What Happened Today: Feb 16, 2022
SF parents win; Shots fired at Jewish candidate; Woman’s HIV cured
The Big Story
San Francisco just became an unlikely center of parent-led backlash against progressive activism after voters in the city overwhelmingly backed a measure to recall three school board members: President Gabriela López, Commissioner Faauuga Moliga, and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. An organizer of the recall, Siva Raj told The New York Times, “It’s the people rising up in revolt in San Francisco and saying it’s unacceptable to abandon your responsibility to educate our children.” Proponents of the recall, including the city’s mayor, London Breed, were incensed by the board’s focus on symbolic ideological crusades during the coronavirus pandemic. In January 2021, when schools were closed due to COVID-19 restrictions, the school board advanced a plan to rename 44 public schools currently named after figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Dianne Feinstein. “What I cannot understand,” Mayor Breed said at the time, “is why the school board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.” Voters also opposed the school board’s decision to change the admission criteria for Lowell High School—the most prestigious public high school in the district, which is currently majority Asian American—from a merit-based system to a lottery. San Francisco’s Asian American community strongly opposed the move, which likely would have led to far fewer Asian students being accepted to the school. Collins, the ousted school board commissioner, had previously accused Asian American students of being racist and using “white supremacist” thinking for self-advancement. The successful recall represents two emerging trends in American politics: the growing importance of school board elections, and the increasingly high political engagement and voter turnout among Asian Americans.
Read it here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/san-francisco-votes-recall-citys-scandal-plagued-school-board-rcna16394
The Back Pages: The Divide on Israel Isn’t Generational
The Rest
→ A local Black Lives Matter activist in Louisville, Kentucky, Quintez Brown, has been charged with attempted murder for allegedly entering the office of Craig Greenberg on Monday and firing multiple shots at the Jewish Democrat running for mayor. There were no injuries in the shooting, but Greenberg says that one bullet grazed his shirt. No motive has yet been established for the shooting, but Brown’s friends and his lawyer note that he has mental health issues. Brown’s social media posts feature numerous Black nationalist slogans and express his endorsement of “Pan-Africanism: the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism.” Known for his political activism in Louisville, Brown previously wrote for a local newspaper and had announced his intention to run for city council. A day after the shooting, an organizer for Black Lives Matter Louisville said that a community bail fund would pay Brown’s $100,000 bond.
→ After years of tension and hostility, Israel and Turkey are taking tentative steps toward a thaw in relations. “We welcome this visit,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters about Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s scheduled trip to Ankara next month. “God willing, it will be good for Turkey-Israel relations for such a step to be taken after such a long period.” Turkey had once been Israel’s closest ally in the Middle East, but the relationship frayed when Erdogan, running as an Islamist, came to power in 2003.
→ CNN’s Chief Marketing Officer Allison Gollust has resigned, marking the third high-profile departure from the network as it investigates “issues associated with Chris Cuomo and former governor Andrew Cuomo.” Gollust had been having an affair with Jeff Zucker, who left his post as the head of CNN two weeks ago. The affair highlighted the multiple conflicts of interest that shaped CNN’s news coverage during Zucker’s tenure—particularly its coverage of Governor Cuomo during the pandemic. Gollust had worked with Andrew Cuomo before joining CNN and was hired a month after Chris Cuomo joined the network. CNN fawned over Governor Cuomo’s COVID-19 response, even as it became clear that the governor had imperiled New York’s seniors in nursing homes and manipulated the state’s death count. While Zucker claims he resigned because of the office romance, Chris Cuomo says otherwise. Zucker’s exit, a spokesman for Chris Cuomo said, was “never about an undisclosed relationship. Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust were not only entirely aware but fully supportive of what [Chris] was doing to help his brother.”
→ The first woman ever has been cured of HIV, by scientists using a stem-cell transplant from a donor with a rare genetic condition that makes the immune cells targeted by HIV naturally resistant to the virus that causes AIDS, scientists reported on Tuesday. The woman, a leukemia patient in the United States, is the third person to be cured of HIV using umbilical cord blood from a donor.
→ The American Bar Association joins the wokeocracy after voting Monday to mandate that law schools educate students about bias, racism, and cross-cultural competency. Law students will now be taught about their duty to “work to eliminate racism” as part of their required curriculum. An open letter from 10 Yale Law School professors calls the new policy an effort to “institutionalize dogma.” In a separate resolution, the ABA refers to accommodations for “lactating individuals” but does not use the word woman.
Read more: https://freebeacon.com/campus/how-the-american-bar-association-just-radicalized-law-school/
→ The clue that led federal investigators to seize $3.6 billion in Bitcoin—the largest financial haul in Justice Department history—came from a $500 Walmart gift card. Manhattan couple Ilya Lichtenstein, 34, and Heather R. Morgan, 31, who now face up to 20 years in prison for their alleged role in a complex scheme that involved hacking into a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange and moving Bitcoin “then worth about $71 million—through more than 2,000 unauthorized transfers to an outside account.” A fraction of the pilfered Bitcoin was then used to buy the gift card connected to the couple.
→ President Biden has rejected former President Donald Trump’s claim of executive privilege and ordered the release of White House visitor logs to the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riots. In a letter released to the public Wednesday, Biden’s White House counsel, Dana Remus, directs the National Archives to turn over the logs within 15 days. Last month, the Supreme Court denied an emergency request from Trump to block the House panel from obtaining the records.
→ Not only can you have your bank account frozen in Canada for participating in a peaceful protest, but now it looks like just donating $40 dollars to a legal, peaceful protest is a risky proposition.
→ The French government has passed legislation requiring public museums to return artworks taken or purchased from Jews during World War II to the heirs of the original owners. From 1940 until 1944, during the Nazi occupation of France, artworks and precious artifacts were unethically seized or purchased from Jewish owners, amounting to roughly 100,000 objects, the French culture ministry estimates. Many of these works are currently held by the country’s greatest art institutions, including the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre. Klimt’s “Rose bushes under trees,” a colorful canvas full of trees in bright bloom, is one such example. Acquired by the French government in 1980, the painting will be moved from the Musée d’Orsay to the family of Nora Stiasny, an art student who sold the work in 1938 during the Nazi Anschluss of Vienna. She was deported and killed in 1942, along with her mother, husband, and son.
Clayton Fox on Zionism's conflict between the 'unblemished' Jews and the ones with dirt under their nails
In his latest Kol Nidre sermon at Tzedek Chicago, Rabbi Brant Rosen reaffirmed his congregation’s hostility to Zionism. “When we openly state that our congregation is not Zionist, that’s more than mere semantics. It is a statement that the Judaism we lift up will not and cannot include apartheid, settler-colonialism, and militarism. This is not mainly a political position. It’s a spiritual statement of conscience about what it means to be Jewish.”
In the same speech, while referring to the gap between Zionist American Jews and non- or anti-Zionist American Jews, Rabbi Rosen said, “I cannot view that as anything but an untenable, unbridgeable divide.”
On the one hand, this could be seen as yet more proof of the increasingly popular narrative being asserted throughout general-interest media—of “a generational divide over Israel among American Jews that is driving some of Judaism’s most delicate internal debates,” as The New York Times recently put it. Except for one fact: Rabbi Rosen is pushing 60.
In fact, the Times and others are right about a growing split between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews. They’re just not right about what’s dividing the two sides—because it’s not age.
According to the Times, we’re looking at a generation of twentysomethings who are increasingly alienated from, or even hostile to, Israel. To argue this, it calls on Modern Orthodox, one-state solution-touting blue-check writer Peter Beinart, clocking in at age 50. Interviewed extensively for the Times story, Beinart frames the question in terms of David and Goliath, saying that the older cohorts grew up with an Israeli David and the younger only see a Goliath. And in Peter’s world, no young idealist can support a Goliath, no matter the history that preceded its ascension or the totality of its purpose.
The David and Goliath framing isn’t a totally useless schematic; it just doesn’t neatly map onto Jews according to age. As Liel Leibovitz articulated recently, there is an unstoppable realignment underway. This is not altogether surprising, says Leibovitz, since almost everything in our culture is in flux and no longer means what it used to. And so the end result is the dividing of the tribe into teams. He calls them Team A, the anti-Zionists, and Team B, the Zionists:
[Team A] is home to people who move, and want to remain, in a set of social circles in which Israel has become a totem for everything sinister about the West, from colonialism to white supremacy to police brutality. These people find themselves moved by the arguments of those who see Israel as uniquely criminal, and who feel impelled to distinguish themselves from their parents or communities. This group now includes celebrities, pop star politicians who specialize in Twitter activism, and anyone who wants to be considered one of the cool kids in the arts and academia, as well as a generation of younger Americans Jews, who are—by positioning their views on Israel-Palestine inside vogue intersectionality—helping to change the coverage at former legacy brands in American journalism. Many of these people imagine or publicly present themselves as still believing in or supporting a Jewish state, just one that is somehow more righteous or fair. To the extent that it’s still true today, it won’t be for much longer.
Team B members tend to be drawn from different milieus.
In the United States, the Jewish Zionist camp includes traditional political right-wingers and the Orthodox, joined by majorities in the ethnic and recent immigrant communities of former Soviet Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Persian Jews, as well as a cohort of stunned college kids. As of last week, it also seems to be attracting normie American Jews newly aware about their impending loss of status.