On cynicism
This is about hope dying last
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This past Monday, paid subscribers got June’s ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire. This coming month’s guest was a wonderful person who is also my dad.
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
On the Election Tricycle, we unpacked India’s surprising election results.
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stephanie M. Lee has a profile of a misinformation expert who was maybe …spreading misinformation.
In case you missed the touching viral moment between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and a World War II veteran on D-Day, here it is.
My friend Adam shared this with me and described it as the kind of article I include in my newsletter, so I’m including it: Haaretz profiled “MiddleMeets, an initiative by students from Israeli universities to expand the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both at home and abroad.”
VSquare has a piece on a Polish businessman who is wanted by prosecutors and a Sejm committee and who evidently blew up his own spot by posting repeatedly on social media from Budapest.
This is a good breakdown on the differences in how Trump and Biden supporters view issues like race, gender, and immigration.
Justice for the Beagles.
For Pride Month, my friend Nishita dreamed up the Big Gay Book of Nature.
MY VIEWS ON…
…cynicism!
I was thinking about this with respect to the Indian elections earlier this week, but I think it’s true more generally, too.
Things are terrible. It is easy to feel that things will only ever get more terrible. Protest movements fizzle out. Aspiring autocrats are voted out of power only to come back in. Wars wage on. Bad things happen to good people. Personal disappointments and heartbreaks and griefs abound. All our idols are dead and our enemies are in power, as the song goes.
And still, despite that, good things do happen. Opposition candidates manage to win elections even when they’re unfree and unfair. Legislation that makes people’s lives better sneaks through. Powerful people are, shockingly, held accountable for crimes. The things we have given up on in our personal lives come through for us.
I think it would be grossly misleading to tell people that you have to hope for or believe in the best when the best is so rarely what we get. I, personally, will continue to expect that things will be terrible. But I guess what I’ve come to is that, alongside all of that, you and I have to keep showing up, in whatever form that means to us. We have to do this not because things are bound to turn out for the best, but so that the best, if it’s ready to appear, can find us ready and waiting for it.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From Haaretz: “The Israeli government is behind a large-scale influence campaign primarily aimed at Black lawmakers and young progressives in the United States and Canada…According to sources and information obtained by Haaretz, the operation was commissioned by Israel's Diaspora Affairs Ministry but carried out by a different party, for fear that its exposure could entangle Israel in a crisis.”
Progressive Jewish group Bend the Arc broke its longstanding policy on not engaging on Israel and called on the Biden administration to stop “offensive munitions” sales to Israel.
Rokhl Kafrissen has a great rebuttal to Ken Burns on Yiddish.
Mexico elected its first Jewish (and first woman) president!
The New York Times has an extremely well done piece looking at how Holocaust museums in the United States are grappling with and talking about (or alternatively not grappling with or talking about) Israel and Gaza.
-ET