What Happened Today: October 27, 2022
Cost of living protests sweep Europe; Musk plays nice with Twitter advertisers; lobbyists storm the Federal Reserve
The Big Story
Teachers, nurses, and railway workers led strikes in dozens of French cities on Thursday, as a wave of protests across Europe challenged the soaring cost of living across the continent. With tens of thousands taking to city streets in Romania, Belgium, Hungary, Germany, and the Czech Republic, and at least 100,000 last week at earlier protests across France, discontent with skyrocketing energy bills and food prices is reaching a fevered pitch. French President Emmanuel Macron agreed on Wednesday that workers were justified to demand higher wages, and promised this week to add more funds to the roughly $71 billion that France has deployed to combat inflation, much of which has been propelled by the energy crisis stemming from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “There’s no quick fix to the energy crisis,” said Torbjorn Soltvedt, an analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, a consulting firm in England. “And if anything, inflation looks like it might be worse next year than it has been this year.”
With inflation already up 9.9% across the 19 nations using the euro, the prospect of intensifying economic pressure driving wider protests has European officials alarmed about both disruptions to critical infrastructure and potential political backlash to support of Ukraine. Already, French union strikes at critical refineries and fuel distribution hubs have led to gas shortages around the country. And while European nations have collectively dispersed more than $566 billion to offset residential and business energy costs since 2021, there’s a growing sentiment, particularly in east Germany and among low-income Europeans struggling with runaway food prices, that support for sanctions against Russia and military aid to Ukraine shouldn’t take precedent over measures to offset the burden of inflation on Europeans.
In the United States, Democratic strategists are starting to openly express fears of a potential rout come November because campaigns haven’t made the economy a priority. Earlier this week, candidates began rolling out new messaging that moves away from calls to make the election a moratorium on Roe v. Wade and other culture war issues and instead champions Democrat-led stimulus efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Voters have to “know you understand what is going on their lives,” four longtime Democratic strategists wrote last week in a plea for party candidates to shift their focus. “They want to know you are helping with their No. 1 problem and have a plan.”
Read More: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/strikes-protests-europe-over-cost-living-pay-2022-10-18/
In the Back Pages: Israel’s French New Wave
The Rest
→ Will 2022 be the year the Democratic Party loses Florida for good? Democratic strategists worry the Senate and gubernatorial contests are all going to stay red, and longtime blue districts are flipping in that direction, which has prompted a rapid halt to campaign funding across the Sunshine State. Already, incumbent Ron DeSantis leads his challenger for the governor’s race by 11 points, and Marco Rubio has rallied to overtake the lead once held by his opponent, leading Val Demings by 7 points. Democrats now wonder what they’ll do in 2024 and if Florida will retain its status as a decisive swing state in the presidential election. For whoever becomes the next Republican candidate for president, taking over the traditionally blue stronghold of Miami-Dade, along with a growing base of Latino voters registering as Republicans, could turn Florida into the linchpin of a 2024 presidential victory. “If Democrats follow this building national narrative and decide not to compete in Florida in 2024, it will be one of the most short-sighted decisions of the last 30 years,” Greg Goddard, a veteran Florida democratic fundraiser, told Politico.
→ Konstantin Vorontsov, a senior Russian foreign ministry official, told the United Nations First Committee that “quasi-civilian infrastructure may be a legitimate target for a retaliatory strike,” including “components of civilian space infrastructure belonging to the United States and its allies in armed conflicts.” The bellicose comments, Vorontsov contends, are a response to the satellites being deployed by the United States to support Ukraine’s war effort—“an extremely dangerous trend.” The escalatory rhetoric from Russia comes after Moscow warned in recent days that Ukraine is planning to use a dirty bomb—a claim that is widely interpreted as a pretense for Russia to do so first. Ukraine has relied on American satellites, many of which have been donated by Elon Musk, to target Russian forces. These satellites have proven vital for Ukraine’s ability to communicate and fight effectively. The prospect of Russia targeting these satellites would not only hamper Ukraine’s defense efforts but also threaten to drag the West into a wider conflict with Russia.
→ As Elon Musk prepares to officially take over Twitter, advertisers have two big concerns: Musk’s commitment to free speech will place major corporate ad campaigns next to content they find objectionable; and Musk’s own conflict of interest as the owner of a Tesla will make it impossible for auto industry competitors to trust Twitter with their targeted ad information. Though Twitter comprises roughly 1% of digital ad spending in the United States, it is coveted real estate, and Musk has tried to assuage concerned ad buyers, writing in a note Thursday that “fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the most respected advertising platform in the world that strengthens your brand and grows your enterprise.” In the past, Musk has expressed distaste for ads on the platform, but he’ll have to reinvent Twitter’s business model before he kicks ad buyers to the curb: Currently, advertisers account for 89% of total revenue.
→ Upon entering office, President Biden announced that, unlike his predecessor, he would respect the Federal Reserve’s independence by not lobbying it to adopt policies that would support his goals. The business and banking communities, however, made no such claims, and have been aggressively lobbying the Fed for favorable regulatory policies. The Chamber of Commerce, for instance, the largest business lobby in the country, put a chunk of its roughly $15.5 million lobbying budget toward supporting Jerome Powell’s nomination as Fed chair while championing his deregulatory policies. “The Fed has a history of caving to corporate special interests,” Elizabeth Warren told The Intercept, “and I’ve loudly warned about the dangers of financial deregulation under Chair Powell that risk Americans’ economic security.” Although meeting with banks and financial firms goes against the Fed’s own communications policies, records on the Fed’s website reveal regular meetings with banks and lobbyists, including Discover Financial, Student Loan Servicing Alliance, National Bankers Association, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.
→ In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the nationwide protests that followed, Penn State unveiled plans to open a Center for Racial Justice and quickly created a faculty committee to work out the details. “This is just the beginning,” Penn State’s president promised at the time. The beginning hasn’t amounted to much, however, as local reporting in October found that the university was “wavering” on funding the center— which was confirmed by Penn State’s president on Wednesday, who said the university would be abandoning plans for the center to “inventory, evaluate, and enhance existing [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging] programs [and] efforts.” Those existing programs, according to some faculty members of color at Penn State, don’t amount to much either. In 2020, months before George Floyd’s murder, several faculty members at Penn State penned a two-part report documenting the institution’s failures to attract and keep faculty of color or to address accusations of racism across the university’s campuses.
→ Graph of the Day:
Meta has seen some ups and downs over the years, but its latest reports on quarterly ad revenue have finally landed in the red. The company announced on Wednesday that revenue fell 4% this past quarter and might drop another 7% in the quarter to come. Net income, meanwhile, plummeted 52%, and Meta’s stock price has followed suit. While some of the lost ad revenue is merely a result of an industrywide pullback on ad spending, with companies saving their funds for the seven years of famine to come, much of it is owed to Meta’s struggles to keep users engaged on Facebook while it invests heavily in virtual reality technology and Reels, its counterpunch to TikTok; neither of those projects has yet to produce much profit.
→ The inquest looking into the death of Molly Russell—a British 14-year-old who took her own life in 2017 after struggling with depression and routinely engaging with social media content featuring suicide and depression—concluded that those social media sites “likely” contributed to her death. The inquest was launched at the request of Russell’s parents and overseen by a senior coroner, Andrew Walker, who believes she died from “an act of self-harm whilst suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content.” Russell was constantly offered content related to suicide and depression by Instagram’s and Pinterest’s algorithms, which feed users more of whatever they have shown a preference for; she engaged with such posts 2,100 times in the final six months of her life. While the inquest is not legally actionable, it does add yet more data on the negative impact of social media sites on children and teenagers—findings that Instagram has internally gathered as well, according to the company’s leaked documents. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” a slide shared internally by Meta employees in 2021 said. “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide shared internally.
→ Pfizer is in hot water as Italian officials investigate if the pharmaceutical giant’s $1.2 billion in profits made by its Italian unit between 2017 and 2019 were routed to other worldwide divisions to avoid paying taxes. If the Italian tax authority finds wrongdoing, the hefty fine wouldn’t be the company’s first. In 2009, Pfizer was ordered to pay $2.3 billion, the largest fine for healthcare fraud ever paid, for illegally marketing four of its drugs for purposes other than their FDA-approved application.
→ Quote of the Day:
As we grieve this deadliest act of antisemitism in American history, we stand with the community of Squirrel Hill—and Jewish communities across America and around the world—in resolving to combat antisemitism and hate in all of its forms. This is especially true as we witness an ugly increase in antisemitism in America.
President Biden’s statement marking the fourth anniversary of the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where a gunman entered the shul during Shabbat morning services and spent 20 minutes walking about the building and killing congregants. “All Jews must die!” he shouted during the rampage. He killed 11 people, including several Holocaust survivors, and injured six people. “In the four years since that terrible day,” Biden’s statement goes on, “the people of Pittsburgh have shown us what it means to be stronger than hate. Welcoming the community to Torah study sessions. Showing their support for refugees and immigrants. Reimagining the Tree of Life synagogue as both sanctuary and memorial. The courage and character of the Pittsburgh community remains an inspiration to us all.” According to data from the Anti-Defamation League, antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2021 reached an all-time high, and there’s reason to believe that 2022’s numbers will be worse.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman, and Clayton Fox
TODAY IN TABLET:
Luxury on the Lower East Side by Jenna Weissman Joselit
A new hotel rises on the site of a century-old bank that was once essential for the neighborhood’s Jewish immigrants
Sophie, Max, and Freud By Liel Liebovitz
A writer’s journey to discover her father’s family leads her to the father of psychoanalysis
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.
Israel’s French New Wave
The growing and distinctly western Mediterranean olim are a boon to Israel but a dark omen for the future of France
By Matti Friedman
The rumblings of Jewish history take many forms, and in this case the form was a disk of lemon filling, the dough brittle, the meringue slightly browned. I was at Gagou de Paris. Across the street was the rival patisserie L’Artisan. I was called jeune homme by a manager graciously rounding down and heard French at three of the four outdoor tables adjacent to mine. But hurrying by us on the sidewalk were the familiar capotes, the e-bikes, the skinny jeans on Arab teens, the religious girls with hair wrapped like African queens—it was Jerusalem.
Because the condition of Jews is a barometer of events anywhere, and because Israel has always been a barometer of Jewish life in other places, in Israel you can sense events far away. Even without ever watching the news this year, for example, you’d notice unusual numbers of Ukrainians around, and young Russian speakers with fashionable sneakers just off the plane from Sheremetyevo, bewildered and traveling light, and you’d know that something fateful is happening in and around the Russian Federation.
In the same vein, what does it mean that when I walk down a short stretch of Bethlehem Road in south Jerusalem, near my own street, I now pass the new butcher shop Le Charolais, and then the even newer bakery Delices de Paris, before reaching the restaurant Rendez-Vous? Discussing French affairs through cuisine is a cliché, yes, but the altered gastronomical landscape of the neighborhood is hard to miss. And what about the families erupting from Sephardic synagogues around here on Shabbat by the dozens, shouting “arrête Ayala!” and “viens Eitan!”? Or the fact that of the kids in my son’s kindergarten last year, a quarter had parents recently arrived from Paris or Marseilles? I would never claim to understand the soul of a culture whose language I don’t speak, or of a place where I’ve never lived. But even through the limited lens of this city, it’s clear that something is happening, and that it’s linked to the increasingly unsettled feeling of Jewish life in these times.
At Le Charolais, under a few sides of beef hanging elegantly from hooks and by shelves stocked with imported preserves, I met Avraham Haim, 61, who spoke to me while dismembering red slabs with an enormous knife. Haim, who has a beard and a black kippah, trained at Potel et Chabot, the 200-year-old Paris caterer. This butcher shop, which opened three years ago, serves many French customers who are professionals, he said, people who are used to high standards from home and can pay. “The people who come here know what they want,” he said. He came to Jerusalem 15 years ago and commutes from the neighborhood of Har Homa, which is now heavily French. When I asked why he moved to Israel, he said it was because his wife wanted to. When I asked why French Jews were moving in general, he mentioned the fear of violence, the sense that the country no longer seems itself: “It isn’t France anymore, it’s Muslim.” I asked if he thought Jews had a future in France. He paused with his knife. “I am not a prophet,” he said.
Down the street, the chef at Rendez-Vous had a different take. Yoni Markezana, 34, grew up in Marseilles, son of a father with old family roots in the city and a mother from Algeria. The new arrivals in Israel are overwhelmingly of North African extraction, as France’s Jewish community, estimated at about 440,000, mostly hails from the old colonial possessions of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. The same is true of French Muslims. “We came with them, and I grew up with them,” Markezana said of the Muslims of Marseilles. His parents moved the family to Israel when Yoni was 14. The move was due not to fear, but to Zionism. “It was their dream,” he said.
I asked about concerns of violence committed by Muslim radicals, the kind of events that make the international news. He sees this as a more pressing concern in Paris than in Marseilles. “People say there are lots of Arabs in France, but ...,” he grinned, and gestured around at the city. More than a third of Jerusalem’s residents are Arab Muslims. If you’re fleeing a threat from radical Islam in Europe, where you’ve already fled from your ancestral home in Muslim North Africa, does it really make sense to choose the heart of the Arab Middle East?
There have always been French Jews in Israel, but the sense in recent years is that a “wave” of immigration is under way, and that this population has assumed a critical mass that didn’t exist before. It’s not quite the Russian wave, which brought a million people to Israel in the 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed; since 1972, the first year for which the Absorption Ministry has records, the number of arrivals from France is a tenth of that number—106,775. But of those, a remarkable 41,860 have come in just the last 10 years.
As a result, the French have assumed a solid shape in the shared imagination of the Israeli public—not the older clichés of de Gaulle or Yves Montand, but that of a traditional Jew, less European than Mediterranean, Casablanca via Paris, God-fearing, life-loving, right-leaning, the imprint of a Star of David necklace sunburned onto the chest after too many hours at the beach. The beach at Netanya, of course, because with all due respect to Jerusalem, it’s Netanya, on the coast north of Tel Aviv, that’s seen as the holy city of the French. On a recent afternoon in a local playground there, nearly all of the young families seemed to be Francophone. A municipal spokeswoman told me with impressive precision that 16,602 French immigrants have moved in since 2002, and estimated the number of Francophone residents at about double that, just over 10% of the population. Netanya is in fact “the Riviera of Israel,” according to the jingle that plays while you’re on hold on the phone with city hall, though I have not heard this anywhere else.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-french-new-wave-matti-friedman
"... as a pretense ..." -- should read "... as a pretext ..."
Apologies for acting as your editor. Professional habit :)