What Happened Today: August 18, 2023
Political costs rise for urban decline; Israel's air defense to Germany; Trump out of GOP debates?
The Big Story
Drugs, homelessness, and petty theft in several large American cities have become a growing challenge for local businesses willing to endure the hostile climate. In Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, the epicenter of the nation’s largest open-air drug market, the Mexican restaurant Cantina La Martina won a coveted nomination as a James Beard finalist earlier this year while racking up rave reviews from critics. Yet a specialty food vendor will no longer make deliveries to their dangerous location, their insurer has canceled their policy, their fire alarm provider has cut off service to their building, and the recycling vendor can’t make regular pickups. It’s become known as the “Kensington tax,” and local businesses say the price keeps going up.
“We see feces, we see people laid out, and we see open wounds on people,” Sunny Phanthavong, co-owner of Laotian eatery Vientiane Bistro, told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Why are we still having this issue?”
Like Philadelphia, other cities struggle to find an answer as sweeps of homeless encampments and aggressive crackdowns on drug dealing and use often become temporary solutions, with drugs and tent camps returning or just moving to adjacent streets.
The open-air drug traffic and ongoing retail theft in and around downtown San Francisco, meanwhile, has become such a drain on the local economy that California Gov. Gavin Newsom has dispatched members of his administration to intervene there. The city’s rapid decline could become a major liability as Newsom eyes an eventual run for Congress or the White House. “I am mindful of the critics—and I’m one of them—that we can be doing more and better in myriad areas,” Newsom told Politico in an interview on Friday. “I can’t do it all. But I’m also mindful that the buck stops here. And I’m ultimately going to be held to account.”
Read More: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/18/san-francisco-gavin-newsom-homeless-00111777
In The Back Pages: American Jews and Israelis Need to Learn How to Speak the Same Love Languages
The Rest
→ Leaders of Japan and South Korea will join President Joe Biden at Camp David on Friday, and China is not happy about it, with Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin warning that the White House is attempting “to form various exclusive groups and cliques and to bring bloc confrontation into the Asia-Pacific region.” He went on: “[It] will definitely spark vigilance and opposition in the countries of the region.” The summit will see Biden strengthen economic and security ties amid looming concerns over the threat posed by Beijing. On Thursday, Japan’s Defense Ministry alleged that 11 ships from China and Russia crossed between the southern Japanese islands of Okinawa and Miyako.
→ Tweet of the Day:
https://twitter.com/Ron_Prosor/status/1692090399253275047
That’s from Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor, noting the landmark deal between the two countries after the U.S. government endorsed Israel’s $3.5 billion weapons deal to Germany. As part of Israel’s largest ever defense deal, Germany will pick up the Arrow 3 missile defense system as it seeks to shore up its military capabilities as the war continues to wage in Ukraine.
→ The first Republican primary debate scheduled for Wednesday on Fox News might not include the GOP frontrunner as former President Donald Trump looks instead to sit down with former Fox host Tucker Carlson for an interview. Trump’s making good on the rumors that he’s going to skip both of the initial GOP debates would be a major blow to the Republican National Committee and Fox News as they struggle to retain control over the campaign process that Trump seems keen to pursue on his own terms without them. While Trump has sparred with Fox over negative coverage of the former president, the broadcaster still remains a major influence in the political process, and Trump has shown some signs he’s not going to give up on them quite yet. Earlier this month, Fox News President Jay Wallace and his chief executive, Suzanne Scott, sat down for dinner with Trump at his Bedminister property to talk about his possible appearance at at least one of the debates.
→ America’s largest chicken producer is interested in selling its operation in China, adding to the list of international companies looking to pull up stakes in China’s increasingly hostile markets. According to a Reuters report on Thursday, Tyson tapped Goldman Sachs to begin chumming the waters for potential buyers, sending out preliminary purchase sheets to several private equity firms. Tyson has been cutting costs across its American footprints as of late, shuttering several chicken plants as it missed its latest Wall Street targets. Current estimates say Tyson’s China business pulls in about a billion dollars in annual revenue.
→ Cornell’s student government successfully pushed school officials to stop serving Starbucks coffee on campus after the coffee company moved to shut down two unionized locations in Cornell’s hometown of Ithaca. “Cornell Dining does not intend to serve Starbucks Coffee in its café venues after the current agreement with the company expires in 2025,” the school’s vice president for university relations, Joel Malina, wrote in an email to Bloomberg. The retaliatory attack on Starbucks’ lucrative licensing agreements on college campuses could open up a new front in the ongoing war between the coffee giant and union organizers and their supporters as the company has made aggressive moves to prevent more of its 9,000 U.S. stores from joining the 350 who’ve so far unionized. “Regional directors of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board have issued 100 complaints accusing Starbucks of illegal anti-union tactics,” Bloomberg noted.
→ Number of the Day: 12%
That’s the percentage of homes the typical teacher can afford that are near the school where they work, a drastic drop from the 30% of homes within commuting distance just four years prior, according to a new Redfin analysis. On the rental side, average teacher salaries mean only 27% of available homes or apartments are within reasonable distance to schools, a decline in affordability that will only exacerbate efforts by school districts to recruit new teachers as schools struggle with widespread staffing vacancies across the country.
→ After Ecuador presidential hopeful Fernando Villavicencio was shot dead last week while at a campaign stop, his close friend and former colleague Christian Zurita is asking voters to still endorse the deceased man, whose name remains on the ballot. Wearing a bulletproof vest and flanked by armed guards, Zurita has hit the campaign trail as Villavicencio’s ostensible replacement after the electoral board said he could take his place even after ballots were already printed with his assassinated friend’s name and face. Struggling with rampant drug violence and political corruption, Ecuador is set to vote on the replacement for President Guillermo Lasso after he moved to dissolve Congress to avoid impeachment.
→ QR codes, first invented to track car parts before they became ubiquitous replacements for menus and website links, are now a major security threat. Cybersecurity firm Cofense reported this week that an unnamed energy company suffered a major phishing attack via QR codes sent to employees in emails. The campaign bypassed email security tools that thwart typical phishing links by embedding their links to update Microsoft software in QR codes, which users scanned with their phones. Cofense says this is the first instance of QR codes being used on this scale, suggesting that QR codes could become a major new avenue of pursuit for phishing scammers.
TODAY IN TABLET:
What Really Matters with Walter Russell Mead
Walter and Jeremy discuss Taiwan, voter fraud, Imran Khan, climate politics, and how to fall in love with poetry.
American Jews and Israelis Need to Learn How to Speak the Same Love Languages
To avoid a painful divorce, advice from a classic work of pop psychology
One of the most amazing—and underrated—scenes in Fiddler on the Roof is the one when Tevye turns to Golde, his wife, and asks her a strange question: “Do you love me?”
Golde is bewildered. “Do I what?” she replies. A short dialogue ensues. Tevye gets upset. But Golde won’t back down. “Do I love you?” she replies. “For 25 years, I’ve washed your clothes, cooked your meals, cleaned your house, given you children, milked the cow. After 25 years, why talk about love right now?”
I thought about that bit recently as I was sitting in many workshops trying to facilitate a conversation between Israelis and American Jews. There was shouting. There were tears. There was passion. The discussion didn’t sound like a debate between two sides of a conflict; it sounded like an argument between two lovers who’ve been together so long they don’t even know what they’re arguing about.
And so, if these two groups—the two largest concentrations of Jews in the world today—want to kiss and make up rather than find themselves filing for divorce, they need to learn how to talk about their love. Luckily for them, a 30-year-old work of popular psychology can give them all the tools they need.
It’s called The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, by Gary Chapman. According to Chapman, there are five distinct ways to express love: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving and giving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. So while Golde, say, was all in on acts of service, poor Tevye was clamoring for a few words of affirmation. It’s not that they didn’t love each other; it’s just that they spoke different love languages.
So do Israelis and American Jews.
What language of love do Israelis speak? It’s straightforward. They speak two of them: the language of gifts and acts of service. The State of Israel regards itself as a refuge and a national home for Jews from anywhere (acts of service). As official policy, its gates are open to Jews seeking to settle there, regardless of their origin. And this open-door policy conveys, with varying degrees of explicitness, the message that Jews in the Diaspora should consider their sense of belonging and safety anywhere but in Israel as temporary or false. The Jewish myth we recite every year on Passover, “In every generation, they rise against us to destroy us,” only reinforces this narrative.
In the context of this covenant, Israel expects Jews in the Diaspora, especially in the United States, to express their unconditional support in the name of national solidarity. This can be in the form of economic support (gifts), whether by donating through civic organizations and private initiatives or by influencing government policy; or it can be in the form of political support, public identification with the Israeli narrative, and vigorous lobbying activity in the highest echelons of American leadership (acts of service).
Those expectations, increasingly, rub American Jews the wrong way. While many American Jews, particularly younger ones, have grown more critical of Israel’s policies, they have also been seeking new ways of expressing their love—ways that are more consistent with their current leanings and values. Hundreds if not thousands of American Jewish leaders are still traveling to Israel each year to take in various programs because they are eager to learn about Israeli society and encounter the mosaic of voices within it. Israel Studies departments are thriving with diverse scholarship. Thousands if not tens of thousands remain deeply immersed in Israeli culture and politics and can speak about the goings-on in Israel with depth and sophistication. These examples aren’t merely inspiring—they’re an expression of love by quality time, pure and simple.
But the love, alas, is unrequited, because while for American Jews, “quality time” means caring and knowing much about the other culture—visiting the land, watching the TV shows, bothering to keep up with the current events—Israelis never respond in kind. When they come to New York for a visit, they rush to Macy’s, not to the local Reform temple. They never bother reading Roth, Heschel, or Bellow, say, because to them, Jewish literature means Oz and Grossman. On more than one occasion I’ve encountered more curiosity about the Jewish way of life in America from non-Jewish Americans than from Israeli Jews. I find that truly troubling.
Can new love languages flourish between these two communities? As someone who comes from one and now lives in the other, I believe the answer depends largely on Israel’s willingness to open up to its sister community in the United States and embrace it along with the changes that the latter has embraced. As I see it, there are two necessary conditions. The first is that Israel recognizes that its familiar language of love that has been ingrained for decades is no longer as relevant to significant segments of American Jewry. From this, the second condition arises, which is the recognition of the existence of other languages of love—those that already exist, and those that are yet to emerge.
So far, this hasn’t been the case. Instead of seeking to become aware of America’s rich diversity and embracing it despite the beautiful differences, the religious leadership in Israel often dismisses its American counterpart as “non-Jewish.” The Jewish community in America includes Reform streams whose customs and religious practices—especially when it comes to the choice of leadership—are considered illegitimate by the rabbinic establishment in Israel. The ordination of women as rabbis is often met with harsh criticism from the rabbinate. Moreover, young Jewish American women who express their wish to read from the Torah at the Western Wall or visit (physical touch) holy sites in Israel as Jews will often encounter rejection and even scorn; they will learn that their Judaism is flawed or unreal because it’s patrilineal or because female Jews are prohibited from reading the Torah out loud in public. Israel promises to defend their bodies in times of emergency but at the same time rejects their Judaism.
The Five Love Languages theory reminds us that humans experience and express love in different ways. Sometimes a language that was appropriate at a certain moment or stage in life is not necessarily appropriate at another moment or stage, and insisting on it can lead to a frustrating situation in which the other side is unable to express love according to their ability and desire.
Just asked Golde and Tevye: As I watched these two quibble on-screen, I felt a strong need to reach out and remind them that they could rest assured—they loved each other, but they loved each other in different ways and therefore had a hard time to experience their partner love. All they needed was the willingness to listen and attune themselves to each other’s signs. The same is true for Israelis and American Jews.