A line on dissent
To be a citizen
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes:
This coming Monday, paid subscribers will get November’s ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire. I know I say this all the time but I’m so excited about this coming month’s guest.
For those of you who are new, the regular newsletter (i.e. what you are reading right now) is divided into three sections, which are a roundup of news, my views on a subject, and some stuff about Jews. This week (and I guess all weeks, but especially right now), some of the individual links in the section on Jewish news could be in straight news, and the reverse is true, too. I tried to use my best judgment and I hope it makes sense.
Also for paid subscribers: I’m thinking about what paid-only features to offer next year, in 2024. If you have any opinions on this—if you like the monthly questionnaire but not the reading list, for example, or if you think I should keep both, or if you’d rather something entirely new—please do feel free to let me know either in the comments or via email.
And anyone else should feel free to email (polite, constructive) feedback, too.
And now onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For Slate, I wrote on American Jewish fear, and why we need to both recognize and address it and also use it as a source of solidarity, not as a reason to shut down discussion.
Arab American support for US President Joe Biden is dropping dramatically.
In what I am pretty sure was a first for a major English language publication, the Financial Times called for a ceasefire.
A mass deportation of Afghan refugees is underway in Pakistan.
Unsurprisingly, Poland’s ruling party, which lost the recent elections, is casting doubt on the results. Poland’s LGBTQ population, on the other hand, is celebrating them.
“A university set up in Warsaw by Ordo Iuris, a prominent conservative legal group, with political and financial backing from the Polish government has registered only one new student this year.”
My beloved husband showed me this piece on partnerships where one person talks way more. Can’t imagine why it spoke to him.
Activist Ady Barkan passed away at the age of 39.
MY VIEWS ON…
…a line on dissent!
I wrote my undergraduate thesis, Fulbright project, and Master’s thesis on the rights-based dissident movement in Soviet Russia. Early on in that process, I would wonder, over and over, why they did it. They were a relatively small group. They risked professional punishment, or imprisonment, or, in some cases, psychiatric abuse. And their chances of getting the government to hold itself accountable to its own laws were—let’s put it delicately—slim. Arguably the most prominent protest in rights-based dissident history was the one on Red Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. A handful—literally, several—of people showed up and held a banner that read, “For your freedom and ours.” They risked life as they knew it to do that.
One of those people, Vladimir Dremlyuga, explained his decision thusly (per Marshall Shatz’s Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective): “All my conscious life,” he said, “I have wanted to be a citizen—that is, a person who proudly and calmly speaks his mind. For ten minutes, I was a citizen.”
I have thought of the quote often lately, looking at the first protest against the war and/or against their government in Israel, or thinking of the way dissent is silenced in times of crisis. A lot of things make me cry, but Dremlyuga’s line is one of them.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I can’t recommend this interview with Etgar Keret highly enough.
Natasha Rowland had an interesting piece on the uses of Holocaust memory.
Anshel Pfeffer had a good piece on Israel’s ambassador to the UN’s decision to don a yellow star and the political context in which that decision was made.
Two Jewish Currents pieces on whether what is happening in Gaza constitutes a genocide: Raz Segal makes the case that it does, while Dov Waxman argues it does not.
This New Yorker interview with Israeli activist on Hagai El-Ad is worth reading.
This Haaretz piece on the Israeli peace activists who lost loved ones but not their empathy in Hamas’s attack is, too.
That’s it for now. Hope to see you back here soon.
-ET