in GL referencing a non existent retainer agreement. No wonder the grand jury voted to indict. Easy for a jury to understand.
To Liel. Very well put. You didn't quite say it, but the institutions you found lacking were reform? reform and conservative? Am I right? Yet the orthodox ones are, um, too orthodox. Impossible to adjust to. You might also note that the same problem occurs with Christians -- the "old" denominations (Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc.) are more or less "woke" and losing adherents every day; the Evangenicals are a bit TOO fundamental; and the Catholics are....torn in two directions. My experience -- which is limited -- is that what you are looking for, if it exists, is among the "modern orthodox", whom I have found tolerant of my rather casual attitudes and understanding of the need fo joy and communality.