We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This coming Monday, paid subscribers got this month’s ET Watch Home, a monthly movie essay. Each month, I write about a different Czech New Wave movie and its director. This month’s movie was Jaromil Jireš’s The Joke.
Paid subscribers also get the premium version of The Election Tricycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on this year’s elections in the United States, United Kingdom, and India.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
This week on The Election Tricycle, we got an update from India and discussed the state of parties in the UK.
From the AP: “To a degree never seen before, Israel is killing entire Palestinian families, a loss even more devastating than the physical destruction and the massive displacement.”
From Politico: “Ursula von der Leyen has sought to slow down an official European Union report criticizing Italy for eroding media freedoms, as she seeks Rome’s support for a second term as European Commission president.”
We can end sentences with prepositions now! The dictionary said so!
MY VIEWS ON…
…your views!
We are about halfway through the year! That means that, this week, instead of sharing my thoughts, I am asking you for yours.
As a rule, I don’t read the comments on articles or most Twitter/Bluesky replies on what I publish—in the words of that one guy in Love Actually, “It’s a self-preservation thing, you see”—but I am making an exception for you, beloved ET Write Home readers.
If there are things that you especially like in this newsletter, let me know! If there is something you would like to see more or less of, let me know that, too! If there is something you really hate, please find a way to tell me that is kind and constructive as I am very sensitive.
Paid subscribers can comment, but everyone is welcome and indeed encouraged to reply to this to let me know their thoughts. (You can always do this, to be clear, but I am especially encouraging you to do so this week.)
And since I don’t say it every week even though I always think it: Thank you for reading.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
Haaretz has a report on the findings from Columbia’s Antisemitism Task Force and what the university plans to do next.
Much in this newsletter is upsetting, but I feel I should caution readers that this, from the Washington Post, is upsetting in a specific way: “The reported rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in a suburb of Paris has brought protesters into the streets and drawn condemnations from top politicians, who have linked the episode to rampant antisemitism.”
From JTA: “Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary, will begin admitting and ordaining students who are in relationships with non-Jews, following a decision by its board to drop a longstanding ban on interfaith relationships for rabbinical students.”
Also from JTA: “Wikipedia’s editors have voted to declare the Anti-Defamation League ‘generally unreliable’ on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, adding it to a list of banned and partially banned sources.” I thought Professor James Loeffler’s comments on the decision in this CNN piece were sharp, and that this Forward column on the development was well done, too.
Many stories of “Jewish runaway husbands are part of a special exhibit, opening this week at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan, devoted to a little-known agency called the National Desertion Bureau.”
-ET