On what cannot be undone
This is about choices
And we’re back!
Housekeeping notes: For those of you who are new, this newsletter is divided into three sections, which are a roundup of news, my views on a subject, and some stuff about Jews. This week (and I guess all weeks, but especially this week), some of the individual links in the section on Jewish news could be in straight news, and the reverse is true, too.
Also for paid subscribers: I’m thinking about what paid-only features to offer next year, in 2024. If you have any opinions on this—if you like the monthly questionnaire but not the reading list, for example, or if you think I should keep both, or if you’d rather something entirely new—please do feel free to let me know either in the comments or via email.
And anyone else should feel free to email (polite, constructive) feedback, too.
And now onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
For Slate, I covered a protest at the White House led by progressive Jewish groups against the war—and, more broadly, looked at the Jews, here and in Israel, pushing back on Israel’s choices in Gaza.
I wrote about how nationalists around the world promise to protect their country’s distinctiveness while managing to sound the same as one another—on how nationalists, in other words, offer deeply indistinct, unremarkable projects. This was pegged to Poland’s elections, which happened this past weekend. Speaking of which…
…it looks like voters did not buy the argument that voting for anyone but the ruling party makes you a traitor to the Polish nation and that the opposition will have won!
I really enjoyed this profile by Polish film director Agnieszka Holland in the Financial Times. The theme is given away by the quote in the headline: “It’s possible to commit the worst crimes and never pay.”
The once and future prime minister: Slovakia’s Robert Fico reached a coalition deal for a new government.
India’s top court did not legally recognize same-sex unions.
Friend of the newsletter Akbar Ahmed has an exclusive report on a senior State Department official who resigned over the Biden administration’s Israel policies.
Kelly Weill over at MomLeft (her newsletter for moms on the political left) wrote on the idea of waging war on children on behalf of other children.
This sharp piece from Ben Samuels looks at how Israelis are praising Biden as a leader while Republicans in the United States are trying to blame him for Hamas’s attack.
A six-year-old boy was stabbed to death near Chicago because he was Palestinian and Muslim.
If you read nothing else this week, please read this New Yorker interview with Sari Bashi, program director at Human Rights Watch and co-founder of Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, about the present responsibility to respect civilian lives regardless of what has been done in the past.
MY VIEWS ON…
…what cannot be undone!
I’ve given a lot of thought to what I want to write this week, and basically what it comes down to is this.
What is said and done now can never be unsaid and undone. The things we advocate for: We’ll never not have advocated for them. The things we choose to write and say: We’ll never not have written and said them. This is what I’ve tried to remember these past several days in determining what to cover, and write, and post, and say. That these will always have been my choices in this moment. I can later make different choices! But these choices, I can never take back.
I normally write longer essays than this for this newsletter. But this week I just wanted to throw that out there. That things can often be made right, and sometimes erased, but never completely undone.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
I strongly encourage you to read this piece by Arie Dubnov, chair of Israel Studies at GW, in the Tel Aviv Review of Books. I am not going to pull out a sentence or try to summarize it as I cannot do it justice.
Israeli settlers have reportedly decided now is the time to attack Palestinians in the West Bank. Haaretz has an editorial arguing that, if this goes on unchecked, it “will lead to the opening of another front, [and Netanyahu] will be responsible for another failure in his series of disastrous failures.”
Also from Haaretz: “Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi is promoting regulations that would allow him to direct police to arrest civilians, remove them from their homes, or seize their property if he believes they have spread information that could harm national morale or served as the basis for enemy propaganda.”
JTA has a piece on divisions within the Jewish left on how to respond to Hamas’s attack and war in Gaza.
The Forward offered a rabbi on what Jewish law has to say about war, while Yehuda Kurtzer, president of Shalom Hartman, wrote for JTA on turning to the history of Jewish trauma to make sense of Hamas’s attack.
This essay by Peter Beinart is on the idea that, if you really love Jews, surely you’ll show it by backing everything Israel does toward Palestinians, or else you must not love Jews or being Jewish. It’s also about why that is a false choice. I found it helpful. I am including it here because maybe it will help you, too.
That’s it for now! Hope to see you back here soon.
-ET