What Happened Today: October 4, 2023
Chaos reins in GOP; Canada’s crackdown on podcasts; Airlines duped in safety scam
The Big Story
The contentious battle to replace Kevin McCarthy after he was ousted as House speaker on Tuesday night is already in full swing. On Wednesday morning, Reps. Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise each announced their run to lead the lower chamber, and several other lawmakers are rumored to be eyeing their own bids. The sudden collapse of the GOP leadership following the historic removal of McCarthy, the House’s first defenestration of a speaker, underscores the instability of the Republicans, who have no clear path forward.
In January, during the chaotic 15 rounds of voting McCarthy endured to secure the speakership, he relented to demands from the hard-right faction led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, agreeing to implement a new House rule that allows any congressional member to call for the removal of the speaker. Now that Gaetz has utilized that very rule to oust McCarthy, the threat of it being used, or abused, against his replacement makes the leadership role all the less appealing. “I’m not sure I would wish this job on anyone,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson, a sentiment echoed by Rep. Greg Murphy, who is skeptical that Gaetz and the other seven Republicans who voted McCarthy out will remain satisfied with his successor. “Who are they going to accept? Are they going to attack him or her?” Murphy told Axios.
The collapse of the House leadership comes just after Congress passed stopgap legislation to avert a government shutdown—with the clock now ticking down to Nov. 18, if the two parties don’t agree on a new funding bill to keep the government running. House Republicans are expected to meet next Tuesday to plan for a new House speaker, leaving nearly a week for havoc to reign.
In The Back Pages: The Honorable Sephardim
The Rest
→ At least 75,000 health-care workers went on strike against Kaiser Permanente on Wednesday after contract negotiations between the workers’ union and the health-care provider failed to reach a new agreement over the weekend. One of the largest health-care worker strikes in U.S. history, the walkout, which did not include doctors and nurses, primarily comprised support staff like lab technicians and sanitation workers who clean rooms. While talks over wage increases and working conditions between the two sides have resumed, the brunt of the strike’s disruption will be felt in California, where a significant number of KP facilities will likely postpone nonurgent procedures because of staffing shortages.
→ Homeowners in parts of the United States who are increasingly vulnerable to flooding and other extreme weather events are struggling to find affordable insurance policies, with hundreds of thousands of Americans forced to sign with so-called insurers of last resort. At least 30 states now offer a form of last-resort coverage, but the policies are not exactly cheap, with some homeowners finding premiums as much as ten times as expensive as their previous insurance policies. “The insurance is more than my mortgage,” Robert Dubie, a resident in part of California that’s been hit with wildfires, told The Wall Street Journal. Even with the ballooning premiums, more insurance companies will still be unable to cover their claims due to the uptick in wildfires and other extreme weather events, which could force government agencies to cover more of the burden for relief. “These plans were really only supposed to be a ‘break glass in emergency’ type of a product,” Douglas Heller, an executive at the Consumer Federation of America, told the WSJ. “Now that the insurance industry is walking away from communities, we’d better have a much more robust and healthy public backstop.”
→ In a move that critics are calling an assault on free speech, Canadian regulators announced they will now require certain podcasters to register with the government before the end of November. The new Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission policy, which applies to broadcasters with $10 million or more in annual revenue, will provide the government with demographic information about their audience, among other pieces of data, while prohibiting them from releasing the podcasts only to people who subscribe to certain internet providers. Some say the new policy will do little harm to free speech and will mostly apply to American streamers like Spotify, getting them to change their distribution strategies as part of the government’s effort to boost the Canadian media industry—though that could ultimately harm small, independent podcasters who rely on the larger platforms. “This really is a battle between Canadian telecom giants and American web giants, and small Canadian successful content creators are the roadkill caught in the middle of this,” Jesse Brown, publisher of Canadaland, the largest independent podcast network in Canada, told Yahoo.
→ During Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial on Tuesday, Judge Arthur Engoron imposed a gag order on the former president after he attacked the judge’s clerk in a social media post that linked to the clerk’s social media account, all while Trump and the clerk were sitting in court together.
“Personal attacks of any member of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I will not tolerate them,” the judge said.
The personal attack on the clerk comes amid a rather dark turn in Trump’s rhetoric as of late: The former president recently suggested that former Joints Chief of Staff chairman Gen. Mark Milley’s “treasonous act” while in office once qualified for a “punishment [of] … death.”
→ Airlines are on the hunt for thousands of faulty jet-engine parts installed in their planes after it was discovered the spare parts were verified with fake safety certificates. The dubiously checked parts include critical pieces of equipment like turbine blades, rudimentary nuts, and bolts, and they’ve been found already in roughly 100 aircraft across several major carriers. General Electric has filed a lawsuit against the part broker, AOG Technics, a relatively small outfit whose outsize impact on the industry’s safety standards emphasizes the complexity and vulnerability of the global aerospace supply chain.
→ A new Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis finds that more than 400 Georgia prison employees have been arrested for various criminal schemes, with some correctional officers taking jobs in the prisons after being recruited by gangs to serve as intermediaries with incarcerated gang affiliates. “We have got a chronic, persistent issue in the state of Georgia of bad apples within the Department of Corrections doing all sorts of things. It’s a problem we’re dealing with everyday,” T. Wright Barksdale, a Georgia prosecutor, told the Journal-Constitution. Part of the issue stems from the simple fact that prisons are struggling to staff their facilities, with low pay and often violent work conditions leading to high turnover. “You’re making chump change, so to speak, and then these inmates offer you large sums of money just to bring in an item,” said Jose Morales, a retired Georgia prison warden. “Those factors add up to where they need more money to survive.”
Read More: https://www.ajc.com/news/investigations/prisons-inside-job/
→ Despite other signs of strength across the economy, a key employment report from payroll firm ADP shows a growing weakness in the labor market, with private-sector employers adding only 89,000 jobs in September, almost half of what economists polled recently by Dow Jones had expected. “We are seeing a steepening decline in jobs this month,” Nela Richardson, chief economist for ADP, said in a statement. “Additionally, we are seeing a steady decline in wages in the past 12 months.” Economists are now waiting for a Labor Department report on Friday to clarify if the historically tight labor market has finally begun to ease up, which could prompt the Federal Reserve to stop raising interest rates.
→ Number of the Day: $127 billion
That’s the total in student debt relief that President Joe Biden has approved while in the White House, a sum boosted on Wednesday when the president said he’d cancel a new round of $9 billion from the government’s debt rolls. The latest cancellation will utilize a change in loan-forgiveness rules for low-income borrowers and student borrowers with “total or permanent disabilities,” the administration said. In total, Americans are on the hook for $1.7 trillion in student debt obligations, the vast majority of which is held by the government.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Built to Last by Stuart Halpern
As Sukkot winds down, we are reminded of the ease with which buildings crumble to dust. And as Simchat Torah begins, we are reminded of how much longer words can endure.
The Antidote to Ableism by Judy Bolton-Fasman
In her new book, Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, a disability activist and scholar, takes a ‘revelatory and revolutionary’ look at everything from the story of Moses to the value of Shabbat
The Honorable Sephardim
What Ashkenazis can learn about honor from their Sephardi brethren
By Rafael Castro
Jews of all shades of religious observance, from Shlomo Sand to Amira Hass to Peter Beinart to Neturei Karta, view it as a special, righteous mission to openly support the declared enemies of the Jewish people. I have long been intrigued by this phenomenon of Jews and Israelis voluntarily endangering their coreligionists and compatriots by denouncing Judaism and Zionism. In trying to find an answer to this seeming paradox, one aspect jumped out at me—the overwhelming majority of Jews who engage in rituals of self-denunciation are from Ashkenazi cultural backgrounds, while virtually none are Sephardim.
Many observers have attributed the Ashkenazi Jewish propensity for self-flagellation to the prestige and influence of leftist, secularist, or universalist ideas. I believe this explanation is unsatisfactory. These “Un-Jews,” as Natan Sharansky and Gil Troy have called anti-Zionist Jews, are a product of the unique history and cultural influences that shaped Ashkenazi Judaism, and are largely absent in Sephardic Judaism. Among the Ashkenazim, at various places and times in Europe being an “Un-Jew” often paved a path to assimilation and higher social status. But for the Sephardim, who lived by and large, outside the secularist assimilationist passions of Europe, greater exposure to Arab-Muslim culture and its emphasis on the concept of "honor," made self-disrespect unappealing.
The origins of this sense of honor, which we can understand as an ironclad commitment to preserving one's reputation and the dignity of one’s family and community, can be traced back to societies where warrior classes and aristocratic elites held significant power and influence. Diaspora Jews, denied political power for almost 2000 years, had no endogenous reasons to cultivate this ethos. Particularly, in Eastern Europe, where this ethos of honor was strongest in Ashkenazi lands, Jews were often insular and had excellent reasons to despise and reject the Gentile military-aristocratic ethos in which honor played a role of paramount importance. For Ashkenazi Jews reeling from pogroms and blood libels, assimilation of surrounding social norms and values was not just difficult, but would have paved the way for assimilation. There are exceptions, of course, such as the secular Odessa-born Ze'ev Jabotinsky, whose emphasis on the value of hadar - encompassing self-respect, cultural excellence, physical fitness, nationalistic aspirations, and assertiveness - reflected the chivalrous spirit he had assimilated from 19th century Czarist Russian culture. But for Ashkenazi Jews throughout history, honor was neither useful nor highly valued.
Sephardic Jews on the other hand, tended to be far more immersed in surrounding Gentile culture. Not just in medieval Andalusia, but also in the Ottoman Empire and in the areas of North Africa and the Middle East where Jewish communities secured the protection of European colonial powers. These historical developments, together with the fact that Islamic ethics value militarism more than Christianity, contributed to honor playing a more important role in the Sephardic ethos.
We can see these differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews playing out across contemporary politics. The Sephardic Iranian Jewish leadership, for instance, has never written for a Western newspaper the kind of anti-Israel screed that regularly appear on English-language Israel-baiting platforms. This is so, despite the rewards they would secure and the dangers they would avert within Iran for doing so. In addition, the Neturei Karta rabbis from New York and London who in the past traveled to Tehran to shake hands with President Ahmadinejad, were snubbed by the local Jewish community.
Jorge Iacobsohn, the founder of leading Spanish language platforms about Middle East politics and Jewish culture highlighted anti-Israel Sephardic intellectuals like Professors Avi Shlaim and Ella Shohat who appear to refute my thesis. However, I highlighted that neither of these intellectuals has published op-eds or open letters denouncing Israel, the way Haaretz columnists do every day. Indeed Haaretz, despite its vaunted egalitarian progressive ethos, has an overwhelmingly Ashkenazi staff and very few Sephardic journalists.
Ashkenazi Judaism, in its single-minded pursuit of intellectual rigor and clarity, has bred brilliant intellectuals of unsurpassed integrity and creativity. But the value placed on intellectualism, with its numerous benefits, also comes at the expense of competing values. For instance, the idea that the pursuit of abstract truth should take precedence over loyalty and obligation to one’s immediate family, has no place in an honor culture.
There are examples of European Jews cultivating an “honor” tradition, but these typically are exceptions that prove the rule. In order to avenge antisemitic sleights, late 19th century Viennese Jews became such skilled fencers that antisemites refused to duel them knowing they would most likely lose. The pretext these antisemites formulated for their cowardice was that "Jews have no honor to defend, since they have no honor in the first place."
Paradoxically, the kernel of truth in this slander resides in the fact that while Ashkenazi Jews readily fought duels to avenge the sleights and slander of Gentiles, among Jews themselves such duels were invariably settled in court.
An exploration of the distinct roles and interpretations of honor within Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities thus reveals crucial cultural differences. By highlighting an aspect of Sephardic culture that plays a pivotal role in protecting the good name and reputation of the Jewish state, this piece will hopefully contribute to raising awareness of Sephardic virtues which, beyond the culinary and musical sphere, are not always acknowledged in Israeli and Ashkenazi circles.
Furthermore, a greater appreciation for Sephardic values could promote the peace and security of Israel. By shifting away from a predominant reliance on Ashkenazi cultural and psychological perspectives in contemporary diplomatic and political decision-making, there is a potential to safeguard the Jewish State from costly strategic misjudgments while defending its interests in the Middle East.
Rafael Castro is a Berlin-based independent political analyst. Born in Italy, Rafael graduated from Yale and holds graduate degrees from Hebrew University and the Freie Universität. His writings about Middle Eastern politics and the Jewish world have appeared in Ynetnews, The Jerusalem Post, Arutz 7, and the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He can be reached at rafaelcastro78@gmail.com.
Great Back Pages article, please publish it in Tablet!
As an Ashkenazi married to a Sephardi, I believe that is not just honor, but also pride. If you are proud of who you are, there is no desire to assimilate. The shame of the Holocaust weighs heavy on the Ashkenazim.
Mr. Castro's premise is intriguing-but if you look at the works of Sefardic commentators on the Talmud and Sefardic Halachic decisors, there is very much a search for the truth and denunciation of what is false in Halacha and Hashkafa as opposed to a let and live attitude on such subjects