On No End
This is about the election and a movie
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This week, paid subscribers got November’s ET Ask Home, a monthly questionnaire, featuring a very special guest to whom I am married.
Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get the premium version of The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India—and the wider world.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
On Wednesday morning, I wrote this for the Forward on the election, what happens now, and the gap between “we’ve got this” and “we’ve got us.”
Before the election, I wrote this for Slate on why American Jews shouldn’t buy what Trump is selling (the good news is, if the polls we had are correct, they overwhelmingly didn’t; the bad news is, he still won).
This week on the podcast, we talked about — surprise! — the US election.
I thought this, from Erica L. Green at the New York Times, on what Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris means to Black women is worth watching.
Also in the New York Times, Hamed Aleaziz broke down why Arab Americans voted for Trump in Dearborn, Michigan.
I thought this piece on what drove Latino men to vote for Trump was excellent.
I don’t have a whole essay in me on this but I am really grappling and struggling with the fact of sexism in this election. I don’t just mean that Kamala Harris is a woman. I don’t just mean that abortion access and reproductive rights are at greater risk as a result. I don’t just mean that he was found liable for sexual abuse. I mean that misogyny was so core to his campaign and that appealed to many people and I guess didn’t bother enough other people (including many women) for it to be the winning message of the day. That’s a hard thing to know about your fellow citizens.
MY VIEWS ON…
…the election!
All I have to say about this week that is not in the Forward piece I linked to at the top or that last bullet point is this: There’s a movie by Krzysztof Kieślowski called No End. It’s set in the 1980s, in Poland under martial law. Kieślowski said it’s about people with their heads held low, hanging down.
In the movie, this woman’s husband dies. He was a defense attorney, and he was working on the case of a man who helped organize a strike. That person takes on a new lawyer, an old man who goes by Labrador. And the client goes on a hunger strike, and is debating whether to make himself a martyr or a symbol or something to this effect. And eventually Labrador says: Listen. When our political situation changed and got worse, you didn’t all storm the barricade. You didn’t all up and die. And the client asks, basically, should we have? And Labrador says: No, I’m not saying that. But you chose to live. And a person who has chosen to live must be able to endure.
I think of this a lot. “A person who has chosen to live must be able to endure.”
I do not want to sugarcoat what comes next, which as I’ve written elsewhere will, I think, be very bad. But this is not the worst thing in human history. It is, if we are honest, not even the worst thing happening to people in the world right now. And we have the obligation to not give up.
To go back to No End: I think Central and Eastern Europe’s political history and present (ie Hungary and Slovakia) show us how bad this can get, but they also show us that things can get better. But we have to endure in order to see how.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
Per a poll from GBAO Strategies, American Jews 71 percent of American Jews voted for Kamala Harris. A Wall Street Journal poll had a slight drop to 66 percent. This is to say that, as far as we know now, the perennial prediction that American Jews would flock to Trump over Israel and fear of antisemitism did not come true.
Relatedly, from the Forward: “More than a year after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, most American Jews are broadly supportive of Israel but harshly critical of its leadership and prosecution of the war on Gaza, according to an Election Day exit poll released on Thursday, even as they expressed deep concerns about antisemitism related to protests against the war.”
From Haaretz: “Settler leaders believe that Donald Trump's election is good news for them, especially regarding the future of the Biden administration's sanctions regime and U.S. obstacles against building settlements in Gaza.”
JTA has a developing story about violence against Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam.
Here is a piece that suggests we should expect a crackdown on universities in the name of fighting antisemitism under Trump.
You should go see this film on Jews in Poland today at YIVO in early December! I saw it in Warsaw and think it’s excellent.
-ET
Image from Wikipedia