I’m not a subscriber to Liberties, the journal, so I can read only a bit of this article by Susie Linfield, “The Politics of the Hardened Left: The Left Since October 7.” I’m not complaining. Having read a fair amount of Linfield’s work over the years, I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of what she thinks. And what she’s going to think. Never many surprises there. Which is why I want to comment on this opening statement of her article: Cataclysmic world events — the fall of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, September 11, Donald Trump’s ascendancy — should cause cataclysmic, or at least fundamental, changes in thought. To be an intellectual, or a citizen, means to respond to […]
I appreciated this conversation between Ahmed Moor and Peter Beinart over Beinart’s decision to speak at Tel Aviv University, in violation of BDS, and then, in the face of a lot of public and private criticism, including from people who are close to Beinart, his very public reconsideration and apology for having done so—and then the backlash to his apology. That backlash to his apology is coming from two different sides, from people who are anti-Zionist, who claim that Beinart is just doing damage control to preserve his brand, and people who are Zionist, who say he was forced to grovel before a political inquisition of the left. I have to say that Beinart does an extremely good job of […]
Until 2006, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch was chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is the leading academic and rabbinical training institute for Conservative Judaism. Which is all the more reason to be surprised, even shocked, by what he says in this interview with Peter Beinart. You have to understand the position of the JTS within American, even international Jewry, and the rabbinate it produces, to grapple with the full weight of Rabbi Schorsch’s statement. And know that he’s now 89 years old, and what it must be like, to have lived a full Jewish life to that age, to have survived and been a refugee from Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, to have created this world of rabbinic Judaism in the […]
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Categories
Jews, Palestine and Israel
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Tags Amos, Ezekiel, Foreigner, Gaza, Isaiah, Jewish Theological Seminary, Kristallnacht, Mishna, Peter Beinart, Prophets, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Roberta Flack, Yom Kippur
Two weeks ago, the New York Times ginned up a controversy over Zohran Mamdani’s college application. In his senior year of high school, Mamdani applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked off the boxes for Asian American and African American. He made a point of specifying that by African American he meant that he was from Uganda. Mamdani’s opponents, most notably Eric Adams, and other commentators immediately used the story against him, claiming that Mamdani was trying to game the affirmative action system of higher ed for his personal advantage by falsely claiming he was Black and Asian American. Peter Beinart has an excellent video out this morning, which puts the story in Mamdani’s family context—and […]
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Categories
Education, Jews, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, The Left, The Right, Violence
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Tags Edmund Burke, Eric Adams, Mahmood Mamdani, Mira Nair, Peter Beinart, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zohran Mamdani
I wasn’t going to address the controversy over what Zohran Mamdani did or didn’t say about the phrase “globalize the intifada.” But now that Hakeem Jeffries, the Minority Leader of the Democrats in the House, has decided to weigh in on it, on the Sunday morning talk shows no less—specifically, by invoking the fear that Jewish New Yorkers like me are supposed to be feeling when we hear the phrase being used—I think it’s worth a comment or two. Jeffries claims that Mamdani needs to “clarify his position” on the phrase, which is silly, because the only reason Jeffries is even talking about Mamdani’s position is that he has clarified it. On June 17, Tim Miller, an interviewer for The […]
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Categories
Jews, Middle East, Palestine and Israel, The Left, The Right, The State
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Tags Andrew Cuomo, Brooklyn College, Edith Wharton, Hakeem Jeffries, Kirsten Gillebrand, Margaret Litvin, Peter Beinart, Zohran Mamdani
From the Haggadah: And they did us evil, those Egyptians. They made us seem malevolent, as it is written: Behold, the nation of the children of Israel has become too many and too massive for us. Let us find a solution for this before they further multiply. Two points. First, the evil that the Egyptians did to the Jews was to construe them as malevolent, as wicked. Second, their wickedness consisted in becoming a massive nation within a nation. The Egyptians understood the wickedness of the Jews, in other words, by virtue of the demographic challenge they posed to the Egyptian nation. I’m not big on readings of the Haggadah that seek to extract contemporary political instruction from the text. […]
Peter Beinart is a liberal Zionist, a firm believer in the State of Israel, and a staunch critic of BDS. And this is what he has to say in Haaretz: But the tactical brilliance of BDS becomes clearer with every passing month. At a time when their leaders are bitterly divided and their people are geographically fragmented, BDS has united Palestinians like nothing else in recent memory. For the many young Palestinians fed up with both Fatah and Hamas, it offers a form of political action untainted by corruption, theocracy, collaboration and internal repression….And by relying on international activists—not Palestinian politicians—it universalizes the Palestinian struggle… But there’s one more factor that makes BDS so tactically shrewd: It exploits the mendacity […]
The speed and scale of the backlash against the ASA boycott have been formidable. But the backlash has a curious feature: it is a very elite backlash, as this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education makes clear. It is spearheaded almost entirely by university presidents (not exactly my go-to sources of moral instruction on academic freedom), government officials, and institutional actors like the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities. If you want to understand the sources of that elite backlash, particularly among university presidents, Bard College President Leon Botstein—by no means a progressive on this issue—breaks it down in that Chronicle piece. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and a boycott opponent, said calls from alumni […]
In shul this morning, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi spoke at length about the State of Israel. This is more surprising than you might think. I’ve been going to this shul since I moved to Brooklyn in 1999, and if memory serves, it’s only been in the last two or three years that the rabbi has devoted at least one of her High Holy Days talks to Israel. Throughout the aughts, Israel didn’t come up much in shul. During flash points of the Second Intifada, you might hear a prayer for Jewish Israelis or nervous temporizing about some action in Jenin or Gaza. But I can’t recall an entire sermon devoted to the State of Israel and […]
In September 2005, on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, The Nation ran a long piece I did on liberal support for the Iraq War and for US imperialism more generally. By way of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, and Peter Beinart—as well as Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty—it addressed what I thought and still think are some of the deeper political and intellectual roots of the liberals’ support for the Iraq War. On the tenth anniversary of the War, I thought I might reprint that essay here. Some things I got wrong (Beinart, for example, went onto have something of a turnabout on these issues; it wasn’t Oscar Wilde but Jonathan Swift who made that jibe). Other issues I […]
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Categories
Foreign Policy, Political Theory, The Left
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Tags A. Philip Randolph, Christopher Hitchens, James Baldwin, Judith Shklar, Katha Pollitt, Malcolm X, Martha Gellhorn, Martin Luther King, Michael Ignatieff, Paul Berman, Peter Beinart, Robespierre, Stokely Carmichael