We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Next week, paid subscribers will get ET Watch Home, a series for this year only on Czech New Wave movies. This month’s movie is actually Slovak: It’s Birds, Orphans, and Fools (1969), which you can stream on Eastern European Movies dot Com if you are so inclined.
Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get the premium version of The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India—and the wider world (yes, we just rebranded and are proud of it and you should listen!).
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
I was quoted in this JTA piece on politicians using—and not using—the word “Zionist.”
I had to miss our podcast recording this week but Rohan and Tom had a special guest for a discussion on France.
I liked this write up of this week’s presidential debate.
As this Politico reporter put it, “City hall in Springfield, Ohio has been evacuated for a bomb threat, after the city has been the subject of a right-wing misinformation campaign about Haitians eating pets — an unsubstantiated claim Trump repeated on the debate stage.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…bad faith!
This week, a person went into a university bookstore and took a photo of a number of books, including mine. She expressed outrage over them (and, in follow ups, over my title, Bad Jews, specifically), and likened the books on display to Mein Kampf.
Obviously, none of this is anything next to any number of very real problems in the world, but I have been thinking about this for the last few days, ie since it happened, and would like to take this space to expand on what I said on Twitter dot com.
Firstly, the title of my book is not Jews Are Bad. It is Bad Jews, a phrase Jews throw at one another to contest and gatekeep identity, hence why is it the title of the book with a subtitle that reads, “A history of American Jewish politics and identities.” I cannot be sure but my guess is that the authors of Bad Mexicans and Bad Gays chose their titles for similar reasons.
Secondly, were an antisemite to somehow mistake this as reading material for them, they would find a nuanced and ultimately loving portrait of American Jewishness, so I am not worried about that.
Thirdly, so often, in my experience, the people who express outrage over the title are themselves people who try to claim that there’s one right way to be Jewish, and that I’m doing it wrong, thus proving my point.
Fourthly, and what I did not think to say on Tuesday but have been reflecting on since: While I do not know this person, and thus cannot speak to her state of mind or intent, I do think that this falls into a broader pattern of deliberate bad faith and fake outrage. I’m not offended, per se, that my book title was used to demonstrate that a university bookstore is conspiring against Jews, but I do think that we should be comfortable pushing back and saying that, no, that’s pretty clearly not what’s happening here.
I also think it’s shameful to try to present this — a table of books on Jews and Jewishness — as antisemitism, thus watering down the word beyond recognition. And while I am not expecting an apology from a person who likened me to Adolf Hitler because she didn’t like my book title, in the spirit of Elul, I will say that I think she should probably reflect on and change that behavior.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
Haaretz has a report on Jews who have moved from—and to—Israel since Oct. 7.
From The 74: “The portrayal of Jewish people became a main point of contention Tuesday during a state school board hearing about Texas’s new reading curriculum that predominantly features the Bible and Christianity over other faiths.”
Here’s a dispatch from Germany on the Jewish artists being labeled as antisemitic.
From the New York Times: “An ad campaign in [Michigan], funded by a group that appears tied to Republicans, seems designed to remind Muslim voters of Kamala Harris’s pro-Israel views and her husband’s Jewish faith.”
-ET