Vienna, part II
A little reflection
And we’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This week, paid subscribers got ET Read Home (a day late, for which I am very sorry). This month’s little reading list was focused on Central Europe.
I got home from 11 days in Vienna (ft. a weekend in the best city, Prague) yesterday, which is why this, too, is a day late (again, very sorry!). We at ET Write Home thank you for your patience.
As always, if there is something you would like to see more or less of in this newsletter, please let me know. Only paid subscribers can comment on posts (talk around here is cheap, but not free), but all of you are welcome to email me with your thoughts. I just ask that you keep it polite and constructive.
And now onto news, views, and Jews.
THE NEWS
I went on the American Prestige podcast to talk about Bad Jews and American Jewish identities.
Slovak President Zuzana Caputova is not seeking re-election in what some are seeing as a further blow to liberalism in the country.
Dozens of lawmakers urged Biden to raise the issue of human rights during Modi’s state visit this week.
Modi said there is no discrimination in India.
This visit yielded results like the Indian purchase of US spy drones.
US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was taken luxury fishing by a billionaire who then had business before the court. Alito did not disclose this or recuse himself.
The EU Court of Justice ruled that Hungary is depriving people of their right to seek asylum.
In some rare good news, Estonia legalized marriage equality!
MY VIEWS ON…
…Vienna, part two!
The short version is that my impressions from the beginning were my impressions at the end. It’s a lovely, highly functional city with a history half-hidden in plain sight surrounded by a country in which the far-right is apparently on the rise, again.
The slightly longer version, though, is that I spent a lot of time thinking about my last time in Vienna. That was a decade ago. I had come to meet my family for a trip. I was living in Germany on a Fulbright. I was researching Soviet dissidence at an archival centre in Bremen, Germany. It was a lonely year. I made other Fulbright friends, but they were scattered around the country. I hung out mostly with Erasmus students, which always felt like I was standing on the very outer edge of a social circle. It was the darkest winter in German history.
I realized now, though, what I didn’t back then. My German was better then, but I’m more comfortable slipping into it now, and I know that if someone is snide about a mistake, as happened then and happened this past trip, that’s a reflection on them, not me. I know now that I took the academic research from that year and used it in my graduate studies, and in my second book, and in an article. I know now that I learned from that year how to try to get along with people from lots of different kinds of places. I know now that the things that made me upset then or seemed so big are anecdotes now. I know now all the things I’ve done. I know now all the things I haven’t been able to do. I was cockier then, I think, because I was 23. But I’m happier now, probably in no small part because I’m not 23 anymore.
I was speaking with another journalist on this program about how sometimes there is a tendency to feel like you’re only as good as the last thing you did. I feel that way a lot. But a thing that I realized while in Vienna, and that I hope I can keep with me, is that the things you did—the pieces you publish, the trips you take, the people you meet—are not isolated moments. You get to take them with you. I’ve done so much that I’m proud of in the last decade. I have also had lows that felt like they were never going to end. They were all there with me in Vienna, guiding me from metro stop to metro stop, from session to session, from meal to meal.
This isn’t, of course, really about Vienna. But it’s about a place, and returning to it the same and also different, and leaving, and taking both versions of you with you as you board the plane to go home.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
Israel is adding and reauthorizing settlements.
A Missouri school board voted not to ban Maus.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a disgrace to Jews so Zelensky called him an antisemite.
The Combat Antisemitism Coalition has confirmed that its video blaming “work ideology” for antisemitism will stay offline.
I recommend this Anshel Pfeffer column: “The history of the persecution of the Jews over the centuries is unique. As a result, Israel’s achievements are pretty unique as well. The hatred of an individual who is capable of setting a house on fire with its occupants still inside is not. No matter where it happens or the identity of the arsonist. You don’t have to call it a pogrom to remember how, not long ago, our grandparents were the ones inside the burning homes…No one has any right to expect Jews to be somehow better, and there is no lack of ethnic hatred and murderous depravity elsewhere. But the burden of our history is there, and we can’t just shut it out when it becomes uncomfortably inconvenient to remember.”
Germany has pledged $1.4 billion to Holocaust survivors in 2024.
A South Carolina rabbi is planning to move out of the state due to anti-LGBTQ legislation.
That’s it for now! Hope to see you back here soon.
-ET