What Happened Today: June 30, 2023
Hundreds arrested in France riots; Portland in ruins; RIP Alan Arkin
The Big Story
The third night of rioting across France after the police shooting of a teen boy of Algerian and Moroccan descent saw 12 public buses burning in Paris and 875 arrests by Friday morning. France’s interior minister suspended bus and train service while announcing a crackdown on the sale of the large fireworks that have been used in the protests, sometimes against police.
As a separate phenomenon from the protests earlier this year against President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed retirement-entitlement reforms, the current demonstrations stem primarily from the widely shared video of the police shooting Nahel M. at point-blank range, Tablet contributor and French journalist Marc Weitzmann told The Scroll—though the uprising isn’t only about the young man’s death. “What you call the racial tension is a multifactorial situation where social crisis, misunderstood colonial history, misplaced loyalties, and racism on all sides play a part,” Weitzmann said. He added that while police in France are notorious for being both under-equipped and prone to acts of prejudice and racism on the job, the young rioters are also heavily influenced “by far-left mythology, Islamist groups, and apocalyptic mass culture” embedded in the “propaganda traveling across the country thanks to social network activists.”
French officials said on Friday that the gendarmerie was now authorized to use armored vehicles to tame the unrest, though there has been no sign of the protests abating. In Nanterre, not far from where the shooting took place, a Holocaust memorial was defaced in graffiti. On a nearby building, someone wrote, “Bitches, we are going to make you a Shoah.” “Whatever measure is taken now won’t solve the problems,” Weitzmann said. “Even if order is superficially restored for a while, the question remains: What will happen in a year from now, when the Olympics open?”
In the Back Pages: Fitting In on the Fourth of July
The Rest
→ It’s been a terrible week to fly United Airlines, as the beleaguered carrier has had to cancel 3,000 flights since Saturday. While some of the cancellations were due to inclement weather, insiders say that’s not the half of it: “United’s travel disruptions this week stem from one source; company senior management’s inadequate planning,” said Captain Garth Thompson, head of the Air Line Pilots Association unit at United. The flight attendants union blamed management as well, but the airline leaders say these delays and disruptions lie at the feet of the Federal Aviation Administration. No matter who’s to blame, it still stinks to be a passenger these days. As a friend of The Scroll reported in, “I need a beer after my 5:30a flight was delayed until 9:30a and ultimately cancelled and rescheduled for 2 fucking days later.”
→ Thread of the Day:
https://twitter.com/NancyRomm/status/1674534261121069058
In this blistering thread, journalist Nancy Rommelmann lays out the desecration of Portland, Oregon, where the murder rate has quadrupled in the past five years, drug overdoses doubled between 2019 and 2022, robberies are up 50% in 2022, 25% of downtown real estate remains empty, and there are more than 700 homeless encampments in the city of 635,000 people. Rommelmann reminds us that until recently, Portland was on the rise as one of the United States’ most exciting young cities. Decay, it seems, can happen in the blink of an eye.
→ After much negotiation, New York City has a budget, at least for FY 2024. The $107 billion the city set aside, however, includes many cuts to existing programs, though some say the reductions won’t be enough to keep the city financially healthy in the coming years, with a projected $8 billion deficit in 2027. Deficit aside, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams says taking money from the rehabilitation programs for inmates at Rikers Island was a big mistake, though Mayor Eric Adams defended the move, declaring any money to external rehabilitation programs was “an insult” to the corrections department.
→ On Friday, survivors of a capsized boat of immigrants that led to an estimated 300 to 600 deaths accused the Greek Coast Guard of accidentally capsizing the ship in a botched attempt to tow the vessel. Migrants claim they screamed at the Greek sailors to stop as the boat rocked back and forth while being towed, but the Coast Guard claims no tow was attempted. The tragedy comes amid at least 50,000 attempted crossings of the Mediterranean already this year.
→ On June 20, the Michigan House of Representatives passed a new bill that will make it a felony to “intimidate” someone by making them feel “terrorized, frightened, or threatened.” The legislation also specifies penalties for anyone who targets people based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. The problem, many critics have pointed out, is that the bill’s criteria for a violation is based entirely on how a victim feels, a subjective measurement that could ultimately be weaponized by someone looking to chill speech or behavior they find offensive. The bill now moves on to the Senate.
→ On July 14 the World Health Organization is set to release new guidance on aspartame, an artificial sweetener otherwise known as Equal or NutraSweet, which may possibly be “carcinogenic to humans.” The compound was discovered by accident in 1965 and approved by the FDA since 1974, but the Center for Science in the Public Interest says that a growing body of “compelling evidence [finds] that it causes cancer and is a potent carcinogen.” The American Beverage Association of course strongly disagrees. Another entry in the annals of artificial products or medicines approved by the FDA that take years and years to show harm—because science takes time.
→ Graphic of the Day:
California and New York have lost enough wealthy taxpayers in the past year that their balance sheets are in the red. Meanwhile, Texas and Florida, which have no income tax, are still showing revenue growth off sales tax alone in their thriving economies. While federal money made it look as if California had a surplus over the past few years, the state is actually $32 billion in the hole. Luckily, it’s also stashed away the nation’s largest reserves of cash, at $38 billion.
→ On Friday, the Supreme Court ended its term with two more blockbuster rulings, this time on free speech and student loan repayment.
In a 6-3 decision, the court found that a Colorado website designer must not be compelled to work on websites for gay marriages because the First Amendment cannot allow a state to compel “an individual to speak in ways that align with its views but defy her conscience about a matter of major significance.”
The same 6-3 split ruled that the Supreme Court would halt President Biden’s plan to forgive $430 billion in student loans, finding that it would be an overreach of the executive branch.
The 9/11 era HEROES act provides the secretary of education the authority to waive or modify loan programs in the event of an emergency, but the Supreme Court majority found that it does not give the executive the power to “transform” the existing statutes.
Representing the dissenting justices, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the HEROES act does allow for the Biden program and accused the majority of substituting its own policy judgment in place of Congress and the Executive. Interest on loans will resume Sept. 1, and payments in October.
→ RIP the great American Jewish actor Alan Arkin, who passed Thursday at the age of 89. Arkin was a Tony, Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Oscar winner—the Oscar was for his indelible role in Little Miss Sunshine in 2006. More recently, he played opposite Michael Douglas in their heartfelt show about Hollywood, acting, and aging, The Kominsky Method, for which he also received two Emmy nominations. He is survived by his sons, Adam, Matthew, and Anthony, and his wife, Suzanna Newlander. Zichrono livracha.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Magic of Arak by Dana Kessler
This anise-flavored liquor is perfect for cocktails. It’s also medicinal. And according to some, it can even do miracles.
Every Day Is Like 9/11 by David Meir Grossman
A new concept album puts tragedy on repeat
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.
Fitting In on the Fourth of July
For Jewish immigrants more than a century ago, Independence Day offered a chance to demonstrate their American identity—quietly
The Fourth of July was no picnic for American Jews of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As members of a minority religion—a “snail among elephants,” as one American Jew of the 1890s colorfully described his co-religionists, many of whom were also recently arrived immigrants—they sought opportunities throughout the year to demonstrate their fealty to the republic lest their commitment to America be questioned by native-born, white, Christian Americans.
The Fourth of July, a holiday given over to “rampant patriotism,” ranked high among these opportunities. More obligation than occasion, it was tailor-made for American Jews eager to show the colors: a command performance.
Besides, “Uncle Sam’s birthday” was great fun. A day off from work, it was marked by parades, outdoor concerts, baseball games, bonfires, and greased pig contests. Every one of these activities was punctuated, from morning to night, by the sights and sounds of fireworks and “Chinese crackers,” Roman candles, and gunfire from both toy pistols and the real deal.
Between the incessant “crack, boom, and splutter” of explosive devices and the growing number of casualties and even deaths that resulted from handling them, things got so bad in America of the 1900s that increasing numbers of concerned citizens began to wonder “why a nation of apparently sane people should countenance” this annual display of firepower.
As petitions in favor of tightening existing restrictions on firecrackers, or banning them outright, gathered steam, spreading across the country, it didn’t take long before the public hue and cry took shape as an organized social movement known as the “Safe and Sane Fourth.” Working together with municipal officials and civic reformers in the years prior to WWI, it sought to curb the use of these dangerous props and to fill the resulting “awkward silence” with more peaceful, decorous alternatives.
Though some Americans fretted lest “all the ginger [was] taken out of our national holiday,” and rued the absence of its characteristic “pep,” most celebrants went along with, and approved of, attempts to “debrutalize” the occasion.
Possibilities abounded: Two pages’ worth of suggestions ran in the Journal of Education in 1912. Bell ringing, bugle calling, an automobile parade, horse and pony races, the sending up of balloons, “motion picture exhibitions in public squares,” as well as floats, pageants, and tableaux featuring “important incidents” in American history as well as the contributions made by America’s “nationalities” to the republic’s well-being were just a few of the many options which, as The New York Times would have it, were “even better than the old-fashioned Fourth.”
Some of these pointedly wholesome activities were designed to “keep young America on tiptoe from sunrise to bedtime, too busy and interested to bewail the absence of dangerous explosives and firearms.” Others were designed to keep immigrants in line.
On the surface, the Safe and Sane Fourth movement had to do with public safety, with eliminating practices that endangered the commonweal. Who could argue with that? When you look a little more closely, it becomes increasingly clear that this particular civic reform had even more to do with control of the streets, with defining and regulating what constituted appropriate forms of leisure, especially among the foreign-born, rendering its campaign less benign and more disturbing. Safety might have been the pitch; Americanization was the point.
Acting on—and concretizing—the widespread but erroneous belief that rowdiness and noise-making was the handiwork of “aliens,” as immigrants were often called, the Safe and Sane Fourth movement singled out foreign-born Jews for making a “low, vulgar” racket on the Fourth and for endangering everyone else’s health and welfare. Implicit throughout was the notion that they needed to be taught how to salute America and, more damning still, that they were insufficiently grateful to their adopted homeland.
More established, middle-class American Jews, always eager to please, or, at the very least, determined not to rock the boat, went along with that assessment; few challenged the notion that their co-religionists were accountable for the mayhem, or that they could do better when it came to acknowledging their good fortune. In New York, prominent Jewish philanthropists such as Mortimer Schiff and Otto Kahn joined with equally prominent do-gooders such as Lillian Wald and Flora Spiegelberg to see to it that residents of the Lower East Side celebrated the Fourth in an appropriately respectful manner.
Under their watchful eye, a “picture show of a patriotic character” was screened at the People’s Theater, at the corner of Rivington Street and the Bowery; the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English at various neighborhood gatherings; a parade composed of representatives of local Jewish organizations marched through the downtown streets, while the kids of the neighborhood were encouraged to engage in organized bouts of flag-waving. No longer did the public experience the kind of “discomfort” they had once felt, observed the Forverts on its front page on July 4, 1911, adding that when “going out on the streets, one didn’t feel the same fear of being shot as one used to feel.”
From time to time, some American Jews bristled at the idea that the foreign-born among them were more in need of civic lessons than the native-born. The “very reverse is the case,” chided the American Israelite in 1914, urging those who thought otherwise to “read and read carefully, Mary Antin’s The Promised Land.” Immigrant Jews, their champions believed, “outdid” their more established compatriots in their demonstrations of patriotism and needed no special coaxing, or distinctive programming.
Other American Jews had different grounds for demurring from the Safe and Sane Fourth’s agenda, taking offense at the sight of floats and other mobile expressions of patriotism like those promoted in 1909 by the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, in which Jews appeared alongside “negroes” (sic). Classifying both in terms of race, they claimed, was regrettable and in “bad taste,” too. And still others rejected any differentiation on the basis of origin, insisting that immigrants be seen alongside the native-born as “Americans without qualifications.”
The Safe and Sane Fourth movement hit its stride around 1914 before fizzling out and going the way of most mild-mannered efforts at civic uplift. Americanization soon became a year-round political project, not just an occasional gesture: more a matter of coercion than of persuasion.
In its day, the campaign made sure the Fourth of July went off with few hitches. In ours, we’ve come to see that celebrations of the nation’s birthday were not all fun and games.