Found in translation
On writing about Jewishness
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: Next Monday, paid subscribers will get this month’s ET Ask Home, this newsletter’s monthly questionnaire.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the New Republic, I wrote about Jewish institutions during the Red Scare and now and what we can learn from the similarities and differences regarding their behavior toward dissenting Jewish groups and individuals.
For Slate, I wrote about the campaign against Harvard’s Derek Penslar, and why I think it’s emblematic of much of what’s wrong with today’s debates around antisemitism.
For the Washington Post, I reviewed Lovers in Auschwitz.
This week on the Election Tricycle podcast, we discussed Nitish Kumar, Trump-boosting Tories, and the US border and immigration. And also Taylor Swift.
I really enjoyed, and felt a sense of doom reading, this Rolling Stone piece on young Republicans in Manhattan by Jack Crosbie.
I encourage you to read this New Yorker interview with a pediatrician on her experiences in Gaza.
MY VIEWS ON…
…Bad Jews coming out in Polish and what it reminded me!
My book came out in Polish this week. I was surprised how moved I ended up being by this simple fact.
The reason is this: I sometimes think that I should never have started writing about Jewish politics and identities. People email and message me things that I would never say about or to anyone, ever. The same arguments happen and I document them. People tell other people that they’re not really Jewish or don’t belong within the fold or are betraying Judaism and I write about it, or just watch it and take it in, wondering why I’m doing this. I should have just stuck to writing about US policy toward Central and Eastern Europe.
I was playing around on Ancestry dot Com last week—I made a tree back when I was writing my book—and saw that the woman for whom I was named, my great-grandmother, Ete-Feyge, was from Poland. I wondered, when this book came out, what she would have made of this. My book coming out in the place she and her family left. My book on Jewishness that features her.
And I guess what this helped me understand is that it’s not as though US policy toward Central and Eastern Europe is divorced from Jewish politics, or that I could have kept writing about one without that other, at least without hiding from it. That eventually, we find our way back to the things we’ve maybe been avoiding or trying to keep from directly looking at. These things about which I care are interconnected.
And it also helped me understand that the reason I am spending my time on this is that it means so much to me. The world wouldn’t really be any worse off if I gave up and focused on something else. I would be, though.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I loved this Forward piece on Mikhl Yashinsky and his Yiddish-language play, which Neil and I were lucky enough to see last month in New York City.
Dave Klion has an essay in NYRB on anti- or non-Zionist Jews on the left’s place, or lack thereof, in American Jewish institutions.
From the Forward: “The founding dean of Hebrew College’s rabbinical school has been barred from its campus over the fallout from allegations of sexual misconduct brought by a faculty member who was previously his student.” Also in the Forward, Laura E. Adkins argues that the reckoning needs to be public.
Settlers held a summit envisioning Gaza’s resettlement.
Open Society Foundations announced “$1 million in additional funding to combat antisemitism and hate and work to further prevent the weaponization of antisemitism charges from undermining efforts to address the root causes of the conflict.”
-ET