How and Why the Nation,S Crime Busters Are Becoming Criminal Enablers Commentary by ANDREW C

CommentaryMARCH 2020 The Progressive Prosecutor Project How and why the nation,s crime busters are becoming criminal enablers Commentary by ANDREW C. McCARTHY

MARCH 2020 : VOLUME 149 NUMBER 3

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JOHN PODHORETZ

F THE BOND shan’t burst,” Friedrich Nietzsche that Jews have no ancestral history in Jerusalem, and once wrote, “bite upon it first.” He called this a finger-wagging demands that their beloved terrorist ‘ I“rule as a riddle,” a way of describing how an ir- Jew-killers be released from Israeli jails. rationally insoluble problem sometimes requires an The Israelis offered Palestinians a state twice unconventional solution. It’s Alexander the Great and in 2000. The Palestinians answered those offers with the Gordian knot—or Indiana Jones facing a scimitar- terrorism, hate-filled propaganda, and war. The hope wielding foe in a dusty marketplace and saving him- of optimistic Israelis that there could be a favorable self with a single shot from a pistol. resolution of this intractable problem exploded like That is the logic of the Trump-administration a suicide vest. plan for Israel and the Palestinians. Its designers are In the two decades since the second intifada be- seeking to slice through two decades of stasis by means gan, there has been only one half-serious, half-ludicrous of a radical alteration in the role of the United States as proposal—made in 2008 in secret by the unpopular, un- one of the players in the so-called peace process. elected, and bribery-tarnished accidental prime min- Since the Oslo accords in 1993 effectively created ister, Ehud Olmert. The Olmert plan was rejected on a negotiating partner for Israel by incepting a “Pales- spurious grounds by the Palestinian Authority’s leader, tinian Authority” led by Yasser Arafat, the American Mahmoud Abbas. When he came into office in 2009, approach was to propose various trust-building and Benjamin Netanyahu immediately offered to move to confidence-building measures. They were explic- final-status negotiations with the Palestinians, only to itly designed as precursors, as ways of smoothing the be rebuffed—and there matters have lain dormant. rocky road to a final deal that would be negotiated Donald Trump came into office promising the between the Israelis and the Palestinians. “deal of the century,” and his administration’s ap- That strategy was wish-based, not fact-based. It proach is inventive. No confidence-building. No “it’s assumed that the difficulty in settling the existential not up to us to shape the ultimate arrangement.” It’s row between the two parties was based in misunder- a full-blown plan that lays out the geography of the standings and suspicions that could be calmed by me- two states, including a mammoth tunnel connecting diated behavior. That can work when the ultimate aim Gaza and the West Bank. It ends the weird fiction of both sides is a deal. But even then, such measures that Israel could ever surrender neighborhoods, are not really necessary since the two sides basically some half a century old, because they sit on suppos- have the same goal. They didn’t. Israel demonstrated edly “occupied” land—land that was never under any its willingness to fulfill the 1947 notion of two states nation’s modern sovereignty. living side by side—not so their interlocutors. The Pal- And, most dramatically, it basically challenges estinians didn’t need confidence-building. What they the Palestinians to take it or leave it. They have four seemed to have confidence in was the idea that Israel’s years to come to the table, at which point the deal is acquiescence to international demands marked it as a dead and the Israelis are (in American eyes) free to do paper tiger. Their long-expressed hope of pushing the what they want. The outrage with which the plan has Jews into the sea was within reach. been received in certain quarters ignores the central Over the decades, the Palestinians have never question: Why not try this? Nothing else has worked. come to the table with a plan of their own, or any Cut the Gordian knot. Bite the bond that won’t plan, only lists of grievances, jaw-dropping claims burst. See what happens.q

Commentary 1 March 2020 Vol. 149 : No. 3

Articles

Andrew C. The Progressive Prosecutor Project 15 McCarthy How and why the nation’s crime busters are becoming criminal enablers.

Edward Bright Lights, Blighted City 24 Kosner A journey through the mayors culminates in the de Blasio disaster.

Seth The Rot Inside American 29 Mandel Jewish Organizations How they refuse to engage.

Michael J. Yale’s Art Department Commits Suicide 33 Lewis The shutdown of a Western survey course is a historic debacle.

Christopher A Bellow from France 37 Caldwell Why don’t Americans ‘get’ Michel Houellebecq, the most important European novelist of the last quarter-century?

Emily Mamzer 43 Fox Gordon A memoir of my father-in-law.

Politics & Ideas

Kevin D. Why Ezra Klein is Polarized 51 Williamson Why We’re Polarized, by Ezra Klein

Politics & Ideas

Jay P. A Man in Full 56 Lefkowitz Touched with Fire, by David Lowe

Naomi Oh, No! 59 Schaefer Riley Boys and Sex, by Peggy Orenstein

Jonathan Mixed Up 61 Silver Remix Judaism, by Roberta Rosenthal Kwall

Culture & Civilization

Terry Sondheim at 90 65 Teachout What has the greatest theatrical talent of our time achieved?

Mark Mother Courage 69 Horowitz The Kindness of Strangers, by Salka Viertel The Sun and Her Stars, by Donna Rifkind

Monthly Commentaries

Editor’s Commentary Washington Commentary 1 John Podhoretz Matthew Continetti 10 The Two-State Something The Wages of Political Paranoia

Reader Commentary Jewish Commentary 4 Letters Meir Y. Soloveichik 12 on the January issue Hath Not a Jew Costumes?

Social Commentary Hollywood Commentary 8 Christine Rosen Rob Long 72 The Confessions of Jeanine Cummins Growing Old in Hollywood READER COMMENTARY

Our Social- Media Problem

To the Editor: exposed them for what they are. Christine Rosen writes: HRISTINE ROSEN makes Barely a day goes by without some OSHUA BERNS is correct to C many important points in her journalist letting the cat out of the Jnote that one of the most article on the perils of social media bag on Twitter and showing for all significant changes wrought by (“The Social-Media Decade,” Janu- the world that he is not deserving the social-media revolution has ary). But is there not some reason of our blind trust. been the effect of social media to suppose that the initial hopes of Some journalistic institutions on mainstream media institutions. the social-media revolution have choose to punish their employees Reporters who once wove their come to fruition after all? Namely, for this kind of thing. Others don’t. ideological leanings into their re- social media has revealed the But, in the end, it doesn’t really portage have now been liberated to traditional media as a collection matter. What’s important is that tweet them—but they are also now of hopelessly biased and forever the American people get a fuller subject to greater public scrutiny. preening activists. view of the press in which they In some cases, real-time criticism In a country that holds its free place so much stock. I, for one, from social-media users creates press in such high esteem, it’s only would hate to see us go back to the much-needed correctives to media right that citizens get to see the day when journalists can disguise bias, as it did when high-school true face of that press. Traditional their biases by employing subtle students from Covington Catholic journalism made it easy for ideo- journalistic slant with impunity. A were slandered by reporters for logues to hide behind institutional truly informed public is one with a supposedly bullying and harass- walls. But with the advent of social clear picture of its informers. ing a Native American activist at media, the temptations of personal Joshua Berns a monument in Washington, D.C. celebrity, brand-building, and sim- Norwich, Connecticut (Video footage of the event later ple narcissism drew out the most revealed that the high-school boys vociferous activists in the press and 1 were not guilty of anything but run-

4 March 2020 of-the-mill teenage awkwardness… and wearing MAGA hats). But I would nevertheless urge caution in celebrating this change too enthusiastically. Although in some cases the media have had to acknowledge their own bias be- March 2020 Vol. 149 : No. 3 cause of revelations by critics using social media, the ubiquity of social- media use has also given such expo- John Podhoretz, Editor sés less and less force as time goes Abe Greenwald, Senior Editor on. Now, after being attacked by so- Noah Rothman, Associate Editor cial-media users, mainstream me- Christine Rosen, Senior Writer dia outlets as often as not apologize � for not being “woke” or progressive enough rather than having to admit Carol Moskot, Publisher their own liberal bias. Ironically, Kejda Gjermani, Digital Publisher this has had the effect in many insti- Malkie Beck, Publishing Associate tutions of encouraging the hiring of � more activist-oriented journalists. Ilya Leyzerzon, Business Director Consider the New York Times’ hir- Stephanie Roberts, Business Manager ing of avowed feminist, progressive � activist Sarah Jeong to its editorial Terry Teachout, Critic-at-Large board, even though her Twitter feed � included such gems as “White men Board of Directors are bullshit” and “#CancelWhite- Daniel R. Benson, Chairman People.” Jeong claimed she was only Paul J. Isaac, Michael J. Leffell, joking, and she kept her job because her jokes came at the expense of a Jay P. Lefkowitz, Steven Price, group that the Times doesn’t deem Gary L. Rosenthal, Michael W. Schwartz to be victims. In the long term, the vigilante- cover illustration: Brian Stauffer style takedowns social-media users have perfected aren’t the best cure for the disease that is media To send us a letter to the editor: [email protected] bias, because they contribute to We will edit letters for length and content. a broader decline in trust in our To make a tax-deductible donation: [email protected] institutions. Twitter and Facebook For advertising inquiries: [email protected] and other social-media platforms For customer service: [email protected] have helped the public recognize the ideological bias of some mainstream media outlets, but no one benefits if social media end up de- Commentary (ISSN 0010-2601) is published monthly (except for a combined July/ stroying them. However flawed are August issue) by Commentary, Inc., a 501(c)(3) organization. Editorial and business offices: 561 Seventh Avenue, 16th Floor, New York, NY, 10018. Telephone: (212) 891-1400. Fax: (212) our media (and they are flawed), 891-6700. Customer Service: [email protected] or (212) 891-1400. we still need media for a free so- Subscriptions: One year $45, two years $79, three years $109, USA only. To subscribe please go ciety of informed citizens to flour- to www.commentarymagazine.com/subscribe-digital-print. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, ish. Hot takes on Twitter aren’t an and additional mailing offices. Subscribers will receive electronic announcements of forthcoming issues. Single copy: U.S. is $5.95; Canada is $7.00. All back issues are available in electronic adequate replacement. form at commentarymagazine.com. Postmaster: Send address changes to Commentary, P.O. Box 420235, Palm Coast, FL, 32142. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, 1 self-addressed envelope. Letters intended for publication may be edited. Indexed in Reader’s Guide, Book Review Digest, and elsewhere. U.S. Newsstand Distribution by COMAG Marketing Group, 155 Village Blvd, Princeton, NJ, 08540. Printed in the USA. Commentary was established in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, which was the magazine’s publisher through 2006 and continues to support its role as an independent journal of thought and opinion. Copyright © 2020 by Commentary, Inc.; all rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. the generations, countless attempts at corrective measures, some from within, some from without, a few more farfetched than others. The Jews and same thirst for spiritual nourish- ment that animates today’s “yoga Shabbat” is found in the 18th- century rise of Hasidism (though not the same apparel). Here I must Buddhism include my own personal fondness for paleo-Judaism. The American To the Editor: Judaism between the letter of the version of Buddhism, with its low DEEPLY ENJOYED Jesse Keller- law and its spirit is not a new phe- barrier to entry, muted theology, I man’s article on Jews and Bud- nomenon but one as old as the re- and perceived malleability, pro- dhism (“Why Are Jews Buddhists?” ligion itself. Isaiah (29:13) upbraids vides a ready fit. At the same time, January). It gets at something I’ve the nation for mouthing God’s I suspect one could easily write an observed in some of my religious honor while distancing their hearts article similar to mine about other Jewish friends: While the many from Him and showing a me- movements, such as Communism daily rituals and demands of Jew- chanical respect. (Parts of Jesus’s or folk music, that have attracted ish life serve to solidify the Jewish rebuke of the Pharisees—indeed, a a disproportionate number of dis- family and ensure the continua- large part of Christianity’s original proportionately fervent Jews. We tion of Jewish practice, they also, mandate—may be similarly under- seem to need to believe in some- paradoxically, can minimize the stood.) Subsequent generations of thing. And we’ll do it—the most! spiritual side of religion. It seems Jewish religious scholars wrestled In examining the plight of the that a good portion of Jews are left with the question in various forms: contemporary worshipper, it is seeking spiritual succor elsewhere. Does ritual require intention, or worth considering another strand This is not, to be clear, an at- can one fulfill an obligation merely of thought, famously articulated tack on Jewish practice, which is by performing the act? Ought we to in the Sefer ha-Chinuch, an anony- remarkably rich in spirituality and plumb the commandments’ ethical mous book of halakha first pub- mysticism. The problem is that purposes, or are they simply to be lished in 13th-century Spain: “After the popular view of Judaism often obeyed as God’s will? The technical, the actions, the heart is drawn.” It omits these aspects of the religion. exacting nature of these inquiries is ritual itself, the book argues— And those who practice Judaism would appear to further highlight ritual, with its formal structure faithfully, especially in the busy the crux of the problem. and repetitive nature—that creates modern age, can resort to saying Faced with continual upheaval, religious sentiment, rather than and doing the right things by rote Jews have tended, understandably, the other way around. (A less chari- while leaving some of the deeper to cling to the concrete. There’s table rendering might be “fake it aspects of the faith behind. little sense in fretting over one’s till you feel it.”) Psychologists start- The popular view of Buddhism, soul when one is running to save ing with William James have noted on the other hand, is entirely one’s skin. Let us also note that the counterintuitive relationship dominated by the spiritual—often Judaism is far from the only moral between emotions and behavior. comically so. And it seems, in a framework to privilege deeds over “We feel sorry because we cry,” quick and shallow reading, like the internal experience. “All the beauti- James writes, “angry because we perfect antidote to Jews in crisis. ful sentiments in the world,” James strike, afraid because we tremble.” Lawrence Dornbusch Russell Lowell writes, “weigh less Or, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Carlsbad, California than one lovely action.” But the Heschel elegantly has it: “Being legalistic flavor of halakha is un- bound to an order and stability of 1 avoidable, such that “Talmudic” observance, to a discipline of wor- has acquired pejorative overtones, ship at set hours and fixed forms Jesse Kellerman writes: describing a system caught up in is a celestial routine. Nature does AWRENCE DORNBUSCH’S ap- the picayune at the expense of its not cease to be natural because of L praisal is sadly accurate; I broader human appeal. its being subject to regularity of would add that the tension within Likewise, there have been, over seasons. Loyalty to external forms,

6 Letters : March 2020 dedication of the will is itself a place. So how to get people there? of the character of the school envi- form of worship.” According to this Nu, it’s a problem. Don’t ask me to ronment. Wisse’s article made me formulation, we feel God because solve it, Mr. Dornbusch. I’m already wonder if I should bother to attend we do what He commands. late for yoga. Bard College events in the future. Of course, to appreciate the Larry W. Josefovitz majesty and humility of bowing Beachwood, Ohio during the Yom Kippur service, one 1 must come to synagogue in the first 1

Ruth Wisse writes: THANK LARRY JOSEFOVITZ I for his observations. Bard’s Saving Free Thought awareness of the problem was already clear from the measures it took to protect me and my right to on Campus speak. The college has since then undertaken its own review of the events I described. But I doubt that this behavior can be corrected at To the Editor: endured at Bard. the point of eruption by the filming UTH R. WISSE’S distressing Admission to these events he proposes or through any other R article (“Save Me from my De- should require that audience mem- such stratagem. fenders,” January), coming not long bers sign a release acknowledging At this stage, higher education after Abraham Socher’s “O Ober- that they may be photographed and can be saved only through an over- lin, My Oberlin” (September), is that these photographs may be dis- haul of admissions, hiring, and cur- cause for the development of active seminated to media. I doubt the ad- riculum. College can once again be strategies to confront scandalous ministration would be happy with a place of learning when it admits campus behavior. Childish students widely circulated images of stu- students on the basis of intellectual are being coddled by faculty and dents behaving shamefully toward and personal maturity. If it intends administrations. I was taken by distinguished guest speakers. These to perpetuate the best of Western Wisse’s description of a previous universities surely would worry civilization, it will have to hire facul- speaker’s encounter with threaten- that their fundraising and recruit- ty and reset curriculum accordingly. ing students who “swarmed around ment would be affected. Speakers I think the deterioration has gone him, shoving a phone in his face to should be protected by professional too far for tinkering at the edges. record his discomfort,” and even photographers armed with equip- more startled by the insult that she ment needed to give a full account 1

Commentary 7 SOCIAL COMMENTARY The Confessions of Jeanine Cummins

CHRISTINE ROSEN

S JEANINE CUMMINS was writing Ameri- her own filthy gain. This is a charge Cummins sought can Dirt, her much-hyped novel about a to address preemptively in a note in the book: “When I A Mexican woman and her child who flee gang decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege violence and illegally cross the border into the United would make me blind to certain truths, that I’d get States, she must have imagined scores of suburban things wrong, as I may well have.…I wished someone American women lounging on overstuffed couches slightly browner than me would write it.” and sipping rosé with fellow book clubbers as they This genuflection to diversity wasn’t anywhere discussed her terrifying melodrama. The book would near enough for Cummins’s critics. “Nobody is going have powerful resonance for them—for, after all, they to rip a pen out of Jeanine Cummins’s hand,” self- live in Trump’s America, which (like Obama’s America identified “Chicana writer” Myriam Gurba told the before it, though they would surely not discuss this) Washington Post. “But if you write a trash, racist story, puts children detained at the border in cages. people are going to criticize you. If you do it, be willing American Dirt was designed to elicit just such to take the heat.” Gurba claims that Cummins traffics resonances, and at the beginning, it did so with a ven- in stereotypes about Mexicans as poor and violent geance. The book earned the imprimatur of Oprah’s and points to the fact that Cummins italicizes Span- Book Club and a reported seven-figure advance. It ish words in the book, which she calls “fake-ass social was further bolstered by glowing pre-publication re- justice literature,” as evidence of her racism. views by authors such as John Grisham, who called it “I hoped that American Dirt would generate a “page-turner,” and Julia Alvarez, who gushed that if more discussion about the border and the anti- any book “can change hearts and transform policies, immigrant mentality that has dominated our society this is the one!” for too long,” said Mexican-American writer Reyna Alas for Jeanine Cummins, it isn’t hearts and Grande. But that hope was apparently outweighed policies that have changed as much as American sen- in her case by simple professional envy: After finding sitivities about minority voices. Even Oprah was not out about Cummins’s huge advance, Grande said, “I enough of a zeitgeist-whisperer to protect Cummins confess it offended me and hurt me. I felt undervalued from the backlash that arose when the world discov- and deceived.” ered that the author of American Dirt is not herself Cummins might be feeling a little undervalued from Mexico. Jeanine Cummins stood revealed as a herself. Her publisher, Flatiron Books, has canceled cultural appropriator, stealing the stories of others for her book tour, citing “safety concerns.” A petition signed by more than 100 prominent writers demanded Christine Rosen is senior writer at Commentary. that Oprah rescind her selection of American Dirt for

8 March 2020 her book club. “In a time of widespread misinforma- criticizing Cummins for not being Latina enough to tion, fearmongering, and white-supremacist propa- write about Mexicans. Perhaps Washington Post critic ganda related to immigration and to our border,” they Ron Charles’s gallows humor about the American Dirt wrote, “in a time when adults and children are dying controversy— “I suppose future novelists will have in U.S. immigration cages, we believe that a novel to submit their manuscripts along with a 23andMe blundering so badly in its depiction of marginalized, genetic profile”—is less a prediction than a depressing oppressed people should not be lifted up.” description of the present. In an effort to respond to her critics, Cummins The irony is that the identity-politics-friendly didn’t make the case for the enduring power of literary approach to literature Cummins’s critics are criticizing creativity. Instead, she tried to play her own identity her for ignoring is precisely the market for which Cum- card. “The fact is that I am a white person. I am a citi- mins wrote the book—and which the publishers who zen of the United States. I am a person who has a very bid for it and the blurbers who praised it and even the privileged life,” she confessed on NPR—before inform- sainted Oprah all thought she had accomplished suc- ing us that her grandmother is not Caucasian. cessfully. Cummins set out to push all the right buttons “I am also Puerto Rican,” Cum- in her woke readers with the express mins said. And she used her one- purpose of generating sympathy for quarter Puerto Ricanness to go on In a sense, the American immigrants. It turned out that she the attack: “And I—you know, that Dirt controversy is less just didn’t happen to be minority fact has been attacked and sidelined about ‘cancel culture’ than enough to write it. by people who, frankly, are attempt- In a sense, the American Dirt ing to police my identity.” This self- it is an identity-politics controversy is less about “cancel justification might ring a bit hollow version of the Dunning- culture” than it is an identity-politics once you learn she encouraged her version of the Dunning-Kruger ef- publisher’s marketing department Kruger effect: Cummins fect: Cummins overestimated her to talk about her husband’s undocu- overestimated her ability ability to flatter her readers with her mented status (he’s Irish) and that to flatter her readers politically correct politics. And so she seemed to have no problem with they punished her. a book party that featured flower ar- with her politically correct Flatiron publisher Bob Mill- rangements wrapped in barbed wire. politics. And so they er has issued a mea culpa about It would be easy to dismiss the controversy: “The discussion the American Dirt brouhaha as yet punished her. around this book has exposed deep another example of so-called cancel inadequacies in how we at Flatiron culture, but in fact the story is more complicated than Books address issues of representation, both in the books mere in-group policing by progressives. Is it really we publish and in the teams that work on them…. We appropriate to call an author “cancelled” when her should never have claimed that it was a novel that de- book debuts at number one on the New York Times fined the migrant experience.” bestseller list, as Cummins’s did? But novels are supposed to define an experience! After all, complaints about white writers appro- The best ones often emerge from the imaginations of priating the experience of minorities for their fiction people with no firsthand knowledge of the experiences are as old as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s they describe; consider every historical novel ever writ- Cabin (or, more recently, William Styron’s The Confes- ten. In any case, what else are novels for but to help us sions of Nat Turner). Today, however, as the literary better understand human nature in its most glorious establishment navigates the churning waters of iden- and wicked forms? That is the experience no one can tity politics, authors—even authors of fiction—are appropriate because it is the one we all share—regard- expected not only to craft sensitive, empathetic char- less of our racial, ethnic, religious, national, or socio- acters, but also to disclose their own ethnic or racial economic backgrounds. heritage to demonstrate the purity of their motives in By embracing progressive identitarian politics as a creating those characters. necessary element in the production of literature but fail- Jennifer Givhan, whose latest book is “a contem- ing to recognize how identity politics understands few porary novel about a pregnant, Latinx anthropologist limits in its ambitions to govern culture, the publishing who has to battle her way through an apocalyptic New establishment has created a monster. Unlike the fabled Mexico,” offered readers of Salon an extensive geneal- golem, what this monster will destroy isn’t prejudice ogy in order to prove her Mexican bona fides—while or bigotry. It’s literature itself.q

Commentary 9 WASHINGTON COMMENTARY The Wages of Political Paranoia

MATTHEW CONTINETTI

HE 2020 Democratic primary began with the has contributed to widespread political paranoia and absurdity of a Zen ko–an: What if they held hysteria. To suppress any hint of illegitimacy, Perez T an Iowa caucus and no one knew who won? and the Iowa Democrats changed the way results were As I write, Pete Buttigieg holds a tenth of a percent- reported. They introduced a phone application to pre- age point lead over Bernie Sanders in “state delegate vent tampering. The app was so secure, it would not equivalents.” The former mayor of Indiana’s fourth- tell Democrats the winner. largest city has edged out, by the slimmest of margins, The obsession with election interference began the socialist senator from Vermont. This latest number in 2000, when the Florida recount ended with Al Gore is sure to be contested. conceding defeat to George W. Bush. Democrats said It follows uncertain outcomes in the 2012 Re- the Supreme Court had delivered the presidency to publican and 2016 Democratic caucuses, a snafu in Republicans. This line persisted despite an exhaus- the technology used to report precinct data this time tive April 2001 study by USA Today and the Miami around, a partial recanvass of select areas requested Herald. It concluded that Bush still would have won a by the candidates, and a stern rebuke from Democratic statewide recount conducted under Gore’s standard. National Committee chairman Tom Perez, who said a Hillary Clinton must not have asked Huma Abedin to recount was necessary “to assure public confidence in “pls print” that article. In October 2002, she was telling the results.” The state and national Democratic Parties audiences that Bush had been “selected” rather than are at odds. “I do not conduct a performance evalu- elected president. ation of every party chair,” Perez told the New York Gore’s national popular-vote victory, the narrow Times. It shows! state results, the varying and subjective criteria for I suspect Perez is too frazzled by the Iowa mess which ballots should have been counted or rejected to see the delicious irony at work. For one-fifth of a and by whom, and the Supreme Court’s intervention century his party has done its best to not “assure public are all reasons for the enduring controversy of the confidence” in elections Republicans happen to win. Florida dispute. “This man was elected president of It was a matter of time before Democrats who lost the United States of America,” Joe Biden said while intraparty contests began making the same argument introducing Gore in 2013. In the fall of 2016, a blogger against their comrades. for New York magazine wrote of “The Rigged 2000 The belief that outside forces have manipulated Florida Recount and the Path to Donald Trump.” After a result that does not match one’s desired outcome the 2018 midterms, a writer for the Intercept said, “We know that Gore won Florida in 2000.” Around the Matthew Continetti is a resident fellow at the same time, a writer for the Nation described 2000 as American Enterprise Institute. “a political coup” that could have been prevented only

10 March 2020 by “grassroots organizing and nonviolent direct action call for our party to enact real reforms that ensure a on a massive scale.” fair, open, and impartial nominating process in elec- Paul Waldman wrote recently in the liberal tions to come.” American Prospect, “This is the GOP created by Flor- Democrats blamed Russian interference for ida 2000.” He forgot that America has a two-party their general election defeat. “I don’t see Trump as a system. Florida also affected the Democrats. It drove legitimate president,” Representative John Lewis said many of them bonkers. In 2004, Bush won the state before Inauguration Day 2017. “I think the Russians of Ohio, and reelection, by some 110,000 votes. A participated in helping this man get elected.” In July theory took hold on the left that voting machines 2018 the same New York writer who is convinced Gore manufactured by the Diebold Corporation, whose won Florida wrote several thousand words hypothe- chairman supported Bush, were to blame for the sizing that Trump might have been working for Russia Democratic loss. “We cannot declare that the elec- since 1987. “Ask yourself how somebody like Donald tion of 2004 was free, transparent, and real for all Trump ever gets within cheating distance of the Oval those who attempted to vote,” Representative Sheila Office in the first place,” said Pete Buttigieg a year Jackson Lee said that December. later. Hillary Clinton said in May 2019, “You can run In January 2005, 31 Democratic congressmen the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and Senator Barbara Boxer tried to block certification and you can have the election stolen from you.” She of the election. “With regards to our factual finding, was not afraid of the “sour-grapes question.” in brief, we find that there were massive and unprec- In 2018, Democrats shifted their excuse. They edented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio,” adopted the perennial standby of voter suppression. said Representative John Conyers. In March 2005, Former state representative Stacey Abrams refused Christopher Hitchens, perhaps remembering the con- to concede to Georgia governor Brian Kemp despite spiracy theories he used to spin during Iran-Contra, her 55,000-vote defeat. “I am not convinced at all that devoted a Vanity Fair column to the fracas. “I am not we will have free and fair elections unless we work to any sort of statistician or technologist,” he conceded, make it so,” Abrams said. “Let’s say this loud and clear: “and (like many Democrats in private) I did not think Without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be that John Kerry should have been president of any the governor of Georgia. Andrew Gillum is the gov- country at any time.” Still, the F.E.C. “ought to make ernor of Florida,” said Kamala Harris. Referring to Ohio its business.” voter-ID laws, which did not prevent record turnout in A professor of media studies at New York Univer- Georgia, Joe Biden said, “You’ve got Jim Crow sneak- sity, Mark Crispin Miller, wrote an entire book making ing back in. You know what happens when you have an the case that the 2004 election had been hijacked. John equal right to vote? They lose.” Kerry “told me he now thinks the election was stolen,” Fears of criminality and robbery on the part Miller revealed to the far-left broadcaster Amy Good- of election officials and voting technology haunt the man in November 2005. “He says he doesn’t believe Democratic mind. As they caucused in February, Iowa he is the person that can be out in front because of Democrats could read in Rolling Stone an article under the sour-grapes question.” Not to mention the mental- the headline “The Hack Next Time.” Journalist Andy sanity question. Kroll provided an ambiguous yet sinister description Amazingly enough, electoral illegitimacy, fraud, of what happened in 2016: and theft were not issues debated in the media after Democrats won in 2006, 2008, and 2012. Did Russia’s hack-and-leak operation and Perhaps Vladimir Putin noticed the Democratic disinformation blitz tip the election to Trump? susceptibility to crying foul. When Wikileaks revealed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a communications that DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile had helped professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 primary, Sanders argues in her book Cyberwar that Russia and his supporters accused the party of dirty tricks. helped Trump win, but the debate over that “Some people say that maybe if the system wasn’t question rages on to this day. What’s not in rigged against me, I would’ve beat Trump,” Sanders doubt, however, is how unprepared and vul- said. Politicians eager to win over Sanders voters nerable the U.S. was. jumped in the fray. In early November 2017, when asked if she thought the primary had been fixed, Eliza- The Democrats are super-prepared for Russian beth Warren replied, “Yes.” Running to replace Brazile, meddling in 2020. What they haven’t addressed is Representative Keith Ellison said, “We must heed the their own incompetence.q

Commentary 11 JEWISH COMMENTARY Hath Not a Jew Costumes?

MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK

HE BIBLICAL Book of Esther and Shake- refuses to relent, she utilizes the very same law against speare’s The Merchant of Venice are opposites. him: Shylock must indeed take a pound of Antonio’s T One describes the Jewish triumph over anti- flesh, but their contract does not allow Shylock to spill Semitism, the other the anti-Semite’s triumph over the a drop of Antonio’s blood. Portia has cornered Shylock: Jew. Yet there are similarities between the two tales. Both His insistence on enforcing the deal means he will have emphasize inversions, a turning of the tables, through a to give up his wealth and be condemned for conspiring woman’s disguising of identity. In the Bible, the king of against a Christian. The only way for him to avoid these Persia rids himself of his wife in a fit of rage, which sets dual fates is to convert to Christianity to save himself. the stage for a Jewish woman named Esther to become Both Merchant and Esther are thus tales of iden- his queen. She, in turn, under the advice of her cousin tity, and each features an astonishing line about Jew- Mordecai, keeps her true origin a secret: “Esther would ish identity itself. In Esther, the extraordinary phrase not reveal her people or her birth.” Haman, who hates appears toward the beginning of the book: “There was Mordecai, convinces the King to issue a decree demand- a Jew, in the capital of Shushan, and his name was Mor- ing the genocide of the Jews. Esther, at an opportune decai.” The modern reader breezes past these words, moment, reveals her Jewishness to the king, and Haman but the ancient one would have known how shocking is hanged. they are. For Mordecai was not a Jewish name, nor was The Merchant of Venice also centers on a heroine, Esther. Each is derived from the appellation of a Baby- Portia, who disguises herself. Shylock the Jew lends mon- lonian god—Esther comes from “Ishtar,” and Mordecai ey to the Christian Antonio, who has never made his anti- from “Marduk.” Semitism a secret. Shylock therefore stresses that if the These names are a sign of the acculturation of loan cannot be repaid, he will be entitled to take a pound the Jews of Persia. Jackie Mason, in a routine mocking of Antonio’s flesh. When Antonio’s ships, the source of his American Jews for “trying to out-Gentile the Gentiles” funds, are lost at sea, Shylock takes him to court. in their choice of names, describes how he once met a Portia, in love with Antonio’s friend, dons the Jew named “Crucifix Finkelstein. This is amusing, but garb of a male lawyer. She debates with Shylock on his the phrase Mordechai HaYehudi, Mordecai the Jew, is insistence that the letter of the law be followed. When he meant to be similarly contradictory, a pagan version of Crucifix Finkelstein. Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation The very name demands that we ask: What is Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of Mordecai’s true identity? What is Esther’s? Being forced the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at to answer this question openly sets the stage for Esther Yeshiva University. to embrace her true self and to plead for her people: “If

12 March 2020 I have found favor in thy sight, O king, and if it please once wrote, “Shylock the Jewish villain became part the king, let my life be given me at my petition, and my of world mythology. He may not have added anything people at my request: For we are sold, I and my people, to existing stereotypes, but as the most famous Jewish to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish.” Esther and character in literature he helped to spread them and to Mordecai thus emerge as embodiments of the endur- keep them vigorously alive. He belongs, inescapably, to ance of Jewish identity and solidarity. the history of anti-Semitism.” Merchant makes the opposite point, in a shocking We should think of Shylock as we celebrate Pu- sentence that is also about Jewish identity. Portia enters rim, the holiday of the Book of Esther. Though marked the courtroom, disguised as the legal expert, and utters by levity, Purim is deadly serious: We are reminded that her opening line in her central scene: “Which is the Haman exists in every generation and that we Jews dare merchant here, and which the Jew?” not ignore our own identity. Strik- Of course, the audience knew ingly, it was in the Venice of Shake- well who the Jew on the stage was. We wear costumes not to speare’s time that history records Harvard’s Marjorie Garber says Shake- disguise our identity, but some of the earliest instances of speare here is noting the similarities rather to emphasize that Jews wearing costumes to com- of Shylock and Antonio, since both are memorate Purim. To this day, you motivated by pecuniary concerns. Per- no superficial sartorial will find Jewish children dressed haps. But for the anti-Semitic society selection can alter our as Gentiles, taking the trappings for whom Merchant was composed, of another identity but still read- there is another, more obvious expla- identity—for ultimately, ing the Book of Esther in Hebrew nation: that ideally, there ought to be the central defining aspect in the synagogue and distributing no Jew at all. Portia’s entire speech of ourselves will shine Purim gifts to their co-religionists. in court, one of the most famous in It is often said that the reason Jews English literature, contrasts justice through. On Purim, Jews costume themselves on Purim is to with mercy and thereby Judaism and don costumes and ask remember Esther’s initial hiding Christianity. Shylock the Jew is asked of her own identity. The truth is by a woman disguised as a man to be Portia’s question: Who is very nearly the opposite. We wear “gentle,” to ignore the letter of the law, the Merchant, and who is costumes not to disguise our iden- and to pay no attention to his “bond.” tity, but rather to emphasize that This is an obvious reference to St. the Jew? To this we give a no superficial sartorial selection Paul’s description of Christianity re- ready answer, as Esther can alter our identity—for ulti- placing the Torah: once did: Jews we are, and mately, the central defining aspect of ourselves will shine through. But before faith came, we were Jews we still remain. On Purim, Jews don costumes and kept under the law, shut up unto ask Portia’s question: Who is the the faith which should afterwards Merchant, and who is the Jew? To be revealed. …But after that faith is come, we this we give a ready answer, as Esther once did: Jews we are no longer under a schoolmaster. …There are, and Jews we still remain. is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond In 2011, London’s Globe Theatre invited act- nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye ing troupes from 67 countries to come and perform are all one in Christ Jesus. a Shakespearean play in their respective tongues. Israel’s HaBima actors chose The Merchant of Venice. In the end of the play, this “ideal” is realized. Por- The costumes were Shakespearean, the actors Jews. tia—momentarily neither “male nor female”—brings A play written in Elizabethan English was performed about a result where the bond is dissolved and Shylock in modern Hebrew, a spoken language resurrected in is forced to convert. There is no longer a bond, and a miraculous Jewish state. Meanwhile, leading British there is no longer a Jew. All are one in Christianity. actors and directors publicly demanded the boycott of Christian mercy has triumphed over the Jewish letter of the Israeli troupe, even as plays were performed by rep- the law, resulting in Shakespeare’s “happy” ending: the resentatives of despotic tyrannies with nary a murmur evisceration of Jewish identity itself. from the English cultural elite. This plot is, of course a calumny, and a horribly The legacy of Shylock endures; the history of influential one. “Invested with Shakespearean power anti-Semitism continues. But much to the consterna- and, in time, with Shakespearean prestige,” John Gross tion of the anti-Semite, Jewish identity lives as well.q

Commentary 13 WHY LISTEN TO THE COMMENTARY MAGAZINE PODCAST? BECAUSE OUR LISTENERS ARE RIGHT. ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “Podhoretz and company are excellent. Come for the insight. Stay for the excellent analysis and the joke of the week.” ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “It’s free! They’re nice! You’ll find out what the hell is going on!” ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ “A bit of solace and sanity in the midst of such political madness. Podhoretz and Rothman offer perceptive and sharp commentary on the day’s topics. A must-listen podcast for all conservatives.”

Commentary Magazine’s The Commentary twice weekly podcast is Magazine Podcast hosted by John Podhoretz, is FREE with your annual Noah Rothman, and subscription to Christine Rosen & Abe Greenwald. Commentary Magazine. THE COMMENTARY MAGAZINE PODCAST www.commentarymagazine.com/podcast The Progressive Prosecutor Project How and why the nation,s crime busters are becoming criminal enablers by ANDREW C. McCARTHY

NEWLY minted district attorney cisco DA actually has in mind an immigration defense for a major American city vows unit. He wants to assign a staff of prosecutors to to establish an immigration unit. protect undocumented aliens—those who are either il- At first blush, that would seem legal and thus deportable to begin with, or for whom a entirely normal for a prosecutor’s criminal conviction could result in loss of lawful status office. Immigration laws require and thus eventual deportation. The unit’s enforcement enforcement, and prosecutors are target would be not the law violators but the Immigra- in the law-enforcement business. tion and Customs Enforcement agents who enforce But no—the new San Fran- federal laws, along with any local police and correc- tions officials who have the temerity to assist ICE in Andrew C. McCarthy is a contributing editor at that endeavor. The prosecutors’ mission, in the words ANational Review and a former federal prosecutor. of their new boss, would be to “stand up to Trump on

Commentary 15 immigration”—the president having made signature no mind to the record-high minority recruitment in issues of border security and the stepped-up deporta- police departments and prosecutors’ offices, many tion of aliens who flout the laws. of which are now led by black and other minority That kind of immigration unit is not some- officials. Far from serving as the solution to system- thing you’d expect to find in a district attorney’s atic racism, they simply serve as cover when they office. But of course, neither would you expect, upon join these indelibly bigoted institutions. The mass- this new DA’s election, a victory party marked by ear- incarceration “crisis,” we are to believe, stems from splitting chants of “F*ck POA!” The POA is the Police the bigoted targeting of “oppressed” populations for Officers Association. investigation. May I introduce to you, then, a new and uniquely We are told we inhabit not a constitutional re- destructive actor on the 21st-century scene: the pro- public but a “carceral state” when 2.2 million people, gressive prosecutor. out of a population of 330 million, are in custody For such law “enforcers,” the obstruction of after being proved guilty of felonies beyond a reason- immigration-law enforcement barely scratches the able doubt, followed by multiple rounds of appeal surface. The agenda here is to obstruct prosecution in a justice system run predominantly by political itself. It is, to quote Chesa Boudin, the newly elected progressives—a “carceral state” that is the envy of the progressive prosecutor described above, “a move- world (or haven’t you noticed that our immigration ment…rejecting the notion that, to be free, we must enforcement “crisis” involves millions seeking to enter cage others.” and stay in the United States).

In the past 30 years, violent crime in New York City has plummeted an astonishing 70 percent. In 1990, there were 2,245 people murdered in New York City; in 2018, the number was 289, a decline of 80 percent.

The movement he mentions is self-consciously By the movement’s lights, the very act of polic- racialist. It is not merely heedless of, but fiercely hos- ing, of enforcing the laws enacted by the people’s rep- tile to acknowledgement of, one signally inconvenient resentatives, is an exercise in race-based persecution. fact: The disproportionate incarceration rate for Indeed, in its most triumphalist iteration—and it is African Americans in comparison to their propor- really feeling its oats these days—the movement would tion of the overall population (like the closely related eliminate police departments. Not tame them. Not higher rate of crime victimization suffered by African- scale them back. Eliminate them. American communities) is due to striking differences Criminal-justice “reform” is all the rage these in behavior. For all the chatter about “reform,” what days. Not just on the political left but across the bipar- the left calls “mass incarceration” is not principally tisan Beltway, with more momentum under President a criminal-justice issue. It is the glaring symptom of Donald Trump than it has ever enjoyed. (His Super a cultural issue, inextricably intertwined with what Bowl commercial touted his work in this area.) This progressive governance has done to erode bonds of periodically astonishes those of us still mindful of our family, faith, and intermediate institutions that not so good fortune to live in an era of historically low crime, long ago had pride of place over the individual’s ties to wrought by the intelligence-driven revolution in polic- (and dependence on) the state. ing begun in the early 1990s. But you are not to see it that way. For pro- The Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga gressive prosecutors, it is not that young black crunches the numbers that a generation of domestic males commit strikingly more crimes than other tranquility has bleached from memory and reports: demographics; it is that the system is endemically “The nation’s violent-crime rate blasted from 161 racist, both willfully and unconsciously. And pay crimes per 100,000 people in 1960 to 364 a decade

16 The Progressive Prosecutor Project : March 2020 later, reaching a terrifying summit of 758 in 1991.” In condition. Yet, as Malanga adroitly observes, the re- the early 1990s, however, law-enforcement principles vival of urban neighborhoods has lured the well-to-do guided by information technology and gimlet-eyed to cities. Among those relocating are college graduates social science were pioneered by New York City Mayor attracted by the prospect of tech-sector careers. Those Rudy Giuliani, along with his police commissioner, Bill products of American higher education have “the pro- Bratton. They included such innovations as “Comp- gressive beliefs typical of their demographic.” stat,” a system that enabled precinct commanders to To say this demographic is spearheading a re- allocate police assets based on timely crime statistics, surgence of progressive urban governance understates and the “broken windows” theory posited in 1982 by the matter. It is one thing to be soft on crime. Today, James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, which champi- the hard-left shock troops who are ascendant in Demo- oned the cultural and intelligence-gathering benefits cratic Party politics are fightingThe War on Cops, to of taking action against petty crime. adopt the fitting title of Heather Mac Donald’s deeply The results were transformative, and they researched book. spread across the country. Law and order were re- And ingeniously front and center in the waging stored as the norm of the streets, gentrifying neighbor- of this war is the Progressive Prosecutor Project. hoods that had been riven by decades of gang violence and law-breaking. In the past 30 years, violent crime ROGRESSIVES GRASP, in a way their political in New York City has plummeted an astonishing 70 adversaries mostly do not, that executive power percent. In 1990, there were 2,245 people murdered in P is the change agent in modern society. The

The crime waves that washed over America from the tumultuous 1960s into the 1990s are not in the conscious memory of young Americans. New Yorkers graduating from college today were toddlers when Rudy Giuliani was mayor.

New York City; in 2018, the number was 289, a decline Framers had in mind a vision of limited government of 80 percent, even though the city’s population had in- in which power was divided and distributed among creased by more than a million (to about 8.5 million) in components that would be motivated to check one that span. (Murders ticked up to 318 in 2019, but that’s another—separate state and federal sovereigns, and still just a fraction of 1980s carnage and compares fa- within each, discrete executive, legislative, and ju- vorably to the worrisome but still historically low 335 dicial branches. It is a cliché to speak of the latter as murders recorded in 2016.) New York is a trailblazer “co-equal” branches of government. The founding con- but not an outlier: Violent crime has been cut in half ception was that legislative power—close to the people, nationwide since 1990, and property crimes reduced endowed with the authority to enact law, create courts slightly more than that. and agencies, make rules for them, and control their Nevertheless, success can be its own undoing. budgets—would be primus inter pares. The crime waves that washed over America from A century-plus of progressive governance has the tumultuous 1960s into the 1990s are not in the dramatically overhauled this construct. The executive conscious memory of young Americans. New Yorkers is now the principal locus of power. The complexity of graduating from college today were toddlers when modern society, the theory runs, requires ever greater Rudy Giuliani was mayor. Americans of a certain age, interventions by bureaucracies to which legislatures especially those of us who spent much of our profes- delegate their regulatory authority. Most of this ad- sional lives fighting crime, remember the Bad Old ministrative state ultimately answers to the chief ex- Days and scoff at the conceit that they could not come ecutive, who is empowered to make key appointments back—and do so far more quickly than it took to sup- and impose policy direction. Legislative authority is press this manifestation of evil, an enduring human marginalized. The executive both manages the bu-

Commentary 17 reaucracy and, more significantly, exercises discretion And here we see how muscular, how potentially regarding which laws get enforced. transformational, is the power of the prosecutor. In the arena of criminal justice, this implicates If a state or local legislature dared to enact a law the venerable doctrine of “prosecutorial discretion.” that made such distinctions as race, ethnicity, or sex Properly applied, prosecutorial discretion is nothing dispositive of, or even relevant to, the decision to pros- more than common-sense resource-allocation guid- ecute, such a law would promptly be invalidated on ance. Law-enforcement assets (police, prosecutors, constitutional grounds. It would either be thrown out administrative support, and, ultimately, courts and by the courts or repealed due to public outcry. Simi- prisons) are finite. It would not be possible to pros- larly, a judicial ruling that endorsed such invidious ecute every crime, no matter how trivial. Nor would discrimination would quickly be reversed by appellate such overbearing enforcement comport with a free courts or legislative action. society. Therefore, prosecutors are given broad discre- District attorneys, by contrast, can achieve the tion to prioritize the enforcement of some laws at the same noxiously discriminatory result without any expense of others (say, to focus more on gang violence fuss—through the pretextual exercise of prosecutorial and drug trafficking than financial-institution fraud discretion. At first, it would be done subtly, ostensibly if that’s what local conditions call for). Government on a case-by-case basis, as if the merits of each suspect, attorneys also get to determine which offenders merit rather than class distinctions, were driving the result. prosecution as opposed to some form of diversion (e.g., But as the public grew gradually inured to the no- unconditional non-prosecution for a given offense, tion that such distinctions were a legitimate factor in

Critically, prosecutorial power is attainable at the ballot box. For the most part, district attorneys, who oversee state prosecution at the municipal level throughout the United States, are elected officials.

adjournment of an arrest case in contemplation of dis- prosecutorial determinations, our assumptions would missal without formal charges after a period of good change, and so would the facts on the ground. behavior, counseling or community service in lieu of Eventually, we would come to the stage the indictment, and so on). left believes we have now reached: A critical mass of Prosecutorial discretion, picking and choosing people in urban centers have bought into narratives which cases to pursue, should be and has historically about the racialist bias of law enforcement, so much so been unremarkable. But like any discretionary author- that progressives are comfortable brandishing them ity, it can be abused. If the weighing of the merits of in campaigns for public office. These narratives are prosecution based on the facts of individual cases no longer up for debate in a growing number of cities morphs into a programmatic decision not to prosecute where progressives dominate the political system, the various categories of crime, it becomes an executive media, and, increasingly, top-tier positions at law- veto of the community’s right to define and punish enforcement agencies. penal offenses through its legislative representatives. The key to understanding the Machiavellian This flouts the foundational executive duty to brilliance of the Progressive Prosecutor Project is this: execute the laws faithfully. Similarly, if what is ratio- As a matter of constitutional law, no legislature or nalized as “prosecutorial discretion” devolves into court has the power to order a prosecutor to charge charging decisions that are based on class distinctions, any crime against any person. In our system, pros- particularly race, as opposed to a color-blind assess- ecution is exclusively an executive call. Practically ment of the criminal histories of suspects in individual speaking, short of voting a rogue district attorney out cases, this eviscerates the bedrock principle of equal of office, there is no remedy for abusive discretionary protection. It undermines the rule of law itself. omissions—decisions not to prosecute. To be sure,

18 The Progressive Prosecutor Project : March 2020 if a prosecutor performs some affirmative illegal act any intraparty vying for the nomination. while enforcing the law, there are legal remedies avail- Consequently, DA positions have been ripe able—motions to suppress evidence, lawsuits against for the taking. Over the last few years, a network of government, potentially even prosecution. But omis- progressive activists backed by big money has seized sions are a different story. It is nigh impossible to force the day. prosecutors to take enforcement action. Thus, a willful Most notable is George Soros, the 89-year-old district attorney has enormous power to install non- billionaire investor and currency trader, whose Open prosecution as the default policy. Society Foundations lavishly fund leftist causes and Realizing this, the left’s social-justice warriors politicians. As noted by the left-leaning scholar Rachel have grasped that the control of prosecutorial power Elise Barkow (in her provocative bestseller, Prisoners may be the most effective route to rapid societal of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration), transformation. It is transformation driven not by DA campaigns are traditionally modest affairs, with law, logic, or a half-century’s empirical data on of- budgets that seldom exceed five-figure fundraising. fense behavior and policing methods, but by cultural This creates an opportunity, and the Soros network Marxist narratives: the criminal-justice system and has pounced, overwhelming the field by pouring mil- its law-enforcement agencies as a superstructure lions of dollars into the coffers of favored candidates. reifying America’s pervasive racism, xenophobia, and The Open Society Foundations network is joined forcible oppression of The Other. in its effort by other progressive actors—Democratic Equally important, prosecutorial power is at- trial lawyers, the Service Employees International

The progressive prosecutor is perhaps best instantiated by the San Francisco DA. He is 39-year-old Chesa Boudin, the honoree at a raucous anti-cop victory celebration and pioneer of the anti-enforcement approach to enforcement.

tainable at the ballot box. For the most part, district Union (SEIU), the Civic Participation Action Fund, attorneys, who oversee state prosecution at the mu- such political action committees as Color of Change nicipal level throughout the United States, are elected and Real Justice, and Black Lives Matter. Together officials. (By contrast, United States attorneys, who they have backed and supported the electoral efforts of oversee federal prosecutions, are Senate-confirmed progressive prosecutors in Chicago, Denver, Houston, appointees of the president.) But the vast majority of Orlando, St. Louis, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, DA elections have not traditionally been high-profile, New Mexico, and elsewhere. high-dollar affairs, in the way contests for governor Barkow intuits that the lesson is that overtly and mayor tend to be. This, despite the fact that top progressive agendas can win if they have sufficient prosecutors wield enormous power, setting the pri- financial support to get their message out. I’m more orities and parameters of police enforcement action, inclined to believe that, at least for now, in cities living which determine whether order or chaos reigns su- off the low-crime legacy of the intelligent policing rev- preme on the streets. olution, hard-left community organizers resonate with DA candidates tend to be politically active heavily Democratic constituencies because they now lawyers who have gained prosecutorial experience as outspend, as well as outwork, left-leaning moderates. young attorneys before moving on to respected law The progressive prosecutor is perhaps best in- firms. They are slated by their party to run for the chief stantiated by the aforementioned San Francisco DA. prosecutor position. Often, these races are not compet- He is 39-year-old Chesa Boudin, the honoree at that itive. In de facto one-party governance (Democratic), raucous anti-cop victory celebration and pioneer of which controls most urban centers, the DA candidate the anti-enforcement approach to enforcement. If the runs virtually unopposed, the real contest limited to name has the faint ring of the dim and distant past,

Commentary 19 there is a good reason. Yale- and Oxford-educated Hugo Chavez’s regime. In this, he was tracing the Boudin is the son of Weather Underground terrorists footsteps of Ayers, a frequent visitor to Venezuela and Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. Alas, his parents devotee of the Bolivarian revolution’s education “re- were not around for his formative years. Still an informs”—and how well that is all working out! Boudin fant on October 20, 1981, Chesa was left with a sitter eventually joined the San Francisco public defender’s as they went off with their Black Liberation Army office but did not try cases and had no prosecutorial confederates to execute the infamous Brinks armored- experience when he ran for DA. car robbery in Nanuet, New York—a blow against the In that progressive paradise, though, he is radical indelible racism of AmeriKKKa, in which the plotters royalty, his candidacy lauded by Senator Bernie Sand- murdered a private security guard and two police ers, Communist icon Angela Davis, Islamist apologist officers, including Waverly Brown, a U.S. Air Force Linda Sarsour, and Shaun King, the civil-rights activ- combat veteran who had become Nyack’s first African- ist and Black Lives Matter promoter. His fundraising American police officer. blew away the field, led by Soros ally Chloe Cockburn Airbrushed into an “author and activist,” Gilbert (program manager for criminal-justice reform at the is still serving his murder sentence. Released after de- Open Philanthropy Project, a left-wing mega-donor, cades in custody, Kathy Boudin is now—you’ll no doubt after a stint as counsel to the ACLU’s “campaign to end be shocked to learn—the co-founder and co-director of mass incarceration”). Also included among Boudin Columbia University’s Center for Justice. There, she supporters were such Soros-backed ventures as the studies the effects of (what else?) mass incarceration Tides Foundation and the Brennan Center for Justice.

In the eyes of the left, anti-gang measures such as intelligence databases, enterprise prosecutions, and sentencing enhancements are seen as pretexts for surveillance and harassment of poor communities.

while agitating for criminal-justice reform. No one will ever describe the new DA as abashed. Chesa was raised in Chicago by their Weather- He vows to dial back what he frames as undue police man comrades Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, two focus on people of color, the implication being that it other terrorists who escaped prosecution due to the is police animus against people of color—not the fact excesses of the FBI’s COINTELPRO scandal (“Guilty that communities of color are inordinately victimized as sin, free as a bird,” as Ayers himself put it). They, by crime—that generates arrests, prosecutions, and too, have been reinvented as distinguished academ- imprisonment. Boudin would halt prosecution of mi- ics. Dohrn, co-author of the terrorists’ “Declaration nor “quality of life” offenses—essentially rejecting the of a State of War” against the United States, recently “broken windows” approach. retired from her perch as a clinical law professor at His campaign promises included ending both Northwestern’s Children and Family Justice Center. the cash bail system and enhanced sanctions against Ayers retired as a Distinguished Professor of Educa- gang members. Repealing cash bail is a hard-left hob- tion at the University of Illinois. In 1997, he penned by horse, a storyline that accused felons languish in A Kind and Just Parent, a scathing indictment of the prison for nonviolent crimes because they are minori- American justice system, which he analogized to South ties of minimal means, while the well-to-do are sprung. Africa under apartheid. Barack Obama, then a young In reality, bail is presumptively granted to all arrestees Chicago pol and acquaintance of Ayers and Dohrn, (they are presumed innocent until proven guilty), but raved that the book was a “searing and timely account.” it is denied in cases that present some combination of As he recounts in his memoir Gringo: A Coming a serious offense, an accused with an extensive crimi- of Age in Latin America, Chesa Boudin cut his politi- nal history, and strong indications that the accused is cal teeth as a translator and think-tank researcher for apt to abscond. It is fair enough to argue that the rich

20 The Progressive Prosecutor Project : March 2020 should not escape pretrial detention in cases that call of players (the person directly wronged, the accused for it; but it is preposterous to contend that, to achieve defendant, the families of each, the investigators and equal justice, we should just indiscriminately release administrators), all victimized, all assuming the roles everyone, heedless of the risks of danger to the com- imposed by a “broken system.” Instead of prosecution, munity, intimidation of witnesses, and flight. instead of all that handwringing over who mugged In the eyes of the left, anti-gang measures such whom, shouldn’t we all just talk it out? as intelligence databases, enterprise prosecutions, and Boudin is the paragon of the Progressive Pros- sentencing enhancements are seen as pretexts for sur- ecutor Project’s aspirations. But the project has been veillance and harassment of poor communities—ve- underway for a number of years, providing good hicles by which the dominant white class keeps people examples of progressive prosecutors in action. In of color checked and “caged.” In point of fact, gang-re- 2017, Philadelphia elected Larry Krasner. Named for lated crime results in higher punishments because (a) brotherly love, the city is better known today for its it is inherently violent (even the ostensibly nonviolent cauldrons of crime. Krasner, as progressive pols like to offenses are abetted by the well-earned reputation for say, has a plan for that. Because high levels of arrest, brutality), (b) it accounts for an inordinate amount of prosecution, and mass incarceration are caused by the total crime, and (c) the heinous effects of gang crime justice system, this dolorous situation can be reversed are disproportionately inflicted on poor communities. only if we stop prosecuting so many people, stop seek- In New York City, for example, City Journal’s Robert A. ing bail for arrestees, water down the charges against Mangual notes that gangs are responsible for between people who are prosecuted, and then accelerate the

The newfangled theory holds that crime is not a matter of willful predator and innocent victim. Rather, crime is a societal phenomenon in which there is no individual agency or culpability, just a congeries of players.

30 and 40 percent of homicides and nearly half of total release of people already in custody. shootings. Fully 20 percent of shootings in the city oc- Krasner has thus homed in on a favorite piñata cur in public housing projects, though only 5 percent of the Progressive Prosecutor Project: mandatory- of the population inhabits them. That is precisely minimum sentencing provisions. These statutes in- because they are hotbeds of gang activity and rivalry. struct judges, upon a defendant’s conviction for Besides thwarting immigration enforcement, certain serious felonies, to imprison that defendant Boudin plans to prioritize investigations into ex- to some minimally required period of time (say, five cessive-force claims against police. For felons, by years for rape; or 10 years on a second violent felony contrast, he would establish a unit specializing in the conviction). Probation and similar slaps on the wrist reexamination of prior convictions for legal flaws— are not options. i.e., diverting resources from protecting the public The left howls that this divests judges of the against ongoing crime to the mitigation of convicts’ discretion to administer individual justice with empa- criminal histories. thy and compassion, the hallmark of judging. In fact, Overarchingly, Boudin rejects the premise that mandatory minimums are enacted by the people’s prosecution and imprisonment are the proper way for, representatives because they reflect the community’s you know, prosecutors to address crime. Alternative judgment that serious crimes warrant prison time. techniques, such as “restorative justice,” would be im- The purpose of punishment is not merely to address plemented. This is the newfangled theory that crime is the accused’s need for rehabilitation but the public’s not a matter of willful predator and innocent victim. need for retribution, incapacitation of (typically) ha- Rather, crime is a societal phenomenon in which there bitual offenders, and deterrence. Judges are legal elites is no individual agency or culpability, just a congeries who hail from the same self-proclaimed progressive

Commentary 21 academic institutions as the new breed of prosecu- the standard “disparate impact” delusion: The justice tors. Many of them buy the narrative and prioritize system must be structurally bigoted because minor- the interests (and the perceived victimhood) of the ity defendants are prosecuted at numbers that vastly accused over those of the community. Without manda- overrepresent their proportion of the population. tory minimums, they would not incarcerate sociopaths But it was the Jussie Smollett debacle in 2019 that whom it is imperative to sideline. thrust Foxx into the national spotlight. An openly gay Now, there is a worthy argument that some man- African-American actor who was starring in a cable- datory minimums are too draconian. Again, though, television drama, Empire, Smollett claimed to have these provisions are statutory, so they can be (and been subjected to a vicious attack by Trump supporters in some cases have been) tapered back. Plus, if real shouting racist and homophobic slurs. The incident injustice is done in individual cases, the governor’s spurred a major police investigation, with dozens of pardon power (or the president’s at the federal level) personnel working long hours to interview witnesses, can alleviate it by reducing sentences. But if our choice pursue suspects, and conduct forensic analysis. The is between unaccountable judges or elected repre- effort yielded powerful evidence that the actor himself sentatives answerable to the people most affected by had staged the “assault.” crime, most of the public would favor putting in the When Smollett was finally arrested for filing legislature’s hands decisions about what prison terms a fraudulent police report, Foxx was contacted by a are minimally necessary for serious crimes. friend, Tina Tchen, who vouched for the Smollett fam- Knowing that, the progressive prosecutor usurps ily and admonished that there were “concerns” about

If our choice is between unaccountable judges or elected representatives answerable to the people most affected by crime, most of the public would favor putting in the legislature’s hands decisions about necessary prison terms.

the decision for himself. Krasner’s office defeats these how the police conducted the investigation. (Tchen minimum-sentencing statutes by not invoking them, just happens to have been chief of staff to former First even if the criminal conduct at issue fits the statute Lady Michelle Obama.) Foxx intervened, contacting a prescribed by the legislature. Rather, it engages in Smollett family member and trying to pressure Chica- fictional “fact-pleading”—pretending, at the charging go police to let the FBI take over the case. In the result- or pleading stage, that the offense did not occur, or ing uproar, she intimated that she had recused herself reimagining it into vanilla crime. In so doing, Krasner’s but did not do so formally. After Smollett was indicted people erase indicia of violence, firearms, drug-weight, on 16 counts, Foxx’s top aides abruptly dismissed the and other factors that trigger statutory minimums. In case for a song: a few hours of community service and one case that left many Philadelphians speechless, a the forfeiture of $10,000 in bail, while the court sealed defendant shot and nearly killed a store owner during the case file from prying public eyes. a brutal hold-up, and thus potentially faced decades in Foxx insists this was not sweetheart treatment the slammer on attempted murder, aggravated assault, but the level of punishment commensurate with a and robbery charges. Krasner struck a plea deal that nonviolent crime committed by a first offender. Having will allow the felon to serve as little as three-and-a-half been extraordinarily taxed by the demands of the in- years’ imprisonment. Alas, this is what Philadelphians vestigation, the police remain livid and the FBI is said voted for when they elected their new DA. to be exploring potential federal charges (a tough case The same was true when Chicagoans, the resi- for the feds to make when it is state law enforcement dents of the nation’s murder capital, elected Kim Foxx that has been obstructed). Foxx’s kid gloves, mean- the DA of Cook County in 2016. She is yet another while, extend liberally to violent criminals, too. As she Soros progressive prosecutor, who campaigned on hews to the progressive prosecutor template of mini-

22 The Progressive Prosecutor Project : March 2020 mizing prosecutions and sentences, police increas- maker Christopher Ruso recounts in the City Journal ingly find that suspects arrested for serious felonies that Sean Scott, who came within a hair of winning are preying on the streets despite lengthy rap sheets. election to the municipal legislature, campaigned Crime is beginning rise again, and, naturally, the spike on a platform of defunding the “police state” that is mainly detectable in the poorest neighborhoods. “steer[s] many black and brown bodies back into, in essence, a form of slavery.” One of Scott’s allies in REPARE TO spot a trend. With its foundation “build[ing] towards a world where nobody is crimi- built on scandalous fictions, the Progressive nalized for being poor” is Kristen Harris-Talley, who Prosecutor Project cannot help but imperil the briefly sat as an appointed city councilwoman. She Ppublic and squander the urban flourishing achieved by traces the origin of policing to slavery: “How do you the historic reduction of crime. This becomes clearer reform an institution that from its inception was each day. The racial scapegoating of cash bail, for ex- made to control, maim, and kill people?” ample, has been taken to parodic heights in New York, Now, Americans are not going to abolish the which has dispensed with bail entirely for broad cat- police any time soon. And there are glimmers of hope egories of crime regarded as “nonviolent.” Gotham, the that the Soros funding network has become suffi- original laboratory for intelligent policing, is becom- ciently notorious that it will no longer sneak up on ing the Progressive Prosecutor Project writ large. The unsuspecting cities and towns. In the last cycle, its DA results would be comical if not so dangerous. candidates were defeated in California and upstate In the first weeks of the new law, a bank rob- New York, with voters more antagonized than enticed

Prepare to spot a trend. With its foundation built on scandalous fictions, the Progressive Prosecutor Project cannot help but imperil the public and squander the urban flourishing achieved by the historic reduction of crime.

ber named Gerod Woodberry was released multiple by the anti-enforcement agenda and the incursion times during a string of six attempted heists—some- of out-of-state progressive ideologues and funding times detained just long enough to have lunch streams, seeking upheaval, not sensible reform. between robberies and marvel that he was not kept Then again, Chesa Boudin’s candidacy, and the in custody. The rationale? Woodberry’s modus ope- agenda he champions without apology, would have randi is to hand tellers a threatening note rather than been inconceivable a decade ago, even in San Fran- confront them at gunpoint. Hence, he is deemed a cisco. Now, he is the elected DA, an undeniably char- “nonviolent bank robber.” (Federal authorities, who ismatic leader of a movement that, however patently are not subject to state anti-bail provisions, finally destructive upon close scrutiny, has real traction in our stopped the madness, charging and detaining Wood- cities. It has become a commonplace for clueless pols berry pending trial, under U.S. law.) Meantime, a to wax delirious over criminal-justice reform—craving raging anti-Semite named Tiffany Harris physically any glimmer of bipartisan light in our deeply divided assaulted three women while screaming “F-U Jews” politics. We’d do well to resist the kumbaya moment. at a Hanukkah observance in Crown Heights. She Crime was suppressed, to the nation’s great benefit, by was released—not violent enough, you see—only to clear thinking about the willfulness of offenders, and sucker punch another young woman the following the realization that compassion is owed, first and fore- day in Prospect Heights. most, to the aggrieved. The reformers prominently in- Of course, bail is only an issue because we clude progressive prosecutors and their patrons, who have police making arrests. In Seattle, progressives would have us unlearn those hard lessons. They are are thus working on a “reform” that would simply making real strides toward the dystopia we thought abolish the police department. Documentary film- we’d left behind.q

Commentary 23 Bright Lights, Blighted City A journey through the mayors culminates in the de Blasio disaster By Edward Kosner

HERE IS A MOMENT toward the ton Bridge in upper Manhattan, when “The Little end of every flight when the pitch Flower,” Fiorello La Guardia, flourished in City Hall, of the engines changes slightly and I’ve lived in the city ever since, with excursions and the plane seems momentarily overseas and to woodsy retreats and beaches. I wrote suspended in air, then eases onto about dough-faced mayor Bob Wagner in the late its downward path. Sure enough, 1950s and early ’60s as a kid rewrite man on Doro- the flight attendant comes on the thy Schiff’s New York Post. I confected cover stories intercom to report, “We’ve begun our initial descent. about the great WASP hope, Mayor John Lindsay, for Check thatT your seatbelts are fastened.” Newsweek in the mid-1960s. I was the editor of New I feel that way about New York City these days York magazine during the harum-scarum 1980s and under the feckless hand of its 109th mayor, Bill de early ’90s of Ed “How’m I doing?” Koch and courtly Blasio. I was born not far from the George Washing- David Dinkins, and I was running the city’s (then) biggest tabloid, the Daily News, during September Edward Kosner is the author of It’s News to Me, a 11th, with Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral heroics, and later memoir of his career as the editor of Newsweek, New with Mike Bloomberg, who came into office vowing York magazine, Esquire, and the New York Daily News. to market New York “as a luxury good.” I know the

24 March 2020 city—at least, its cosmopolitan core—and its mayors platforms that leave the sidewalks permanently in as well as anybody. gloom, and they don’t want pieces of buildings to fall Life here has always been fraught. The Dutch on them or their grandchildren. They don’t want to be found that out in the early 17th century when they confronted by a phalanx of panhandlers on the prime rowed ashore from what became the Hudson River to shopping blocks of Fifth Avenue or groped by a mooch- be greeted by the Lenape Indians. The locals thought er costumed as Captain America in Times Square. Or the Dutch smelled awful, but not so bad that they see men peeing on the sidewalk. wouldn’t sell them their Manahatta (Island of Drunks) The Manhattan skyline is now disfigured by not once but twice. During the Revolution, the British the needle skyscrapers of Billionaires Row along 57th anchored warships off Turtle Bay on the East River Street, money-laundering machines full of unsold and threatened to fire broadsides that would have con- apartments or vacant pied-à-terre of Ukrainian oli- sumed the wooden settlement in flames. New York’s garchs and Malaysian Midases. (A legacy, as it hap- first policemen were so corrupt and unreliable that pens, of Bloomberg’s zoning revisions.) Parents don’t rich citizens had to hire bodyguards to escort them want to wait on line for hours in the vain hope of around town. Civil War draft rioters burned down the getting their smart kid into a good middle school or to Colored Orphans Asylum on Fifth Avenue and 43rd have to shell out more than $50,000 a year for a spot in Street. More than 20,000 New Yorkers died in the 1918 a private school, if they can even secure one. Spanish influenza pandemic. In the 1930s and ’40s, Whatever the statistics might show, there’s a New York detectives liked to hang recalcitrant sus- creeping feeling that New York under de Blasio is pects by their ankles from three-story back windows raveling around the edges, that a kind of grimy decay of precincts until they squealed. The South Bronx was is setting in. The hot restaurants are still jammed, indeed burning as the Yankees won the 1977 World Broadway is booming, Central Park still a wonder of Series in the House that Ruth Built. manicured nature. But the empty storefronts on the Real New Yorkers have realistic expectations. avenues all over town are inescapable—even as the They know there will be traffic jams and crammed last stage of the building boom of luxury condomini- subway cars at rush hour and that finding a cab in ums with swimming pools, hair salons, wine cellars, the rain has always been a sodden long shot. A movie and yoga studios staggers on. Symbolically, perhaps, ticket will cost twice as much as it does in most towns Barney’s, New York’s signature fashion hub, just and so will a jar of Orville Redenbacher’s popcorn in went bankrupt. the supermarket. The fire engines, patrol cars, and Other cities have bigger problems. Homeless- ambulances screaming past your windows can jolt you ness is now endemic in Los Angeles and, especially, awake at 3 a.m., and the traffic agent will ticket your car San Francisco. Violent crime rates in St. Louis, Detroit, even if the sign listing the no-parking hours is hidden Memphis, and other places dwarf New York’s. Indeed, the city doesn’t even appear on the 2019 list of the 25 most New Yorkers don’t want to be confronted dangerous cities in the country. by a phalanx of panhandlers on Fifth But New York was less dangerous than most cities in statistical Avenue or be groped by a moocher terms even at the height of the 30-year national crime spree, costumed as Captain America. and so what? New Yorkers don’t really care what goes on else- by a plane tree. Shows on and off Broadway, the New where. That Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover with the York City Ballet, and the Metropolitan Opera are so city towering in the foreground and everything beyond expensive that audiences routinely leap to standing the Hudson scrunched into inconsequence didn’t be- ovations because a performance that costs so much come an icon by accident. must be memorable. Still, New Yorkers didn’t bargain for what they’re GREW UP in a different New York. At 10, I began seeing these days. They don’t want the subways to traveling around the city on my own on the A break down so often or to spot a rat scurrying along I train downtown and on Fifth Avenue buses to with a pizza crust or to get slugged on the platform the Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Mu- or shoved on the tracks by some mumbling paranoid seum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. I had a nut. They don’t want to hurry under the construction free education at a public elementary school—where

Commentary 25 specialists from Barnard College and the Bank Street piled up on the sidewalks, and Central Park turned School of Education ran special programs for us— into a sylvan slum. Prime co-op flats on Fifth and then junior high, then the Bronx High School of Sci- Park Avenues that later sold for $10 million and more ence and City College. At CCNY, I had a state regents went for a pittance. scholarship that paid for my textbooks and student Next, the feisty, ego-driven Ed Koch made New fees and left me enough to buy button-down shirts York renowned as the brassy Big Apple even as the and rep ties at Brooks Bros. University Shop. The rent crack epidemic unleashed a crime wave so ferocious on my first apartment, on 12th Street between Sixth that the cops were reduced to triaging the daily on- and Seventh Avenues, was a week’s salary at the Post. slaught. For example, a perp had actually to fire a gun I took the subway down to Rector St. at midnight for while committing a robbery or assault before detec- my lobster shift at the paper and never got hassled. Ed Koch was succeeded by David Obviously, economic and cultural forces beyond the sway Dinkins, New York’s first black mayor, a of any mayor or governor— or president, for that matter— well-intentioned municipal bureaucrat shape the lives of New Yorkers, who was often overwhelmed by the job. then and now. Still, the persona and performance of the mayor of New York have a real effect on how the city runs tives would get on the case. After a dozen tumultuous and how New Yorkers and the rest of the world feel years, Koch was succeeded by David Dinkins, New about it. Some history helps to understand the New York’s first black mayor, a well-intentioned municipal York state of mind these days. Over the past half bureaucrat who was often overwhelmed by the job. century and more, New York has had a succession Racial incidents triggered boycotts and riots on his of charismatic and pallid, energetic and languid, watch. Citywide murders spiked at 2,234 in 1990, Din- charming and churlish, honest and less so, compe- kins’s first year in office. The city was shocked when a tent and hopeless men in charge. Mormon family from Utah in town for the U.S. Open La Guardia was in tune with the scrappy spirit tennis tournament was attacked and robbed on a of FDR’s New Deal. Bill O’Dwyer, a genial Irishman subway platform and the 22-year-old son stabbed to from County Mayo, was so sketchy that President death. DAVE, DO SOMETHING! beseeched the front Truman had to shuffle him off to Mexico City as U.S. page of the Post. ambassador one step ahead of the law. All you need Rudy Giuliani, the celebrated crime-busting U.S. to know about his successor, Vincent Impellitteri, is attorney, took over City Hall on January 1, 1994—and that his election symbol was a light bulb. Robert Wag- the revival of New York got under way. A Republican, ner, the phlegmatic son of a revered New York liberal Giuliani was even more abrasive than Koch, but he senator, presided for a dozen years over a placid city mastered crime in a city that was living in fear. He and managed to build more public schools and public instituted the “broken windows” approach in which housing than any mayor while not seeming to do any- cops cracked down on minor offenses—such as sub- thing. “He’s Fresh and Everybody Else Is Tired” was way turnstile-jumping—as if they were more serious, John Lindsay’s not-so-subtle campaign slogan, and it and he used computer data to track crime trends. worked. He was in the reform-Republican tradition “Squeegee Men,” the panhandlers who extracted tips but was thwarted by the entrenched unions and Dem- by wiping motorists’ windshields with greasy rags, ocratic machine pols. New York was dubbed “Fun City” had become the symbol of shambolic New York. Now, in his reign, although fun was scant and he wound up they were banished. Violent crime began to ebb dra- with one of the biggest police-corruption scandals in matically, and New York became one of the safest cit- history and busted the budget. ies in America. It helped that the crack epidemic with Lindsay’s successor, the hapless accountant its attendant robberies and shootings had burned Abe Beame, a Brooklyn machine Democrat, almost itself out. Giuliani loved to pick fights with nearly ev- presided over the bankruptcy of the city when the erybody, but nobody wondered who was in charge of federal government refused to intervene, prompt- the city, especially after 9/11. ing the famous Daily News headline FORD to CITY: The safer streets of New York began to pulse DROP DEAD. At the last minute, a municipal bailout with revitalized energy. And Giuliani’s unlikely succes- was contrived. City payrolls were slashed, garbage sor was the man to bring the city all the way back and

26 Bright Lights, Blighted City : March 2020 more: Michael Bloomberg, a short, divorced, Demo- for his progressive agenda anyway. Just before he crat-turned-faux-Republican billionaire originally took office, I found myself at dinner with a savvy city from the Boston suburbs. He had made his money pol familiar with de Blasio and the public advocate’s creating and selling state-of-the-art computer termi- job and asked what kind of mayor he’d be. “He’s lazy nals for financial traders, and he had a vision for New and disorganized and he’ll be a disaster,” came the York. He didn’t mean to slight the boroughs outside prescient reply. Manhattan, but he focused on restoring the city again as the artistic, media, corporate, and banking capital of “TALE OF two cities” had been de Blasio’s the world. Bloomberg used his fortune to subsidize the stump slogan, signaling that he’d right the arts and other worthy causes in the city, and to recruit A balance skewed by the plutocrat Bloomberg. a staff superior to any of his predecessors. He pushed through his prime campaign pledge—free Seven years after 9/11, the financial crisis para- pre-kindergarden classes for all children in the city, a lyzed markets and prompted a devastating reces- boon to working parents paying for day care for their sion, but Bloomberg’s New York cruised through the kids. But otherwise, de Blasio lived down to the ad- worst of it and gained momentum. Over the next five vance billing. He turned out to be chronically tardy for years, the city achieved an unmatched level of pol- meetings and official engagements—most egregiously ish. Slum neighborhoods across the city gentrified, missing the moment of silence at a Queens memorial sleek new buildings went up all over, the streets got service for the 265 victims of the 2001 crash of Ameri- cleaner, the subways more reliable. Even the public can Airlines Flight 265. Where billionaire Bloomberg schools began to perform better. Limited by law to would ostentatiously take the subway to City Hall, two terms, the mayor used his clout—and his wal- man-of-the-people de Blasio chose to be ferried around let—to wangle four more years in City Hall. Critics town in a big, gas-guzzling SUV. His penchant for be- complained that income inequality had worsened on ing chauffeured to his old YMCA gym in Brooklyn for a his watch. By the end of his 12 years, many New York- long workout most days won him scorn. And it turned ers were ready for change. out he was a Red Sox fan. A New York Post columnist And change they got. The new mayor, Bill de Bla- took to calling him “Mayor Putz.” sio, sworn in on January 1, 2014, was the polar opposite Controversy dogged De Blasio from the start. of Bloomberg: 6' 5" to Bloomy’s 5' 8", a career politician The FBI, the U.S. attorney, the Manhattan DA, and rather than a mogul, worth perhaps $2.5 million not his own Department of Investigation opened five $55 billion, a gentile and not a Jew, a Brooklynite and different probes into the fundraising activities and not an Upper East Sider, and—most to the point—an other shenanigans of two of his biggest donors. His aggressively progressive Democrat with an African- Campaign for One New York, a piggy bank filled by American wife with whom he’d honeymooned in Cas- labor unions and real-estate developers ostensibly to tro’s Cuba. About the only thing the two mayors had in promote his policies, came under scrutiny and folded common is that both were Boston transplants. up. More scandals and bad news followed—flagrant De Blasio had been the city’s public advocate, a grade inflation at public schools, the appointment sort of juiceless municipal ombudsman and parking of a federal monitor for the deteriorating mammoth spot for City Hall wannabes. He’d won the Democratic public-housing system, unprecedented delays and breakdowns on the subway system that carries 5.7 million New Where billionaire Bloomberg would Yorkers each day (although, in ostentatiously take the subway to City fairness, the subways are run by the mayor’s antagonist, Gover- Hall, man-of-the-people de Blasio chose nor Andrew Cuomo). It turned out that the to be ferried around town in an SUV. mayor had put his wife, Char- lene McCray, in charge of a $1.8 mayoral primary, the ticket to election in years with- billion mental-health program called ThriveNYC, but out a unicorn Republican like Giuliani or Bloomberg the streets seemed to be filled with more distressed in the race. Only a sliver of the 4.3 million registered souls than ever, and there was little accounting for New Yorkers bothered to vote in the general elec- the $900 million already spent. He earmarked $773 tion; de Blasio’s 73 percent margin amounted to 17.5 million of public money for a program to revive failing percent of the eligible voters. He claimed a mandate public schools without visible improvement in student

Commentary 27 performance. More money was pumped into his bal- slugging three Orthodox Jewish women, then assault- lyhooed plan to create and preserve 300,000 units of ing another woman the next day only to be freed again; affordable housing. Even so, a survey found one out a top deputy to de Blasio’s education chancellor busted of 10 public school pupils had no permanent address. for trying to have sex with an underage boy; and a De Blasio’s approval rating cratered except smelly homeless man grabbing prepared food with among African-American New Yorkers. Still, city his bare hands at a midtown Whole Foods market. politics being what they are, he easily won reelection Giuliani blasted de Blasio as “possibly the worst Mayor in 2017. He savored the idea of being mayor if not in NYC” history for not doing enough to counter anti- leaning hard into the job and had delusions of future Semitic incidents in the city and for not reinstating his political grandeur, perhaps as senator from New York. “broken windows” approach to crime-fighting. Unlike Lindsay, Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, and Bloomberg, who Statistics show that, while murders and loved the Gotham limelight, de Blasio was a social ghost in his rapes remain low, other crimes, including adopted city. A reporter asked him what he and his wife liked to shootings, robberies, burglaries, and car do at night. “Watch reruns of The theft increased dramatically. Wire,” replied the mayor. He isn’t short on ego. In the midst of it all, he decided to join the swarm of Toward the end of the year—nearly three de- Democrats running for president. His literally quix- cades after that Mormon tourist was fatally mugged otic crusade took him to primary states where he on the subway—an 18-year-old Barnard freshman was greeted politely by a few bewildered voters and from Virginia was stabbed to death by barely teenage generally ignored. He appeared in two televised de- robbers in Morningside Park just a few blocks from bates and then slunk back to City Hall amid general the Manhattan campus. It was the kind of emblematic derision. crime that confirmed to many New Yorkers that the He’s earned it. Contributing to the unease are dread bad old days might indeed be coming back. “social justice” démarches by the mayor and his pro- SAFE NO MORE, headlined the Post, right on cue. And gressive allies on the City Council to stop policing early in the new year, police released statistics showing quality-of-life offenses and to cheer new state rules that, while murders and rapes remain low, a range of freeing more defendants without bail before trial. The crimes, including shootings, robberies, burglaries, and papers are full of dystopian stories, including anti- car theft increased dramatically. police radicals swarming subways stations and Grand Early in my days editing New York magazine in Central at rush hour brandishing banners and scrawl- the 1980s, we did a cover story illustrated by a graf- ing graffiti; a female architect killed by a slab of loose fitied wall that read “Wounded City.” My successors masonry falling from a midtown office building; an at the magazine might find themselves recycling that African-American woman released without bail after cover sooner than they think.q

28 Bright Lights, Blighted City : March 2020 The Rot Inside American Jewish Organizations How they refuse to engage By Seth Mandel

OMETHING UNUSUAL happened in Attending the White House ceremonial release the world of Arab–Israeli negotiations of the plan were envoys from Bahrain, Oman, and early this year: The Palestinians were the United Arab Emirates. In a statement, the Saudi given a reason to come to the negotiat- foreign ministry said it “appreciates the efforts of ing table. On January 28, the president President Trump’s administration to develop a com- unveiled “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision prehensive peace plan between the Palestinian and to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian the Israeli sides” and encouraged further talks using and Israeli People,” to great fanfare at the White House. the Trump plan as the basis for negotiations. Similar The planS leaves open a path to a Palestinian state with- statements came from Morocco and Qatar. Even Egypt out holding Israeli security needs and political legiti- chimed in with praise. macy hostage. It calls for a settlement freeze in most The plan is extraordinarily favorable to the Jew- of the West Bank and offers amnesty for illegal Pales- ish state’s security without condemning a Palestinian tinian construction, thus giving a boost to Palestinian state to the dustbin of history, and the Arab world— sovereignty, while allowing Israel to retain control over including Saudi Arabia, the authors of a competing the areas of the Jordan Valley it deems necessary. peace plan—are comfortable with it. American Jewry must be over the moon, right? Seth Mandel is executive editor of Washington Ex- Well, not exactly. aminer magazine. J Street called it “the logical culmination of re-

Commentary 29 Attacking a U.S. plan for its pro-Israel lean is nonsensical for those who should, by the very nature of who they are and what they do, want the U.S. to have a pro-Israel lean. peated bad-faith steps this administration has taken can society are due to their Judaism and not their to validate the agenda of the Israeli right, prevent the Democratic Party membership. What we are seeing is achievement of a viable, negotiated two-state solution the way American Jewish leaders fail to take seriously and ensure that Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestin- the rising tide of anti-Semitism that masquerades as ian territory in the West Bank becomes permanent.” “anti-Zionism”—and even the way progressive groups A group called National Security Action penned an enable it. Attacking an American plan for its pro-Israel angry open letter from former administration offi- lean is nonsensical for those who should, by the very cials, featuring past U.S. ambassadors to Israel Daniel nature of who they are and what they do, want the Kurtzer, Martin Indyk, and Daniel Shapiro, denounc- United States to have a pro-Israel lean. ing the peace plan as “a recipe for perpetual conflict” There is no future for Jewry without a strong and meant to “help re-elect Benjamin Netanyahu.” (This surviving Israel. Indeed, for the modern Diaspora, no even though Netanyahu’s opponent, Benny Gantz, idea has more successfully preserved the notion of an also backed the plan and enjoyed a smiling Oval Office egalitarian Jewish peoplehood—one that crosses lan- photo op with Trump the day before.) guages and religious boundaries—than Zionism. Long The Israel Policy Forum—founded in the wake before the reestablishment of the State of Israel, Zion- of the Oslo Accords to satisfy Prime Minister Yitzhak ists were the Jews dedicated to arguing compellingly for Rabin’s desire for a rival to AIPAC and now advised a coherent Jewish identity and thus for Jews as a minor- by prominent philanthropists such as Charles Bron- ity deserving of the rights and recognition afforded oth- fman, Haim Saban, and Ronald Lauder—called the ers. If American Judaism is to have a chance at survival, plan “an Orwellian exercise in doublespeak” intend- it must first realize thatthat is what it is fighting for. ed to bury any chance at peace. The great irony of the Israel Policy Forum’s condemnation is that Rabin HAT DOES it look like when a national himself never expressed support for a Palestinian Jewish community understands what’s at state and was a consistent opponent of Palestinian W stake? The United Kingdom offers a good autonomy plans that endangered Israel’s security example. Heading into the December elections, the interests in the Jordan Valley. Labour Party was (and is, for the moment) led by Jer- The idea that the plan might be too favorable to emy Corbyn. He attempted to pass off his admiration Israel was a particular concern to the Jewish Demo- for terrorists and his party’s harassment of Jewish cratic Council of America. “The complete absence politicians and Jewish voters as “anti-Zionism”—as of the Palestinians today speaks volumes about the though that were a good thing—but he still ended up illegitimacy and naiveté of the process that led to the proving that the word “Zionist” is just a stand-in for plan’s creation,” the JDCA said in a statement, blaming “Jew” in leftist discourse. He claimed that “Zionists,” everyone but the Palestinians for their intransigence. even those who have lived their whole lives in Britain, True, the American Jewish Committee had only “don’t understand English irony.” The Jew, to leftists good things to say about it, and the Republican Jew- like Corbyn, will forever be an outsider. ish Coalition and Conference of Presidents of Major A full 87 percent of UK Jews denounced Corbyn American Jewish Organizations endorsed it. But even as an anti-Semite. “What will become of Jews and AIPAC, while praising Trump’s effort and intentions, Judaism in Britain if the Labour Party forms the next equivocated that “both Israeli political leaders view government?” Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis wrote in late this framework as the basis to restart negotiations November in the London Times. “This anxiety is under- with the Palestinians,” distancing the organization standable and justified.” Jewish Labour groups fought from the appearance of a direct endorsement. to expose their own party’s bigotry, even as whistleblow- What’s happening here is more than a skirmish ers faced retaliation. Jews abandoned Labour. In the over a peace plan, or a distressing glimpse into the way event, Labour lost the election in a historic landslide. American Jewry’s leaders privilege their partisan lean- Such communal solidarity has become distress- ings over the fact that their leadership roles in Ameri- ingly unthinkable in the United States. Consider the

30 The Rot Inside American Jewish Organizations : March 2020 Astoundingly vulgar politicking in the wake of a massacre of co-religionists was par for the course for the JDCA, but even the ADL is now similarly guided by partisan politics. story of the anti-Semitic crime spree in New York. can Jews.” The home page of the group’s website files For nearly a year, the steady low-level harassment every instance of anti-Semitism in America in the past of visible Jews in the Big Apple spiraled deliberately three-plus years under “Anti-Semitism Under Trump.” into an open-ended, slow-rolling pogrom outside the The JDCA even opposed Trump’s executive order ap- city—a broad-daylight massacre at a Jersey City kosher plying civil-rights protections to Jews on campus with a market followed by a Manhattan man driving 30 miles garbled and petulant statement from its director, the ex- to the Haredi town of Monsey, where he stormed into Obama political operative Halie Soifer, that boiled down a rabbi’s house with a machete and hacked away at to not liking it because Trump did it. (The president stunned victims. based his order on an Obama-administration opinion.) The media ignored the violence until there As indefensible as this is, it’s tempting to say was blood in the streets; the organized Jewish world that we might expect this level of cynicism from an reacted like a deer in the headlights; non-Orthodox explicitly partisan organization like the JDCA. But rabbis sneered at the Haredi community as it absorbed there isn’t much of a distinction now. Take the ADL, daily assaults; Jewish intellectuals pretended nothing now led—like the JDCA—by a former Obama-admin- was happening. Well into the Brooklyn violence, anti- istration official guided by partisan politics. During Semitism chronicler Liam Hoare insisted that “despite the 2018 midterm election season, the organization the endless handwringing about anti-Semitism on put out a guide to “extremist” candidates. All were the left, it is far-right extremism which constitutes Republicans. Tablet, meanwhile, put out its own the paramount threat to American Jewish life today.” guide to the “Anti-Semitic 8”: Four were Democrats, It was a line the Anti-Defamation League had been four were Republicans. That is, the Anti-Defamation pushing hard as well. But the renewed violence in the League had misled American Jews about dangerous New York area wasn’t coming from white nationalists anti-Semitism for purely partisan purposes. or alt-right posers. Many of the attacks caught on tape What are those partisan purposes? Foremost featured African-American suspects in outer-borough among them is creating space for the ongoing Demo- neighborhoods where religious Jews were framed as cratic Party shift against Israel, which often quickly land-grabbing outsiders, with some residents telling devolves into rank Jew-baiting and classic anti-Semitic interviewers they viewed Israel as the point of origin for stereotypes. Just look at the Jersey City shooting. The these Jews. In Jersey City, the shooters were reportedly aforementioned conspiracy theory behind it—that Black Hebrew Israelites, a kind of extreme black na- Jews manipulate cops to cull the African-American tionalist group, apparently motivated by a conspiracy population, based on a program that sees police officers theory that Jews pull the strings of the police to kill from the U.S. and other countries visit Israel—has been black people—a calumny that took original form as a prominently spewed by Linda Sarsour. She was a key claim that Israel was training U.S. cops to persecute electoral ally of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and then minorities. “Israel” very quickly becomes “Jews.” she led the Women’s March, the flagship public protest The Jewish Democratic Council of America movement of “the resistance.” But Sarsour—who signed used these horrifying events to try to score partisan a statement saying Zionism is racism, advocates a one- points. It tweeted in the wake of the attack: “We stand state solution, and says that Israel is built on Jewish with the Orthodox community in NY, which has been supremacism (long a talking point of David Duke’s)—is increasingly under attack, including this past August in her most powerful position yet. She is a key campaign when NY county GOP leaders launched and defended surrogate of Senator Bernie Sanders, the front-runner a Facebook ad campaign alleging Hasidic Jews were for the Democratic presidential nomination. ‘plotting a take over’ of Rockland County.” Until recently, the best that ADL’s CEO Jonathan Such astoundingly vulgar politicking in the wake Greenblatt could muster was to announce his “deep of a massacre of co-religionists was par for the course opposition to Sarsour’s views on Israel.” She finally for the JDCA, which also announced a swing-state ad earned tough criticism from Greenblatt late in 2019, campaign calling Trump “the biggest threat to Ameri- but only after years of having her hate whitewashed as

Commentary 31 With the backing of prominent Democratic politicians, the left has seized the moment to instigate an all-out attack on the nonpartisan Jewish establishment. legitimate criticism of Israel. That has been the Ameri- Ocasio-Cortez told a radio station last July. can Jewish leadership’s default posture: If a Democrat It’s a deliberate strategy to elevate fringe groups. invokes the word “Israel” or “Zionist,” he or she is in- Tlaib and Omar had a congressional trip to the Palestin- oculated against accusations of anti-Semitism. ian territories canceled by Israel when it was revealed The result has been an American prefabricated the tour was being funded by an organization that version of Corbynism. Like Malcolm McLaren seek- seeks the destruction of the Jewish state. After ripping ing to re-create the Ramones in London with the Sex the Netanyahu government, Tlaib held Shabbat events Pistols, the Bernie Sanders campaign has become a with the viciously anti-Israel group Jewish Voice for knockoff, trendy domestic brand. Sarsour is joined in Peace. JVP, to complete the circle, has been one of the the Sanders camp by Representatives Rashida Tlaib more vociferous propagators of the “deadly exchange” (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN). Tlaib has accused conspiracy theory held by the Jersey City shooters. American Jews of dual loyalty and remorselessly Substituting progressive politics for religion is spread blood libels from Palestinian officials. Omar one reason that neither the JDCA nor the ADL will cross has also accused Jews of dual loyalty, multiple times, Team Sanders. But it’s a longstanding problem. Fol- and even faced the possibility of a congressional reso- lowing the October 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh lution criticizing her anti-Semitism before Speaker synagogue, the Jerusalem Post asked the ADL whether Nancy Pelosi, under pressure from Omar’s protector it would finally drop its long-held opposition to fed- Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others, eral security grants for synagogues and other houses backed off. Ocasio-Cortez is also part of the Bernie of worship. The answer was no. The ADL, an official team and explicitly endorsed Corbyn. explained, was still opposed on constitutional grounds. With the backing of Democratic politicians such In 2004, the Religious Action Center for Reform Juda- as these, the left has seized the moment to instigate an ism, a project of Reform umbrella groups Union for Re- all-out attack on the nonpartisan Jewish establishment. form Judaism and the Central Conference of American In October, the far-left New Israel Fund launched a com- Rabbis, put out a memo opposing security funding for petitor philanthropy to the Jewish Federations of North Jewish institutions. America, formerly known as United Jewish Communi- Sure, protecting shuls is important, the organiza- ties. This came after a JFNA would-be donor’s gift was tion said, but there is “no need to do so in a manner rejected by the Federations because it was earmarked that dangerously threatens the wall separating church for IfNotNow, a radical anti-Zionist group whose mem- and state, which has been a bedrock of democracy and bers went so far as to facilitate the banning of the Star the foundation of religious liberty in our country for of David on pride flags at a major gay-pride march in more than 200 years.” The Reform organization finally Washington, D.C. As Jonathan Tobin explained at the dropped its opposition after the Pittsburgh shooting. Jewish News Service, “it is nothing less than an attempt The “constitutional” issues were a pretext to elevate by the Jewish left to topple the basis on which Jewish liberal political stances over Jewish communal needs, philanthropy in this country exists.” but now appear to not be worth the public-relations Just how are groups like IfNotNow punching so headache. In December 2019, Trump signed the ap- far above their weight? The answer is that prominent propriations bill that included $90 million in federal Democrats, such as Ocasio-Cortez, are promoting them security grants for religious institutions, a 50 percent and using them as a shield to deflect accusations that increase over the previous year. their criticism of Israel strays well outside the main- Peace plans that offer Palestinians a pathway to stream of the American Jewish community. “There are a state are bad; efforts to roust out anti-Semitism on really amazing organizations of young people, groups college campuses are bad; federal support for guards like IfNotNow, that they are young Jews organizing protecting Jews at prayer are bad; these are views held for justice because they realize that all of our fates and in esteem by many rising Jewish organizations. our destinies are intertwined and that there cannot be What happens when not even the Jews will justice in Israel without justice for Palestinians, too,” speak out for the Jews?q

32 The Rot Inside American Jewish Organizations : March 2020 Yale’s Art Department Commits Suicide The shutdown of a Western survey course is a historic debacle By Michael J. Lewis

HANGES TO an academic cur- straightforward act of modernizing. “No one survey riculum normally do not arouse course taught in the space of a semester could ever be public controversy, but we do not comprehensive,” he told the Yale Daily News, nor could live in normal times. Yale Univer- any single course “be taken as the definitive survey of sity’s decision to abolish its vener- our discipline.” Instead of that course’s heroic journey able “Introduction to Art History: from Michelangelo to Jackson Pollock, there will now Renaissance to the Present” has be a changing roster of four different introductory drawn considerable publicity and outrage, surely to courses, such as “Global Decorative Arts” or “The the surpriseC of its instructors. For Tim Barringer, Politics of Representation.” chairman of the art-history department, it was a For outside observers, this was yet one more sign of the American university’s dereliction of its Michael J. Lewis is the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard responsibility as the carrier of Western culture. Yale Professor of Art at Williams College and reviews archi- “has succumbed to a life-draining decadence” (Wall tecture for the Wall Street Journal. Street Journal), perpetrated by “a band of hyper-

Commentary 33 The German émigrés of NYU brought art history to the U.S. as an intellectual pursuit, but at Yale it remained what its French professors had made it, an aesthetic pursuit. educated Visigoths” (New York Post). As Visigoths go, 20th century when it established a graduate program Yale comes late to the pillaging; for a generation now, in medieval art. Beginning in 1932, it engaged two of universities have quietly been shelving their introduc- France’s leading historians of art, Henri Focillon and tory surveys. Had Yale done so in the 1990s, as Harvard Marcel Aubert, who would teach in tag-team fashion, did, it would have passed unnoticed. Or perhaps not, sailing over in alternate semesters, expecting the for Yale holds an exceptional place in the history of graduate students to follow their lectures conducted American art education. entirely in French.* Focillon was the author of the In 1831, Yale received a curious offer from John influentialLa Vie des formes, The Life of Forms, which Trumbull, the artist whose paintings of the American exalted the formal properties of a work—e.g., line and Revolution hang in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. contour, body and mass, color and tone—over its nar- Having fallen on hard times and having no assets rative meaning. For Focillon, the form of a work of art other than his extraordinary collection of paintings, was itself its chief content and meaning. Although he proposed to give it to Yale on two conditions: that he was a medievalist, his formal approach could be it build a museum to house them, and that it pay him applied to works of art of any time and place, and his an annual stipend of one thousand dollars. This was a students would achieve distinction in the widest range radical suggestion for a university that had begun, as of fields. For example, George Kubler, his student and had Harvard, as a seminary for training Puritan min- successor at Yale, was a pioneering scholar of Pre- isters, whose visually image-free meeting houses were Columbian American art. the physical manifestation of the commandment that All this stood apart from the main channel of thou shalt not make graven images. But out of defer- American art history, for which the decisive event ence to Trumbull, who was himself a veteran of the was Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. A whole generation Revolution and whose father had been the governor of of prominent art historians, most but not all Jewish, Connecticut, Yale accepted. The fact that he was 75 and fled Germany; first came Erwin Panofsky, who was evidently in poor health may have helped the decision followed by Walter Friedlaender, Karl Lehmann, Ju- (as it happened, Trumbull would live to cash 12 of Yale’s lius Held, and Richard Krautheimer, who collectively checks). He himself designed the tasteful Greek shrine made New York University into a kind of art-historical that housed his collection. And so America’s first art government in exile. Within a decade, NYU’s graduate museum—the first built exclusively for the care and students were staffing art-history programs across display of a permanent collection of paintings—origi- America and teaching art differently from the way it nated as a pension plan. was done at Yale. Panofsky’s specialty was iconology, From this kernel grew the Yale School of the Fine the interpretation of the rarefied language of signs Arts, whose classroom and studio building of 1869 and symbols embedded in Renaissance painting. If were also the first of their kind in the country. Because Focillon taught the life of forms, and the pleasure they the museum preceded the school, its instructors had give, Panofsky taught their meaning. The German a ready supply of objects from which to teach. To this émigrés of NYU brought art history to America as an day, the practice of teaching art using actual objects is intellectual pursuit, but at Yale it long remained what one of the hallmarks of the Yale program; Barringer its French professors had made it, an aesthetic pursuit. says the new dispensation will maintain the practice of bringing students “face to face with works of art and F YOU HAVE not taken an art-history survey, you material objects of great beauty and cultural value.” will not appreciate how essential is the element of Those who have not taken a course in art might be I showmanship. It is necessarily taught in darkness surprised to learn that this is not a universal practice, by means of projected images, usually shown in pairs. and that in progressive programs where conceptual The impulse to fall asleep is strong and, if the room art is the rule, it is fashionable to sneer at art as being * The department of my own institution was created on the Yale too “retinal” (i.e., it gives the eye something to look at). model. See my “An Art Teacher’s Art Teacher,” Commentary Yale continued on its distinctive path in the (April 2007).

34 Yale’s Art Department Commits Suicide : March 2020 Until a generation or so ago, the unspoken premise underlying the teaching of art was that it was the expression of a civilization, and among the loftiest of its creations. is overheated and the instructor’s voice undermodu- that it was the expression of a civilization, and among lated, nearly irresistible. But in Vincent Scully, Yale the loftiest of its creations—as lofty as the music of had a master showman, and over his 60-year teaching Mozart or the drama of Shakespeare, and something career, he made the survey a legend. Scully strode be- about which one might take a certain proprietary fore the screen, speaking without notes and with stag- pride. Art history quite naturally concentrated on gering eloquence, roaring or whispering as needed, those moments of great creative fervor, as in the 13th and pounding the floor with his long bamboo pointer century or the High Renaissance, or the great gallop- to tell the projectionist to advance the slides. ing leap of artistic development that in the space of a A student who sees his professor get choked lifetime vaulted from impression to cubism. That this up over a work of art (and Scully was a great weeper) art was Western, reaching all the way back to Classical never forgets it. In the end, you did not simply learn a Greece, was not something that required a justifica- roster of buildings and paintings, which you can find tion or an apology. in the books, but you learned what it was to stand What has changed, and what has made schol- eyeball to eyeball with a work of art, in existential ars squeamish, is any sense that Western art is “our” confrontation, and bring to bear the whole of your art. To emphasize the Western tradition is to validate humanity, your intellect and emotions and memories. it and be complicit in whatever historic crimes you It was a heady experience, and Scully inspired more might chose to impute to it, whether imperialism, co- than his share of students to go on to architecture lonialism, or environmental mayhem. The notion that school; the New Urbanism of the 1980s is in large part some art is better than others, that some even rises the work of his former students. Some of the outrage to the pinnacle of human achievement, has become over Yale’s abandonment of the survey course is due embarrassing. But even as the collapse of cultural to its historical association with Scully, who retired confidence in the West was creating a void, that void officially in 1991 and who soon proved irreplace- was being filled from another quarter as scholars dis- able, none of his successors rising anywhere near his covered that they could avoid making judgments of swashbuckling heights. value by looking at art objects not as a connoisseur but Academia is hardly lacking in articulate show- rather as an anthropologist. men with a sense of theater, but to run a broad survey At Princeton, another program that offers “not a course requires something more. To teach artists as comprehensive survey but a sampling of arts . . . from different as Giotto and Picasso with lively enthusi- diverse historical periods, regions, and cultures,” the asm—for without enthusiasm such a course is dead anthropological methodology is explicit: on arrival—requires that one be a generalist. Ideally one should have gregarious interests and a broad base Like any social scientists or humanists, [stu- of reading, but at a minimum one needs a fearless dents] must evaluate evidence (documentary, willingness to make broad assertions. But fearless textual, or pictorial), form hypotheses, test generalists are thin on the ground in the modern their data, and draw conclusions. Success- university, where scholars prefer the safety of teach- ful majors master the translation of visual ing within their own specialties. Even if Yale wanted perceptions into linguistic or material expres- to maintain its traditional survey of Western art, it sion, develop their visual memory, and make would have great difficulty finding professors able or connections with a wide array of other histori- willing to teach it. cal evidence.

HE ABOLITION of the survey is only the tangi- It’s as if the students were being asked to para- ble sign of deep-seated changes that have been chute into an unfamiliar culture with its own curious T going on in the field of art history, and largely practices and beliefs, and to observe them with objec- invisible to the public. Until a generation or so ago, the tive detachment. How they are to distinguish mean- unspoken premise underlying the teaching of art was ingfully, in terms of significance, between thePietà

Commentary 35 The tragedy is that the new dispensation, by addressing itself to theoretically sophisticated future graduate students, has turned its back on the curious non-art major. and a vodka advertisement is not made clear. over time; and without such a lattice to serve as system In the process, the introductory survey has come of order, all one has is a welter of free-floating facts. to be disparaged as that most reactionary of things, The traditional survey was addressed to the the “grand narrative.” This is the notion that the canon general student, who might be destined for a career in of Western art was an instrument of power, furiously business or medicine, but who felt a duty to acquire a exclusionary in purpose, meant to enforce existing sys- minimum of cultural literacy and to be able to identify tems of power relationships—the whole thing part of Michelangelo and, if pressed, say why he matters. The the elaborate machinery of oppression. As narratives tragedy is that the new dispensation, by addressing go, that is about as grand as it gets. itself to ever more theoretically sophisticated future On its face, there is nothing wrong in introduc- graduate students, has turned its back on the curious ing students to non-Western art, as early as possible. non–art major. But there is nothing new about that. Departments of The architecture critic Paul Goldberger, a prod- art history have been doing that since the first half uct of the Yale system, once said that Scully’s most of the century, and Yale, blessed with stupendous re- important students were not architects and art his- sources in African and Asian art, is perfectly poised torians but rather “the bankers and the lawyers who to do this in its expanded survey courses. But the cost went on to support architecture,” whom he turned into of exchanging the survey for a smorgasbord of offer- “informed clients.” Yale’s new curriculum has much ings is that there is no common frame of reference, to recommend it, and its continued stress on object- no shared body of knowledge to which colleagues can based teaching is admirable—but those bankers and relate their own discoveries and communicate them lawyers won’t be back. The department is unlikely ever effectively to others. again to draw the 300 students who are gathering now Barringer of Yale is correct that no semester-long for the last hurrah of its old survey. Like every other survey “could ever be comprehensive,” but nobody program that has dismissed the Western tradition, its ever claimed it could. What it does do is give the stu- enrollments will fall. It’s as if a minister had decided dent a mental lattice into which new facts and objects to aim all his sermons at prospective future ministers can be fitted and related to one another. That lattice and addressed himself exclusively to the minutiae of will inevitably be a rickety affair of generalizations and theological dispute…only to wonder why the pews are simplifications, but it will be refined and corrected empty next Sunday.q

36 Yale’s Art Department Commits Suicide : March 2020 A Bellow from France Why don’t Americans ‘get’ Michel Houellebecq, the most important European novelist of the last quarter-century? By Christopher Caldwell

ATALISM AND Fellatio” is the title him. He co-stars in curmudgeonly films with Gérard the Süddeutsche Zeitung gave last Depardieu. He directs pornographic films of his own. fall to a scathing essay about Michel For a quarter century, he has been hailed in country Houellebecq’s seventh novel, Sero- after European country as a prophet, and just as tonin. The reviewer assailed Houel- widely dismissed as a charlatan. In this he resembles lebecq’s prose, despairing that even the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of only a certain female critics should be handful of living novelists who can claim a similar thrilled by the musings of this “depressive sexist.” It Europe-wide resonance: Many of those who read him ‘ was a Ffamiliar assessment. The 62-year-old Houel- don’t “get” him. lebecq (pronounced Wellabeck) is an eccentric. He Americans may get him least of all. Except for makes passes at female journalists sent to interview a few weeks in 2015 when his novel Submission was invoked to explain a wave of French terror attacks, Christopher Caldwell, a contributing editor at English-speakers have not embraced him. Perhaps the Claremont Review of Books and a contributing that will change with Serotonin, in which a desper- opinion writer for the New York Times, is the author ate protagonist seeks to keep the modern world at of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties bay with every weapon at his disposal: sex and drugs (Simon & Schuster). The translations in this piece are and rock-n-roll, yes, but also populism, nostalgia, and his own. religion.

Commentary 37 Michel Houellebecq places his characters in front of specific, vivid, contemporary challenges, often humiliating and often mediated by technology.

Certain basic things that important novelists do, system of social differentiation in our societ- Houellebecq does not. Great novels usually concern the ies, quite independent of money and just as relationships, institutions, and ideals out of which the pitiless. And the effects of these two systems “bourgeois” social order is knit together—marriages, are exactly equivalent. ... In a perfectly liberal schools, jobs, piety, patriotism. But in our time, rela- economic system [capitalism], some people tionships fail to take root. Institutions fall apart. The amass considerable fortunes; others rot in visible social order seems not to be the real one. Many joblessness and poverty. In a perfectly liberal novelists limit their vision to those narrow precincts sexual system, some people have a varied and where the world still makes sense (or can be made to exciting erotic life; others are reduced to mas- make sense) in the way it did to Balzac or Flaubert. turbation and loneliness. Economic liberalism Often these are contexts in which a set of rules has means the battlefront is widening—widening been bureaucratically imposed, or grandfathered in: a to all ages of life and all classes of society. In SEAL team in bestselling fiction, a university literature the same way, sexual liberalism means the department in more arty work. Houellebecq is up to battlefront is widening—widening to all ages something different. He places his characters in front of life and all classes of society. of specific, vivid, contemporary challenges, often humiliating and often mediated by technology: Internet The title Extension du domaine de lutte is sup- pornography, genetic research, terrorism, prescrip- posed to compare our society to something that in- tion drug addiction. This technological mediation spires horror—a collapsing line of defense, or the sack can make his characters seem isolated, and yet it is an of a port city. You will not find that resonance in the isolation with which any contemporary can at least English-language title, however, since its translators empathize. The Outsider is Everyman. Houellebecq’s chose, idiotically, to call the book Whatever. The me- reputation as a visionary rests on his depiction of what diocre and inaccurate English translations of Houel- we have instead of the old bourgeois social order. lebecq’s first two novels go a long way to explain why he has caught on so much less well among English- IS EMERGENCE in 1994 was inauspicious. language readers than elsewhere in the West. Until then he had been a saucy formalist The translators lacked the ideological imagina- H poet with one book-length critical essay tion to see Houellebecq’s metaphorical comparison on H.P. Lovecraft to his credit. No mainstream critic of capitalism and sexuality as anything other than an was swept away by the slim novel he published that empty provocation, so they suppressed it. They were year called Extension du domaine de la lutte—which not alone. In France at the time, capitalism was in dis- means, roughly, “The Widening Battlefront.” What was repute but the unregulated sexuality preached by the distinctive about it was that it pluckily presented as Generation of 1968 was still venerated as a sort of glo- protagonists the kind of people novels don’t get written rious refounding. There was an assumption that only about: a pair of second-tier technicians sent to give cor- right-wingers cared about money and only left-wing porate computer tutorials in a provincial French city. people appreciated sex. That economic and sexual Their efforts to socialize with women end in horrors of exploitation might have a common logic was, until embarrassment and indignity. At a party, one of them Houellebecq, a view confined to a few irritable priests works so hard to drink his way into sociability that he and Marxists. Nor had anyone ever seen quite so clear- vomits behind a living-room couch. They are losers. ly that the “liberations” of the 1960s could just as eas- But at the end of this aimless and low-energy ily produce de-sexualization as hyper-sexualization. novel, the unnamed narrator makes a shocking obser- Houellebecq was impossible to place ideologically, vation that sets the tone for all of Houellebecq’s work, and the confusion would deepen when he published and possibly for the literature of our own century: his masterpiece Les Particules élémentaires (“The El- ementary Particles”) four years later. Sex, I told myself, has truly become a second The Elementary Particles is a veiled autobi-

38 A Bellow from France : March 2020 He argues that a change in values in the course of the 1960s removed the social and institutional support that individuals needed to sustain even a pretense of decency.

ography, and a frontal attack on the culture of the feminism and the value system that arose out of it. 1960s. To understand the centrality of that decade to “The bitches never stopped talking about doing the Houellebecq’s worldview, it helps to know something dishes and sharing the housework; they were literally about his childhood, which resembles that of no public obsessed with dirty dishes,” Bruno’s girlfriend Chris- figure so much as that of Barack Obama. He was born tiane complains. “In a few years, they managed to turn on Reunion Island, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, their boyfriends into impotent, sniveling wimps. At in 1956. His mother was a progressive doctor afflicted that point—well, what else would you expect? They with wanderlust. Much like Obama’s mother, who started to miss having a man around. They wound up wrote ethnological studies of the smithies of Indonesia dumping their boyfriends to jump in bed with the first for the Ford Foundation, Mrs. Houellebecq shipped macho idiot who came along.” her son back home to be raised by more traditional The 1960s are almost like a malevolent character grandparents, while she went off to save the (Third) in The Elementary Particles. “The serial killers of the World. Houellebecq in traditionalist France, like nineties,” Bruno opines as he researches the circles in Obama in hokey Hawaii, seems to have held out hope which his mother traveled, “were the offspring of the that the absent progressive parent was doing some- hippies of the sixties.” Houellebecq’s point is that a thing of relevance to him, that his archaic upbringing change in values in the course of the 1960s removed the was somehow linked to his mother’s modernizing social and institutional support that individuals need- adventure, even if the two seemed to be in contra- ed to sustain even a pretense of decency. His fictional diction. Each boy wanted to believe that no one was world is emotionally excruciating. When Christiane “relegating” or “abandoning” him to anything. The suffers a spinal collapse and is confined permanently hidden system behind their upbringing would reveal to a wheelchair, Bruno kisses her on the cheek and says its wholeness in the end, in a union of the nomadic and tenderly, “Now you can move in with me.” But when she the sedentary. When that didn’t happen, each of the replies “Are you sure?,” his magnanimity breaks down. men turned against one half of his childhood, Obama He looks away and cannot meet her gaze. against the traditional/provincial side, Houellebecq To the question of what it was about the 1960s against the progressive/cosmopolitan side—though that made them so destructive, most of Houellebecq’s each remained fluent and comfortable enough in the early books would have given a technological answer, other idiom to consort with, and “pass” among, those not an ideological one. Skepticism about the ability who still believed in it. of science to master society’s challenges pervades his The Elementary Particles is the story of two lonely work. “One can say the West loved literature and the half-brothers, the molecular biologist Michel Djerzin- arts,” says a colleague of Michel Djerzinski, “but prob- ski and the middle-class drifter Bruno Clément, whose ably nothing counted more in its history than the need shared mother chose raising her consciousness over for rational certainty. To this need, the West sacrificed raising her kids. She joins communes, free-love colo- everything: its religion, its happiness, its hopes, and, nies, and drug circles in far-off lands. The two brothers when all is said and done, its existence.” emerge damaged from parental neglect, each in his own Among the previous generation of American way. Bruno is what used to be called in the 20th century novelists, the sensibility closest to Houellebecq’s is a “sex maniac,” reducing every human relationship to Saul Bellow’s—passionately engaged but authoritative the same urge and seeking out sex clubs, orgies, and and judgmental, an essayist’s sensibility as much as a various hedonistic communities in the vain hope of novelist’s. If his characters frequently hold crackpot slaking his urges. Michel is a genetic researcher who opinions, that never make his novels feel like crackpot hopes to replace sex with cloning or some more rational projects. Houellebecq, educated at the elite National option. Houellebecq implies that these are two sides of Agronomic Institute, has a mastery of, and a curiosity the same coin. about, the facts of science. He delights in them. There The novel is not misogynistic, as critics almost is a fussy statisticality about his writing: “The year uniformly allege, but its characters are resentful of 1970 saw a rapid growth in erotic consumption, de-

Commentary 39 Submission was published, in a way that sealed Houellebecq’s reputation for prophecy, on January 7 2015, the very day Islamist terrorists massacred most of Charlie Hébdo’s staff. spite the efforts of a still-vigilant sexual repression.... satirical magazine Charlie Hébdo, massacred most of Naked breasts spread rapidly on the beaches of South- its staff, and took hostage the shoppers in a kosher ern France. In the space of a few months, the number supermarket near place de la Nation—four of whom of sex shops in Paris rose from 3 to 45.” would be executed over the following days. Submis- This is the texture of all Houellebecq’s books. sion has proved the most popular of his books in the They ventriloquize or parody other genres—journal- United States. ism (as in this quote), science writing, encyclopedias, Houellebecq saw, even well before most political travel guides, marketing pitches, and history. (Houel- commentators registered the rise of “populism,” that lebecq’s conceit is that The Elementary Particles is a non-European immigration was driving native voters book written in 2079 but set in the 1990s.) In an age of towards a politics of European identity. “Sooner or lat- political correctness, this distancing in time and tone er, civil war between Muslims and the rest of the popu- allowed Houellebecq to restore to the French novel lation is inevitable,” explains one French extremist in its didactic or wisdom-imparting function. He (or his Submission, before going on to describe some of his narrator) could say such things as: “That’s one of the comrades-in arms. “They draw the conclusion that the worst things about extreme beauty in young women: sooner this war begins, the better chance they’ll have Only an experienced pickup artist, cynical and without of winning it.” Houellebecq’s narrator is a university scruples, thinks himself up to the task; so it is in gen- scholar of 19th-century literary decadence fascinated eral the rottenest men who win the treasure of their by both sides of this confrontational politics. Europe- virginity, and this marks for such girls the first stage of ans, he believes, are losing their only culture and their a permanent debasement.” only home. As he explains to his Jewish girlfriend, This is the tone of the hardboiled French fic- who departs for Israel as the Islamist takeover begins, tion associated with the sensualist aristocrat Henry “There is no Israel for me.” de Montherlant and the detective writer Georges Because it is the most explicitly political of Simenon. Until Houellebecq came along, it had been Houellebecq’s books, Submission is of much nar- decades since anyone used it. rower range than his others, but it has two strikingly sophisticated elements. First is the sure-handed way OR A LONG TIME, whether he was writing Houellebecq describes the slowly forming consensus about science, as he did in Elementary Par- among France’s journalistic and political elite that F ticles and The Possibility of an Island (2004), or they have more to fear from the National Front (the tourism, as he did in Platform (2001), or art and the art right-wing nationalist movement dominated by the market, as he did in The Map and the Territory (2010), Le Pen family) than from Ben Abbes. So in the name Houellebecq made no effort to fit his political opinions of “republican values,” they rally behind a party that into any prevailing categories. But critics have been wants to turn France into a sharia state. Second is nearly unanimous in detecting something suspect. It Houellebecq’s sense that the only two really indepen- has always been clear that Houellebecq is troubled dent participants in this argument, the seemingly by the not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper surrender of adversarial “identitarians” and the Islamists, are France and the rest of Europe to self-confident immi- actually converging on a consensus, which happens grants, including Muslims. Soumission (“Submission”) also to be a truth: that “liberal individualism” has was the first sign that he was moving in a direction that failed or, to be more precise, has reached the end of its could unambiguously be called right-wing. historical logic. Set in the near future, it describes the machi- By liberal individualism, Houellebecq means the nations that lead to the election of the Islamist Mo- principle of breaking down custom and tradition in or- hammed Ben Abbes as the first Islamist president of der to render society more rational. As one liberal con- France. It was published, in a way that sealed Houel- vert to Islam puts it in Submission, “Liberal individu- lebecq’s reputation for prophecy, on January 7 2015, alism triumphed when it was content to dissolve such the very day Islamist terrorists broke into the French intermediate structures as countries, corporations,

40 A Bellow from France : March 2020 Serotonin’s narrator takes a pill that keeps his depression at bay but makes him impotent—a metonym for Western society, as Houellebecq would probably see it.

and castes, but now that it has reached the ultimate Houellebecq’s obsessions. Florent-Claude has until structure, the family—and thus the demography—it recently been a well-remunerated soldier on behalf of has signed its own death warrant. Logically, the time the former. He worked for Monsanto, a corporation of Islam has arrived.” that in Europe has a nearly Satanic reputation. Then he marketed to international buyers some of the lesser- R AT LEAST the time of bigger things. Houel- known cheeses of Normandy—i.e., not just camembert lebecq’s latest, Serotonin, takes an explicitly but also livarot and Pont-l’Évêque. But the admission O religious turn. This is not exactly a surprise. of Eastern European countries to the European Union Houellebecq has made sidelong references to religion in 2002, the suppression of the EU’s dairy quotas in in many of his earlier books. In The Elementary Par- 2015, and downward pressure on farm prices brought ticles, Bruno attempts to become a Catholic, spend- about by genetically modified organisms have put ing half his time reading Charles Péguy and writing huge pressure on farmers. What Florent-Claude has tracts in defense of Pope John Paul II, and the other really been doing is helping people who know about half cruising Minitel (France’s proto-Internet) for business to wipe out people who know about agricul- pornography. The Map and the Territory contains, by ture, and to wipe out rural cultures and landscapes way of an obituary for Houellebecq, who appears as along with them. Not to give away too much of the plot, a doomed character in his own novel, a strange note: this is something that becomes clear to Florent-Claude “It was discovered—and this was a surprise for every- when he visits his best friend from agronomy school, body—that the author of The Elementary Particles, now an independent farmer, and finds him cleaning who had taken a lifelong stance as an intransigent an assault rifle. atheist, had had himself discreetly baptized in a Houellebecq’s characters are, as noted above, church at Courtenay six months before.” And in Sub- both solitary and common. Florent-Claude spends a mission, a newly installed (and largely sympathetic) lot of hours on one of the more solitary/common mod- Islamist university rector talks reasonably to François ern pastimes: rehashing his erotic past as he hunts (himself a Catholic dabbler) about God. “When you down old lovers on the Internet. There was Kate, the get down to it,” the rector says, “isn’t there something romantic Scandinavian. There was Claire, the state- a bit ridiculous about this miserable little creature, subsidized countercultural performance artist whom living on an anonymous planet in the backwaters of he dated during his time at Monsanto, who briefly a run-of-the-mill galaxy, standing on his hind legs to gained fame for a show in which she masturbated proclaim: ‘God doesn’t exist!’?” while someone read texts by Georges Bataille. But As Serotonin begins, the agronomist Florent- above all there is Camille, a beautiful and adoring Claude has left his faithless (to put it mildly) girlfriend woman he met when she arrived as a teenage intern and moved into a chain hotel in a drab neighborhood at his office in Normandy. They wound up living apart on the Parisian periphery. He spends his days watching while she gained professional credentials. It might cooking shows, leaving the room only for a meal once a seem he could have asked her to stay with him, pro- day when it is being cleaned. He takes a pill called Cap- posed marriage to her. torix that keeps his depression at bay but makes him impotent—a metonym for the whole of Western soci- But I didn’t, and I certainly couldn’t have. I ety, as Houellebecq would probably see it. Serotonin is hadn’t been formatted for such a proposal, Houellebecq’s sloppiest novel in years. He drifts into that wasn’t part of my software, I was a mod- paragraph-long, under-punctuated sentences that ern man, and for me as for all my contempo- leave no literary impression beyond haste of composi- raries, a woman’s professional career had to be tion. Its sexuality is not just crude but perverse, even respected above everything else. It was the ul- (when it comes to one inspiration for winning back an timate criterion, the triumph over barbarism, old lover) homicidal. the exit from the Middle Ages. Economic and sexual liberalism continue to be

Commentary 41 Since Christiane in Elementary Particles, there about. A novelist who sincerely believes they have has been a woman like Camille in each of Houellebecq’s been destroyed finds himself in want of raw material. novels, one who—at any other time than now and in Novels require rich, ramifying networks of deeply hu- any other culture than that of the decadent West— man connection. The culture does not nurture these would have been a wife, a mother, a partner in build- the way it did in an age of large and loyal families, ing something larger. But Florent-Claude, like other intertangled commercial enterprises and long-settled Houellebecq protagonists, rejects Camille—actually, communities. Houellebecq has faced this predica- he repels her through a series of highly unnatural and ment with artistic integrity, refusing to fantasize that learned “defenses,” most of which involve his own ut- individuals in our time can somehow be re-inserted terly pointless quest for sexual novelty. He is free to love into such “novelistic” webs of meaning. Hence the whom he wants, but he can find no particular reason paradox of Houellebecq. Better than any other author to settle into a productive pattern of love with anybody. he describes certain human predicaments of the global As Houellebecq sees it, liberalism’s various age—but he has not managed to capture a wide audi- emancipatory projects require dismantling hierar- ence in the global language. He is the most serious and chies, institutions and cultures. He is right about this. important novelist in Europe—but he is writing at a That is why his novels are so intelligent, vivid, and true. time when New World critics and readers have decided The problem is that these same hierarchies, institu- to do without the kind of wisdom European novels tions, and culture are what novels have always been traditionally impart.q

42 A Bellow from France : March 2020 Mamzer A memoir of my father-in-law By Emily Fox Gordon

E WAS A peasant, really—un- his malapropisms: “She eats the cake,” he said of a educated, overbearing, explo- foolish neighbor. “Ha,” he once remarked, gesturing at sive, crude—utterly unlike the a woman in a revealing bathing suit, “the fleshtops of urbane, ironic, self-deprecat- Babylon.” At the breakfast table one morning he loudly ing American Jews I’d always accused my mother-in-law of being a warmonger. No- known. After 50 years in this body could have been less of one. He’d meant to say country, he never lost his gut- “worrywart.” tural rural German accent, and in spite of his high He was a tall, broad-shouldered, physically im- intelligence,H he never quite learned to speak Eng- posing man with heavy-lidded blue eyes and a full lish. My husband’s mother, who grew up in Cologne, head of white hair that grew in tightly scalloped waves. achieved near-perfect fluency, but his father struggled My own mother described him as a “lion of Judah.” to articulate even simple sentences. When he was Alternately stiff and clumsily jocular, he had a way of unable to retrieve a noun, he substituted “dinks.” No putting people off, particularly other men. He was full doubt he meant “ding,” the German word for “thing,” of élan vital, but his world view was too hierarchical though for some reason he changed the g to a k and to allow friendship and his work ethic too stringent to added an s. “Where is the dinks?” he would demand, permit him much indulgence in the usual recreations, meaning the car keys, the newspaper, the saltshaker, though he watched his share of TV. His diet was plain: who knew? His three sons made a game of collecting overcooked brisket, baked potatoes, canned vegeta- bles. (He did love good bread and drove miles out of his Emily Fox Gordon is the author of the memoir way to patronize a European bakery.) Even in his later, Mockingbird Years; a novel, It Will Come to Me; and a wealthy days, his ways were sober and industrious and collection of essays, Book of Days. This is her first ap- routine-bound. For him, everything was subordinated pearance in Commentary. to work and family.

Commentary 43 In the years I knew him, he was rich, and while Chinese restaurants, though the food, served in undif- he never ceased to honor the principles of thrift and ferentiated heaps, made them squeamish. They even deferral of gratification that had made him that way, attended a regular New Years’ Eve party, though they he allowed himself to indulge his taste for well-made found it too bibulous for their comfort. But in the clothes. He wore them dashingly. I remember a leather midst of their adjustment to the new world, they main- jacket, regularly rubbed with oil, and a gray Persian tained an umbilical connection to the old through my lamb astrakhan hat. Once, emboldened by the requi- father-in-law’s parents, whose Washington Heights site four glasses of wine at a seder dinner, I told him neighborhood might have been mistaken for a Jewish he dressed like Telly Savalas in Kojak. How he glowed quarter in almost any European city. My husband’s at that. grandfather served as a shammas in a synagogue there, He and my mother-in-lawƒ had emigrated to and his grandmother shopped at the open-air markets this country in the 1930s, having fled the Nazis. When on Dyckman Street, where she bought plums for her they’d gotten settled in uptown Manhattan, he ar- plum cake and live carp for gefilte fish. She cooked and ranged for his parents and brother to follow (his sister baked for days in anticipation of visits from her New died in the camps, as did my mother-in-law’s parents). Jersey grandsons, but when they arrived, they waved My husband was born in Newark, the eldest and liveli- away her offerings. They wanted pizza, and they got it. est of three boys, the inheritor of his father’s buoyant Soon after the death of his father, my father-in- energy and his mother’s near-crippling anxiety. His law swerved toward Orthodoxy. My mother-in-law, ever father later designated him “the intellectual one.” The loyal, swerved with him. They kept kosher, observed other two, “the spiritual one” and “the practical one,” the Sabbath, and joined the shul in their suburban New came along in due course. My parents-in-law cher- Jersey town, where my father-in-law’s conspicuous ished all three of their infant sons, but only my hus- zeal put him on a fast track to become president of the band got the full treatment. They wore surgical masks congregation. They enrolled the eldest son in Hebrew whenever they held him, and by dint of ferrying him school, which he hated. They sent their sensitive, duti- to the bathroom and back a hundred times a day, they ful middle son away to a yeshiva in the Bronx. managed to toilet train him before his first birthday. My husband never forgave his father for this My father-in-law’s professional life was a true banishment, which ended his brother’s promising Horatio Alger story, all the more impressive given his career as a high-school baseball player. He—my hus- social awkwardness and his troubles with the English band—was the feistiest of the three brothers, the one language. He started as a janitor in a Newark plastics who stood up to his father’s autocratic displays of tem- factory and quickly rose to foreman. Within 10 years per. More than that; he actively baited and taunted his he and his engineer brother had established their own father, not just by pointing out holes in his reasoning plastics business, FLEX Products, in the northern New but by smirking in a way calculated to arouse his fury. Jersey suburbs. Among other things, they manufac- When his parents took their sudden religious turn, tured those translucent rectangular boxes in which my future husband resented it as only a bright, callow, super-rational teenager could— so much so that he secretly My father-in-law often expressed a sabotaged their kosher arrange- particular worry: that his sons would ments, contaminating the milk and meat plates by scrambling marry shiksas and that his grandchildren them together in the sink, then returning them to their proper would, as he put it, laugh at him. places on the shelves. His parents never knew that their son people once stored marijuana, though I doubt they had had rendered traif all the food they subsequently ate any idea that their product was used this way. What from those two sets of crockery. made my father-in-law rich was his canny decision, My father-in-law often expressed a particular which put him at painful odds with his brother, to sell worry: that his sons would marry shiksas and that the factory at the very beginning of the 1970s oil crisis. his grandchildren would, as he put it, laugh at him. During their early, struggling years in this And two of them did marry gentiles. The shy Catholic country, he and my mother-in-law did their best to bride of the youngest brother was actually barred assimilate. The gave their sons New Testament names from their house for some months. The eldest mar- (George, Peter, Steven) and occasionally patronized ried me, a half-Jew of the wrong kind. My mother was

44 Mamzer : March 2020 a Gentile, and so, according to the law of matrilineal As it turned out, I was the only one of my siblings descent, am I. Or was, before I converted, though the to marry a Jew. Our wedding was an entirely secular efficacy of that conversion was thrown into doubt in ceremony held on the grounds of my parents’ sum- a curious way. mer house in Williamstown. My husband’s parents My father-in-law never treated me in the con- attended, though it obviously cost them an effort. My temptuous way he treated the Catholic girl. Even so, husband had just been awarded his Ph.D. in philoso- I felt his ambivalence from the start. Not only was I phy and had already published a number of articles in half-Gentile; I was a disorganized chain smoker with a long psychiatric history, not the kind Not only was I half-Gentile; I was a of daughter-in-law he would disorganized chain smoker with a long have wished for. But I was also, in his word, “classy,” by which he psychiatric history, not the kind of meant that I came from an intel- lectually accomplished family. daughter-in-law he had wished for. This worked in my favor, but also against me. academic journals. I had no degree, not even a B.A., I grew up in a New England college town. My and had been working at various dead-end jobs in New father was an economist, one of the first Jews to teach York. My parents could hardly contain their amazed at Williams College. Later, he was among the academ- delight that I’d found such a solid and promising hus- ics called to Washington by the Kennedy administra- band. My in-laws, on the other hand, sat stiffly in lawn tion. He served on the Council of Economic Advisers, chairs, eating nothing and drinking only water. and later, under LBJ, as director of the budget. During A few weeks later, when my husband and I visit- the Nixon administration, he was the president of the ed them at their summer cabin on Lake Hopatcong, my Brookings Institution. He and my mother were witty, father-in-law suddenly exploded in a fit of anger. He of- ambitious people, enthusiastic drinkers, wisecracking ten lost his temper, but this was uncontrolled rage. The agnostics. My father never pretended not to be Jew- occasion for his outburst was a tangled fishing line, ish, but his attitude toward his Judaism was casually but soon it became clear that it was motivated by his dismissive: He viewed it as a source of food, jokes, resentment of my father, whose easy worldliness and and stories, but otherwise irrelevant. My mother, like insouciant attitude toward his own Jewishness had my father, had no belief, but her attitude toward her been on display at the wedding. My father embodied religious background was different: She passed on to every ambition that my father-in-law had cherished her children a sampling of some of the elements of her for his sons—and my father-in-law hated him for it. Presbyterian upbringing. She took from it what she Out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, he turned on found beautiful—the psalms, the hymns, the festive rit- my husband, bellowing: “You kiss his ass!” uals of Christmas and Easter—and removed it from the It took me years to sort through my reactions to shell of belief, just as she might have prised the meat this episode. It shocked and frightened me, of course, from a walnut. My siblings and I grew up enjoying and I must confess it gave me an illicit thrill. I had the traditions of holiday Christianity without having my own reasons to resent my father, and to resent my been baptized, confirmed, or instructed in any dogma. husband for being in some ways so much like him. About the other side of our heritage, we were taught But it was also the beginning of understanding. For even less. I picked up a feeling for American Jewish one thing, it made me realize that my father and my culture from my father’s extended family in New York husband, though widely separated in age, were really but learned very little about Judaism. Until I studied of the same generation. Each of them had grown up the subject in a high-school comparative religion class, struggling to meet the expectations of an angry and I knew almost nothing about it. exacting patriarch, a creditor whose debt neither could I grew up a religious tabula rasa, and have re- ever repay no matter how much the world rewarded mained blank all my life, unable to imagine what it him. It was more than that: My father-in-law’s explo- would be to believe, or even to observe. Toward Juda- sion opened up a crack in the world through which I ism, I’d describe my attitude as a strong rooting inter- could see something of the tragic chronicle of my hus- est, but I retain a primitive longing for the customs of band’s family. I’ve replayed that scene over and over in my childhood Christmases—the carols and the Bûche my mind until the crack grew wider still, giving me a de Noël and the sweet-smelling tree. glimpse into the chasm of Jewish history.

Commentary 45 HAD BEEN semi-estranged from both my parents then I caught only phrases, delivered in the offhand, all through my adolescence. After I married, I insinuating tones of a dedicated pitchman—“You I transferred what remained of my filial loyalty to will find perhaps you are more secure?...” or “The my in-laws, particularly to my husband’s lovely, mod- marriage will possibly grow stronger…?” My father- est, sunny, anxious mother, a woman as naturally re- in-law was nothing if not shrewd: He saw how shaky fined as her husband was crude. How I longed for her things were between my husband and me in those approval! She did her best to accept me, but I knew she early years. would have preferred a more feminine, more domesti- Then I got pregnant, and conversion became ur- cated daughter-in-law. (Our relationship never quite gent. I was more susceptible now to my father-in-law’s survived an early incident at the lake house, when she persuasion: The hormones had softened my imagina- discovered my diaphragm soaking in the guestroom tion. For moments at a time I was able to picture my- sink.) Nevertheless, she was always kind to me, and I self as the “dodd-in-law” my husband’s parents would was grateful. I got on better than I expected with my have wished for, standing in the glow of the Sabbath father-in-law, who acknowledged my membership in candles, wearing a kerchief (a kerchief?), the baby the family by talking to me in the distractedly gemut- perched on my hip. Wasn’t this a secure embedment lich nonsense language he used with his sons. “Emilia, in family—the life I longed for? But the fantasy never Emilia, Encyclo-pee-lia!” was his greeting. I was grate- lasted long. I knew very well that in real life my hus- ful for that too, though it embarrassed me. Wary as I al- band would be rolling his eyes. His father would round ways was of him, I was also grateful that soon after my on him, the lion roaring at an impudent cub. own father died at age 60, he took my husband aside My father-in-law drove me to my first meeting and reminded him of his responsibility to me. “She is with the rabbi. We parked in the circular driveway of alone in the world,” he said. “You are all she has.” the synagogue. Just as I was climbing out of the Lin- And I had the odd sense, more and more so as coln, he beckoned me back in. “Close the door,” he said. he grew old, that he and I shared a certain rapport. My (I invite the reader to imagine his accent.) attention was important to him: When he sat at the Then, whispering hoarsely: Don’t tell the rabbi breakfast table telling stories about the family and the you’re a mamzer. past, he addressed them to me. There was something Me (thinking): A mamzer? in my habitually detached perspective and my half-in, FIL: A bastard. A Jew can’t marry a bastard. half-out position in the family that inclined him to Me (gesturing in the direction of the synagogue): consider me a confidante. Perhaps he hoped I might But I’m converting. explain him to his son. FIL: A mamzer can never convert. My husband and I moved from the New York Me: What? area to Vermont, where he taught at the university in This odd last-minute admonition seemed to Burlington. Every few months his parents drove up reverse his expressed wishes, but I knew that my to visit us from New Jersey, their car packed with the father-in-law didn’t always observe the law against self-contradiction. By now I was There was something in my habitually too caught up in the conversion project to ask questions anyway. detached perspective that inclined him I got out of the Lincoln and trudged into the newly renovat- to consider me a confidante. Perhaps he ed synagogue, where the recep- hoped I might explain him to his son. tionist greeted me and led me into the wood-paneled office of the rabbi. On the wall behind his pots and pans and paper plates and rolls of aluminum desk were framed photographs of himself posing with foil they’d need to maintain their kosher arrange- local notables—the mayor, the governor, various mem- ments in my kitchen. As we drove around town doing bers of the Christian clergy, the influential owner of a errands, my father-in-law began to work on me to furniture warehouse. “So,” he said as I seated myself, convert to Judaism. “you want to be a Jew. Life isn’t hard enough already?” It was an oddly muted campaign conducted Because time was short—I was four months from the driver’s seat of his Lincoln. He kept up a along—the rabbi omitted the ritual of discouraging the steady mumble just beneath the threshold of audibil- convert three times in order to test the sincerity of her ity, forcing me to lean in close to hear him, but even intentions. He required only that I do some reading

46 Mamzer : March 2020 and meet with him periodically, that the baby undergo It was hard to comprehend the idea that what a bris, or in the case of a girl, a naming ceremony, and kept me from becoming Jewish was not the Gentile in that soon after the birth I immerse myself in the ritual me, but the Jew. It was harder still to understand what bath called the mikvah. I never brought up the subject was in it for my father-in-law. of my half-and-half status, not so much because I felt He’d driven me and the baby to see the rabbi bound by my father-in-law’s injunction but because that morning and was waiting for us in the Lincoln. I the conversion seemed to be rolling along on rails. The imagined him napping at the wheel, the brim of his hat rabbi was interested in getting it done, not in soliciting information about my background. And My father-in-law was a man with a besides, I didn’t want to think frenetically active inner life. Subject to about anything difficult. For me, pregnancy was like walking the pressures that built up in his head, across a stretch of rocky terrain, all the while balancing a bowl of odd ideas formed and hardened. water on my head. Because I cul- tivated equilibrium, I relegated the mamzer business drawn low over his eyes. Suddenly I saw him in a gang- to the back of my mind, where it seemed to blink on sterish light, a Mafioso parked outside an abortionist’s and off like a faulty light bulb in an adjacent room. It office with the motor running, taking care of a bit of wasn’t that I didn’t see what was manifestly irrational business for his son. about it, only that I didn’t allow myself to register it. The baby was born. I had finished my course of VER the years, I’ve told the mamzer story to instruction with the rabbi, and except for the upcom- a number of people who are knowledgeable ing naming ceremony (and the postnatal immersion O about Judaism. I’ve asked them: Is it true in the mikvah, which I never actually got around that half-Jews whose mothers are Gentiles cannot be to), the conversion process was complete. Even so, I converted? Not one ever said it was. A colleague of my couldn’t resist bringing her in to show her off to the husband who came from a long line of rabbis summed rabbi. He leaned over her, making the clucking noises up the consensus: “That’s nonsense. He made it up.” people make at babies, then looked up at me, cocking My father-in-law was a man with a frenetically his chin, and squinting quizzically. “Don’t you hate active inner life, all the more so because his inability war?” he said. The beneficent hormones that had kept to speak fluent English kept him isolated, safe from me feeling rosy during my pregnancy had apparently the corrective influence of other minds. Subject to the drained away. The rabbi’s remark irritated me, not pressures that built up in his head, odd ideas formed only because it was sanctimonious but because it was and hardened. One of these was his conviction that a so obviously his go-to reaction to babies, a formula woman’s urine is stronger than a man’s, strong enough that allowed him to sidestep rivalries between the to kill grass. Another was the mamzer notion, which congregation’s new mothers. Then and there I ac- burst out of his volcanic imagination with such force knowledged to myself that he was a hack, a Chamber that he took it to be canonical. of Commerce rabbi. But really: What could I expect of But why did he spend months persuading me the spiritual leader of the Conservative synagogue in to convert, only to reverse himself so suddenly? I Burlington, Vermont? can’t know the topography of the totem-and-taboo At the same moment I allowed myself for the land that was my father-in-law’s mind, but here is my first time to work out the implications of my father- guess. His effort to persuade me had originally been in-law’s “mamzer” admonition. If I’d been entirely an effort to persuade himself that he had some control Gentile, I’d have had no problem converting, but as a over the eventuality he’d long feared, the arrival of the half-Jew of the wrong kind, I could never be Jewish, grandchild who would, notoriously, laugh at him. A any conversion undertaken in bad faith notwithstand- child who grew up identified with Judaism would not ing, and neither could my daughter or her children or laugh at her Jewish grandfather: This was consistent grandchildren. My whole line (and my husband’s too, with the assimilationist views he held during the years at least if I were the mother of all his children) would when his parents were alive. But as he grew older, be barred from membership in the tribe (unless, I sup- materially secure but cut adrift from his origins, a pose, a son was born to me or one of my descendants, stronger, darker view emerged in him. What he feared and he married a Jewish woman). now was more powerful and primitive than ridicule:

Commentary 47 It was contamination. nightmarish chimera, doubly unclean, both the prod- Hygiene had always been one of his preoccupa- uct and the agent of contamination. In that moment tions, and as he grew richer and older, it became an outside the synagogue, he understood that to encour- obsession. He divided the world into two categories: age me to convert might have been a terrible mistake. clean and unclean. Hotel rooms were almost always Not only was he allowing his family’s blood lines to be unclean. My mother-in-law’s uterus, inspected by a adulterated; he was bringing upon himself a charge gynecologist after an early miscarriage, was clean. I of responsibility for that defilement. Trapped by this remember how emphatically he insisted on this, as if realization, he cast about for some way out. He could anyone needed to be convinced: “She vas as clean on not stop the process he’d set in motion, but he could at the inside as she vas on the outside!” His own mouth, least disassociate himself from it. In his desperation, for that matter, was clean. He kept it that way by direct- he invented the Mamzer. ing his dentist to extract all of his teeth rather than It was my father-in-law’s fate to live in the crux salvage the sound ones to use as foundations for fixed of a great historical irony. He and my mother-in-law bridges, which belonged in the unclean category be- fled Germany to escape Nazi persecution. Within 20 cause parts of them were inaccessible to a toothbrush. years of his emigration to America, he began to real- (I remember thinking that this made a kind of sense, ize that they hadn’t escaped the threat of elimination then realizing that the same could be said of natural after all, that it was finding him and his family here teeth.) Instead, he opted for a full set of dentures, com- just as it had nearly done there, more slowly but also pletely cleanable and therefore clean. more surely. No murderous intent was necessary, Was this cleanliness fetish a manifestation of just the steady, trampling march of secularizing obsessive-compulsive disorder, a syndrome with a progress. strong genetic component? Certainly I recognize simi- For Jews like my own father and my husband, lar tendencies in my husband and other relatives. Or the slow dissolution of the Jewish people was not a cri- was it a consequence of the psychological trauma my sis. If anything, it was a liberation. Toward the end of father-in-law underwent as refugee? I think he did his life, my father’s confidence in his own agnosticism indeed suffer from OCD, or something like it. His ex- wavered a little. He saw the filmHester Street and was perience of Nazism, however, was explanation enough. surprised to find himself feeling an intense nostalgia But it isn’t really this nature/nurture distinc- for the Jewish world of his childhood. I don’t think tion that interests me; it’s what happened during that this meant much, really. Nostalgia is not so much a moment of reversal in the car when my father-in-law feeling as a symptom of the death of feeling—a kind of delivered me to the rabbi. I envision two psychologi- emotional neuropathy. For his part, my husband was cal fronts colliding within him. The weaker force was less yielding: He’d never known a Judaism that wasn’t what remained of his optimistic, forward-looking shot through with his father’s authoritarian tendency, assimilationist impulse, which had sustained him and for him that spoiled it, particularly its ceremonial through the years when he worked hard to establish aspects, forever. He never forgave his father for his reli- giosity. But now that he is a wise old man, not a callow young one, He began to realize that assimilation, I think he has forgiven his father. carried to its conclusion, would mean He’s come to understand the terror and loss he endured, to ap- that the Jews would forget what it was to preciate his rescue of his parents and brother and all the children be Jews, that they would disappear. that the future would bring, the devoted and exhausting work of his family in this country. The stronger force, which establishing and developing a business, and his clear- in that moment swamped the weaker one, was his eyed decision to sell it when the time was right. At long realization that assimilation, carried to its conclusion, last, he’s grateful for his patrimony. would mean that the Jews would forget what it was to be Jews, that they would disappear. What was craziest FTER MY daughter’s naming ceremony, my in him gave motive force to an insight that was both parents-in-law never mentioned the conver- despairing and entirely sane. A sion again. It was as if it had never happened. To my father-in-law, I must have personified I rarely thought of it myself. Apart from lighting the the process he dreaded. I imagine he saw me as a menorah at Hanukkah for my daughter’s sake—they

48 Mamzer : March 2020 did it at her school, so how could I omit it?—I never when they saw our daughter, threw their arms wide, observed any of the Jewish holidays. For one thing, never tired of doting. She is lucky indeed to have had my husband would have objected: He found it hard such grandparents. enough to suffer through the hours of the annual seder So she took her turn as number-one grandchild, in New Jersey. and I took mine as the favored dodd-in-law. Later, In deference to his parents’ feelings, I never ob- when she was six years old, they moved to California to served Christmas either. Actually, one year I did, in a be near the middle brother and his family. My husband very small and sneaky way. Why, I asked myself, should my family not enjoy the holiday I loved as Perhaps he had accepted the futility a child? Why should the festive of resisting the slide into oblivion that day go dark? And so I propped up a pine bough in a glass vase, assimilation was bringing about, or hung it with a few red and green globes, and handed out token perhaps he was just growing old. presents to my husband and daughter. I thought I’d destroyed all the evidence, but and daughter and I flew across the country two or during his next visit from New Jersey, my father-in-law three times a year to visit them in their orange-roofed spotted a pine needle lodged in the carpet. “Vot is dis?” condominium in one of those verdant developments he demanded, and I never did it again. that spring from the desert outside San Diego. They But it hardly mattered. Something in him had hadn’t lived there long before the prostate cancer my softened, given way a little. Perhaps he had accepted father-in-law’s doctors had long been treating with the futility of resisting the slide into oblivion that hormones (how much this had to do with his femi- assimilation was bringing about, or perhaps he was nized fantasy life I have no idea) turned aggressive. He just growing old. He was calmer now, more reflec- spent a year dying, with exemplary stoicism. tive, and when he and my mother-in-law and I took My mother-in-law survived him for nine years, the baby for walks in the state-of-the-art stroller he’d suffering for eight of them from Alzheimer’s. Here bought for her, we had some long, relaxed talks. My was another terrible irony: This exquisitely careful, father-in-law confided that his one of his lifelong conscientious woman, so orderly in her habits that wishes, odd though he knew it sounded, was to be the she once confounded the airline that lost her luggage mother of a young child. by producing receipts for every item she’d packed, The mother? I asked. Yes, he said, the mother. was reduced to a state in which she could not speak, He was enchanted by his granddaughter. She comprehend, recognize her sons, or swallow. It was the was no mamzer to him. Each time he and my mother- kind of cruel fate that prompts an agnostic like me to in-law drove up from New Jersey to visit, they brought demand: How could any god permit it? one carefully chosen gift—a floppy lamb made of The situation doesn’t offer much in the way in the white fleece; a Fisher-Price child’s tape recorder on way of mitigation. The best I can do is to observe that which her two-year-old voice can still be heard, 35 while the disease destroyed her mind, it also erased the years later, singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”; a anxieties that had plagued her since her German child- Cabbage Patch doll, then so popular they were nearly hood. But that’s cold comfort. Instead, I suppose, I can unobtainable, packaged with its own “birth certifi- remind myself that in her case, the loss of memory was cate” document. My parents-in-law fell on their knees only accelerated—that eventually, we all forget.q

Commentary 49

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Why Ezra Klein Is Polarized

Why We’re Polarized there is very little reason to believe group polarization. Some of this By Ezra Klein that the stupidity and ugliness of stuff is, as Klein writes, terrifying Simon and Schuster, 336 pages our current Kulturkampf politics and insane-seeming. In one experi- are likely to abate, because they are ment, a group of boys is shown a Reviewed by less a defect of our politics and cluster of dots projected on a screen Kevin D. Williamson more a defect of ourselves, or an as- and asked to estimate the number pect of ourselves, if you prefer less of dots. They are then divided into HE MOST interesting judgmental language. two groups, the over-estimators and useful parts of (I prefer more judgmental lan- and the under-estimators—or so Ezra Klein’s new book, guage.) they are told. In reality, they are di- Why We’re Polarized— Klein deforms what might have vided up randomly. But even with so and those who are fa- been a very interesting and valu- thin a purported commonality (en- T miliar with Klein mainly from his able book by shoehorning a pre- tirely fictitious in reality), the boys journalism may be surprised to existing, self-serving progressive quickly develop classic in-group/ learn that there are interesting and master-narrative into his larger out-group behavior when asked to useful parts—are the most despair- account. You know the one, or can allocate money among members inducing ones. And this is a despair- guess: This is all really, at heart, of both groups: “A large majority of inducing book. If Klein is correct in about Republican racism. the subjects in all groups . . . gave his fundamental argument, then In the book’s best and most more money to members of their thought-provoking chapters, Klein own group than to members of the Kevin D. Williamson is the deftly runs through the findings other group,” the authors of the roving correspondent at National and commonalities of a number study report. What is even more Review and the author most recent- of academic studies, mostly psy- remarkable is that the boys were ally of The Smallest Minority. chological, of group dynamics and ways giving money to others, never

Commentary 51 to themselves, so their bias against when we participate in politics the out-group was not the result of He to express who we are, that’s a immediate self-interest. i signal that politics has become Other very narrow slivers of mistakes an identity. And that’s when our common identity proved very ef- relationship to politics, and to fective at provoking the same kind the emergence of each other, changes. of group dynamics: Another group political parties was divided up by whether the But does it change? Or, more to boys preferred a painting by Paul that are more the point, has it changed? Is our Klee or one by Wassily Kandinsky homogeneous— current political moment polarized (again, a ruse, in reality a random in a way more dramatic than the division). The results were not more polarized, polarization of the 1960s? In 1967, encouraging: as Klein would 26 people died in riots in Newark, New Jersey; 43 people were killed This time, the setup was de- have it—with in riots in Detroit; similar riots signed to test whether making a polity that is took place in more than 100 U.S. money for their group or screw- cities from Omaha and Tampa ing over the outsiders was more more polarized to Minneapolis and Milwaukee, important for the assembled or, more many bad enough that the National kids. In some scenarios, the Guard had to be deployed. Thou- boys would have to choose be- precisely, that is sands were injured. Things grew tween maximizing the amount worse the next year. Are things of money everybody received more uniformly worse today? and maximizing how much polarized. Klein mistakes the emergence more their group got even it if of political parties that are more meant their group got less in to- homogeneous—more polarized, as tal. The latter proved the more Klein would have it—with a pol- popular option. Reflect on that language and its most worrisome ity that is more polarized or, more for a second: they preferred to implications, it amounts to a soft precisely, that is more uniformly give their group less so long form of biological determinism. polarized. The parties are more as it meant the gap between In short: Human beings have ideologically homogeneous today what they got and what the out- immutable psychological charac- than they were in 1960, but that group got was bigger. teristics that are observable in homogeneity is far from consistent. childhood and generally stable Views about abortion and gun Those of us who have followed in adulthood; these psychological control break down along pretty the “inequality” debate are perhaps characteristics exercise profound neat partisan lines, but views about a little less surprised by that than influence on political affiliation; trade and immigration do not are such entrepreneurial instiga- consequently, political affiliation (although the old union-hall hostil- tors of the “inequality” debate as in our time is more a statement ity toward low-wage immigrants, Ezra Klein. And those of us who about what kind of person you voiced by Bernie Sanders as re- are on the right may be a little less understand yourself to be than cently as the 2016 primary, seems sanguine than Klein is when think- about what you think about taxes to be attenuated among Democrats ing about how this plays out in aca- or entitlement reform. Hence: today). In 2016, Republicans nomi- demic life or in the media—which, nated Donald Trump, the least Klein preposterously insists, are As the political coalitions split ideologically conservative of the not actually all that left-leaning. by psychology, membership in primary candidates by far, one Still, Klein writes these chap- one or the other becomes a who had at times identified as a ters with a real sense of the human clearer signal, both to ourselves Democrat and had voiced typically folly—and human tragedy—he is and to the world, about who we Democratic positions on abortion, describing. His pessimistic prem- are and what we value. When gun control, homosexual marriage, ise is both interesting and persua- we participate in politics to and the like. sive, and though he avoids both solve a problem, we’re par- And while it is easy to exagger- the most straightforward kind of ticipating transactionally. But ate the polarization of the parties,

52 Politics & Ideas : March 2020 the political space itself—by which HERE IS certainly some I mean the range of acceptable Klein truth to the hypothesis mainstream political opinion— i T that right-wing populism has narrowed, at least on the proves to is related to white demographic very issue at the heart of Klein’s decline. But Klein leans rather too analysis: race. In 1955, you could be a practitioner heavily on race to the exclusion of hold office as an enthusiastic seg- of the very other considerations. For example, regationist and white supremacist he notes that there are right- or as an enthusiastic desegrega- adolescent wing populist movements rising up tionist and committed anti-racist. us-and-them around the world, and that they do In 2020, you cannot: Where there not share any common attitude on were two poles, there is now a politics he things like taxes or welfare policies. single consensus. Even if you would have us (Which makes one wonder what believe that Donald Trump is an “right-wing” and “populist” mean Orval Faubus at heart, the fact that transcend. It is in that context.) All they have in he might be obliged to pretend to irresistible for common, Klein writes, is that they be an admirer of the Reverend oppose immigration, especially Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to progressives when the immigrants are brown a fundamental shift in our racial and Muslim. Now, perhaps the at- politics. The issue of race—or at like him to titude of the American right and least the kind of vulgar, open, characterize the European right toward Islam is unapologetic bigotry that we used sometimes hysterical, and increas- to mean by the word racism—is conservatives as ingly hysterical as one approaches one of the few fronts on which we racists. the populist fringes. But Klein have managed to push forward a might have considered that hesita- few inches toward a more humane tion about the “brown and Muslim” consensus. is a fixation of thebrown bits of the As Klein’s Vox colleague Julia ing, because there is what he populist right, too, for instance the Azari put it, we find ourselves in a calls a “browning of America.” He government of Narendra Modi’s perverse situation of weak parties implicitly says that white Ameri- BJP. In August 2001, almost no one and strong partisanship. The par- cans believed they could afford in the United States was giving a ties are labels, not organizations, to be more liberal about race and second’s thought to immigration with the organizing activities of power when it looked as if their from Muslim countries; in Sep- politics having been delegated to race would effectively have all the tember 2001, they were, and being other groups. In that sense, it is power. They were accommodating “brown” had very little, if anything, natural that they would become because they believed that other to do with it. more polarized, and it was easier to races would share power at their But for the left, “Muslim” and polarize them once their operation- sufferance, and they would share “brown” are near-synonyms. In al character had been diminished. power only on terms that were the wake of the Boston Marathon But while the parties have grown amenable to the white majority— bombing, David Sirota, last seen more distinct as identities—more an attitude that has been turned advising Bernie Sanders’s cam- polarized, in the sense Klein uses on its head with the diminution paign, offered a daft little prayer the term here—at least one very of the white political monopoly. that the bombers would turn out important part of our politics has For that reason, Klein’s argument to be white terrorists rather than grown less polarized in the same is that race drives the polarization Muslim jihadists, and they ended sense, in a way that undercuts of American politics today in an up being a double dip: Islamic radi- Klein’s efforts to put racism at the especially powerful way—even as cals and literal Caucasians. The center of his story. such memorable events as Dwight more things you lump together, the Klein’s answer is that the poli- Eisenhower’s calling out the 101st less useful your lump becomes. tics of racial resentment exhibits a Airborne to protect black stu- In the end, Klein proves to be kind of ubiquitous predominance dents in Little Rock seem as dis- a practitioner of the very ado- in 2020 that it did not have in 1967 tant as General Ross’s burning of lescent us-and-them politics he because the population is chang- Washington in 1814. would have us transcend. There

Commentary 53 is no more damning accusation The more complicated truth is signed a pledge promising never to in American public life than the that affluent black voters who are raise taxes under any circumstanc- accusation of racism, and it is unlikely ever to receive welfare es.” In reality, at least one prominent therefore irresistible for progres- benefits are significantly more sup- Republican seeking high office— sives to characterize conservatives portive of such programs than Donald Trump—has raged that Wall as racists. And, beyond that, Klein are the lower-income black voters Street sharks do not pay enough in joins with his fellow progressives more likely to benefit from them. taxes, and in 2017 Republicans im- in defining conservatism itself as In fact, the best data we have show posed a substantial tax increase on racism. For instance, he writes that that narrow economic self-interest a large part of the country’s highest the Dixiecrat senator Strom Thur- is not a very good predictor of earners by limiting the federal de- mond “wasn’t just a conservative policy preferences for voters of any ductibility of state and local taxes. on race…he was a conservative on race. Rich people who advocate If Klein thought a little bit about everything.” Oh? Barry Goldwater, higher taxes on the wealthy are it, he might see that that deviation “Mr. Conservative,” did not have celebrated for their enlightenment; from the Republican playbook ac- Strom Thurmond’s views on race: poor people who worry about wel- tually fits quite nicely into his psy- He helped to fund desegregation fare dependency (having, perhaps, chological account. But it does not lawsuits out of his own pocket. some intimate experience with it) fit into his political account, and so Neither did Senator Robert Taft are derided as rubes who “vote he simply proceeds as though it did have Thurmond’s views: The sena- against their own interests,” as not happen. tor known in his day as “Mr. Re- though immediate and personal What actually has happened is publican” tried to put together a economic benefits were the only not so much a change in our poli- civil-rights act in 1946. The point kind of interest, or the only kind of tics as a change in our private lives of this is not that we should vin- interest that is legitimate. that has left a great vacuum into dicate midcentury Republicans or To the extent that race is an which the fumes of politics have damn Democrats. It is that Klein important factor in the calculus of been sucked by a nation of parti- is building a model of the political social affiliation, it is sure to exer- san paint-huffers. The decline and world that is so schematic as to be cise some influence on economic- delay of marriage and parenthood, of no use. policy preferences, as it does on changes in the nature of work Klein suggests that if Trump so many aspects of American life. (especially more frequent changes voters had been genuinely moti- But Klein does not understand race in employer), declining church at- vated by economic anxiety rather as a factor—he understands it as a tendance and civic engagement, than racial anxiety, then they skeleton key. etc., have left many people (men would have rallied behind some That key does not open the more intensely) without tradi- form of left-wing populism rather lock on every political conundrum. tional sources of status, belonging, than right-wing populism. This Dwight Eisenhower, civil-rights ad- and community. At the same time, oversimplifies the relationship vocate facing a Southern electorate social media and related phe- between economic self-interest, convulsed by Brown v. Board of Ed- nomena have reduced the cost of economic policy preferences, and ucation, won a slightly larger share the most shallow kind of political cultural attitudes. For example, of votes in the old Confederacy participation, and hence the af- African-American voters gener- than Barry Goldwater would a few fective polarization of our time—a ally support policies of redistribu- years later running as an opponent polarization not of political ideas tion and income support more of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How but of political mood. strongly than white voters do. did that happen? The story is more Ezra Klein’s affect—smug, po- This leads certain conservative complicated than Klein’s just-so faced, cocksure—surely has con- critics to write idiotic essays about tale allows for. tributed to the agitation. But he’s the “welfare plantation,” the pur- This kind of blithe self-assur- mostly just along for the ride. ported exchange of political sup- ance runs through the book. E.g.: There is much that is of genuine port for government checks. What “Both Presidents Ronald Reagan interest in Why We’re Polarized, is more, African Americans are, and George H.W. Bush signed leg- but the book is also a case study on average, poorer than whites, islation raising taxes, for instance. in the phenomenon it would de- which would seem to make that That would be unthinkable in scribe, an intellectual ouroboros, preference a matter of ordinary today’s Republican Party, where swallowing its own tail and its economic self-interest. almost every elected official has own tale.q

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AVAILABLEAVAILABLE AT AT age of 81. During the years in which we overlapped at Paul, Weiss, I served as an informal speechwriter A Man in Full for him in his role at the Confer- ence of Presidents. Later, I worked for him when he was the representative of the United States to the Touched with Fire: human rights abroad. And in his European Office of the United Na- Morris B. Abram and the Battle pursuit of those ideals, he aligned tions, a position he held from 1989 Against Racial and Religious himself with whatever political par- to 1993. Morris had nominated Discrimination ty lived up to his principles. me to serve as a member of the By David Lowe U.S. Delegation to the UN Human University of Nebraska, 320 pages FIRST MET Morris Abram in Rights Commission in 1990, and we 1987 during my second week worked closely together that year Reviewed by Jay P. Lefkowitz I as an associate at the New combatting the hypocrisy of a UN York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, human-rights agency that refused WO YEARS before he Wharton & Garrison, where he was to take any action on human-rights was elected president, a partner. I had just returned from abuses in Iraq or Cuba but readily Senator John F. Ken- a clandestine trip to the former adopted anti-Israel resolutions. nedy gave a speech at Soviet Union where I had met with I never worked directly for Mor- Loyola College in Mary- dozens of refuseniks. Morris was ris again after my experience in T land that concluded with the soar- then the chairman of the National Geneva, but we remained close as ing rhetoric of a bygone era: “Let us Conference on Soviet Jewry and he, a longtime Democrat, found not seek the Republican answer or the chairman of the Conference of himself shifting further rightward. the Democratic answer but the right Presidents of Major American Jew- In the fall of 1991, I was work- answer.” Though Kennedy’s remarks ish Organizations, and a friend of ing as a domestic policy aide to may seem hopelessly naive to a mine had urged me to give him a President George H.W. Bush. One generation that treats politics as a report on my recent trip. I knocked of the most contentious political blood sport, my good friend and on his office door. issues at the time was the effort mentor Morris Abram, who hailed As I waited for Morris to finish by Democrats to pass new civil- from the small Georgia town of what he was writing, I let my eyes rights legislation. The prior year, Fitzgerald, actually lived much of wander around the walls of his of- Bush had vetoed a bill because he his life in the public eye adhering to fice, which were covered with pho- claimed it would have legalized Kennedy’s exhortation. tos of Morris with Robert Kennedy racial quotas. Throughout 1991, In this splendid new biography, and Martin Luther King, Jr., as well Congress and the White House David Lowe (who retired as vice as several American presidents and battled back and forth, working to- president for government relations Israeli prime ministers. It was both ward a compromise bill that could and public affairs for the National intimidating and inspiring. Even- gain the president’s approval. By Endowment for Democracy) tells tually, he turned his attention to late October, it looked like a com- the life story of a now-forgotten me, and after I introduced myself promise had been reached—and man who served as an adviser to and told him about my recent trip, though Bush would claim of the Democratic and Republican presi- he handed me the letter he had just bill he ultimately signed that “it dents and led several major Jewish finished writing and asked, “Would does not resort to quotas, and it organizations. Though he began his you mind looking this over and strengthens the cause of equality political life on the left and conclud- letting me know if you have any in the workplace,” many conserva- ed it on the right, Morris Abram edits?” It was a letter he had just tive supporters thought otherwise was singularly guided by a passion written to Ronald Reagan asking and were deeply distressed. Among to advance civil rights at home and the president to raise the names of them was Morris Abram. certain refuseniks at his upcoming I was sitting in my office in the Jay P. Lefkowitz, a longtime summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. White House two days before the contributor, is a member of the board So began our 13 years as col- president was to sign the bill when of directors of Commentary and a leagues and friends, which culmi- I got a call from Morris, who was in partner at Kirkland and Ellis. nated in his passing in 2000 at the Geneva. He was agitated about the

56 Politics & Ideas : March 2020 legislation and asked me if I could Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. arrange a call between him and the Abram This experience seared in him the president to discuss it. He told me i desire to devote his life to fighting he was sending me a letter to Bush was at for civil rights at home and human in which he explained his convic- rights across the globe. And that is tion that the law would trample the vanguard of what he did. Beginning in 1949, he on the Equal Protection Clause’s human-rights commenced what would turn out goal of color-blindness. In the end, to be a 14-year battle to overturn Bush read Morris’s letter and spoke activism. While a Georgia electoral rule called the with him on the phone. But the serving on a UN county unit system, which gave dis- president also signed into law the proportionate weight to the votes bill Morris wanted him to veto. And subcommittee, of small rural counties instead though he continued to serve Bush he was the lead of the far more populous urban dutifully from his post in Geneva, areas in the state. This legal battle Morris was bitterly disappointed in drafter of an climaxed in an argument before the president for his compromise. international the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 in Lowe explains how a civil-rights which Abram, joined by Attorney lawyer from Georgia who argued convention that General Robert Kennedy, persuad- a landmark “one-man, one-vote” called for the ed the Court to strike down the case before the Supreme Court Georgia system of voting. As Jus- came to work for President George elimination of all tice William Douglas wrote in his H.W. Bush and ultimately criticized opinion for the Court, “the concept him for not opposing racial prefer- forms of racial of political equality...can mean only ences. The answer to both the how and religious one thing—one person, one vote.” and why is simple: The culture and Abram was also at the vanguard political climate changed but Mor- discrimination. of human-rights activism. In the ris did not. early 1960s, while serving on a UN Abram’s family was part of a subcommittee on human-rights is- small group of about a dozen Jew- with Gentiles” and “‘too anti-Se- sues, Abram was the lead drafter of ish families in Fitzgerald. There mitic’ to associate with exclusion- an international convention that was no synagogue in the town and ary Jews.” Lowe reveals that when called for the elimination of all Abram never had a bar mitzvah. Abram was invited to join a Jewish forms of racial and religious dis- But there was no way to avoid the fraternity, he responded that “he crimination. Though he fought complexities of growing up as a Jew was personally opposed to groups valiantly to include anti-Semitism in Georgia in the 1920s. I remem- that were segregated by race or reli- in the anti-racism law, he was sty- ber, more than a half-century after gion.” That sentiment, vehemently mied by the Soviets, a prelude to he had left the Peach State, Morris anti-exclusionary and color-blind, his later work on behalf of Soviet would open the dinners he hosted became familiar to me in the Jewry. Then in 1965, President Lyn- in Geneva with Jews and non- course of the countless conversa- don Johnson appointed Abram U.S. Jews alike by retelling the story of tions I had with Morris about race representative to the UN Human Leo Frank, the young Jewish man relations. And he regularly invoked Rights Commission in Geneva. In who was framed for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.’s encomium that role, he took the lead in ad- 13-year-old Mary Phagan in Atlanta that we should not judge people vocating for the appointment of a and then hanged by a lynch mob “by the color of their skin but by the UN high commissioner on human three years before Abram was born. content of their character.” rights, a campaign he finally won Though he later became an ac- After attending law school at the nearly 30 years later, in 1993. Upon tive supporter of the State of Israel, University of Chicago and serving his retirement from government in his youth he was anti-Zionist. in the Air Force, Abram moved to service in 1993, Abram founded He also had no interest in joining a England for two years of study at a Geneva-based nongovernmental Jewish fraternity when he entered Oxford. Then, during the summer organization called UN Watch that the University of Georgia in 1934 of 1948, he served on the staff of Su- to this day adheres to his founding and recalled in later years that he preme Court Justice Robert Jack- vision of “monitoring the perfor- was “far too proud to assimilate son, the chief U.S. prosecutor of mance of the United Nations by the

Commentary 57 yardstick of its own charter.” activities at Brandeis to celebrate Anti-discrimination was Morris He took his own investiture. Abram’s guiding principle, and it i The events featured many prom- was not only the hallmark of his a serious inent figures on the left, including legal career; it was also the domi- Bayard Rustin, who had organized nant issue on which he focused interest in the 1963 March on Washington, his attention during his tenure as Catholic–Jewish and Coretta Scott King, whose hus- president of the American Jewish band had been assassinated only Committee, then the leading na- relations. At the six months earlier. When Abram tional Jewish advocacy organiza- time, a pivotal rose to speak, he advanced the tion. He also took a serious interest same classical liberal views he had in Catholic–Jewish relations. At issue within advanced his whole life, sounding a the time, a pivotal issue within the the Jewish warning note: “The danger to dis- Jewish community was the Vatican sent within the university comes II Council’s reconsideration of the community also from a new direction. It comes Catholic Church’s charge of dei- was the Vatican from within.” cide against Jews. Lowe highlights As Lowe details, during one of Abram’s meeting with Pope Paul II Council’s the panel discussions that week- VI in 1964 in which Abram pressed end, a student representing the the pontiff to denounce the deicide reconsideration Brandeis Afro-American Society charge once and for all (as New of the Catholic accused the university of “insti- York Cardinal Spellman had re- tutional racism” by reneging on cently done at the urging of Abram Church’s charge its promise to add an African and and other Jewish leaders). of deicide against Afro-American Studies major to Perhaps the story Morris was the curriculum. She shouted to most fond of retelling, and that Jews. Abram that as long as “men like Lowe recounts in much the same you” are in charge, there would be way Morris did (minus the sweet no progress. Only three months Southern accent), was how he de- Martin Jr. was set free after Robert later, Brandeis students became veloped his relationship with the Kennedy took the unorthodox step among the first in the nation to oc- Kennedy brothers. A week or so be- of calling the judge in the case on cupy one of the buildings on cam- fore the 1960 presidential election, King’s behalf. Abram asked Daddy pus. And while Abram ultimately Martin Luther King Jr. had been King, who had previously opposed negotiated a peaceful resolution to imprisoned with a group of student the Catholic Kennedy on religious the crisis, he never really found his activists after being refused service grounds, to endorse the senator footing at Brandeis and left after at a segregated restaurant in Atlan- publicly. And at the Ebenezer Bap- only 16 months. As his daughter ta’s largest department store. The tist Church on the Sunday before Ruth explained in an interview Kennedy campaign reached out to the election, King made good on with Lowe, “here he had been Morris and asked him to intervene his promise to Abram to deliver a a Southern white taking stands on behalf of King with the city’s “suitcase” full of votes for Kennedy. that put him in some danger and mayor to help secure King’s release, were in opposition to the main which Morris did. HE PIVOTAL experience tenor of the time, and he comes to But while King was let go from of Abram’s later life was Brandeis, a Jewish institution, and the city jail, he was then taken in T probably his brief tenure as to be told he is a racist, it was just the middle of the night to a state president of Brandeis University, so upsetting to him.” prison. While this was taking place, when this Kennedy-Johnson Dem- Lowe’s book causes one to re- John Kennedy called Coretta Scott ocrat was mugged by the political flect on just how rare a breed Mor- King to express his support for her reality of the New Left. In October ris Abram was. Because he was a husband’s release from prison. 1968, just as the student protest tireless advocate for civil rights and When she received that call, she movement was about to boil over anti-discrimination, he was also a was sitting with her father-in-law, into widespread protests at college steadfast opponent of affirmative Daddy King, in Abram’s law office, campuses across the nation, Abram action and racial quotas of any strategizing about the situation. organized an inaugural weekend of kind. Though he had no formal

58 Politics & Ideas : March 2020 Jewish education, was completely and Republicans are tribal in their even grief-stricken. They have suf- non-observant, and intermarried fanaticism for their respective par- fered through their parents’ divorc- twice, he led major Jewish organi- ties and antipathy toward their es, being dumped by girlfriends, zations in some of their most piv- opponents, Lowe’s recounting of ostracization from friends. They otal moments and was a passionate Abram’s life offers a welcome re- seem uncertain about their future Zionist for the last quarter-century minder that public servants once and are in some cases directionless. of his life. He served with enthu- did have values that trumped It turns out that the rise of depres- siasm under Presidents Kennedy, partisan politics. There may not sion and anxiety on college cam- Johnson, and Carter, and then later be another Morris Abram, but his puses is not just among women. with equal vigor for Presidents largeness of spirit and ability to But Orenstein’s grasp of the social Reagan and Bush. stay on a consistently principled trends of modern history is so weak In the hyper-politicized world path serves as an inspiration to that she not only misdiagnoses the we inhabit today, where Democrats future public servants.q problem but also prescribes a treatment that is almost certainly the polar opposite of what these young men actually need. Much of the book is devoted to how men mistreat women, with a Oh, No! focus on pornography. Take “Reza,” a sophomore at Boston College. “I’ve got things narrowed down to Boys & Sex: Young Men on it—a book whose thesis is that a very, very specific body type that Hookups, Porn, Consent, and young men, particularly those who turns me on,” he tells Orenstein. Navigating the New Masculinity are white, straight, athletic, and “Like the size of the areola and its By Peggy Orenstein reluctant to gush openly about color, that sort of thing. It’s prob- Harper, 292 pages their feelings, pose a nightmarish ably not all driven by porn, but I threat to American society. Hiding figured out what I liked from that Reviewed by behind an authorial guise of a sym- and I think I wouldn’t have other- Naomi Schaefer Riley pathetic observer trying to help wise. It doesn’t ruin my relation- this population and the adults who ships, but it’s not nice when I’m T THE outset of her care about them, Orenstein gets the trying to talk my girlfriend into new book, Boys & boys with whom she talks in the liking a part of her body, but I’m Sex, Peggy Orenstein book to spill the most intimate de- secretly thinking, Well, actually, I recounts walking tails of their lives—and then throws would prefer…” down a high-school them under the bus. Many describe how they learned A hallway to meet an 18-year-old The interviews in Boys & Sex about sex—not only what type of named Cole who was sitting out- feature surprisingly frank details body they liked, but also what type side the library: “He topped six feet, about the lives of these kids. of body they themselves should with broad shoulders and short- Orenstein says she had a younger have and what they should be do- clipped, dirty blond hair. His neck assistant helping her, but it would ing with a woman—from porn. This was so thick that it seemed to be interesting to know just how a led to all sorts of fear and anxiety merge right into his jawline.” Her middle-aged woman was able to about their own performance and first reaction to the sight of the boy attend parties with drunken high- deeply awkward encounters with was this: “Oh no.” Orenstein de- school students and get them to real-life girls. “The guys I talked scribes her instinct as “a breach of answer her questions about alco- to actually were concerned with journalistic objectivity, a scarlet hol, sexual encounters, and locker- female satisfaction in a hookup,” letter of personal bias.” But she has room banter. She continues to have Orenstein writes, because “they written a whole book that confirms conversations with these young believed it to be a function of their men months after their initial own endurance and, to a lesser ex- Naomi Schaefer Riley is a encounters to find out what hap- tent, penis size.” resident fellow at the American En- pened with a girl they liked or how It’s not just porn. The same mes- terprise Institute and visiting fellow they are adjusting to college life. sages about sex, how it should be at Independent Women’s Forum. Many of them are sad, anxious, casual, how men should rack up

Commentary 59 as many notches on the bedpost Orenstein interviews who mentions as possible, how treating women The wanting to join the military after respectfully is unmanly, are coming i learning about the My Lai massa- from the lyrics of music they listen author, cre. “I want to be able to be in the to as well as from television. In- same position as someone like that deed, when Orenstein asks the guys whose specialty commanding officer and not order she meets about how they define has been writing people to do something like that,” he masculinity, their answers revolve tells her. It’s a moving idea, one that around sex, being good at sports, books about harks back to a more traditional and being “cool”—which they often how society tries definition of masculinity, but the can’t define, except to say that it boy is worried that his inability to means not getting too attached to to shackle girls stand up to other members of his women they’ve had sex with. And, with suppressive crew team when they used homo- oh yes, they have to be able to down phobic slurs would mean he could a lot of liquor, too. fantasies about never achieve that level of strength She writes: “Alcohol is, above all, princesses, and independence. what establishes a couple’s indiffer- Orenstein worries about that, ence: hooking up sober is almost believes that the too. Her solution is that we should by definitionserious. Inebriation only solution talk to boys more about sex and itself—‘I was so drunk’—can even what makes women happy, that become the reason (or the excuse) to the boy crisis they should get in touch with their for an encounter, as opposed to, feelings and learn to express them say, attraction, interest, or con- is to get men to more effectively, that men should nection.” One boy even describes behave more be told it’s okay to cry, that we how the music is so loud at parties should raise men to be more like specifically to save boys and girls like women. women. But that is exactly what from having to talk. Instead boys the most fashionable precincts of can just walk up behind girls and our culture have been preaching start “grinding” on them. fulfilled; able to see women as for the past 30 years at least, and What, you might wonder, is the true peers in the classroom, it’s not working. If anything, it solution to all of this bad treat- boardroom, and bedroom. has arguably led us to the current ment of women and bad feelings crisis. Orenstein has written Boys on the part of men? Orenstein, Notably, this list is indistin- & Sex as if it’s 1950, as if we haven’t whose specialty as a freelance guishable from what Orenstein already lived through the men’s writer has heretofore been books thinks a woman should be. Oren- movement, the sensitive man of about how society tries to shackle stein is squarely in the “gender is a the ’90s, the metrosexual, emo girls with suppressive fantasies social construct” camp. Almost all guys, and male feminists. We have about princesses, believes that differences that she sees between girls wrestling on boys’ teams; we the only solution to the boy crisis men and women are the ones that have women in military combat is to get men to behave more like society has bred into us. If men roles; we have virtually eliminated women. On the last page of the seem to enjoy casual sex more single-sex education (at least for book, she finally gets around to than women, that’s largely because boys); we have taken books that telling us what she thinks a man that’s the message they have grown appeal to boys out of school cur- should be: up with, in her view. If women ricula; we have drugged young seem more concerned about their boys to keep them from moving Compassionate and egalitarian; appearance, it’s largely because around too much in classrooms; respectful of others’ bound- they have absorbed the media’s we’ve eliminated recess, and we’re aries; capable of connection, ideas about women’s bodies. demonizing football. If you want vulnerability, honest commu- to know why boys are watching so nication, emotional expression HERE IS almost no positive much porn and playing so many and love; able to develop and vision of what it means to violent video games, well, what the sustain authentic relationships; T be a man in this book. The hell have we left for them? able to be happier and more only hint of one comes from a boy Orenstein’s extensive bibliog-

60 Politics & Ideas : March 2020 raphy includes no references to they disappointed. After two hours the patience for such inquiry, con- Christina Hoff Sommers’s The War of his painstaking analysis of Aris- fident instead that they can alter Against Boys or Kay Hymowitz’s totle’s and Plato’s understanding of human nature without having to Manning Up, and indeed, she seems courage, they never returned. consider any time before yesterday. to have no sense that there may be Mansfield was (and is) con- They see problematic behavior and other explanations for the crisis cerned with the millennia-old ques- discomfiting attitudes among the she finds. Without a specific position of how to make boys into men. men around them and ask instead tive understanding of the role that But modern feminists do not have how to make men into women.q men are supposed to play—without learning about ideals of courage and even chivalry, and no sense that they should be getting married and supporting a family—men have increasingly retreated from society. Mixed Up The boys she interviews—those in college and those bound for it—are not the full-blown victims Remix Judaism: Preserving law—and the cultures inhabited by of this societal withdrawal. Most Tradition in a Diverse World Jewish communities. Remix Juda- of them grew up with fathers in By Roberta Rosenthal Kwall ism brings together these interests, the home that they could emulate. Rowman and Littlefield, 272 pages builds on the idea that Jewish prac- Most of them will end up making tice is influenced by the ambient a decent salary, working serious Reviewed by Jonathan Silver culture, and analyzes the extent of hours, and in some cases acting as that influence through the lens of the sole breadwinner in their fam- ACK IN 2014, the Wash- intellectual-property law. Just as ily. Even if their role isn’t clear to ington Post ran a curi- a musician, creating a new song, them now, it will probably become ous article about re- borrows and “remixes” from other more so as they get older. scheduling Passover. A songs, so the Judaism that Kwall The males raised in homes rising number of Jew- recommends is “remixed” from without that social capital—the B ish households, the piece explained, traditional Jewish elements. ones Nicholas Eberstadt describes had started to forgo convening the The book’s key premise is that in his book Men Without Work, the family seder on its appointed night most non-Orthodox Jews simply ones who are not in school, have no and instead began to gather during cannot understand and are not in job, and play a lot of video games— the weekend. Postponing Passover the least moved by the command- are the ones who will truly suffer works better for everyone’s sched- edness at the foundation of tradi- from this loss of a real understand- ule, and it allows Jewish families to tional Judaism. Remixed Judaism ing of masculinity. And there is a bring an aspect of the Jewish tradi- is a strategy for these Jews who will generation of women who will be tion into their life on their own never shoulder the obligations of worse off for it. terms. It’s an example of the kind of Orthodoxy but who nevertheless Orenstein’s lack of curiosity Jewish engagement that Roberta want to preserve some form of about her subject reminded me of Rosenthal Kwall endorses in her tradition. It serves as an unusual a scene during my final year of new book, Remix Judaism: Preserv- work of kiruv, the Hebrew term college, when I took a seminar ing Tradition in a Diverse World. for drawing Jews closer to Jewish from the political scientist Harvey Kwall is a professor at DePaul practice. Mansfield on the subject of “manli- University College of Law, where The book introduces seven do- ness.” I walked into the first session she specializes in copyright. Her mains of Jewish experience, the and was surprised to find that the previous book, The Myth of the Jewish calendar, and the Jewish small classroom was packed. Who Cultural Jew, argues for the sym- lifecycle, including chapters on were these students? Many of the biosis between halakha—Jewish Shabbat, food, marriage and fam- attendees, it turned out, were cam- ily, and mourning. Each chapter pus feminists looking for a fight Jonathan Silver is the host describes the basic parameters of over current affairs with the man of the Tikvah Podcast, and this Jewish practice, interspersed with they saw as Harvard’s leading de- spring he will become the editor representative stories of Judaism fender of the patriarchy. Boy, were of Mosaic. “remixed”—how, for example, the

Commentary 61 recitation of kiddush or the sepa- culture has also refashioned Jew- ration of dairy and meat can be Our ish life in its own image, nowhere accommodated to the tastes and i more than among the unaffiliated preferences of modern life. How far freedom and non-Orthodox denominations. can these elements of traditional Parents and educators tasked with Judaism be taken from their hal- in American the formation of Jewish children akhic context and still strengthen society is the must face up to the characteris- Jewish identity? tic hazards of our culture, which Kwall establishes three criteria necessary are the flip side of our culture’s that allow for personal choice precondition strengths: American freedom is the while still ensuring that Judaism necessary precondition for Jewish “remixed” remains Judaism at all. for Jewish thriving, but it is also a solvent that First, “people exercise individual- thriving, but it corrodes the restraints and limits ity as to what rituals and traditions that are essential to traditional they elect to incorporate in their is also a solvent Judaism. Whether they were liv- lives.” Second, “people infuse the that corrodes ing in Baghdad or Brisk over the elements they choose with their past many centuries, our ancestors own personal meaning.” And fi- the restraints did not need instruction to choose nally, “people consistently perform and limits that the parts of Judaism that aligned the elements they practice in a way with their values. The liberal Jews that embraces, at least to some de- are essential of America do, and the very free- gree, the authenticity of historical dom that allows us to flourish also tradition.” The main thing is to feel to traditional threatens to wipe away the Jewish good about what you’re doing, and Judaism. identity of every weakly affiliated if you can persuade yourself that it reader that Kwall wrote the book to is rooted in the Jewish tradition, strengthen. The fact is that Remix however tenuously, then under- Judaism itself exemplifies what taking it will make you feel a little lyze the American culture that is happens to the Jewish tradition more Jewishly connected. the foundation of her audience’s when its inner spirit has been pen- That might seem tautological, worldview. But Remix Judaism etrated by the dominant beliefs of but that’s the book. If wanting reveals a great deal about the non- secular society. tradition on your own terms is a Orthodox religious temperament For our secular society no less paradox, then it is a paradox. So be at this moment in American life. than for particular Jewish families, it: This is supposed to be a practical To begin with, one must ac- a religion refashioned to fit the pre- book, not an intellectual one. But knowledge that American freedom vailing mood is a lost opportunity. Remix Judaism provokes funda- is a blessing and that it has enabled America’s exhausted culture needs mental questions about the char- Jewish life to flourish here as it moral replenishment, and the great acter of cafeteria religion, in which has never flourished in any other movements that made America bet- users select a little of this and a diaspora community. To cite an as- ter over the years have emerged out little of that, about the purpose tonishing recent example, in Janu- of communities of faith, from the of the halakhic system, and, most ary, nearly 100,000 Orthodox Jews abolition of slavery to the establish- important, about the relationship assembled in MetLife Stadium to ment of civil-rights protections in that American society has had to celebrate the completion of their the middle of the 20th century. Our American Judaism. seven-year study of the Babylonian fellow citizens could use the wis- Talmud. Festivities like that haven’t dom embedded in Jewish practice, UR society prizes auton- happened very often in the history from family formation to limits omy and customization. of the Diaspora, but American free- on technology and much else. But ‘O People tend to observe dom and American security have in acquiescing to the grounds of ritual when they find it to be per- made it possible for more Ameri- personal autonomy, following the sonally meaningful,” Kwall writes, can Jews to study more Torah than formula of Remix Judaism would “and have no second thoughts at any point in history. make it harder for American Jews, about discarding everything else.” So America genuinely deserves as Jews, to contribute to the Ameri- Beyond this, Kwall does not ana- Jewish gratitude. But American can public square with the moral

62 Politics & Ideas : March 2020 confidence of an intact tradition. the traditional prayer celebrating While no one in the world In a God’s majesty around which Jew- perfectly fulfills each and every i ish mourning is organized? Say you Jewish commandment, and while ‘remix’ do, say you stumble through the no one should criticize Jews who transliterated Aramaic and decode want to grow in their Jewish con- Judaism, each the translation, with its grandiose sciousness and Jewish observance, Jew’s practice is praise of God and not a scant refer- nevertheless by ceding the nor- ence to the deceased. What then? mative standard to which Jewish his own creation, You’ll find it frustrating. You’ll life should aspire, Remix Judaism unique and come to resent Judaism as insensi- would make it harder to be part of tive and irrelevant. It was supposed a community, to pass a moral in- without a shared to be there for you at this moment heritance to your children, and, for communal of crisis. Instead, anguished by those reaching beyond themselves, grief, missing your beloved and let to encounter transcendence medi- reference. When down by Judaism, you’ll never feel ated through God’s covenant with we bow our more alone. His chosen people. On the other hand, say you Without striving to obey a law heads to the spend your life reciting the Kad- derived outside of the self, those work of our own dish. You say it and you say it again, who remix Judaism are borrow- day in and day out. The recitation is ing Jewish tradition in order to creation, we automatic and calming, its cadence adhere to their own law. They will is an anchor. Your days and your likely find that they are not being are bowing to weeks and your life are structured enlarged by tradition but rather ourselves. by it. Then when the moment of diminished—and, in Tocqueville’s crisis comes, instead of groping to phrase, could become “shut up in read meaning into this foreign text, the solitude of [their] own heart.” In you encounter hidden resonances the paradigm of “remix” Judaism, destined to become. in the words that are your daily each Jew’s practice is his own cre- Perhaps most unfortunate is companions. This blessing truly ation, utterly unique and without a the fact that remixed Judaism is can comfort you. But it takes a life- shared communal reference. When bound to disappoint us in moments time of conscious effort to prepare we bow our heads to the work of of existential crisis, when we need for that moment. And traditional- our own creation, we are bowing to the consolations of tradition the ist Judaism is the structure that has ourselves. most. Near the end of the book, been built up over the generations By contrast, the ethical ambi- Remix Judaism explains how to for that preparation. tion of a halakhic life is that if you adapt Judaism’s mourning rituals Remix Judaism might seem to allow the rules to shape you, to to grieve, and it is an illustration share an inclination with the rab- discipline you, you will develop the of how ultimately impractical this binic tradition because they both faculties of self-government to bat- practical book turns out to be. That sift and select and decide what be- tle down your demons and emerge is because choosing is impossible longs at the center and what belongs from the battle a better person. at the very moment when grieving at the periphery of religious life. But That is only possible if the ultimate is necessary. At the moment of pro- for the rabbis of the Talmud as for ground of the halakhic system is found despair, in the face of a lost Orthodox Jews today, the whole of beyond human choosing. Remix spouse, a lost parent, or, God forbid, Jewish law is binding. Falling short Judaism is Judaism with sugges- a lost child, the idea that you’re go- of our covenantal obligations is a tions in place of commandments. ing to select from a menu of mourn- practical concession to our human And because the suggestions come ing options is a fool’s errand. Devas- frailties. But with the best will in the from ourselves and are directed to tated from overwhelming sorrow, world, Remix Judaism makes our ourselves, they reinforce who we is the mourner supposed to start frailties rather than our strengths are rather than shape who we are googling how to recite the Kaddish, the basis of a Jewish lifestyle.q

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Sondheim at 90

What has the their successors was writing scores Company was played out on greatest theatrical that made idiomatic use of con- a chrome-and-Plexiglas set that temporary pop music, much less mirrored Sondheim’s chilly vision talent of our time producing shows whose subject of New York as a high-rise “city of achieved? matter reflected the fast-growing strangers” who “meet at parties social complexities of modern through the friends of friends / By Terry Teachout American culture. Who they never know.” By turns Then, in the spring of 1970, sardonic, joltingly pessimistic, and IFTY YEARS ago, the Stephen Sondheim, a 40-year-old cautiously hopeful, it took Broad- Broadway musical was lyricist best known for writing way by surprise, not only because marking time. The the words to Leonard Bernstein’s of its innovative structure and dé- songwriters of the pre- music in West Side Story (1957) cor but also because of Sondheim’s rock era were all past and Jule Styne’s in Gypsy (1959), songs. Their pastel harmonies, F their prime, and except for Burt teamed up with George Furth rock-flavored rhythms, and elabo- Bacharach and Hal David in Prom- on a plotless show about court- rately rhymed wordplay (“It’s shar- ises, Promises and James Rado and ship and marriage in modern-day ing little winks together, / Drinks Gerome Ragni in Hair, none of Manhattan. Company consisted of together, / Kinks together, / That a string of interlocking sketches makes marriage a joy”) sounded Terry Teachout is Commen- about five New York couples who like nothing that had ever been tary’s critic-at-large and the dra- have in common their friendship heard on or off Broadway. The re- ma critic of the Wall Street Journal. with Robert, an affable 35-year-old sult, Sondheim later remarked, was Satchmo at the Waldorf, his one- bachelor who is tired of living alone “the first Broadway musical whose man play about Louis Armstrong, but unwilling to commit himself to defining quality was neither satire has been produced off Broadway any of the three young women he is nor sentiment, but irony…told at a and throughout America. currently dating. dry remove from beginning to end.”

Commentary 65 Some found its tone off-putting. mass audience of theatergoers Clive Barnes, who reviewed Com- At 90, who prefer jukebox musicals and pany for the New York Times, was i shows based on recycled hit mov- “antagonized by [its] slickness,” dis- he is the ies of the past to more emotionally missing its characters as “trivial, last living link demanding fare. shallow, worthless and horrid.” But As for Sondheim himself, he has its frankness about Robert’s fear of to the heyday of found an alternate path to enduring commitment was a new and pro- success. Starting in the 1990s, the- ductive wrinkle for the Broadway the school-of- ater companies in the U.S. and Eng- musical, as was Company’s double- Hammerstein land began to mount small-scale edged portrayal of love and mar- revivals of his shows, thereby intro- riage: “Somebody crowd me with musical, and ducing them to viewers too young love, / Somebody force me to care, Company to have seen the original large-scale / I’ll always be there / As frightened Broadway productions. Once the as you, / To help us survive.” and the shows extravagant big-budget trappings Though Sondheim was already that followed of their original productions were famous on Broadway for his work stripped away, it became clear that on West Side Story and Gypsy, as it continue to shows such as Company, Follies well as the two previous shows for be produced (1971), A Little Night Music (1972), which he had written not only lyrics and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Bar- but the music as well (a hit called A throughout ber of Fleet Street (1973) had more Funny Thing Happened on the Way the English- in common with the tough-minded to the Forum and a huge flop called marital-life studies of Edward Albee Anyone Can Whistle), Company speaking world. and Tennessee Williams than with established him as a creative force South Pacific or My Fair Lady. It in his own right, an artist in touch was this belated recognition that with the hopes and fears of urban by connoisseurs and professionals, made it possible for Sondheim’s mu- America. It ran for 705 performanc- they are neither widely popular nor sicals to claim their rightful place in es—three more than Gypsy—and influential, and show no signs of the theatrical repertoire. won Tonys for best musical, best becoming so. As I wrote in Com- Here, too, Sondheim departed music, and best lyrics. All at once, mentary in 2003: “Only one of from precedent to a degree little Sondheim was a star. his songs, ‘Send in the Clowns,’ short of radical. While old-fash- A half-century later, the great has become a standard, and the ioned musical comedy seeks to re- innovator of postwar musical com- original productions of most of assure its audiences that love con- edy is now its grand old man, the his shows have lost money. At the quers all, his shows sent a different Irving Berlin of our time. At 90, same time, Broadway itself is now message: Some of their endings Sondheim is the last living link to far less hospitable to musically were happy, others not, but all were the heyday of the school-of-Ham- challenging scores, and in recent tinged with the bittersweet flavor merstein musical, and Company years a growing percentage of the of doubt. Ambivalence, he has said, and the shows that followed it (as new musicals opening in New is his “favorite thing to write about, well as West Side Story, Gypsy, and York have been ‘jukebox’ shows… because it’s the way I feel, and I A Funny Thing Happened on the whose undemanding ‘scores’ are think the way most people feel.” Be Way to the Forum) continue to be pieced together from pre-existing that as it may, it is not how most produced, not merely on Broadway pop songs.”* people expect to feel after seeing a but throughout America and the This is why the only present- Broadway musical. They long for English-speaking world. Taken today songwriters who write “like the certainty of romantic closure, gether, they form the most signifi- Sondheim” are those who, like and Sondheim usually refuses to cant body of musical-theater work Adam Guettel and Michael John give it to them. It was not until his ever written. LaChiusa, accept going in that musicals started to be performed Significant—but not consequen- their shows will never reach the in front of more sophisticated audi- tial. ences willing to take them on their For even though Sondheim’s * “Sondheim’s Operas” (Commentary, own astringent terms that their musicals have long been admired May 2003) future became assured.

66 Culture & Civilization : March 2020 VEN WHEN the fate of to embrace Company, Follies, A Sondheim’s musicals still Sweeney Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, E appeared to be in question, i and Into the Woods (1987). It is no few seriously doubted the merits Todd coincidence that the first three, of his songs, though their prolif- was originally which deal with various aspects erating variety may in some cases of modern marriage, have more have obscured their quality. This mounted on or less “happy” endings, as does is especially true of the ones that Into the Woods. And A Little Night make up the score of Follies, an en- the grandest Music, whose waltz-time operetta- cyclopedic catalogue of historical possible scale, style score is more immediately pastiche in which virtually every accessible than that of any other number recalls a particular song- framing its Sondheim musical, even goes so writing style of the past, from the penny-dreadful far as to offer its audiences a disil- bluesy Harold Arlenisms of “I’m lusioned but ultimately hopeful Still Here” (“Good times and bum tale of a serial- view of romantic love. times, / I’ve seen them all, and my killer barber Conversely, Sweeney Todd is a dear, / I’m still here”) to the smiling full-blown tragedy of near-oper- good cheer of “Broadway Baby,” whose victims atic scope, a melodrama that ends which evokes the Depression-era end up ground with a stageful of bloody corpses hopefulness of Buddy DeSylva, Lew and dazed survivors. It was origi- Brown, and Ray Henderson so into meat pies as nally mounted on the grandest precisely that the results are all but an indictment of possible scale, framing its penny- indistinguishable from their model dreadful tale of a serial-killer bar- (“Still / I’ll stick it till / I’m on a bill/ capitalism. ber whose victims end up ground All over Times Square!”). into meat pies as an indictment of Yet here as always in Sondheim’s the moral corruption of capital- musicals, each number arises di- can, as is true of an astonishingly ism: “The history of the world, my rectly from and is integrated into high percentage of Sondheim’s sweet, / Is who gets eaten and who its dramatic context with a subtlety best musical numbers, so many gets to eat.” But it, too, has proved and thoroughness so complete that that one marvels in retrospect at unexpectedly amenable to small- it is often surprising to see how the accusation of coldness that scale presentation, though the comprehensible the results are has pursued him throughout his show was also successfully filmed when performed separately from long career. “Anyone Can Whistle,” by Tim Burton in 2008 and has the shows for which they were writ- “There Won’t Be Trumpets,” “I been taken, like A Little Night Mu- ten. “The Road You Didn’t Take,” Remember,” “Sorry-Grateful,” “An- sic, into the repertoires of major for instance, is a monologue by one other Hundred People,” “Losing opera houses. of the show’s principal characters My Mind,” “Send in the Clowns,” Sondheim, however, preceded who looks back in middle age on “Every Day a Little Death,” “Not and followed Sweeney Todd with a his unrealized hopes with a blithe- While I’m Around,” “Not a Day pair of shows that left their audi- ness (Sondheim’s word) that is Goes By,” “Loving You”: These rank ences puzzled at best, hostile at contradicted by subtle touches of among the 20th century’s most worst. The subject of Pacific Over- dissonance in the musical setting intensely felt songs. tures (1976) is the Westernization of his thoughts: That said, it is hard not to of 19th-century Japan as viewed wonder which of the shows from by the Japanese, while Merrily We You take one road which they spring is most likely to Roll Along (1981) tells the story of You try one door, hold the stage over the long haul. two close friends and theatrical There isn’t time for any more. Do any of Sondheim’s musicals partners whose friendship found- One’s life consists of either/or. have the staying power of the ers on the shoals of ambition—but golden-age shows whose untragic, does so in reverse chronological How is it possible that so spe- quintessentially American ideal- order, so that its wonderfully op- cific a song can be lifted out of the ism retains to this day its popular timistic closing song (“Our time score of Follies without undercut- appeal? To date, American theater- coming true / me and you, man, me ting its emotional effect? And yet it goers have proved most willing and you!) reveals the show to be a

Commentary 67 tragedy rather than a celebration. of preachy sentimentality. Hence mosexual, which may have caused Merrily closed after 16 perfor- the difference between the shows him to portray heterosexual love mances. In response to its failure, Sondheim wrote for Prince and his at an emotional remove unusual in Sondheim dove even deeper into later work, which he describes as golden-age musicals—albeit with- the recondite. After doing all of follows: “A quality of detachment out any hint of incomprehension or his breakthrough shows with the suffuses the first set, whereas a hostility—Sondheim is said to have producer/director Harold Prince, current of vulnerability, of longing, had only modest success in his own he now teamed up with James informs the second….With James, life with long-term relationships. It Lapine, who directed and wrote the detachment was replaced by a mea- makes sense, then, that he should books of three shows whose themes sure of compassion.” have found it difficult to portray diverged still further from the In part because of this crucial such relationships on stage and musical-comedy mainstream. The difference, the original produc- that over time he would grow less first of them,Sunday in the Park tions of Into the Woods and Sun- inclined to try. with George (1984), is about the day in the Park with George both This, I suspect, goes at least as far French pointillist painter Georges transferred to Broadway and had toward explaining the mixed recep- Seurat, while Into the Woods brings multiyear runs there. Not so As- tion of Sondheim’s later shows as do together a group of stock fairy-tale sassins and Passion, which have their self-evident flaws. Yet they are characters to tell a tale that starts yet to solidly establish themselves noteworthy precisely because they out as an exercise in farce comedy. in revival. After that, Sondheim are for the same reason so differ- And both take similarly disastrous fell silent, spending nine years ent from the “stolid solemn uplift turns after the intermission: Into working in vain to revise Road equipped with impressive lumber- the Woods becomes a didactically Show (2008), a one-act chamber ing spectacle” (Sondheim’s phrase) communitarian fable, while Sun- musical about Addison and Wil- that now dominates Broadway-style day in the Park with George moves son Mizner that went through nu- musical comedy. In the meantime, into the present with sententious merous iterations before reaching there are Company, Follies, A Little platitudinizing about modern art: New York’s Public Theater, where Night Music, and Sweeney Todd— “Stop worrying if your vision / Is it closed after a month. Since and if that seems a slender legacy, true. / Let others make that deci- then, he has done little but tinker it should be noted that none of the sion— / They usually do.” with his earlier shows, confessing other major theatrical songwriters No less eccentric, though pow- to “a diminution of energy and of the postwar era left behind a erfully moving when done well, the worry that there are no new much larger one. If we accept Frank is Passion (1994), a quasi-opera ideas.”* None of the Broadway Loesser as a master for having about an Italian soldier who be- greats whom he followed had cre- written Guys and Dolls and How to comes inexplicably obsessed with ative success after the age of 65, Succeed in Business Without Really a sickly and unattractive woman. and the same, alas, has been true Trying, then surely Sondheim is as In between, Sondheim and John of Sondheim. deserving of the name. Weidman wrote Assassins (1990), On the other hand, this is prob- It is possible, of course, that a political revue about a group of ably also due to his decision to a new generation of playgoers presidential assassins whose prem- break with the traditional subject will fail to be engaged by any of ise is that the American dream is a matter of the Broadway musical, Sondheim’s shows. But even if that snare and a delusion. which sent him in a direction even should happen, the greatest of his less compatible with mass popu- songs, which epitomize in their HE LINE of demarcation larity. It is clear in retrospect, and uneasy fusion of yearning and am- that separates these two far from surprising, that he was bivalence the dark voice of moder- T groups of shows is plain never wholly at ease telling love nity, will undoubtedly continue to to see. Sondheim calls himself “a stories. In addition to being ho- speak to their doubts about life and Broadway baby” who “think[s] in love long after the vapid anthems terms of the well-made play.” Not of a senile Broadway have been * In addition, Sondheim and the play- so Lapine, who “lean[s] toward wright David Ives are reported to be forgotten. As he begins his 10th de- lateral thinking, toward intuition working on a stage version of two films cade, Sondheim surely knows that rather than structural logic,” and by Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charm of his praises—like his songs—will be the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating whose theatrical style is direct and Angel. To date, though, Buñuel remains in sung for as long as there are listen- forthcoming—at times to the point the workshop stage. ers with broken hearts.q

68 Culture & Civilization : March 2020 welcoming a steady flow of friends and visitors through the front door Mother Courage while distributing food and money to indigent Jews and starving peas- ants through the back. In Los Angeles, Viertel provided The Kindness of Strangers tality and ingenuity helped émigré a substitute home for those, like By Salka Viertel artists find their place in an other- herself, who had lost their original New York Review Books, 368 pages wise Byzantine and impenetrable one. But these were no ordinary studio system. These same émigrés refugees trooping through her liv- The Sun and Her Stars: transformed Hollywood. ing room. If she at times comes Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles Now, at long last, Salka Viertel is across as something of a name- in the Golden Age of Hollywood trending. Late last year, her memoir dropper (and she does), can you By Donna Rifkind was finally reissued, and the Los blame her? The regulars at her The Other Press, 560 pages Angeles writer and critic Donna Rif- Sunday parties included Charlie kind has just published a lusciously Chaplin, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Reviewed by Mark Horowitz detailed new biography, The Sun Brecht, Leon Feuchtwanger, Ar- and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and nold Schoenberg, and Jean Renoir. T BEST, Salka Viertel Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of (Her husband, the writer and di- should be a Holly- Hollywood. Rifkind makes a con- rector Berthold Viertel, called Ma- wood footnote. Be- vincing case that Viertel is a prime bery Road an “oasis in the ever- fore coming to Cali- example of how immigrants, even widening desert.”) fornia in 1928, she involuntary exiles, make America How did Viertel do it? Rifkind A had been a moderately successful great. “The look, the sound, and the has her theories. “Never an obvi- stage actress in Germany and Aus- speech of Hollywood’s Golden Age ous beauty,” she writes, “she had tria. When she arrived on these did not originate in Hollywood,” learned during her theater days to shores—one of 10,000 European Rifkind writes. “Much of it came use every other asset she had—her exiles and refugees who washed up from Europe, through the work of intelligence most of all, but also her in Los Angeles during the ’20s and successive waves of immigrants voice and her glance and her ges- ’30s—she couldn’t find work as an during the first half of the 20th tures—to assume a forceful pres- actress (not beautiful enough, too century. The last several of those ence, to make one pay attention. … old) and ended up writing screen- waves brought a group of trauma- Laughter and tears came easily to plays for her friend Greta Garbo. tized artists who were lucky enough her; her moods were dramatic and Later, she published a memoir, The to escape Hitler’s death trains and unpredictable, just as the house Kindness of Strangers, that went extermination camps. All were anti- was histrionic, layered, complex.” out of print almost immediately. fascists; some were Communists; Her friendship with Garbo, It shouldn’t have. The mem- most were Jews.” whom she met at Ernst Lubitsch’s oir is spectacular—more modern Viertel, “a builder of bridges,” house, also helped. It made it than most modern memoirs, filled was instrumental in getting their possible for her to land a job as a with the same struggles that 21st- voices heard. Her house on Mabery screenwriter at MGM, where she century women reckon with (ca- Road in Santa Monica, a short developed an intuitive understand- reer, identity, sexual independence, walk from the beach, was “filled ing of the peculiar ways of the stu- difficult marriages). And what a with the dispossessed,” Rifkind dio system, which in turn allowed life! Viertel played a significant writes, “drawn to her compassion her to be an effective translator for role in Hollywood history, hosting and her European cooking.” There, new arrivals looking for work. a legendary Sunday salon at her they rubbed shoulders with studio Those MGM paychecks support- home in Santa Monica. She was grandees and, under her prodding, ed three sons, her underemployed what Malcolm Gladwell has called discovered common ground. husband (he never adjusted to a “connector,” a woman whose vi- She had acquired her ingath- Hollywood or America), and family ering style years earlier, in a far members still trapped in Europe. Mark Horowitz is a contribut- corner of the Habsburg Empire, She donated regularly to the Eu- ing writer at Tablet. Follow him on where her prosperous Jewish par- ropean Film Fund, a Hollywood Twitter @markhorowitz. ents maintained an open house, charity that rescued Hitler’s Jewish

Commentary 69 victims, even as the U.S. govern- gether by family, affection, and nity is fascinating, though partial; ment shut its gates. She took in her mutual admiration. Leaving her Rifkind fills in many of the missing brother and his family, as well as for one prolonged absence, Ber- pieces. Berthold considered himself her mother, once they managed to thold wrote her from aboard the a socialist and a pacifist. Salka, escape. If she dared to complain, Super Chief to New York, “Cable more assimilated, was devoted to it was only to confide in her diary, me, phone me, and never give up FDR—except for his closed-door “Oh, how I would like to have two loving me. Do you hear, never! As policies toward Jews. “My Ameri- hours without worrying about any- for me, only death can cure my ad- can passport made me feel guilty,” body.” She suffered from depres- diction to you.” she wrote, “because my heartless sion but called it “combat fatigue.” She called her long and relative- adopted country refused entrance ly open affair with a married neigh- to the oppressed, persecuted and IERTEL’S only book, The bor her “furtive happiness.” Even poor.” She supported Popular Front Kindness of Strangers, so, she’d write Berthold, pleading organizations such as the Holly- V gives readers a bracing and with him to come back to L.A. “You wood Anti-Nazi League and down- firsthand glimpse of that depres- know that I love you and that I played the Communist affiliations sion. The memoir likely escaped belong to you. Once, when I was of comrades such as Brecht and notice when it was first published terribly unhappy because you were Hans Eisler. because Viertel was unwilling to infatuated with somebody else, you When Hitler and Stalin signed dish about famous friends such as told me: ‘Imagine it is an illness; their non-aggression pact in 1939, Garbo and Dietrich. And back in you would not love me less were I Hollywood’s Communists cyni- those days, the inner lives of Holly- sick.’ But you are leaving me alone cally turned isolationist. Viertel’s wood women weren’t appreciated in my illness. I need you…” friends Ernst Lubitsch and Billy much in their own right. But they Depression and loss haunt her Wilder told her to distance herself certainly are now—as are forth- narrative. If you lose your country, from the Communist-controlled right tales of depression, displace- your home, your family, your lan- League. They were right. Her “pre- ment, and dispossession. guage, your cultural patrimony, mature anti-fascism” would cost The Kindness of Strangers is a what is left? Thomas Mann, a her after the war. powerful expression of the darker central figure in L.A.’s refugee Was she a Red? It’s obvious from side of the refugee experience. It colony (he wrote Doctor Faustus both books that Viertel couldn’t is also something of a literary tri- while living in Pacific Palisades), have cared less about revolution umph. Readers and critics in 1969 claimed, “Where I am, there is and class consciousness. She be- clearly weren’t ready for all that sur- Germany.” But as The Kindness lieved in the power of the individu- vivor’s guilt, but readers in 2019 are. of Strangers makes clear, he was al, and for her, the question “what I myself mistakenly came for the wrong. For too many other exiles, could one person do” was not rhe- gossip but stayed for the trauma. including Mann’s own brother, torical. If FDR wouldn’t save Jews, Viertel’s memoir is also a fasci- Heinrich, the loss of identity was she would. The essence of her poli- nating record of her very compli- devastating. Stefan Zweig com- tics was charity and hospitality—a cated marriage to Berthold, a long mitted suicide. As did Walter legacy from her mother, not Karl and tempestuous love affair that Benjamin. For refugees, identity Marx. The mitzvah of hachnasat survived separations and even a di- wasn’t an ideological buffet you orchim, Rifkind says, “the taking vorce. The book is startlingly blunt, could pick and choose from. It was in of guests,” was her credo. The almost wrenching in its honesty, singular and irreplaceable. And it political was always personal. detailing Berthold’s long absences could be stolen from you. The Kindness of Strangers ends and open infidelities, set against The memoir relentlessly cap- in Switzerland, a third exile. A her own affairs with a neighbor tures the despair of those who depressed and lonely Viertel, black- and (for almost a decade!) Max failed to make it to the next trench. listed and unable to work, arrives Reinhardt’s son, Gottfried, some Their stories will break your heart. and falls in love with a six-year-old 20 years her junior. (Rifkind quotes Not suprisingly, politics was the granddaughter she has never met one friend who said, “Above all she refugees’ lifeblood. They were glued before. It is a new beginning, a case is a European. She loves perfume to their radios, devouring every of her “incorrigible heart” coming and takes lovers.”) morsel of news from Europe. Vier- to her rescue again. She survived Despite everything, Viertel and tel’s analysis of the contending ide- and thrived only because she was a her husband remained bound to- ologies within the artistic commu- fool for love.q

70 Culture & Civilization : March 2020 HOLLYWOOD COMMENTARY continued from page 72 selling, which kind irascible old people, flamboyantly gay young people, of buyer is more attractive? Put it this way: We don’t humorless nursing staff, and Stephen Sondheim lyrics. even call it the “18 to 34 demographic” anymore. We In other words, a near-perfect setup. just say “The Demo,” because there really is only one. It’s an almost entirely Gray project: about Grays, And it is axiomatic in the television business that written by a newly Gray writer, from a piece in the Gray if you want to attract The Demo, do not hire A Gray. Lady. I would have been laughed out of the room back That rule, though, is a lot less ironclad than it in The Demo days, but in the new television landscape, used to be. the pitch has generated some interest in both the broad- As broadcasting television transforms into a casting and streaming sides of the television business. platform for event-based telecasts—think Oscars; “Why is it a television show?” an independent think Super Bowl—and big-scale competition shows, it film producer asked me recently. “It sounds like a re- becomes less about the age of the audience and more ally great indie film.” about the size. About 100 million people watched He went on to describe the new independent film Super Bowl LIV in February 2020, and the advertis- marketplace, where older big-name actors are available ers didn’t spend their money based on the ages of the for small-budget projects, and older-skewing films eas- viewers. They were going for what a friend of mine in ily find their way onto Netflix and Amazon Prime after a the ad-sales business calls an “awareness bomb.” If you lucrative span in the theaters. Do it as an indie, he told want 100 million people to know about your amazing me. Better yet, do it as an indie in the UK, where there new potato chip—or, for that matter, even 10 million are people like Judy Dench and Ian McKellan who re- people—there’s still only one place to go, and that’s ally know how to chew the scenery. broadcast television. “Old people,” he reminded me, “still go to the Streaming services and premium cable chan- movies.” nels operate under a totally different model. It really Which makes a lot of sense. doesn’t matter to HBO Max or Disney+ how old their To watch an offering from a streaming service, viewers are, or if they’re sophisticated urbanites. Net- here’s what I need to do: turn the TV on using the On flix and the rest of those services don’t sell advertis- button, not the All On button, select the correct HDMI ing. They sell subscriptions. And in that business, 11 port using the remote control for the television by dollars is 11 dollars. Everyone pays the same and all selecting “Input” and then scrolling through the ports money is green. until “HDMI 5” shows up and then clicking on that, put Geriatric money is greener, in fact, because in the TV remote down and pick up the Apple TV remote the streaming business model, the cranky and ossified and choose “Menu,” decide if it’s a Hulu or Netflix or and reluctant-to-change customer is actually more Apple+ or HBO Max or CBS All Access show—which valuable. If you’re selling advertising, the viewer you might mean putting down the remote and picking up want is persuadable, open, brand disloyal. If you’re my phone to Google the show—and then hope that selling subscriptions, the viewer you want is the kind the show appears as a choice and that I don’t have to of person who has only recently given up his AOL re-input my username and password again, because I email address, who can’t always read the small print had to do that the day before, for some reason, just to on the credit-card statement, who doesn’t want to call watch Fox & Friends. her grandchild one more time to ask how to reset the I am a man in his early fifties, and I find this television for a new service. process to be unacceptably tedious. I assure you that Late last year, I read an article in the New York at 60 or 70, it’s an easier and more convenient option Times that would be an excellent television series. It to just get in the damn car and go to the movies. As a was about old people in an assisted-living facility and salt-and-pepper, I can still figure it out. But in a few the young person who gives acting and singing les- years when it’s all-salt upstairs, I’ll be entering the sons in the day room. He produces plays and musicals new The Demo: people with money who can’t find starring the residents, and the article was filled with their glasses.q

Commentary 71 HOLLYWOOD COMMENTARY Growing Old in Hollywood

ROB LONG

EARS AGO, a group of older Hollywood writ- “We like to work with writers who have more experi- ers—they called themselves “The Grays”—filed ence. In fact, we work regularly with two or three writ- Y a class-action suit against some of the major ers in their sixties.” talent agencies in town. The suit accused the agencies I mentioned their names. The Greek Fisherman of failing to adequately represent writers over 50—not shrugged. “Oh, those guys,” he said. “I know those guys. including them on client lists, not pushing them for But they’re, you know, good writers. I don’t mean them. writing staff jobs—and contributing to discriminatory, I mean, do you ever hire just ordinary older writers? ageist hiring practices prevalent in the entertainment The older ones that aren’t good?” business. The plaintiffs identified some key television “Honestly, we try to hire only good writers,” I said. shows, and showrunners, in the complaint. “See, that’s ageism,” the Greek Fisherman said. At the time, I was in my late thirties and was The irony of the lawsuit was that it went on for one of the showrunners mentioned. So I wasn’t so long, with so many counter and cross complaints, surprised when a man in light blue jeans, a salt-and- and inspired so many task forces and committees, that pepper beard, and a Greek fisherman’s cap accosted I am now technically old enough to qualify as both a me at a local coffee spot. defendant and a plaintiff. I have become a Gray. Let me explain. In Hollywood, people tend to I never thought it would happen to me! These wear the clothes they bought the last time they had real days, whenever I am mentioned in show-business money, which means you can always tell where some- trade publications like Variety or Deadline, it’s almost one is in his career by calculating the age of his ward- always with the modifier “veteran,” or worse, “long- robe. A talent manager wearing a big-shouldered vent- time showrunner.” I have a friend about my age who less Armani suit is a talent manager who hasn’t had a was once described as an “industry fixture.” He didn’t working client since 1990. An actress in long boots and leave the house for several weeks. a fedora probably had her own television series from Getting old in Hollywood means losing touch 1972 to 1974. And the IMDB page of a writer in a Greek with the segment of the audience that, until very re- fisherman’s cap and acid-washed jeans is going to list cently, ruled the airwaves. Young people—described by as the most recent credit a sitcom from the 1980s in- marketers and network executives alike as the “18–34 volving a family where one of the kids is a secret robot. demographic”—have been the target of ad-supported “So, do you ever hire older writers on those sit- television for decades, and old people have been coms of yours?” asked the older writer in a challenging screaming about it for just as long. “We have all the tone of voice as I was slipping the (useless) cardboard money,” old people mutter and rattle, “so why do those ring around the stem of my coffee cup. awful kids get all the attention?” The theory is this: I nodded vigorously. “Of course we do,” I said. Older people have already formed their crucial brand preferences. Old people already have a favorite tooth- Rob Long has been the executive producer of six TV paste, pretzel, auto insurer. Younger people are open series. to persuasion. If you’re continued on page 71

72 Culture & Civilization : March 2020 YOU DESERVE TO KNOW THE TRUTH... Aid to Israel Makes the U.S. Safer U.S. aid to Israel is really not aid at all. The $3.8 billion sent annually to Israel is an investment in our own country’s security, returning many times its cost.

Despite frequent misconceptions, U.S. aid to Israel is no monitor regional threats. Israel is also a world leader gift—but actually a calculated expense that ensures our in cybersecurity and intelligence gathering, providing regional interests and the safety of our country and its the U.S. a priceless feed of classified information about troops—one that delivers a higher return on investment Iran, Syria, Russia, al Qaeda, Hizbollah and Hamas. In than foreign aid to any other nation. addition, Israel worked with the U.S. to weaken Iranian nuclear weapons operations using the Stuxnet virus, and What are the facts? last year Israeli agents penetrated Iran’s secret nuclear Several American politicians have proposed withhold- warehouse in Teheran, taking documents that proved ing U.S. aid to Israel unless it does more to support a Iran’s cheating on the 2015 nuclear deal. Palestinian state, such as ceasing to build 5) Israel serves as a port of call for U.S. housing in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank). This Linkage of troops, ships, aircraft and intelligence proposal ignores the real purpose of U.S. aid to operations. Strategically located on the Israel and confuses the relationship of Israel’s U.S. aid to Mediterranean and Red Seas, Israel guards settlements to a Palestinian peace process. Israel with a critical waterways used for international A bit of context helps explain this discon- shipping and military activities. As U.S. nect: Consider that the U.S. currently spends Palestinian Representative Steve Rothman (D-N.J.) $143.25 billion a year on military operations puts it, “For about 2 percent of what the and aid for Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. state is U.S. spends in Afghanistan, Iraq and Contrast that amount with the overwhelming misguided. Pakistan this year, Americans can take value America receives for its $3.8 billion pride in the return on our investment in aid investment in Israel. to Israel.” 1) U.S. funds do not support Israel’s day-to-day Those who seek to link U.S. investment in Israel military operations, but rather are largely used to pur- to creation of a Palestinian state, make a fundamental chase world-class armaments, such as U.S.-manufactured mistake: First, it would be foolhardy for the U.S. to F-35 stealth fighters, and to develop, with the U.S., new jeopardize its regional security interests—or those of our advanced weapon systems, such as Iron Dome, Arrow 3 valued ally, Israel—for the sake of the unrelated matter and David’s Sling missile defenses. Note that fully 70% of of Palestinian sovereignty. Second, after the Palestinians’ the U.S. investment in Israel must be spent to purchase refusal of three generous offers of land for peace by U.S. military equipment—which supports U.S. high-tech Israel since 2000, as well as their refusal to negotiate with defense jobs and our industrial base. Israel since 2010, it’s unfair to hold Israel solely respon- 2) The nations and forces that threaten Israel also sible for their statelessness. threaten U.S. interests—these include Iran, Syria, U.S. aid to Israel dramatically limits U.S. need to send and U.S.-designated terror groups like Hizbollah, troops to the explosive Middle East and ensures Israel can Hamas, al Qaeda and ISIS. Remember that Israel support U.S. interests in the region. Indeed, our investment destroyed both Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons in Israel is returned many times over—often not the case factory in Iraq in 1981 and a nuclear facility in for other U.S. aid. Thus, any linkage of the U.S. investment Syria in 2007. Recall that Israel has attacked proxies in Israel with a Palestinian state is misguided. U.S. aid to of America’s number one enemy—Iran—in Syria Israel helps guarantee our own security, but also the safety and Lebanon more than 200 times in recent years. of one of our greatest allies. Israel assists Egypt in fighting al Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula. No nation—anywhere—battles jihadists This message has been published and paid for by more assertively than Israel. 3) Our ally Israel is ranked the 8th most powerful nation globally, based on economic and political Facts and Logic About the Middle East influence, international alliances and military strength. Israel is not only America’s strongest Middle East ally, P.O. Box 3460, Berkeley, CA 94703 it is also one of our strongest globally. James Sinkinson, President Gerardo Joffe (z"l), Founder 4) No U.S. troops need to be stationed in Israel. FLAME is a tax-exempt, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Its purpose While U.S. forces never do Israel’s fighting for it, the is the research and publication of facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the Jewish state does collaborate with the U.S. on the United States, Israel and other allies in the region. You tax-deductible X-band radar system, which helps both countries contributions are welcome. To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org