An embarrassment of horrible riches
This is about ...too much!
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This past Monday, paid subscribers got this month’s ET Ask Home. This month’s guest was Eoin Higgins, journalist and author of the forthcoming book Owned.
Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India, and the wider world, ad-free and directly to their inboxes from me (these posts will now unlock later).
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about the inauguration, the Soviet right-based dissidence movement, and why it’s important to push back against lol nothing matters.
This week on the podcast, we talked about Trump’s first days and the view from the UK and India.
VSquare has a great piece on a man in Poland who was caught spying for Russian, did time, and then—went right back to going to business conferences to network.
David Pressman, outgoing US ambassador to Hungary, to the New York Times: “When I walk away from this experience, one of the things that is most alarming to me is just how easy it is to actually control people. It doesn’t take secret police. It doesn’t take guns. It doesn’t take gulags.”
Good for this bishop.
From the BBC: “Slovakia's populist prime minister, Robert Fico, has claimed opposition forces are planning a "Maidan"-style coup, referring to the popular uprising that toppled Ukraine's pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Fico, who survived an assassination attempt last May, quoted from what he said was a classified report ahead of an opposition-sponsored motion of no-confidence in his government on Tuesday.”
From the WSJ: “The gears of government slowed to a halt this week after President Trump axed major federal initiatives across Washington, causing even routine functions to hit the skids.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…not knowing what to write about because there is too much!
I am going to be honest with you and say that I don’t know what to write this week.
I’m a little embarrassed by that. Firstly, I want this newsletter to do what it says on the tin, i.e. to offer a roundup of news, my views on a given subject, and some stuff about Jews, and if I’m not offering you a “view,” it’s not really doing that. Secondly, and self-servingly, this newsletter normally “does better” when this main section is about something.
But thirdly, and most importantly, it’s not like there’s a shortage of stuff to write about. I could write about Melania’s hat or the general vulgarity of Trump’s inauguration. I could write about birthright citizenship or how truly, bone-chillingly deranged it is that we’re talking about dusting off the Alien Enemies Act. I could write about how I think it’s sick, actually, to tell federal employees that they have to snitch on one another should they sense but a whiff of diversity, equity, inclusion, or accessibility. They’ve cut off health communications to change phrases like “pregnant people” to “pregnant women.” I don’t care about being called a person or a woman! I just want people, including me, to get information we need about our health! Also, it’s completely unbelievable that this is actually for women, given that anything that smacks of gender or radical stuff like “considering women” is being snuffed out. Also given that Pete Hegseth, who as the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer put it, “had an NDA with a rape accuser to whom he paid $50k and has a non-disparagement clause binding his ex-wife-from publicly speaking ill of him,” was put forth as our next secretary of defense.
I could talk about Elon Musk’s double salute, and how whether he was intentionally doing a Nazi salute (twice, while thanking voters for saving civilization) matters less than his long history of antisemitic, white supremacist rhetoric and policy promotion, or how appalled I was that the ADL’s response to this was to encourage people to “take a breath.” I could write that I think it is both horrifying but also deeply misguided that a Jewish organization made a list of foreign students it wants deported to present to the Trump administration (I have been working as a fellow with the Nexus Task Force, a part of the Nexus Project, which works to counter antisemitism and protect free speech, and which put out a statement about this here).
There’s too much, in other words. There’s too much to choose from. A real embarrassment of riches of terrible things about which I could focus on in this newsletter.
That’s the point, right? Flood the zone, wear you out, grind you down. And that’s maybe the reason I’m most embarrassed to not have been able to fully formulate a mini essay for you today. Because it hasn’t even been a week.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From Ben Samuels in Haaretz: “Musk's 'Fascist Salute': U.S. Jewish Establishment Failed Its First Test With Trump 2.0”
From JTA: “The Belgian railway company that sent Jews to Nazi death camps should not have to pay compensation to survivors, a panel commissioned by the Belgian government has concluded.”
In case you missed it (as I did), an episode of the “On the Nose” podcast looking at Trump’s upcoming repression and weaponization of antisemitism.
From Haaretz: “After a shooting attack that killed three Israelis in the West Bank, and especially with Palestinian prisoners being released in the hostage deal, extremist settlers have ramped up their calls to avenge Palestinian villages. On Monday, they carried out their threat.”
Joshua Shanes, a professor of Jewish studies, has a sharp piece on the history of antisemitism, definition debates, and Harvard’s recent agreement to adopt IHRA as the definition of antisemitism, and why “Harvard’s adoption of the IHRA definition, accordingly, would mean that any speech that calls for full equality for Palestinians risks academic and legal sanction, even without any material discrimination against Jewish students.”
-ET
Hi Emily,
I think most everyone is overwhelmed this week and an admission of that is a perfectly cromulent way of parsing this week’s events. I know it is certainly how I am (partiality failing) to process things.
I also want to thank you for the Shanes’s piece. Having such a succinct summary of the last few years discussion around dueling antisemitism definitions made me able to put to words a frustration I’ve had the last few years:
There has been a lot of ink spilled, understandably, on how to define individual instances as antisemitic or not but less conversation on a wider theory of WHAT role antisemitism is playing in a broader abstract sense in society and culture l.
Personally I feel like something broader like that would be useful in helping parse whether any given…hand gesture is worth focusing on.
I’ll say that my own search for more recent writing like that will likely mean cracking open my copy of Shaul Magid’s “Importance of Exile” and maybe poking my head into some sources he mentions there (e.g. Lapidot’s Jews Out of the Question etc. ) but I’d be very interested if you or readers/commenters to the newsletter had any other recommendations for anything along those lines written post-Oct 7th.