On the opposition
This is about a hearing and also on conceding the point
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This Monday, paid subscribers got ET Leave Home, a monthly travel recommendation. This week, readers went to Savannah, Georgia.
Beginning this week, all 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. My co-hosts and I are trying to broaden its reach and sending it out to all of you is one way to do that. I hope you’ll give it a listen.
With that! Onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about the relief that came with not hearing Trump talk about antisemitism or Jews and the knowledge that that relief is kind of fake, because our well being is jeopardized by much of what he did say.
This week on the Political Cycle, we talked about the view of Washington from the wider world.
I thought this piece by Hamilton Nolan, on the joint address and the way we live now, was very good.
Lovely piece on Warsaw in the Financial Times magazine this week (paid subscribers will have already seen some of these restaurant recommendations in January’s ET Leave Home).
This, from Andrew Roth in the Guardian on JD Vance’s role in the attempted humiliation of Ukraine, was spot on.
From Reuters: “President Donald Trump's administration is planning to revoke temporary legal status for some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the conflict with Russia, a senior Trump official and three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially putting them on a fast-track to deportation.”
Poland, I am begging you. From the Financial Times: “A far-right outsider in Poland has leapt ahead of his conservative rival in the run-up to presidential elections in May, in another sign of how Donald Trump’s brand of populism is gaining traction in Europe.”
MY VIEWS ON…
…the opposition!
I got a little emotional watching clips of and reading about Mayor Michelle Wu’s performance—which, let’s be real, is what these are—yesterday at a congressional hearing on immigration. She showed up with her seven week old baby and said, as far as I could tell, refused to give an inch. Shame on the “border czar” for lying about her city, she said. “This federal administration is making hard-working, tax-paying, God-fearing people afraid to live their lives. A city that’s scared is not a city that’s safe. A land ruled by fear is not the land of the free,” she told them. And her viral moment: telling Paul Gosar, “If you wanted to make us safe, pass gun reforms. Stop cutting Medicaid. Stop cutting cancer research. Stop cutting funds for veterans. That is what will make our city safe.”
I think we are too deep into this moment to think that any one politician or testimony or speech is going to turn this thing around. But it was something to see someone not give an inch. Not concede that maybe the Republicans were making some good points, or pretend that it’s immigrants who make this country more dangerous, or that Republicans at this moment in history are actually pursuing good and common sense immigration policy. You don’t have to hand it to them.
It was nice to see someone demonstrate that, particularly given that many national Democrats have apparently decided that it’s wrong to do so. Virginia’s Mark Warner, whose constituents are, I am sure, particularly hard hit by Trump’s attack on federal workers, said that he thought Trump was making “great progress” on the border. He walked it back, but why say it at all? Who is that for? Going to the joint address and wearing pink and sitting through lies and holding up little ping pong paddles—what’s the point of that? I’m not sure how you say in one breath that this is antidemocratic and illegal and will get people killed and in the next say that you need to respect the dignity of his office or find common ground.
I am not sure if it’s the case that our elected opposition does not understand the stakes of this moment or if it’s that they do but don’t know how to respond or some combination of the two but the end result is the same. Which is why it was noteworthy that, this week, given the chance, someone went to Congress and said that not only that Trump and his party were lying about immigrants, but that, on the merits, they were wrong.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From the New York Times: “Under the Biden administration, Israel’s far-right finance minister was the rare Israeli official whom the United States rebuked by name for his views, like his opposition to a cease-fire in Gaza. Under the Trump administration, he is a welcome guest in Washington, where top U.S. officials are now aligning with some of his beliefs about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The minister, Bezalel Smotrich, met with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday, remarking in a statement about his embrace after years of being effectively shunned.”
From the Times of Israel: “It’s a strange sight in a Jewish burial ground, where religious law says the dead must remain undisturbed in perpetuity. These newcomers are archaeology students from the University of Warsaw who convinced Poland’s Jewish authorities to let them work on restoring the cemetery’s pre-war infrastructure — beneath the soil and debris piled over the untrodden paths to Jewish graves.”
It is with a heavy heart that I bring you the following from JTA: “Kingsley Wilson, appointed in January to be deputy press secretary at the Pentagon, last year tweeted a neo-Nazi talking point about Jewish lynching victim Leo Frank.”
From the New York Times: “Editors waited decades for the final manuscript of Chaim Grade’s ‘Sons and Daughters.’ Its appearance shook the Yiddish literary world.”
I recommend two pieces, both from Haaretz, on No Other Land: Dahlia Scheindlin on what its Oscar win won’t change, and this editorial on what it might.
-ET
"Michelle Wu campaigning for Mayor (1) 02" by [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLaJ9rM3XrOp3VD851ByKwQ Boston University News Service] is licensed under CC BY 3.0.