What Happened Today: September 22, 2023
Auto workers invite Biden to walk; Netanyahu teases peace with Saudi Arabia; Schumer takes Senate from dress to dress casual
The Big Story
Shawn Fain, leader of the United Automobile Workers union, pressed President Joe Biden on Friday to walk the walk when he invited him to join the autoworkers on the picket line. Biden will now have to juggle his green energy platform, which is pushing a transition to electrical vehicles in the United States, on one hand and his self-described status as “the most pro-union president in American history” on the other. The White House has not yet responded to Fain’s overture, though Biden backed the UAW when it first began its strike last week, saying union members “deserve a fair share of the benefits they helped create.”
The invite came as 5,600 more workers across 20 states at 38 more locations joined the strike on Friday, after talks over new contracts made minimal progress. Unlike several other major unions, Fain has not yet endorsed Biden, as he hopes to leverage the possible influence of the White House in negotiations with the Big Three automakers.
Former president Donald Trump will forgo the Republican primary debate next week to try to win over the union at an event with autoworkers in Michigan. While not all of Trump’s opponents share his strategy to align with the union—Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina has suggested that automakers should simply fire workers on strike, and he accused the UAW on Friday of being corrupt—Trump sees opportunity in blaming Biden’s green energy push for not producing enough new jobs to replace those lost in the transition to electric vehicles.
In The Back Pages: It’s Never Too Late To Atone
The Rest
→ The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Robert Menendez (NJ), was hit with an extensive three-count indictment on Friday that accused the top Democratic lawmaker of peddling a variety of corruption schemes at home and abroad. The new case follows a federal prosecution on unrelated criminal charges six years prior that ultimately ended in a hung jury. With a spate of charges against three New Jersey businessmen and the senator’s wife, this more sprawling indictment alleges that Menendez and the other defendants conspired in a scheme of wire fraud and bribery while he and his wife stand accused of accepting gold bars and other gifts in exchange for political influence. The case will certainly become the focal point for the Democratic and Republican candidates currently challenging the senator in his re-election campaign for a fourth term in the Senate.
→ Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized the significance of the possible normalization of diplomatic relations between his nation and Saudi Arabia while urging other leaders to increase vigilance against the threat of Iran. “We are at the cusp of an even more dramatic breakthrough [than the Abraham Accords],” Netanyahu said, “a historic peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.” Though Netanyahu has tussled with the Biden administration in the past, he was quick to credit the White House for pushing forward the talks with Saudi Arabia, adding, “Just as we achieved the Abraham Accords with the leadership of President Trump, I believe we can achieve peace with Saudi Arabia with the leadership of President Biden.”
→ Early on Thursday morning the Hillel on the University of Pennsylvania campus was attacked by a vandal who flipped over several pieces of furniture while “shouting antisemitic obscenities about Jewish people,” Rabbi Gabe Greenberg said in a statement. The man was then chased out of the building by staff before he was apprehended by campus police. Penn’s Public Safety office made little note of the timing of the episode days before Yom Kippur, writing only that the vandal had been “experiencing a crisis” before authorities took him to be evaluated. “We are saddened by these events, but are utterly undeterred in our mission—to support every single student on campus during their Penn journey, Jewishly, and in so many other ways—today, tomorrow, and for years to come,” Greenberg said.
→ The Biden administration announced a plan for new federal regulations that would prevent credit scores from including information about unpaid medical debt, a burden now carried by about 100 million Americans. Putting aside the fact that nearly 1 in 4 Americans are unable to afford medical treatment, the new rules would amount to one of the most substantial federal interventions in the nation’s spiraling medical debt crisis. Advocates have been calling for credit-report protection for years as the most common tactic that collection agencies and hospitals use to get patients to pay their bill is to threaten reporting the debt to credit agencies. The effort to enact the regulation is expected to draw fierce opposition from the health-care industry.
→ Roughly 26,000 visitors flocked to Vote.org every hour after Taylor Swift implored her 272 million Instagram followers to make sure they could participate in upcoming elections. The “get out the vote” drive saw 35,000 new-voter registrations, which included a whopping 849% increase in registrations among 18-year-olds compared to the same registration period in 2021, according to the vote website. “In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now,” Swift wrote in 2018 as she moved into the political arena to back a Democratic candidate for the Senate.
→ With the pipeline of new content drying up in the wake of the ongoing Hollywood strikes, platform streamers are sure to keep consumers in their good graces by introducing more advertisements and fees to the viewing experience. Citing the need for more revenue to increase investment in new content “over a long period of time,” Amazon said on Friday that Prime Video will begin inserting advertisements on its platform unless users want to pay an additional three bucks a month to make the intrusions go away. Investors called for the streamers to increase revenue long before the strike as increased competition across platforms saw more users bouncing around services. After Netflix found earlier success layering in different tiers of advertisements on its platform, Apple is expected to soon follow suit.
→ Speaking of the strike, negotiations continued this week, with long days of talks between the writers union and the studios; progress was slow regarding how new labor contracts will account for the role of AI in content creation. Despite the hang-ups on AI, though, those close to the talks emphasized the compromises reached so far by both sides and the unusual involvement of chief executives from Disney, Netflix, and other studios in the bargaining sessions—a sign that a deal could be imminent. At 144 days long, the ongoing strike is inching closer to the duration of the 1988 walkout that saw writers out of work for 154 days.
→ Not all Democrats support the abolition of the rule against gym shorts and sweatshirts inside the Senate after Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer struck down the requirement for business attire inside the chamber. The move was intended to accommodate Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s penchant for casual clothes upon his return to work after a medical leave to treat depression. But when Fetterman presided over the Senate in a short-sleeve shirt on Wednesday, the optics of such an underdressed representative of the people didn’t sit well with his colleagues: Several Democrats voiced opposition to the rule change. “I don’t like it,” Sen. Mark Kelly said on CNN, while Sen. Joe Manchin is gaining support for what his representative described as a “bipartisan resolution to ensure the Senate dress code remains consistent with previous expectations.”
Programming note: The Scroll will be off on Monday for Yom Kippur and back on Tuesday.
TODAY IN TABLET:
During Kol Nidre, a Shocking Reminder of My Mortality by Rebecca Stanfel
As we recite the ‘Unetaneh Tokef’ prayer on Yom Kippur, we remember that life is finite. For me, that realization came with a jolt of electricity.
The Return of the Cousins by Zoe Strimpel and Tom Stammers
Despite the proliferation of anti- and post-Zionist rhetoric in Britain, Israel remains a central pillar of Anglo-Jewish identity
Originally published in Tablet, September 2014
It’s Never Too Late To Atone
Even if the person you wronged doesn’t remember what you did, it can still make a difference to ask for forgiveness. Maybe.
By Etgar Keret
Yom Kippur was always my favorite holiday. Even in nursery school, when all the other kids liked Purim because of the costumes, Hanukkah because of the latkes, and Passover because of the long vacation, I was hooked on Yom Kippur. If holidays were like kids, I once thought when I was still a boy, then Purim and Hanukkah would be the most popular in class, Rosh Hashanah would be the most beautiful, and Yom Kippur would be a kind of weirdo, a loner, but the most interesting of all. When I think about that now, “a kind of weirdo, a loner, but the most interesting of all” is exactly how I saw myself then, so maybe the real reason I loved Yom Kippur so much is that I thought it was like me. The thing is that even though I’m not a kind of weirdo anymore, definitely not a loner, and grown-up enough now to understand that I’m not the most interesting, I’m still in love with that holiday.
Maybe it’s because Yom Kippur is the only holiday I know that, because of its very nature, recognizes human weakness. If on Passover, Moses and God settled accounts with the Egyptians, on Hanukkah Judah Maccabee beat the crap out of the Greeks, and on Israeli Independence day we fought bravely against the Arabs and won our country, on Yom Kippur we’re not a heroic dynasty or a people, but a collection of individuals who look in the mirror, are ashamed of what demands shame, and ask forgiveness for what can be forgiven. And maybe that was actually the quality that attracted me to Yom Kippur from the very beginning, that it is the most private of all our holidays, a day when you stand alone before your deeds and their consequences without TV, without bustling cafés and restaurants, without stores crammed with merchandise, without all the rest of the day-to-day noise that makes them more palatable. It’s the holiday when you come face to face with your life as it is, and there’s no stupid reality show to divert your attention, no news updates, no chocolate-chip ice cream cone to offer you some consolation.
For me, Yom Kippur was and remains the holiday, always. That’s why, even though it’s been years since I’ve bothered to wish people a happy new year on Rosh Hashanah, or since I’ve taken the trouble to dress up on Purim, as Yom Kippur approaches, I still apologize to people I feel I’ve hurt. It doesn’t happen too many times, but when I finally call to ask for someone’s forgiveness and I’m waiting in embarrassment for the phone to be answered, still praying deep down that no one will pick up so that I can settle for an apologetic message on the answering machine, I feel with every bone in my body that there’s something very healthy about being compelled to ask for forgiveness. So, maybe it’s easier to love a holiday that commands you to eat jelly doughnuts than a holiday that requires you to put yourself in a vulnerable, uncomfortable position, but when you’re finally done, you feel that, thanks to that weird holiday, you’ve gotten rid of a burden that has been oppressing you for a very long time without your even knowing how much.
My strangest Yom Kippur apology story begins when I was 4. One of the kids in my new preschool group was a pretty, sweet girl named Noa. She was quiet and smiley, two qualities I was not blessed with, and when I once accidentally touched her thick blonde hair, it felt like sticky cotton candy. I really wanted to play with her but didn’t exactly know how to do it, so after six months of looking at her from a distance, I decided to make a move, and one morning, when I saw her running next to me in the yard, I stuck out my foot and tripped her.
Noa fell and hurt herself. She started to cry, and when the teacher ran over to help her, Noa pointed at me and said, “He did it. He tripped me.” The teacher, who liked me very much, asked me if it was true, and I immediately said no. The teacher rebuked Noa, “Etgar is a good boy who never lies. Why are you making up such terrible things about him? You should be ashamed of yourself!” Noa, who’d almost stopped crying, started all over again, and the teacher stroked my head and walked off angrily. Right then I wanted to tell Noa I was sorry and confess to the teacher that I’d lied, but I couldn’t find the courage. Meanwhile, another girl helped Noa walk over to the fountain so she could wash her scraped knee, and I remained standing in the yard.
Noa wasn’t in kindergarten or in elementary school with me. In high school, during a break one day, a girl in my class mentioned Noa’s full name and said she was a real grind, studying in the biology track. It was the first month of school, Rosh Hashanah had already passed, and Yom Kippur was on the way, and when school ended that day, I waited for Noa near her classroom. She was almost the last one out, orange headphones on her head and a Sony Walkman in her hand. She looked completely different from how I remembered her from when I was 4; she barely smiled and had a lot of pimples on her face, but her hair was still thick and blonde and still looked like cotton candy. I went up to her, legs weak. It’s always hard to say you’re sorry, but saying it after 13 years is especially hard. I wanted to tell her that since that day in the preschool yard I’d tried hard not to lie, and that every time I felt the urge, I remembered her, her hair in tangles, crying and hurt in the yard, and immediately quashed the impulse and told the truth. I wanted to tell her that soon I’d be a man and go into the army and everything, and that when I looked back on my life, what I did to her then, at the age of 4, was the thing I was most ashamed of, and that even though so much time had passed, I wanted to make it up to her somehow: buy her a Popsicle, lend her my sports bicycle for a week, or I didn’t know what, something.
But instead of all that, the only thing that came out of my mouth was her name, “Noa,” in a very shrill voice. Noa stopped, took off her headphones, and studied me. “I’m Etgar,” I said, “Etgar Keret. We were once in the same preschool together.” She smiled and said she remembered preschool but didn’t remember me. I told her about how I tripped her and lied, and how she cried because of the affront and a little because of the pain, but she didn’t remember any of it.
“It was a long time ago,” she said, half-apologetically.
“But I remember,” I persisted, “and soon it’s going to be Yom Kippur, and I wanted to apologize.”
“Apologize for something stupid you did when you were 4?” she said and smiled that lovely smile I remembered from preschool, then added, “Were you this weird back in preschool, too?” She laughed and so did I, because the truth is I really was weird in preschool. “Apology accepted,” she said after a brief pause, and then put her orange headphones over her ears and left.
I remember going home from school on that day. I rode my bike, the pedals turned easily, the road felt smooth, and even the uphill parts felt like they were downhill. I never saw her again, but since then, whenever I have a strong urge not to tell the truth, I think of her outside her high-school classroom, smiling broadly, her face full of pimples, saying she accepted my apology. Then I take a deep breath, and lie.
Translated by Sondra Silverston