What Happened Today: February 3, 2023
Omar is out; Fentanyl isn't racist; The Replacement of Jews
The Big Story
Voting along party lines, the House removed Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar from her position on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on Thursday because of her past antisemitic remarks, including, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” suggesting that Jewish money buys political support for Israel. In a Hail Mary effort to sway Republicans before the vote, Jewish Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) co-sponsored a bill with Omar that supports Israel and condemns antisemitism. “Don’t tell me this is about consistency! Don’t tell me this is about a condemnation of antisemitic remarks when you have a member of the Republican caucus [Marjorie Taylor Greene] who has talked about Jewish space lasers and a tired amount of tropes and also elevated her to some of the highest committee assignments in this body!” Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) shouted on the floor ahead of the vote. “This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America!”
While some have suggested that House Leader Kevin McCarthy is only retaliating against Omar because Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar were punitively stripped of committee assignments during the previous congressional session, the move has also had significant implications for American Jews. Jewish Democrat solidarity with Omar—reflected in the letter of support from Reform Jewish organizations, as The Scroll reported last week—fits somewhere in the landscape of American politics described by Tablet’s own Armin Rosen in his 2022 profile of Omar. “American politics now resembles a tribal struggle, a competition between a constellation of in-groups over scarce resources and even scarcer channels of actual power,” Rosen wrote. “Protecting and advancing one’s political tribe using the full range of available tools, including media manipulation, calculated dishonesty, and mass protest, is often an objective that supersedes any loyalty to a political party or ideological system, as well as to any higher ideals, like the truth.”
Read Armin’s profile here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ilhans-country
In the Back Pages: The Self-Righteous Idolatry of the Anti-Zionist Rabbi
The Rest
→ The Pentagon advised President Biden against shooting down a Chinese surveillance balloon drifting over the Midwest and several areas considered “sensitive sites” on Wednesday because of the possible risk of falling debris to civilians. Speaking to the media, a senior defense official said that the government had taken measures to prevent the balloon from gathering important information, without elaborating on what those measures were, adding that the balloon isn’t much more of a threat than Chinese satellites already in orbit. Meanwhile, China claims it is an errant weather balloon that’s gone far off course. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has announced that the incident has led him to cancel his scheduled visit to Beijing, a trip ostensibly intended to shore up strained diplomatic relations.
For another balloon tale, see the classic 1966 short story by Donald Barthelme: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1966/04/16/the-balloon
→ Quote of the Day:
I’m not a thief. I’m not involved in kidnapping. I’m not a rapist. I’m just carrying out a social fight.
That’s Haiti’s Jimmy Chérizier, the leader of the notorious G9 Family and Allies gang who sometimes goes by the nickname “Barbecue,” explaining to the Associated Press why he’s not a violent villain. Since the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse by gunmen who claimed to be working for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Haiti has plunged into a Mad Max-style tragedy of epic proportions. The United Nations estimated in December that at least 60% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now controlled by warring gangs, the most notorious of which is Chérizier’s G9, which the United Nations recently accused of threatening the “peace, security, and stability of Haiti.” The nation saw 2,200 murders in 2022, a 100% increase over 2021, and an estimated four people are kidnapped every day for ransom.
Read More: https://apnews.com/article/haiti-gangs-democracy-at-risk-7ddcea955fdd364e2b574e28daa71d03
→ Number of the Day: 20
The 2016 Italian film Perfect Strangers by Paolo Genovese has now been remade in 20 countries owing to its relatable plot and ease of adaptation to different cultural mores. The basic plot is that a group of three couples and one divorcée meet for dinner and decide to read to the group whatever incoming texts, messages, and emails arrive to their phones. While the characters claim they have nothing to hide, this is quickly proven false, and chaos ensues. In Italy the friends dine on gnocchi, the Icelandic version uses reindeer, the French guests bring wine, and in their version, South Koreans bring paper towels. No American production is yet confirmed, though Issa Rae of Insecure on HBO said she is working on an adaptation.
→ California law enforcement authorities reported on Wednesday the arrest of 368 people and the rescue of 131 after carrying out a massive sex-trafficking sting in Southern California. “It’s an ugly scar against this great country that exists too often times in plain sight,” said Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore, who worked with several federal and state offices to carry out the raid that included the apprehension of both pimps and customers involved in the exchange.
→ Video of the Day:
In a contentious House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday titled “Biden’s Border Crisis, Part One,” Houston Republican Rep. Wesley Hunt delivered a stunning rebuke to his Democratic colleagues who’ve suggested that the Republican approach to border security was racist. This was too much for Rep. Hunt. “I’ve been Black for a long time sir, so I get it … but this is actually not about race. This is an issue of public safety. And if I call this an invasion, sir, I’m not racist. I can assure you I’m not racist. What I can assure you is that I want to make sure that fentanyl doesn’t indiscriminately kill any race, religion, color, or creed.” Mr. Hunt reminded the committee that enough of the drug has come up over the southern border to kill every single American five times—though the overwhelming majority of it has been smuggled in cars through ports of entry.
→ Last year, Russian athletes were not allowed to play at Wimbledon, Russian musicians were not allowed to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, and some bartenders even switched to non-Russian vodka. But perhaps the most absurd boycott of all has been that of the publication of research created by joint Russian and European teams at the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva. For almost a year, completed research about the nature of our universe and the problems of particle physics have been sitting on pre-print servers, as European scientists want to prevent Russian institutions and teams from receiving credit upon publication. According to one Russian physicist interviewed by The Guardian, the Europeans care more than the Ukrainians: “I would say that some of my EU colleagues are much more radical.” An American scientist, Nina Fedoroff, emeritus professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University, cautioned against the counterproductive approach, “During the so-called Cold War, interactions among Russian and American physicists and between the physicists and their respective governments were credited for keeping the war cold,” she said.
→ The Cochrane Reviews are the gold-standard for assessing medical research, and a new Cochrane investigation has found that while a “high risk of bias” might exist across the 78 randomized controlled trials on masking it reviewed, “there remained uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited,” investigators wrote. They added, “The pooled results of RCTs did not show a clear reduction in respiratory viral infection with the use of medical/surgical masks.” They also found that N95s were not shown to be statistically better than normal surgical masks in the prevention of infection.
→ Thread of the Day:
This provocative thread comes from self-described “Grand cultural architect of the post-Palestine Middle East” and Tablet contributor Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, the director of the Endowment for Middle East Truth’s Program for Emerging Democratic Voices from the Middle East. Mansour received political asylum in the United States in 2012 after being tortured by the Egyptian government, which believed him to be an Israeli agent. In the thread, Mansour highlights the normally inarticulable problem of the slow replacement of American Jews as the ultimate and beloved (or perhaps fetishized) “other” by less assimilated minority groups, e.g., Muslims. Mansour says that this loss of status afforded to the group or groups that represent the “counterculture” is leading to a “panic among a certain segment of American Jewry.” We highly recommend you read it in full, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on the ideas presented, in the comments below or at scroll@tabletmag.com.
→ On Thursday, the BBC reported that tests of otters, foxes, and seals have all come out positive for the H5N1 avian flu virus in the United Kingdom; the animals likely contracted the disease after eating infected birds. Hopefully “here we go again” won’t be a headline in the coming months as the virus continues to develop in disturbing ways. After the most recent outbreak began in October 2021, there have been more than 10,000 documented outbreaks in birds worldwide and 119 in mammals, including five humans. In October 2022, there was an outbreak at a mink farm in Spain that, disturbingly, showed transmission between minks. It is extremely rare that this virus can spread between mammals, but the current strain seems to have acquired just such a mutation. Tom Peacock, a virologist at Imperial College London, told Science, “This is a clear mechanism for an H5 pandemic to start,” though he added that the more specific changes required for easy human transmission have not yet emerged. Sounds reassuring.
Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
A film by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert
In the midst of an IRS audit and with grandpa arriving any moment and the family’s Lunar New Year celebration only hours away, we enter the claustrophobic lives of Evelyn Quan (Michelle Yeoh) and her husband, Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), laundromat owners and first-generation Chinese Americans who are coming undone. Their receipts don’t add up; their marriage is falling apart; their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), is dating a woman despite their wishes; grandpa is here demanding breakfast.
But just as it seems that her world is about to end, Evelyn learns through some sci-fi space-time high jinks that the end of her world is hardly cause for concern—that, indeed, her world is but one among billions, some with differences so great they can’t even support human life, but others with differences that metastasize out of the negligible: Instead of saying yes to a marriage proposal, Evelyn says no, and from that one decision spawns an infinity of new ones. As she traverses the multiverse, Evelyn gathers skills from these endless iterations of her identity, using them to fight the evil forces threatening the lives of those she loves.
A genre-bending film of extravagant creativity and warmth, Everything Everywhere All At Once is just that: a kung fu thriller, a multigenerational family drama, a story about motherhood and marriage, an existential adventure, a Buddhist meditation on bagels. In the infinity of options that exist (and the film will toy with quite a few doozies), some will be abysmal and some beautiful, but most will fall in the ambiguous mean, where there’s only, as Joy puts it in the film’s sweet finale, “a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.” This movie is such a time.
For more about the film, read Liel Leibovitz’s review in Tablet Magazine: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/eeaao-liel-leibovitz
TODAY IN TABLET:
What’s in a Name by Eric Muller and David Muller
The legacy of Nazi laws can still be found in the official documents for our grandfather—and other Jews who had their names changed against their will
Video Game Music for a Long Winter by David Meir Grossman
On4word’s improbable blend of Radiohead and Mario Kart somehow works
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.
Today’s Back Pages was previously published in The Scroll, April 2022
The Self-Righteous Idolatry of the Anti-Zionist Rabbi
On Yom Kippur these enlightened Chicagoans and their pied piper were basking in their own moral superiority
By Clayton Fox
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?
Kol Nidre services, also on Zoom, began with a stirring Enya-like riff on “Shema Koleinu,” and I was drawn in by the liturgical, musical magic. Listening to his opening Yom Kippur remarks, I felt an urge of empathy for the rabbi and his seemingly noble and utopian quest. Indeed, I admire people who are willing to stand up for unpopular beliefs. And the Kol Nidre itself was deeply moving, unavoidably, as the Aramaic belongs to everyone.
“Repair is always possible,” Rabbi Rosen encouraged. “We know that we are not perfect. We cannot fix what is broken completely, both in our own lives and in these systems that have been so corrupting life, in our communities and around the world. … Brokenness is not our destiny. Repair and return is always possible.”
Return. What kind of return was he referring to? That became clearer during the sermon, when Rabbi Brant said that Tzedek Chicago was unequivocally opposed to “Jewish nation-statism” from its inception. Parroting Amnesty International, the rabbi also said Israel was an apartheid state. And while citing the numbers of Palestinian dead in the May conflict, he shared his grief. “As with past Israeli attacks on Gaza, I found those weeks in May to be utterly unbearable.”
In the comments, congregants wrote, “Thank God for the moral leadership of this community,” and “We were weary of Zionist congregations. We are so so nourished by this offering.” That’s good for them, I suppose, but it’s impossible not to notice that this nourishment has nothing to do with the Torah or Jewish history, which is nothing if not obsessed with return to the land of Israel. It’s the nourishment of political talking points, the same thin gruel being doled out on college campuses, in prestigious newspaper columns, and within every other elite, progressive space in the United States.
Here we were, then, on Yom Kippur 2021, during a wave of stabbing attacks in Israel. The country was in a state of minor panic over the escape from Gilboa Prison of six “security prisoners,” two of whom were still on the loose. (One congregant asked that “the recaptured Palestinian political prisoners” be included in the thoughts and prayers of the mishebeirach.) During the morning service the next day, Rabbi Rosen delivered his most ambitious sermon yet, the one he called “There’s More of Us Than There Are of Them,” a jeremiad against white American males and their rage.
It was best to understand aggrieved white Americans as analogous to the sea monster Leviathan, the rabbi explained, which is “never fully vanquished.” The vital question, then, on Yom Kippur, was how to respond to such evil. Channeling King Théoden in The Two Towers, the rabbi asked, “How do we resist such fierce and unrelenting rage?” To go on the offense. To embrace the moniker white radical in place of white liberal. To continue with organizing and activist work. And to remember that the shofar blast on Yom Kippur is about changing the status quo and that “setbacks and backlashes are a sign of their fear, not their strength.”
***
Granted, the entire Days of Awe were being conducted on Zoom, and that is already an impersonal, distancing mechanism, but by the time we reached Neilah, I couldn’t focus on the service. I had become fixated on the sheer lack of introspection. Normally, on Yom Kippur, if you’re even half-interestedly participating in the repetition of the prayers, by the time you reach Neilah, you have been forced to meditate on your shortcomings, your assholery, the dark thoughts, the evil impulses you are called to resist. It is a profoundly personal holiday, a 25-hour struggle session against yourself. But from Rosh Hashanah right up to the closing gates, the congregants of Tzedek Chicago seemed most interested in The Struggle™ rather than any kind of reckoning within themselves.
In the Tzedek liturgy that we used for the holiday, you’ll find the traditional vidui and these inward-looking admonitions:
We have done wrong. We have been untrue. We have broken the law. We have defamed others. We have harmed others. We have acted unjustly. We have been zealous. We have caused hurt. We have lied. We have acted rashly. We have covered up. We have behaved with scorn. We have abused our responsibility. We have neglected those who need us. We have been unnecessarily stubborn. We have acted offensively. We have bent justice. We have caused dissension. We have been apathetic. We have aided wrongdoers. We have acted corruptly. We have disdained others. We have gone off course. We have misled.
And there was some light chest tapping and a cursory run-through of the ancient plea for forgiveness. But much more reflective of the energy of the day was the adapted Al Chet prayer: “For the wrong we have done before you, for preferring militarized fences to open borders”; “For the wrong we have done before you, for demonizing immigrants as threats to be neutralized”; “For the wrong we have done before you, for the continued colonization of indigenous peoples.”
Of course, these are not genuine requests for forgiveness before the Lord. These statements offload guilt onto the evil conservative white supremacists that the rabbi and his congregants spent 25 hours combatting. These sins are not the sins of the evolved, liberated, liberationist attendees, but the sins of their deplorable countrymen and fascist Israeli cousins. The good people of Tzedek Chicago would never prefer militarized fences to open borders, never demonize an immigrant, never colonize anyone—and certainly would never raise a rifle to defend their people.
At the time of year commanded to be used for self-reflection and an accounting of the soul, these enlightened Chicagoans and their pied piper were instead basking in their own moral superiority. Of course, there’s nothing brave about such people declaring their anti-Zionism—it’s the ultimate demonstration of narcissism and obedience. Only, rather than obeying divine authority, they obey the dictates of a progressive ideological machinery that treats bashing Israel and defunding the police in U.S. cities as two sides of the same coin. It is, in other words, the quintessential modern form of idol worship. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad.
Brant and his ilk should pay reparations to the Jewish People for all of the damages they have for to Jewish men women and children in destroying their awareness of authentic Jewish values traditions and continuity