What Happened Today: December 21, 2023
Goodbye, Gay?; Hostage deal back off; More Capitol Hill sex tapes
The Big Story
The heat may finally be turning up on Harvard President Claudine Gay. Last week, The Scroll wrote about the initial plagiarism allegations against Gay, which have only grown more extensive in the intervening days. On Dec. 19, The Washington Free Beacon reported on a fresh plagiarism complaint submitted to Harvard’s research integrity officer, listing more than 40 alleged instances of plagiarism by the university president, some of them previously unreported, including an accusation that Gay lifted several lines in the dedication of her dissertation from another scholar.
Were these allegations embarrassing? Sure. Well-documented? Of course. Damning? Probably. But they were published in the right-wing press, which, from Harvard’s perspective, was almost as good as them not being published at all. Let the racists and conspiracy theorists rave amongst themselves; the serious scholars at Harvard’s independent review board had already cleared Gay of misconduct.
But the story hasn’t gone away. On Monday, the left-leaning Boston Globe ran an editorial calling Harvard’s exoneration of Gay “confusing” and “contradictory.” Wednesday, CNN’s Jake Tapper led with a story on the plagiarism allegations, asking, “Is Harvard really holding its president, Dr. Claudine Gay, to the same standards when it comes to plagiarism that it would for students committing the same offense?” The New York Times, which had previously mentioned the plagiarism charges only to say that Gay had been cleared of them, and which last week ran a hit piece on leading Gay critic Bill Ackman that was clearly sourced to university bureaucrats, finally broke omertà with articles on Wednesday and Thursday, one on the controversy and another highlighting five allegedly plagiarized excerpts from Gay’s academic work. Perhaps the Times finally judged that the story was newsworthy, or perhaps some of the same Harvard sources who last week wanted to discredit Ackman are now turning on Gay.
Why? Money, probably. Ackman claims that Gay has already lost Harvard “billions” from donors livid at her handling of campus antisemitism, and Bloomberg reported Thursday that billionaire businessman Len Blavatnik had joined the ranks of the mutineers. Also on Wednesday, the head of the GOP-controlled House Education and Workforce Committee announced in a letter that the committee would expand its probe into Harvard to include its handling of the plagiarism allegations. The letter noted that any failure to enforce the cheating and plagiarism standards of Harvard’s accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education, could put the school’s federal funding at risk. Plus, given that Gay previously helped knife prominent Harvard faculty members such as Roland Fryer and Ronald Sullivan on pretextual grounds after they fell afoul of the progressive media and campus mob, there may be more than a few people in Cambridge happy to see the favor returned.
The Harvard board appears to be sticking by Gay for now, calling the latest plagiarism allegations “meritless” in a Wednesday evening statement, but that could change. The Thursday Times story gave a glimpse into the psychology of Gay’s defenders with a quote from Harvard Law professor Charles Fried:
“It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions. … The obvious point is to make it look as if there is this ‘woke’ double standard at elite institutions.”
“If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence,” he said of the accusations. “But not from these people.”
The problem for Harvard is that it’s no longer just “these people.” It’s the Times, Bloomberg, Congress, and the people who cut Harvard checks, too.
IN THE BACK PAGES: Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson on celebrating Christmas as a Jewish child in Manchester
The Rest
→Hamas has rejected Israel’s offer of a one-week pause in fighting in exchange for 40 hostages. Officials from Egypt, who met with Hamas Politburo head Ismail Haniyeh in Cairo on Wednesday, told The Wall Street Journal that Hamas was not rejecting negotiations but merely holding out for a better offer, but a senior Israeli official told The Times of Israel Thursday that there are currently no active negotiations with Hamas. For the moment, both sides appear to be pressing maximalist demands: for Hamas, an end to the war and the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including murderers and terrorists; for Israel, a release of all the remaining hostages. Hamas official Ghazi Hamad, who said in late October that Hamas would repeat the Oct. 7 massacre again and again until it destroyed Israel, told Al Jazeera Thursday that Hamas would not turn over more hostages without an end to the war, since Israel “will start a new round of mass killing and massacres against our people.”
→Yesterday we reported that “at least 400,000” unauthorized migrants had entered the United States since the fiscal year began on Oct. 1. It turns out that was an undercount. Fox News’ Griff Jenkins reports:
But don’t worry. As White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Thursday, “Migration flow, it ebbs and flows. And we’re at a time of the year where we’re seeing more at the border. It’s not unusual.” We suppose that depends on your definition of unusual: 14,500 migrants were recorded crossing the border on Monday, the highest single-day total in history, breaking a record set earlier this month.
→Is Israel softening its stance on the Palestinian Authority? In a Thursday op-ed published by Saudi-owned news site Elaph, Israeli National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi, a top aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, said that the PA cannot govern postwar Gaza “in its current form,” but he left open the possibility that a “reformed” PA could be left in charge of the territory. Later in the day, however, a “senior Israeli official” said at a press briefing that Hanegbi’s comments had been “misunderstood” and that PA administration of Gaza was a “nonstarter.” But it appears that the Palestinians think the Americans, who are pushing Israel to turn Gaza over to a “revitalized” PA after the war, will eventually prevail. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that “Hamas’s political leaders have been talking with their Palestinian rivals [in the PA] about how to govern Gaza and the West Bank after the war ends.”
→The Capitol Hill gay sex tape that led to the firing of a Ben Cardin (D-MD) staffer over the weekend was, it now turns out, the second Capitol Hill gay sex tape in less than two years. Semafor reports that in June 2022, a staffer for Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-WA) was investigated over a pair of explicit Snapchat videos. The first showed “a man masturbating inside a House office building,” and the second featured “two men engaged in a sex act in an office setting.” The participants’ faces were not visible in the videos, however, and an investigation found “no conclusive evidence” as to the identities of the men in the videos. The Newhouse staffer at the center of the investigation denied the allegations and later left the job for unrelated reasons. We’ll keep you updated as more videos of congressional staffers having sex in their workplace come to light.
→Iran plotted to assassinate two television presenters for anti-regime broadcaster Iran International in London last fall, ITV reports, only to be foiled when it turned out the would-be assassin was a double agent for Western intelligence. The plot, hatched by Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Mohammad Reza Ansari, involved paying $200,000 to a human smuggler for the killings. The initial plan was for the assassin to detonate a car bomb at Iran International’s London headquarters, but IRGC officials later concluded that would be too difficult and decided instead on a knife attack targeting the presenters outside their homes. The assassin, a human smuggler who had been in contact with the IRGC since 2016, relayed the conversations to his Western intelligence handlers, who thwarted the plot. Iran International began broadcasting from the United States last November, after being informed by Scotland Yard of the planned assassinations.
→Stat of the Day: 55%
That’s the percentage of the Russian car market now controlled by Chinese auto manufacturers, up from 9% in 2021, according to a new report in The New York Times. Sanctioned in Western markets, Russia has been deeping its reliance on China for all sorts of manufactured goods, from cars to computer components, and in return exporting raw materials such as oil and natural gas. Overall, the Times reports that China’s exports to Russia soared 69% in the first 11 months of this year compared with the same period in 2021, before the invasion of Ukraine.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Holiday Spirit, by Jenna Weissman Joselit
Questions of how Jewish children can or should engage with Christmas are nothing new. A battle over the holiday erupted in American public schools more than a century ago.
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.
A Jewish Christmas in Manchester
Celebrating the holiday of schmaltz
by Howard Jacobson
Even without the red suit and snowy beard, my father looked like Father Christmas. He was the right height, had the right girth, possessed a range of benign expressions and enjoyed the appreciation of children for whom he loved performing party tricks. Which meant he was busy, even in the Jewish neighborhood we lived in, attending parties and distributing gifts from about the beginning of Chanukah to whenever we estimated it was time to take the Xmas decorations down. Writing and, in some families, even pronouncing Christmas as Xmas stopped the whole shemozzle becoming too tref. And, though I talk of Xmas "decorations," in reality they were rarely more than streamers made of crepe paper and a few spiral cardboard mobiles the youngest of us had made at school.
There was, of course no tree. For the Jews of North Manchester a tree was a step too far in the direction of Christology. Years later, when I was experimenting with "marrying out," my father expressed horror that my wife had brought a Christmas tree into the house. "Just think of it as a big flower," I said. He shook his head and looked away. "Why would a big flower have an angel sitting on it?" he asked.
"Jews have angels, too," I reminded him. He didn’t know much Old Testament history but something about an angel with a fiery sword guarding the way back into the Garden of Eden had stayed with him since cheder. "Our angels don’t have sweet expressions," he said.
Setting angels to one side, I further reminded him that when I was growing up he’d played Father Christmas for the whole street. "That was different," he insisted. He never explained the difference to me. Not impossibly, he thought Jesus had been nailed to something resembling a Christmas tree, in which case to have had one in the house would have been either to commemorate the crucifixion or to invite being accused of it all over again.
Right or wrong about the tree, my father was surely correct in thinking Father Christmas had no necessary crucifixion associations, though I did once see a photograph of a giant crucified Santa on the roof of a Tokyo department store. Many are the delights of cultural confusion which the miserly charge of "appropriation" denies us.
I look back on those mongrel days in 1950s Jewish Manchester with great affection. In truth, we could move from Judaism to Christianity with relative ease because we didn’t know a lot about either. By "we" I mean my immediate family—Max Santa Jacobson and his Little Helfers. If faith was a pyramid, we were buried under its base. But we had neighbors who were at the very apex, who were never out of shul, whose children wore yarmulkes and fringes and who went blind davening. And between them and us there was every complexion of conviction and lack thereof. To be a Jew in Manchester in those days meant being whatever we wanted to be so long as we didn’t want to be not Jewish.
Though we poked gentle fun at the fanatically punctilious as they drew their curtains in fear of seeing my father ride by on his sled, we rubbed along—except when it came to the van. My father had no sled but he did, of professional necessity, have a van—a huge, rusting, noisy vehicle which coughed hoarsely every time he tried to start it up and often broke down before he’d driven it out of the street. Letters both begging and threatening were put through our letter box almost every day, cursing the van, calling it an eyesore, a noise-pollutant and a danger to children. Some people said the sale of their houses had fallen through because of it.
To our frum Jewish neighbors the van was even worse than that. It desecrated the Sabbath. But what could we do? Saturday was the busiest market day. My father had no choice but to start revving the engine at about 5 a.m. if he was to have any hope of getting to his market in Nottinghamshire about 80 miles away. Christmas being busier still, he’d revise 5 a.m. down to 4 a.m. Why being woken early on a Shabbes was worse than being woken early on any other day we didn’t know. But I have said that our grasp of Yiddishkeit was at best slender. Mr. Freedlander would bang on his window anyway and shake his bony fist. By way of recompense my father offered to come down his chimney on Christmas morning and leave a sack of toys for the Freedlander boys, Pinchas, Menachem and Hymie. This generous invitation was never taken up.
My father sold swag in his market stall, referred to more respectably as fancy goods. In later years my mother would run a swag shop which she called "Just Fancy." Fancy was a word that tickled ours. More than anything else, it denoted gaudy, cheap, made behind the Iron Curtain or China, flimsy in manufacture, but somehow beguiling and worth a couple of shillings of anybody’s money if only for the mirth it occasioned. "Cheap Johnny" was the name my father traded under when he wasn’t being Father Christmas. The one persona bled into the other, just as swag bled into Christmas.
In Christmas, swag found itself. I mean no disrespect to Christianity. All religions descend into kitsch in the act of merchandising their narrative. Only think of the electric menorahs and dancing rabbis for sale in the foyers of Israeli holiday hotels. In early November, anyway, as the days darkened, our thoughts turned to festive swag. What would this year hold, we would wonder, waiting for my father to return from the swag warehouses in the East End of London with tinsel hanging off the mirrors of his van.
Whether according to some divine plan or quite by accident, the year of my bar mitzvah saw innovations in holy swag to take the breath away. Not just the usual streamers and fairy lights and wreaths and boxes of stale Moldovan mince pies and crackers that rarely banged when you pulled them and when they did turned out to hold nothing more exciting than paper hats and jokes in Cyrillic script, but also polystyrene plaques of a bleeding-heart Jesus whose innards glowed red if you had the right batteries, 3D reproductions of the Last Supper in which all the diners except Judas looked Mongolian and ate with chopsticks, plaster figurines of the Three Wise Men who had somehow become confused with the Three Wise Monkeys and covered their mouths and eyes and ears when greeting the Baby Jesus. Pietàs that weren’t always sure just who was meant to be cradling whom. And, most intriguing of all, a haloed Virgin riding a reindeer sidesaddle.
Should we have laughed? Were we poking fun at what had been done to a sacred narrative or the narrative itself? The former. For Christmas itself I felt something akin to awe. The carols drifted up from school assembly into the balcony rooms where the Jewish boys were, for their own good and that of the school, routinely sequestered. I felt doubly an alien, neither a Christian nor a Jew, just a melancholy waif shut out in Christina Rossetti’s wonderfully English Bleak Midwinter where “the earth stood hard as iron and the water like a stone,” but not able to take my place there either, and thus twice, thrice, God knows how many times denied, the son of a purveyor of Xmas tat, who didn’t belong here, there or anywhere (for where was home: Manchester? Lithuania? Mongolia with Jesus’ dining companions?) and whose heart was broken in a hundred places.
And then came Christmas day itself, when we ate turkey with chrain and Christmas pudding with smetana, and pulled my father’s shmatte crackers, and listened to the queen’s message on the radio and fell asleep, happy enough, in front of Gian Carlo Menotti’s one-act opera Amahl and the Night Visitors on television.
Since then I have bought into all the cheap commercializations of Christmas I can lay my hands on. The pies, the puddings, the presents, the mangled theology, the schmaltz. And that, for me, is the saving, all-encompassing, marvellously inauthentic word for it. Schmaltz. This year I intend to be in Scotland for the snow that used to fall on Manchester, though does less often now, the snow that is deep and crisp and even but which the Jewish Jesus would never have seen. "I’m dreaming of a schmaltzy Christmas," I’ll be singing, though if I’ll be dreaming of anything it will be my benevolent, overweight father trying to squeeze himself into the Freedlanders’ chimney with a sack of chametz. And a time—long, long ago—when to be Jewish was very heaven.