CommentaryDECEMBER 2018 ‘May God Avenge Their Blood’ REFLECTIONS AFTER PITTSBURGH MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK / SETH MANDEL / JOHN PODHORETZ Commentary

DECEMBER 2018 : VOLUME 146 NUMBER 5

THE SOCIAL-JUSTICE INJUSTICE $5.95 US : $7.00 CANADA $7.00 : US $5.95 NOAH ROTHMAN

December 2018 Cover.indd 1 11/15/18 12:19 PM Saving lives. It’s in our blood.

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December 2018 Cover.indd 2 11/15/18 12:20 PM EDITOR’S COMMENTARY Words Spoken to My Daughter, One Week After the Horrors at the Tree of Life Synagogue

JOHN PODHORETZ

—November 3, 2018

Y BELOVED S----, you become a bat mitz- children, and their children can teach theirs, and theirs vah today, which confers upon you obliga- and theirs and theirs and theirs—until it is 3,600 years M tions and responsibilities as a member of from now and there are still Jews on this earth just as the Jewish community and as an inheritor of a tradition there were 3,600 years ago when Abraham and Sarah dating back thousands of years. The haftarah you read breathed their last. Nothing could make me prouder of today, from the Book of Kings, is about a struggle over you than to see you pass on our heritage and continue King David’s inheritance. It concludes with Bathsheba as part of this divine legacy. speaking the words “May my Lord King David live We thank God for blessing us with you. And even at forever.” What Bathsheba meant was that David’s line your darkest and bleakest moments, we hope you never should live forever, that the Jewish people should live forget, or take for granted, how much He has blessed you. forever. After the unspeakable event last weekend at You are blessed with three grandparents here today, three Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, it is an obligation grandparents whose love of ideas and love of country and upon you and upon us to do what we can, every one of love of life you have inherited, and you were blessed by us, to make sure Bathsheba’s wish is fulfilled. a grandmother whose memory is a blessing and whose The theologian Emil Fackenheim said Auschwitz love of family and of you was all-encompassing. had required this of us—that we were not allowed to grant You are blessed with aunts and uncles who de- Hitler any posthumous victories. He called it the Com- light in you, and cousins both grown and toddling who mandment of Auschwitz. It is also the Commandment of cherish you. You are blessed with the ever-present spirit the Tree of Life. The monster who slaughtered and wound- of your aunt Rachel, who so very much appreciated you. ed all those people wanted to kill Jews for being Jews. “All You are blessed with a sister and a brother who will, if Jews must die,” he shouted as he murdered them. you are lucky, be your dear friends the way your mother The parshah from the Torah you read today is and I take wisdom and comfort from our siblings. You about the very first Jews. It begins with the death of are blessed with the good fortune of having been born Sarah and proceeds to tell of the death of her husband, in this, the greatest and noblest nation the world has Abraham. So here is my charge to you: If you want to ever known. And you are blessed with the astounding make Robert Bowers’s words turn to ash, follow in the birthright of the Jewish people. footsteps of Abraham and Sarah. Live as a Jew. Have May you pass such blessings to your own nieces, Jewish children. Try as your mother and I have with your own nephews, your own children, and your own you and your sister and your brother to teach those grandchildren in the endless chain that extends back to children how to live as Jews so that they can teach their the lifetime of Sarah.q

Commentary 1

Columns.indd 1 11/15/18 11:53 AM December 2018 Vol. 146 : No. 5

Articles

Meir Y. ‘May God Avenge Their Blood’ 13 Soloveichik How to remember the murdered in Pittsburgh.

Seth The Know-Nothing 17 Mandel Excommunicators How the massacre brought out the worst in some liberal Jews.

Noah The Social-Justice Injustice 21 Rothman What Brett Kavanaugh’s trial by fire was really all about.

James Piereson The Givers 27 & Naomi Schaefer Riley and Their Attackers The philosophical assault on philanthropy is really about extending government control.

Joseph Our Gladiators 33 Epstein Of Tiger Woods and those who play for our amusement.

Memoir

Thomas P. And So This Is Christmas 39 Balázs A Jewish ex-Lutheran in Colonial Williamsburg at Christmastime.

Columns.indd 2 11/15/18 11:53 AM

Politics & Ideas

Edward Before the Parades 45 Kosner Victory City, by John Strausbaugh

Andrew ‘Who Pays for the Inedible Fish?’ 47 Roberts The Churchill Documents Volume 21, Edited by Martin Gilbert and Larry Arnn

Sohrab Pattern Recognition 49 Ahmari Identity, by Francis Fukuyama

Culture & Civilization

Terry King Lear, Our Contemporary 52 Teachout The darkest Shakespeare play finds its moment.

Monthly Commentaries

Editor’s Commentary Social Commentary 1 John Podhoretz Christine Rosen 8 Words Spoken to My Daughter, Oppression at One Week After the Horrors $160,000 Per Annum at the Tree of Life Synagogue Washington Commentary

Reader Commentary Andrew Ferguson 10 4 Letters Paul Ryan and the on the October issue Boys of ’94

Media Commentary Matthew Continetti 56 The Real Forever War

Columns.indd 3 11/15/18 11:53 AM READER COMMENTARY The Atheist Faith

to legitimate a great deal of evil, ventional (or traditional) religions To the Editor: as Gary Saul Morson argues, the and secular religious ideologies N OTHERWISE interesting ar- system was not anti-religious. Bol- (such as Marxism-Leninism) ab- A ticle is undermined by its over- shevik ethics cannot be reduced hor moral relativism and provide reach (“Among the Disbelievers,” to atheism. The Soviet system at- grounds for righteous intolerance. October). Lost to Gary Saul Morson tempted to provide a substitute Both systems of belief find support is the inherent mistake of his condi- religion, tried to meet the diffuse in sacred writings that are used as tional syllogism: If all Bolsheviks are religious needs of its people, and sources of legitimacy and cannot be atheists, and all Bolsheviks are evil, encouraged certain beliefs similar challenged. Quotes from the Bible then all atheists are (potentially) evil. to those of conventional religious or the Koran, as those of Stalin or This is obviously not true. denominations and believers. Mao, have been routinely used as I recall an incident from the Stalin was not an ordinary substitutes for reasoned argument. movie Judgment at Nuremberg: dictator but a redeemer, a divine fig- Both religious and secular reli- Two accused Nazis awaiting trial ure who shared many attributes of gious beliefs (such as those rooted are having a conversation. The first traditional divinity as projected on in Marxism-Leninism) have been asks the second whether he is afraid him by propaganda. There was con- sources of both idealistic, selfless of God’s judgment. The second siderable popular receptivity to this attitudes and behavior, and ruthless replies, no, because there is no image. The Soviet system and its fanaticism. There is no shortage God. The first asks again, How do ideology shared with traditional re- of historical examples indicating you know that for sure? The reply ligions a future orientation—Com- that many idealists of both types from the second: If there was a God, munism was a secular version of believed that hallowed ends justify could we have done what we did? heaven in which all known, worldly sordid means and they used them Jerome Feldman frustrations, deprivations, and con- with a clear conscience. Much of New York City flicts were to be alleviated or al- what Mr. Morson wrote is of course together removed. Secular rituals correct, but we cannot overlook the 1 imitated religious ones, including similarities between the religious the veneration of Lenin’s embalmed and secular religious beliefs (or ide- body. Good and evil were sharply ologies) noted above, and especially To the Editor: defined in the Communist value the basic human needs both types of HILE IT IS BEYOND doubt system (as they are in many reli- belief systems seek to satisfy. W that the Soviet system was gious beliefs), although of course Paul Hollander atheistic and its atheism helped they had different bases. Both con- Northampton, Massachusetts

4 December 2018

Columns.indd 4 11/15/18 12:38 PM 1

Gary Saul Morson writes: want to thank Jerome Feldman I and Paul Hollander for their thoughtful responses and for pro- December 2018 Vol. 146 : No. 5 viding the chance to clarify what I am, and am not, claiming. I am at a loss to understand John Podhoretz, Editor why Mr. Feldman thinks I state that Abe Greenwald, Senior Editor all atheists are evil. (Everyone is Noah C. Rothman, Associate Editor “potentially” evil.) I was responding � to the atheist claim that religions Carol Moskot, Publisher are uniquely horrible, unlike hu- Kejda Gjermani, Digital Publisher mane atheism. But in the past cen- Leah Rahmani, Publishing Associate tury, avowedly atheist regimes have � killed far more people, and killed Ilya Leyzerzon, Business Director them far more cruelly, than all reli-

gions in the course of history com- Stephanie Roberts, Business Manager bined. Surely the atheists should at � least stop claiming that atheism is Terry Teachout, Critic-at-Large necessarily more humane. � I know of no Jewish or Chris- Board of Directors tian sect that has deemed compas- Daniel R. Benson, Chairman sion, pity, or individual conscience Meredith Berkman, Paul J. Isaac, a vice, and taught schoolchildren Michael J. Leffell, Jay P. Lefkowitz, as much. But Bolshevism, which Steven Price, Gary L. Rosenthal, inspired Marxist-Leninist regimes governing some 20 countries rul- Michael W. Schwartz, Paul E. Singer ing some 40 percent of humanity, created what can only be called a reverse categorical imperative Cover Photo: Brendan Smialowski /getty images and a negative golden rule. And for reasons I outline in the article, To send us a letter to the editor: [email protected] they derived this abhorrent eth- We will edit letters for length and content. ics directly and explicitly from To make a tax-deductible donation: [email protected] atheism. Reading the memoirs of For advertising inquiries: [email protected] those who survived the Gulag, I For customer service: [email protected] was also struck that even atheists report that under pressure every- one except some religious people would choose survival over moral- Commentary (ISSN 0010-2601) is published monthly (except for a combined July/ ity. Somehow, in an extreme situa- 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) tion, ethical tenets not grounded in 891-6700. Customer Service: [email protected] or (212) 891-1400. the divine, but depending solely on Subscriptions: One year $45, two years $79, three years $109, USA only. To subscribe please go one’s own reasoning, proved feeble. to www.commentarymagazine.com/subscribe-digital-print. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, Paul Hollander, whose work 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 I greatly admire, is of course cor- form at commentarymagazine.com. Postmaster: Send address changes to Commentary, P.O. Box rect that Bolshevism in many re- 420235, Palm Coast, FL, 32142. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, spects resembled a religion. As a self-addressed envelope. Letters intended for publication may be edited. Indexed in Reader’s Guide, comprehensive worldview, there 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 was no way it could not. Mr. Hol- 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 © 2018 by Commentary, Inc.; all rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions.

Columns.indd 5 11/15/18 11:53 AM lander correctly outlines several sciences. At least in the West, today And I did call it “unreliable.” parallels. Indeed, it is a truism of the claim of absolute certainty in all Parts of his memoir recollecting Russian intellectual history that matters can be sustained only by an his conversations with Stanley in- Russian Communism reflects the ideology claiming not divine revela- deed read as if constructed like apocalyptic orientation of Russian tion but scientific status. Atheists a screenplay, so how are we to Orthodox Christianity as well as claim that, unlike religious folk, know that he wasn’t applying his the theories of Marx. they rely on empirical evidence. singular talents in the art form Nevertheless, atheism, even Why, then, do they fail to address of fictional screenwriting to his Bolshevik atheism, is not a re- the evidence of atheist regimes in memoir? How else are we to treat ligion. After all, pseudo-sciences the last century murdering at least evidence without any independent share many features with real sci- a hundred million people, often verification? When I say that Mr. ences, but that does not make them selected entirely at random? Raphael “claims” something, it is not to doubt his veracity but simply to admit I don’t have any proof that what he says is true. Mr. Raphael was repeatedly unavail- able, though I tried contacting him Working with without success several times. The actual role that Mr. Raphael played in the final screen- play, as all writers working on Kubrick Kubrick screenplays found, is de- batable. And the disgruntled and embittered screenwriter is long To the Editor: ing with Kubrick, Eyes Wide Open, a theme of the movies, let alone N MY BOOK, which is 328 pages namely, Kubrick’s Jewishness. And, Stanley’s films. Dalton Trumbo had Ilong, Frederic Raphael is men- yes, while Geoffrey Cocks has tilled some very harsh words to say about tioned a mere 12 times. Despite the this ground before, his research led his experience of working with fact that the book covers the years to very different conclusions from Stanley on Spartacus. As did Kirk 1928–1999, and Mr. Raphael col- mine: that Stanley always wanted Douglas, who certainly tried his laborated with Stanley Kubrick only to make a film about the Holocaust, hand at writing some of that film from the mid-1990s, in his review and the film he ended up making and the one that preceded it, Paths he still managed to distill its entire about it was The Shining (1980). of Glory. He described Kubrick as a content into being about him (“By a Fair play to Mr. Raphael, though, “talented shit.” Captain, He’s No Captain,” October). for he did read the Lolita and It is hard for Mr. Raphael, And, lo, he becomes, in his own Barry Lyndon chapters, it seems. to use his own words, to deny (but words “the sole villain of the piece.” I did not have a “scheme” per convenient to omit) that maybe it Had Mr. Raphael read my se, but I did have a word limit and took Stanley, and not the writer, book more closely, rather than fo- unfortunately what Mr. Raphael some 30 years to “crack” how to do cusing on the bits that mentioned calls “mundane biographical facts” Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle. his name, he’d know that I argue had to be limited to what was rel- But, of course, in Mr. Raphael’s that where Kubrick departed from evant. Please find me a publisher scheme, he is the sole hero of the the seriousness of the New York that will let me write a 500-page piece. Intellectuals was in his playfulness. tome! The reason Mr. Raphael I do not, as Mr. Raphael Yes, I did call Mr. Raphael’s doesn’t like that I called “S.K.” an claims, affect “to unlock what Stan- memoir “self-serving.” Unsurpris- “intellectual” is that I am not suf- ley was ‘really’ dealing with, in all ingly, Stanley emerges as the sole ficiently deferential to his own his movies.” In fact, quite the op- villain of Mr. Raphael’s piece. It credentials as an intellectual. It posite. I emphasize the films’ mul- also says much that Mr. Raphael has always struck me that bright, tivocality and diversity, but simply published his memoir a mere four educated individuals with a huge wish to add a further voice to the months after Stanley died—cash- array of honors seem to need to cacophony, one that Mr. Raphael ing in?—never giving him the shout the loudest about how bril- raised in his own book about work- chance for a rebuttal. liant they are.

6 Letters : December 2018

Columns.indd 6 11/15/18 11:53 AM Another correction: I do not Stanley during two or three years, I disagreeable,” Mr. Abrams will be refer back to Peter Arno, the New commemorated him with affection familiar with the old playground re- Yorker cartoonist whom Kubrick tinged with amusement, which only tort, “Look who’s talking.” In truth, photographed in 1949, but rather the pious will take for blasphemy. I greatly enjoyed working with suggest that Kubrick’s interest in The last words of the book are “im- Stanley, however taxing and even the subject matter that formed Lo- mortals also die.” Those who knew exasperating it sometimes was, and lita might have had its roots some- Stanley well, and did not have Stan- I look back on it with pride and time earlier. Yes, Kubrick might ley’s wife’s and her brother’s interest amusement. Collaboration with well have not written the caption, in effacing my contribution to Eyes him was a game and a challenge, but I am sure he read it! Wide Shut, found my memoir both as one might expect when faced And in what sense is Chris- convincing and affectionate. I was with what Mr. Abrams, with his tiane K. my “benefactress”? I have glad of the work and proud of my se- instant access to the obvious, calls a received no funding from the Ku- lection, but adaptations of existent “consummate chess player.” Jeremy brick Estate other than access to material are not central to what Mr. Bernstein, who played chess fre- the archive that is available at the Abrams would certainly be quick quently with Stanley, reports that University of the Arts London. Nor to call the vanity of a man who has he reached no better standard than did the bibliography “shun” any- written more than 40 books of fic- that of a good club player. As for the thing: It was trimmed, again, for tion and nonfiction. idea that I “cashed in” on my experi- reasons for length. The allegation that what I ence, I will say only that I am a writ- I do, though, agree entirely reported was unreliable, i.e. false, er and will write about anything with Mr. Raphael. Rather than because there were no witnesses that takes my fancy. If someone waste time on his words, “it would to our exchanges, is as fatuous as chooses to publish it and pay me, so be cheaper, and wiser, to look it is insulting. As it happens, I have much the better. Did James Boswell again, and then again, at Kubrick’s a good memory for conversations “cash in” on his acquaintance with masterpieces.” and locations and I also have the Dr. Johnson? If you say so. Nathan Abrams habit of writing, copiously, in my In his determination to be Bangor, Wales notebooks, of which there are now offensive, Mr. Abrams says that I some 40 manuscript cahiers (thick “didn’t like” him calling S.K. an exercise books), soon after events “intellectual”, because he, Abrams, 1 that excited my interest. I may edit; was “not sufficiently deferential” to I do not fabricate. Seven volumes my “credentials as an intellectual.” have been published; not once has I neither thought nor implied any Frederic Raphael writes: anyone mentioned in their pages, such thing. It requires no high level ATHAN ABRAMS wheels out however unsparingly, complained of intellectual attainment to recog- N the trite charge, so often ad- of being misrepresented. nise Mr. Abrams as a cultural busk- dressed to disobliging critics, that Mr. Abrams is quick to accuse er (for instance, he says that Camus I have not read his book. My five me of “claiming” this or that, with was an “existentialist,” which that pages of typescript notes prove that, the clear suggestion that I am a liar, author expressly denied). To label alas, I trudged through it from cover and then has the nerve to claim Kubrick a “New York Intellectual” to cover. I should be glad to send a that he tried to get in touch with may help to sell a book, but it is a copy to the professor, but I will not me when writing his book. He says false billing, as Jeremy Bernstein bore your readers with the tabu- that I was “repeatedly unavailable.” confirmed to me in a recent letter. lated evidence of his affectations That is a straight lie. I have always As for S.K. “auditing” lectures at of rare insight. Mr. Abrams cannot made myself available to research- Columbia, what he actually did even get his clichés right: For wit- ers on Kubrick, as Michel Ciment, was gate-crash, occasionally, after less example, Peter Sellers is said to Laurent Vachaud, and others will failing to qualify scholastically for have been given “free reign [sic]” as confirm. Since I did not know how formal entry to the college. He was Quilty in Kubrick’s Lolita. bad a writer Mr. Abrams was, at the a self-made genius. Nice work if you To say that Stanley Kubrick time he says he so frequently sought can get it. And that is quite enough “emerges as the sole villain” of my contact with me, I should certainly of that. memoir is ridiculous. There is no have agreed to see or talk to him, villain, but a hero as seen by his had he ever actually asked. 1 valet, so to say. Having worked with As for being “disgruntled and

Commentary 7

Columns.indd 7 11/15/18 11:53 AM SOCIAL COMMENTARY Oppression at $160,000 Per Annum

CHRISTINE ROSEN

N NOVEMBER 1, APPROXIMATELY 20,000 And as the protestors’ demands quickly morphed Google employees in offices from Singapore from specific calls for reform to allegations of “sys- O to San Francisco walked out of their jobs. The temic” racism, sexism, and abuses of power, it became walkout was prompted by a New York Times report clear that the walkout wasn’t the collective action that, despite claims of sexual misconduct, Google of downtrodden workers seeking to right a wrong. gave Android creator Andy Rubin a $90 million sever- Rather, it was the latest iteration of a kind of identity ance package when he left the company in 2014. The politics and grievance-mongering all too common on purpose of the protest, as outlined by its organizers college campuses—only this time it was playing out in New York magazine, was to demand 1) an end to on the campuses of technology companies that have mandatory arbitration in cases involving discrimina- long prided themselves on their supposedly progres- tion and sexual harassment, 2) the commissioning sive values. of a “publicly disclosed sexual-harassment transpar- Unlike workers who strike for better pay or ben- ency report” detailing all of Google’s settlements and efits, Google employees weren’t walking out to protest dismissals related to sexual harassment, 3) a com- oppressive working conditions. That would be diffi- mitment to “end pay inequity,” and 4) employee rep- cult given that the median salary of a Google employee resentation on the company’s board of directors. “All is $161,000 plus benefits; it is the best-paying large employees and contract workers across the company company in the U.S., according to Business Insider. deserve to be safe,” the organizers wrote. This is probably why walkout organizers took pains Given the breathless treatment of the walkout to align their cause with that of workers who make a by the press, you would think this was a historic lot less than they do. “This is part of a growing move- moment in labor relations akin to the large-scale ment, not just in tech, but across the country, includ- steelworkers’ or textile workers’ strikes of previous ing teachers, fast-food workers, and others who are centuries. Left unmentioned was the fact that the vast using their strength in numbers to make real change,” majority of Google employees (approximately 7 out of walkout organizers claimed in a press release. It’s 10) chose not to participate in the walkout. also why Senator Elizabeth Warren used the walkout as an opportunity to promote legislation that would Christine Rosen is managing editor of the Weekly encourage greater federal-government meddling in Standard. the free market. “I stand with those calling for an end

8 December 2018

Columns.indd 8 11/15/18 11:53 AM to sexual harassment & discrimination @Google,” Google controls 75 percent of online search and 90 Warren tweeted. “My Accountable Capitalism Act percent of search on mobile devices, to say nothing of would answer 1 of their demands by letting workers its 42 percent share of online advertising and other at big companies choose 40% of their Board members, products. Like its Big Tech peers Facebook and Ama- giving them a real seat at the table. #GoogleWalkout.” zon, Google aggressively buys out smaller competi- But this is no working-class revolt. Google tors, and in 2017 it spent more on lobbying lawmakers employees might have initially walked out because than any other company in the country. Employees of dissatisfaction with sexual-harassment policies no doubt knew this when they accepted jobs there. at the company, but they quickly It’s not a company you work for if moved to denounce Google as an you’re a fan of the little guy. all-purpose oppressor. As Forbes Google controls Which makes these employ- reported, workers at the walkout 75 percent of online ees’ newfound class consciousness in San Francisco chanted, “Time’s search and 90 percent somewhat risible. Lobbying for up on sexual harassment, time’s up changes to specific company ha- on abuse of power, time’s up on sys- of search on mobile rassment policies and procedures is temic racism, enough is enough.” devices, to say nothing one thing; positioning themselves Google CEO Sundar Pinchai as modern working-class heroes responded quickly to the protests of its 42 percent share of and progressive leaders is less per- with apologies and a “comprehen- online advertising and suasive, especially given the narrow sive action plan” that included other products. Like its range of what passes for accept- an end to mandatory arbitration, able progressive beliefs in the tech “more granularity” regarding sexu- Big Tech peers Facebook world these days (remember James al-harassment investigations, and and Amazon, Google Damore?) an expansion of sexual-harassment The Google Walkout for Real training. In typically banal corpo- aggressively buys out Change, as it is now styling it- rate diversity-speak, he also com- smaller competitors, and self, promises more ideological fire mitted to “creating a more inclu- drills on tech campuses in the fu- sive culture for everyone.” in 2017 it spent more on ture. “If we want to end sexual ha- Walkout organizers weren’t lobbying lawmakers than rassment in the workplace, we must assuaged, and they weren’t satis- any other company in fix these structural imbalances of fied with specific remedies re- power. This is a global movement, garding sexual harassment. “The the country. Employees and the beginning of our continued company must address issues of no doubt knew this when work, not the end,” walkout orga- systemic racism and discrimina- nizers wrote. tion, including pay equity and rates they accepted jobs there. And it’s likely to spread be- of promotion, and not just sexual It’s not a company you yond Google. As the 2018 Deloitte harassment alone,” they wrote in work for if you’re a fan Millennial Survey found, “millen- a Medium post responding to nials—and now Gen Z—are acutely Pinchai’s proposed policy changes. of the little guy. attuned to business’ wider role in They complained that Google’s society, and overwhelmingly feel response “troublingly erased” the demands that fo- that business success should be measured beyond cused on “racism, discrimination, and the structural financial performance.” The survey found that “three- inequity built into the modern day Jim Crow class quarters of millennials believe multinational corpora- system that separates ‘full time’ employees from tions have the potential to help solve society’s eco- contract workers.” They said that “these forms of nomic, environmental, and social challenges.” marginalization function together to police access to In other words, forget bread and roses. Today’s power and resources.” As organizer Stephanie Parker young workers—such as Google’s privileged tech em- argued, “they all have the same root cause, which is a ployees—want global businesses (rather than demo- concentration of power and a lack of accountability cratically elected officials or faith communities or at the top.” individual citizens) to enact social change. Like their Complaints about concentrations of power are peers on campus, they protest in the name of justice. a bit rich coming from Google employees, since the Unfortunately, what they’re demanding looks a lot concentration of power is Google’s business model. more like ideological conformity.q

Commentary 9

Columns.indd 9 11/15/18 12:44 PM WASHINGTON COMMENTARY Paul Ryan and the Boys of ’94

ANDREW FERGUSON

OU SEE THEM attacking their rib eyes with all 50 states a national standard for—can you guess?— entrenching tools at the Palm or leaning drunk driving. By twos and threes and fours, the revo- Y back in the plump, upholstered banquettes lutionaries left Congress, but not Washington. A large at the Capital Grille—faded figures but well-fed, a number hired on as the lobbyists and special pleaders, look of dreamy contentment about them, heads care- the swamp creatures, they had campaigned against. fully coiffed, faces tanned and rounded, and giving off, It’s hard to imagine Paul Ryan, the soon to be ex- through the Italian silk of their bespoke pinstripes, the speaker of the House, living out his years as a swamp faintest whiff of swamp gas. These are the Boys of ’94. creature. His retirement from Congress, of course, was They came to Washington 24 years ago with the self-imposed. His continuing popularity back home in Gingrich Revolution, retaking the House of Represen- Wisconsin’s first congressional district was affirmed tatives for the Republican Party for the first time in 40 when a hand-picked protégé was easily elected to fill years. Their famous Contract with America bristled his seat. He leaves under his own steam, but no one with small-government idealism and contempt for quite trusts the reason he gives for his departure, for deficit spending, social engineering, crony capitalism, how often does an ambitious professional politician at and the manipulation of the powers of the state on the peak of his career suddenly realize he has a family behalf of monied interests. The Class of ’94 was prom- he wants to spend more time with? The most common ising something that seemed impossible for public ser- assumption is that Ryan has simply given up on life vants to ask of themselves. They were seizing power for in Donald Trump’s GOP, whose style, interests, and the purpose of giving it away, returning it to the states political direction are so different from his own. and localities and to the people themselves. There must be truth here. Ryan is quiet, boyish, And indeed, it proved impossible. “Discretionary intellectually curious. Increasingly he has been sur- spending”—the part of the federal budget Congress ac- rounded by colleagues who, chimp-like, bound after tually controls—did fall that first year of the revolution, a loud, boorish, incurious leader in the White House. but it went up the next and continued to climb faster But here as in other matters, political observers in than inflation. Not a single agency or department was Washington reflexively give Trump too much credit eliminated, and the hymns to decentralized power fell (or blame). There are planetary orbits beyond the silent at last when the Republican Congress imposed on president’s gravitational field. The fact is that long before Trump rode his golden escalator to the presi- Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of the Weekly dency, Ryan and the conservative movement of which Standard and the author of Land of Lincoln and he was the purest expression were already exhausted, Crazy U. finished, kaput, intellectually and politically.

10 December 2018

Columns.indd 10 11/15/18 12:48 PM Only 48, Ryan seems a man from a different era. do you mobilize a mass of individualists? Ryan tried His early hero was Jack Kemp, for whom he went to with what was first called the Roadmap for America’s work straight out of college. Kemp was an exemplar Future and later the Path to Prosperity (that’s some of Reagan-era conservatism. He was positively, indeed marketing right there). annoyingly, giddy about the power of free markets to Ryan’s platform showed another conservative- unleash human potential—regardless, as Major T.J. movement weakness: a taste for totalism. It did every- Kong put it in Dr. Strangelove, “of yer race, yer color, thing all at once. Social Security privatization was in or yer creed.” Kemp insisted that an expansive, upbeat there, slightly attenuated, along with top-to-bottom conservative movement offered the way out of the reworkings of every aspect of the welfare state, from bleak cul-de-sac into which the bankers and accoun- Medicaid and Medicare to job training and the tax tants of the Republican establishment had led the code. Most important, all this energetic reform would party during the 1960s and ’70s. With the same visions be undertaken in the service not merely of fiscal re- dancing in his head, Ryan ran for Congress the first sponsibility but of republican virtue. “It restores an chance he got, in 1998, and won at the tender age of 28. American character,” read one of the documents, dot- Ryan quickly established himself among move- ted with capital letters like an 18th-century pamphlet, ment conservatives as the party’s leading man of “rooted in individual initiative, entrepreneurship, and ideas—meaning that he grazed the think tanks and opportunity—qualities that make each American’s issued wonkish white papers on abstruse subjects. It pursuit of personal destiny a net contribution to the took a while for the man to meet his moment. By the Nation’s common good as well. In short, it is built on end of Ryan’s first term, the Republican ideology du the enduring truths from which America’s Founders jour involved the pro-government, “market-oriented” established this great and exceptional Nation.” concoctions of George W. Bush’s compassionate con- The Path to the Roadmap—or was it the other servatism, which was conceived as a replacement way around?—horrified Democrats and the political for the fading Gingrich Revolution. The signature press corps and made the public uneasy. It dazzled achievement of comp-con was a giant hairball of feder- Washington conservatives, however. The freelance al mandates aimed at the nation’s public schools called man of ideas was elevated to the House Budget Com- No Child Left Behind. Within a couple years, teachers, mittee, then to chairman of the Ways and Means academics, parents, local officials, and students had Committee, and finally to the speaker’s chair, a job he rendered a unanimous judgment. They hated No Child sincerely said he didn’t want and whose chief duties Left Behind. Also, it didn’t work. —fundraising and corralling congressmen—he wasn’t The party’s leading man of ideas stepped up with suited for. (Along the way he had a three-month pe- an alternative idea to rally round: allowing taxpayers riod during which he was his party’s nominee for vice to place some of their Social Security moneys in a pri- president.) His great achievement as speaker was last vate individual account to manage as they saw fit. It year’s tax reform, which for all its virtues will take the was a twofer. Partial privatization would enlarge per- federal government’s debt to levels undreamed of by sonal liberty, Ryan argued, and reduce the cost of an the young conservatives who once railed against the already overextended program. Social Security reform profligacy of Democrats. would have been a great blow against statism, in the- The Washington press presented Ryan first as a ory, except it would probably have been unworkable whiz kid, then as a purist, then as a villain, and now in practice, owing to political and actuarial realities. as a tragic figure—another victim of Trump’s brutality. Even so, with his own bag of big ideas depleted, Bush In fact, Ryan’s career is part of a train that extends embraced a milder version of the ideas man’s idea in back in time to a point long before Trump, past even 2005 and even hit the road to promote it. Republicans the Boys of ’94. There’s a reason so many onetime got creamed in the next midterm election. There were conservative idealists have found a home at the Palm lots of reasons, among them the public’s horror at the and the Capital Grille. They discovered there was no thought of a reformed Social Security system. percentage in foisting the rigors and parsimony of Ryan believed that Bush’s inability to sell partial small government and enlarged freedom on a resis- privatization to the public was a failure of marketing. tant public. Why not join the Washington game if you The rise of Barack Obama gave Ryan the chance to as- can’t beat it? I doubt that Paul Ryan, an intelligent and semble a platform of policies attacking the corruptions honorable man, will join them in the banquettes. On of statism on every front. The conservative movement the other hand, I’m not sure I’d blame him if he did. has always quivered with tensions and weaknesses. It’s nice work if you can get it, and he’s tried his best. After all, there’s one built into the very phrase: How And the rib eyes are awesome. q

Commentary 11

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Columns.indd 12 11/15/18 11:53 AM SeptemberNovember 2018 Cover.indd 42 10/15/188/14/18 1:44 1:32 PM PM Columns.indd 1 2/16/18 12:41 PM ‘May God Avenge Their Blood’ HOW TO REMEMBER THE MURDERED IN PITTSBURGH BY MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK

Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way as ye came forth out of Egypt; how he met thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, all that were enfeebled in thy rear, when thou wast faint and weary; and he feared not God. — Deuteronomy 25 And the LORD said unto Moses: “Write this for a memorial in the book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.”

And Moses built an altar, and called the name of it “God is my battle-standard [Adonai nissi].” And he said: ‘The hand upon the throne of the LORD: the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation. — Exodus 17

S THE NAMES OF THE JEWS murdered in Pittsburgh were released, many of their co-religionists, responding online to this unthinkable occurrence, looked to Jewish tradition and parlance. “Zi- chronam Livracha,” some of them typed. “May their memories be a blessing.” That is indeed the A phrase usually utilized to mark the passing of a Jew, and it was heartfelt. But it was also, in this con- Meir Y. Soloveichik, who writes our Jewish Commentary column, is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Is- rael in New York City and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/Getty Images SMIALOWSKI/Getty BRENDAN Commentary 13

Soloveichik.indd 13 11/15/18 11:55 AM text, insufficient and therefore inappropriate. When Israel because in their hatred for the Chosen people, Jews are murdered because they are Jews—by a Nazi they attacked the weak, the stragglers, the helpless, in Auschwitz, by a terrorist in Netanya, or by an anti- those who posed no threat to them in any way. Simi- Semite in Pittsburgh—then the traditional phrase we larly, many among the dead in Pittsburgh were elderly use is different, and starker. or disabled; the murderer smote “all that were en- Hashem Yikom Damam, we say. feebled,” and he “feared not God.” Amalek, for Jewish May God avenge their blood. The phrase draws tradition, embodies evil incarnate in the world; we are on several biblical verses, paralleling the 13th-century commanded to remember Amalek, and the Almighty’s prayer known as Av HaRachamim, which, com- enmity for it, because, as Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik memorating those murdered in the Crusades, cites explained, the biblical appellation refers not only to the Psalms: one tribe but also to our enemies throughout the ages who will follow the original Amalek’s example. To Why should the nations say, “Where is their say Hashem Yikom damam is to remind all who hear God?” us that there is a war against Amalek from generation Let it be known among the nations in our to generation—and we believe that, in this war, God is sight not neutral. that You avenge the spilled blood of Your It is therefore inappropriate to servants. merely say “may their memories be a And it says: “For He who exacts retribution for blessing.” We must treat these kinds of spilled blood remembers them. murders differently from most deaths; to He does not forget the cry of the humble.” do otherwise is to ignore Jewish life, Jew- ish tradition, and the Jewish historical Prayers such as these illustrate something fun- experience. In her Atlantic article “The damental about Judaism. Memory is central to Jewish Jews of Pittsburgh Bury Their Dead,” life; that is why we pray after any death that the one Emma Green describes the process of who has passed should be remembered. Yet when it tahara, the ritual of washing dead bod- comes to murdered Jews, our recollection of how they ies before burial, as well as the society died must be joined forever with a prayer for divine known as the chevra kadisha, the “sacred vengeance. colleagues,” members of the Jewish com- Why is this so? munity who answer the call to bury our The saying reflects the fact that when it comes to brethren, as emotionally searing as it mass murderers, Jews do not believe that we must love may be. She writes: the sinner while hating the sin; in the face of egregious evil, we will not say the words ascribed to Jesus on the When one person dies, members of cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what the Jewish community often step in to they do.” We believe that a man who shoots up a syna- care for the body and the family. When gogue knows well what he does; that a murderer who 11 people die, the whole community sheds the blood of helpless elderly men and women becomes part of the mourning process. The knows exactly what he does; that one who brings logistics are complicated. Eleven bodies have death to those engaged in celebrating new life knows to be accompanied, washed, and buried. precisely what he does. To forgive in this context is to Eleven funerals have to be planned. Families absolve; and it is, for Jews, morally unthinkable. move into an intensive period of mourning, But the mantra for murdered Jews that is called shiva, that lasts for up to seven days Hashem Yikom damam bears a deeper message. It after the burial. is a reminder to us to see the slaughter of 11 Jews in Pennsylvania not only as one terrible, tragic mo- Green’s description is beautiful and her intent ment in time, but as part of the story of our people, admirable, but the picture she paints is incomplete. who from the very beginning have had enemies that “If an Israelite is found slain,” we are informed by the sought our destruction. There exists an eerie parallel Shulhan Arukh, the Jewish code of law, “they bury between Amalek, the tribe of desert marauders that him as they found him, without shrouds, and they do assaulted Israel immediately after the Exodus, and not even remove his shoes.” As the Pittsburgh rabbi the Pittsburgh murderer. The Amalekites are singled heading the chevra kadisha told Tablet, “if the bodies out by the Bible from among the enemies of ancient are being buried in their original condition, then there

14 ‘May God Avenge Their Blood’ : December 2018

Soloveichik.indd 14 11/15/18 12:44 PM is no tahara.” Rather, he said, “they are buried in the For Jews in America, thank God, the world of clothes in which they died.” If we are able, if autop- the auto-da-fé does not exist, and rarely have Jews sies do not intervene, we bury murdered Jews in the been safer in their history than they are at this mo- clothes soaked in their blood that was shed. ment. But Amalek has not been defeated. When the The intent, in part, is to highlight the fact that news from Pittsburgh broke, Jewish and Gentile they died because they were Jews, and to inspire con- Americans alike invoked George Washington’s words stant recollection of their murder, to inspire eternal to the Jews of Newport: “May the children of the outrage, on the part of the Jewish people—and on stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to the part of God himself. To mark the memory of the merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabit- murdered as a blessing, without speaking of just and ants—while every one shall sit in safety under his righteous vengeance, is to treat them as anyone else own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make who may have died; it is to forget the fact that they him afraid.” died before their time and that their lives were cruelly Washington loved the phrase “under his own cut short solely because of the people and faith to vine and fig tree.” It is from the Hebrew Bible, and he which they belonged. used it often. The fact that this country’s first presi-

TO MARK THE MEMORY of the murdered as a blessing, without speaking of just and righteous vengeance, is to treat them as anyone else who may have died; it is to forget the fact that they died before their time and that their lives were cruelly cut short solely because of the people and faith to which they belonged.

T IS WITH THIS IN MIND that we must mourn dent applied imagery from a Jewish text to the people the murdered Jews of Pittsburgh—by treating whose ancestors wrote those words tells us a great their murder as an act of evil that is an Amalekite deal about the blessed home that Jews found, and Iexample in our age. As my own community, the Span- continue to find, here in America. Yet the context of ish and Portuguese Synagogue of New York, prepared the quote, from the prophet Micah, reminds us that to memorialize those slaughtered in the attack, it was we do not yet live in an age where nothing can make suggested to me that we utilize the text of a medieval us afraid: memorial prayer said by Sephardic Jews on behalf of those who died in the Inquisition’s auto-da-fé. Thus, But in the end of days it shall come to pass, one week after Pittsburgh, we used words written to that the mountain of the LORD’S house shall remember Jews burned alive in Toledo 500 years ago be established as the top of the mountains, to mourn the deaths of Jews shot to death in Pitts- and it shall be exalted above the hills; and burgh, Pennsylvania, in the 21st century. We thereby peoples shall flow unto it. And many nations connected recent deaths of Jews to Amalek’s assaults shall go and say: “Come ye, and let us go up to throughout history—from the desert after the Exodus, the mountain of the LORD, and to the house to Torquemada, to today. of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of

Commentary 15

Soloveichik.indd 15 11/15/18 12:45 PM His ways, and we will walk in His paths”; the United Nations—while inside the building, dicta- for out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and tors and modern Amalekites are welcomed to inveigh the word of the LORD from Jerusalem…and from the podium. Evil still exists, and as long as it they shall beat their swords into plowshares, does, the Lord is still at war—from generation to and their spears into pruning hooks; nation generation. shall not lift up sword against nation, neither We know, and we pray, that the memory of those shall they learn war any more. But they shall 11 murdered will be a blessing. The eulogies described sit every man under his vine and under his remarkable human beings who were dedicated to fig-tree; and none shall make them afraid; for their people, and to their neighbors. And we must the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken. remember their deaths in an exceptional fashion, never forgetting that they were murdered because— The world Micah describes is not yet upon us. and only because—they were Jews. This fact will be Peace does not reign on earth, and the nations of the forever on our minds, and on our lips, whenever we world have not all celebrated the Jewish connection make mention of Daniel Stein, Joyce Feinberg, Rich- to God, to the Torah, to Jerusalem. Nothing could il- ard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil lustrate this better than the fact that Micah’s words, Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan paralleled in Isaiah, predicting an age when swords Simon, Melvin Wax, and Irving Younger. are beaten into plowshares, grace the wall outside Hashem Yikom Damam.q

16 ‘May God Avenge Their Blood’ : December 2018

Soloveichik.indd 16 11/15/18 11:55 AM The Know-Nothing Excommunicators How the massacre brought out the worst in some liberal Jews By Seth Mandel

ERHAPS WE SHOULD call it “Spi- slaughtered.” Bowers then, according to police, burst noza’s Revenge.” into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue and shot dead In 1656, Amsterdam’s Jewish 11 worshipers. His social-media presence appears to leaders pronounced a cherem—ex- have been saturated with anti-Semitic conspiracy communication—on Baruch Spino- theories and neo-Nazi refrains. He reserved special an- za, the Jewish philosopher who con- ger for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the storied tested the Torah’s divine provenance. refugee agency, because it was a symbol of what he and Spinoza became the founding father of secular Jewry others believe to be the Jewish drive to flood the white on the Peve of the Enlightenment. In a twist, the drive blood out of America. to excommunicate dissenters is now led by many who The fact that President Donald Trump was ac- would consider themselves Spinoza’s heirs. From the cused of inciting the violence was unsurprising; pens and pulpits of the American Jewish left come the Trump is accused, fairly and unfairly, of responsibil- writs of cherem for those with unacceptable political ity for every extraordinary action in America. But opinions. what happened next was a genuinely ugly moment for This wave of McCarthyism didn’t start with the American Jewry, one that may have done lasting dam- Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, but that is where age to a Diaspora community already prone to division we shall begin. On the morning of October 27, Rob- and atomization. Like the Lords of the Ma’Amad in ert Bowers took to the social-media service Gab and Amsterdam nearly four centuries ago, the declaration announced: “I can’t sit by and watch my people get of excommunication went out. In the words of the At- lantic’s Franklin Foer: “Any strategy for enhancing the Seth Mandel is the editor of the Washington Exam- security of American Jewry should involve shunning iner Magazine and a former editor at Commentary. Trump’s Jewish enablers. Their money should be re- His piece “The Shame of the Anti-Defamation League” fused, their presence in synagogues not welcome. They appeared in our November issue. have placed their community in danger.”

Commentary 17

MANDEL.indd 17 11/15/18 11:56 AM The sentiment was echoed by GQ’s Julia Ioffe. tion for his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. In his “A word to my fellow American Jews: This president declaration of cherem, Foer named Adelson and Jared makes this possible. Here. Where you live. I hope the Kushner, as well as former top Trump economic ad- embassy move over there, where you don’t live was viser Gary Cohn, whose great evil was that he had not worth it,” she tweeted. quit in protest of the president’s atrocious response to American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris, the Charlottesville neo-Nazi march in 2017. shocked at what appeared to be a celebrated Jewish Cohn and Kushner were targets of a Washing- journalist accusing pro-Israel Americans of complic- ton Post column by Dana Milbank, who likened them ity in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, to “court Jews,” whose historic role was “to please the asked Ioffe to clarify: “Let me see if I get this right. As king, to placate the king, to loan money to the king.” He a nonpartisan Jewish group, can we support the em- might “beg the king for leniency toward the Jews, but, bassy transfer, Nikki Haley’s voice at the UN & doubts ultimately, his loyalty was to the king.” about the Iran nuke deal w/out being labeled enablers Ioffe’s attack on the AJC, meanwhile, echoed of anti-Semitism, or must everything this White House one from Rabbi Jacobs in the Washington Post in No- does be declared dead on arrival?” vember 2016. Groups that indicated they were open Ioffe’s response to Harris was to implicate the to working with Trump once he took office—among AJC in the tragedy: “As the head of your group, you de- those referenced were the AJC and AIPAC—were, Ja- cide, not me. It’s on your conscience, not mine.” cobs wrote, acting the part of the “Court Jew.” Such Jill Jacobs, a Conservative rabbi and left-wing people had succumbed to greed, willing to “sell out” activist, took to Twitter to endorse Foer’s cherem pro- their values “in the name of one-off successes.” Jacobs nouncement. So did Chris Edelson, an American Uni- even invoked the memory of the late Abraham Joshua versity professor and presidential historian. George- Heschel to designate her fellow Jews as collaborators town law professor Marty Lederman praised Foer for with evil. his “appropriate fury and moral clarity.” Michael Ka- There is one fact of life in 2018 that complicates zin, an editor at Dissent magazine, called it “beautiful this narrative of the pusillanimous Jew appealing to and necessary.” the supposed tyrant in the hopes of staving off anni- If this were an overheated emotional response, hilation or penury: the existence of the state of Israel. it would be no less ghastly but perhaps more under- But liberal Judaism’s pulpiteers have a ready-made re- standable. But it isn’t. The cherem impulse is not an sponse: Israel’s the problem. Two versions of this pre- aberration born of grief, and it represents both a cor- dominate: one, that Israel’s strength has deceived Jews ruption of liberal Jewish institutions and a poison in into weakening their position in America; two, that Is- the bloodstream of Diaspora Jewry. raeli policies are to blame for the bloodshed. Naming, shaming, and ostracizing specific “Dear @netanyahu,” Jacobs tweeted two days prominent Jews has been a regular feature of politi- after the Pittsburgh massacre, “please stop embracing cal commentary for as long as there has been political dangerous autocrats. If the last few millennia didn’t commentary. Over the past few months, liberals have teach you that such leaders are bad for the Jews, this past Shabbat would have.” Former Anti-Defamation League The cherem impulse represents official Harry Reis was more explicit. both a corruption of liberal Jewish In his telling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Knesset Minister institutions and a poison in the Naftali Bennett, Ambassador to Wash- ington Ron Dermer, and U.S. Ambas- bloodstream of Diaspora Jewry. sador to Israel David Friedman “are enablers and defenders of @realDon- been aghast at the Trumpian attacks on George So- aldTrump’s hate and the white supremacists who sup- ros, the Holocaust survivor and major left-wing donor port him.” and activist. But they think nothing of directing their The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson took the next own ugliness at Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish casino logical step in this progression and—ironically, en- magnate and Republican donor. Long reviled for his dorsing a key neo-Nazi talking point—proclaimed: support for Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Ne- “The bizarre and terrifying nexus between Israel and tanyahu, Adelson became the focus of an obsessive white nationalism actually starts to make sense when dog-whistling campaign by the Obama administra- you understand the ethno-nationalist literature. Ex-

18 ‘The Know-Nothing Excommunicators : December 2018

MANDEL.indd 18 11/15/18 11:56 AM treme right Zionists and anti-Semitic white national- religion that equates what we can do with what we ists have the same core beliefs.” should do. Nor does it take isolation lightly. We are Liberals have thus unwittingly been reprising warned in Pirkei Avot: “Do not separate yourself from the old “Zionism equals racism” calumny with the 2018 the community.” version: Zionism is borderline Nazism. In a Facebook But of course the religion we’re talking about advertisement for a Boston rally for the week’s victims isn’t Judaism, is it? It’s progressivism—the Torah of of “white supremacy, antisemitism, and na- tionalism,” organized The manipulation of Jewish theology to settle by the local chapters political scores is not limited to what one is of Workmen’s Circle, IfNotNow, and Jew- permitted to do or where one is permitted to ish Voice for Peace, the list of victims of go. It also covers permissible thoughts. the Pittsburgh mas- sacre was followed by the names of three Palestinians Liberalism. In leftist politics, isolation is the first, not killed by Israeli self-defense strikes in Gaza. “May their the last, line of defense against upsetting ideas. What memories be for a blessing,” ends the post. we’re seeing more and more is the blurring of the two. So there you have it: The Jews are the authors Jewish clergy and officials at Jewish organizations in- of their own destruction, supporters of Israel are dis- voke God in the name of partisan squabbles. It’s why, loyal Americans, Zionism is a first cousin to Nazism, after Charlottesville, liberal Jewish groups like the right-wing Jews are Nazi collaborators, and Trump- Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Re- supporting Jews should be expurgated from Jewish constructionist Rabbinical Association announced communal life. that they would cancel their annual High Holy Days Why are they fixated on excommunication? And call with the president. Counsel and reconciliation why is it so important to reject this particular abuse of are pillars of Jewish High Holy Day preparation, but communal self-policing? these groups answer to a higher authority, apparently. Regarding the first question, there is a great iro- The Central Conference also boycotted the previous ny here: Liberal laymen and clergy are deploying one year’s Chanukah party organized by the Conference of of the most heavy-handed rabbinical retributive pow- Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations— ers on the menu. Indeed, they are playing with spiri- whose very raison d’être is channeling the American tual fire. According to Jewish law, one infraction that Jewish community’s fractious instincts into some sem- earns you excommunication is the act of inappropri- blance of a unified spirit—because it was being held at ately excommunicating someone. a Trump hotel. A Talmudic story illustrates this. Rabbi Eliezer The manipulation of Jewish theology to settle is arguing with his fellow sages about the purity status political scores is not limited to what one is permitted of a vessel. He is outnumbered but persists and calls to do or where one is permitted to go. It also covers forth several supernatural acts—such as declaring that permissible thoughts. As Karol Markowicz observed if he is correct, the nearby stream will flow backwards, at National Review: “After every horrible mass shoot- which it then promptly does—to prove his case. The ing, when we should be mourning together, looking for other sages are unmoved. They rebuke Rabbi Eliezer solutions to stop future attacks, consoling the families for abandoning argument in favor of the supernatu- of the victims, there’s an immediate rush to make sure ral and for ignoring the majority opinion. The sages conservatives know they do not belong to that wider decide to excommunicate Rabbi Eliezer. Rabbi Akiva, American community feeling the pain. Worse, there’s a delivering the bad news to Rabbi Eliezer, is dressed in constant allusion to the fact that those on the right are black, as if in mourning—or even, some commentaries responsible for the slaughter. Republicans spend the say, to make it seem as if the sages have put themselves time following these attacks not in mourning like they in separation. One of the other sages was traveling on a should be but beating back the sickening idea that they boat that nearly capsized; the waves abated only when inspired the shooter.” the sage appealed to God. This is revolting enough in a political context. The upshot: the sages may have been within But Foer, Ioffe, Jacobs, and their acolytes have found their rights to excommunicate Rabbi Eliezer, but they a particularly repulsive use for it: interrupting Jewish incurred God’s wrath for doing so. Judaism is not a mourning. You would think rabbis would know and

Commentary 19

MANDEL.indd 19 11/15/18 11:56 AM respect the primal sacredness of Jewish mourning. To world” power structures. “In a pre-emancipated so- violate a Jew’s attempt to accompany and honor the ciety, the herem affected every part of an individual’s dead, and the attendant spirit of communal integrity, life, since the central Jewish authorities controlled ev- is inexplicably cruel—both to the mourner and to the ery aspect of community life—social, economic, and mourned. spiritual,” Silver wrote. Excommunication was, then, Such is the totalitarian suffocation of left-wing “an attempt to regain control of New York’s Jews.” It politics in 2018. Which brings us to why the cherem was an affront to a Jewish community reeling from the impulse must be rejected unequivocally: The rea- Holocaust and to the American ideals of free thought son speaks directly to the type of society we want the and free worship. America of the future to be. The Jewish Theological Seminary refused to fire In June 1945, the Agudat HaRabbanim, an Or- Kaplan, despite its numerous objections to his schol- thodox group in New York, issued a formal declaration arship. “I spent my entire career trying to ensure the of cherem against Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan of the Jew- Seminary’s academic respectability in the American ish Theological Seminary, the founder of Reconstruc- academic world. All I had to do was declare one teach- tionism. His textual deviations were deemed too radi- er that I disagreed with and fire him, and I would have cal even for Conservative Judaism. The cherem failed ruined the seminary’s reputation forever,” JTS Presi- to take hold in the Jewish community, and that failure, dent Louis Finkelstein later recalled. wrote Zachary Silver in the American Jewish Archives This is the question before us: Will the American Journal in 2010, marked “a watershed moment for a Jewish community permit the hijacking of its faith by wider Jewish community, coming out of wartime and the sheerly political? Proclaiming such actions at odds wrestling anew with the meaning of democracy and both with the country and with the faith they knew, freedom in America.” American Jews rejected fanatical suppression in the In postwar America, the cherem smacked of “old past. We must do so again.q

20 The Know-Nothing Excommunicators : December 2018

MANDEL.indd 20 11/15/18 11:56 AM The Social-Justice Injustice What Brett Kavanaugh’s trial by fire was really all about By Noah Rothman

HE NATIONAL UPROAR THAT supposed to tip the scales against Kavanaugh in a rose against Judge Brett Kavana- process that Democrats, discomfited by their roles as ugh following Christine Blasey mock criminal prosecutors, took to describing as a Ford’s allegations of sexual assault “job interview.” decades earlier was a travesty of From the start, the lack of hard evidence in the justice—in large measure because case presented a problem. How could anyone arbi- justice was never really the issue. trate the competing claims of Ford and Kavanaugh The uproar was not about righting a past wrong. It when claims were all there were? The solution seized was designedT to influence a political body that was by some of those who wanted the charge to stick was in the middle of making a political decision. It was to use their own personal experiences as a peculiar form of supporting circumstantial evidence. In a pow- Noah Rothman is associate editor of Commen- erful essay entitled “I Believe Her,” the Atlantic’s Cait- tary. His first book, Unjust: Social Justice and the lin Flanagan revealed the occasion on which she, too, Un-Making of America, will come out in January from had been assaulted as a young girl in high school. CNN Regnery. political contributor Symone Sanders confessed that

Commentary 21

Rothman.indd 21 11/15/18 11:57 AM The social-justice left has embraced concepts that an earlier generation of civil-rights activists fervently opposed: racial hierarchies and genetic determinism.

she had also been the victim of a sexual assault in col- The redefinition of classical civil-rights issues lege—and because of what had happened to her, she has swept through the left like a twister. “The legal argued, “there is no debate” about Kavanaugh’s guilt. gains on which the ACLU rests its colorblind logic Something snapped in the media psyche. A tor- have never secured real freedom or even safety for rent of influential reporters, columnists, politicians, all,” wrote UCLA Critical Race Studies Fellow K-Sue and celebrities began exposing their most cherished Park of the American Civil Liberties Union in the wake belief systems to the public. They turned a political of the traumatic 2017 confrontation between white melodrama into a morality play. Those who jeered nationalists and counterdemonstrators in Charlottes- at Kavanaugh were certain that he was guilty not ville. Two years earlier, Park’s employer, the University because of Ford’s account; rather, they knew because of California system, defined the phrase “when I look of his physical, familial, and genetic features. He was at you, I don’t see color” as one of several “microag- “white,” “male,” “angry,” “rich,” or some combination gressions” that perpetuate “the myth of meritocracy.” of these characteristics. In a Washington Post op-ed, Northwestern Uni- They believed these traits undermined the le- versity president Morton Schapiro argued that reseg- gitimacy of his efforts to defend himself from career- regating his school’s lunch counters by race was a way killing accusations of violent misconduct. And they of liberating his students from “uncomfortable learn- were shocked beyond measure when their certitude ing.” Film and television productions are attacked did not carry the day. When did it become acceptable for casting actors who “steal” the experiences of the for a critical mass of influential and respected figures characters they are playing if they don’t exhibit those to express the kind of unenlightened chauvinism we character’s traits in real life. Literary institutions such associate with prejudice as openly as the anti-Kava- as Kirkus Reviews have found themselves compelled naugh chorus did? How did the choristers know there to assign reviewers to works only if those reviewers would be no repercussions for them if they did so? At share the protagonist’s identity. In the name of prog- what point did a popular culture obsessed with stig- ress, benign ghettoization is making a comeback. matizing monoculturalism adopt a form of it—against white males—to try to take down a Supreme Court OR THE SOCIAL-JUSTICE LEFT, Brett Kava- nominee? naugh represented a dominant demographic The answer can be found in the way modern F group, and he was therefore due a comeup- social-justice activism works in tandem with the pance for that reason alone. To those for whom Kava- identity politics that forms its foundational ethos. In naugh’s guilt was a foregone conclusion, not only was my forthcoming book on the subject, Unjust: Social the presumption of innocence an overly charitable Justice and the Un-Making of America, I explore the dispensation; so, too, was the notion that he should be vindictive philosophy to which Brett Kavanaugh allowed to defend himself. At the very least, his most was served up as a sacrifice. Social justice is an ethos fervent critics appeared to suggest, Kavanaugh should dedicated to subjective definitions of equality and have had the decency to let the allegations against him egalitarianism as they relate to class, race, and sex, stand, as a courtesy to his accuser and those like her. and it embraces collective retribution to achieve its To Quartz’s Ephrat Livni, Kavanaugh wasn’t goals. On its face, the definition of “social justice” is entitled to “any process” whatsoever. Benjamin Wittes not antithetical to fundamentally American notions of of the Brookings Institution argued that “Kavanaugh fairness, recompense for the genuinely aggrieved, and cannot blame or attack or seek to discredit a woman societal reconciliation. Today, though, the doctrine’s who purports to have suffered a sexual-assault at his adherents are less interested in rapprochement than hands.” If he did, he’d be no better than Harvey Wein- revenge. The social-justice left has embraced concepts stein, smearing his victims in a final, flailing effort to that an earlier generation of civil-rights activists save himself. Yahoo’s Matt Bai said Kavanaugh “makes fervently opposed: racial hierarchies and genetic de- a victim of [Ford] all over again by essentially calling terminism. her delusional.” As a service to the #MeToo moment’s

22 The Social-Justice Injustice : December 2018

Rothman.indd 22 11/15/18 11:57 AM Alleged victims of sex-related offenses deserve a fair hearing. They do not, however, have a right to the kind of reflexive deference that would deprive the accused of their rights.

reckoning with the abusive men hiding in plain sight, powerful men from the consequences of their abusive Bai suggested that Kavanaugh should at least allow actions. But the long-overdue social, professional, and for the possibility that he was guilty of a sex crime. Bai criminal penalties meted out amid this great social even drafted a confession for the judge. awakening were the result of overwhelming evidence This is a natural outgrowth of an idea popular- implicating the guilty parties—not mere assertions. ized by the left’s social-justice enthusiasts even before The presumption that America not only over- the movement sparked by Weinstein’s outing: “the looks but condones sexual violence against women right to be believed.” According to this, those people has given rise to a set of assumptions that undermines who are part of a victimized class in America deserve the conduct of impartial justice. At the root of this to have their claims taken as a given because of the vic- idea is the belief that sexual-assault statistics are de- timization that they and people like them have expe- ceptively low because the behavior that constitutes an rienced. “To every survivor of sexual assault,” Hillary assault is too narrowly defined. Clinton announced in 2016, “you have the right to be The due-process standards for prosecuting this believed.” For example, Crystal Magnum, an African- type of violent criminal conduct places an undue bur- American stripper who accused the members of den on the accuser, the thinking goes, and therefore Duke University’s lacrosse team of gang rape in 2006, keeps victims from sharing their stories. The eviden- enjoyed the right to be believed. The young men she tiary thresholds to establish guilt are too high; the falsely accused had their names and reputations per- demand that a victim be made to confront her abuser manently besmirched. Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Ruben is too traumatic. These foundational conceptions of Erdely manipulated adherents of this doctrine when what constitutes probity in the enforcement of law are she spun an implausible yarn involving ritualistic a product of a time before feminist justice ethics. At a sexual violations at the University of Virginia in 2014. conceptual level, so the argument holds, justice needs The tale cost her publication $1.65 million in damages a reboot. and destroyed her career, but the ordeal that Erdely’s These assumptions are embedded in the way victims endured will never be fully known. And these that colleges transformed Title IX protections for were just the cases that made national headlines. How students into a means by which social justice could many more targets of this ideological crusade are un- be pursued outside of a courtroom for those claiming known to us? they had been sexually assaulted. But expanding the This is nothing less than an assault on the rule definition of what constitutes a victim of a crime did of law, which is based on the proposition that we judge not result in more justice. It resulted in more victims. allegations of malfeasance on a case-by-case basis ac- Investigators have found that the standards colleges cording to the facts alone. To be sure, the alleged vic- applied to the adjudication of sexual-assault claims tims of sex-related offenses deserve sympathy, a fair prevented both the accuser and the accused from tak- hearing, and the understanding that coming forward ing full advantage of their Fifth and Sixth Amendment is often a harrowing experience. They do not, however, rights. The accused have been compelled to issue have a right to the kind of reflexive deference that disingenuous confessions; accusers have been forced would deprive the accused of their rights. to issue Soviet-style denunciations of their peers. The “right to be believed” is central to another Accusers were deprived of counsel and have had to tenet of the modern social-justice movement—the prosecute their own alleged abusers themselves. Con- notion that the United States is culturally and insti- sensual relationships were criminalized. tutionally ill-equipped to fairly adjudicate alleged Colleges have spent hundreds of millions of sex crimes. They call it “rape culture.” Like many of dollars defending their conduct against students who the social-justice left’s core ideas, this one is rooted have filed complaints with the Education Depart- in something real. The #MeToo moment has revealed ment’s Office for Civil Rights alleging that their cases vile conduct in private American businesses and in- were mishandled by their college tribunals. The jour- stitutions in which an unspoken creed has shielded nalist Emily Yoffe observed that, from 2006 to 2010,

Commentary 23

Rothman.indd 23 11/15/18 11:57 AM Negative discrimination by class or birth no longer has a stink about it, so long as the discrimination targets hereditary ‘privileges’ afforded to those seen as fortunate.

the higher-education insurance group United Educa- “It’s not just that white men are allowed to be tors paid out $36 million to students involved in the angry and women are not; it’s that white men’s anger adjudication of sexual-assault claims. “The vast ma- can be used to their benefit,” the author and columnist jority of the payouts, 72 percent, went to the accused,” Rebecca Traister wrote. “We reflexively understand she wrote, who were “young men who protested their the anger of white men, especially when used to con- treatment by universities.” vey how unfairly they’ve been treated, as righteous Worst of all, the relaxed standards have irrevers- and correct.” ibly set back the cause of true justice. Real victims of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd de- abuse and assault now must compete to have their scribed Kavanaugh’s emotional testimony in his own claims heard amid the proliferation of fabulist tales in- defense as a display typical of “entitled white men volving gang-rape rituals performed by cultish fraternity acting like the new minority, howling about things bros. The experience of alleged victims whose cases find that are being taken away from them, aggrieved at their way into a real courtroom is tainted by association anything that diminishes them or saps their power.” with these ethically questionable extrajudicial institu- For the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, tions. No matter how you define it, this is not justice. Kavanaugh’s affecting performance was a “galling” “display of white (male) entitlement.” To his colleague HE SOCIAL-JUSTICE MOVEMENT has ad- Jennifer Rubin, it was a “frightful episode of white opted a set of unfalsifiable assumptions. male anger determined to prevent non-white-males T Its leaders believe, to some degree, that the from depriving them of their due.” United States is riddled with flawed institutions that “He just looked like an entitled, privileged are incapable of achieving justice because they are white male, whining because he’s unaccustomed to deliberately blind to the conditions that would yield losing anything,” McClatchy columnist Erika Smith justice. They believe that an immutable set of traits confessed, “much less a lifetime appointment to the and experiences are associated with race, gender, and nation’s highest court that he always expected to get.” sexual identity. They believe in fairness and equality “Kavanaugh, by his words, actions, and demean- writ large, but also believe that these conditions can or right now is either a man who has been horribly never be achieved without oppressive social leveling. wronged or a stunning personification of white, male Negative discrimination by class or birth no longer privilege on display,” former CBS News anchor Dan has a stink about it, so long as the discrimination Rather postulated. Though he declined to hazard a targets hereditary “privileges” afforded to those of guess as to which condition he thought was accurate, fortunate birth. you could probably take a successful guess. These assumptions give way to misandry and “Kavanaugh Borrows from Trump’s Playbook on prejudice, and they have been internalized by some of White Male Anger,” read the New York Times headline America’s most prominent and influential figures. By adorning ostensibly straight reporting on Kavana- the time Brett Kavanaugh found himself in the dock, ugh’s testimony. According to Esquire’s Charles Pierce, the stigma associated with what in any other context “the Hour of Angry White Male Rage had come ’round we would call bigotry had been rebranded as a new at last.” species of enlightenment. New York Times contributing writer Bryce “A lot of white men don’t know what it’s like to Covert was awed by the privilege inherent in Kavana- feel threatened, powerless, and frustrated,” said Jennifer ugh’s attempt to defend himself against career-ending Palmieri, former communications director for Hillary criminal allegations. “Such power, such prestige, is Clinton’s campaign, presuming to know not just Kava- his birthright as a white man,” she wrote dismissively. naugh’s personal history but also that of anyone else who “Not getting what he wants is the same as losing his looks like him. “As we go through the reckoning of this very life.” lopsided power balance, there’s going to be a lot more In an especially supplicative display, ABC News of this.” analyst Matthew Dowd offered up himself and his

24 The Social-Justice Injustice : December 2018

Rothman.indd 24 11/15/18 11:57 AM When some Republicans began to take offense at the bigoted attacks, their anger was taken as evidence of how old white men are guilty of false consciousness.

fellow white males as sacrifice to atone for the sins of country for all of us, a democracy in which everyone Brett Kavanaugh and those who looked like him. “We matters and all are equal, or a citadel of white male as white male Christians should do what real leader- privilege,” she wrote. ship demands and practice a level of humility which After calling Kavanaugh a “closed mind,” demonstrates strength by stepping back from the without a hint of irony, the novelist Stephen King center of the room and begin to give up our seats at the postulated that “if ‘white male entitlement’ was in the table,” he submitted. dictionary, it could be illustrated by Brett Kavanaugh’s In the middle of a segment that was billed by photograph.” CNN’s Brian Stelter as an example of the kind of ex- In the end, only Georgetown University associ- pertise we should see more of on cable television, the ate professor Christine Fair pushed the bounds of pro- feminist writer Jessica Valenti attributed Republican priety too far by advocating “miserable deaths” and support for Kavanaugh to bigotry. “I think the reason posthumous castration for the “entitled white men” that so many on the right were really praising this who reserved judgement on Kavanaugh. For these sort of rageful diatribe that he went on was that he sentiments, she was suspended temporarily from the was epitomizing this moment of backlash that we’re classroom. in among privileged white men who are furious about Some Republicans began to take notice of all being finally held to account,” she opined with what these attacks on the demographic to which many of we must assume amounts to expertise. them belonged, and they took offense. And when they “Guess who’s perpetuating all these kinds of dared do so, their anger was taken as evidence of how actions? It’s the men in this country,” Senator Mazie old white men are guilty of false consciousness. Hirono asserted. “Just shut up and step up.” When Donald Trump said that accusations “What we got last week was a view into the soul against his Supreme Court nominee had been trau- of Trumpism,” New York Times economics columnist matic, New York Times reporter John Harwood clari- Paul Krugman insisted. “It’s about the rage of white fied that Kavanaugh’s signs of stress “more accurately” men, upper class as well as working class, who per- signaled “trauma for white men unaccustomed to ceive a threat to their privileged position.” trauma.” Convinced of the entirely unsupported notion Senator Lindsey Graham’s display of genuine that Kavanaugh lied to Senate Judiciary Committee and uncharacteristic outrage over Kavanaugh’s treat- members about his high-school antics and the extent ment was deemed by Vox’s Zack Beauchamp a dog of his drinking as a teenager, Chicago Tribune colum- whistle designed to communicate “that white men in nist Rex Huppke suggested that Kavanaugh would power are not going anywhere.” never have receive the benefit of the doubt if it weren’t And when Senator Susan Collins delivered a for his external features. “They’re called ‘little white- 43-minute speech in which she observed that the al- male-privilege lies,’” he wrote. “Lies about things a legations against Kavanaugh couldn’t even pass the powerful white man deems small or unimportant, “more likely than not standard” she had invented told to avoid hurting that same powerful white man’s for this occasion, even she suffered the wrath once ambitions.” reserved for her male counterparts. Collins, according Though she insisted that she was not accusing to Alexis Grenell’s New York Times op-ed, was a rep- Brett Kavanaugh of murder, Boston Globe columnist resentative of her type: white women who place their Renee Graham wrote that Kavanaugh’s “white male “racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender superiority complex” indicated the pathology that status” by acting to “uphold a system that values only famously led Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb to their whiteness.” kidnap and murder a 14-year-old boy. “White women,” Grenell continued, “are expect- The essayist Rebecca Solnit raised the stakes of ed to support the patriarchy by marrying within their Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight to nearly existential racial group, reproducing whiteness and even mini- heights. “This is a battle over whether this will be a mizing violence against their own bodies.” Collins was

Commentary 25

Rothman.indd 25 11/15/18 11:57 AM a “gender traitor,” betraying her sex only to maintain their own righteousness following a judicious survey her standing within her race. of the evidence before them. Rather, they believed If this chauvinism had been applied to women in their own rectitude because they believed in the and minorities, more would see it for what it is: rank group guilt for which Kavanaugh could and should bigotry. But because of the pseudo-academic cachet of pay. White, male, and of a privileged socioeconomic negative discrimination based on accidents of birth, upbringing, Kavanaugh was supposed to be the object the misanthropy that masquerades as social justice of the retribution that was due members of his class. gets a pass. It shouldn’t. That is social justice in practice. It is the antithesis When identity forms the basis of ideology, it of objective, blind justice. And despite the fact that robs individuals of agency, legitimizes collectivism, Brett Kavanaugh now sits on the Supreme Court, it and necessitates dehumanization. Those who would is becoming more popular—and more dangerous—by have condemned Kavanaugh were not convinced of the day.q

26 The Social-Justice Injustice : December 2018

Rothman.indd 26 11/15/18 11:57 AM The Givers and Their Attackers The philosophical assault on philanthropy is really about extending government control By James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley

FTER YEARS of public specula- tion as “morally fraught,” whatever that might mean. tion about what Amazon founder As the Slate critic Jordan Weissman explained, Jeff Bezos would do with his “While [Bezos] is busy trying to use his fortune to help massive fortune, he finally gave the poorest of the poor, his company has become an us an answer this fall. Bezos an- almost perfect diorama of American inequality—from nounced he would donate $2 his own outrageous wealth, to the highly paid execu- billion to charitable organiza- tives and tech employees, to the underpaid warehouse tions that provide food and shelter to the homeless workers who often need to use food stamps to get by. and to Aa new network of Montessori preschools in low- Especially since so much of his wealth is tied up in the income areas. To say that early childhood education stock value of his company, every dollar Bezos gives and homeless shelters are among the favorite causes of away is in part a reminder that many of his workers the left would be an understatement. Yet the reaction could use a raise.” Bezos, in other words, piled up his to Bezos’s generosity was decidedly muted in liberal fortune by exploiting his workers; therefore his chari- circles. Indeed, a tweet from Slate described his dona- table donations are the fruits of an unjust enterprise. But the critics go further and insist that, in addi- James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan tion to being rebuked for the way he made his money, Institute. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fel- Bezos should be condemned because he does not sup- low at the American Enterprise Institute. port government efforts to assist the homeless and the

Commentary 27

PIERSON RILEY.indd 27 11/15/18 11:58 AM poor. As Weissman writes, “the timing of Bezos’ new pensing gifts to the genuinely needy, but the volume venture is especially fraught, given Amazon’s recent of requests made impossible any cursory examination role in killing a tax that Seattle lawmakers had hoped much less serious review of each appeal,” Reich writes. would fund the city’s own anti-homelessness efforts.” “To match the size of his wealth, it was necessary to do Progressive critics prefer that social problems be ad- more than accelerate the pace of giving. He would have dressed with tax dollars rather than through private to shift from retail charity to wholesale philanthropy, initiatives. he would have to seek to address root causes of social Bezos also earned some criticism when he ills rather than provide direct relief through alms, and pledged $33 million earlier this year to provide college he would have to pursue a broad mission with a global scholarships for so-called Dreamers (immigrants who vision.” In other words, Rockefeller had so much mon- were brought illegally to the United States by their ey that it would be impossible to give it away wisely parents). It mattered little that this is also a cause dear without a professional operation to guide it. to the hearts of progressives. In Rolling Stone, Ed Bur- Rockefeller initially sought a federal charter for mila wrote: “Imagine if people like Bezos and compa- his foundation because state governments frequently nies like Amazon paid in practice anywhere close to capped the size of philanthropic endowments and lim- the tax rates that apply to people of such great wealth ited their purposes. The objections to this effort came in theory. Imagine if a company of such staggering when Rockefeller tried to form “a perpetual charitable wealth—$43 billion in revenue in a single quarter of trust,” that is, a foundation that would exist to distrib- 2017—paid its employees enough to send their own ute his fortune, even after his death. Foreshadowing kids to college. If that happened, college applicants modern criticisms of wealthy donors, Teddy Roosevelt, might not need to pray for the good will of benevo- then a former president, announced: “No amount of lent billionaires to afford an education.” It is not easy charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in for wealthy businessmen to win the good opinion of any way for the misconduct in acquiring them. Indeed, progressives who are not inclined to take yes for an the way he made his money should actually disqualify answer. him from engaging in philanthropy.” The president of The attacks on Bezos and his philanthropy fol- the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, low a familiar pattern launched against almost every suggested, “The one thing the world would gratefully successful person who has given away money, going accept from Mr. Rockefeller now would be the estab- back more than a century to John D. Rockefeller, An- lishment of a great endowment of research and educa- drew Carnegie, Julius Rosenwald, and others. How did tion to help other people see in time how they can keep they make all that money in the first place? Why don’t from being like him.” they run their businesses in more altruistic ways? But the question at hand was not whether Rock- Shouldn’t they pay their fair share in taxes? Imagine efeller should be able to give his money away but rath- all the ways the government could do a better job of er how it should be given and how the U.S. government spending that money. would treat this new conception of a private founda- As Rob Reich, professor of political science at tion. The Reverend John Haynes Holmes, testifying before the Commission on Industrial Relations, said that Rockefeller’s plan There is a familiar type of attack for a foundation “must be repugnant launched against almost every to the whole idea of a democratic soci- ety.” And the chair of that commission, successful person who has given Senator Frank Walsh of Missouri, ob- served that “huge philanthropic trusts, away a lot of money. known as foundations, appear to be a menace to the welfare of society.” Stanford and co-director of its center on Philanthropy This claim that charitable foundations are il- and Civil Society, writes in his new book Just Giving: legitimate because they are inconsistent with demo- Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It cratic values is at the heart of Reich’s critique of philan- Can Do Better, John D. Rockefeller faced a barrage of thropy. According to this critique, a democratic society attacks when he tried to set up a charitable foundation. is one where everyone enjoys equal opportunity from By the first decade of the 20th century, the oil titan birth and no one is entitled to inherited advantages. received 400 to 500 letters per day asking for money. Reich argues that allowing philanthropies to continue “Rockefeller, a devout Christian, prided himself on dis- in perpetuity (or even after the death of their founders)

28 The Givers and Their Attackers : December 2018

PIERSON RILEY.indd 28 11/15/18 12:39 PM means that a wealthy person has an outsize influence Reich goes further to ask whether philanthropy as it not only during his own time but well into the future. is currently conducted is actually beneficial to society. There is no reason from a legal perspective to respect He explains: “There are more than 25 different the wishes or directions of the deceased. Reich cites categories of nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations in John Stuart Mill, who argued with regard to corpora- U.S. law, including social welfare organizations, frater- tions (including churches) that “the only moral duties nal societies, employee benefit associations, business which we are conscious of are toward living beings, either present or to come; who can be in some way better Is a contribution to an art museum or for what we do or forbear.” a think tank of lesser benefit than an For anyone who has followed the trajectory of perpetual founda- equal contribution to a soup kitchen tions, it would appear that the oppo- site is true: The visions of philanthro- or a homeless shelter? pists are rarely carried out with care by their successors, whether children, grandchildren, leagues, chambers of commerce, veterans organiza- other family members, friends, or business associates. tions, cemetery companies….” In addition to forgoing Indeed, in the cases of the Ford and MacArthur Foun- the taxes that these organizations would pay if they ex- dations, subsequent generations seem today to be isted as for-profit institutions, people who give to these working hard to undermine the ideals of their found- organizations may take an income-tax deduction, and ers. That is true of many other foundations as well that foundations that contribute to these organizations were created by conservative business figures but were also earn special tax privileges. Moreover, these tax allowed to drift into the hands of successors who do privileges are “a blunt instrument,” Reich explains. not share their views. For this reason, many conserva- The policy “fails to differentiate between the social tives now criticize the concept of perpetual founda- benefits produced by various nonprofits.” The “$1,000 tions and write sympathetically about requirements donation that you make to a contemporary arts muse- to terminate those institutions after a defined period um to underwrite a video installation is worth exactly of time. As the late Sir John Templeton once advised: the same as the $1,000 that I give to a soup kitchen. Are “Do your giving while you’re living so you’re knowing these of equal social value? That social policy should where it’s going.” be indifferent between these two kinds of goods and Reich’s critiques go beyond the problem of foun- provide equivalent subsidies to their respective donors dations existing in perpetuity. Even if one assumes might seem odd.” that people who make money have the right to spend it It is not really odd at all. Is a contribution to an (charitably or otherwise) in any way they wish, Reich art museum or a think tank of lesser benefit than an asks why government needs to subsidize those charita- equal contribution to a soup kitchen or a homeless ble expenditures via tax policy. After all, as he empha- shelter? Reich may have an opinion, but so does ev- sizes, the wealthy (those in the highest tax brackets) eryone else. receive disproportionate benefits for their charitable Reich cites a recent study using “multiple data gifts compared with those in the lowest brackets. Let sets and extended generous assumptions about how the wealthy give away their money, he suggests, but to count giving that benefits the needy.” The study also let them do without the tax subsidy, or at least found that "at most one-third of charity is directed to equalize the subsidy as between those in the highest providing for the needs of the poor.” Most giving in and lowest brackets. the United States goes to support religion and local For many people the answer will seem obvious: churches—roughly $130 billion, Reich estimates. (This We offer tax benefits to subsidize things we think are does not include groups such as the Salvation Army good or of some social value. This is how Americans that are counted under “human services.”) Individu- ended up with a home-mortgage deduction and a als (not foundations) donate most of these funds, and child tax credit. Home ownership and childbearing they typically itemize those deductions on their tax re- are thought to be social goods, even though there are turns. The next largest sectors of giving are education many who argue that these incentives have distorted and health care. He notes that wealthier givers are less markets in ways that are undesirable or reward certain likely to donate to help the poor but instead donate lifestyle choices about whether to rent or own a home, to museums and universities that disproportionately or whether to have several children or none at all. But serve the rich.

Commentary 29

PIERSON RILEY.indd 29 11/15/18 11:58 AM The result, according to Reich, is that “philan- tion? Reich does not say. What many donors do in the thropy exacerbates social inequalities in a way that guise of “helping the poor” is to give funds to advocacy seems fundamentally at odds with certain egalitarian groups to lobby government to spend more money on aims of social policy.” He offers the example of Parent public programs designed to help the poor. Somewhat Teacher Associations in wealthy school districts that paradoxically, those funds go disproportionately to supplement their public-school budgets with charita- middle- and upper-middle-class professionals adept ble contributions from local families. The effect is that at lobbying the government in support of public pro- the rich districts get richer—tax-subsidized—and the grams that similarly allocate funds to professionals poor districts get nothing. who provide services to the poor. Well, not quite. Donations to health and sci- Mr. Reich reports that the tax subsidy for charity ence are a favored avenue of philanthropic giving. came to $55 billion in a recent year. That is a sizable These kinds of programs are expensive, and philan- sum to be sure, but it comes to only about 1.5 percent thropic funds are small compared with government of a federal budget that is currently approaching $4 spending in both areas. But the benefits of that re- trillion per year. One might argue that government search help everyone, rich and poor alike, as in the could spend those funds more effectively, but if past discovery of vaccines, antibiotics, cancer treatments, performance is a predictor, then the chances of that and scientific breakthroughs that have universal are not very good. applications. Even foundations that have specifically devoted In any case, the charitable deduction was not themselves to fighting inequality—the Ford Founda- inserted into the tax code with the purpose of encour- tion announced recently that this was among its ma- aging giving to the poor. The income tax itself came jor goals—do not have much to show for their efforts. in via constitutional amendment in 1913, and World For one thing, the winds blowing in the opposite di- War I started just a year later, with the U.S. entering rection are very strong, as many economists have tried in 1917. At that point, Woodrow Wilson and the Con- to point out. Just to list one key factor, the continuing gress raised the top marginal rate to 77 percent (from bull market in stocks, bonds, and real estate means 1 percent in 1914) in order to pay for the war. Heads that the rich are likely to get richer for the foreseeable of schools, colleges, hospitals, and other such enter- future, or at least as long as those markets remain on prises warned that rich people gave their excess funds that upward path, because they disproportionately via charitable donations and would no longer do so own those appreciating assets. Some significant por- because those excess funds were going to the govern- tion of those funds flows back into the philanthropic ment. They suggested there should be exemptions for sector through the creation of foundations and large gifts to charitable organizations—scientific, religious, charitable donations to colleges, universities, schools, and educational. Aiding “the poor” had little to do and organizations that help the poor, the sick, and the with it. Indeed, during the debate over tax reform in handicapped. While the financial boom of the past 1969, there were no real complaints that foundations several decades may have led to greater inequality, should be doing more to help the poor. it has also led to significantly increasing charitable contributions and a vast ex- pansion in the philanthropic While the financial boom of the past sector. several decades may have led to greater Reich, like many pro- gressives, seems to be of two inequality, it has also led to significantly minds when it comes to phi- lanthropy and its privileged increasing charitable contributions. tax status. On the one hand, it is of dubious value because F PROGRESSIVES wish to claim that philanthropy it promotes inequality and benefits the rich; on the can justify its place and its tax status only by help- other hand, it opens an avenue to criticize the sector Iing the poor, they should describe how that might and perhaps to exert control over it on the grounds be done. After all, the U.S. government launched a war that those are public funds and thus subject to public on poverty more than a half century ago, with highly control. A few states, with California leading the way, uncertain results. What have they learned from this have debated policies to force foundations to diversify long-running experiment? What can be done with their boards and staffs and to direct them to spend limited philanthropic resources to improve the situa- more of their funds on the poor. The greater the tax

30 The Givers and Their Attackers : December 2018

PIERSON RILEY.indd 30 11/15/18 12:39 PM benefits for philanthropy, the more progressives will people seem to get wealthier, he observes, while also continue efforts to direct the flow of those funds on earning credit for their philanthropy, without ques- the grounds that tax-subsidized funds belong to the tioning whether they deserve that wealth in the first public–and thus should be government-controlled. At place or whether the public should subsidize their some point as this campaign gains force, those who highly publicized philanthropy. have traditionally defended the tax subsidy will begin But if there is such a thing as "the Aspen Con- to wonder if it is re- ally worth keeping. Unlike many Wealthy people seem to get wealthier, without of his fellow critics questioning whether they deserve that wealth on the left, Reich is willing to allow in the first place or whether the public should that there are some legitimate reasons subsidize their highly publicized philanthropy. for private founda- tions to exist: “A foundation is a corporate structure sensus,” then it has less to do with inequality and the designed to deploy private assets for public benefit, lifestyles of the rich and more to do with a kind of where what is funded is subject to donor intent. Be- groupthink that permeates the world of high status cause donor preferences can be idiosyncratic, founda- philanthropy. Here is a small world convinced of its tions can deliver idiosyncratic results.” Those results own virtue and good intentions, where everyone al- include “minority” public goods or “controversial” ready knows the “right” solutions to society’s prob- public goods, or in any case social benefits that would lems—usually some form of government intervention not otherwise be provided by government. currently blocked by those ignorant voters who popu- Reich explains that "foundations can serve as a late the middle and working classes. They gather in democratic society’s 'risk capital,' a potent mechanism places like Aspen ostensibly to listen to panels about for experimentation in social policy with uncertain re- the great challenges facing society but then go home sults over a long time horizon.” In making that case, to put their money in the conventional charities. The he has the support of the late Justice Lewis Powell, irony is that most earned their money via some inno- who wrote in a 1983 decision (Bob Jones University vs. vative breakthrough but then give it away as members United States) that the tax subsidy for nonprofits “is one of a herd. indispensable means of limiting the influence of gov- Nor do they have much independence from gov- ernment orthodoxy on important areas of community ernment. The philanthropic consensus says that more life.” As Powell argued, entrenched public policies and money from government will solve social ills and that the political forces that defend them are able to close off philanthropy should be used to encourage govern- governmental experimentation with new approaches ment to do so. Meanwhile the burgeoning nonprofit to public problems, leaving private initiatives as the sector is funded in large part by big government itself: only means of promoting alternative approaches. Nonprofit hospitals and clinics get the bulk of their Reich has a partner in his critique of contem- funds from Medicaid and Medicare, while colleges porary philanthropy in Anand Giridharadas, whose and universities receive a large share of their tuition Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the dollars from state and federal programs. World decries what he calls “the Aspen Consensus,” or Even religious organizations, such as Catholic the view that wealthy people of good intentions can Charities, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, gather in places no one else can afford to design ways and World Vision, receive substantial shares of their to deploy their vast resources to improve the world. budgets from federal grants. The publication Giving Critics of wealthy philanthropists usually challenge USA, which tracks charitable spending, reports that them to do more good, Giridharadas points out, but government now supplies one-third of all funds raised rarely tell them to do less harm. He criticizes leaders by not-for-profit institutions. Many of those groups in the field like Darren Walker, president of the Ford receive government grants and then use those funds Foundation, who joined the board of Pepsi, thereby to lobby government to spend even more on their pro- earning a large annual fee but without altering the grams. So pervasive is public funding of private chari- direction of that organization; and Bill Clinton, who ties that in many areas it can be hard to discern any earned large speaking fees from corporations while meaningful distinction between public and private in- also directing his prominent family charity. Wealthy stitutions. If the original purpose of the charitable de-

Commentary 31

PIERSON RILEY.indd 31 11/15/18 11:58 AM duction was to preserve the independence of private ment, then it would be a step well worth considering. institutions as alternatives to government, then it is But in fact such a move might make the charitable no longer fulfilling that vital purpose. sector even more dependent on government funds This more than anything else is the true crisis due to a potential decline in private donations aris- of contemporary philanthropy: the gradual folding ing from the loss of the tax deduction. Whether or not of private institutions into the expanding web of gov- we keep the tax deduction for charitable donations is ernment programs to the point where they function a question that should be judged not in terms of its as servants rather than alternatives to government. consequences for poverty and inequality but in terms This runs against the spirit of American philanthropy of the role we want philanthropy to play in a plural- that has sought to promote pluralism and diversity as istic society that places limits on the reach of govern- a necessary foundation for a free and dynamic soci- ment. Reich and his colleagues are not bothered by ety. As Justice William Brennan wrote (Walz vs. Tax this question because they appear to welcome greater Commission of New York City, 1970), nonprofit groups governmental control over the charitable sector. For receive tax exemptions because “each group contrib- those who hold to a pluralistic vision of America, the utes to the diversity of association, viewpoint, and great challenge is to restore the charitable deduction enterprise essential to a vigorous pluralistic society.” to its original purposes, and to liberate the chari- If doing away with their special tax status would table sector from its self-defeating dependence on help charities regain their independence from govern- government.q

32 The Givers and Their Attackers : December 2018

PIERSON RILEY.indd 32 11/15/18 12:39 PM Our Gladiators Of Tiger Woods and those who play for our amusement By Joseph Epstein

ETWEEN THE National Football around before audiences willing to pay exorbitant League’s motto “Football Is Family” sums to watch them do so? or the National Basketball Asso- As salaries and ticket prices soar, so do the size ciation’s assertion “The NBA Cares,” of the athletes themselves: The 300-pound NFL line- which has the lower truth quotient? man is now commonplace, so, too, the seven-foot NBA Without the finest calibrated of in- basketball center; the majority of current-day major- struments it is, I suspect, impossible league pitchers appear to be around 6'4", and the New to measure. Major League Baseball thus far makes no York Yankees have only one pitcher under six foot and Bsimilar claims to caring, sharing, or dispensing her- five over 6'7." Of the top ten ranked male tennis play- ring, which is just as well. But why the need for this sad ers, five are over 6'5"; six-feet-tall female tennis players public-relations effort on behalf of football and basket- are not uncommon. Just about everything about pro- ball and of professional sports generally? fessional sports these days is outsized, out of propor- Part of the answer is that there is something tion, swollen. askew about the entire enterprise, at least in its con- Two of the three major American professional temporary phase. How else consider a situation in sports, football and basketball, have a preponderance which (mostly) men in their twenties and early thirties of African-American players. For football, the percent- are able to earn millions of dollars hitting or throw- age is 64 percent, for basketball it is 75 percent. (Of ing or kicking balls or banging pucks or one another NBA games, a friend of mine noted that they are over not when the fat lady sings but instead when the white Joseph Epstein has written for Commentary for guys go in.) Meanwhile the number of black players in 55 years. Major League Baseball has slipped to 7.7 percent, with

Commentary 33

EPSTEIN.indd 33 11/15/18 11:58 AM Football, with its strong possibility of lasting head injuries, is no longer the uncomplicated field of speed, brawn, and physical courage it once seemed.

the Hispanic players in the game now at a high of 29.8 From a fairly early age, gifted athletes often live percent and Asian players coming up slowly on the in a privileged status. Today, kids with professional outside. Baseball, the national pastime, is getting less athletic ability are spotted as early as 13 or 14 and cul- and less national every day. tivated by high-school coaches and sometimes college Every boy with an interest and prowess in sports coaches. At 17, LeBron James’s high-school basketball harbored—and many as older men may well still har- games were shown on national television. For a brief bor—the fantasy of playing his favorite sport for a liv- spell, some of the best players in the NBA took a pass ing, with all the rewards that would flow therefrom in altogether on college, and many others took up the the coin of fame, glory, and now heavy coin itself. Yet option known as “one-and-done,” by which is meant the sports fantasy is wearing thin. Football, for exam- that after a single year of college, which gave the pros a ple, with its strong possibility of lasting head injuries, chance to scout them, they departed with a hefty con- is no longer the uncomplicated field of speed, brawn, tract for the NBA and all the associated rewards that and physical courage it once seemed. Head injuries re- go with it. sulting in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), The effects of such early adulation on personal- causing early dementia and sometimes death, have ity aren’t easily reckoned. A number of years ago, the clouded both the present and future of football. Some Chicago Bulls basketball team had a player named years ago Doug Planck, an old Chicago Bears safety, Scottie Pippen, whose sobriquet around town was “No said, more prophetically than he knew, that the first Tippin’ Pippen,” owing to his being known for never thing one must give up if one is to play in the NFL is leaving a tip at restaurants. But then how could he one’s sense of self-preservation. have known about tipping, when all his life long he Another thing one may have to give up to play probably never had to pick up a check? sports in college is any hope of obtaining even a simu- The real toll on superior athletes may be in the lacrum of an education. The son of a friend of mine, narrowing of perspective, and thereby personality, who had a baseball scholarship to Northwestern, that great athletic prowess often brings in its train. dropped off the team when it was made clear to him To become a great athlete calls for endless practice, to that, along with the official NCAA sanctioned four the exclusion of much else in life. The rewards for the hours for practice, he would do well to put in still extra truly promising are palpable. Imagine you are 20 years hours in the weight room. One of the sad joke phras- old, in top physical shape, playing in the NBA or NFL es of our time is “scholar-athlete” to describe college or MLB and earning, say, $8 million a year, with the jocks; even “student-athlete” has come to have a bit- promise, barring serious injury, of lots more to come. ter, unreal ring. The proof of this is in those pre- and How would any of us nonathletes, at that age post-game, barely literate interviews with professional with that kind of money available to us, have come athletes. Years ago it was said of a certain NBA all-star through? Could we handle it, keep it all in perspec- that he led the league in “you knows.” tive? In 2009, Sports Illustrated published a study that Yet the pool of admiration for athletes in Ameri- showed that two years after retirement, 78 percent of ca never quite empties. While politicians come and go, NFL players were either broke or struggling financial- actors increasingly make dodos of themselves through ly, and after five years of retirement, 60 percent of NBA their politics or going into confession mode on talk players were broke. Sad though this is, it doesn’t seem shows, a select number of athletes—Sandy Koufax, in the least shocking. Derek Jeter, Bill Russell, Joe Montana—remain en- I watch an unseemly number of baseball, bas- shrined in their countrymen’s good graces. The spe- ketball, football, hockey games, tennis matches, prize cial honor in which athletes have been held is of long fights (in an earlier day), track meets, and more on standing. Thucydides tells how the people of Scione, television, but reading 400-page biographies of ath- after having been rescued by the Spartan general Bra- letes is far from my idea of a good time. Especially bi- sidas, "would come up to him and deck him with gar- ographies of golfers. A condominium on a golf course lands, as though he were a famous athlete." is the notion of Valhalla for many of the boys, now re-

34 Our Gladiators : December 2018

EPSTEIN.indd 34 11/15/18 11:58 AM Even in our day, when the word 'millionaire' has lost much of its punch, Woods’s earnings are impressive. His agent brought in roughly $120 million in endorsements for him.

tired men, I grew up with. But I, in one of the sounder fame, along with Oprah, Michael (Jordan and Jack- decisions of my youth, sedulously steered clear of play- son), Frank (Sinatra), Serena (Williams), and a few ing golf, a sport that has been described as a good walk rarified others. “Tiger Woods was the kind of transcen- ruined. (Golf on television, for me, has long been a fine dent star that comes around about as often as Halley’s nap encouraged.) I mention all this because I have re- Comet,” write Benedict and Keteyian. “He was some- cently read a 485-page biography of Tiger Woods and thing no one had ever seen or will ever see again.” Here found it unexpectedly fascinating, not least on the since 1996, his first year as a professional golfer, is a subject of the perils of the life of the highly successful partial account of what he has accomplished: professional athlete. He won 79 PGA tournaments, including 14 so- called Majors, and more than 100 tournaments world- EFORE recounting the life of Tiger Woods as set wide. Player of the Year 11 times, he has earned more out in Jeffrey Benedict and Armen Keteyian’s than $110 million in tournament prize money. When Bfull-court-press and iconoclastic biography, he appeared in a tournament, attendance records shot it needs to be emphasized that not all professional up, as did television ratings; when he played on a Sun- athletes are selfish, unintelligent, blinkered by their day, the PGA usually beat the ratings of the NFL and own fame or wealth. The Chicago Cubs’ current first- the NBA. His popularity allowed the amount of tour baseman, Anthony Rizzo, himself the survivor of can- prize money awarded to players to jump from $67 cer, spends a fair amount of time visiting child cancer million in 1996 to $363 million today, thereby mak- victims at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Little Children’s ing millionaires of more than 400 PGA tour golfers. Hospital in Chicago and has committed $3.5 million In the words of Benedict and Keteyian, Tiger Woods from his personal foundation to the hospital. Tim “changed the face of golf—athletically, socially [as a Anderson, the White Sox shortstop, at the opening of bi-racial golfer in a formerly country-club sport not the current school year, bought a hundred ghetto kids known for its generous integration policies], cultur- haircuts and backpacks filled with school supplies. ally, and financially.” Other athletes have set up charitable foundations. Even in our day, when the word “millionaire” Not a few retired NFL players have devoted funds to has lost much of its punch, Woods’s earnings are im- research into the effects of CTE. Some former athletes, pressive. His agent at the International Management baseball players especially, working as announcers, are Group brought in roughly $120 million in endorse- sharp, amusing, subtle. ments for him: from Nike, American Express, Disney, Perhaps the essential sadness at the heart of Gillette, General Motors, Rolex, Accenture, Gatorade, the professional athletic life is that such lives are es- General Mills, and the video-game company called EA sentially over by the age of 40, when everyone else is Sports. He was paid $1 million merely to appear in a beginning to attain mastery over his or her own work. golf tournament in Germany, $3 million to appear in If they have managed to save their money, other pos- another in Australia. His instructional book How I sibilities are of course open to the former professional Play Golf sold a million copies in hardcover. By 2010, athlete. Or, if they prefer, they can hit golf balls for the he is said to have earned more than $1 billion through remainder of their days as they watch their fame slow- golf and investment deals. His caddy, for God’s sake, ly diminish. Several years ago, at the Standard Club in earned $12 million dollars over 11 seasons with him. Chicago, I was introduced to Marshall Goldberg, once Woods had enough money to be able to pay one of his an All-American at Pitt and then an All-Pro running 14 mistresses $10 million in hush money (making our back for the Chicago Cardinals, and his pleasure in my president’s alleged payment of $130,000 to Stormy recognizing him was nearly boundless, for there are Daniels seem chump change) in the hope of keeping not many people left who do. his marriage intact. Tiger Woods, who is now 42 and still on the PGA As his biographers note, “one of the perks of be- Tour, need not soon worry about his own fame dimin- ing a celebrated athlete is that tact and personality are ishing. He falls in that select inner circle of first-name not prerequisites for securing female companionship.”

Commentary 35

EPSTEIN.indd 35 11/15/18 11:58 AM Wood's biographers tell us that as a boy he was never asked to do household chores, never held a job, mowed lawns, delivered newspapers, or did anything else. Golf was his only job.

Woods took sufficient advantage of this perk so that for ing to his parents. They decided from the outset that the better part of four years, the National Enquirer, the Eldrick (Tiger’s name at birth) would be among the scandal-sheet, had him under nearly full-time surveil- favorites of the gods, would himself be a god. His fa- lance. The Enquirer did eventually run a story about ther, Earl, an African-American and retired U. S. Army his extramarital affairs, but everything really fell apart lieutenant colonel, referred to his son as “the Chosen when Elin, his wife and the mother of his two young One,” and, early in Tiger’s professional career claimed children, discovered texts on his phone from one of his that, because of his son’s half-black, half-Thai ethnic- mistresses. ity, “he’ll have the power to impact nations. Not peo- Things get a bit blurry here. What is known is ple. Nations.” Earl Woods also believed that, as he told that at 2 a.m. on November 27, 2009, Woods rushed a journalist, “the first black man who is a really good from his house, got into his Cadillac Esplanade SUV, golfer is going to make a hell of a lot of money.” (He got lost control peeling out of his own driveway, ran over a that right.) Tiger’s mother, Kultida, an immigrant from fire hydrant, and wound up crashing into a tree in his Thailand, was both his protector and cheering section, neighbor’s yard. His biographers write: “When the po- instructing him that only victory mattered and victory lice arrived after responding to a 911 call from Tiger’s was meant exclusively for him. neighbor, they found that both sides of the back seat of Tiger was raised one stage beyond pampered. his vehicle had been smashed out with a golf club that His biographers tell us that as a boy he was never had been swung by Elin.” asked to do household chores, never held a job, mowed This provided a splendid feast for the gutter lawns, delivered newspapers, or did anything else. Golf press, and a lengthy Schadenfreudeian holiday for was his only job. Beginning at age two, the baby Tiger the media generally. From the New York Times to Us practiced swinging a golf club two hours a day. As he Weekly, everyone had a shot at Tiger, golf great and grew older, his sole mission was mastering control cheating husband. His biographers report that he ap- over a small hard white ball, smashing it vast distances peared on the front page of the New York Post 21 days off the tee, down the fairway, out of the rough or sand in a row, surpassing the previous record of 20 consecu- traps, onto the green, and in a putt or two, plonk, into tive covers devoted to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “God, the hole. On a normal day he would hit at least 600 the media is pounding me,” Tiger said to a friend, a practice balls. He later came to view his golf swing as former golf instructor named Hank Haney. “They’re his most precious gift. Golf was all he did, pretty much such vultures.” all he knew, his life. Tiger Woods claimed not simple abysmal irre- This narrowing of Tiger Woods’s interests pro- sponsibility for his errant sexual rompings but the lat- duced a less than impressive, one might even say est psychological excuse, sex addiction. (W.H. Auden a less than full, human being. As a boy, apart from claimed that the motto of psychology ought to be golf (and his father did not permit him to play other “Have you heard this one?”). And, not long after crash- sports, lest he injure himself), he spent long hours at ing his car, he went into a facility for sex addiction in video games. He had few friends. Gratitude seems not Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Although he publicly apolo- to have been in his quiver of emotions. Later in life, gized for his adulteries, his wife divorced him. Per- once his fame had set in, according to his biographers, haps more important, his golf game went into a deep “for Tiger even the most basic of civilities—a simple hole. He failed to win a tournament for a full five-year hello or thank you—went missing from his vocabu- stretch; his PGA ranking dropped from his perennial lary.” A Vegas night-club owner said, “He got mean.” A first to 13th. sports journalist named Jimmy Roberts remarked that Tyger, tyger, burning bright, / In the Forst of the “there’s more ‘f--- you’ in Tiger Woods than in any ath- Night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame lete I’ve ever seen.” Perhaps all major athletes have to thy fearful symmetry?” William Blake’s question, in be self-centered, but, as his biographers write, “the se- regard to the Tiger of our time, is easily enough an- cret to Tiger’s dominance [in golf] was that he was the swered—two sets of hands, both mortal, each belong- most one-dimensional human being on the PGA Tour.”

36 Our Gladiators : December 2018

EPSTEIN.indd 36 11/15/18 11:58 AM In our professional athletes we have created a gladiator class. Not, to be sure, an enslaved class, like the gladiators in Rome, but a highly paid and privileged one.

Tiger Woods is doubtless in many ways an ex- privileged one. Yet gladiators in function our contem- ceptional case—more protected by his family and porary athletes remain, a function much the same as agents, more famous, more narrow in his interests, their Roman precursors: to provide circuses (hold the more stunted in his general development. But aren’t bread) for a large portion of the male citizenry of the most professional athletes almost of necessity self- American republic. centered, one-dimensional, stunted, because of the This gladiatorial status is true across the spec- nature of their work? They are adulated from boyhood trum of professional sports. Even tennis, once a vague- on, later lavishly rewarded, catered to in every way. I ly aristocratic game, has felt the deadening hand of think here of Joe DiMaggio, one of the greatest of all professionalization through the infusion of huge sums baseball players, who played before the big money of money. (First-prize money, for men and women, in kicked in. During his years on the New York Yankees, the U.S. Open this past year was $3.8 million.) When when he came in each half-inning from his position in tennis players win tournaments, they now customar- center field, he found on the edge of the dugout a hot ily thank their “team.” By team they mean coach or cup of coffee and a lit cigarette awaiting him. I think of coaches, trainers, physicians, and psychologists. As for the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kobe Bryant, who in 2003 was graceful play on the court, turn on a tennis match, close charged with rape by a hotel employee in Colorado. your eyes, and from the grunting, often on the part of The charges were eventually dropped, though sexual both players, men as well as women, you are more like- intercourse was admitted, but my guess is that Bryant, ly to think it coming from a Masters & Johnson labo- who had probably not before then ever been said no to, ratory than from, say, the green courts of Wimbledon. must have been confounded when what he construed Watching Rafael Nadal in his muscle shirt, twitching, merely as droit du seigneur was taken for rape. groaning, and grunting away, feels more like watching The morning Michael Jordan announced his a wrestling than a tennis match. In tennis, elegance, retirement from professional basketball at a heavily even sportsmanship, is out. Winning is all. attended press conference in Chicago, I watched on Please understand, I make these strictures with television his stepping up to the microphone in what no moral authority whatsoever, since I have watched, looked to be an $8,000 suit and his noting that a po- and continue to watch, my share of professional sports licemen had been shot the night before and the press on television. Would I, I have sometimes asked myself, that was here for him should really be covering that have been one of those besheeted and benighted Ro- much more important event. If for a moment you be- mans seated in the Coliseum 2,000 years ago, turning lieve he really meant it, there are some O. J. Simpson my thumbs down and screaming for the death of a de- souvenirs I should like to sell you. feated gladiator? In fact, I have begun to feel a touch As a young man, Tiger Woods claimed he want- queasy about watching college and professional foot- ed to be “the Michael Jordan of golf.” He later became ball now that I know that the men who participate in close to Jordan, thought of himself as his younger it are risking their health and mental balance for their brother, the same Michael Jordan of whom Benedict profit and my entertainment. I may need to see a sport- and Keteyian claim one “didn’t have to travel far to find spectator therapist, but, apart from baseball, which stories of [his] barely tipping, or stiffing caddies, lock- continues to seem a game of great subtlety, with only a er-room attendants, card dealers, bartenders, or of his minimum of barbarity, basketball, tennis, hockey, and driving his tricked-out North Carolina blue golf cart other sports are beginning to bore me. down the middle of a fairway . . . music blaring as he Think of it: We have been paying a select group blew by one foursome or another while yelling, ‘Hurry of overly trained men, and a few women, grand sums, the f--- up. You guys are slow as f---’ . . . ” at the expense of their not leading normal lives, to per- fect and perform for our pleasure what are in effect n our professional athletes we have created a games devised for children. Then there is the obvious gladiator class. Not, to be sure, an enslaved class, yet still disturbing fact that we fans of many of these Ilike the gladiators in Rome, but a highly paid and games are more loyal to the teams we follow than are

Commentary 37

EPSTEIN.indd 37 11/15/18 11:58 AM In an earlier day, great professional athletes stayed their entire careers with the same teams in the same cities. Now, a player is offered more money and it's yo, dude, catch you later.

the men who play for these teams. (I still run into our time engaged with them overlook these contra- the occasional older man who has never forgiven the dictions easily enough. Has the time come to cease to Dodgers for moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.) do so? I suspect it has. If you feel as I do and wish to In an earlier day, great professional athletes—DiMag- discuss this further, don’t hesitate to be in touch, but, gio, Stan Musial, Bob Cousy, Johnny Unitas, Gordie please, don’t call before the playoffs and World Series Howe—stayed their entire careers with the same are over. Sundays after that, I shall be busy watching teams in the same cities. Now, with free agency, arbi- Chicago Bears games. In October, the NBA season be- tration, sports agents, a player is offered more money, gins; so, too, that of the NHL. The first of the tennis and it’s yo, dude, catch you later. majors is played in Australia in January. April, the The contradictions inherent in professional new baseball season gets under way, with a promising sports—in playing them, watching them, paying for young Chicago Cubs team. On second thought, if you them—are too glaring to overlook. Yet most of those wish to be in touch, maybe you would do best to make among us who spend a disproportionate amount of an appointment.q

38 Our Gladiators : December 2018

EPSTEIN.indd 38 11/15/18 11:58 AM MEMOIR And So This Is Christmas

A Jewish ex-Lutheran in Colonial Williamsburg at Christmastime

By Thomas P. Balázs

T WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE Thanks- however, was not sore feet, but a different sort of ache, giving 2015, and I was taking my then a feeling of loss, a yearning for something I thought I seven-year-old son ice skating for the had happily left behind a decade ago on the same trip first time at a small outdoor rink on that killed my sesamoid bone—the joys of Christmas. the edge of Colonial Williamsburg. I am a child of Jewish parents, both Holocaust We had been in Virginia for about a survivors, but I was raised Lutheran. That year on the week as part of a year-long sabbatical ice marked the 10th since I had begun not only admit- road trip I was taking with him and ting publicly to “being of Jewish descent” but also my wife, and this was our last night identifying culturally and living religiously as a Jew. A visiting the restored 18th-century city. decade earlier, I had travelled to Israel ostensibly re- I held Judah’s hand as we tot- searching a spiritual novel set in the early years of the tered around the ice. I hadn’t been on skates for some Christian church, shortly after the death of Jesus. I left 30 years, and I was worried not only about falling but Chicago a lapsed Protestant seeking inspiration in the Ialso about the consequences of focusing 175 pounds footsteps of Jesus—perhaps a bit too literally, because on the narrow steel blades of my skates. Since my during that month in the Holy Land I wore sandals early 40s, I’ve suffered from a pain in the ball of my exclusively, and that primitive footwear delivered the foot caused by a necrotic sesamoid bone that requires death blow to my dying sesamoid bone. I came back me to wear the sort of orthotics that don’t fit into ice with a pain in the ball of my foot and a thirst to learn skates. Even if I didn’t slam down on the ice and break everything I could about the religion my parents had a leg or hip, I thought, I’d pay for this extravagance in surrendered. It was a change as unexpected and life- the morning. But that’s what it meant to be a dad, at altering as the one that occurred when I first learned 51, of a young boy. The result of that night on the ice, of my Jewish identity.

Thomas P. Balázs, a fiction writer and essayist, is an associate professor of English at the University of Ten- nessee, Chattanooga.

Commentary 39

Balazs.indd 39 11/15/18 12:00 PM ROUND THE TIME I was confirmed as a With the exception of a short-lived crisis of faith Lutheran, my father granted me a kind of in college, I lived happily as a Christian for the next A private bar mitzvah. He sat down with me one 27 years, which is not to say I was a happy person. I morning at the kitchen table and informed me that was not. I have been chronically dysthymic since early he and my mother had been born and raised as Jews, childhood. But if I was discontent with everything and that Nazis—or their Hungarian counterparts, the else about my life, if I felt a perennial sense of low Arrow Cross—had murdered three out of four of my self-worth, I always felt OK about being Christian. grandparents as well as my only true uncle, my father’s Even when I ceased to believe in a literal way, I felt brother. Christianity had provided me with a solid and satisfy- I had always known, of course, that my parents ing ethical and spiritual basis. came from Hungary. What I didn’t know was that my Then my father died, and a year later I went to father’s father and my father’s older brother had been Israel to research a novel set in the days of the early shot by the Arrow Cross and that their bodies, in all Church—and everything changed. likelihood, were dumped into the Danube. I didn’t The whys and wherefores of what happened know my mother’s father had been deported to Bergen to me that month in Israel are subjects for another Belsen and was killed when Allied planes bombed a memoir. But, in short, at the age of 41, I met Orthodox train in which he was being transported by the Nazis. Jews for the first time, learned from them that Juda- I didn’t know my mother’s mother had gone looking ism was not just about following the “letter of the law,” for her husband, my grandfather, after his deportation as I had been taught in Sunday school, but that it was and was never seen again. She was reported to have a deeply spiritual faith and in many ways more suited been beaten to death in the streets of Budapest by Ar- to me than the one I had grown up in. Immediately on row Cross hooligans. I learned all this for the first time returning to the U.S., I began studying with a rabbi that morning. and taking my Friday-night dinners with an Orthodox I also learned that both my parents survived couple who “adopted” me. About a month after I got the last few months of the war by pretending to be back, I had a middle-aged bris at Mount Sinai Hospital Christians. in Chicago. A year after that, I met my wife through They didn’t know each other at the time. It was J-Date. We got married six months later (in Israel), years later, my father told me, that he and my mother put mezzuzahs on our doors, kashered our kitchen, met in an Austrian refugee camp after the war (they and had our one and only boy the following year. He, were fleeing Communists then, not Nazis), and they unlike me, entered into the covenant, i.e., was circum- didn’t begin dating until a few years after that, when cised, on his eighth day of life. they emigrated, separately, to Canada. They still iden- The year that I first took my son skating, my tified as Jews back then. But when they got married family and I commemorated the 10th anniversary of in the late 1950s, they converted to Christianity in the my renewed Judaism by returning to Israel for the hopes of sparing their children and grandchildren the chagim, the High Holidays, and it had been on my horrors they had experienced. mind since then to take stock of what I had and had The story helped me understand my parents not taken on with regard to my Jewish identity. But better. There was always so much tension in our what I realized for the first time that Thanksgiving eve house, and my mother and father seemed unhappy with Judah in Williamsburg, Virginia, was that it had with both themselves and each other. But their tale of also been 10 years since I gave up something I once survival helped me see them more as enobled, tragic truly loved—not boiled shrimp and soft-shell crabs, figures at a time in my life when I had ceased looking rib-tips and cheeseburgers. I once took great pleasure up to them as heroic. in consuming those now forbidden foods, and I still It did not, however, rouse in me any great in- miss them occasionally. But there’s not much emotion terest in Judaism. On the contrary, it confirmed my attached to, say, a good lobster bisque. Christmas, faith as a Christian. I considered myself to have been however, is a different thing. blessed by God to have not been raised Jewish. I ought to have been a Jew, I told myself, but He arranged OLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG, if you haven’t things so that I would be raised in the knowledge of been, is a “living museum” in which costumed Jesus. Cactors inhabit a restoration of what was once

40 And So This Is Christmas : December 2018

Balazs.indd 40 11/15/18 12:00 PM the capital of Revolutionary War–era Virginia. Ev- I ignored the latter for nearly my entire life and, firmly erything is rendered as authentically as possible. The ensconced in my Jewish identity, had comfortably dis- buildings are composed of bricks baked on site in a gi- regarded the former for the past decade. So it was odd ant wood-burning kiln. The homes are lit with candles when I found myself singing along with Bobby Helms and oil lamps. The men wear britches, and the women as Judah and I skated around the rink, especially wear corsets. since, even as a Christian, I had objected to the playing My parents had taken me there as a child, and I of holiday music prior to the evening of November 23. hadn’t been back since then. The only memory I had of When I was a kid growing up in White Plains, the place was of a Red Coat officer standing by a horse New York, in the 1970s, still unaware of my family’s and of my father rescuing me from an angry gander. I Jewish history—a Lutheran kid who was heartbroken had apparently gotten too near the bird’s goslings, and if he missed the annual televised airing of Rudolph the the gander went after me, but my dad was bigger than Red Nosed Reindeer and who loved dressing up as a their dad and chased him away. That’s the No. 1 rule of shepherd for the yuletide pageant—Christmas didn’t dads, right? Protect the kids. begin until the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Some 40-plus years later, in the Colonial city, my Parade, when Santa brought up the rear. The smiling wife and son and I had spent the morning listening white-bearded fat man in red leaning forward on his to George Washington lecture about Thanksgiving rolling sleigh and waving to the crowds of parents and and the Constitutional Congress. In the afternoon, kids lined up on 34th Street—that was the signal for we watched slaves debate religion with a slaveholder. the start of the Christmas season. Even then, the holi- We drank spiced liquid chocolate in an 18th-century day season was more than a month long, and that was coffeehouse and joined Virginia recruits as they en- long enough even for the jolliest of Christmas revelers. listed in the Revolutionary Army and were drilled by a So later in life, while I was still nominally Christian, I young sergeant. So it seemed a little anachronistic, as was scandalized when stores began hauling out fake night fell, to be skating around an ice rink listening to trees and tinsel on Halloween morning, and it seemed “Jingle Bell Rock.” to me kind of sadistic to subject the public to two full My wife, who doesn’t skate anymore because of months of “Let It Snow” and “Feliz Navidad.” a hip condition that puts to shame my necrotic sesa- And yet, there I was that night on the border moid, and who was raised in Israel in the 1970s where of Colonial Williamsburg, the kosher turkey not yet you’d have been hard-pressed to find a jingle bell, stuffed with challah bread crumbs and thrust into the found the disparity jarring. “meat oven,” listening to “Jingle Bell Rock” and feeling “Why don’t they play 18th-century music?” she kind of nostalgic. And then they started playing, “Hap- asked the ticket seller at the rink. She pointed out that, py X-Mas (War Is Over),” and I really began to struggle. while you could see the horse-drawn carriages from Jewish or not, I can’t be emotionally agnostic where we stood, we were technically outside Colonial when I hear John Lennon’s voice ring out, “And so this Williamsburg and so part of the 21st century. My son is Christmas….” The words and the tune evade reason, was also disturbed. “Why are they playing Christmas logic, and faith, operating on paths of Christmas sen- music?” he complained. He had not grown up as part timent laid down long before I ever lit a Chanukah of a majority culture, as I had, and didn’t get it. candle. Lennon’s tune inevitably produces in me a At first, I too found the music an unwelcome yearning for something I can’t quite name—not for contrast. But as we made our way around the rink, Jesus, not even for peace, but maybe for some sort of my son falling every few yards, me picking him up, I hopefulness that transcends tragedy, the kind of naive entered a time warp of my own, remembering not only optimism that kept the one-time Beatle believing he the days when I was Judah’s age and just learning to could end a war with a song. And the kind of optimism skate but also the times when the music I now found that kept me believing in good will toward men even irritating filled me with joy. after Lennon was gunned down my sophomore year in Until that moment, the first 10 years without high school, 17 days before Christmas. Christmas had been surprisingly easy for me. I can The song used to be a bit of a rarity. Prior to remember times when I was no more aware of it be- Lennon’s death, only the hippest of DJs played it. And ing December 25 than I was aware it was Super Bowl even in the years immediately following Lennon’s Sunday. Perennially uninterested in spectator sports, murder, it didn’t usually get the kind of play it gets

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Balazs.indd 41 11/15/18 12:00 PM today. When I was a freshman in college, only about never get used to that. three years after Lennon was killed, I had to beg a lo- So he stormed off to his room and slammed cal radio station to air the song. I had just eaten my the door shut. Then Ed stormed off to his room and turkey dinner at the cafeteria by myself. It was my first slammed the door shut. And I and my mom and my Thanksgiving away from home, and I longed for some- brother Steve were left sitting around the living room thing that would make me feel a little less lonely, and I with all those unopened presents and a feeling of knew “Happy X-Mas” would do the trick. The DJ said dread. that she wasn’t sure she could manage it, but she’d So much for war is over. So much for rocking see, and I was filled with warmth and gratitude when, around the Christmas tree. 20 minutes later, I heard, “And so this is Christmas.…” Not all my memories of Lennon’s song are happy HOUGH it was my favorite holiday, Christmas ones, but they’re all meaningful. The song was actually was a fraught celebration at my home, mostly the catalyst for one of the worst Christmas mornings T because of my dad. Among other things, he was of my childhood. We were all sitting around the tree terrible at exchanging gifts. You could never get the getting ready to open gifts, my mother and father, me right thing for him. If you gave him a new shirt, he and my two older brothers. My dad, who was in a rare would complain that it wasn’t 100-percent cotton. If mood of holiday spirit, because December was never you gave him a razor, he’d say it was the wrong brand. an easy time for him, asked, “Why doesn’t someone My mother once bought him an expensive set of golf put on some Christmas music?” clubs. My father was a doctor, and she thought he So my oldest brother, Ed, who I suppose was might like to take up the sport. He didn’t try them once, around 15 at the time, ran upstairs and retrieved his and they became playthings for me and my brothers. 45-rpm record of the Lennon song and put it on. He mostly left the gift-giving to my mother, but one The moment he heard “And so this is Christmas year he took it upon himself to get us something he …,” my dad said, “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant found impressive—table lamps that lit up when you Christmas music.” touched the lampshade. My dad loved gadgets, but we “This is Christmas music,” Ed said. didn’t share his enthusiasm. My brothers and I said “No, I meant real Christmas music.” something like “gee, thanks” and put them aside never “This is real Christmas music.” to be activated, and my dad’s feelings were hurt. To my brother and me, it was. But to my father, My dad, like so many men of his generation— real Christmas music was sung by the likes of Bing and like so many Holocaust survivors—was a mystery Crosby and was about snow and sleigh bells, not rock to his children, and my mother often had to interpret music by a Beatle protesting a war that—it being the him for me. She told me that my father grew up poor mid-’70s—really was now over. I understood how Ed and wasn’t used to getting and giving gifts. When felt, but I could see where this was going. I was older and knew the family history, she said it “Let’s just hear the rest of the song,” Ed said. was because Christmas was still foreign to him. Both “No,” my father said, “turn it off.” stories were probably true. Regardless, he was hard “Why? It’s a great song.” to please. Turn it off, turn it off, I thought to myself, but I But it wasn’t all bad. One of my oldest memories didn’t say anything. is of buying my first Christmas presents for my fam- “Turn it off,” my dad repeated. ily. I’m not sure how old I was, maybe eight or nine. I “No,” Ed said. “Let me finish the song.” saved up my allowance and walked to the local drug- And that was that. My dad stood up, cheeks as store, which was the closest shop to our house, to see red as any Santa’s, and called out the name of the man what I could afford. I got three blue-ink Bic pens for for whom the holiday was named: “Jesus Christ! No my dad, the kind with the pull-off caps, and a pack of one listens to me! No one respects me!” gumballs for each of my brothers. I didn’t know what That was a recurring theme in my father’s to get my mom, but the kindly druggist suggested a complaints. My mother once explained to me that he bottle of Jergin’s hand lotion, and that’s what I got her. expected to be treated the way his father was treated It meant a lot to me to buy Christmas presents for the in the old country, in Budapest, as a kind of patriarch. first time, and those gifts are fixed in my memory. And In America, however, he was just “Dad,” and he could that year my dad was gracious about the gift.

42 And So This Is Christmas : December 2018

Balazs.indd 42 11/15/18 12:00 PM “These are my favorite pens,” he told me. cash register when Vince Guaraldi’s “O Tannenbaum” I don’t have any Jewish memories to compete lilted over the store speakers. with that because, of course, I wasn’t raised Jewish, Then something happened to me as an adult. It didn’t even know I was a Jew until I was 13. But then was gradual, probably not taking root until my 30s, but again, I do have at least one kind of Jewish memory of I started to lose interest in Christmas. The cartoon and Christmas in the ’70s. claymation specials I watched on TV every year weren’t It was the year after the Bic pens, and, again, I so special anymore. I grew too self-conscious to wear wanted something special for my mom. Our neighbors my Santa hat, and the anxiety around gift-giving began were having a garage sale, and there was this blue ce- to wear on me. I always spent the holiday with my par- ramic vase shaped like a fish that I thought was pretty ents, but in the last couple of years before my father’s cool. It only cost 50 cents, so I got it for my mom, and death, I took a pass on the midnight service, which now she kept it with our other tchotchkes for the next 40 seemed more like a bother than a treat. years or so. But when I bragged to one of Ed’s friends So it seems that when I got to Israel in the fall that I had bought this vase for my mother at the ga- of 2005, I was in a good place to put down the Cross rage sale, his response was, “You bought your mother and pick up the Magen David. Only a couple of months a present at a garage sale? What, are you a Jew?” later, after my return, I bought my first menorah I was, but I didn’t know it yet. It’s always been a and gave away my ornaments with nary a pang of bit of a mixed-up holiday for me, I guess. nostalgia. Although I did hang on to the dozen or so Christmas CDs I had collected over the years. I had a HE FIRST THING I wanted to be, my parents special fondness for the whole range of holiday tunes: used to tell me, was not a writer, but a reindeer. traditional melodies like “Greensleeves”; American T And even after I learned that my parents had standards my dad would have appreciated, such as been Jews and Holocaust survivors and that therefore Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song”; novelty jingles like I was in some way a Jew, it was many years before the Chipmunks’ “Christmas Don’t Be Late”; and even my attachment to Christmas waned. Throughout my the delightfully pretentious classic-rock strains of childhood and adolescence, I attended the midnight Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Father Christmas.” I had a service at Trinity Lutheran Church and always looked habit of buying a new Christmas CD every December, forward to the last five minutes. That’s when the en- and though, after returning from Israel, I removed all tire congregation, even kids, held aloft small white those yuletide tunes from my iPod, I couldn’t quite get candles poked through little white cardboard squares myself to give away the CDs themselves—a reluctance and sang “Silent Night.” On the way home, my dad that, looking back, presaged this current crisis. would drive us through the neighborhood about a half I sometimes like to remind my wife and son that mile from our house where homeowners competed many of those great Christmas songs were penned to erect the most elaborate displays, and none of us by Jews, as if perhaps that makes it OK for me to still ever used the words “gaudy” or “tacky” or “kitschy” be attached to that music. “White Christmas,” “The to describe those reindeer on the rooftops or life-size Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” and even “The crèches or animatronic elves. We didn’t scoff at the Christmas Song” were all written by members of the hundreds of dollars in electrical bills. We were all, tribe. So what’s not to like? But I know I’m rational- even my dad, sincerely and unironically impressed, izing. I know that’s not why I still take some pleasure delighted, and grateful. in Christmas music. If it’s true, as some say, that one In high school, my friends and I used to don San- can never stop being a Jew, it’s also true that you can ta hats immediately after Thanksgiving dinner and, never quite shake off Christmas once it has worked its except to sleep and shower, didn’t take them off until way into your system; it’s cultural DNA. In my case, Boxing Day. In college, I typically worked retail during it’s also a by-product of growing up in a traumatized what was then called Christmas break, and I loved the Jewish household of modern-day Marranos. It’s the feeling of entering a mall festooned with garlands and result of living as a Christian for four decades. And strings of white lights, gigantic ornaments hanging it’s a consequence of there being some really great from the ceiling, and Santa seated by the escalator Christmas songs. beneath the food court. It was exciting to be part of the Did I mention my boy’s name is Judah? There holiday frenzy, and there was a joy even in working a are lots of reasons we chose that name. One was so

Commentary 43

Balazs.indd 43 11/15/18 12:00 PM he would have a moniker that both his American and ONCE HEARD an Orthodox rabbi speak about Israeli cousins could pronounce (as opposed to, say, Jewish attitudes toward Christmas. It was the Yitzchak). Another was, well, just because it was a I Saturday morning after Christmas, and he con- “strong name.” That’s what lots of people used to say gratulated those few of us present on showing up to when we’d tell them the name we had chosen. “Judah, shul instead of lying around on the holiday weekend. that’s a strong name,” they’d say. I wanted him to be He talked about how Christmas had become a holi- strong, a lion cub. day that Jews took too much interest in. Some would A bigger reason, though, for me at least, was admire the seasonal displays, some put up Christmas that it was based on the name Judah—that is, from trees. He even took to task those Jews who marked the the tribe of Judah—that the people once known as He- holiday by going out for Chinese food. brews and Israelites came to be called “Jews.” Unlike “This is how you express your Jewish identity?” me, my son will always know he was a Jew. He can’t he asked, “by going to a treif restaurant?” help it. The word is built into his name. His name is He was scandalized that Jews would brag about the foundation of the word. such a thing on Facebook. “If you have strong attach- And we’ve done more than give him a strong ments to things that are not Jewish,” he said, “then you Jewish name. We have striven from the start to give are having trouble with your Judaism.” him a strong Jewish identity. When he was a baby As I made my way around the ice with Judah first coming home from the hospital, we helped him that night in Williamsburg, I realized that I still had to reach up and touch the mezuzah on our door post some strong attachments to Christmas. Was I, a de- before entering the house. We taped a card with a He- cade after embracing my suppressed religious and brew blessing and a picture of a revered rabbi to the ethnic heritage, now having trouble with my Judaism? inside of his crib. My wife spoke Hebrew to him from As we circumnavigated the rink, Judah was de- birth and, when he began talking, wouldn’t respond lighted to be holding my hand and skating for the first to him if he said “mommy” instead of “imma.” We sent time. Maybe he sensed that I was struggling to stay him to a Jewish preschool and now take him to shul on my feet. Maybe he saw that I was wrestling with every Saturday. At home in Chattanooga, he goes to a something else. weekly Hebrew School, and on our year-long sabbati- “You know,” he said, “you’re a really good daddy.” cal road trip, he attended Hebrew School online. Every As I’ve mentioned, I had a difficult childhood. Friday night during our Shabbos dinner, we discuss Things got better as an adult, but I’ve struggled my the weekly parsha—the portion of the Bible assigned whole life with depression, addiction, frustrated by tradition to that week. We subscribe to PJ Library ambition, and feelings of low self-worth. But that one (a free service that mails Jewish-themed children’s sentence made up for about everything that ever felt books to Jewish families), my wife reads him stories in wrong in my life. And maybe that gave me more con- Hebrew and teaches him Hebrew songs. We observe fidence in Judah’s attachment to Judaism and in the all the holidays (even Tu B’Shevat—“the new year for commitments I had made earlier. the trees”), spend summers in Israel, and keep a strict- Christmas may have stuck, but so had my Juda- ly kosher kitchen at home even if we eat only sort-of, ism. I knew I didn’t want any Christmas trees at our kind-of “kosher style” when we go out. house. I knew I was OK with leaving behind Santa and We live a life I consider traditional—or masorti, baby Jesus. I didn’t have any second thoughts about as the Israelis say—rather than Orthodox, but we have my decision to embrace the religion of my ancestors always aspired to build a “Jewish home” and to instill in even if it never produced for me any heartrending Judah a Jewish pride and a love of yiddishkeit. I never holiday music. Nonetheless, I saw then that Christmas wanted to do to him what my parents did to me, which was part of who I was and who I am and that I wanted was, at 13, to pull the identity rug out from under me by Judah to know his dad better than I knew mine. explaining that, despite eight years of Sunday school “Do you know who sings this song?” I asked. and six months of confirmation class, I was, in fact, “No,” he said, “who?” a Jew. I understand why they did that. I don’t blame “John Lennon,” I said. “One of the Beatles. I used them, but I didn’t want to do that to my son. to really love this song.” q

44 And So This Is Christmas : December 2018

Balazs.indd 44 11/15/18 12:00 PM Politics & Ideas

Before the Parades

Victory City: A History Pier 88. The exquisite art deco empty (although good customers of New York and New Yorkers French liner had caught fire while could occasionally score contra- During World War II being refitted as a World War II band lamb chops slipped discreetly By John Strausbaugh American troop ship. Later, I saw into shopping bags by compliant Twelve, 496 pages the Swedish motorship Gripsholm, butchers). The streetlights were now ferrying exchanged prisoners dim, the cars were old, newspapers Reviewed by Edward Kosner of war, moored in the Hudson. I thin, every tinfoil cigarette wrap- remember grocery shopping with per or rubber band scavenged for NE OF my most vivid my mother clutching booklets of the war effort. Hordes of raga- childhood memories tiny colorful ration stamps and muffins mobbed candy stores on is of riding in a red- waking up to go to school at 7 a.m. rumors that unobtainable frozen and-yellow DeSoto in total darkness because it was Milky Way bars might be on sale. Skyview taxi along actually 5 a.m.—“War Time” had In Washington Heights, where I O the old West Side Highway in Man- pushed the clock back two hours to grew up, clutches of murmurous hattan in the early 1940s past the create more daylight at the end of refugees from Hitler would gather burnt-out hulk of the S.S. Nor- the workday. And hearing Edward on the Jewish High Holy Days at mandie heeled over in its slip at R. Morrow on the radio intoning, a fence facing west over the Hud- “This is London,” in the rubble of son—a makeshift Wailing Wall. Edward Kosner is the former the blitz. These flashbacks have been trig- editor of Newsweek, New York, Es- The war years were grim, even gered by John Strausbaugh’s bril- quire, and the New York Daily News for New York families without men liantly evocative Victory City, a and the author of a memoir, It’s News fighting overseas. The supermarket panoramic new social history of to Me. shelves and meat cases were half New York during the run-up to

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Politics&Ideas.indd 45 11/15/18 12:01 PM the war, the three years and nine and Rabbi Stephen Wise). Certain women in factories, shipyards, and months from Pearl Harbor to V-J enemies of FDR’s took to complain- the armed forces, and the pervasive Day, and the aftermath of the cata- ing about “Franklin Rosenfeld” and segregation of black Americans in clysm. Even people like me who re- his “Jew Deal.” Sensitive to it all, the same settings. The Irish and member the wartime years will find Roosevelt underplayed Hitler’s Fi- Italian mobs had a stranglehold on fascinating new details on nearly nal Solution for fear that America’s the waterfront, where vital war ma- every page. And for younger read- entry into the growing conflict teriel was dispatched. The problem ers, the book will be a revelation. would be resisted as “a war to save vanished when the Feds enlisted It’s startling to be reminded of the Jews.” He was circumspect Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano the number and the arrogance of about the Holocaust, Strausbaugh to tame the gangsters. Stars such as the Nazis and their sympathizers writes, until nearly the end of the Tallulah Bankhead, Judy Garland, in New York, which had the biggest war, despite the public clamor led and Katherine Hepburn pitched in Jewish population of any city in the by the writer Ben Hecht and others. at the Stage Door Canteen for GIs world and more than its share of Even a $50-a-head ransom offer in the heart of the theater district. anti-Semites. In the late 1930s and for 70,0000 Romanian Jews was But all wasn’t altruism. The crime until Pearl Harbor, members of the pigeonholed. boss Carlo Gambino cleaned up by Bund in knockoff black and brown Jews are omnipresent in Vic- peddling stolen and counterfeited shirts strutted around Yorkville tory City, from atom-bomb sci- gas-ration stamps. Black markets singing the “Horst Wessel Song” entists such as J. Robert Oppen- in everything from nylon stock- and cuffing the occasional Jew who heimer, Isadore Rabi, and Edward ings to bicycles, typewriters, and got in their way. They staged mon- Teller to atom spies Julius and Eisenhower jackets—named for the ster rallies in Madison Square Gar- Ethel Rosenberg, Harry Gold, and Supreme Allied Commander—flour- den bedecked with huge swastika David Greenglass, who were later ished throughout the city and na- banners out of a Leni Riefenstahl prosecuted by Irving Saypol and tionwide. Some of the worst culprits propaganda movie. The Nazis had Roy Cohn at a trial presided in wartime duplicity were among the allies in the America First move- over by Judge Irving Kaufman. most respected names in American ment, which was primarily isola- Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had industry and banking: Rockefeller, tionist—as were most Americans launched Superman in the depths Morgan, and Harriman. at the time—but which also had its of the Depression. Now, Jews cre- Strausbaugh has a masterful share of Jew-haters. ated wartime comic-book action section documenting how subsid- First among them was Charles heroes, including Captain Amer- iaries of Rockefeller’s Standard Lindbergh, for a while after his ica. (Wonder Woman, though, is Oil sold aviation fuel to Germany 1927 trans-Atlantic flight the most a shiksa.) The songwriter Irving throughout the war using tankers famous man in the world. Lindy Berlin (born Israel Beilin) wrote flying Panamanian flags. A bank was a special admirer of Hermann the two great anthems of the war, cofounded by Averell Harriman, Goering’s Luftwaffe and was cer- “God Bless America” and “White FDR’s special envoy to Stalin, laun- tain that Great Britain would fall. Christmas,” and other Tin Pan dered money for an industrialist He led the last America First rally Alley tunesmiths turned out the close to Hitler. The Morgan banks at Madison Square Garden on Sep- forgettable “We’ll Knock the Japs collaborated with others to set up tember 11, 1941, ranting against Right into the Laps of the Nazis” the Bank for International Settle- Franklin Roosevelt, the British, and “Praise the Lord and Pass ments in Basel, Switzerland. “Via and especially the Jews. “Their the Ammunition.” The paramount the BIS,” he writes, “American and greatest danger to this country,” he gossip columnist Walter Winchell British bankers would maintain a harangued, “lies in their large own- (born Weinshell) was Roosevelt’s mostly secret friendship with their ership and influence in our motion greatest PR man, exploiting leaks Nazi and Japanese counterparts pictures, our press, our radio, and from the White House and his own straight through World War II.” our government.” fevered brain. “Adele Hitler” he The Germans never stopped try- Roosevelt was surrounded by cracked, “is an out-and-out fairy!” ing to spy on the American home- Jews, a sizable subset of his “brain Jews are only one element in front and commit sabotage. New trust,” among them Samuel Rosen- Strausbaugh’s cavalcade of the city York was a logical focus, especially man, Henry Morganthau Jr., Felix in wartime. He examines nearly ev- because the mammoth Brooklyn Frankfurter, and Sidney Hillman ery aspect of life. There’s “Rosie the Navy Yard was turning out and (plus kibitzers like Bernard Baruch Riveter” and the growing role of repairing so many warships, and

46 Politics & Ideas : December 2018

Politics&Ideas.indd 46 11/15/18 12:01 PM so much war cargo moved through cializing in racist caricatures of the factoids add to its authenticity and the port, the largest in the coun- hated Japanese. fascination. Still, there’s not much try. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI There are some historical oddi- granular detail about the texture boasted of the effectiveness of the ties, too. According to Victory City, of life on the streets of New York bureau’s counterespionage efforts, the savage German attack on Guer- during the long years when the city dramatized in movies such as The nica in Spain, the inspiration for was shadowed by the approaching House on 92nd Street. (The house Pablo Picasso’s iconic painting, was war, the 45 months during which used in the movie was actually on actually a Luftwaffe bombing er- Americans actually fought, and the 93rd Street.) In fact, Nazi sabo- ror. Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is chaotic aftermath. teurs who were dropped off from Your Land” was written as a retort Unlike most of the world’s a German U-boat off Amagansett to Berlin’s “God Bless America,” great cities, New York emerged on Long Island early in the war which originally had an isolation- unscathed from the war—now the couldn’t get the G-men in New York ist first verse later discarded as the capital of the world, a distinction to accept their surrender and had momentum grew for U.S. entry into soon ratified by the establishment to go to Washington to convince the war. Anti-Semitic orators took of the United Nations on the East Hoover’s men to lock them up. to referring to Jews as “Eskimos”— River. A 1945 newsreel called it FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt a dog whistle for the in-crowd. “The Wonder City.” World War II come alive in these pages, and so Rather than trivializing the is history. The wonders—mixed as does the city’s pint-sized, irrepress- book, these passing glimpses and they may be—never cease.q ible mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, whose mother was Jewish and whose sister was stranded in Na- zi-controlled Hungary. LaGuardia badgered Roosevelt until the presi- dent named him to command the ‘Who Pays for nationwide civil-defense program, but the mayor was so manically disorganized that he quickly had to be replaced. the Inedible Strausbaugh’s narrative is spiced with lively cameos. There’s Malcolm Little—not yet X—in a zoot suit talking enough Daddy-o Fish?’ jive to his Harlem draft board to wangle a deferment. Sargent Shriv- er turns up as the duty officer at dis- The Churchill Documents, cant original document relating to trict Naval headquarters in down- Volume 21: The Shadows of the life and career of Winston town New York on what became Victory, January–July 1945 Churchill. It is a stupendous work Pearl Harbor Day. He was supposed Edited by Martin Gilbert and of scholarship that will comprise to be monitoring military commu- Larry Arnn some 20 million words. The pres- nications but got bored and turned Hillsdale College, 2,149 pages ent volume is the 21st, and it covers on the broadcast of the New York the period in 1945 from New Year’s Giant–Brooklyn Dodgers football Reviewed by Andrew Roberts Day to July 31. It ends with game at the Polo Grounds—thus Churchill having lost the general missing news of the sneak attack OR MANY YEARS now, election and his premiership. for hours. J.D. Salinger came home Hillsdale College has The astonishing size of this vol- from the war in Europe with five been engaged in the ume—2,149 pages—is explained by battle stars and a French-German mammoth task of pub- the extraordinary amount of work war bride, who promptly fled back lishing every signifi- that Churchill squeezed into each to Europe and filed for divorce. F day. Given his naps and lunchtime Before he was Dr. Seuss, Theodor Andrew Roberts’s biography, alcohol, one does not immediately Geisel was the wartime cartoonist Churchill: Walking with Destiny, has think of Churchill as a workaholic, for the innovative tabloid PM, spe- just been released by Viking. yet he very clearly was, relish-

Commentary 47

Politics&Ideas.indd 47 11/15/18 12:01 PM ing his task of looking into every he wrote to Food Minister Lord aspect of the prosecution of the These Woolton, complaining, “What is war. Although Volume 21 opens i the point of bringing 500 tons of with the Battle of the Bulge still pages fish per day to London, if only one- under way, it was clear by this contain nothing half of it is edible? To what use is point that the Allies were going to the other half put? If there is no win the war. And so Churchill was to support use for it, could not the salting be already worrying about what sort made at the place of delivery? Who of Europe would be left from the the left-wing pays for the inedible fish?” This continent-wide funeral pyre. conspiracy book is packed with examples of The reaction of Allied leaders Churchill’s insistence on knowing to the liberation of the Holocaust theory that about everything his government extermination camps might be Churchill started was doing. summed up in a letter to Churchill In a thoughtful preface, Larry from his chief of staff, Hastings the Cold War, Arnn points out that although “Pug” Ismay, on April 19. “The Ger- and much to there were “increasing signs that man concentration camps which Churchill’s energy and stamina have recently been overrun by the sustain the truth were not what they were, he was Allied armies are even indescrib- that he was one still a dynamo.” Arnn’s preface is ably more horrible than those titled “Triumph and Tragedy,” in an about which General Eisenhower of the few to echo of the title of the last volume spoke to you yesterday and of foresee it early of Churchill’s war memoirs—for which photographs have appeared although the triumph of defeat- in the press today,” Ismay wrote. and clearly. ing Nazi Germany was obvious, “General Eisenhower emphasised the tragedy of so much of Europe that the time factor was most im- slipping into the Stalinist maw was portant since it was clearly impos- bomber forces justifies an urgent clear to Churchill but to far too few sible to leave these indescribable review of their employment, to others in the West by July 1945. places in their present condition this end.…Such attacks might even “The misery of the whole world for very long. The American del- have a political value in demon- appals me,” Churchill had written egation might be too late to see the strating, in the best way open to us, to his wife Clementine on February full horrors, whereas an English to the Russians a desire on the part 1, “and I fear increasingly that new delegation, being so much closer, of the British and Americans to as- struggles may arise out of those we could get there in time.” sist them in the present battle.” The are successfully ending.’” Yet peo- This book also provides new Dresden bombing was not a massa- ple were no more willing to listen proof for those who argue that cre for its own sake, as Churchill’s to his warnings about Stalin after the bombing of Dresden in Feb- detractors allege. the war than they had been those ruary 1945—long characterized The continued bad relations about Hitler before it. These pages solely as an act of revenge for between Churchill and Charles contain nothing to support the the raids on London—was justi- de Gaulle even after the German left-wing conspiracy theory that fied in part by the need to keep surrender are evident from this Churchill started the Cold War, German forces from using their volume. Even as late as June 16, and much to sustain the truth that railway nodes to transport troops the prime minister was writing to he was one of the few to foresee it westward. As a Joint Intelligence Sir Alec Cadogan, the head of the early and clearly. report to Churchill on July 25 puts British Foreign Office, that “the Churchill told his private secre- it: “The degree of success achieved arrangements should be cancelled tary, Jock Colville, in the aftermath by the present Russian offensive for the decoration of French of- of the Yalta Conference at which is likely to have a decisive effect ficers at the [British] Embassy on the postwar structure of Europe on the length of the war. We con- 20th June and thus the risk avoid- was agreed on with Stalin: “I have sider, therefore, that the assistance ed of a refusal for them to attend not the slightest intention of being which might be given to the Rus- by General de Gaulle.” That same cheated over Poland, not even if we sians during the next few weeks by day, Churchill’s attention to detail go to the verge of war with the Rus- the British and American strategic was illustrated by a memo that sia.” But cheated he was, not least

48 Politics & Ideas : December 2018

Politics&Ideas.indd 48 11/15/18 12:01 PM because the Roosevelt administra- Arnn and his team of experts, democratic project—one that he tion had no intention of support- including the indefatigable Rich- thinks represents the telos, or end- ing him to the extent of going to ard Langworth and Soren Geiger, point, of history. war. These documents prove that have only a few more volumes to go If identity politics is at root Churchill was not duped at Yalta, before they reach Churchill’s death about recognition, then it isn’t as so many historians have claimed. in 1965. This venture will stand as a new phenomenon at all but a Rather, they show he recognized the greatest act of collaborative very old one indeed, and it be- early on that Stalin had been lying secular publishing since Vivant hooves moderns to listen to what over Poland and Eastern Europe, Denon’s magisterial Description the ancients had to say about but Churchill could do nothing of Egypt of 1802–22. Until then, in the problem. Fukuyama does this about it with millions of Red Army Churchill’s own phrase, they must in his early chapters, the book’s troops stationed on Polish soil. “keep buggering on.”q strongest. The desire for recogni- tion that animates identity politics arises from what Socrates in Plato’s Republic calls the thymos, the spirit or “the third part of the soul.” The thymotic urge kicks into action Pattern when people seek recognition of their equal dignity (isothymia) or when they want to establish supe- riority over others (megalothymia). Recognition Isothymia can easily morph into megalothymia, a danger that didn’t escape Plato’s notice. Still, the rigid class distinctions of the ancient Identity: tion in an intellectual landscape world helped contain some of the The Demand for Dignity and the populated by dreary quants and tensions. Pagan society reserved Politics of Resentment TED charlatans. recognition only for certain people, by Francis Fukuyama In his latest book, Identity, the mainly the guardians of the com- Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 218 pages Stanford University scholar turns munity, whose descendants formed his attention to the burning ques- the aristocracy; other classes were Reviewed by Sohrab Ahmari tions of the moment, namely, iden- born, they toiled, they died unre- tity politics and the challenge it membered, and that was that. RANCIS FUKUYAMA poses to the democratic West. Who, The God of the Hebrew Bible— is America’s last great or what, is to blame for our new- and Christianity, which spread the student of G.W.F. found obsession with identity—this Bible’s promise to the Gentiles— Hegel. Which promi- thing we’ve had enough of and yet changed all that. That God imprint- nent thinker today still can’t get enough of? Should the de- ed his own image on this one crea- Fwrites earnestly of the Spirit’s un- mocracies attempt to feed this hun- ture, man, and gave him free will folding in history, of Napoleon at ger for identity? And if the answer and a capacity for moral judgment. Jena? None but Fukuyama. He has is yes, how can they do so without Thus, “in the Christian tradition, one foot firmly in serious Continen- tearing themselves apart? all human beings are fundamen- tal thought, and the result is that “Demand for recognition of tally equal: they are endowed with even when he’s wrong, he’s wrong one’s identity is a master concept an equal capacity for choice,” Fuku- in fascinating ways. That alone that unifies much of what’s going yama writes. The French philoso- should commend him to our atten- on today,” the author notes, from pher Rémi Brague has described campus mobs to white-backlash this process as Judeo-Christianity’s Sohrab Ahmari, formerly se- politics to the resurgence of na- “democratization of nobility.” nior writer at Commentary, is the tionalism. He sets out to uncover As Fukuyama argues, many of incoming op-ed editor of the New the origins of these paroxysms our highest ideals today echo these York Post. His memoir of Catholic and to offer a “more universal un- teachings. The birth of moder- conversion, From Fire, by Water, is derstanding” of recognition that nity, however, radically altered how forthcoming from Ignatius Press. would be at peace with the liberal- men and women went about satis-

Commentary 49

Politics&Ideas.indd 49 11/15/18 12:01 PM fying the thymotic drive—and what and deeper attachment that we they sought recognition for. Cathol- Identity group under the term “identity icism, in Fukuyama’s telling, “acted i politics,” on the other. This is the on the external person” through politics book’s least compelling portion. the sacraments. But then came has deep roots. The author can’t give up on the Martin Luther with his claims idea that secular universalism is about justification by interior faith But there is a the only way forward, since in his alone. Whatever their theological tendency among view, religion can offer only “par- validity, Luther’s ideas triggered tial” recognition. a revolution of subjectivity in the some liberals, of Thus, instead of calling for a West. The schism in Western Chris- recovery of Western democracy’s tianity would have far-reaching the classical and religious roots, as the likes of John secular consequences. contemporary Paul II and Rabbi Lord Jonathan In the centuries that followed, Sacks have argued, Fukuyama in- thinkers such as Rousseau told varieties alike, sists that secular, liberal-demo- those hitherto unremembered to view today’s cratic culture itself should become multitudes that society was un- the glue that holds us together. justly suppressing their inner lives, identity politics Put another way, the procedural which were full of rich feelings as a novel and norms of liberal democracy that and moral intuitions that deserved are enshrined in Western constitu- to be liberated from external re- alien invasion. tions should form the basis for at- straints. Hegel, Fukuyama’s muse, tachment to the reigning political saw in history the gradual uni- order and respect for the dignity of versalization of recognition for all some liberals, of the classical and the other. But such thinking is pre- along French-revolutionary lines. contemporary varieties alike, to cisely what got us here in the first The fact that history designated a view today’s identity politics as place. At one point, he even envi- marauding French general to im- a novel and alien invasion. Fu- sions creating a European Union pose these principles on the world kuyama’s best contribution is to citizenship as a way to calm the “was a small detail” for the German remind readers that deep secular- Continent’s nationalist and popu- philosopher. ization, what he calls the “disap- list storms. These intellectual develop- pearance of a shared religious Sigh. If the last few years have ments both reflected and influ- horizon,” set the stage for today’s taught anything, it is that voters enced modernization across the identity explosion. In other words, across the West are hungry for West. The material benefits, in the same process that made liberal a substantive vision of the good terms of growth and technologi- democracy possible also divested and of belonging and recognition. cal progress, are beyond dispute. Western societies of a common Telling them, loudly and slowly, DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN GET But Fukuyama also tallies the source of attachment, belonging, that liberal democracy is the best harms—not least the dislocations, and recognition. In its place came apparently doesn’t calm the agita- geographic and spiritual, that had demands for recognition based on tion at the heart of identity politics. THE IPAD EDITION OF Commentary millions answering the siren call race, nationhood (including the And a soupy end-of-history trans- of murderous ideologies such as nasty, exclusionary kind), sex, gen- national liberalism doesn’t sate Nazism. Elsewhere, in the liberal- der, and a thousand newfangled Western man’s spiritual hungers. democratic technocracies, they sexual preferences. It’s too bad Fukuyama the Hege- opened the way to a therapeutic So what to do? Fukuyama de- lian can’t look back and retrace FOR FREE? culture that authorized moral li- votes the final chapters of his book historical steps, to see whether cense and disorder in the name of to imagining some new model that truths from the past were unduly “authenticity” and “self-esteem.” could reconcile, on the one hand, discarded; the very arrow of time Identity politics, then, has deep liberal democracy, and the various must ratify his ideas. This, even as YES! YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO COMMENTARY roots. There is a tendency among longings for collective recognition historical events debunk them. q INCLUDES IPAD ACCESS Choose from either Commentary Complete or Commentary Digital and you’ll get 24/7 access to the iPad edition. All for one low price of $19.99! SUBSCRIBE ONLINE AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM/SUBSCRIBE 50 Politics & Ideas : December 2018 Commentary

Politics&Ideas.indd 50 11/15/18 12:01 PM DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN GET THE IPAD EDITION OF Commentary FOR FREE? YES! YOUR SUBSCRIPTION TO COMMENTARY INCLUDES IPAD ACCESS Choose from either Commentary Complete or Commentary Digital and you’ll get 24/7 access to the iPad edition. All for one low price of $19.99! SUBSCRIBE ONLINE AT COMMENTARYMAGAZINE.COM/SUBSCRIBE Commentary

Politics&Ideas.indd 51 11/15/18 12:01 PM Culture & Civilization King Lear, Our Contemporary

The darkest English-speaking female actor has it: While it is hard enough for a assumed the part widely thought young actor to play the aged king, Shakespeare play to be the most difficult of all classi- who calls himself an “old man, / ‘ finds its moment cal stage roles—is bringing the play Fourscore and upward,” it is even to Broadway in a new production harder for older performers to staged by Sam Gold. muster the physical stamina that is By Terry Teachout Jackson’s version will be of spe- necessary to perform so demand- cial significance becauseKing Lear ing a role. IS THE SEASON of has been staged on Broadway only But the latter-day growth of King Lear. In Septem- twice in the past six decades, with regional theater means that a lack ber, Richard Eyre’s Lee J. Cobb in 1968 and Christo- of interest by Broadway and Hol- BBC adaptation of pher Plummer in 2004. Moreover, lywood is no longer an adequate Shakespeare’s play, no earlier Broadway Lear was at index of Lear’s American recep- setT in an imaginary totalitarian all notable save for Orson Welles’s tion. For my part, I have reviewed counterpart of contemporary Lon- notorious and disastrous self-di- 14 Lears in the past 15 years, with don and starring Anthony Hopkins rected 1956 production, of which such actors as Plummer, Stacy Ke- in the title role, was released on Simon Callow, his biographer, said, ach, Kevin Kline, Frank Langella, Amazon Prime to critical acclaim. “they racked the critical thesaurus John Lithgow, Ian McKellen, and Next April, Glenda Jackson, who to denounce.” Sam Waterston in the role. Lear is played Lear in London two years Why were American versions by now solidly established in the ago—the first time that a famous of King Lear so uncommon for U.S. as one of the most popular of so long? Because it is to theater Shakespeare’s plays. Terry Teachout is Commen- what Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge is to What is it about King Lear that tary’s critic-at-large and the drama music, an all-encompassing super- explains this surge in its popular- critic of the Wall Street Journal. drama fraught with complexities ity? One plausible explanation is Satchmo at the Waldorf, his 2011 that pose challenges of under- that as the baby boomers reach play about Louis Armstrong, has standing to the playgoer. The title the ends of their lives, they are been produced off Broadway and role is also challenging in a more naturally growing more interested throughout America. practical way to those who assume in Shakespeare’s most searching

52 December 2018

Culture & Civ.indd 52 11/15/18 1:16 PM study of old age and its discon- the Eyre/Hopkins TV Lear, work pre–World War II Lear. As the rev- tents. Another is that Lear can be reasonably well on their own re- olution in stage décor triggered by interpreted, however tendentious- strictive terms, but others have Thornton Wilder’s Our Town long ly, as a quasi-feminist statement, a been unconvincing, on occasion ago demonstrated, Shakespeare’s study of what happens when the even preposterous. The worst Lear plays work best when performed leaders of a patriarchal society I have ever reviewed, directed by without scene breaks in open-stage cling tenaciously to power instead Robert Falls at Chicago’s Goodman productions that employ a bare of handing it over to younger wom- Theatre in 2006, turned the play minimum of props and scenery, en (which is, of course, what Lear into a tale of Eastern European and Lear in particular also benefits does at first, though he changes his gangsters whose opening scene from costumes that identify the mind once he sees what it would was set in a men’s room with a characters without locking them mean to be powerless). No doubt working urinal. into a specific time and place. In many such explicitly politicized Even the best conceptual Lears such productions, it is the verse Lears await us. have in common a self-limiting and the way in which it is spoken Yet there is a far more impor- tendency: They tell you how to un- by the cast, that set the scene and tant reason, which is that the play derstand the play instead of letting indicate the illimitably vast scope and its title role are both protean, you come to your own conclusions of the tragedy. lending themselves to an astonish- about it. But much of what makes For King Lear is not an Arthur ingly wide range of other interpre- Lear so theatrically effective is its Miller–style kitchen-sink drama tations—many of which are, as the lack of specificity. It is not a history about a bad father who can’t get millennials like to say, “relatable,” play but a story set in a legendary along with his daughters, much not just to angry young women or kingdom of the imagination about less an anachronistic #MeToo para- aging baby boomers but to every- which we know no more than is ble. It is, rather, an inquiry into the one. For no matter where you set it needed to set the plot in motion. meaning of life, one that goes so far or how you stage it, the plot of King And we respond with empathy to as to suggest that human life might Lear is so immediate in its implica- its characters not because they be a cruel game played on mankind tions that it could have been lifted look like us but because they act by a heartless deity. In the words of from the front pages of today’s like us. Hence a director’s decision the Earl of Gloucester, whose eyes newspapers: A tyrannical father to set Lear in modern times and are gouged out by Lear’s daughter signs away his power and pelf to a stage it naturalistically can have Regan when he refuses to betray pair of greedy, flattering daughters the paradoxical result of dimin- his king: “As flies to wanton boys who turn on him as soon as the ink ishing the play’s relevance (in the are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for dries on the trust deeds. cant sense of the word) rather than their sport.” Naturalistic acting, Clothed in the splendor and vio- heightening it. however accomplished, cannot lence of Shakespeare’s verse, such Many of the problems inher- even begin to plumb the anguished seemingly commonplace events ent in staging a verse drama like depths of so raw an utterance. cannot but seize the viewer by Lear—as well as with an up-to-date This is not to say that the title the throat, speaking as they do to political spin—were exemplified by role need be performed in the oro- our primal fear of losing control Bill Rauch’s 2013 Oregon Shake- tund basso-profundo style of an of our lives in old age. Barbara speare Festival production, which Orson Welles. Robert Foxworth, Gaines’s masterly 2014 Chicago was set in “a kingdom, now.” This who assumed the role in Adrian Shakespeare production actually Lear was performed in the round Noble’s 2010 Old Globe staging dared to make this fear manifest in a theater whose modest size in San Diego, instead made Lear on stage by portraying Lear as a inhibited large-scale classical act- a snappish, small-statured ruler victim of dementia. ing, and the décor, in which we saw (he was shorter than all three of Too often, however, the quest Lear relaxing in a La-Z-Boy and his daughters) who is destroyed for “relatability” results in mod- Cordelia decked out as a tattooed by his pettiness of spirit. Larry ern-dress stagings whose every goth chick, was self-consciously Yando’s dementia-beset Chicago element seems to have been deter- clever to the point of glibness. Shakespeare Lear, by contrast, was mined in advance by an arbitrary None of this, however, is meant at once frightened and frighten- concept superimposed on the text to endorse the reflexive use of the ing, a snarling, capricious man in by the director rather than arising “traditional” costumes and sets whom great violence alternated organically from it. Some, such as that would have been seen in a with great tenderness.

Commentary 53

Culture & Civ.indd 53 11/15/18 12:02 PM But neither actor did so much less. As John Simon has written of awaited him. It is, of course, impos- as hint that there is anything small Lear: “The point of Shakespeare’s sible to say whether the 80-year- about King Lear’s suffering, much work is not that everyone is equally old Epstein could have made a less the behavior that led to it: He dreary and culpable but, clearly, like impact in a larger theater, but is a ruler of towering stature who that some are deserving and even to watch him up close was—in a makes the fatal mistake of suppos- noble, while others are bad and word—awesome. ing that power is more important even vicious, yet in the short run No small part of the force of than love, then discovers the world the bad may actually have a better this Lear arose from the fact that as it really is, cold and hostile to the time of it. An awe-inspiring vision, instead of trying to make Shake- vanity of human wishes. “Is man no startling for its—or any—time.” speare’s play more easily palatable more than this?” Lear cries at the So it is, and any Lear that opts to modern viewers, it took for piteous spectacle of the half-naked for lazy, politically correct “relat- granted that they would have no Edgar trembling in the storm, and ability” over Shakespeare’s ter- trouble grasping the relevance of in an instant he is invaded and con- rible vision of helpless men and Lear’s plight to their own lives. For quered by self-doubt. To “human- evil gods cannot but trivialize his not only did Shakespeare write a ize” such a titan by playing him supreme act of truth-telling about play in which universal emotions naturalistically is to diminish the man’s fate. are writ large, but he looked di- pathos of his brutal humiliation. rectly into the infinite abyss of ni- Even more disturbing is what S IT POSSIBLE to do more hilism without being fazed by what happens next. Having passed than rough justice on stage to he saw there. Indeed, he found in it through the refiner’s fire of suf- I a play of such colossal scale a source of inspiration. fering, Lear sees the error of his and purposeful complexity? Un- Bernard Shaw, who believed ways and embraces Cordelia, the likely as it may sound, the most that “no man will ever write a bet- only daughter who loves him. But artistically successful Lear that I ter tragedy than Lear,” described his redemption comes too late to have reviewed to date was a small- this latter quality with typical pith: prevent her murder, a denouement scale production with an octoge- “That Shakespear’s [sic] soul was so sickeningly unjust that even narian star. damned (I really know no other a critic as acute as Samuel John- In 2005, Boston’s Actors’ Shake- way of expressing it) by a barren son could not accept it, just as he speare Project, which puts on site- pessimism is undeniable; but even thought the blinding of Gloucester specific stagings of the Shakespear- when it drove him to the blasphe- to be “an act too horrid to be en- ean canon in locations throughout mous despair of Lear…it did not dured in dramatic exhibition.” Boston and Cambridge, mounted break him. He was not crushed by Those commentators who argue Lear in a high-ceilinged classroom it: he wielded it Titanically, and that Shakespeare is best under- of the Boston University School of made it a sublime quality in his stood as a Christian artist find it Theatre. The near-abstract bare- plays.” hard to grapple with King Lear, bones production, staged by Pat- In the end, it is this titanic sub- whose “message” is more likely to rick Swanson and designed by Da- limity that keeps us coming back to strike today’s viewers as all but ni- vid R. Gammons, looked as though King Lear. While another English- hilistic. Yet it is in this very aspect it had been blown into the room by speaking poet rightly reminded us that the play’s deepest appeal is to a hurricane, with paint spattered three centuries later that “human be found. For just as all of us fear on the walls and wood chips flung kind / Cannot bear very much real- that we will die with our minds oc- across the floor. ity,” it is also true that to watch a cluded by senility, so are even the The title role was played by Al- genius fearlessly and beautifully most steadfast of religious believ- vin Epstein, whose previous cred- voice our innermost suspicions ers—Dr. Johnson among them— its included the 1956 Broadway about the ultimate meaningless- beset by periodic pangs of doubt. premiere of Waiting for Godot (and ness of life cannot but have a tonic The genius of King Lear is that who played the Fool that same year effect on the mature playgoer, one it stares down this doubt, even in Welles’s King Lear). He gave us that helps us accept the dark trials broaching the possibility that hu- a gnome-like, stiff-jointed Lear, by of our own lives. If Shakespeare man life, far from being directed turns malicious, doddering, and can face it, one thinks after seeing by what Shakespeare elsewhere desperate, whose senile playful- Lear, then so can I. Such is the stuff calls “a divinity that shapes our ness made you shudder with pro- that great art—and great courage— ends,” is in fact entirely meaning- spective dread at the horrors that is made on.q

54 Culture & Civilization : December 2018

Culture & Civ.indd 54 11/15/18 12:02 PM MEDIA COMMENTARY

continued from page 56 Room of the White of the day. Diaz wouldn’t accept it. She interrupted House was filled with reporters who, by shouting out the president six times in a vain attempt to get him to questions, waving their hands wildly, and jostling for parrot the conventional wisdom. What did she expect? Trump’s attention, treated the august setting more like Humility? a rope line on the campaign trail than the onetime The president’s over-the-top attacks on the residence of John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, media as the “enemy of the people” have solidified JFK, and Ronald Reagan. CNN contributor April Ryan journalistic class-consciousness. An attack on one kept shouting her question about “voter suppression” of them is now an assault on the Bill of Rights. This despite not being called on and despite Trump’s an- guild mentality excuses some ridiculous activity. What swering it off-handedly. “Very hostile—such a hostile Acosta did was blatantly unprofessional. “We want media,” Trump remarked, whereupon Ryan yelled at journalists to ask questions and seek truth,” wrote Al him again. Tompkins and Kelly McBridge of Poynter.org. “But Jim By the time the press conference was over, Acosta’s encounter Wednesday at a White House press President Trump had answered 68 questions from conference was less about asking questions and more 35 reporters. Between his about making statements.” tweets, his rallies, his in- However, when the terviews, his remarks as he There hasn’t been a dull day in White House revoked Acos- makes his way to Marine ta’s hard press pass, making One, and his press confer- Washington since Trump announced it more difficult for him to ences, Trump has to be his campaign. You’d think reporters cover the White House, the one of the most “available” would be in hog heaven. Why do they press rallied to his side. presidents in memory. CNN said in a statement, We know his unvarnished hate him so? One reason is politics. “This unprecedented deci- opinion on practically ev- sion is a threat to our de- ery topic in the news, espe- mocracy.” The next day, cially ones that involve him. Plus, there hasn’t been a Peter Alexander said, “If he had an issue with Jim dull day in Washington since he announced his cam- Acosta, and we know that the two of them have tussled paign. You’d think reporters would be in hog heaven. in the past, he could have called on somebody else.” Why do they hate him so? One reason is politics: The Of course, if Trump hadn’t called on Acosta, the press press exhibits liberal bias even in the most main- would have zinged him for cowardice. “There is not stream of Republican administrations, much less this a rudeness exception to the First Amendment,” said populist-nationalist one. Peter Baker of the New York Times. Earlier presidents The media are also used to controlling the nar- “took the questions and they weren’t such fragile rative. For decades, the country has talked about what flowers that they couldn’t stand up for themselves.” executives and editors in New York and D.C. want it to But Trump did stand up for himself. It’s why you’re talk about. But this tradition is breaking down because criticizing him! of cable, digital, and social media, and it is incredibly Jim Rutenberg of the Times asked, “Should the frustrating for reporters when the president refuses press boycott Trump?” He spent an afternoon calling to accept their own ideological priors. The last ques- political strategists for advice, as if the real campaign tion of the postelection press conference, for example, were between President Trump and the journalists came from Aixa Diaz of Hearst Television. She noted who mock him all day on Twitter. Rutenberg’s piece that suburban women had turned against the Repub- was clarifying. It made one realize that there’s a better lican Party: “How do you bridge that divide now—also chance of bipartisanship between Trump and Nancy with the influx of women coming into Congress?” Pelosi than between Trump and Jim Acosta. It made Trump answered as he always does. He denied weak- one realize that, if this really were an election, the ness, projected strength, and reiterated his message press would lose. And it would be a landslide.q

Commentary 55

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The Real Forever War

MATTHEW CONTINETTI

RESIDENT TRUMP tried to put his best spin One couldn’t help but be struck by the way Acosta on the midterm results as he began his post- began the exchange. “Thank you, Mr. President,” he said. P election press conference. He noted that the siz- “I wanted to challenge you on one of the statements that able Democratic gains in the House of Representatives you made in the tail end of the campaign in the mid- were in line with historical averages, that many of the terms.” At that point, Trump interjected: “Here we go.” Senate candidates for whom he campaigned had won, And he was right to be sarcastic. Notice the self-serving that Democrats did not do as well in statehouses as and impertinent manner in which Acosta framed his they had hoped. He mocked Republican House candi- question. He didn’t ask Trump to clarify his words. He dates who had distanced themselves from him during didn’t say that many people had criticized Trump’s de- the campaign only to lose anyway. In low and somber scription of the “caravan” of asylum seekers from Central tones, he called on House Democrats to govern in a America as an “invasion.” He said he was going to “chal- bipartisan manner and threatened to play hardball if lenge” the president of the United States, as if press avail- Nancy Pelosi and Jerry Nadler moved aggressively to abilities were the same as trial by combat. investigate his administration. When Trump stated flatly, “I consider it to be an Then he opened it up for questions and all hell invasion,” Acosta interrupted him once more. “As you broke loose. know, Mr. President,” he said condescendingly, “the Actually, that’s not quite right. The first sev- caravan was not an invasion.” Trump noted that he and eral questions were fairly routine ones. Things took Acosta have a difference of opinion. This was unaccept- a bizarre turn when the president called on CNN’s able to Acosta. He refused to let the president continue, Jim Acosta. No stranger to this column, Acosta has saying that Trump “demonized immigrants” and “that’s become infamous for his showboating questions at not an invasion.” And he pressed on, refusing to sit White House press briefings. He is point man for his down and hand over the microphone when his turn was network’s aggressive coverage of Trump—coverage over and Trump had called on NBC’s Peter Alexander. that often slips the surly bonds of objectivity into sen- To make matters worse, Alexander stepped on sationalistic opposition. Republican presidents have his own question about the Mueller probe to defend faced journalistic nemeses before: Nixon had Dan Acosta. “In Jim’s defense,” Alexander said, “I’ve trav- Rather, Reagan had Sam Donaldson, and the Bushes eled with him and watched him. He’s a diligent re- had Helen Thomas. But Rather and Donaldson were porter who busts his butt like the rest of us.” To which poodles compared with Acosta. His behavior exempli- Trump responded, “Well, I’m not a big fan of yours, fies the attitudes and conduct of a press corps that is so either.” convinced of Donald Trump’s abnormality and villainy That’s when the joust between CNN and the that it is willing to cast aside decorum, professional- president turned into a melee. Alexander asked, “Why ism, and its own credibility. are you pitting Americans against one another, sir?” As though Donald Trump is the first president in history Matthew Continetti is the editor in chief of to attack his opposition and use wedge issues for politi- the Washington Free Beacon. cal gain. The East continued on page 55

56 December 2018

Culture & Civ.indd 56 11/15/18 12:02 PM YOU DESERVE TO KNOW THE TRUTH... Anti-Zionism Is Racism Anti-Semitic attacks that kill Jews in a synagogue are fundamentally no different than attacks on Zionism—Israel’s right to exist. They’re both racist acts of hate. Anti-Semitism calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state in the Middle East. Its citizens of all races, genders, people—whether that is by murder or destruction of the ethnicities and religions enjoy equal civil rights—more Jewish state. Those who call for endangering or eliminating freedom than in most of the world’s nations. Arabs serve any ethnic group—by either the political right or left—are in Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, and Supreme Court. Yet guilty of racism. who criticizes the Palestinians’ apartheid demand that all Jews be cleansed from their ancient biblical homelands of What are the facts? Judea and Samaria? Double standard? Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have a right Attack #5: Jews are members of a religion, not a to self-determination—to the State of Israel in their real “people.” Whereas Jews have always been united by millennia-old homeland. According to the U.S. State a belief in Judaism, the Bible speaks of Am Yisrael—the Department, anti-Semitism is a form of racism directed people of Israel—ancient Hebrews who built a sovereign at Israel using demonization, delegitimization or double nation, as well as legal, economic and social systems. standards. This form of anti-Semitism appears in Jews are also united by the Hebrew language. Contrary numerous guises—usually false accusations—from both to this delegitimization attempt, Jews are a distinct the radical right and radical left. The objective of anti- people who also share Zionist attacks is to deny the right of the Jewish state, “The whole world a religion. among all the world’s nations, to exist. must see that Attack #6: Some Attack #1: Israel is a colonial state. This assertion Jews oppose Israel, bespeaks a double standard, as well as a lie. No campus Israel . . . has the so that can’t be demonstrators protest Turkey’s military colonization of right to exist.” anti-Semitic. Just as Crete, nor China’s occupation of Tibet. Yet Israel is falsely blacks, Muslims or accused of colonizing its own ancient homeland. In fact, —Martin Luther King, Jr. any group can express Jews are the indigenous people of Palestine—survivors of unjust racial or ethnic the oldest sovereign state in this land more than 3,000 years bias against their own people, so can Jews. Jewish ago, with continuous residency since then. Indeed, Zionism ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta sect members oppose is an anti-colonialist movement, having fought Roman, a Jewish state before the Messiah arrives. Other Jews, Crusader, Ottoman, British and Jordanian imperialism. such as members of Jewish Voice for Peace or Students Attack #2: Israel stole Palestinian land. This attempt for Justice in Palestine, object to Zionism based on the to delegitimize Israel ignores the fact that aside from false and slanderous accusations listed above. The fact private land holdings, the Palestinians have never had remains that specifically targeting Jews—and the world’s sovereignty over any territory. Therefore, they do not only national refuge for Jews—is a form of racial bias, in “possess” public lands in present-day Israel or Judea this case anti-Semitism. and Samaria (the West Bank). The territory controlled Attempts to delegitimize Israel—whether in the United by Israel today was settled on land that Jews owned Nations, college classrooms or by the Boycott, Divestment or purchased, was public land granted by the British and Sanctions movement—are markers of racist anti- Mandate for Palestine, or was captured when Israel Semitism. Good people will heed the 1967 exhortation of defeated invading Arab armies from Jordan and Syria in civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The whole 1967—all legal acquisitions under international law, to world must see that Israel must exist and has the right to be resolved by negotiations. exist and is one of the great outposts of democracy.” Attack #3: Israel’s claims to the Holy Land are religiously based. Many oppose the claim by some This message has been published and paid for by Jews and Christians that Israel’s right to exist springs from biblical authority. Yet Zionism is largely a secular movement, and Israel’s right to exist is also supported by indisputable legal, historical and humanitarian rights. Facts and Logic About the Middle East While Israel’s state religion is indeed Judaism—and it is P.O. Box 3460, Berkeley, CA 94703 the world’s only Jewish state—it joins 40 other nations, James Sinkinson, President mostly Muslim, that designate a state religion, also Gerardo Joffe (z"l), Founder including Costa Rica and England. Above all, Israel is FLAME is a tax-exempt, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Its purpose not a theocracy, like Iran, but a secular democracy. is the research and publication of facts regarding developments in Attack #4: Israel is an apartheid state. This attempt to the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the United States, Israel and other allies in the region. You tax-deductible demonize Israel is false on its face: Israel is the most diverse contributions are welcome. To receive free FLAME updates, visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org

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