What Happened Today: October 03, 2022
Khamenei blames United States and Israel as protestors call for new regime; med students struggle with med studies; Credit Suisse “the worst bank in Europe,” but fine, for now
The Big Story
After weeks of riots and popular unrest in Iran directed against the government, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, claimed Monday that the protests, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians have participated, are a plot orchestrated by the United States and Israel. “I say this clearly that these riots were planned by America and the fake Zionist regime,” Khamenei said in an appearance at a military graduation ceremony, alluding to Israel in his first comments since the protests began. The mass demonstrations were sparked by the death of a young woman in police custody after her arrest for violating Iran’s stringent dress code. Thousands have so far been arrested, and 130 people have been killed in clashes with security forces; the violence could increase now that Khamenei has signaled to ratchet up the military crackdown. “Those who ignited unrest to sabotage the Islamic Republic deserve harsh prosecution and punishment,” he said.
The breadth and the intensity of the protests, with large numbers of protestors chanting “Death to Khamenei” and billboards depicting the leader set on fire in Tehran, suggest a renewed challenge to the often brutal, repressive rule of the religious elite that has ruled Iran for the past four decades. Tehran’s Sharif University cleared its campus on Monday after more than 200 students clashed with security forces late into Sunday evening. Local news accounts said police used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse the students, some of whom were driven into a parking garage where they were surrounded by police. An Iranian news wire, Mehr, reported that the protestors there chanted, “Students prefer death to humiliation.”
In the Back Pages: May I Be as Jewish Then as I Am Today
The Rest
→ As the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid finalizes negotiations with Lebanon over the disputed maritime rights of a potentially oil-rich area in the Mediterranean Sea, former prime minister and current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu is accusing Lapid of both hiding the details from lawmakers and the public and “shamefully surrendering to [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah’s threats” by “giving Hezbollah sovereign territory of the State of Israel.” This follows reports from Lapid’s administration that the deal, which is unfinished and thus remains undisclosed, would cede much of the disputed territory to Lebanon in exchange for royalties on whatever oil is found. Once the deal is complete, Israel’s attorney general will issue guidelines for how the details of the agreement will be reviewed and debated.
→ Tweet of the Day:
→ Peter Daszak—the coronavirus researcher whose company, EcoHealth Alliance, helped fund gain-of-function research on viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that would later feature prominently in debates about the origins of COVID-19 (often because he hid the facts about his research and affiliations)—has just received yet more funding from the National Institutes of Health to do yet more research into bats and the coronavirus. Daszak is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on SARS and the coronavirus, and he was central in writing and publishing a letter in The Lancet in February 2020, still in the early days of the pandemic, that “strongly condemn[ed] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” even though there was scant evidence at the time to reach such a conclusion. He also failed to share that in 2018 his lab submitted a research proposal that included an experiment to see if coronaviruses could be made more lethal to humans—the kind of experiment that proponents of the lab-leak theory allege were happening in Wuhan.
→ An award-winning professor of organic chemistry, with decades of experience teaching at Princeton and a widely used textbook under his byline, was terminated by NYU following an uproar by pre-med students who complained that his class was too difficult. The professor, Maitland Jones Jr., said the problems began well before the COVID-19 pandemic, with students over the past decade struggling to comprehend “exam questions at an astonishing rate,” according to a letter he wrote to the university after he was terminated. Jones had tried to help students during the pandemic by spending $5,000 of his own money to record his lectures, but it wasn’t enough. “A class with such a high percentage of withdrawals and low grades has failed to make students’ learning and well-being a priority and reflects poorly on the chemistry department as well as the institution as a whole,” wrote 82 of his 350 students in their petition. “The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply,” said NYU chemistry professor Paramjit Arora. Patients, of course, love wondering if their doctors passed chemistry in college and have no issue prioritizing the fragile emotional well-being of their medical providers over their solid grasp of basic science.
→ A stampede at a soccer match on Saturday in Indonesia’s capital of Jakarta caused one of the deadliest stadium catastrophes in history; authorities are now investigating whether police officers in the stadium escalated the violence and made the situation more deadly. The unrest in the stadium began when the home team lost, causing fans to spill onto the field; officers responded by clubbing those fans and then indiscriminately shooting tear gas canisters into the stands, forcing fans to flee out the narrow exits. At least 125 people died in the disaster, including 33 children.
→ Credit Suisse’s stocks were still plummeting Monday morning as investors dumped shares and continued buying up the company’s credit default swaps, or CDSs, which pay out if the company defaults on its debts—a clear sign that the bank’s troubles are far from over. This comes after Credit Suisse’s stocks dove 25% last month on the news that the company would become “leaner” in the wake of heavy losses last year. Executives from the bank have begun reaching out to investors to calm fears while trying to raise more funds. “The teams are actively engaging with our top clients and counterparties this weekend,” one executive told the Financial Times. “We are also getting incoming calls from our top investors with messages of support.” An executive from another firm told the Times that Credit Suisse is presently “the worst bank in Europe,” but not in immediate danger—a view that raters and analysts from JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank both share.
→ Question of the Day:
Babs has entered the chat.
→ Newly appointed British Prime Minister Liz Truss is backtracking on promised tax cuts for the country’s highest earners as that policy proposal met with fierce opposition and prompted interventions from the Bank of England to prop up the country’s plummeting currency and bond market. In the wake of Truss’ pledge to cut the rate for England’s highest earners, the value of the pound fell to nearly record lows against the dollar, and the country’s bond market sank, putting pension funds at risk of becoming overleveraged. “Any pension funds which have used even moderate levels of leverage are struggling to keep pace with the moves,” one investment manager told Bloomberg. Truss’ net approval rating had also dropped dramatically, diving almost 30 points in a single week. Conservative British lawmakers have taken notice, meanwhile, distancing themselves from the unpopular proposal. “I can’t support the 45p tax removal when nurses are struggling to pay their bills,” said Tory lawmaker Maria Caulfield.
→ With mortgage rates on the verge of 7%, the once red-hot housing market is cooling down, and new home developers are scrambling to find buyers. “We are being cold-called by builders we don’t even know,” said Bruce McNeilage, who runs a business catering to single-family renters. “They’re saying, ‘Nobody is going to qualify for financing. We’re going to suck wind on this. Let’s contact investors and see if they want an entire subdivision.’” Roughly 14% more homes were built this past August compared to August 2021, driving up inventory just as demand has begun to slack. Now, some of the biggest players in home development projects, such as KB Home, are walking away from deals to flip large tracts of land into new homes as sales continue to slide amid the ongoing volatility in the economy. That’s been good news for business owners like McNeilage, who’ve been getting discounts upwards of 20% to take the new homes off developers hands—though those savings aren’t necessarily being passed on to renters. “We think rental rates will remain very strong,” Dean Myerow, a rental owner, told The Wall Street Journal.
→ Image of the Day:
Off the coast of Haifa in the Mediterranean Sea, a diver happened upon this crustacean-covered iron sword. He retrieved it and contacted the Israel Antiquities Authority, which determined that this was a 900-year-old weapon likely left behind by Crusaders from Europe. The sword’s shell of shells kept it extraordinarily well preserved. The diver, Shlomi Katzin, also discovered fragments, pottery, and boat anchors from the same period, all laying together and exposed by the shifting sands.
Programming Note: The Scroll will be off Tuesday and Wednesday for Yom Kippur and will return on Thursday.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Divine Feminine by Maggie Phillips
Hindu Americans honor the power of women as the fall Navaratri festival gets underway, with implications for religion, culture, and politics.
The Purge by Chandler Davis
In memory of Chandler Davis, mathematician and human rights advocate
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.
May I Be as Jewish Then as I Am Today
In Ruth Wisse’s new translation, Jewish history is a tale of war that only makes us stronger
By Liel Leibovitz
All great translations are the record of two wars. The first, fought over fidelity, must be won by the author, whose sound, style, and soul are to be preserved at all cost. The second, fought over familiarity, is the translator’s for the taking, because every great translation is as much a wild recreation as it is a faithful facsimile. More than a bit of Scott Moncrieff shines through his (not Proust’s) In Search of Lost Time, and Alexander Pope was so invested in his Iliad that his frenemy Richard Bentley quipped, “it is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”
Add to that short and immortal list of combatants Chaim Grade and Ruth Wisse. The former was a writer doomed by circumstance to occupy a lesser rung on the ladder of Yiddish masters than his talent merits. The latter is our great scholar of Yiddish literature and a masterful writer in her own right, whose favorite themes—Jews and power, Jews and history, Jews and other Jews—make her a perfect pugilist for Grade. And so, just in time for Tishrei, we have what ought to be required reading for the Days of Awe, Wisse’s new translation of Grade’s My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner.
How to introduce the book? Best to begin in medias res: The narrator, also named Chaim, is sitting on a bench in Paris, all watched over by Moliere, Voltaire, and the other dead eminences whose stony likenesses adorn the city’s Hotel de Ville. He is talking to an old schoolmate of his, Hersh. Or maybe “talking” isn’t the mot juste: The word Grade chose in the original Yiddish was krig, or war, an apt term for a conversation that spans, in no apparent order, God’s culpability in the Holocaust, the possibility of a sustainable moral code divorced of religious faith, Platonism and its discontents, the nature of forgiveness, the rhythms of Jewish history, and other existential quandaries that can’t possibly be resolved in any one conversation—or one short story.
Chaim and Hersh were both students in a Yeshiva run by stringent rabbis who believed that life was best lived in a state of perpetual purification. It was the sort of place where you got in trouble for owning a comb, because caring about your appearance was a sign that you might be veering away from the singular dedication to moral self-improvement that was the only path a Jew ought to take in the world. Chaim couldn’t take it; he abandoned the school and Orthodoxy alike, became a famous writer, and spent the Second World War safely in Russia. Hersh stayed put, stayed faithful, survived a Nazi death camp, and ascended to become the head of a Yeshiva of his own.
As the two old friends continue their long-lived argument—the story gives us two brief vignettes, one from 1937 and the other from 1939, before settling down in postwar France for the showdown—one of Hersh’s students walks by and spots his rebbe. His name is Yehoshua, and he walks onto the scene like Ilsa sauntering into Rick’s Café Americain, a two-legged catalyst for urgent moral choices. Quickly, for Grade is artful with short sentences that contain multitudes, we learn that Yehoshua had survived the Holocaust in large part thanks to Hersh’s selflessness. Eager to defend his teacher, the boy joins in the quarrel, but, lacking Hersh’s mental agility and eloquence, he simply berates Chaim for failing to see that fervent sacrifice in service of Hashem is the one true path a Jew must take.
Prior to Yehoshua’s arrival, Chaim is so mild-mannered in his counterattack that readers could be forgiven for wondering if the conversation they’re witnessing is actually taking place, or if it’s some postmodern bifurcated monologue unfurling inside the author’s head, with both characters representing two sides of an argument Chaim is having with himself. But when provoked by Yehoshua’s harangues, the writer rises and delivers a rebuttal for the ages.
“My friends in my writers’ group—those in the Vilna ghetto who survived—they did risk their lives for their writing,” Chaim roars. “And they also put themselves at risk to rescue the manuscripts of great writers of the past. I’ll go further: you risked your life for a Sefer Torah, but you wouldn’t have done so for secular books. Maybe you didn’t approve of the Germans burning them, but you yourself would have burned them if you could. I understand now! My friends saved Jewish sacred texts, rare volumes, with the same devotion as Herzl’s diary and a letter from Maxim Gorky.”
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/ruth-wise-jewish-then-as-i-am-today