What Happened Today: October 25, 2022
Kanye gets boot from Adidas, CAA; Obama and Biden hit midterm trail; the mushroom arms race
The Big Story
Kanye West is running out of companies and associates who have not yet severed ties with the rapper following his string of antisemitic tirades during recent interviews and media appearances. Sneaker company Adidas, after initially making no statement following repeated antisemitic statements from West, announced on Tuesday that it had ended its decade-long partnership with the entertainer, saying his “comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful, and dangerous.” As recently as earlier this month, the German sports company championed its relationship with Kanye as “one of the most successful collaborations in our industry’s history.” Adidas is expected to take a hit of $245 million as it shuts down the Yeezy sneaker and clothing line that once amounted to 8% of the company’s total revenue.
Adidas could still sell the Yeezy products it owns the rights to with different branding, though scrubbing the Yeezy association isn’t so easy for MRC Entertainment, who halted distribution of a recently completed West documentary. Vogue and Balenciaga said they, too, were no longer working with West, as did premier Hollywood agency CAA, which previously represented the rapper. “Those who continue to do business with West are giving his misguided hate an audience,” Ari Emanuel, a top Hollywood executive, wrote in an op-ed, a sentiment echoed by the head of United Talent Agency, Jeremy Zimmer, who urged his employees to “please support the boycott of Kanye West.”
West, who wore a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at a Paris fashion event, has also been a vocal critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, writing on social media that “everyone knows that Black Lives Matter was a scam.” Ironically, BLM has repeatedly courted its own antisemitic controversies, including with the group’s founding 2016 platform, which accused Israel of being an “apartheid state” commiting a “genocide” against Palestinians.
In the Back Pages: From Knock Knock to the Goodbye
The Rest
→ Despite early midterm-election predictions that Democrats could buck political tradition and retain full control of Congress as the ruling president’s party, recent surveys show that persistent inflation and the rising cost of living has chipped away at the lead they held over the summer. Republicans are now up by as many as three percentage points in averages of national polls. To try to claw back some of that momentum in Pennsylvania, where the Senate race could determine who leads the chamber, President Biden will team up with former president Obama to barnstorm rallies throughout Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. It’s likely to be Biden’s sole outing on the campaign trail, despite the long-standing tradition of presidents swooping in to shore up candidates in tight midterm contests. In his stead, Obama is expected to keep the campaign going, with appearances scheduled in Detroit, Atlanta, and Milwaukee ahead of the Nov. 8 election.
→ FBI officials said on Monday that the agency is now opening investigations into Chinese espionage roughly once every 12 hours, just after the agency announced a slate of indictments against 13 Chinese nationals accused of spying and trying to interfere in the U.S. investigation of Chinese telecom behemoth Huawei.
According to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court, two Beijing intelligence officers offered $61,000 in Bitcoin and $14,000 in cash and jewelry to a U.S. double agent in an attempt to obtain information about the ongoing U.S. criminal investigation against Huawei.
Other Chinese nationals included in the indictment allegedly engaged in harassment of Chinese nationals residing in the United States, which prosecutors said was part of China’s Operation Fox Hunt, a “global extralegal effort” to bring dissidents and whistleblowers back to China.
Though the vast majority of attention by corporate media and several top Democratic officials has focused on Russian counterintelligence in recent years, the greater threat has long remained Chinese spying and theft of intellectual property. Recent estimates suggest the United States loses $600 billion each year because of stolen trade secrets used to beef up the Chinese military.
Early in the Biden administration, the Justice Department caused a stir after ending its China Initiative program, a spying deterrence effort criticized by some U.S. lawmakers as well as Chinese officials for racially profiling Asian Americans. Matthew Olsen, who ran the Justice Department program, said the initiative was trying to address “genuine national security concerns.”
→ Predicting the fate of Twitter amid the company’s ongoing leaks and legal disputes is a dicey proposition, but it seems that the company’s sale is one step closer to completion after Elon Musk sent paperwork to his investors signaling the deal would wrap up on Friday before a key courtroom deadline. Musk—who moved to buy the company then subsequently tried to back out of the deal—has said that once at the helm, he’d drastically reduce Twitter’s headcount, laying off 75% of its workers to keep a skeleton staff of 2,000. Current employees, some of whom had already been protesting Musk’s promise to make the platform more open to diverse political views, reacted poorly to the plan. In a letter to Musk and the current board of directors, employees of the social media company wrote that reductions to their ranks threatened the platform’s “ability to serve the public conversation.”
→ French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are set to meet on Wednesday to ease strain between the two nations after tensions rose last week when Macron said Germany risked “isolating itself” if it kept up its present energy policies. At the center of this discord is a disagreement over a European gas price cap, which France supported and Germany initially opposed, and looming behind that is Germany’s close energy relationship with Russia and growing ties with China. “The machine to produce compromises appears to be blocked up,” Pierre Sellal, France’s former representative to the European Union, said in an interview, though German officials have been quick to bat away such rumors. “We differ on some things but not on the really fundamental issues,” one official said. While there is fundamental agreement between the two countries, France is growing concerned that Germany’s eyes keep wandering to the East, and to China in particular, after Germany recently signed an air-defense pact with 14 eastern European nations, France not among them.
→ Number of the Day: $9.4 million
The amount Stacey Abrams’ voting rights organization, Fair Fight Action, paid the gubernatorial candidate’s campaign chairwoman and close friend in legal fees in 2019 and 2020. Much of the money ostensibly funded the lawsuit Abrams’ organization brought against Georgia’s secretary of state and board of elections alleging the state’s elections system “violated the First, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Abrams and her organization have been a galvanizing national force in the Democratic Party, raising millions of dollars from donors. As the money was pouring in, some critics raised questions about the large sums being paid to Abrams’ associate to fight a case that was suspected to be—and has since proven to be—rather flimsy, with the presiding judge ruling against Abrams on almost all counts. “It happens all the time. It is the way our system is built, that the political leaders and the policy leaders are one in the same. So this is not unique to [Abrams’ friend],” Norm Eisen, a White House ethics adviser during the Obama administration, told Politico. “We not only countenance it, we embrace it; that is the American political, legal and ethical system.”
Read More: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/24/stacey-abrams-fair-fight-action-00061348
→ Companies are feverishly competing for the future of highly lucrative legal drug sales, filing hundreds of patents in recent years to warn other psychedelic mushroom manufacturers not to harsh their buzz by encroaching on the market for depression and anxiety treatments. The National Institutes of Health and academic research centers are exploring the potential benefits of psilocybin, but there are growing concerns that a high volume of legal action from the private sector could slow scientific progress. As Robin Feldman, an expert on pharmaceutical intellectual property at the University of California Hastings College of Law put it, “What we’re seeing is a clash of cultures between the altruism of those who want to use existing compounds in new and exciting ways crashing up against the realities of the patent system.”
→ Two men accused of making thousands of robocalls with false voter information in the run-up to the 2020 election pled guilty to felony charges on Monday. Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman made recorded robocalls accusing Pete Buttigieg and Robert Mueller of sexual harassment while cautioning voters that showing up to ballot boxes could guarantee their enrollment in mandatory vaccination programs. Voters were also warned not to turn over “private information to the man” at polling places, as police were on the lookout for any voters with outstanding warrants. The two men, who achieved some national notoriety for pushing various fringe conspiracy theories online, tried to have the charges thrown out, claiming the robocalls constituted protected speech under the First Amendment.
→ Video of the Day:
MrBeast, a YouTube star with more than 100 million subscribers (his channel ranks among the top five most subscribed in the world) is now looking to raise roughly $150 million as part of a $1.5 billion valuation for his YouTube empire. Those figures make this recent post featuring MrBeast squaring up against Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in a $100,000 Rock-Paper-Scissor showdown a bit more understandable. MrBeast will put the billions he’s hoping to secure toward expanding his YouTube empire, producing and selling more consumer goods and merchandise, and further developing his two recently launched food companies, the virtual restaurant called MrBeast Burger, which uses other restaurants to prepare reportedly mediocre burgers, and the highly lucrative Feastables snack line.
→ Quote of the Day:
As someone who developed asthma because of the toxic air I breathed growing up in public housing, I am painfully aware that environmental justice is racial justice. Stifling innovations that can unlock carbon markets and stimulate climate action is the exact opposite of what we should be doing during a crisis.
In the latest example of how money in politics erodes public trust of elected officials, Bronx Congressman Ritchie Torres wrote the above in a letter sent to the American Carbon Registry as he asked it to reverse course on its policies pausing cryptocurrency tokenization, a highly pollutant method for cryptocurrency production. This support followed Torres’ praise of cryptocurrency in a Tweet as “the future,” adding that “New York should and must embrace crypto.” What he didn’t tweet out is that he’d received tens of thousands of dollars in support from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz—funding he did not disclose until it was reported by CNBC. Cryptocurrency remains, Torres has said, our “best hope for de-concentrating power in both finance and technology.”
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
Even Richard Nixon Has Got Soul by David Mikics
Hunter S. Thompson’s classic ‘Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972’ demonstrates a human empathy and political savvy that today’s hack political propagandists lack.
Harvard and the End of the Jewish Ivy League by Tablet Podcasts
Gatecrashers Ep. 8: Declining Jewish student numbers, the changing face of the American university, and what happens in the generations after the gates are crashed
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.
From Knock-Knock to Goodbye
“We’re all the children of nine—kul-na iw-laad ti-sa.”
That’s how Robby Berman, an American Israeli religiously observant Jew with a brown crocheted kippah atop his buzz cut, concluded his presentation in New York-accented Arabic to a classroom of 11th and 12th graders, Christians and Muslims, at the Schmidt College School for Girls in East Jerusalem in the spring of 2017. As founder and director of the Halachic Organ Donation Society, an organization generally dedicated to educating Jews about religious issues to increase organ donation, Berman was there to speak to the students about organ donation and the importance of saving lives. Among Muslims, as among Jews, the rates of organ donations are low due to questions regarding the permissibility of organ transplantation; he wanted to assert that the medical claim that brain death defines the end of life ought to be taken seriously.
But in speaking these final words, Berman was not just educating about organ donation; he was also bridging the Israeli-Palestinian divide through the use of idiom, as he is wont. He was finding the figurative language that paints a robust image rich with texture that opens the heart. The implication of that particular expression—“children of nine,” referring to the nine months we’ve all spent in the womb before being born, an expression that all the students would have understood as part of their local Arabic lexicon—made it a perfect way to end his speech that day: “We’re all human beings, we’re all equal.”
“To speak a language, you need to know its idioms and expressions,” Berman explained. “You can learn grammar in a classroom and vocabulary from a dictionary, but idioms are hard to come by. Usually people pick them up on the street.”
Berman had been picking up Palestinian Arabic idioms for many years. More than a decade ago, he started studying Arabic intensively and scribbling spoken Palestinian Arabic expressions, initially in transliteration, on the margins of paper scraps, the backs of dog-eared spiral notebooks, envelopes of junk mail, the flaps of a Cheerios box. In his distinctive indecipherable vertical script, he recorded expressions like “il-baab biy-faw-wet Ja-mal,” which literally means the door is big enough to bring in a camel, but figuratively means: If you don’t like it, you and your camel are free to leave—take a hike.
“I learn visually, so I had to write them all down,” said Berman. He periodically loaded the bits and pieces into an Excel spreadsheet that grew and grew. When it reached 1,000 entries, he realized that he had the makings of a book.
That book—the first and only English compilation of its kind, with more than 1,800 entries—is called Min Taq Taq: A Collection of Arabic idioms in the Palestinian Dialect. The title itself is taken from “min Taq-Taq las-sa-laa-mu a-LE-kom,” an Arabic idiom literally translated as “from knock knock to the goodbye,” meaning all the details from start to finish. The compilation was published last year by Minerva Publishing, the largest publisher of Palestinian Colloquial Arabic books. A Hebrew version was released in July 2021. Thus far, thousands of copies have been sold in English and in Hebrew, and reprinting of both is underway. (In English, it’s a second reprint.)
No other books like this exist because the Arabic language exists in a state of diglossia, where there are two registers of the same language in a speech community: amiyye, a colloquial Arabic that is spoken at home and on the street, and fusha, or written literary Arabic. Arabic speakers don’t typically compile and write down their spoken expressions. Rather, they write in Modern Standard Arabic, the modern version of Classical Arabic.
For the novice stepping up to learn the language, the lack of a collection of written-down spoken idioms can make it hard to connect, said Berman. When he began learning and speaking Palestinian Arabic, he encountered many idioms that left him clueless: “I was trying to have a political conversation with a Palestinian friend and he said, ‘hOnmar-baT il-fa-ras’—‘this is where the horse is tied.’ I said, ‘What horse? Where? You’re not a farmer! I thought you had a car!”
The friend laughed out loud, and told him, “It’s an idiom, ya’ani, it means this is the crux of the matter, this is the critical point.” (The parallel Hebrew idiom is “poh kavur hakelev”—this where the dog is buried.)
Read the rest here:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/palestinian-arabic-idioms-robby-berman