Mandy Patinkin's words of wisdom
This is about something that helped me, and might help you, too
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This week, paid subscribers got May’s ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire.
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
For The Washington Post, I reviewed Tobias Buck’s Final Verdict: The Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century.
For Slate, I wrote about why I think American Jews should oppose the Antisemitism Awareness Act out of self interest, if nothing else.
I also went on The Briefing to discuss the piece with Steve Scully.
This week on the Election Tricycle, Rohan and I interviewed Newslaundry executive editor Manisha Pande about TV news in India.
Christopher Hooks has a dispatch from the Habsburg convention in Plano, Texas. Yes, you read that correctly.
I found this, by Aryeh Neier, who has done as much as anyone living for the concept of human rights and international law, very moving, not only for his analysis, but for his own personal story.
MY VIEWS ON…
…an interview from January with Mandy Patinkin!
This is a very self-indulgent mini-essay, but I came across an article that helped me, and I am sharing it here in case it helps you, too.
This is probably too personal to write here, but I go back and forth on how I feel about writing as much as I do on American Jewish politics and identities. I came up in journalism as a foreign policy reporter, not through the Jewish press. That it’s now one of my beats is more of a reflection of following personal interest where it leads: writing on dissent and Central and Eastern Europe led me to writing on George Soros, which led me to writing about antisemitism and dismissiveness of his Jewishness, which led me to write about American Jew identities and the gatekeeping thereof, which led me to the current version of my career.
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I feel very lucky to get to write about all of this for a living, because it’s a privilege to get to get paid to write about something that’s important to you and that you spend many of your waking hours, and indeed some of your sleeping hours, thinking about. On the other hand, I know (because they have told me) that there are many people who don’t only disagree with what I’m writing and saying, but are personally angered by it. And because of the subject, this includes people that I know and care about in real life. And I sometimes wonder why I keep doing this. Nobody’s making me. I’m freelance.
This is the kind of self-pitying place I was in when I came across this Town and Country interview from January by Emily Burack with American Jewish treasure Mandy Patinkin. In it, he tells her,
Let’s just marry escapism to the word fear. What are you afraid of? What are you trying to get away from? You will never outrun it. You will never escape it. It’ll always win the race. So the key is: walk toward the fire. Walk toward your fear. Face it, embrace it, and treat—this is, to me, one of the most important things—treat your troubles as the greatest gift you were given that day, because that’s where you learn something.
That really helped me change my thinking about this. It helped me realize that it’s because it’s such a source of feeling for me that I want to keep doing this, not despite it. You’re left with the feeling either way.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
Hey Alma has nine essays by Jewish college students on what it feels like at this moment. (It will not surprise you to know that they all feel differently in this moment.)
At the Washington Post, Michelle Boorstein and Annie Gowen unpacked what people are talking about when they’re talking about “Zionism.”
Omer Bartov writing in Moment: “Yesterday’s passage by the House of Representatives of the Antisemitism Awareness Act (AAA) in response to student demonstrations and encampments protesting the war in Gaza is a cynical, or at best naïve move that will only lend a hand to opponents of free speech and undermine democracy in the service of 21st-century authoritarianism—the same kind of authoritarianism that only seven decades ago engaged in the labeling, persecution and mass murder of Jews and other minorities in Europe.”
I thought this, by Mark Mazower, was really great. It’s a response to one Atlantic piece about the end of the Golden Age of American Jewishness but it’s more than that, too.
And I thought this, by Maya Lecker in Haaretz, on who deserves to be called the Israeli opposition, was brave.
-ET
"You Kill My Father" by valkyrieh116 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.