What Happened Today: January 24, 2022
Iran deal spin; U.S. mulls troops in Ukraine; Supreme Court considers Affirmative Action
The Big Story
The U.S. hostages currently held captive by the Iranian government have typically remained a footnote in efforts to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran—so why are they now at the forefront of talks? Critics of the deal say it’s about managing public relations rather than a real shift in the American approach. On Sunday, Robert Malley, the lead U.S. negotiator in talks with Iran, told Reuters, “It is very hard for us to imagine getting back into the nuclear deal while four innocent Americans are being held hostage by Iran.” Yet Malley’s suggestion that the hostages have presented a serious obstacle to the deal would appear to be contradicted by two things: Talks between the United States and Iran are now in their eighth round, and the Biden White House has made it clear that resurrecting the Obama-era nuclear deal is one of its top foreign policy priorities. “This is transparent narrative-building,” a long-time Malley watcher with good contacts in the U.S. national security establishment told The Scroll. “It’s an attempt to make paying ransom for American hostages look like tough negotiating, when in fact it’s all part of the same big cave-in. It’s like something from the Brer Rabbit stories. ‘Please, oh please, don’t make us pay you for hostages in addition to licensing your nuclear bomb.’ It's just disgusting.” Tablet’s Levant analyst, Tony Badran, expressed a similar view on Twitter.
Negotiations have stalled over the past year over Tehran’s demands for more money in the form of payouts and sanctions relief. A new Russian-brokered plan, which reportedly has U.S. backing, was also rejected but could provide a framework for future talks. The problem, according to Republican members of Congress, is that the White House is withholding the terms of the Russian plan, preventing them from debating it or providing oversight on the White House-led efforts.
Backpages: Guarded by the Hebrew People, Who Never Forget Their Dead
The Rest
→ President Biden is considering sending additional U.S. forces to Ukraine to reinforce the small contingent of special operations forces already there, ahead of a possible invasion by Russia, senior administration officials said Monday. President Biden has repeatedly indicated that he is reluctant to get the United States directly involved in a military conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but White House aides have typically sounded more hawkish, a dynamic also found in the Trump administration when the president often expressed public reluctance about policies that received the full-throated endorsement of defense officials. On Sunday the second shipment of U.S. munitions worth $200 million arrived in Kiev, a package of so-called “lethal aid” reportedly containing anti-tank weapons along with non-munitions such as patrol boats.
→ Four separate lawsuits filed Monday accuse Google of deceiving its users by continuing to record their location even after they had turned off the “location history” option, which means the phone is being tracked. The suits were brought by the attorneys general from Washington, D.C., Indiana, Texas, and Washington. “Simply put, even when a user’s mobile device is set to deny Google access to location data, the company finds a way to continue to ascertain the user’s location,” one of the suits states. That claim appears to be corroborated by an internal Google document submitted as evidence in which an employee states that the company’s user options for location tracking “feels like it is designed to make things possible, yet difficult enough that people won’t figure it out.”
→ Websites set up to recruit Hezbollah and Syrian government operatives to work for Israel were likely part of a counterintelligence operation run by entities associated with the Iranian government, according to an analysis in The Daily Beast. The “crude and clumsy sites are fakes, with no plausible connection to Israel’s spy services,” according to intelligence experts who spoke with the Beast, but the sites show signs of being “associated with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security.”
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/shady-network-of-fake-mossad-job-sites-target-iranian-spies
→ The death of a 78-year-old U.S. citizen, the Palestinian American Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad, while in the custody of the Israeli military, will likely lead to punitive measures against individual Israeli soldiers, according to local reports in Israel. As’ad was detained along with a number of other Palestinian citizens to prevent them from alerting other people in the area of Ramallah about a planned raid, according to information that came out when members of the unit were questioned by military police. As’ad was found dead of an apparent heart attack after being handcuffed, blindfolded, and gagged for more than an hour.
→ Fears that the Federal Reserve bank could tighten monetary policy and raise interest rates have driven weeks of falling stocks, which continued Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing more than 1,000 points and the S&P 500 dropping 3.9% and hitting its worst week since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The rout has battered Bitcoin as well, which fell by 8% over the weekend and another 4% Monday morning and is now valued at less than $34,000—roughly half its all-time high of $69,000 last November. The Fed’s Open Market Committee is expected to announce its new monetary policy Wednesday at the summit’s conclusion.
→ The Supreme Court is preparing to review race-based criteria for college admissions. The court announced Monday that it would hear challenges to affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In previous cases, lower courts have sided with the universities.
→ And here’s an illuminating rundown at American Compass of the way that the “college for all” model has worked to enrich the colleges while failing many students who would have been better off pursuing other kinds of education and paths to work. As one of the authors of the report notes, “Only about half of colleges’ enrollees complete a degree within even six years, and of those who do graduate, about 40% end up in jobs that don’t require a degree. The idea that we should be pushing more people and resources into this system is absurd.”
Read more: https://americancompass.org/a-guide-to-college-for-all/
→ And, of course, along with enriching virtually every other elite institution in the United States, COVID-19 has been a windfall for colleges. Twitter user Show Me the Data runs down the numbers.
→ Last week I credulously repeated the claims contained in a new book that allege Anne Frank and her family were betrayed to Nazi officials by a local Dutch Jewish businessman. That was an error, and those claims are now being taken apart by a number of prominent historians. “Big conclusions demand big proof,” historian Johannes Houwink ten Cate told The Times of Israel about the case. That is certainly true, and I should have sought more evidence. Mea culpa.
In Out of the Fog, historical detective Brian Berger digs through newspaper columns, clippings, and other clues to bring readers the fascinating, scandalous, and forgotten tales of the past. In this installment: CANTER’S LOWLY RESTING PLACE.
Often in historical research, one stumbles upon something other than that which they were looking for. So it occurred recently while I was researching the life of Lower East Side saloonkeeper, politician, and proto-Jewish gangster, Charles “Silver Dollar” Smith (born Solomon, c. 1841-1899). I also found a story that would help illuminate another, more literal underworld: that of Manhattan’s three Hebrew boneyards and their remnants, which remain, often unnoticed, among us now.
My discovery was made in the New York Herald of Sunday, Dec. 3, 1893, in an un-bylined piece whose top headlines read:
FORGOTTEN GRAVES IN NEW YORK—Neglected Cemeteries of Other Generations Lying in the Heart of the City—CANTER’S LOWLY RESTING PLACE—Ancient Burial Spots Jealously Guarded by the Hebrew People, Who Never Forget Their Dead
“I think in all wide New York there is no more saddening spot than the grave of Canter, the Hebrew,” our reporter begins. “It lies in a quiet residence street just off one of the busiest thoroughfares of the so-called ‘shopping district.’ It is hidden, in a dense tangle of sprouts, at this season brown and sere.”
Though, mysteriously, we are told neither the name nor the exact location described, the writer’s next statement—“The plot is a triangular piece of land … ”—makes it clear we are on ground belonging to Congregation Shearith Israel, also known as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States.
The synagogue was founded in 1654 by some two dozen Spanish and Portuguese refugees in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The Sephardic congregation first convened in the loft of a flour mill before moving, as the congregation grew, into three successive synagogues built in 1682, 1730, and 1818, none of which survive. The current temple, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was opened in 1890.
What remains, however, is a fragment of the first Shearith Israel cemetery, opened in 1681, just steps from today’s Chatham Square in Manhattan. Two centuries after it was opened, in 1893, the Herald reporter who remarked on the grave of “Canter, the Hebrew” described the area— then part of the notorious Five Points district—as being “in the very haunts of dingy trade and traffic in things, like itself, ancient of days—old clothes, old furniture, stale beer saloons and rat ridden lodging houses. Overheard, high in air, flag in the breeze the week day washing of the tenement house dwellers, the elevated railway trains roar above; the hand organ man makes dismal, sobbing music a few feet away … ”
Yet, despite its triangular shape, Shearith Israel’s cemetery site is not Canter’s final resting place.
Street expansion, land sales, and other development compelled Shearith Israel to relocate numerous times. While some graves stayed behind, a second cemetery was established in 1805 on what was then the city’s outskirts but would become Greenwich Village. Two decades later, when the opening of 11th Street required many graves to be removed, a third Shearith Israel cemetery was opened on 21st Street, steps west of 6th Avenue.
It was, even to writers of the later 19th century, a wonder that these three boneyards remained even partially intact. In 1875, The Jewish Messenger newspaper did a series on the city’s cemeteries, including the transcription of gravestone engravings that might otherwise have been lost to decay. Though the author of these pieces is unknown, it’s by their efforts that we know Joshua Canter lay in Shearith Israel Cemetery #2.
On this unlikely spot just east of 6th Avenue, our Herald reporter of 1893 observed, “Again and again attempts have been made to procure this pinch of ground for building purposes,” but all offers, from gentile and Jew alike, were ignored. “So it has been in the past, and so, doubtless it will be in the future. The plot, narrow and ugly as it is, desolate, uninviting, quiet neglected, will forever be held to extol the virtues of a race to whom it may be truly said, ‘They never forget the graves of their ancestors.’”
And yet … who was Canter? Even then, his weathered gravestone gave no indication, nor was his eminence such that it survived his passing.
His name was Joshua A. Canter, a portrait painter and art instructor, born in Denmark, likely in the latter half of the 18th century. In 1788, he emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina—then home to the United States’ largest Jewish population—where he was a notable portrait painter and art teacher. As Charleston’s economy faltered in the early 1820s, Canter moved to New York, where he died of unknown causes and was buried in 1826. While the city’s Jewish population remained small in those years, Canter’s life overlapped with the period when Jews began to take a more prominent role in New York’s public and political life.
Despite some scholarly interest, what might remain of Canter’s artwork is at present unidentified.
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The author expresses his gratitude for the work of Mary French and her New York Cemetery Project: https://www.nycemetery.com.
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