Nightly Supper

From The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/01/weeknight-dinner-never-easy/681210/

The writer, a young career woman, lamented disruptions that creating a suitable supper for her family every evening imposes. It likely does, but prioritizing a set time for everyone to assemble around a table at has benefits that are hard to recapture.  I'm an empty nester, the one who came home from work later than everyone else.  Sometimes supper awaited me, other times the onus of creating, or otherwise acquiring something for us to all eat together fell to me.  Later, as cable made Food TV readily available, I took a liking to the kitchen.  In late career, I allocated an annual bonus to remodeling it, mostly in a cosmetic way.  Now supper creation has become my challenge, one that I seem to meet most nights with an element of accomplishment.

The author's ambivalence is hardly unique to her generation.  In my childhood, we did not have the means to eat out and ordering online would take decades to become available to everyone.  Instead, fortunes were made by suppliers of TV dinners.  Banquet, Swanson, Stouffer's.  My mother, who did not work outside the home, popped them in the oven.  As a student, I went to a cafeteria most evenings.  Then as a wage earner with a kitchen and a family that progressed through its stages, supper came mostly from our stove.  We never ate Fast Food for supper, but would go out on occasion for a pizza.  Still, my family like her family, regarded supper each evening as our primary meal, both for sustenance and interpersonal cohesion.

Like the author, we have reached the modern age.  Preparing supper has never been easier.  Unlike the author, I have evolved a repertoire and a planning mechanism, which she has not developed.  The anchors have become the weekly Shop-Rite ad and my freezer.  Shabbos dinner creates a fixed point.  It has limited repertoire.  Chicken parts, beef cubes, occasionally ground beef.  Friday night is usually the only time of the week in which I will prepare meat.  Chicken is mostly seared and baked, enough for two meals.  Ground beef becomes a meat loaf, two meals.  Beef cubes become cholent, two meals this week and a portion frozen for a subsequent shabbos.  Thus I have 2/7 suppers done.  The template also includes a starch and a vegetable.  Near East Couscous or rice goes on sale, boil water, add contents of box, and sit on stove a while longer.  Or bake a white or sweet potato in the oven.  Boil frozen vegetable or make a cucumber/tomato salad.  

In my freezer I have pierogies, ravioli, fish that had been frozen at sea, garden burgers, a couple packages of plant based meat in various forms.  Fish is nature's fast food.  Thaw the night before.  Tuna steaks need only seasoning and a few minutes in a hot skillet.  Ravioli is boiled.  Perogies have differnt options for cooking.  My refrigerator has swiss and American cheese.  Two pieces of bread and grill on the stovetop.  My refrigerator has eggs and milk.  Quiche takes minutes to assemble, providing meals for two nights.  Sometimes I put extra effort to plan ahead.  Macaroni and cheese in the style of Horn & Hardart has been recaptured as a recipe.  Assembly is tedious, requiring a béchamel and precooked noodles.  The concoction gets baked in a lasagna pan.  Two meals this week.  Freeze two other quarters for single meals each of the next two weeks.  Same for spinach lasagna, recipe from the first cookbook that the upper tier Artscroll publishers ever authorized.  The Shop-Rite ad is useful.  When the ingredients go on sale, particularly the perishable kosher cheeses, that becomes my kitchen project.

And not to forget my pantry.  Spaghetti is quite versatile.  One third of a box, boil, strain.  In olive oil, sauté garlic that I have chopped.  Sauté sliced onions, mushrooms if on sale, some parsely from my indoor pot.  Mix in a bowl.  Often enough for two meals.  In the pantry I keep canned salmon.  Modern small choppers make this easy.  Onion, maybe celery into the chopper.  Add salmon and spin once or twice. Add egg, spin again.  Into bowl.  Bread crumbs or matzoh meal for consistency, spices chosen at whim.  Pan fry as sandwich sized patties.  Enough for two meals.

None of this seems physically taxing or mentally difficult to plan.  Restaurant once a month or so, pizza once a month or so.  Take-out never, fast food never.  We eat pretty well most evenings.

And for guests, shabbos, Seder, Thanksgiving, Rosh Hashanah,  I do a little more. Same for special events wife's birthday, anniversary, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day.  Expanded menu.  Planning a week or two in advance. Coordinating various courses with stove top and oven requirements.  It is those skills utilized for weekday suppers that enable executing the more elegant preparations.  

Mugged by Reality

Several years ago, pre-pandemic, as I compiled my semi-annual list of things I'd like to do in the upcoming half-year, I committed myself to purchasing two new subscriptions that would challenge my mental capacity.  After soliciting advice, some helpful, some perfunctory, I settled on paid electronic subscriptions to The Forward and The Atlantic.  I have maintained each on autopay ever since.  Each week I strive to read six pieces in The Atlantic and ten in The Forward, with reasonable adherence.  While The Forward specializes in news and commentary targeted to a Jewish audience, The Atlantic is more eclectic.  It has staff writers, some very experienced, some promoted to journalism's big leagues after time in the minors.  It has frequent contributors, usually people who hold professorships with areas of study.  Each day's edition, as the electronic version has new articles daily, includes one or more essays from independent contributors.  In the political year, politics dominates the daily content.  The editors make sure that its readers like me receive analytically driven opinions worthy of the college grads who subscribe.  As the American election results had little ambiguity, experienced political mavens went to work sorting out their pet conclusions as to why our ballot boxes reflected a clear preference for Republicans across geography and most demographic categories.  

Two members of a think tank, More In Common, addressed polarization as perceptions, some right, others I think erroneous.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/democrats-defined-progressive-issues/680810/

Their op-ed asserts that Republicans prioritized their principal goals as a party, inflation control and immigration control.  As they campaigned, that was the message the voters received.  Democratic voters, when polled, set their top issues as inflation control and health care access.  Conceptually, there is very broad consensus on these concerns that does not segregate by party.  Everyone has either modified what they purchase from the grocery due to price, or at least grumble about what they perceive as cost exceeding value.  We all find our periodic doctor visits, or medical dependencies, a hardship in some way.  It could be economic costs of insurance or medicines, limited availability of appointments, doctors who look at screens instead of us, or concerns about how much of the medical care we get mismatched to what we really need.  People in some parts of the country feel the immediate impact of illegal border crossings more than others, but we've probably all encountered people from Latin America when we dine out or watch our neighbors have their yards upgraded.  Whether properly documented or not, we suspect that they cannot all be.  We live the same way irrespective of our political imprints.  We shop, travel, eat, go to work, drive on the highways beyond our own towns, have mixed feelings when we send our kids off to school each morning.  America offers a lot of common ground.  We all know, and pretty much agree on where the failures emerge, with some contention over who is at fault.

As the two authors note, with data to present, the perception of what the Democrats as a party aspire to deflects this common ground in favor of minority views.  Gender identity, ethnic entitlements, redress of historical wrongs, indignities of self with linkages to global groups with their grievances absorbed into our own.  That is not at all inflation control or health care.  Yet it hijacks the priority concerns, becoming subordinate to people with much smaller constituencies but more visible platforms.  Their essay focuses upon how issues of subordinate broad concern, indeed widespread unpopularity, became the disseminated face of the Democratic party.  Where the authors and I diverge is that they see this as a faulty perception.  I see it as a very accurate perception, one in keeping with my own personal experience, undoubtedly magnified throughout the American population by people just like me with parallel personal encounters.

On another personal semi-annual assessment, I concluded two years into retirement that I needed more human interaction.  The pandemic had just upended our lives.  My Senior Program at the state university where I mingled with others most weekdays had shut down.  Synagogue services paused, as Zoom was not an option for an Orthodox congregation on the Sabbath.  As I compiled twelve initiatives, I committed myself to joining two new organizations.  I had never engaged in formal politics, but my Representative District sought committee members.  I volunteered, gaining one of the two seats on that committee allotted to my voting location.  Great people.  We met monthly, mostly electronically.  On a few occasions, the elected officials arranged committee gatherings in a central location with refreshments and their presence.  Interesting, affable people.  The State Rep and Senator each had mental agility, an understanding of legislation, and a willingness to engage with nobodies like me.  We chatted about ourselves, about how to make schools more effective, why medical care has become more problematic for both doctors like me and patients like everyone else, about insecurities we shared with our changing world.  The 2020 election brought a Presidential change, one welcome to us, as most of us had met the new President when he represented us in the Senate.  The year also brought a US Census.  My polling place and the acreage it served would be shifted to a new State Representative as district lines were redrawn by the state legislature.  My seat would be shifted to the Committee of the new district, as the Democratic Party infrastructure apportions its committees by state representative.  Nobody contested my seat.  We met the first Monday of every month by Zoom.  However, our representative had no interest in engaging in committee meetings.  My Senator would remain the same, though she focused more on the previous district.  Another Senator had a territory partly within this district.  She came to the Zoom meetings, making a favorable impression. As a school teacher, she had interest and familiarity with public education, a big item in the state budget and top concern of many citizens.  In addition, my new committee chairman had contacts with the central party, bringing statewide office holders to our meetings.  We never met each other live, the forum where people exchange their spontaneous thoughts.  Agendas came across as more trivial, though the new district had greater prosperity than my old one.  Hardly anyone challenged the elected representatives who agreed to appear, which may be why so many agreed.  Discussions involved procedures and some land use, which is not the purpose of the committee.  I found the people half ideologues, half dull, with crossover between the halves.  I learned that some had been national committeemen for Senator Sanders' delegation.  What lacked were people like my neighbors.  People who worked in the offices and the labs, folks with a business, people young enough to have kids in school.  Many had been with the committee for decades.  One relative newcomer had once held office, another chummed with people of title.  Yet, I did hold the chair, a financial professional of skill and party loyalty, in proper esteem.  And the new committee contained a personal friend, a member of my own synagogue with his agenda that saw his home's property value in jeopardy based on a land use issue that had languished for years. 

Was either Committee a face of the Democratic Party?  Maybe the second one.  More political hobbyists, though the first had its ideologues.  The elected officials, though, all dependent on the support of the various Party structures, never forgot their primary mission of making their districts and our state as a whole the type of place people would want to live.  Contented voters reelect. While we only have one dominant party, we have contested primaries. 

I attended every meeting, engaged sometimes, bored other sessions.  Rarely irritated, but even then rationalized by knowing that everyone on the screen was personally ineffectual but enabled elected officials of quality to emerge.  I took my turn at the nuts and bolts of political committee operations, failing miserably at my one attempt at contacting voters by an automated phone bank.

Buddha once advised his disciples that when their personal experiences diverged from what their leaders promoted, act on experience.  My turn came soon, exposing the face of the Democratic Party to me in an unflattering way.  A young man had just requested to join our committee.  He had recently authored an op-ed in the local newspaper advocating a Gaza ceasefire.  I did not read it, and opposed what he recommended, but I also know that the newspaper has to select from a broad array of opinions submitted to their editors.  They chose his editorial, so at least the writing must have been coherent.  When he came, he requested that our Committee go on record as supporting a resolution by Rep Cori Bush demanding an end to hostilities in Gaza.  The massacre of October 7 2023 transformed me.  This Congresswoman was the placard carrier of the anti-Jewish African American view that we are oppressors who must be contained because we have too much control.  A scripted anti-Semite.  A River to the Sea you don't belong in usurped land type. And I once lived in the City of St. Louis that elected her.  I remained polite.  This is not the purpose of our committee. Our committee does itself a disservice disconnecting its upper middle class highly educated October 8 Jews.  The rest of the Committee thought this made the Democrats stand for the oppressed.  I prevailed on a technicality, as he was not a committee member who could make proposals.  After adjournment, I stayed on Zoom with the chair and one or two others.  These guys could spout the slogans.  I happen to be very knowledgeable about this subject, its history, its many facets.  Those I dealt with were not, and did not care to be.  Their slogans and alignments would suffice.   At the next month's meeting, we voted on his membership in the Committee.  I voted yes.  The Big Tent should be the Democratic Party's foundation.  Now with standing he brought it up again.  He had support.  Just like on the news, you could see who the River to Sea crowd were.  Some were on that Zoom.  That became the face of the Democratic Party to me that evening.  I resigned from the Committee the next day.  The chairman telephoned me.  We agreed that I would think about it for a month.  When the pre-meeting email reminder arrived, I affirmed that I am not willing to watch the committee that should be focusing on local issues that we all experience veer in that direction.  I would not be back.  My party has elected officials that I can support in their primary races, including another Jewish candidate who would ultimately get elected Governor.

A more chance encounter with the face of the Democratic Party came later.  As I was departing, a dedicated politico, one who ran legislative campaigns, applied to return to the District 10 Committee after an absence.  He had experience as a political operative, so having him offer those skills would advance the Committee's purpose of keeping Democratic candidates in office.  By chance, I would meet him not long after.  For several years I have engaged in a labor of love, scoring scholarship applications from HS seniors and medical students on behalf of a local foundation that administers the scholarship funds.  This organization holds two receptions each year which I make an effort to attend.  At the summer event, I saw the name tag of the man I had recently voted onto the committee.  He had decided to run for a new vacancy in the state assembly.  Our conversation touched a little on the committee.  I told him why I departed.  We did not discuss any issues related to his candidacy, but more to the fine organization that sponsored the event we were attending.  A cordial chat, then we went our own ways to the snack table.

Months later, in the midst of the primary campaign, his opponent's husband and daughters knocked on my door.  They being Jewish, recognized my mezuzah and Shalom welcome mat.  I listened to his description of what his wife supports, which is not very different from what I support.  I briefly told him why I had resigned from that district committee six months earlier.  Apparently, her primary opponent, the gentleman I had found affable at the reception, had confronted her as an inferior candidate because she was a Zionist.  That from a talented operative in my own District Committee, whose endorsement he had.  The primaries took place in September.  The Party Choice for that seat, their committeeman, lost to the lady whose family had knocked on my door.  Their choice for Governor, the incumbent Lt. Governor, lost to my candidate.  So even within the Party, its committee could not get the very middle-class Democratic suburban public, those people with degrees from America's most prestigious institutions, to vote for their less capable candidates.  My perception and that of my neighbors linked progressive ideology to less capable.

Not entirely accurate.  We did elect the first trans woman to Congress.  While trans is one of the characters that Republicans successfully linked to an undesirable Democratic social agenda, this lady, and she definitely looks female in person, spent her years in our State Senate functioning as a statesman, crafting legislation that considered minority sensitivities.  And while the progressive face has its intersectionalities where Jews sympathetic to individual causes are not welcome because we've been labeled their oppressors, this lady has been very gracious to us.  I met her at the Jewish National Fund breakfast, the ultimate of advocacy for Zionism.  While this stands out to me personally, it highlights the exception.  The real face is the support of scripted anti-Semites who think they know which oppressors will galvanize their political base.  It does, but at a very high price in November.

We saw the image of the Democratic Party, accurate or not, on TV last fall.  My alma mater made the news as its President got baited for all to see by a Congresswoman.  As students and non-students expressed support for a massacre as a legitimate liberation technique, our university president spoke of context.  With the financial protection of tenure, faculty of the highest IQs came out in support of River to Sea by any means necessary.  I think they vote Democrat, just like me, but for very different reasons.  They have no alternatives as Republican agendas summarily reject what they promote.  The Democrats make space in their big tent.  Those profs may not have an alternative voting pattern, but I do, with enmity to those folks as a campaign asset.  I didn't change my vote, but the national electorate rebuffed that view in a very consistent way. 

My alma mater was at the forefront of not just pro-Palestinian but pro-Hamas advocacy.  Nobody is more sympathetic to the Palestinian plight than me.  I want them to have prosperity and stability.  Nobody is more in favor of people of color succeeding.  But as a United Way Donor, I got invited to their annual meeting, even winning mucho dinero in their raffle.  This umbrella charity, this resource for the disabled, the disadvantaged, the elderly, had become woke right down to Spelling Bees for the Community peppered with buzzwords of Black victimhood.  The United Way exists to help these people succeed.  Their approach won’t accomplish that. After the meeting, I approached the spelling champion, a personable young man to ask if he watched the National Spelling Bee.  He knew nothing of it.  The coach apparently lacked the saichel to realize that his kids, dedicated to their own learning, could move themselves ahead in a national forum.  They are the face of the Democratic party, with people like us with marriages of long duration, diligence to our profession, generosity to our people and their people, and reverence for the icons of American history who enabled what we have, now labeled as their oppressors.  River to the Sea with fists in the air and faces obscured.

Those are the side issues that divert attention.  But prices and immigration drive decisions of voter preference.  I did a seminar this year for a course that I take at the state university's senior division.  The course is part of an ongoing series on NYCity, as the instructor has a fondness for Broadway and lived there much of his life.  Due to the economic activities that dominate our region, science enterprise, corporate law, banking, and medical care, many from Metro NY have settled here to make our living, including me.  We are very attached to this course in retirement.  My presentation involved people who a visitor to NYC might meet.  City employees, vagrants, street vendors, and diplomats.  NYC has people assembling from everywhere.  In researching the section on vendors, I found an advocacy group that compiles data about who the people manning the stands on the street are.  They originate disproportionately from Latin America, with a second cluster from North Africa.  Those who sell food are regulated separately from those who sell merchandise.  Of the food vendors about a quarter are undocumented residents, about an eighth for the merchandise sellers.  And that's from their own advocacy group.  Remove them all, as the incoming administration suggests, and hardship will likely ensue, both to other illegal residents who work and shop at the vendors and people who work, visit, or live in Manhattan where lunch at the cart is a welcome convenience.  Being sympathetic, or at least not disruptive, could have been the Democratic public face, one that affirms the kindness that most people of either party have.  They didn't take that approach.  The Republicans had a plan, likely a trouble-making one with an element of cruelty.  The Democrats not only did not propose a plan, but held the responsibility for the current circumstances.

And prices.  I do the family grocery shopping.  Once a week I read every page of the circular of my principal supermarket.  As I review each column, I write desired items on a notepad.  On the front, things I must get.  On the back of the page, items I would consider, a much longer list than the front.  From this I can plan menus for the week around what discounts the grocer is willing to share with me.  A challenge, almost like a sport, to keep the conglomerates that supply most of our food competitive with each other.  And they are.  Price gouging claims, the face of the Democratic progressives, seem inaccurate. Prices are not uniformly excessive.  Things with licensed team logos and pharmaceutical patents carry enormous premiums.  Intellectual property is lucrative, but defensibly so.  Raw produce, meats, and seafood, those commodities, always have discounted items.  The highly processed foods, those snack items, sodas, prepared foods for reheating, carry the brunt of inflation.  I suspect this reflects supply chains, as these concoctions by the best and brightest of the corporate food labs require global input of ingredients all being at the factory at the same time.  They also support consumer panels that maximize the taste acceptability to the public and assess what people are willing to pay.  That part will probably not change much as political ideologies shift every few years in America.  Democrats controlling prices?  For medicines they did.  For food, there's a very big downside when products people want become scarce.  What can change are incentives to producers.  Part of the Republican campaign to address the problem, even if not a great solution.

My wife defaults to MSNBC when she needs a break from more redeeming PBS and TCM.  Their talking heads spent the campaign telling us the dangers of Donald Trump.  He spent the campaign telling us how he would use Presidential power to address our woes.  My conscience and character told me to vote blue, and I did.  My intellect, those mental elements of binah and saichel incorporated into our Jewish central prayer each day,  questioned that.

Did the Red Wave crest because squeaky wheels within the Democratic party misrepresented it, as The Atlantic's essayists state?  I don't think so.  The product distinction between the two voting options seemed clear.  Inflation and health were concerns for sure, but solutions did not emerge.  The face of the party repels even people like me with multiple university degrees and generational gratitude for what FDR and LBJ did to enhance lives of Americans in economic or racial disadvantage.  That summarizes my experience this past year.  The voters saw a very accurate position of the party the majority rejected.  They acted on experience, just as Buddha advised us.

Meritocracy Gone Astray

Sometimes a single publication captures my full attention.  It's been a while since I devoted a single post to commentary on a single article but this one has already generated many offshoots, including videos on the theme by its author.  It comes from The Atlantic, written by David Brooks whose day job pays him as columnist for the NY Times.  He also has authored a few books, mostly non-fiction commentary.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/

The piece took me several sessions to read in its entirety, then a couple more evenings to ponder its components.  David, which is probably what I would call him if we met in person, as we are contemporaries of age though of unequal legacies, takes great pride in his classical political Conservatism.  He cites Edmund Burke of Tory England as a defining figure, one focused on individual and collective freedom, which enables individual and collective achievements.  And he recognizes its flaws and its misapplications to America's contemporary political landscape.  Basically when people of talent, like him, protbably to a lesser degree like me, are permitted to perform, they will rise to the occasion.  This article explores  one form of American entitlement  shifting to another form.  He focuses on what becomes of students who enter prestige schools.  In one era, money and legacy was the entry ticket.  And those elites generated a mixed legacy with the collapse of Wall Street but very successful FDR recovery programs, WW2 victory, and post-War economic expansion.  Key academics surmised that America could do even better if it sought out innate talent from wherever it emerged, irrespective of pedigree.  A post-war expansion with educational benefits to soldier survivors generated a new talent pool that the finest educational institutions could tap, with the end point being America leading the world in any activity that depends on universithy training.  He and I are both beneficiaries of that shift, Jewish kids once limited by quotas that gave way to high grades and test scores.  We entered top universities.  He became a journalist of international influence.  I became a worthy physician to appreciative patients but did not really advance the medical field.  He cites surveys to indicate that most of the grads of these schools are like me, solid performers.  The stars come from someplace else, but they still emerge.  The Nobels may not go to Harvard alums, but they do go to faculty at these places who often attended college elsewhere.  Same with our cultural advancements, technological transformations, social agencies, and diplomats.  Talent eventually emerges, but the Ivy admissions officers are not all that adept at identifying the exceptional as they are at ranking numerical data.  Moreover, while these graduates have done many worthy things to move our collective life experience forward, an undue number devote themselves to manipulating financial markets or using math abilties to take profitable guesses on where markets might trend without improving the companies themselves or the people they employ.  In effect, solid reliable talent producing less that the optimal public outcome that the admissions reformers of the middle 20th century envisioned.  This generation produced cell phones, medicines, diagnostics, sensitivity to once marginalized groups, opportunities for women.  But these Best and Brightest also generated market fiascos, ill-advised international gambits, undue value on people who can hurdle exams and join things at a young age, and eventually a divide between winners and losers that invites a strongman with dubious alliances to hit the reset button as resentment grows.

David divides his criticism into six categories which I copied.  He answered each of them quite extensively.  I will offer my observations while critiquing his.

1. The system overrates intelligence.

Securing admission to a top school was competitive in my day, even more so in my children's era, as we all attended the same university.  An Admissions staff will receive maybe ten times as many applications as they can accommodate.  Most of those hopefuls could navigate the curriculum requirements.  So they need to distinguish one person from another.  From my HS class I knew the few who got into the Big 3 Ivies.  They all had stronger academic transcripts and scores than me, except for our football quarterback, a wonderful young man of color in a school where the Jews dominated the classrooms.  Still, being a QB, taking challenging courses with decent performance, and having a father who served on the faculty of our regional Ivy made him successful.  But for the most part, the classmates with the best transcripts got into the most selective schools.  Those on the second tier, like me, attended the next tier school.  One from my tier became a superstar.  Everyone else still got to go to college someplace.  We produced doctors, lawyers, engineers.

Might my own school have been better with a different collection of kids?  Or might I have achieved more were I not up against kids who hurdled the requirements with the same proficiency as me?  No way to know.  However, fifty years have passed since commencement.  We know how everyone did.  That's not true the Millenial classes my children attended or the current Gen Z.  But people turned down by the admissions committees, as I was, still had an adult future to attain someplace else.

2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. 

My class in HS and university generated some very productive people, rewarded financially and with symbols of prestige in the form of titles and admiration.  The HS classmate who became an international CEO went to a small division of a state school.  A few very undistinguished students built very profitable small businesses.  We are economically and culturally successful.  That is not the same as being personally successful.  My marriage has endured an adult lifetime.  My children are worthy successors.  I knew to retire when I could no longer excel.  I have no idea how others fared.  Divorces are common as are blended families.  No doubt some had personal misadventures.  I never generated a lot of friends and chafed at working as part of a team where I would have to cede autonomy.  Some would regard this as failure.  Did I reach my potential?  Did my place on the Admissions committee hierarchy squeeze out another applicant who might have benefited more?  No way to know.  Since we make ample incomes, did we save prudently or announce Look at Me through our purchases?  Improper pretense existed.  People less generous with their treasure that their educations enabled also likely prevalent.  I think I have been successful at what mattered, my marriage, descendants, economic security, and a modicum of generosity in excess of what my less well-off parents were able to offer.

3. The game is rigged. 

Rigged isn't the right term.  Understanding the revised rules, acquiring experience with outcome, and setting strategies that achieve the outcome describe the process better.  It is not conceptually that different from prevailing at anything else from a football game to a retirement nest egg.  If the experience that graduates of prestige schools have lucrative, personally satisfying careers, preparing to attend one becomes a priority.  We know how Admissions Officers assess applications.  We know what they ask on the applications.  If they seek the Best and Brightest, those with credentials, then get the credentials.  And as in golf or bowling, there are handicaps to make up the difference.

Do some people have advantages?  For sure.  Tall people have an advantage being on the school's basketball team.  People with certain capacities create better art.  And both can be coached to surpass their inherent advantages.  My family could not afford to have me experience a summer in Europe or a tutor to get me over some calculus obstacles, or private music lessons.  I and many others made the best of what we had.  My classmates in the 1970s seemed of similar background.  We were people who took the challenging curriculum, had been successful with standardized testing since the Iowa tests of early grade school, knew how to write a coherent composition though less well than our future professors thought we should.  Within those classes, we had HS jocks who excelled at sports, a few physics nerds.  We also had kids less academically capable admitted to the class as it benefited the university in some way.  Some were scions of large donors that the school would need to offer its programs to everyone.  Others brought special talents, and some were kids of social disadvantage who excelled in their city or rural HS environment but would struggle in their new classrooms.

Rather than rigged, or offering unfair advantage to one group over another, I think the better criteria would be whether the classes that they ulimately assemble bring credit to the university that selected them among the excess of applicants.  For the most part they do.  And as they move on, becoming fifty-year alumini as I did and David will soon be, did we derive benefit from what our elite schools with its array of opportunities made available?  I think the vast majority did.  And do we accept people who fell at a different stratum in the college scramble in a dignified way when they become our colleagues or neighbors later?  I think we did.

4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system.

Social strata in America and globally predate contemporary times.  Across history, a certain amount of social mobility, upward and downward, existed.  Slavery was a global reality for much of history.  So were people who left the farm to seek fortune as soldiers or merchants.  There were physical conquests of warfare or colonialism that defined who people were and the opportunities they might have as individuals or as groups.  History also has its rebellions and its remodeling.  Rather than a caste system, which we think of as the model of India which is an immutable legacy, what contemporary America seems to show is loss of economic and social advancement opportunities that were once accepted.  That may be true but blaming it on the decisions of a few elite institutions probably isn't.

Social mobility in American history, as taught to me by some pretty astute teachers, came in waves.  Just crossing the ocean on a one-way ticket shut some doors and opened others.   The Africans brought here in chains had no freedom and the natives pushed aside by settlers lost stature from their starting points.  Over time, though, the consequences of doing this had a mixture of benefits and harm.  Policies by those in authority largely expanded economic upgrades to those of European ancestry, whether land for ownership, educational mandates for children, absorption of immigrants into an already established economy, or projects of philanthropy for public benefit.  After economic fiascos from monopolies to depressions, corrective protections were also put into place by those given rightful authority, with a blend of favorable and unfavorable consequences.

The Meritocracy era as David describes came in my father's generation.  The big state universities already existed, authorized and supported since the time of the Civil War.  Transportation already existed.  Manufacturing capacity sufficient to prevail in two world wars already existed.  So did financial institutions and taxation in its various forms.  What changed was expansion of who could access them.  The government committed funds to help my father go to college on their dime in appreciation of bodily risk he and many others experienced. And home ownership benefited the new owners like my father as well as the American economy.

All people who become newly prosperous have to decide what to do with the money they have but never expected to have.  Andrew Carnegie wrote of this as the Gospel of Wealth, but for most it was more personal prosperity.  And the people who are now well-paid, wearing ties to work, consumed some and invested some, including in their children.  So as David and I of the same generation learned, our expectations were rooted in economic security which becomes part opportunity, part safety net for when we fail.  We could access the top educational facilities, but also our state universities.  We could then take those degrees and the abilities to which they attest and offer them to employers needing people like us.  

Our generation that benefited from expanded access did not create the institutions that now welcomed us, though with some strings attached and rules that we needed to follow.  The Ivies had already achieved their acclaim, the corporations that bought us aboard were largely established, even the emerging broadcast industry, our federal and local governments needed civil service talent to serve the public.  We filled those needs, but with few exceptions did not create them.  And while Trickle Down Economics has been discredited for good reason, as we became economically secure, we did not abandon or undermine those who did not get the same economic attainment.  Instead, we traveled on highways designed by civil engineers but built by construction workers, purchased cars initially from Detroit but accepted a variant meritocracy when Toyota built more reliable vehicles, bought products transported to our stores by teamsters, and admired public parks maintained by less educated landscapers.  We wished none ill will.  Rather the mindset was more share our abundance.

Along the way, that social mobility and also interaction between economic strata got interrupted, though we were not the ones to do that.  What changed, in quantum steps methinks, are the interactions.  Starting with the draft, the ultimate in forced social mingling, at least for men, WW2 drafted Kennedys and ranch hands.  Vietnam did not.  And then for defensible reasons, a professional voluntary army requiring a certain literacy attainment to function excluded the school dropouts.  The universities became the next mixture point, one that has shifted from rousing success to troublesome as David outlines for most of his essay.  We have neighborhoods.  They have always been segregated by levels of prosperity along with ethnicity.  We have in more recent decades the decline of intergenerational hometowns, where at least everyone who lived there went to the same HS.  And we have decline of the churches, another place where people of different backgrounds met in the same place.  More recently, we have our devices, the ultimate in customized ME with grudging interaction with anyone else and disregard for who might take offense.  Those are the institutional failures that create strata, if not actually castes.  The evolution of who gets into what school over two generations reflects that.  I don't think it caused it.

5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. 

David and I progressed through our universities unscathed.  I think my kids did too.  The need to divert from your natural interests to jump through the various admissions hoops is worth it for some, but damaging to others.  Despite this childhood deprivation, a very real circumstance, David also acknowledges the long-term payoff.  Economic security that endures for most, with the opportunities for professional and personal growth that go with it, offsets the sacrifice of parts of one's childhood.  Better health, less divorce, less substance abuse, esteem from others.  All big long-term gains that are hard to attain by alternate paths.  Those seem to enhance the psyche.  Since to hurdle Admissions, childhood becomes more regimented than it might otherwise be, adapting to campus regimentation should be no harder or easier than is for other kids who enter young adulthood in different regulated environments like the military or many workplaces.  The campus experience has changed since my time there two generations ago.  I think political correctness is more enforced.  We certainly had our pressured conformities, be it Vietnam opposition or support for Candidate McGovern, though we retained our respect for professors who preferred Nixon like the rest of adult America.  I think that respect element has evaporated for a lot of reasons.  The professors outside the sciences are more ideological.  In my era, George Wallace was a much sought-after campus speaker.  We held up signs but did not interfere with his lecture.  People are too quick to cancel or even punish certain ideologies.  Some of what we absorbed as Derech Eretz, the Hebrew term for good interpersonal relations, has given way to shouting ME and playing Wack-a-Mole with you.  People of the Instagram era seem too focused on their flaws, but I don't think the upper levels of Academy caused that.  More likely that smartphone-internet driven blend of vanity and insecurity was created before the first college application got submitted and was imported to the campus with all its linkages.

Did the quest to attain that Fat Letter from the Admissions office, or now the congratulatory email, cause the fretful, often intolerant emerging adults who populate the campus?  No, it was imported to the campus.  And since these are the kids of needed talent, they will export more to our workplaces, civil service, and beyond in the form of litmus tests for what is acceptable thought, training programs that everyone has to take to make them as sensitive as everyone else in those workplaces.  Conformity has its place.  Our military might would vanish without it.  But harmful standards have a way of being propagated until reformed, which eventually they seem to be.

6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.

Little dispute that we have divisions, including some element of backlash, or at least resentment.  Real financial capitalists of extreme wealth have largely been forgiven.  Knowledge capitalists, those top university grads of more attainable wealth, the very people the ultrawealthy need to run their enterprises, have taken the hit. Voting patterns reflect those alliances and resentments.  The coastal states most dependent on college-trained expertise vote one way, an ever-expanding American interior vote another.  Swing states were once Tennessee and Missouri, now they are Pennsylvania and Nevada.  Yet resentments have been ingrained into American history.  Control of the government shifts every few election cycles.  Dixie resented Reconstruction disruptions enough to enact Jim Crow Laws, then their Democratic congressmen who had reason for economic alliances with Northern Democrats, found backlash to Civil Rights legislation to flip parties.  Workers once depended on the economic benefits of unions, which could protect wages but not keep the plants on American soil.  They flipped, but not before seeing their wages of their auto and steel plants becoming the lower wages of retail workers.  Neither the Confederate nostalgics nor the displaced union members got what they sought.  Acceptance of public access of races to restaurants and state universities is accepted and demeaning references marginalized.  The union guys have not brought the jobs back from Asia irrespective of how they vote.  They are left to nurse their resentments.  Meanwhile, Smart America, those targets of resentment, continue to engage in the creative work that advances technology, makes their doctors more effective, and travel more accessible.  They resent the producers of these, but partake of what has been produced.

In some ways educated America functions as the social croupiers.  It makes no difference who controls the government.  As long as the expertise has value and scarcity, we will prosper.

Over a much longer time frame, useful institutions have been devalued, whether the government agencies, those very elite universities that David now critiques, what we see on our screens, the people we must hire to keep our cars mobile and our homes functional.  The respect that expertise or skill once brought has been targeted very successfully in exchange for resentment-driven votes.  I think its roots lay a lot deeper than the annual scramble for college acceptance decisions.

Moving past David's Six Elements Meritocracy's Flaws, his question of whether our systems generate the best leaders is a very real one.  I will site two offshoots, one a presentation by a Jewish thought leader who I much admire, the other a written reaction to David's column in her student newspaper from one of the elite schools that David bashes.

Bari Weiss graduated one of the Ancient Eight, securing a position at the pinnacle of journalism.  She gave it up to become an electronic journalism entrepreneur on Substack, while also writing and speaking extensively about the scourge of Anti-Semitism emerging from social margins to mainstream, particularly on our campuses.  Most visibility at the universities of David's essay, my own alma mater among them.  Bari gave a speech which I watched on YouTube.  She addressed what is called the General Assembly, a collection of the highest youthful Jewish achievers, the recipients of that stardust that displays how wonderful they all are.  As her litany of anti-Semitic incidents proceeded over the next few minutes, how they were the ones who had to act to reverse it, my half-century of Jewish immersion, Jewish experience flashed back.  Every one of those circumstances on her list occurred with the Best and Brightest of the Jewish community, the highest achievers with titles seeping over the internet, in place.  Just like Ivy League parents groom their children to follow them, the Jewish organizations engage in a similar form of institutional incest.  They get good people, but choose them as obedient proteges.  Those kids listening to Bari at the podium probably never had their Hebrew School teacher complain about them.  They made Honor Roll another designation where obedience overrides intellect, went to Ramah, held offices in Hillel.  Saluted when told to salute.  In the two generations where this constituted the most admired, or at least the most titled, the synagogues that form the core institution of American Judaism have lost membership.  Donors to agencies give more money to the treasuries because the ability to give large sums has expanded.  However, fewer individuals donate.  I could only think like David describing colleges, they picked people less capable than they could have had by setting inferior identification criteria and allowing compliance or affibility to become a surrogate for talent.  The price was high.

A student writing for  The Princetonian, an African-American woman, focused primarily on David's assertion that meritocracy created a rigged game. 

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2024/11/princeton-opinion-column-meritocracy-admissions-david-brooks-ivy-league

Despite her attendance at a school that did not accept my son, she conveys a blend of perpetual victimhood and ingrained unfairness that defies correction.  I don't know if she's right, but it's more productive to see oneself as the agent of moving forward in a better direction.  The Rebbe, z"l, used to receive people seeking his sage guidance.  Often they conveyed to him misfortunes, hoping his wisdom will create a path for more favorable outcomes.  Invariably, the Rebbe would respond to the petitioner in distress, that his circumstance was a Gift from God, a chance to hit the reset button, put the thinking cap on, reject inertia.  And the Rebbe would then make the first suggestion. Nothing is really doomed.  Not our politics, antagonisms, nor our impediments to giving each person their best shot to take.

Anti-Semitism from Afar

My introduction to the thoroughly inhumane attacks by a planned initiative from a Gaza militia on Israeli civilians came as an announcement from our Rabbi as we davened shacharit on Simchat Torah, a day in which traditional Jews keep the electronics turned off.  In the ensuing six months, the responses from around the world, and many places in America where American Jews have been thoroughly engaged for some three generations, have made this an inflection point.  A Sentinel Event for sure.  A Never Event, probably.  Hostility to Israel, the one place in the world that accepts Jews in political distress and offers us sovereignty, has always been an undertone of political discussion.  It is no longer an undertone.  In America, we have political displacement as those chronically uneasy affiliations with the minority communities sink with a predictable mutual detriment.  I find opportunists only too eager to flip the majority Jewish vote a generation after the white wage-earner vote was flipped. 

Within the Jewish community, I read essays by Jews on the political right too eager to purge their organizations of individuals who challenge their hardball pro-Israel and intersected politically conservative agenda.  They seem totally oblivious to a certain reality that the people they wish to evict from their Jewish circles may be the people they need to support nursing homes, Hebrew Schools, and a campus presence.  They've made certain Jews expendable by ideology.

Amid this, some people gifted with that blend of knowledge, experience, saichel, and the ability to craft paragraphs that flow from one to another have brought upper-tier analysis to the forefront.  Two seminal essays appeared in The Atlantic, both rather lengthy but I read each in their entirety.  A response of somewhat lesser length appeared in The Forward.  Several years ago, I decided to add two subscriptions as a semi-annual initiative.  I selected The Atlantic and The Forward.  Good decisions, renewed each year since.

Since the response in The Forward incorporates the other two, and takes a very different position on how American Jews should best grapple with the many dilemmas and uncertainties of where we find ourselves, I add my own comments to that essay.  And while anti-Semitism has become more publicly explicit, my own personal exposure has been mostly from afar.  Shuls have more visible security, but that predated the Gaza attacks.  And the synagogue where I was married had two vandalism events.  But I still appear in public as the best representative of Judaism that I can be with no realistic fear for my personal safety.  

These are the original publications:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/

 https://forward.com/opinion/600187/antisemitism-united-states-israel-gaza-war/

The growing panic about antisemitism isn’t a reflection of reality

Yes, antisemitism is up — but prominent voices are confusing protest with bigotry

American Jews are being whipped into a panic about antisemitism.

There is no doubt that incidents of antisemitism have increased since Oct. 7. But prominent voices in the American Jewish community are making it harder to fight. Would challenge this They have mistaken political protest — however misguided — for bigotry some of it is bigotry, conflated anti-Zionism and antisemitism there are Americans being attacked because they are identifiable as Jewish or their property is damaged because it identified as belonging to Jews, and exaggerated the crisis on the far left while ignoring the far greater one on the far right.  We can argue whether either is a crisis

I do not question the motivations of those who have spoken out against antisemitism in this way. We are all in pain, and we all want a world in which people of all backgrounds can live their lives in safety. But the rampant hyperbole, confusion, and both-sidesing of this present moral panic are making it harder, not easier, to respond effectively.

 

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Antisemitism is rising because of a brutal war

For example, consider two widely circulated recent essays in The Atlantic, “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending,” by Franklin Foer, and “Why The Most Educated People in America Fall for Antisemitic Lies,” by Dara Horn. Both attribute the rise in antisemitism to the resurgence of an ancient, timeless hatred, rather than the obvious proximate cause: a brutal war, which is producing images of unthinkable horror to be streamed daily on social media.  I think it is.  The response on campuses defending the attackers as heroic was immediate.  The condemnation of the President’s response was immediate.  And it was the Islamic, African-American, and progressive elements that emerged essentially immediately.  The very real human cost in Gaza came a short time later.  There was no acknowledgment of the nature of the attack itself or condemnation of the glee many attackers displayed.

In Foer’s 11,000-word piece, few sentences mention the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza, where more than an estimated 32,000 Palestinians have been killed so far. “I don’t want to dismiss the anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently antisemitic — especially because I share some of those criticisms,” he writes.  Much of it is very anti-Semitic, and has been.  The exclusion of American Jews from progressive causes such as BLM was a work in progress.  So was the difficulty in defining anti-Semitism for formal policy purposes as Jewishness has been inseparable from Jewish sovereignty. While I think Franklin Foer is wrong about the end of the American Jewish Golden Age (yes, I did read all 11K words over two sessions)  the virulence of the protests and its direction towards American Jews speaks for itself.  What I think he got wrong is the ability of American Jews to create things, whether institutions for our and public advancement, philanthropy, ideas, or expertise.  Those all remain valuable and don’t seem threatened.

But that is, effectively, exactly what he does, ascribing the increase in antisemitism to anti-liberal trends in American culture, and describing antisemitism as “a mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking, stretching back at least as far as the accusation that the Jews murdered the son of God.” The war is barely even an inciting incident.  I think that’s another area where Foer is wrong. Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindbergh have all been discredited on a one-way ticket in America, though my Islamic medical colleagues tell me the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is required reading in some of their history curriculum in their Middle Eastern primary schools.  The American parochial school kids no longer seek out the Jewish kids for taunting when school lets out.  But in the Islamic communities and in some of our community of color, mistrust of Jews as Jews is still conveyed through household.  And it is usually tied to a justification, whether over-extending their dhimmi status by having a sovereign state or oppression as slumlords.

Horn, like Foer, largely dismisses concerns about the war. The word “Gaza” only appears six times in her essay. Yes, she writes, there are “the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians and the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza.” But those “cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans” — e.g. “Palestine from River to Sea” — “the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews.”  She got it right.

There are numerous omissions in this short passage: How many protests are gleeful? Certainly the primary attacks were.  I think they take more of a form of revenge  Defacing property, intimidating expression, making credible threats to safety, and locking Jews in campus rooms has its illegal elements.    (Few that I’ve seen.) What percentage are lawless? Is “‘river to the sea” always ‘eliminationist,’ despite what many pro-Palestine voices insist?   It has that intent. f But as the response acknowledges later, these chants come from people with no authority and therefore no accountability.  Having the onus of implementation of this desire would change the approach.  Then again, the Gazans are eliminationinst in their manifesto and acted as if this attack were one episode in the larger initiative.

Most significantly, though, both Horn and Foer write as if this is the first time in history that a war or catastrophe has provoked bigotry. But this is always the case. Just as Islamophobia rose after 9/11, and just as anti-Asian hate rose with the onset of the pandemic, so antisemitism is rising now. One could even say the same about anti-German and anti-Japanese stereotypes in the 1940s. or the ending of slavery in America or calling sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage.  The wars proceed because the sides object vehemently to each other.  But irrespective of precedent, we need not tolerate this or rationalize it now.

None of this is to excuse these spikes in bigotry, or to deny that the bigotry exists and is dangerous. It is only to note that the most obvious explanation for the current eruption is not a grand meta-narrative of American or European history, but rage at an ongoing war in which Israel’s conduct has received widespread international condemnation.

No, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism

Second, the moral panic conflates legitimate anti-Zionism with illegitimate antisemitism.  Not understanding why one is legitimate and another is not.  Certainly Popes for a thousand years thought their targeting of Jews was legit.  So did inquisitors.  So did Romans and Babylonias who created our diaspora.  All are interferences with pre-existing established Jewish norms.

Foer’s essay begins with a harrowing account of a Jewish high school student in Berkeley, California, who was “scared” by “a planned ‘walkout’ to protest Israel.” I do not doubt that this student was scared. But what actually happened? A misguided political protest, along with unsubstantiated rumors of “phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence.” It is not antisemitism whenever Jewish people are upset by anti-Israel actions or statements.  No, Jay, it is about fear for safety.  The statements were somewhat normative in a past era, whether by Spielberg’s fictional portrayals in The Fablemans or by encounters with parochial school students in my youth.  The difference is that the fear was not justified, though Spielberg’s character was in fact assaulted.  And Kristallnacht was a very real episode in history.  The kids at that Northern California HS attended that HS the year before.  Their fear is now.

Foer also reports secondhand accounts of Jewish students at other schools in the Bay Area being targeted and harassed in ways that are clearly antisemitic. But he lumps these incidents togethter as if they are the same, which they are not. Protesting against Israel, however misguided or disturbing, is not antisemitic; harassing Jews is.  But one becomes justification  for the other, and inseparable from the fears of the victim of physical harm

Foer asserts, without support, that the left “espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation … valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in.” Notice the elisions: Foer blends together anti-Zionism, support for a “homicidal campaign,” and targeting Jews. (Even the caricature of anti-Zionism is incorrect, as many on the left support a democratic state where Jews would still be a majority, but all would have equal rights.)  Certainly most of the anti-Zionists and Islamists do not attack Jews because they are Jewish.  I’m sure Jewish and Islamic physicians share patients as before, both in America and in Israel.  But as we learned in Pittsburgh, where the slain doctor was a college friend and in Monsey where I was raised, it only requires a few real threats to be deadly, irrespective of how the majority behave.  What matters is the failure of condemnation.  That is new.

This conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is far greater than a few articles. As reported in the Forward, after Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League changed its criteria to define a much broader swath of anti-Zionist activity as antisemitic; anti-Zionist protests account for 1,317 of the 3,000-odd “antisemitic” incidents the organization tracked in the three months after Oct. 7. So they agree that Oct 7 is a demarcation point that changes what is acceptable levels of intimidation. As Forward reporter Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization has focused on in previous years.”  Except that these incidents are directed at American Jews because they are Jewish.  Much like Venn diagram circles that intersect.

The extremism of some left-wing responses to the war is indeed troubling. I agree with Foer’s dismay that “a disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not … share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own.” But are they antisemitic? Yes.  Their Venn Diagrams also intersect with other things. And what about Jewish anti-Zionists (many of whom are friends of mine) — are we really to believe that they are all trapped in some neurosis of self-hatred?  Or do they have a political view to which many of us object?  I’m not sure I know any Jewish anti-Zionists who think that Herzl, Ben Gurion, and Holocaust refugees who settled in Israel were a blight on world history.  I think they don’t want the people there now to have to move on like they did in Spain.  There are criticisms of the government and have been since Begin made Likud the dominant party nearly fifty years ago.  The gripes are with policies and innocent human pawns, not with Jewish sovereignty.

I am a progressive Zionist. Even if the dream seems dim today, I believe in a two-state solution with justice for Palestine and security for Israel. But while Foer’s language of “a nation of their own” sounds benign in principle, in practice, it has meant a nation that displaces another people and denies its 5 million members basic civil rights. Except that it was prompted by a number of attacks that made an offense the best defense.  That rarely appears in these essays from either side.  Nor does the other reality that peace has been achieved among other former antagonists that acknowledge the reality of their neighbor Israel.  For all the talks and proposals, the Palestinians, or the Egyptians before them, never had to submit their wish list of what it would take to reconcile, while the Israelis and the Americans did.  Baseball may have had the right idea.  Each states their demands. The more reasonable is accepted with little negotiation.  Deals are often better when each side has an incentive to consider that if too demanding, they lose.  Moreover, an entire generation of American progressives has grown up during a period in which Israel’s right-wing governments have successfully undermined any efforts toward peace and coexistence. It is not antisemitic to oppose this. For many people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, it is just.  Begin was the first right wing government.  The Abrahamic Accords came with Netanyahu at the helm.  Jews visiting Petra started in 1983.  It is much less the government than the partner’s trustworthiness.

Right-wing antisemitism remains the greatest threat

The moral panic regarding antisemitism also overlooks an essential truth: that although antisemitism on the left is real, and arguably escalating, it still pales in comparison to antisemitism on the right.  Until they both become deadly.  The right has had lethal episodes for a while.  From the American left, this is new.

After a shocking upsurge during the Trump administration, right-wing antisemitism has now reached unprecedented proximity to power. One particularly serious example: Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. Robinson is an antisemite and Holocaust denier. In 2017, he wrote that “there is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.” (Robinson is also a sexist, homophobe, and Islamophobe.)  He hasn’t been elected yet.  And once in office, NC has laws that limit his implementation of policies that target Jews for harassment.  Compare that to DEI programs at our universities, which while well intended, function as zero sum game to promote one identity, whether of color or LGBT over previously excluded minorities who have proven themselves, as in Jews and Asians.  There is political power of people you never see and leverage against you by people that you encounter daily.

This man isn’t a misguided high school teacher or student activist. He may become the next chief executive of the ninth most populous state in our union. He’s been highly praised by Donald Trump. This is extreme antisemitism at the highest levels of the GOP.

And, of course, there’s Elon Musk, who despite his Auschwitz apology tour has platformed — and personally reposted — hardcore antisemites, including Trump. Not to mention Kanye West, now known as Ye, whose public antisemitism has aligned with a sharp right-wing political turn, and whose most recent album went to the top of the charts.  But he doesn’t deny people on the left access to his platforms either.

No one accused of antisemitism on the far left has a platform comparable to either of theirs. Again, none of this is to excuse the presence or tolerance of antisemitism on the left — only to put it in perspective.  Actually I think DEI affects a lot more Jews diligently striving to be their best self a lot more than anything Ye can influence.

Yet in Foer’s telling, they are merely two manifestations of the same phenomenon. “In the era of perpetual crisis,” Foer writes, “a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite — sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists — maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right.”  Or in another era of Mayor Lindsay, my HS era, you live in squalor because of your Jewish landlord and his partner at the furniture store.  Some would say the quest for rights without accountability.  My assessment of the Palestinian avocates today.

But wait a minute. Occupy’s narrative is accurate, but the Tea Party’s is not. Occupy rails against the 1% — they exist. The Tea Party rails against imagined “elites” — now imagined, as part of the QAnon conspiracy theory, as cabals of globalist pedophiles. And when a single protester in Zuccotti Park raised an antisemitic banner, people intervened, and the movement reaffirmed its opposition to antisemitism. There is no equivalence here.  Or really, one is more credible than the other.

Likewise, Foer claims that “America’s ascendant political movements — MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other — would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish.  That’s the one part where he seems accurate. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams.” Really? Rightly or wrongly, the left thinks they’re fighting for fairness and tolerance — or at least against starving a million children as part of a brutal war. Or BML or DEI.  Noble concepts until you start excluding people who would like to be helpful.  These long pre-dated the Gazan casualties. The right is fighting for an American nationalist ethno-state. There is simply no symmetry here.  I think more likely there is a gap between what they claim they want and what they will insist upon if returned to power.  Moral Majority has been around a long time, as have megachurches.  So has the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Never heard a peep about a legislative repeal.  Not a word about restricting the cultural practices of those already here.  The Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants in the Deep South are pretty safe.  If migrant workers are needed to harvest rural crops in George Wallace country, the hiring will go on as before.  And from our end as Jewish multicultural advocates that enabled our achievements in the wide culture, we have no reason to restrict their hunting hobbies.  Abortions ended in my lifetime.  My OB text, circa 1975, still had a chapter on septic abortions which disappeared.  I doubt if the Christian nationalists, for all their rhetoric, want that medical condition to return.

Terrified, tribalistic and isolated

The moral panic over antisemitism isn’t just factually unsound. It’s helping make American Jews more isolated and paranoid.  But with reason.  We weren’t that way last Rosh HaShanah.

It’s obvious that American Jews are feeling disoriented, terrified and traumatized by Oct. 7, as well as by much of the world’s mixed response to that day’s horrific violence. The trauma of the last several months — experienced, in various forms, by Jews, Muslims, progressives and many others — has contributed to the degeneration of our public discourse on the war.  The public discourse on a lot of other things had not gone well before that.

But our moral panic is at once born of this trauma and making it worse. It has caused Jews to become even more terrified and tribalistic. Terrified isn’t the right word, nor is tribalistic.  After the Pittsburgh massacre took my own medical friend, the condemnation was universal.  The condemnation of the Simchat Torah attack is a long way from universal.  And we haven’t done well protecting each other.  On the Jewish Trump side, there are calls to purge Jews who find him objectionable from some mainstream organizations that they dominate.  And it has precedent.  The heavy-handedness of Hillel International on its own chapters that challenged the Zionist litmus test of the parent organization took place before the current millenium.ro The reality is that most of us go to shul at the appointed times, though with enhanced security.  Companies have not withdrawn their Hechshers in solidarity with the anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish pressures.  Hiring goes on as before.  If we were economically prosperous before, that has not been reversed.   It has undermined our solidarity with other vulnerable groups at precisely the time at which we are threatened by the nationalist right. Forgive me, but a number of progressiove organizations expressed their hostility to Jewish participation in their movements years ago.  And it has fed the illiberal campaigns of right-wing culture warriors, who have preyed on American Jewish fears to further their own agendas. Or they understand Maslow’s hierarchy.  You protect your safety before you seek the higher noble principles. We are being fed a diet of hyperbole and misinformation, and we are reacting out of fear.  Except that elements of that fear are both legit and ever closer to home.

To be sure, some progressives responded abominably to Oct. 7, and continue to use irresponsible, incendiary rhetoric about Israel. And we need to be very consistent about identifying them and what they are about. We spend too much effort fighting with each other. There are outrageous things happening on some college campuses. And we have to be openly oppositional to that with negative consequences for outrageous activity. But let’s not lose the thread here. The real crisis is not leftists on campus but white nationalists, insurrectionists, election deniers, science deniers and conspiracy theorists seizing two if not three branches of the federal government. Actually it is the loss of partnership with the progressives that make these people confident that their majority will eventually emerge.  And we are not the ones who undermined that uneasy but protective partnership. That is the Titanic. College activists are the string quartet playing on the deck.

Finally, the consequences of this fatalistic view that antisemitism is everywhere, and that it can never be eradicated, are dark indeed. Professor Shaul Magid has called it “Judeo-Pessimism,” taking a cue from “Afro-Pessimism,” a view that holds that racism can never be eradicated.  Like medical conditions, rarely cured, mostly successfully managed.

For Judeo-Pessimists, antisemitism is a kind of immortal, recurring hatred that simply is part of Western culture; again, Foer describes it as a “mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking.” As such, antisemitism can be fought but never destroyed.  That seems to be where anti-Semitism has gone historically.  And as Bari Weiss recommended in her book on this, the best defense is to be the most visibly honorable Jew you can be,

The natural endpoint of such a view is perpetual paranoia, together with an extreme form of right-wing Zionism.  Not at all.  Zionism has always been part of our consensus.  What we have stopped doing internally is seeking the Middle.  It tells us that we cannot trust the international community, and can only trust Jewish strength.  It dismisses human rights concerns, since the oppression of our enemies is the regrettable price of Jewish survival. Often it is.   Because if we are always and everywhere oppressed, then the Jewish future lies not in engagement with wider society, but in our strength in opposition to it.  Not at all.  Even in our darkest times, we have always had buffers, whether the Turks and Dutch of Inquisition times, Righteous Gentiles during Nazi domination, and the liberal ideologies in America that Franklin Foer and Dana Horn described in their essays.

This is a bleak vision, and reflective of the trauma which gave birth to it.  The Lachrymose View of Jewish History has its element of accuracy.

To be sure, there are good reasons to be scared right now. But the human capacity for freedom lies in our ability to transcend that fear — to recognize it and not be controlled by it. We can recognize that the better angels of our nature are not naive, but are wiser and more trustworthy than our passions, even when they are felt strongly. Moral panic is not the way forward.

Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a contributing columnist for the Forward and for Rolling Stone. He is the author of 10 books, and won the 2023 New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing.