CommentaryAPRIL 2020 The Rise of the New Jacobins BY CHRISTINE ROSEN The Boys from Laupheim ANDREW BERGMAN Jews Who Let Jew-Haters Off the Hook KARYS RHEA & KEREN TOLEDANO // MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK Christopher Caldwell’s

Commentary Brilliant Provocation BARTON SWAIM

APRIL 2020 : VOLUME 149 NUMBER 4 $5.95 US : $7.00 CANADA To m Wreck Side Story Stoppard’s TERRY TEACHOUT Octogenarian Masterpiece Reflections on a Virus JOHN PODHORETZ // WYNN WHELDON ROB LONG

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afmda.org/protectafmda.org/protectafmda.org/protect EDITOR’S COMMENTARY The Virus and the Chicken Little Culture

JOHN PODHORETZ

EW YORK, New York, a hell of a town. We are The number of things we’ve been told were go- hunkered down, and who knows when we ing to kill us that didn’t—products like alar, salt (called N will hunker up. For the past few years, online “The New Villain” on a 1982 Time magazine cover), mobs have enjoyed the lubricious thrill of the “cancel saccharin, nitrites in hot dogs, and supposed threats culture” they have created—tanking careers and liveli- like nuclear winter, population growth, acid rain, the hoods and reputations. Well, welcome to the real can- list goes on and on—has made my bullshit detector cel culture, where there are no basketball games, no uncommonly sensitive and possibly hyperactive. parades, no large parties, and in short order, maybe no And so I greeted reports of the virus with usual live theater, no movies, no nothing. calm. After all, hadn’t we been here before, with bird I turn 59 this month. I feel like I have lived flu and SARS and MERS and H1N1—all global terrors through four unprecedented events in my lifetime. that entirely evaded me, my family, my friends, even The first two were glorious: In 1969, Neil Armstrong my enemies? How bad could this be, really? Besides and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. In 1989, we which, I have been blessed with ridiculously, even un- watched as the Berlin Wall was brought down by revel- justly good health (considering how I might fairly be ers with pickaxes—with the fall of the Iron Curtain and accused of having abused the gift). the Evil Empire to follow. But I am part of an active Jewish community in The third was the opposite of glorious: 9/11. I New York, and we are almost all one degree of separa- lived in Brooklyn Heights at the time, with a window tion from one another—and when a lawyer living in that looked out on Lower Manhattan and Ground Zero New Rochelle came down with the coronavirus and a mile away as the crow flew. I watched for months as a gave it to a child of his at a day school in Riverdale, it black-and-purple gash in the sky hovered over the site wasn’t even a week before it became clear I could not like a demonic version of the divine “pillar of cloud” risk visiting my nonagenarian parents because I was that followed the Hebrews as they journeyed out of too close to the outbreak and they were in the highest Egypt. When the wind changed, I could smell the burn- of high-risk groups. ing plastic from the cords and electrical equipment It seems like once again, Jews are the canaries in that had helped create the sky gash. the coal mine. It’s like the old joke: “Lord, would You The coronavirus is the fourth. Now, I am by na- mind choosing someone else for a change?” ture both an optimist and an anti-alarmist. My usual If we do not respond properly to this pandemic, reaction to warnings about dangers is a deep skepti- some blame will have to be laid at the feet of our Chick- cism followed by an almost irrational annoyance. This en Little culture. We live in a wondrously free and pros- is due in part to the common discussion in the United perous country whose residents are constantly being States over the past half-century. It inclines toward bombarded with messages that they are at existential hysteria—hysteria that usually has a larger ideological risk when they are not. The irresponsibility of that and often anti-capitalist purpose. hysteria-mongering is now all too painfully clear.q

Commentary 1 April 2020 Vol. 149 : No. 4

Articles

Christine The Rise of the New Jacobins 13 Rosen Working for the revolution with or without Bernie Sanders.

Andrew The Boys from Laupheim 18 Bergman Of my father and his savior, the movie pioneer Carl Laemmle.

Karys Letting Anti-Semites Be Their Guide 23 Rhea and A progressive Jewish organization is committed Keren Toledano to letting preferred Jew-haters off the hook.

Barton The Closing of the American Experiment? 27 Swaim Christopher Caldwell’s brilliant provocation.

Politics & Ideas

Josef Freeing the Captives 33 Joffe Genius and Anxiety, by Norman Lebrecht

Tal The Lottery Isn’t Rigged 35 Fortgang The Theology of Liberalism, by Eric Nelson

Naomi Boy Oh Boy 38 Schaefer Riley Tomboy, by Lisa Sellin Davis

Politics & Ideas

Robert The Ravitches of Sin 40 Pondiscio Slaying Goliath, by Diane Ravitch

Michael J. The Year the Sky Fell 42 Totten Black Wave, by Kim Ghattas

Kyle Not-So-Great 45 Smith Great Society, by Amity Shlaes

Culture & Civilization

Terry Wreck Side Story 47 Teachout How to ruin a great and singular musical.

Wynn Tom Stoppard’s Great Jewish Play 51 Wheldon The foremost dramatist in the English language has produced a masterpiece at 82.

Monthly Commentaries

Editor’s Commentary Washington Commentary 1 John Podhoretz Matthew Continetti 9 The Virus and the Chicken Little Culture Primary Lessons

Reader Commentary Jewish Commentary 4 Letters Meir Y. Soloveichik 11 on the February issue What We Need to Remember

Media Commentary Hollywood Commentary 7 Christine Rosen Rob Long 56 Elizabeth Warren’s No, Mr. Bond, I Expect Amiable Panting Dogs You to Self-Quarantine! READER COMMENTARY

What Next for the FBI?

To the Editor: that John Brennan played a more 1 LI LAKE has written a very good dominant and crucial role in the E article about the investigation scandal. James Comey, the FBI, and Eli Lake writes: into the Trump campaign (“The to a lesser extent James Clapper EORGE DOUGLAS is correct FBI Scandal,” February). I’d add were initially duped by Brennan Gthat falsifying information for only one important point: Police but soon became enthusiastic par- a warrant is a serious crime. The in- reports, including wiretap warrants, ticipants in the faulty investigation. spector general agrees. He referred are considered to be under oath, and Brennan was the force behind Kevin Clinesmith for criminal in- falsification of a police report is felony turning the legitimate investiga- vestigation. It’s up to the Justice perjury. Intentional exclusion of ex- tion of Russian influence in the Department to determine whether culpatory evidence counts as misrep- 2016 election into an investigation and how he will be charged. It’s also resentation. There is criminal expo- of Trump-Russia collusion. Both possible that U.S. attorney John sure here. What the FBI did counts as Comey and Clapper initially pushed Durham’s report will recommend more than simply bad behavior. back on Brennan before eventu- more criminal charges. George Douglas ally acquiescing. There is, as Dale Rowe writes, Los Angeles, California I have spent some spare time circumstantial evidence that John trying to understand the Russia- Brennan was an early adopter 1 Trump collusion fiasco, and I’m of the Steele dossier. Though it’s still trying to sort it all out. But I significant that the CIA’s Russia To the Editor: greatly appreciate your having pro- analyst dismissed Steele’s report- Y CONCLUSIONS are much vided your insights. ing. Again, this is something that Mthe same as Eli Lake’s, but Dale Rowe John Durham is investigating, and with one notable variation: I believe Raleigh, North Carolina I await his findings.

4 April 2020 The Wealth Tax Gets April 2020 Vol. 149 : No. 4 John Podhoretz, Editor Worse Abe Greenwald, Senior Editor Noah Rothman, Associate Editor Christine Rosen, Senior Writer To the Editor: � AVID Bahnsen makes a strong Carol Moskot, Publisher Dcase against a Warren/Sand- Kejda Gjermani, Digital Publisher ers–style wealth tax, but there are Malkie Beck, Publishing Associate additional problems (“The Wealth- � Tax Horror,” February). Many public securities have Ilya Leyzerzon, Business Director daily quotations that would not Stephanie Roberts, Business Manager reflect the realizable value for a � large minority holding that came Terry Teachout, Critic-at-Large to market. The varying consider- � ations around such block discounts Board of Directors are common issues in estate-tax audits. Similarly, private-equity, Daniel R. Benson, Chairman real-estate, and venture-capital Paul J. Isaac, Michael J. Leffell, partnership interests often provide Jay P. Lefkowitz, Steven Price, net-asset value estimates. But these Gary L. Rosenthal, Michael W. Schwartz may be very different from the ac- tual prices at which occasional sec- ondary market transactions occur. Moreover, sales of these interests To send us a letter to the editor: [email protected] often require the permission of the We will edit letters for length and content. general partner to admit the new To make a tax-deductible donation: [email protected] holder into the limited partner- For advertising inquiries: [email protected] ship, and such permission may be For customer service: [email protected] arbitrarily withheld. Many private- equity, venture-capital, and real- estate vehicles carry with them obligations to meet unpredictable Commentary (ISSN 0010-2601) is published monthly (except for a combined July/ capital calls by the general partner 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) that may not even occur during 891-6700. Customer Service: [email protected] or (212) 891-1400. the partnership’s life. Similarly, the Subscriptions: One year $45, two years $79, three years $109, USA only. To subscribe please go reductions in wealth attributable to www.commentarymagazine.com/subscribe-digital-print. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, to various forms of debt or pledges 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 can be as complex and fraught as form at commentarymagazine.com. Postmaster: Send address changes to Commentary, P.O. Box the valuation of assets. Rich people 420235, Palm Coast, FL, 32142. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a stamped, often have myriad and intricate self-addressed envelope. Letters intended for publication may be edited. Indexed in Reader’s Guide, obligations associated with their 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 ongoing activities. 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, which was the magazine’s publisher through 2006 and continues to support its role as an independent journal of thought and opinion. Copyright © 2020 by Commentary, Inc.; all rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Finally, the government is a of low-liquidity assets with non- level to owe on the tax to prove they silent partner in all appreciated realizable net-asset value marks were beneath the level, incurring assets to the extent of the tax share is just another example of the potentially hundreds of thousands of realized appreciation. Will these broader point I make regarding the of dollars in expense each year implicit obligations be deductions infeasibility of the Warren/Sanders in tax, legal, audit, and appraisal in determining taxpayer wealth wealth tax. work, all to show that no tax was subject to the new tax? The can- But his letter also brings up really owed? If not, what would didates’ proposals don’t appear a point I did not previously con- the cut-off be? People below the to address this vexing problem of sider. Like a 706 estate-tax return wealth-tax threshold should be just accounting for deferred taxes, i.e., for an estate that does not exceed as concerned as those above it! those taxes that would be owed on the estate-tax exclusion amount, the proceeds from a sale of assets, would the Warren/Sanders wealth in calculating net wealth. In a com- tax actually require someone who 1 plex and progressive income-tax was, say, $10 million beneath the system, what tax rates would be as- sumed for these purposes? Should prospective state and local taxes also be taken into consideration? Bernie Sanders has proposed mar- Revisiting Ellison ginal federal capital-gains rates as high as 63 percent and a New York To the Editor: Invisible Man with a new sense of City resident presently can incur HE ESTEEMED and always understanding and appreciation. another 13 percent, so this issue Tentertaining Joseph Epstein Alan A. Mazurek would be vital, especially for busi- has again delivered a masterpiece Great Neck, New York ness founders with low-cost stock. of critical analysis in his article In effect, the current wealth on Ralph Ellison (“Ralph Ellison 1 tax proposals would require the in Opposition,” February). As a equivalent of valuing and set- white, Orthodox Jew, and having To the Editor: tling an estate—every year—for read Ellison’s Invisible Man more OSEPH EPSTEIN’S article on those above, or near, the wealth- than 40 years ago in college, I JRalph Ellison prompted me to tax threshold. The assembled data don’t think I ever really under- reread Invisible Man. Doing so has might slake Professors Piketty and stood the multiple and nuanced been therapeutic for someone ex- Saenz’s curiosity; but it would do so layers of the black experience in hausted by the current preoccupa- at the cost of an enormous financial America. Later, after being told tion with social justice. Put off by the burden and managerial distraction by the self-appointed academic incessant reminders of our racist to those actually or potentially sub- guardians of culture that be- legacy, I, ironically, needed remind- ject to such a levy. cause I was not black I couldn’t ing of the true abuse that Negroes Paul J. Isaac possibly understand it and that (to use Ellison’s preferred term) New York City any attempts to do so would be have suffered in America. Invisible considered “cultural appropria- Man certainly does this. Remark- 1 tion,” I chose to not even try. After able is Ellison’s refusal to succumb reading Epstein’s remarkable es- to a mentality of bitter victimhood. David Bahnsen writes: say, especially his comments on As Epstein notes, Ellison’s heroes HE DETAILS that Paul J. Isaac Ellison’s independence of mind are Armstrong and Ellington, not Tadds are very much in line and thought, and his almost Vic- Miles Davis. Inspirational. Thank with the critique I offer in my tor Frankl–like maintenance of you for publishing Epstein’s piece. case against Warren’s tax. The dis- dignity and restraint in the face Robert C. Dunn Jr. connect between market pricing of degradation, I want to reread Augusta, Missouri

6 Letters : April 2020 MEDIA COMMENTARY Elizabeth Warren’s Amiable Panting Dogs

CHRISTINE ROSEN

N May 2019, Time magazine put Elizabeth War- more favorable approach to Warren that they studied ren on its cover. In describing the Massachusetts MSNBC’s coverage and found that “Warren had the I senator’s stumping on the campaign trail, reporter lowest proportion of negative coverage of all three can- Haley Edwards gushed, “Just as her diagnosis of the didates (just 7.9 percent of all her mentions) and the problem reaches a crescendo, she takes a step back and highest proportion of positive mentions (30.6 percent).” performs a rhetorical swan dive into crystalline pools The uncritical coverage continued after a CNN- of policy: and here, she says, is how we fix it.” She said sponsored town-hall meeting on LGBTQ issues. After Warren was leading a “populist political revolution”— Warren was asked a planted question about opposi- albeit a revolution that was, at the time, polling at just tion to gay marriage, she delivered a clearly rehearsed 8 percent. Projecting an image of her own behavior response: “I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said around the candidate, Edwards even described War- that,” she said, adding, “Then just marry one woman— ren’s dog as “panting amiably.” I’m cool with that. Assuming you can find one.” The Time wasn’t the only outlet to garland Warren in Washington Post’s Annie Linskey devoted a story to this way. The Guardian declared her “the intellectual Warren’s manufactured zinger, noting the millions of powerhouse of the Democratic party” in April 2019; GQ positive responses it received on Twitter and arguing, announced, “Elizabeth Warren Deserves Your Undivided “She is quick-witted and sharp-tongued in a way that Attention,” in May; and the HuffPo went so far as to de- has played well in the Democratic primary and could fend Warren’s skin-care routine as recently as January. prove effective against President Trump.” So favorable was the coverage of Warren in the Warren’s fabulations about her Native American early months of her campaign that supporters of Bernie heritage and her claim that she was fired from a teach- Sanders felt shortchanged. The progressive magazine ing job because she had been pregnant at the time In These Times was so annoyed by the liberal media’s would have derailed almost any other candidate, but in Warren’s case neither gained traction because main- Christine Rosen is our senior writer. With this stream media outlets didn’t ask too many questions. piece, her monthly column changes its focus from gen- In fact, the pregnancy story likely wouldn’t have eral social commentary to media criticism. appeared in mainstream media outlets at all if it hadn’t

Commentary 7 first been broken by Collin Anderson at a conservative The public mourning continued on television. outlet, the Washington Free Beacon. Publications such Trying to make sense of it all with Representative as the New York Times covered it only after Warren was Abigail Spanberger, NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell con- forced to respond. And the Times downplayed the fact fessed, “Well, Congresswoman, you brought up exactly that Warren had lied by spending most of the story dis- a moment that was so emotional for me frankly and for cussing the legal history of pregnancy discrimination, a lot of others watching,” then played a clip of Warren which Warren had not, herself, suffered. saying, “One of the hardest parts of this is all those pin- Even as her campaign began to founder in the ky promises and all those little girls who are going to polls, positive coverage continued. As Jack Shafer have to wait four more years. That’s going to be hard.” (one of the few non-sycophantic media observers of Self-described “feminist journalist” Lauren Warren) noted in Politico, “Warren got twice as many Duca was more blunt. In a Substack post that she mentions on cable news as Buttigieg over the last three wrote “while sobbing into my partner’s chest,” she months of 2019, when she experienced the steepest described a “pain not unlike the one that followed decline in her Real Clear Politics poll. But she still took Donald Trump’s election and Brett Kavanaugh’s confir- second place in mentions behind only Biden.” mation to the Supreme Court. The agony of watching Then she tanked in the first four states that actu- Elizabeth Warren be diminished by the mainstream ally voted. On Super Tuesday, she came in third in her media has been infuriating. To watch that dismissal home state. Despite the efforts of her superfans in the be reflected at the polls is almost unbearable.” She media to sell Democratic-primary voters on the virtues lamented that Warren, whom she called “a geyser of of Elizabeth Warren, they were not buying. She with- brilliance and enthusiasm powered by pure love of de- drew from the race. mocracy” was what everyone should have wanted and Warren’s journey to oblivion pained reporters. As claimed, “We should all be so furious that we’ve been Annie Linsky and Amy Wang of the Washington Post bullied into not only accepting less, but collectively wrote in the immediate aftermath, “Elizabeth Warren fretting that, for a woman, the best of the best is still attracted big crowds. She won rave reviews in nearly not good enough.” every debate. Her organization was second to none. She Many other journalists also sought to pin the developed plans, a strategy and a message. Yet when blame for Warren’s decline on sexism. CBS News voting started, she not only lost, she lost by a lot.” political reporter Caitlyn Huey-Burns tweeted, “We The media class that had spent a year celebrat- cannot talk about Warren’s fail without talking about ing Warren almost perfectly reflected the average War- the sexism so prevalent in American politics.” Writing ren supporter. FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone noted in the New York Times, Lisa Lerer asked plaintively, matter-of-factly that “the media and its dominant de- “Was it always going to be the last men standing?” mographic group (college-educated white people) are Megan Garber of The Atlantic identified the culprit Warren’s base.” To a media establishment still nursing as “internalized misogyny,” suggesting that it was not its wounds over Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump Warren’s weaknesses as a politician, but the sexist in 2016, she seemed like a political Athena, sprung false consciousness of nonwhite, non-college-educated fully formed from the Senate and armed to wage a Democratic voters, that led them to reject Warren. kinder, gentler form of class warfare than Bernie Sand- But this gynocentric wishful thinking on the ers while simultaneously breaking the presidential part of female reporters was belied by all the evidence glass ceiling. of voters’ intentions. When reporters bothered to talk The tenor of the response among Warren- to actual voters, many of those voters were clear that supportive media outlets demonstrates the extent of they were going to cast their ballots based on who they their misguided overinvestment in her—an investment thought could win against Trump, not on gender. “I’m that didn’t extend to other female candidates such as not going to vote for someone simply because we share Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar. identity,” one young woman told the Times, by way of The New York Times claimed, “Ms. Warren’s impact on explanation for her vote for Biden over Warren. the race was far greater than just the outcome for her Just before Super Tuesday, Duca tweeted, “Eliza- own candidacy.” Writing in Salon, Amanda Marcotte beth Warren is the president we deserve.” Given the raged, “Americans apparently couldn’t see that she is a willful disregard of the weaknesses of her candidacy once-in-a-generation talent and reward her for it with on the part of the journalists covering her, and their the presidency. That is a shameful blight on us.” The failure to acknowledge their own biases, Warren’s fail- headline for a story in Politico simply read: “‘White men ure was the punishment her panting media followers get to be the default:’ Women lament Warren’s demise.” deserved.q

8 April 2020 WASHINGTON COMMENTARY Primary Lessons

MATTHEW CONTINETTI

N FEBRUARY 9, the day before the New drew from the race on March 4, having amassed Hampshire primary, Joe Biden held a slim a measly 61 delegates and winning, of all places, Olead over Bernie Sanders in the Real Clear American Samoa with 175 votes out of 351 cast. Then Politics average of national Democratic-primary polls. he joined the ranks of men who have entered cam- That advantage collapsed after Sanders won New paigns late in the game to great fanfare only to wind Hampshire. It fell ever further after Sanders swept the up as losers. Nevada caucuses the following week. General Wesley Clark, the former NATO com- Then something remarkable happened. After mander, shot to the top of the Gallup poll within a Biden won the South Carolina primary on February week of announcing his candidacy on September 17, 29, his national polling numbers spiked. By the time 2003. A month later, however, the general withdrew he won 10 of the 14 states on Super Tuesday, March 3, from contention in Iowa. He pinned his hopes on Biden was back on top. All in 72 hours. Call him the New Hampshire. His third-place finish there was once and future front-runner. This stunning comeback enough for him to compete in seven states, includ- did more than reestablish Biden’s position. It also re- ing South Carolina, the following week. He ended up inforced some longstanding rules of politics. Let’s look winning Oklahoma by a slim margin. He was out the at four of them. next day. First, late entrants rarely win. Michael Bloom- The late Fred Thompson (1942–2015), senator berg announced his campaign for president on No- from Tennessee, faced a similar problem four years lat- vember 24. His supporters argued that he had Biden’s er. He entered the Republican primary on September positive aspects (experience in office and a moderate 5, 2007, and departed on January 22, 2008, a few days tone) without Biden’s liabilities (weak fundraising and after finishing third in South Carolina. Conservatives a tendency to go off on rhetorical flights of fancy that heralded Thompson as a natural communicator and leave audiences puzzled if not concerned). principled statesman who would draw contrasts with It was thought that Democratic voters spooked the moderate mush of John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and by Sanders would embrace the former New York may- Mitt Romney. And Thompson was gifted, and decent, or as their last opportunity to defeat Donald Trump. and funny. He was also more interested in watching “He might not be exactly what they had in mind,” John SportsCenter on the campaign bus than in mixing it M. Ellis said of Bloomberg in the Washington Post, “but up with supporters. by Super Tuesday he’ll look like Brad Pitt.” Sometimes late entrants join the race out of ego. Danny DeVito is more like it. Bloomberg with- Sometimes they make the mistake of believing their own press. Bloomberg fell prey to both temptations. Matthew Continetti is a resident fellow at the Like Clark and Thompson, he had to play catch-up American Enterprise Institute. with opponents who had been running for president

Commentary 9 for two years by the time voting began. “He went from applause from the social-justice left. But it couldn’t zero to 80 in one night,” one of Clark’s aides said of his make up for her clumsy defense of Sanders’s Medicare boss in 2004. And soon ran out of gas. for All proposal, or for her record as a prosecutor in Second, money isn’t everything. “Mike Bloom- San Francisco and California, or for her awkward style berg builds a general election campaign to show on the trail. strength for his primary bid,” Jeff Zeleny of CNN Julián Castro’s turn came on January 6. Remark- wrote in December. “He’s paying top dollar to some of ably, his plans to decriminalize illegal immigration, the most talented political strategists in the country, abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and including hiring key operatives from Barack Obama’s guarantee abortion rights for trans women—the prize previous campaigns. He’s hiring hundreds of staffers is yours if you figure that one out—failed to catch fire. and opening offices in pivotal swing states. He’s spend- Finally, there was Elizabeth Warren. Her wonky ing more money on advertising than all of his leading “I have a plan for that” persona and devotion to rivals combined.” taking selfies with liberal Democrats won her rave Indeed, he was. And all for nothing. The Wall reviews from the press, filled as it is with wonks and Street Journal estimates that Bloomberg spent “at liberal Democrats. least $620 million” of his $64 billion fortune to win, The problem with plans is that they are subject in the end, an island 4,800 miles from the mainland. to scrutiny. Voters blanched when they looked at the For a time, it seemed as if every other ad on television tax hikes necessary to finance Warren’s transformation was paid for by Bloomberg’s campaign. His fellow of American capitalism and her abolition of private billionaire Democratic as- insurance. By the end of pirant, environmentalist the campaign, Warren was and impeachment activist Electability matters. It’s a slippery promising that her nomi- Tom Steyer, spent around term, ‘electability.’ Elusive and nees for secretary of educa- $250 million for his own tion would be interviewed failed candidacy. undefined it may be, but notions of and approved by a “young These numbers cause ‘electability’ count for a lot when trans person.” She failed fainting spells in the of- challenging a sitting president. to win a single contest and fices of Democracy 21 and dropped out March 5. other groups agitating for Finally, electability campaign-finance reform. But they had no discern- matters. It’s a slippery term, “electability.” How can ible effect on the outcome of the primary. Nor did Jeb one know who has the best shot to defeat an incum- Bush’s $130 million in the 2016 Republican contest, or bent months before the general election begins in for that matter Hillary Clinton’s $768 million in the earnest? Elusive and undefined it may be, but notions general election where she outspent Donald Trump by of “electability” count for a lot when challenging a sit- about 2 to 1. (Trump benefited from an advantage in ting president. “earned media,” or free publicity.) The primary voters who handed Bob Dole vic- “The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived,” tory in South Carolina in 1996 thought he was the most wrote Joseph Schumpeter, “will in the long run prove electable Republican against President Bill Clinton. In powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette.” It’s 2004, Democrats went with John Kerry because they the same with campaign donations. No amount of pos- believed he had the best shot at defeating George W. itive advertising can substitute for a flawed candidate. Bush. In 2012, a large majority of Republicans told Money doesn’t decide elections. Voters do. pollsters such as Gallup that Mitt Romney was the Third, woke doesn’t work. The Democrats most electable candidate against President Barack who assumed that a presidential election is actually a Obama. Recently the Economist surveyed online bet- competition to see who can be the most “woke” did not ting markets and found that Biden has the best chance make it past Super Tuesday. The first to flop was Van- of defeating Trump. ity Fair cover model Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, Democrats in South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, whose proclamation, “Hell yes, we are going to take and Minnesota must have noticed the president’s ea- your AR-15” scared more people than it persuaded. He gerness to face Bernie Sanders this fall. They decided dropped out November 1. not to give Trump what he wanted and chose Biden Next to go, on December 6, was Kamala Harris. instead. They went for the most “electable” candidate. Her ambush of Biden for opposing bussing in de facto Were they right? Or did they make the same segregated school districts 40-plus years ago won her mistake as the opposition in 1996, 2004, and 2012?q

10 April 2020 JEWISH COMMENTARY What We Need to Remember

MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK

T THE age of five, Anatoly Sharansky expe- referring to Stalin’s death as a “miracle.” The stroke rienced his first miracle. Joseph Stalin, bus- occurred on the holiday of Purim in the year 1953, and A ily fanning the flames of the “Jewish doctors just as in the Book of Esther, the anti-Semitic inten- plot” conspiracy and planning a mass deportation of tions of a modern-day Haman were suddenly undone. Soviet Jews, was suddenly struck by a stroke and died Sharansky’s description of his father’s whis- days later. Young Anatoly’s father, a journalist who pered exuberance is all the more poignant because one knew much that Soviet state propaganda would never of the central liturgical pieces of Purim takes pains to reveal, secretly informed his son of the significance of curse the villains of the story and to bless its heroes. what had occurred: By engaging in moral clarity, we thereby contrast ourselves with Haman’s Persia, where moralities are Dad took me aside, made sure that no one was reversed, where a villain is praised and all genuflect around (we then lived in a communal apart- before him, where Jews are targeted, and the queen ment), and said that a miracle had happened. of Persia feels forced to hide the fact that she is Jew- The miracle that saved the Jews from the ish. As Rabbi Yoel bin Nun put it, the book of Esther destruction that was being prepared.... But he intends to teach of the possibility of providence in a asked us, me and my older brother, who was kingdom “which constitutes the antithesis of the Di- then 7 years old, to behave like everyone else. vine Kingdom, a kingdom devoid of any sacred quality And I remember that then in the kindergarten and of anything associated with the Name of God.” It is I cried with everyone and sang along with all hard to think of any better modern parallel to biblical the songs about Stalin’s beloved. And I did not Persia than the USSR. know who cries sincerely, and who cries like Yet at the same time that Sharansky experienced me. This was the beginning of my double life an internal Purim celebration, a very different Jewish of a Soviet man. reaction took place elsewhere. In Israel, kibbutzim associated with the militantly secular and ardently Only years later, following his own Jewish socialist Hashomer Hatzair movement mourned Sta- journey, did Sharansky understand what his father lin openly and sincerely. “Joseph Vissaranovich Stalin had meant, in that officially atheist society, by quietly is no more,” wailed the headline of the daily socialist Hebrew paper Hamishmar. The contrast could not Meir Y. Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation be more striking: A future refusenik, destined to be Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of the most prominent prisoner of Zion, lives in an evil the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at empire and in his heart celebrates the death of a moral Yeshiva University. monster. Meanwhile, days after Purim, Jews in the first

Commentary 11 free state of Israel in two millennia mourned one of study together “Reaganite readings,” linking them- history’s greatest tyrants. selves to a president who had declared 1983 “the Year This contrast was brought to my attention by of the Bible”—and thereby to a statesman who had Sharansky’s daughter Rachel. In a 2016 piece, she elo- dubbed the Soviet empire “evil.” In this, Sharansky’s quently criticized heads of state who offered words own evolution parallels what Israel itself became over of praise for Fidel Castro following his passing—who time—not only less socialist and more Western, but mourned, rather than celebrated, his death. Sharan- also more religious, more biblically connected. More, sky’s reflections, and those of his daughter, are one might say, Jewish. worth revisiting today, given Bernie Sanders’s much- Sharansky’s discovery of the divine, and its con- publicized praise for some of Castro’s policies, which nection to his activism, is worth remembering today as seemed to parallel his compliments for Soviet society the debates of 20th century seem to have returned in expressed in the 1980s. It is true, Rachel Sharansky the 21st. One hears American Jews, in political rheto- wrote, that many who suffered under Castro ap- ric, invoking the phrase tikkun olam, fixing the world, peared to be eulogizing him in as a value central to Judaism. Yet 2016; but perhaps they were doing One hears American the actual phrase, derived from the so “with celebration raging in their Aleinu prayer, is le-taken olam be- hearts.” Jews, in political rhetoric, malkhut Shaddai—to fix the world Rachel Sharansky is correct, invoking the phrase through the kingdom of God. True and reading her reflection in light tikkun olam, fixing the “social justice” through secularism of today’s events, it is difficult not is unsustainable. As Rabbi Jona- to see Sanders and Sharansky as world, as a value central than Sacks notes, if the atheistic So- embodiments of two philosophical to Judaism. Yet the actual viets ended up violating the human and political paths paved in the rights for which they claimed to 20th century. Both men are promi- phrase, derived from fight, it was because “when human nent activists on the world stage; the Aleinu prayer, is le- beings arrogate supreme power to both seem to speak in the name of taken olam bemalkhut themselves, politics loses its sole justice and human dignity. Yet they secure defense of freedom.” The are mirror images of each other. Shaddai—to fix the world exiling of God leads “to the eclipse Sanders spent time in Israel during through the kingdom of of man.” its infancy, in a socialist kibbutz. He As I write these words, Sand- speaks fondly and proudly of that God. True ‘social justice’ ers’s campaign is going down to experience and utilizes it to criticize through secularism is defeat across the country, and his the Israel of the present day, and for praise for Castro is being cited as a its purported bigotry. One senses unsustainable. political turning point. Yet study- that he, like others of his ilk, resents ing the exit polls, one cannot miss the fact that the Jewish state is not the secular workers’ the ardent love that many of America’s youth seem wonderland that some hoped it would be. to bear for the senator’s expressed beliefs. The story Sharansky walked a different path. Originally of Sharansky’s childhood Purim miracle is therefore a Zionist activist without a devout connection to worth revisiting. The central obligation of the Purim Hebrew scripture, he describes in his 1988 memoir season is zakhor, remembrance of what true villainy Fear No Evil how his time in the Gulag inspired him once was, and to apply those lessons to our society to- to bond with the biblical God, and how this faith day. Only then can we learn to do as Anatoly Sharan- inspired him in his resistance to the very tyrannical sky was taught by his father: to praise the good, and society that Sanders spoke so kindly about. Strikingly, curse the wicked, and to never resist calling evil by Sharansky and his fellow prisoners called their Bible its name.q

12 April 2020 The Rise of the New Jacobins Working for the revolution with or without Bernie Sanders By Christine Rosen

ELCOME to the revo- but replace it with something less democratic and far lution,” Waleed Shahid, more socialist. a spokesperson for the Writing in Jacobin, a Democratic Socialist pub- progressive group Jus- lication, about what a blueprint for such a new move- tice Democrats, told ment would look like, Seth Ackerman notes, “We need the New York Times the to realize that our situation is more like that facing day after Senator Ber- opposition parties in soft-authoritarian systems, like nie Sanders won the Nevada Democratic primary those of Russia or Singapore. Rather than yet another caucus.W Whether or not Sanders eventually wins the suicidal frontal assault, we need to mount the electoral Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2020, equivalent of guerrilla insurgency.” The insurgency he the movement he’s been leading since he declared his is promoting would put candidates loyal to the social- intention to be the party’s nominee in 2015 has gained ist movement on the ballot throughout the United new converts, especially among younger Americans. States—but not as fringe third-party candidates. As And it has been increasingly outspoken about its in- Democrats. tentions to not merely reform American democracy Sanders’s effort to advance the revolution was dealt a setback on Super Tuesday. Even so, what he Christine Rosen is senior writer at Commentary. set into motion five years ago has moved beyond him

Commentary 13 The socialist origin story is finding purchase with progressive-minded young people because the ‘revolution’ is marketed as the answer to their generation’s challenges. to some degree. Elaine Godfrey, a reporter for the At- progressive enough to pass their litmus tests. Those lantic, watched returns on Super Tuesday with some include support for Medicare for All (and the abolition in the Sanders vanguard and summed up the mood as of private health insurance); environmental reforms follows: “Although every one of the supporters I spoke along the lines of the Green New Deal; a federal jobs with was disappointed—and decidedly less confident guarantee; and the abolition of the Immigration and than before—they offered the same promise: The Customs Enforcement agency, among others. revolution would continue, with or without Bernie Justice Democrats takes contributions from Sanders.” And there is evidence they are right to be individual donors, and although it makes a lot of optimistic: An NBC News exit poll of Super Tuesday noise about “supporting” the candidates it endorses, voters in California, North Carolina, Tennessee, and in fact it funnels most of its money to other PACs Texas all showed more favorable than unfavorable (such as their partner PAC, Brand New Congress, and opinions of socialism (53 percent in California had a their dark-money sister PAC, Organize for Justice), positive view, for example). who then offer “consulting” services to candidates Sanders and his progressive supporters fre- mounting primary challenges to Democrats. In return, quently liken their movement’s revolutionary fervor those candidates are expected to adhere to the Justice to the socialist upheavals of earlier eras (particularly Democrats platform. those in Nicaragua and Cuba) while also peddling a According to the Center for Responsive Politics, seemingly more reasonable Scandinavian-socialist- Justice Democrats raised $2.7 million in 2017 and style economic transformation that promises free spent almost all of it. But how it was spent reveals health care and free college (while criticizing the ef- an odd definition of “support” for the supposedly fects of the free market). This socialist origin story ordinary progressive-minded Americans they are en- is finding purchase with progressive-minded young couraging to run for office. Among the U.S. House people not because they have suddenly acquired a so- candidates promoted by Justice Democrats in 2018, phisticated understanding of revolutionary politics or most received less than $1,000 from the group, with a macroeconomics, or because socialist ideals have sud- few reporting astonishingly small amounts of money denly been proven sound elsewhere in the world, but (pity John Heenan of Montana, who received only $7— because the “revolution” is being marketed to them as and lost his primary bid). Rashida Tlaib, by contrast, the answer to the challenges their generation faces— received the most ($6,997), followed closely by Alexan- including student debt, high housing costs, foreign dria Ocasio-Cortez ($5,000). wars, and Donald Trump. Justice Democrats spent only $62,844 in total One of the most potent activist vehicles for this for all House and Senate candidates they supported. message is a group that formed in January 2017 in So where did the rest of the money they raised go? the wake of Sanders’s 2016 Democratic-primary loss The Federal Election Commission has been asking the to Hillary Clinton: the Justice Democrats. It is a PAC same question and is looking into possible campaign- (political action committee), although you might not finance violations (and seriously dodgy ethics) related know it given how often media outlets refer to it (as to Justice Democrats’ work for AOC’s campaign. NPR did recently) in more flattering terms as a “pro- AOC is, of course, the group’s biggest star (and gressive organization,” or (as the New York Times did) the only one of the 12 candidates it recruited in 2018 a “grassroots organization.” to win her race); her defeat of Democratic incumbent Justice Democrats—founded by Cenk Uygur, Representative Joe Crowley in the Bronx in a primary Kyle Kulinski, Saikat Chakrabarti, Corbin Trent, and challenge was hailed as the biggest political upset Zack Exley—claims it “encourages” candidates to run. of 2018. Justice Democrats also endorsed (but did That’s not quite right. In practice, it functions as a not recruit) the other members of the so-called 2018 socialist American Idol: Justice Democrats actively Squad—Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida recruits and stages tryouts to identify possible can- Tlaib. All but Pressley are official campaign surrogates didates to run against Democratic incumbents not for Sanders.

14 The Rise of the New Jacobins : April 2020 What’s most striking about the sentiments in much of Justice Democrats’ rhetoric is how individualistic it sounds considering they are promoting a collectivist ideology.

What Justice Democrats and AOC market is a mont, with a score of D+15. socialist feeling, as one of their promotional videos Thus far, the AOC-effect appears to be nontrans- reveals. In it, a few leaders of the group and AOC sit in ferable in 2020. Most of the candidates the Justice a sun-dappled diner discussing their mission in vague, Democrats have promoted in the primaries have not emotionally laden bromides more suited to a wellness performed well. The group’s efforts to plump for “the conference than a revolution. “If everyday people don’t next AOC”—26-year-old Jessica Cisneros, who chal- feel comfortable in their own skin at the most powerful lenged Democratic House incumbent Henry Cuellar in levels of government, then what’s the point?” AOC asks, Texas—was a failure, albeit a closely run one. Several during a discussion of why more progressives need to other Justice Democrats/AOC-endorsed candidates run for office. Another woman nods and says, “You can also lost their primary races. Judged solely by their just be your whole self” if you join Justice Democrats. electoral showing, their movement might seem to have As for revolution: “You can make 10 years’ worth lost momentum. of change in one term,” AOC says. But the message they are selling has obvious Well, yes. And an arsonist can do 10 years’ worth appeal, especially among younger Americans, and it is of damage with one lit match. That doesn’t make it backed by a great deal more “dark money” on the pro- something to encourage. What’s most striking about gressive left than the amount Justice Democrats have the sentiments in the video and in much of Justice raised. As Politico reported, a group called the Sixteen Democrats’ and AOC’s rhetoric is how individualistic Thirty Fund, based in Washington, “spent $141 million it sounds considering they are recruiting on behalf of a on more than 100 left-leaning causes” during the 2018 collectivist political ideology. midterm elections, including funding progressive This is part of a broader intellectual confusion Democratic candidates who were happy to cash their rampant among Sanders supporters as well: They dark-money checks while railing against the nefarious seem uninterested in exploring the trade-offs that an influence of money in politics. One individual donated embrace of Sanders-style socialism would require. They $51.7 million to the Fund; so much for denunciations are, for now, satisfied with vague claims that equality of “late capitalism.” The group funds stunts like one by will triumph and billionaires will be punished, but they Demand Justice, which recently “projected a video of assume that government takeovers of major sectors Christine Blasey Ford accusing Kavanaugh of assault of the economy will have little impact on individual on the side of a truck outside a Washington gala where liberty. And yet the would-be hipster entrepreneur who Kavanaugh was speaking.” wants to start a cannabis business under a Sanders- style socialist government will face a very different set HAT MOVEMENT has gained new support of choices (and much more limited options) than under from progressive intellectuals at publications our current system, with all of its flaws. T such as Jacobin, which is the closest thing to No matter. As Justice Democrats spokesman a Bernie Sanders house organ you can find (Noam Shahid recently told BuzzFeed: “The world completely Chomsky called it “a bright light in dark times”). The changed after AOC’s victory.” Of course, “the world” quarterly, which is unabashedly democratic socialist changed only if you live in the world of progressive in its politics, began online in 2010 and then expanded bubbles. Ocasio-Cortez’s unexpected triumph came in into print in 2011. Its founder, Bhaskar Sunkara, told an extraordinarily liberal district, far more liberal than Idiom magazine that it was “largely the product of just about everywhere else in the nation. According a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold to the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index, War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellec- which measures how much more conservative or lib- tual milieus.” Jacobin also sponsors socialist reading eral a district is compared with the national average, groups, has a scholarly journal called Catalyst, and a AOC’s district scores as D+29. Compare those scores partnership to produce books with Random House. to that of the most liberal state in the country, Hawaii, Its motto is taken from a line in “The Internationale”: which scores D+18, or Sanders’s home state of Ver- “Reason in revolt.”

Commentary 15 The claim that ‘real’ socialism has never really been tried before is often invoked to paper over the movement’s intellectual inconsistencies and ahistorical claims.

Jacobin was “founded with the understanding they are inspired and liberated.” But what is Bernie that a better world is possible and will come into being Sanders-style socialism, with its Green New Deals and by challenging capitalism and those who profit from Medicare for All and attacks on the oil and financial class society,” according to its website, and editorially industries, as well as its generally negative view of it is more honest about its ambitions than Sanders is, private property and private wealth, if not a call for frequently noting the hopelessness of the Democratic elite planning for government seizure of large sectors Party and arguing for its demise in favor of building a of private enterprise and industry? new socialist political movement. Sanders and his supporters (such as AOC and The most recent issue, “Political Revolution,” sets the Democratic Socialists of America) have also called the tone with a little violent rhetoric from Eugene Debs for policies such as the abolition of the Immigration (America’s other homegrown socialist and one of Sand- and Customs Enforcement Agency and policies that ef- ers’s heroes): “There are those who deplore war, revo- fectively would create open borders. Even with a “good lution, and rebellion. Manifestly, war is to be lamented, socialist” at the helm, the transfer of decision-making if it is waged to enthrone or to perpetuate wrong, but it to the federal government on such a scale (and at great expands to superlative grandeur if it is for the purpose expense to American taxpayers) represents a sharp of establishing justice and breaking the fetters of slav- break with previous eras’ understanding of the role of ery. In such cases every blow struck for the downtrod- government. This isn’t the New Deal. It’s a new way of den sends thrills of joy throughout the world.” governance, one the majority of Americans over the But today’s downtrodden Jacobin readers have age of 35 are rightfully suspicious about supporting. different complaints from those expressed by Debs’s Today’s defenders of socialism in publications late-19th-century railway-worker supporters, and they like Jacobin appeal not to the policies of authoritarian have an odd view of what socialist “superlative gran- rulers likes Stalin or Castro, but to vague menaces sup- deur” should look like. As one contributor, Danny posedly threatening everyday Americans: “The des- Katch, wrote, “most of us only experience the excite- pots of the 21st century that stand in the way include ment of capitalism as something happening some- precarity, poverty, plutocracy, structural racism, and where else: new gadgets for rich people, wild parties mass incarceration,” writes law professor Jedediah for celebrities, amazing performances to watch from Britton-Purdy. And they look to the state to fix them. your couch.” Relegated to the role of capitalism’s un- Which is why the claim that “real” socialism has witting voyeurs, they lament “our jobs being replaced never really been tried before (a favorite canard of by that incredible new robot, our rent becoming too the new progressive left) is so often invoked to paper expensive ever since the beautiful luxury tower was over the movement’s intellectual inconsistencies and built across the street.” ahistorical claims. It also allows for a cafeteria-like Like many other Jacobin contributors, Klatch approach to socialism, as demonstrated by Britton- cherry-picks from the revolutionary socialist past to Purdy—who, annoyed that New York Times columnist find examples of flourishing; he notes that just after David Brooks declared that Bernie Sanders is “what the Russian revolution, socialist disruption prompted replaces liberal Democrats,” defended Sanders not by a great deal of creativity (just look at the great posters) invoking Marx but. . . John Stuart Mill. and implies that it could do the same today. He fails to “Sanders is the genuine candidate of the liberal carry through his historical analogy, however, perhaps tradition Brooks invokes,” Britton-Purdy argues, “John since it ended with quite a few of those artistically cre- Stuart Mill, John Locke, the Social Gospel movement ative Russian souls in the Gulag. and the New Deal.” Indeed, in Britton-Purdy’s render- Klatch distinguishes between good socialists ing, Sanders is truly a socialist man for all seasons. “If (like Sanders) and “elitist socialists, whose faith there is such a thing as an honest conservatism in these rests more on five-year development plans, utopian parts, Sanders might even be its candidate,” writes blueprints, or winning future elections than on the Britton-Purdy. This view is echoed by Brooks’s Times wonders that hundreds of millions can achieve when colleague Charles Blow, who argued vigorously that

16 The Rise of the New Jacobins : April 2020 Sanders, like Trump, has cultivated both blind faith and ideological zeal among his base, but at the expense of persuasion and compromise and other democratic ideals.

Build-a-Bear-style socialism was a good thing because swell of new primary voters, but a deliberate, informed “the absolute definition isn’t quite fixed.” vote for a specific set of policies and a reimagining of But such arguments are not the inoculation the market’s central role in all of our lives.” against criticism that eager socialists seem to think The larger cohort of Sanders supporters isn’t that they are. If your most persuasive talking point is that sophisticated. Writing in the Atlantic, Annie Lowrey no one has been able to implement the salvific revolu- described young people who have “warmed up to re- tion you’re promoting (at least without murdering mil- distributive politics” because they look at single-payer lions of innocent people), and your leader (Sanders) is health systems in Canada and elsewhere and think, impatient when asked to spell out the details of how “We’re rich! We could have that!” This is how younger his plan will do it right this time, you’re left with only Americans understand socialism—and Sanders’s sooth- two options: blind faith in the dear leader, or ideologi- saying about “human rights” plays into that. cal zeal. Sanders, like Trump, has cultivated both loyal- Even the taint of the murderous regimes of social- ties among his base, but at the expense of persuasion isms past has faded: A poll conducted by the Victims of and compromise and other democratic ideals. Communism Memorial Foundation about American “We must recognize that in the 21st century, in attitudes to socialism found that “70 percent of mil- the wealthiest country in the history of the world, eco- lennials say they are likely to vote socialist,” and the nomic rights are human rights. That is what I mean by percentage who say they are “extremely likely” to vote democratic socialism,” Sanders said in a 2019 speech. socialist has doubled from 2018 to 2019. As well, 15 per- He sounds like he’s reading from a United Nations cent of millennials “think the world would be better off pamphlet at these moments, but the policies he has in if the Soviet Union still existed” and 57 percent “think mind are all far more radical than such banalities sug- the Declaration of Independence better guarantees gest. Medicare for All would end private health insur- freedom and equality over the Communist Manifesto.” ance and cost $34 trillion according to the center-left In 2017, Justice Democrats co-founder Cenk Urban Institute. The Green New Deal would require Uygur told the Washington Post that 2020 would massively intrusive regulation of free markets. As be the year his movement’s ideas would “more sig- James Pogue, a Sanders supporter who covered the nificantly take over the Democratic Party.” That may primary race in New Hampshire for The Baffler, noted, have been premature, but as Sanders himself tweeted “everyone I spoke to seemed clear about what the recently, “I’ve got news for the Republican establish- Sanders campaign now represented—not a delighted ment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. fuck-you vote for a truth-teller, not a part of a huge up- They can’t stop us.” He didn’t put a date to it.q

Commentary 17 The Boys from Laupheim Of my father and his savior, the movie pioneer Carl Laemmle By Andrew Bergman

N MARCH 1973, I drove onto the Burbank in 1937, arriving in New York with no money and no lot of Warner Brothers to begin a polish of prospects; America was not then in the deepest morass my script Black Bart, the second title of the of the Great Depression, but it was still on life support phenomenon that morphed into Blazing and work was scarce. My dad was initially routed into Saddles. (The first was Tex X, rejected due to a holding pattern of menial jobs, at one point selling the studio’s reluctance to have an “X” leering Fuller Brushes door to door, a task for which he was from the marquee.) I was 28, simultane- spectacularly ill-suited. Shlepping a sample case and ously awestruck and giddy, my heart racing, but as I ringing strange doorbells was a considerable come- passedI through the studio gates, an immense sadness down for a person born into relative prosperity, but my engulfed me and tears began to run down my cheeks. father found the situation more comic than tragic, and This reaction was at once surprising and entirely logi- it left no scars. Rudy was a man for whom bitterness cal, because while I drove alone in my rented Camaro, was an unknown sensation. a ghostly passenger sat beside me—my father Rudy I say that he knew relative prosperity. Middle- Bergman, whose turbulent but not atypical history had class Jews in Weimar Germany lived not extravagantly led me to this piercing moment. but very, very well, with far more domestic help than I Rudy Bergman was a German-Jewish refugee, ever experienced in my years as a hotsy-totsy writer-di- born in Laupheim, Germany, on November 14, 1911. rector. Laupheim was a small but not insignificant town He was a tall, shy, funny man who often referred to in Southern Germany and its bourgeoisie employed bat- Hitler as “my travel agent.” He had fled Deutschland talions of maids and nannies and laundresses; parents basically saw their kids at bath time, in a snapshot of to- Andrew Bergman is a screenwriter, film director, getherness before or after dinner. Rudy was the eldest of and novelist. the three children born to Paula and Edwin Bergmann,

18 April 2020 My dad was an ingenious fellow, endlessly curious and enthusiastic, whether playing Gershwin tunes, painting, or taking remarkable black-and-white photographs. the part owner of Bergmann Wigs, a pro- ducer of hairpieces and associated products that exists to this day, more than 80 years after the Nazis seized its Laupheim factory. In fact, some performances at the Metro- politan Opera still utilize ancient Berg- mann wigs. (The second ‘n’ was dropped when my father arrived in New York.) The Bergmanns were an interesting bunch. My grandfather Edwin, who died when I was two, was intrigued by photog- raphy; my grandmother Paula, who was not permitted, in the custom of the time, any profession whatsoever except for curating headaches and joint pain, revealed herself later to be a spectacular and witty corre- spondent, writing hilarious letters in her second language. The star of the family was my father’s younger sister Margaret (Gretel), a world-class high-jumper whose racial ban- ishment from the German Olympic team on the eve of the 1936 Games became an inter- national cause célèbre that eventually in- spired both a documentary (HBO’s Hitler’s Pawn) and feature (Berlin 1936) film. She died in Queens in 2017 at age 103, by then lionized in Germany (with stadia named after her) and very much at peace after years of anger at her stolen opportunities. After Gretel immigrated to the U.S., she became an American woman’s high-jump and shot- put champion, despite never having thrown Circa 1929–30. Left to right: Rudy Bergmann, the shot in her life! Unfortunately, she ex- Gretel Bergmann, and Walter Bergmann. hausted the family’s athletic genes. While aunt Gretel was a budding sports star, in business schools in Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Rudy was living a relatively unfocussed and, dare I Frankfurt, he turned to music, believing that his pas- say, frivolous existence. Photos of the time feature my sion for piano might be more than a phase. He studied dad and his pals blearily wielding beer steins in their the instrument under the Hungarian composer Matyas beloved Zum Ochsen saloon or lounging on bucolic hill- Seiber at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, which sides with a variety of smiling women. His memories of maintained a jazz department until the Nazis shuttered Germany were unfailingly pleasant, even after his bru- it in 1933. It was a turning point; those lessons, however tal displacement. In truth, he had lived a more leisurely brief, ignited a creativity that was at his very essence. A and unstressed life pre-Hitler than his own kids did in life in business was simply not for him. My dad was an the scrappy lower-middle-class world of 1950s Queens. ingenious fellow, endlessly curious and enthusiastic, Rudy took a while finding himself, cushioned by whether playing Gershwin tunes, painting, or taking the family’s comfortable condition. After fruitless stints (and developing) remarkable black-and-white photo-

Commentary 19 I owe my life to Carl Laemmle, a mild-mannered soul with a fortune built from a multitude of coins dropped by Americans famished for new film entertainment. graphs in both Germany and New York that formed an of their citizenship and forbade intermarriage. At this indelible record of refugee life in the 1930s and ’40s. juncture, Rudy once again turned to Laemmle, who I’m not claiming that Rudy was some kind of provided an affidavit vouchsafing that my father and Leonardo, but he was a particular type of artistically his fellow Jewish townsmen were guaranteed jobs in inclined immigrant who, either by genetic inclina- the U.S. and would not become wards of the state. tion, too-cushy childhood, or just a born-lucky Welt- By offering his assurance in this way, Uncle Carl anschauung, instinctively shied away from ambition. saved the lives of at least a thousand people, whose It just wasn’t in him, as it hadn’t been in the makeup situation became increasingly dire as Hitler’s race war of his father, either. The Bergmanns were basically escalated in lethality and it became obvious that the reticent people, even superstar Gretel. But in his early Western democracies had no more appetite for Jews twenties, with a mercantile career clearly not in the than the Nazis. cards, Rudy had to figuresomething out. Thus, I owe my life—and hence my children and grandchildren’s lives—to this mild-mannered soul with NTER Carl Laemmle. a fortune built from a multitude of coins dropped by Laupheim was also the hometown of Americans famished for this new entertainment. Those E Herr Laemmle, the genial founder of Universal early moviegoers, in their derbies and flouncy dresses, Pictures. That turned out to be not merely a lucky hap- the boys in knickers and newsboy caps, lined up to drop penstance for my father, but also an important factor their nickels into the pocket of Uncle Carl, who ulti- in launching my black sheriff and me on the road to mately used this amassed small change to do more tan- Burbank. gible good than the leaders of the so-called free world. “Uncle Carl” Laemmle was an authentic pioneer Rudy was all too cognizant of his debt to Uncle of the movie business—and a far more benevolent soul Carl and remained so for the rest of his life. A 1931 than founding ogres like Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, biography of Laemmle by John Drinkwater held an or the Warner brothers. Laemmle had immigrated honored place in my family’s bookcase, and Laemmle’s from Laupheim to New York in 1884 and almost im- name was pronounced with reverence throughout mediately entrained to Chicago. He was then 17. After my childhood and beyond. He was a kind of patron working as a bookkeeper for a clothing manufacturer, saint, underscored by the fact that my mother, born in Laemmle abruptly pivoted and purchased a small mov- the Black Forest town of Kippenheim, had no Laem- ie theater in Chicago. He acquired an immediate appe- mle watching over her and was helpless to prevent tite for this electrifying blend of art and commerce and her parents’ deportation and subsequent gassing at headed for Southern California to make his fortune. Auschwitz (events excruciatingly detailed in Michael Despite his full embrace of Hollywood and its Dobbs’s recent book, The Unwanted). My childhood palmy lifestyle, Laemmle never forgot Laupheim or apartment was small and the Holocaust took up a its beery inhabitants. Blessedly, he was a soft touch; great deal of space. It wasn’t spoken of all that often, thanks to his largesse, my father gained employment but it was as much a part of our home as the wallpaper. at Universal Pictures in Berlin (the famed UFA), doing What did my dad do once he retired the Fuller odd jobs and loving both Weimar Berlin and the louche Brushes? He realized that he possessed a marketable ambiance of movie work. I can testify that once one skill, particularly in a country moving almost uncon- has lived and breathed on a movie set, the rest of life sciously into wartime: He was fluent in German and can seem wan and low-stakes, lacking the minute-by- English. Be a translator! Rudy had a terrific ear, re- minute fizz of film production. So it is not surprising lated to his musicality, and also a gift for mimicry. He that Rudy developed a crush on show business that had learned English at an early age, and when he ar- lasted for the rest of his all-too-short life. rived in New York, he placed a dictionary next to the Exiting Germany gained urgency once anti- toilet to increase his vocabulary. By 1940, he claimed Semitism was codified by the Nuremberg Laws of to have begun dreaming in English, which he identi- September 1935—which, for openers, stripped Jews fied as the landmark moment of his assimilation.

20 The Boys from Laupheim : April 2020 My father’s love of comedy became a kind of ongoing seminar for me. He was the first person in New York to notice Ernie Kovacs’s revolutionary performing style.

The Laemmle family meets in Laupheim, 1920.

With this skill, Rudy found work at the New York in junior high school when outraged girls began casti- Daily News, listening to German shortwave broadcasts gating me for Rudy having referred to Elvis Presley as and translating them for the news desk. The Daily “Elvis the Pelvis” after an early appearance on the Ed News in the 1940s had a daily circulation of more than 2 Sullivan Show. They read my Dad’s column! Sadly, it million copies, rising to a nearly unimaginable 4.7 mil- didn’t give me much social traction; then again, at age lion on Sundays. My dad was suddenly the ears for mil- 11 and barely over five feet tall, nothing would. But it lions of New Yorkers, but as the war ended, he moved was a portent of frothy, showbiz fun in the offing. beyond the largely mechanical work of translation to More important, my father’s love of comedy the Radio-TV desk. Now a newsman proper, he became became a kind of ongoing seminar for me. He was the infatuated with the Runyonesque world of New York’s first person in New York to notice Ernie Kovacs’s revo- mightiest tabloid—a universe of underpaid and wise- lutionary performing style; as a result, he and Kovacs cracking journalists, press agents hyping their clients, established a friendship that endured until the come- and ink-smeared typesetters working on massive lino- dian’s fatal 1962 automobile crash. One day, Rudy ap- type machines in Dickensian conditions. Despite the peared on Kovacs’s live afternoon TV show, introduced abysmal wages, he loved this all-so-metropolitan world. as a critic who had “graciously volunteered” to observe As I learned to read, I began to recognize my dad’s the broadcast. I had gained permission to skip school name in print, bylining his columns and reviews, and and watched in wonder as my dad appeared, bound in it was a thrill each time, as it is merely to write “Rudy ropes and roughly dumped behind a typewriter. Rudy Bergman” now, 49 years since his death, with the magi- played along, deadpan, as the prop-loving Kovacs cal belief that I can summon him back to life, a cold continually cut to him during the broadcast, once with coal suddenly glowing red. I joyously recall a morning a clothespin attached to his nose, another time with

Commentary 21 That roar from a live audience, the helpless submission to a surefire gag, was the first taste of a drug I would be addicted to until this very day. smoke billowing from his typewriter. deliver some fresh material. We would sit in Borge’s Rudy’s ambitions went well beyond journalism. dressing room, listening to the explosive laughter from He wrote comedy, submitting sketches to Sid Caesar’s below. At about four o’clock we would hear thunderous Your Show of Shows, all politely rejected, and then applause, and then Borge’s poodle would run up the began writing gags for another Jewish exile, the won- stairs and into the room, followed by the Dane himself, drous pianistic comedian Victor Borge. He and my Dad unfastening his black tie. As cheap as Borge was, he were made for each other, with their shared refugee was unfailingly kind and funny to me. One weekend sensibility and love of music and wordplay. Also, my he invited us all to his massive estate in Connecticut, father worked cheap, which Borge happily obliged. where I developed an immediate and futile crush on At the time, the Dane was starring in Comedy his daughter Sanna. When I played my first piano re- In Music, a one-man show that ran for three years on cital at Turtle Bay Music School, he immediately called Broadway. It was my first experience at the theater, and our Corona home and accused me of stealing his act. it was both sidesplitting and entrancing. To watch this I felt entirely at ease around him, and I have no brilliant combination of verbal wit (the famed “phonet- doubt the experience conditioned me to feel social com- ic punctuation” routine) and physical comedy (falling fort around the high and mighty of show business, an ex- off the piano bench) was a revelation to nine-year-old perience that proved invaluable once I was put in a writ- me. And the laughter! That roar from a live audience, ing room with the likes of Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor the helpless submission to a surefire gag, was the first as my very first professional experience. Even Marlon taste of a drug I would be addicted to until this very day. Brando, whom I directed in The Freshman, could be Borge’s timing was extraordinary. Years later, I handled once I discovered his fatal weakness for Borscht had the pleasure of working with George Burns, who Belt comedy. I had been inoculated against awe. had encyclopedic comic knowledge. When I brought up When I decided to pursue a writer’s life, instead Borge’s name, George flatly declared that only Jack Ben- of that of a history professor, my old man was entirely ny had better timing. The best routine that Rudy wrote supportive. As long as I didn’t become a newspaper- for Borge relied entirely on timing. It was the “self- man, he was content. (Talk about prescience!) When winding watch” bit. While playing Liszt, Borge abruptly he read the 90-page novella called Tex X, he proudly paused and began rotating his left wrist, explaining told my mother: “The little shit writes better than I do.” that he had just purchased a self-winding watch. A When I sold the story to Warners in late May laugh. He resumed playing, still ruminating about the of 1971, he was over the moon. I took the E train out watch, explaining that the hotel operator phoned him to Forest Hills to celebrate with him and my mother nightly every few hours, awakening him to wiggle his and to bid them adieu before a long-planned trip to wrist. But that wasn’t all: Because said operator also Italy. One week later, I received a postcard from Rudy, possessed such a watch, Borge periodically had to wake simply saying, “How’s Tex X?” If he never was going to himself up to phone her back! He then catalogued the make it to Hollywood, his kid was. watch’s myriad features—telling time in different zones, That postcard was our last communication cataloguing sunrises and phases of the moon, before because on June 14, 1971, he collapsed and died in announcing, “It is now low tide in Honolulu!” Rudy sold Genoa. Years later, reclined on my analyst’s couch, I this gag—used in perpetuity by Borge and included in wondered if my success was in any way connected to his classic Comedy in Music album—for a total of $150. Rudy’s demise, if the acceptance of the Bergman name by Warner Brothers meant that he was now free to go. F THE EXPERIENCE was not all that remunera- I prefer to think that he just had a bad heart, but the tive for my father, it was certainly intoxicating two events are forever comingled in my mind. In any I for me. On Saturdays, Rudy and I would take case, I do not doubt his presence in my Camaro on that the Flushing train into Manhattan to visit Borge after sunny March day in 1973. From Laupheim to Burbank, his matinee performance at the Golden Theater and the circle had been closed.q

22 The Boys from Laupheim : April 2020 Letting Anti-Semites Be Their Guide A progressive Jewish organization is committed to letting preferred Jew-haters off the hook By Karys Rhea and Keren Toledano

STRANGE NOTION has found television, media, textbooks, and mosques encour- purchase in progressive circles. age violence against Jews, praise Hitler, characterize It holds that nominally marginal- Jews as “apes and pigs,” and deny the Holocaust. ized and oppressed groups, most Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah move- notably Muslims and African ment, widely taken to be the most moderate wing of Americans, cannot themselves Palestinian politics and the best chance for a partner espouse hateful views. According in peace with Israel, recently released a video claiming to this thinking, white people maintain a monopoly on that Jews “led the project to enslave humanity” and hate, andA every expression of hate by someone who is that Jewish behavior is responsible for anti-Semitism. nonwhite is linked to some form of white or Western To many on the hard left, this moral inversion influence, whether colonialist, capitalist, or Christian. fits comfortably with Marxist theories about class This idea is also frequently embraced by those struggle and power. When a class of people is deemed doing the hating. Consider the strain of anti-Semitism to lack power, their misdeeds are recast as noble ef- endemic to Palestinian society, where government-run forts to obtain that power—even when those misdeeds might include terrorist acts against innocent civilians. Karys Rhea is a Counter-Islamist Grid fellow at the Never mind that the historical record is wholly at Middle East Forum. Keren Toledano is a writer odds with Fatah’s explanation for Jew-hatred. Islamic and artist in New York City. anti-Semitism has been a fundamental part of Middle

Commentary 23 East culture for more than a millennium. Long before tionalism” for the vast majority of domestic terrorist capitalism and Western colonialism, Jews were treated attacks in the United States, conveniently ignoring as second-class citizens, or “dhimmis,” under Islamic that 2019 saw roughly an even number of casualties law, and they endured frequent pogroms, humiliation, at the hands of white-nationalist terrorists and jihad- and brutal oppression. Thus, denying the historical re- ists. JFREJ also doesn’t mention that in 2017 alone, cord is a necessity if one is set on absolving the wicked. groups such as al-Shabab and the Taliban carried out The lengths to which some will go in their denial nearly 11,000 Islamist attacks worldwide, resulting in 26,000 casualties. Just as JFREJ exonerates Just as Jews for Racial & Economic Muslims wholesale for anti- Justice exonerates Muslims wholesale Semitism, the group exempts racial minorities for it as well. for anti-Semitism, the group exempts In an interview with the De- mocracy Now radio show in racial minorities for it as well. late December, JFREJ executive director Audrey Sasson referred is exemplified by a New York–based progressive or- to New York City’s recent onslaught of anti-Semitic at- ganization called Jews for Racial & Economic Justice tacks as a manifestation of white nationalism—despite (JFREJ). Founded in 1990 by the academic and activist the fact that the majority of incidents were perpetrated Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark and the activist Donna by African Americans. In the December 28th stabbing Nevel, JFREJ claims it is inspired by Jewish tradition attack on five Hasidic Jews at a Hanukkah party in to dismantle racism and economic exploitation. On Monsey, New York, for example, the assailant was a its website, the organization highlights its work with 37-year-old black male who reportedly Googled topics Black Lives Matter and its efforts to fight Islamophobia such as “Why did Hitler hate Jews,” “Zionist Temples and dismantle ICE, among other things. JFREJ has in Staten Island,” and “Prominent companies founded published a guide called “Understanding Anti-Sem- by Jews in America.” itism” that takes readers through the leftist looking Some leftist Democratic politicians have dab- glass into a world where oppressor and oppressed bear bled in similar scapegoating. New York City Mayor Bill little resemblance to their real-life counterparts. It is de Blasio, for example, claimed that the rash of hate worth looking at this organization’s rhetoric as it helps crimes in New York City was a “right-wing” problem. shine a light on the current pathways of anti-racist ac- On Twitter, Representative Rashida Tlaib blamed tivism and how it acts as a cover for Jew-hatred. “white supremacy” for the Jersey City shooting at a ko- The authors of “Understanding Anti-Semitism” sher supermarket that took the lives of three Jews and blame Christian dogma and hierarchies for the cre- a non-Jewish police officer, even though both perpe- ation of Jew-hatred while writing off centuries of trators were African Americans and one was affiliated anti-Semitism in the Arab-Muslim world. They even with the Black Hebrew Israelites—a black supremacist reframe the dhimmi status imposed on Jews, cast- and anti-Semitic hate group. ing it as a “protection” of the sultan. And while they De Blasio later backtracked on his comments, and acknowledge that this protection was bought through Tlaib deleted her tweet. But JFREJ has upheld the notion heavy taxation and that it facilitated “sporadic attacks, that there is no anti-Semitism apart from white suprem- forced conversions and mass killings of Jews,” they acy, including retweeting an article from the socialist claim that no specific “anti-Jewish ideology” persisted magazine Jacobin that claimed the best way to fight anti- in the Arab-Muslim world because, after all, other Semitism “is to reject the centrist idea that anti-Semitism non-Muslims were also oppressed. How the presence transcends politics,” and declared it was “pernicious” to of additional prejudices makes anti-Semitism less big- point out that Jew-haters exist on the left and the right. oted is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Muslim Yet every week, it seems, another video appears anti-Semitism culminated in nearly 1 million Jews of on social media, or in the news, showing a black Araby ethnically cleansed, forcibly dispossessed, and American verbally or physically attacking a visibly expelled from their homes in the 20th century alone. Jewish victim. The attacks range from anti-Semitic ti- It is telling that the JFREJ guide discusses “Is- rades to throwing objects, spitting, beating, stabbing, lamophobia” but omits mention of the persecution and shooting. Indeed, one could rightly describe of Christians currently rampant in the Arab-Muslim these frequent and vicious assaults on Jews as a slow- world. It misleadingly blames “white Christian na- motion pogrom.

24 Letting Anti-Semites Be Their Guide : April 2020 What is JFREJ’s solution to this problem? Ap- Farrakhan—who famously compared Jews to “ter- parently, the first step is to deny that it is happening mites,” called Jews “bloodsuckers,” “great and master at all. The group’s website claims that the real issue is deceivers,” and the “enemy of God and the enemy of “white Jews’ preoccupation with black anti-Semitism,” the righteous”—hates Jews because of some misplaced stoked by “a false narrative...that focuses on conflict grudge against the system. And so when Farrakhan between white Jews and black non-Jews.” And who refers to Hitler as “a very great man” and attributes gay does the organization see as the true “architects of this marriage, abortion, and anal sex to the “Satanic influ- conflict”? Get ready for it: “Ku Klux Klan terrorists in ence of the Talmudic Jews,” he is merely reacting to the the South forcing African-Americans to flee to north- evil of the white, Christian West. ern cities”—Ku Klux Klan terrorists, that is, who were In actuality, what we know about the Nation of last active a century ago. Islam and groups such as the Black Hebrew Israelites The second part of the solution is no less con- is that their members have been actively enlisting peo- founding. In Sasson’s recent interview, she said: “Our ple of color for decades, setting up shop and drumming focus is to build solidarity with other groups targeted up hatred in local communities. They preach that Jews by anti-Semitism.” Other groups targeted by anti- are to blame for the plight of African Americans and Semitism? The very formulation defies intelligibility. draw an equivalence between black suffering in the But it is revealing nonetheless. Sasson’s true U.S. and Palestinian suffering in the Middle East. This intention is to deny that anti-Semitism—understood line of anti-Semitism gained particular strength after as a specific hatred against Jews—even exists. JFREJ the assassination of Martin Luther King, a Zionist and subordinates the uniqueness of the Jewish plight to a friend of the Jews. King’s tragic departure from the larger narrative about racism—one that ironically ex- national conversation paved the way for his views to be cludes the Jews. This explains why, at New York City’s overtaken by those in the tradition of Nation of Islam January 5th “March Against Anti-Semitism,” JFREJ founder Elijah Muhammad, who wedded his ideas on chose to publicize the event as a generalized rally black power to a sci-fi version of Islam and made anti- against “hate.” In their promotional material, they Semitism an enduring feature of the Nation of Islam. even mentioned Islamophobia before saying a word JFREJ has actually aligned itself with Farrakhan about anti-Semitism. supporters. On its website, the group proudly states What we see here are leftist Jews leveraging that it lets the priorities of the marginalized groups their “Jewishness” to perpetuate a logical and moral with which it partners “guide [its] actions.” Thus perversion. In a similar fashion, the November 2019 JFREJ has partnered with two former leaders of the issue of Jewish Currents featured Vermont sena- Women’s March: Tamika Mallory, an African Ameri- tor and Democratic candidate for president Bernie can, and Linda Sarsour, a Muslim American. Both Sanders conflating the fight against anti-Semitism women have voiced admiration for Louis Farrakhan. with Palestinian liberation: “The forces fomenting And Sarsour’s record of anti-Semitic statements in the anti-Semitism are the forces arrayed against op- name of Palestinian activism is well-known. She has pressed people around the world, including Palestin- said, for example, that Israel is “built on supremacy” ians.…The struggle against an- ti-Semitism is also the struggle for Palestinian freedom.” Once anti-Semitism is grouped with Once anti-Semitism is bigotry in general, it can be ignored in grouped with bigotry in general, it can be ignored in favor of more favor of more fashionable concerns: fashionable concerns: namely, systemic racism in the United namely, systemic racism in the U.S. States. In her interview, Sasson asserted that attacks on Jews, if committed by minori- and “on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody ties, arise from “rightful anger about real problems.” else.” She also tweeted: “Nothing is creepier than Since black Americans are perceived to be a marginal- Zionism.” Sarsour earned an approving retweet from ized group, their hate crimes must be rationalized as former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke an understandable, if misguided, rebellion against when she tweeted: “Israel should give free citizenship oppression—as opposed to the manifestation of anti- to US politicians. They are more loyal to Israel than Semitism that they are. they are to the American people.” But, as one headline By this reasoning, Nation of Islam leader Louis on JFREJ’s website says, “JFREJ Stands with Linda

Commentary 25 Sarsour (Again, Always, with Love).” If people like class, then overt anti-Semitism becomes “easy to disguise Sarsour guide JFREJ’s actions, it’s no wonder that the as a politics of emancipation,” and punching up at Jews group whitewashes hate crimes against Jews. becomes “a form of speaking truth to power.” Above all, JFREJ prizes its “alliances” and read- While it is true that abusers are often themselves ily dismisses the sins of its allies—even when those the victims of abuse, and that a person’s experience sins run counter to the group’s stated beliefs. In her of oppression may contribute to the ways in which he interview, Sasson rightly described anti-Semitism as a oppresses other people, it is intellectually dishonest to claim that this is somehow exculpatory. And while it is Above all, JFREJ prizes its ‘alliances’ laudable to condemn all forms and readily dismisses the sins of its of bigotry, there is something obscene about automatically allies—even when those sins run counter holding up the perpetrator of a hate crime as a victim and to the group’s stated beliefs. subsequently elevating his griev- ances above the violence done “tool that punches up against Jews, in that it portrays to the actual injured party. Regarding such violence, Jews as powerful.” But this is precisely the conspiracist Sasson’s vigilance is wanting. On Democracy Now, she brand of anti-Semitism espoused by anti-Israel groups argued against greater security measures for Jews and such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, with claimed that the “answer to what is happening is not whom JFREJ partners. These outfits rely on an anti- more policing.” capitalist, anti-colonialist framework that sees the Anti-Semitism has long been a feature of ex- Jewish collective (i.e., Israel) as the oppressive power treme left-wing and Islamist ideologies—from Soviet and that equates Zionism with Palestinian suffering. Communism to Hezbollah’s exterminationist creed. As Either Sasson is displaying willful blindness or she everyone knows, it has also been a feature of fascism has been corrupted by the very suggestion she claims and Nazism. It is incumbent on both the left and right to condemn: that Jews are the oppressor class, and Pal- to root out the Jew-haters in their midst. But some estinians their hapless victims. The latter stance seems progressive groups have instead embraced them—as more convincing given the activist left’s penchant for a display of progressive virtue, no less. As is often the pitting the powerful against the weak. As John-Paul Pa- case when bigotry is given the gloss of victimhood, it is gano has written, if Jews are perceived as the oppressor the Jews who will bear the brunt of the abuse.q

26 Letting Anti-Semites Be Their Guide : April 2020 The Closing of the American Experiment? Christopher Caldwell’s brilliant provocation By Barton Swaim

HE COMMON interpretation of this theory’s flaws, other than the supposition that the 2016 election put forward by millions of Americans are racists, is its reliance on the American left over the last the belief that Trump speaks in code. Its promoters three years holds that Donald frequently use the term “dog whistle.” But what would Trump won by arousing the coun- lead anybody to believe that Donald Trump is capable try’s latent racism and driving of rhetorical subtlety? bigots to the polls. He spoke of Christopher Caldwell never mentions Donald building a wall along our southern border to keep out Trump’s name in The Age of Entitlement: America MexicanT criminals, and he didn’t straightforwardly Since the Sixties, but the book offers its own race- disavow “birtherism”—the belief that Barack Obama related interpretation of the ’16 election. It is a vastly was not born in the United States—until September more sophisticated, thoughtful, and generous version 2016, thus signaling to racists across the Upper Mid- than the one spat out by left-liberal pundits in their west that he sympathized with their hatreds. One of pique, but Caldwell also believes that that election was mainly about race. “By the election year of 2016,” he Barton Swaim is an editorial-page writer at the writes, “Americans would be so scared to speak their Wall Street Journal. mind on matters even tangential to civil rights that

Commentary 27 His overarching argument is that the 1964 civil-rights law inaugurated a completely new worldview in American politics and government and abrograted its predecessor. their political mood was essentially unreadable. Amer- especially those in politics and the media, are now icans’ grievances against diversity were now bottled almost totally incapable of holding nuanced discus- up, in a way that was reminiscent of French people’s sions about race. Querying the rationale behind that late-19th-century obsession with reconquering Alsace law and the modern understanding of the world to and Lorraine. (‘Think of it always,’ the 19th-century which it gave birth is nothing less than an act of secu- French statesman Léon Gambetta had said. ‘Speak of lar blasphemy. In 2010, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky it never.’)” broadly suggested that there were problems with the That state of quiet frustration is where the book Civil Rights Act and couldn’t say whether he would ends. It begins a half-century before, with the Civil have voted for it; he was castigated for it in the media Rights Act of 1964. Caldwell’s overarching argument is so relentlessly that he wound up issuing a lengthy that the civil-rights law inaugurated a completely new press release in essence denying that he was a racist worldview in American politics and government and who wanted to take us back to the days of segregation. abrogated its predecessor. “The changes of the 1960s, But the Civil Rights Act, Caldwell contends, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new didn’t simply repeal the clearly unconstitutional sys- element in the Constitution,” Caldwell writes. tem of segregation. “The civil-rights movement was not precisely a movement of civil rights, in the sense They were a rival constitution, with which the of giving American blacks access to the ordinary rights original one was frequently incompatible— of cives, or citizens,” he writes. “If it had been, the laws and the incompatibility would worsen as the would not have required changing, only enforcing.” civil-rights regime was built out. Much of what What Congress fashioned in the early 1960s was not we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in a guarantee of civil rights but a conception of hu- recent years is something more grave—it is the man rights and an “anti-racist regime” that explicitly disagreement over which of the two constitu- carved up the American people along lines of race. tions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of The 1964 law—together with the 1972 amend- 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurispru- ment assigning enforcement provisions to Title VII, dential legitimacy and centuries of American as well as a body of Supreme Court rulings defining culture behind it; or the de facto constitution various types of discrimination as violations of the of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of le- law—redefined the American polity. The federal gov- gitimacy but commands the near-unanimous ernment soon adopted a new understanding of its endorsement of judicial elites and civic educa- purpose: to remake American society according to en- tors and the passionate allegiance of those lightened theories of racial justice. Federal authorities, who received it as a liberation. and, to a lesser extent, state authorities empowered by state-level versions of the Civil Rights Act, could This gives one some idea of why Trump’s 2016 henceforth monitor and meddle in private affairs even victory was a shock. Many of the people who voted for in the absence of any evidence of racial discrimination. him had been reluctant openly to express the anxiet- In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), for example, the Su- ies that led them to make that decision. To question preme Court ruled unanimously that the Duke Power any component of the civil-rights law, or to reveal the Co. could not impose aptitude tests on job applicants if suspicion that there is something deeply amiss about such tests adversely affected minority applicants, even the way white liberal elites have handled the matter of if there was no intention to exclude them. race over the last half-century, is to risk the accusation The right of association, furthermore, long held of racism and to associate oneself with nostalgists for to be implicit in the First Amendment’s guarantee of segregation. Such accusations wrongly assume that free assembly, was effectively neutered by the law. This specific legislation passed in the 1960s was the only point is obvious, but you don’t often hear it mentioned, way to redress the wrongs of racial discrimination in even by conservatives, since to do so would seem to put the public and private spheres, but American elites, one on the side of segregationism and other forms of

28 The Closing of the American Experiment? : April 2020 A world in which all prejudice must be ferreted out by the authorities is a world in which the proprietor of a pizzeria had better give the right answer about same-sex marriage. bigotry. If a restaurant won’t serve black people, say, arrogance and innumerable follies. They sought to re- the Civil Rights Act empowers the government to ar- make the world by force of will. Whatever they wanted raign the restaurant’s proprietor. The proprietor in that to do henceforth—obliterate racism by fiat, establish case would deserve every bit of public ridicule coming an American stronghold in Southeast Asia, enjoy the to him, but the question is not whether one approves or benefits of sex without the responsibilities of child- disapproves of such repellent behavior. The question is rearing—they felt they could do. whether it’s wise or practical to allow federal authori- They could also build a welfare state without the ties to monitor hundreds of thousands of private busi- means to pay for it. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, nesses for patterns of behavior that are extremely dif- Caldwell observes, was “the institutional form into ficult to detect and even define. Customers themselves which the civil rights impulse hardened.” The modern are far better equipped to carry out that task. Indeed, American welfare state is in many ways the neces- with the assumptions undergirding the civil-rights sary outworking of the civil-rights movement, or at revolution now firmly part of the American moral out- least of the movement as it was interpreted by whites. look, the public is now probably too well equipped to Desegregation, he writes, was “the most massive punish the unenlightened. A world in which all forms undertaking of any kind in the history of the United of prejudice must be ferreted out by the authorities is States,” involving “endurance, patience, and prohibi- a world in which the proprietor of an Indiana pizzeria tive expense,” requiring as it did not just the abroga- had better give the right answer about same-sex mar- tion of segregation laws but the creation of a byzantine riage when asked about it by a local news affiliate. If he web of government entities, from higher education to doesn’t, he can expect to be harassed and shamed and housing policy, designed to manage and enforce the threatened and, eventually, driven out of business. integration of races in every sphere of American life. But the real significance of the Civil Rights Act, The work is still far from done. in Caldwell’s account, wasn’t the act itself. There are The Great Society, indeed, was only one of the cogent arguments for and against the constitutionality massive and massively expensive projects carried of different parts of the sprawling law. Its cultural and out by an American political class that believed itself historical importance lay, rather, in the way its prem- invincible. Another was the Vietnam War. Johnson, ises about law and society came to dominate the minds Caldwell points out, “frequently described the war as of American elites. a New Deal–style project and even launched a Mekong River Redevelopment Commission to industrialize, HE AGE of Entitlement is a work of history, as far as possible, the vast, ramifying waterway that not a work of sociological analysis. It does not entered the South China Sea south of Saigon.” Johnson T conclude with a list of solutions or proposals. said: “I want to leave the footprints of America in Viet- But this is no ordinary work of history. It engages and nam. I want them to say, ‘When the Americans come, dazzles the reader in the way the histories of A.J.P. Tay- this is what they leave—schools, not long cigars.’” lor once did. Caldwell, as those who know his journal- “It was the war itself, and not the protests ism and his 2010 book Reflections on the Revolution in against it,” Caldwell writes, “that was the sister move- Europe will know, has a marvelous talent for pointing ment to the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society.” out the unacknowledged contradictions and perversi- By the mid-1970s, white Americans had begun ties in the outlooks of both left and right. to realize how costly it would be to carry out the goals The overarching theme of the last half-century of the civil-rights law and attendant programs, and in is this: that the war generation, the so-called Great- 1980 Ronald Reagan was there to tell them they could est Generation, the people who wrote, passed, and have it both ways. “The rhetoric that brought Reagan implemented the 1964 Civil Rights Act, felt they’d two landslides,” Caldwell writes, “was, among other triumphed over the gates of hell in 1945. In many ways things, a sign that Americans were unwilling to bank- they had, but their confidence and pride led them, as roll with their taxes the civil rights and welfare revolu- policymakers and managers of the 1950s and ’60s, to tion of the 1960s and the social change it brought in

Commentary 29 Today’s liberals so often sound, attitudinally at least, like conservatives—or rather like cardigan-wearing fuddy- duddies lamenting the changing times. its train.” The solution? Deficit financing. “Once debt had in the past) promiscuity or atheism or was used as a means to keep the social peace, it would pacifism. Today’s “subversive” opinions—that quickly run into the trillions.” there ought to be more blacks in positions Another consequence of the belief that we could of authority, that a gay relationship is just as have anything we wanted, cost-free—the belief that good as a straight one—were given special America could simply decree itself into the multiracial protection by civil rights laws, and there were harmony to which it was entitled—was the criminal- now hundreds of thousands of people at all ization of anything that stood in the way of absolute levels of government and business who had equality and fulfillment. The civil-rights law’s empow- been trained to impose them. ering of federal authorities to manage private affairs was modest compared with the social phenomenon “Subversive,” like “transgressive” and “revolu- that flowed out of it: political correctness. tionary,” has come to mean establishmentarian and For centuries, the conflicts between individual mainstream. This goes some way toward explaining sexual needs, on the one hand, and society’s need for why today’s liberals so often sound, attitudinally at order and stability, on the other—Caldwell asks us to least, like conservatives—or rather like cardigan- think of Romeo and Juliet or the angst-ridden lyrics of wearing fuddy-duddies lamenting the changing times. gay pop singer Morrissey—were tragic manifestations It is no longer conservatives but liberals who must of the human condition. They were not political; they defend the existing regime. They, to use the popular could not be managed or corrected by force of law; term, own it. that is what made them tragic. Now, though, writes The way liberals will need to defend the civil- Caldwell, “with the tools provided by civil rights law, rights regime is nicely illustrated by an early review they appeared quite political. . . . No longer was the of Caldwell’s book. The review, by Jonathan Rauch in irreconcilability of individuals’ and society’s sexual the New York Times, is about as snide as you would priorities a tragedy or a disagreement. Recast in the expect, calling the book “overwrought and strangely categories of civil rights law, it was a crime, a crime airless” and suggesting, predictably, that Caldwell that was being committed against a whole class of peo- half-believes that “Southern segregationists were right ple. The customs and traditions in the name of which all along.” In fact he states clearly what should have it was being committed were mere alibis.” been obvious to any thinking person, namely “that Some of the most penetrating passages of The government-sponsored racial inequality was a contra- Age of Entitlement are those in which the author lays diction of America’s constitutional principles and an bare the assumptions behind fashionable words and affront to its Christian ones.” Snideness aside, though, phrases. Under the permanent civil-rights revolution, the Times review conveniently amalgamates the out- liberal elites had to go on pretending that the objects of lawing of segregation and Jim Crow, on the one hand, their paternal solicitude—racial minorities and, later, and the massive civil-rights apparatus and attendant women and gays—were still the disadvantaged and ideology, on the other—as if the one could never have persecuted people and groups they were before. And been accomplished without the other. so the word “subversive” Rauch, in other words, simply sidesteps the point of the book. “I worry about the illiberal excesses of became a term of praise in academia . . . but identity politics and political correctness,” the reviewer it was deployed in an unusual sense. “Sub- writes, “but I think excesses is what they are, and I think versive” scholars were supporting the very they, too, can be worked through. Being a homosexual same things the government was mustering American now miraculously married to my husband for all its budgetary and enforcement power, and almost a decade, I can’t help feeling astonished by a his- the corporate and foundation sector all its tory of America since 1964 that finds space for only one funding and ingenuity, to bring about. Rarely paragraph briefly acknowledging the civil rights move- did professors now seek to subvert (as they ment’s social and moral achievements—before hasten-

30 The Closing of the American Experiment? : April 2020 Civil-rights laws have expanded to include so many protected classes that even small businesses are obliged to keep expensive attorneys permanently on retainer. ing back to ‘But the costs of civil rights were high.’” something on race disfavored by the arbiters of racial It’s worth noting, and I wonder if Rauch has ever justice. Mainstream news organizations’ fixation on noticed, that phrases like “the civil rights movement’s race intensifies with each passing year, almost as if social and moral achievements” are used almost exclu- there is no topic worth considering apart from its sively by white people. Blacks speak glowingly about relationship to race, as jaded subscribers reluctantly members of the civil-rights movement, especially decide to get their news elsewhere or not at all. Blacks Martin Luther King, but they do not typically glory, as continue to falter in educational achievement, and Rauch does about his status as a gay married man, in black neighborhoods continue to struggle with vio- the advantages and privileges they enjoy as a result of lent crime, decade after decade, even as government the movement’s achievements. You don’t need to deny agencies run mostly by whites keep encouraging the the courage of black civil rights leaders, or question dependency and illegitimacy that ensure failure. But the rightness of their cause, to wonder why that is. at least white liberals can go on congratulating them- Perhaps it’s because to speak airily of the civil-rights selves for their moral superiority and pretending all is movement’s “social and moral achievements” is to sug- basically as it should be. gest that the justice and equality the movement sought have been achieved already. Blacks know they have HE AGE of Entitlement calls to mind a best- not. Perhaps it’s also because the adjectives in that seller of 33 years ago, Allan Bloom’s The phrase—“social and moral achievements”—seem de- T Closing of the American Mind, a book that signed to highlight the virtue of whites, as if the main outraged the country’s liberal elite by contending that value of the civil-rights movement was to unburden American higher education’s unthinking emphasis white people of their guilt. on “openness” had become a kind of moral and intel- Nor is it quite right to dismiss the twisted lectual idiocy. Caldwell’s is a less pretentious book ideologies and vicious practices constantly issuing than Bloom’s, and the latter’s strange and impractical from the race and identity worldview as so many counsel to return to the virtues and ideals of classical “excesses.” Political correctness has now morphed Greek authors has no correlative in Caldwell’s book. into a cruel and arbitrarily coercive set of protocols But like Bloom, Caldwell writes with a nearly unparal- that keep well-meaning people in a state of fear. leled fluency and authority, and likeThe Closing of the Civil-rights laws have expanded to include so many American Mind, The Age of Entitlement poses a direct protected classes that small and midsized businesses challenge to contemporary pieties. are obliged to keep expensive attorneys permanently And yet Caldwell’s book has had a quieter recep- on retainer to tell them if anything in their policies or tion. Judging by its Amazon sales ranking six weeks language falls afoul of the law. Caterers, florists, and after its publication date, The Age of Entitlement is churches across the country are pressured to partici- selling well, but it has not been the media sensation pate against their wishes in same-sex weddings, mani- that Allan Bloom’s book was. It has not scandalized festly in the hope that a court decision will force them the American elite in the way that, by every objec- to accede to the civil-rights agenda. Innocent people tive measure, it should. Is that because, in the age see their reputations ruined and their families threat- of Donald Trump, the elite are not so easily scandal- ened because they spoke a misguided word about race ized? Maybe. But I wonder if it’s also because liberal or gender or sexual identity in a public forum. Accom- academics and intellectuals simply aren’t mentally plished scholars are shouted down and assaulted on prepared to engage with a work that is so—what’s the allegedly elite college campuses because they wrote word?—subversive.q

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Freeing the Captives

Genius and Anxiety: How Jews cent literacy rate, but while it has So how did the Jews, who make Changed the World, 1847–1947 produced writers and scientists, up .2 percent of mankind, “change By Norman Lebrecht their names are not exactly house- the world?” This is the question Scribner, 437 pages hold words. Norman Lebrecht asks in the sub- Contrast this with the Jews. title of his new book, Genius and Reviewed by Josef Joffe They invented monotheism, Hol- Anxiety. “I am not about to make a lywood, gefilte fish, relativity, and case for Jewish exceptionalism,” he HY THE Jews? free will (Adam chose to eat the answers, “nor do I believe that Jews By a liberal de- apple). Over the centuries, Jewish are genetically gifted above the av- finition of trib- über-achievers range from Marx, erage.” Instead, he ascribes Jewish al membership Freud, Proust, Kafka, and Ein- seichel to “culture and experience (meaning those stein to Mahler, Mendelssohn-Bar- rather than DNA.” It’s all due to Wwith at least one Jewish parent), tholdy, Gershwin, and Dylan; to numeracy, literacy, and critical rea- there are around 17 million Jews in Disraeli and Leon Blum; to Jonas soning—the stuff of Talmudic study. the world—about the population of Salk (polio vaccine) and Paul Eh- Lebrecht keeps referring to the Kazakhstan. An ancient civiliza- rlich (chemotherapy); to Silicon causal role of the Talmud through- tion, Kazakhstan boasts a 99.5 per- Valley titans such as Sergei Brin out his book, suggesting that even and Larry Ellison; to Kirk Douglas, Freud and Einstein, who had never Josef Joffe is on the editorial Steven Spielberg, and Seinfeld. Not set foot in a yeshiva, were some- council of the weekly Die Zeit and a to mention Groucho. Or Helena how formed by Talmudic sages fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institu- Rubinstein and Estée Lauder, who who kept arguing ad infinitum for tion. cooked up modern cosmetics. some 300 years at the beginning

Commentary 33 of the first millennium following He has to swim twice as hard to the destruction of the Temple. But Both reach the shore.” But now, the wa- it is a long trip from Babylon and i ter was a lot warmer. Jerusalem to Vienna and Berlin, Freud In a revolutionary economy— from the Talmudic giants to the think chemistry and physics, plas- secularized, even areligious Jews and Schönberg tics and pharmaceuticals, aviation of the 19th and 20th centuries, play starring and telephony—the future beats the many of whom (or their parents) past while talent and drive dwarf had converted to Christianity. roles in Genius the wrong faith and ancestry. The So let’s posit, as Lebrecht sug- and Anxiety, exclusion of the Jews had held them gests we should, that somehow the back throughout the ages, as had ancient masters of pilpul hand- along with insider networks, guild power, and ed the art of disputation down Einstein, because xenophobia. Suddenly, a wondrous through the generations. After all, market opened up in which grow- Freud’s father, Jacob, a wool mer- they overturned ing demand for new skills and per- chant, was a Torah scholar. ancient spectives met an ample supply. The But if “like father, like son” is victims of hatred and persecution the transmission belt, there are dispensations embodied modernity unleashed. two problems. Modernity, in fact, was the new One is conceptual. The Talmud, rather than Promised Land for the outsider a commentary on the law span- delving into pushing in. As the Jew could bring ning some 2,700 pages, amounts new tools and thoughts to bear on to a closed system. Talmudic think- Mishna and old ways, he could leave Torah and ing may be summed up as “turn Gemara. Talmud and move into science, and turn the Torah.” Its scholars technology, literature, and the arts. demonstrated their brilliance by Just one statistic: One-third of construing ever finer distinctions, Germany’s Nobel Prizes up to 1932 skewering the arguments of their nor did they break the mold. The went to Jews. Where they were still colleagues, or invoking the au- question “why the Jews?” should barred from banks and corpora- thority of the masters. Cracking therefore be amended to “Why the tions, as they were in America, paradigms was not their business. Jews in those hundred years, in the Jews went off to Hollywood, where Subversive thought—say, placing midst of modernity?” Laemmle, Goldwyn, and the War- sex at the center of the human con- Sheer smarts is not enough; the ner Brothers revolutionized mass dition, as did Freud, or confront- conditions had to be right as well. entertainment. It was these outsid- ing the ear, as Arnold Schönberg’s In the 19th century, the Jews were ers who grasped the globe-span- painful atonality did—was not the released from the ghetto, gaining ning power of celluloid and then Talmudic way. Both Freud and full civic rights throughout Europe. went on to interpret the American Schönberg play starring roles in Add to that circumstance histori- Dream for the rest of the world. Genius and Anxiety, along with cal serendipity in the forms of ur- Alienation and anxiety have never Einstein, because they overturned banization, industrialization, and spelled a greater advantage. ancient dispensations rather than globalization. With their literacy, delving into Mishna and Gemara. occupational flexibility, and lust for S LEBRECHT chronicles The second is a logical problem. learning, the Jews were perfectly the rise of the modern If the Talmud is the ur-cause, Jew- prepared for this new world. An age- A Jew and his triumphs, he ish worldly success and attainment old order based on working the land never ignores the dark side. For should have been the story of the and plying the trades, from which instance, he invites us to listen to Hebrews throughout the ages. Yet Jews were excluded, began to give the heartbreaking confrontation Lebrecht situates his account in way to a knowledge-based economy. between Arnold Schönberg and the hundred years between 1847 It was tailor-made for eter- his friend Wassily Kandinsky, the and 1947, and rightly so. Apart from nal outsiders with their pent-up painter, who had ascribed “only rare titans such as Maimonides, ambitions and energies. Lebrecht evil to the actions of the Jews.” Jews did not excel in world-histor- quotes Gustav Mahler: “A Jew is Ending the friendship, the com- ical terms in the centuries before, like a swimmer with a short arm. poser thunders: “What is anti-

34 Politics & Ideas : April 2020 Semitism to lead to if not acts of vi- European Jewry in the Shoah. Le- Yuri Slezkine’s pathbreaking oeuvre, olence.…You are perhaps satisfied brecht, a storyteller par excellence, over? After a post-Shoah pause, an- with depriving Jews of their civil brilliantly chronicles a Golden Cen- ti-Semitism is again forging ahead. rights. Then certainly Einstein, tury. Each chapter is a gem, spar- In his penultimate paragraph, Le- Mahler, I, and so many others will kling with historical insight and brecht strikes a wistful note: “The have been gotten rid of.” And it finely drawn portraits of famous sense of otherness is back. Jews, we would be to no avail, Schönberg as- and less-well-known Jews. It is a are told, are different. They have…a sures him: “Jewry has maintained book not just about Jews and their divided loyalty. The Jewish Ques- itself unaided against the whole achievements but also about moder- tion reopens—what is to be done of mankind for 20 centuries.” For nity—how Jews transformed West- about the Jews…The story is not Jews “are evidently so constituted ern ways of thinking and doing. It is over yet.” Neither is modernity, a that they can accomplish the task intellectual history at its best. natural habitat for the Jews once that their God has imposed on Is The Jewish Century, to recall ghetto walls had crumbled.q them: to survive in exile, uncor- rupted and unbroken, until the hour of salvation comes!” So Schönberg sets off to com- pose Moses and Aron a 12-tone opera that celebrates Jewish moxie and revolutionizes Western mu- The Lottery sic, to boot. In America, heroic resistance comes in a comic strip, crafted by two Depression-era kids, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Super- man is still a hit around the world, Isn’t Rigged having spawned innumerable mov- ies and series. What made them do it? Siegel answers: “Hearing The Theology of Liberalism: souls,” undergirding his 1972 and reading of the oppression Political Philosophy and the work, A Theory of Justice­ . The “lot- and slaughter of helpless…Jews in Justice of God tery of souls” posits that an indi- Germany.” A year behind Super- By Eric Nelson vidual’s station in life is the prod- man, two Jews created Batman, the Harvard University Press, 244 pages uct of luck and that social or avenger of the innocents. economic inequality is therefore Note that both superheroes go Reviewed by Tal Fortgang presumptively unjust. by perfectly WASP names: Clark Nelson’s argument is that this Kent and Bruce Wayne. Neither has N HIS new book, The Theol- assumption is riddled with in- ever been near a Torah or a Talmud. ogy of Liberalism, Harvard’s consistencies nearly “rising to the But both are Jewish characters, as Eric Nelson effortlessly level of incoherence,” and that Goebbels fumed in 1940. In the age combines early Christian Rawls’s argument is rooted not of emancipation, as covered by Leb- theology, modern political in common sense but rather in recht, Jews had quickly figured out I philosophy, historical scholarship, a metaphysical understanding of that they could flourish only if they literature, and economic theory to the universe Rawls does not hon- defined their particularist interest present a cogent but unorthodox estly acknowledge. in freedom, equality, and justice critique of one of the great foes of Nelson argues that our liberal as universal goods. So, Jews were liberal democratic capitalism: the democratic tradition is based on the first universal nation, which philosopher John Rawls (1921– the assumption that man is to delivered to them a tidy edge. The 2002). Rawls’s case for redis­ be held accountable for his own message ran: “We don’t want this tributionist policies rests on the actions and rewarded for good for us, but for all of mankind.” notion of an assumed “lottery of deeds. But if man cannot truly This ethos helped to speed their “earn” anything on his own, then rise but did not bring about salva- Tal Fortgang is a senior re- each person’s station in life is a tion. Indeed, the price of success search assistant at the American mere accident, lacking any con- was deadly—the near-extinction of Enterprise Institute. nection to morality or justice. This

Commentary 35 is Rawls’s argument. He says jus- or monarchy. Only in such a system tice must compel us toward a doc- What may individuals justly be rewarded trine of greater equality, demand- i for doing right. ing redistribution in accordance we Rawlsian anti-Pelagians claim with the “difference principle”— that successful humans are pre- according to which inequality of understand to programmed with intelligence, any kind is permissible only to the be a just society ambition, and other inborn char- extent that it might benefit the acteristics that direct them to be least well-off. depends on socially or economically produc- The Theology of Liberalism is what we believe tive. It is therefore unjust when designed to refute Rawls’s conten- individuals are rewarded with tion that our station in life is mor- constitutes a property in accordance with their ally arbitrary, undeserved, and higher law. That deeds, since such rewards simply unaffected by individual merit or reflect this programming. agency. To do so, Nelson goes back in turn is itself If this theory of “program- to the beginning. He argues that deeply informed ming” seems absurd, its account Rawlsians have unwittingly repur- of human nature might be at posed for modern ends ancient by whether we fault. Moral-arbitrariness theory Christian disputes about whether view mankind as presumes a disembodied spirit of people can warrant God’s favor by a future person participating in their deeds. preternaturally this lottery before being assigned The position that man can in- its place on Earth. Do not confuse dependently deduce what is just damned or this account for biological or and claim that he deserves his own capable of freely social determinism. It is, in fact, reward is “Pelegianism”—an early pre-biological. For, to maintain the Christian heresy that rejects the chosen virtue. claim that perfect arbitrariness doctrine of original sin and posits explains every individual’s station, that man can freely choose moral- it must reject those things that are ity or immorality on his own. Since higher law—and therefore could not arbitrary—by which I mean man’s good deeds are of his own not be just. the conscious and subconscious making, Pelegianism asserts, his Our understanding of the just choices of a person’s forebears deeds can serve as evidence that he society depends on what we be- that brought them into being. deserves salvation. The alternative lieve constitutes this higher law. Such as: whom a person chooses is anti-Pelagianism, which Nelson That in turn is itself deeply in- to marry; where a person chooses identifies as the precursor to the formed by whether we view man- or is forced by circumstance to Rawlsian principle of moral arbi- kind as preternaturally damned or live; what religion (if any) one’s trariness. capable of freely chosen virtue. If ancestors choose to practice. All What does a recondite ancient humans can ascertain and freely are formative, fundamental, and, theological debate have to do with choose what is virtuous, we can yes, unchosen by future genera- ongoing political disputes? Con- be rewarded accordingly, merit- tions—but they are not arbitrary. sider the natural-law liberalism ing unequal rewards that might Yet moral-arbitrariness theory ig- of Martin Luther King Jr., who otherwise seem unjust. But if our nores choices made in the past and defended disobedience of man- virtuous or productive behavior considers every birth as the begin- made law because “an unjust law is not really to our credit, then ning of the world anew. is a code that is out of harmony inequalities of many sorts are pre- The Rawlsian anti-Pelagian ac- with the moral law.” King argued sumptively unjust. count, in short, treats a human in his “Letter from a Birmingham Political liberalism, the Pelagian being’s experience as beginning Jail” that segregation was merely analogue, claims that man must be somewhere beyond this world. A an act of a legislature that failed to free to exercise his liberty in order spirit, endowed by some force of “[square] with…the law of God.” It to pursue justice. Such thinking nature with thoughts, traits, and was King’s argument that segrega- distinguishes liberalism, which es- personality, is somehow both de- tion violated human equality—an chews coercion in favor of the free- termined by its programming and indelible feature of the Bible’s dom to do wrong, from theocracy distinct from the body in which

36 Politics & Ideas : April 2020 it is subsequently placed, which past generations mean that every gain [with God] and thereby merit is formed at least in part by the individual’s station in life today our reward.” choices of its forebears. is unearned, whether that station These anti-Jewish currents in Nelson’s book exposes the logi- is positive or negative. Therefore, Marxism flow neatly into Rawls’s cal contradiction here: Rawls and redistribution—or “economic jus- anti-Pelagianism, a theological his disciples are effectively coun- tice”—is a moral necessity. bent on display in his Princeton tering traditional accounts of hu- Nelson lays bare more than undergraduate thesis, written in man freedom with a spiritualist just the weakness of progressive 1942 before Rawls became disil- account of human unfreedom. redistributionism. He also shows lusioned with God and Christian- This account implies that any how its anti-liberal underpinnings ity. The thesis confirms to Nelson person we now know could have actually invited the contemporary the connection between Rawls’s been programmed in a number of secular form of the old specter of theological and political anti- different ways. But those wouldn’t Jew-hatred. Preceding Rawls in Pelagianism, displaying Rawls’s be different versions of the same anti-merit analysis was Karl Marx, rejection of merit and liberal person—those would be different whose call for the abolition both politics well before he published people entirely (especially if our of Jews and capitalism hinged on his landmark A Theory of Justice programming is highly determin- an argument against merit itself. in 1972. istic). We would therefore be hard- Marx’s criticism of liberalism’s ten- “The bargain scheme of re- pressed, to say the least, to create a dency to estrange individuals from demption,” wrote Rawls of the fundamentally more equal version each other was for Marx, in Nel- notion that man can make claims of the society we have—which son’s words, “a manifestation of its on God’s justice, “manifests itself is supposedly a reflection of the essential ‘Jewishness.’” in the barrier of legalism in reli- programming of its individuals— Marx saw the link between gion [Judaism] and in contract without creating a society of en- Jews and liberal capitalism in the theories in politics.” Legalism, to tirely different people. prevalence of “bargaining,” which the young Rawls, is the Judaized These claims have political Marx calls “the worldly cult of the form of Pelagianism. It encour- ramifications, Nelson reminds us. Jew” and identifies as political and ages man to accumulate merit Note the theory of “privilege”— economic liberalism’s alienating through freely chosen adherence another word for a set of suppos- mechanism. “The liberal contracta- to the law and performance of edly unearned advantages—that rian tradition,” writes Nelson, was commandments, and to present undergirds so much current pro- to Marx “merely the application of it to God as evidence of his desert. gressive thinking. Progressives be- this Jewish ‘bargain’ mentality to This view of justice was reject- lieve that history, in concert with the relationship between citizens,” ed by the apostle Paul and deemed oppressive cultural norms that under which claims are leveled and worthy of abolition by Marx, and are not objectively valuable, con- justice adjudicated. Such bargain- it speaks to the corruption of Ju- fers advantages on certain groups ing is not just dehumanizing but daism, according to Rawls: “The and individuals. These need to be absurd, in the anti-Pelagian view, best efforts in Judaism were so recognized and ultimately “lev- and would be eradicated “in a high- corrupted—not the worst, but the eled off,” in Nelson’s term. In this er phase of communist society,” in best,” Rawls wrote, for Judaism progressive account, nothing an Marx’s words. is mired in delusion about merit individual achieves is really de- The dogma of Marxist econom- and God’s justice. Marxist and served, because so much beyond ics, “from each according to his Rawlsian redistributionism, we an individual’s control happened ability, to each according to his must conclude, opposes not just to facilitate it and likely at the needs,” is not just an alternative the Jews but Judaism, rejecting expense of other equally morally to capitalism. It is fundamentally the nature of man and God that worthy individuals, no less. distinct from the liberal view that the Hebrew Bible offers. Nelson’s Privilege theory is not pre- one may deserve unequal reward sobering, rigorous, and difficult cisely the same as pure Rawlsian proportional to unequal produc- analysis reveals that Jews have redistributionism, but it relies on tion, an idea that Marx calls “the every reason to find the logic of a similar account of every indi- narrow horizon of bourgeois right.” redistributionism troubling at its vidual’s participation in a kind of Marx detested the Jewish view that core, because at its core, it is a re- genetic lottery. Choices made by “we can fulfill our side of the bar- jection of Judaism itself.q

Commentary 37 support of trans kids, to many, the op-ed smacked of transpho- bia and ignorance.” Her critics, Boy Oh Boy she says, suggested she “blamed adults’ narrow views of gender on the increasing visibility and ac- ceptance of trans people.” Now she Tomboy: The Surprising identity—and are skeptical of her knows they are right: “I have since History and Future of Girls Who response—the message they send learned after two years of study, Dare to Be Different is that a girl cannot look and act that conflating a young child’s de- By Lisa Sellin Davis like her and still be a girl.” sire for a haircut or a football with Hachette, 307 pages Davis’s article was widely gender identity was very much the shared, including among people fall-out from a hyper-gendering Reviewed by who worry that the transgender childhood.” Naomi Schaefer Riley movement is actually moving girls She has consulted with a num- and women back to a pre-feminist ber of experts on gender identity ISA Sellin Davis is sor- state. All the cultural and legal as well as the University of New ry. Very sorry. In 2017, work involved in ensuring, for in- Hampshire’s “Bias-Free Language she wrote an op-ed ti- stance, that women’s sports are a Guide.” So now she knows that the tled “My Daughter Is legitimate enterprise will unravel word “tomboy” is “problematic/ Not Transgender. She as boys and men will compete for outdated” and should be replaced L Is a Tomboy.” The woke Internet those same titles. And all the work by “children who are gender non- lost its collective mind and now that went into assuring girls that conforming, children who are Davis has written an entire book to they can be interested in areas gender variant.” apologize. Tomboy: The Surprising that are traditionally male will be Gender nonconforming, she ex- History and Future of Girls Who undone by the suspicion that girls plains, “can include anyone of any Dare to Be Different includes some with those interests are “really” gender, doing gender in all kinds of interesting cultural anthropology, boys. ways.” It is unfortunate that Davis but mostly it is an exercise in trying Andrew Sullivan has noted a has gone down this road because to get herself back in the good similar effect of the transgender the question she asks in the be- graces of the Brooklyn neighbors movement on the logic of gay ginning is actually an interesting she has offended. rights. He criticizes the current one. For generations, American In the original piece, she de- idea of “gender identity” because history and culture had a strong scribes how many adults (in- it relies on old-fashioned stereo- tradition of tomboys. From Jo in cluding doctors and teachers) types. “A boy with a penchant Little Women to Jo on The Facts ask whether her seven-year-old for Barbies and Kens is possibly of Life, we used to accept the idea daughter, who wears “track pants a trans girl—because, according that girls didn’t all have to dress and T-shirts… has shaggy short to stereotypes, he’s behaving as a like princesses. hair” and “has friends who are girl would,” he writes. “So instead Particularly as families left the mostly boys,” wants to identify of enlarging our understanding stuffy East Coast and headed as a boy. Davis gushes: “In many of gender expression—and allow- West, they could embrace a more ways, this is wonderful: It shows a ing maximal freedom and variety “all hands on deck” attitude. The much-needed sensitivity to gender within both sexes—the concept of plucky stories of the tomboys nonconformity and transgender ‘gender identity’ actually narrows in Little House on the Prairie issues. It is considerate of adults it, in more traditional and even and Caddie Woodlawn have been to ask her—in the beginning.” regressive ways.” passed down from mothers to But then, she adds, “when they Such speculation has rendered daughters for generations. Think continue to question her gender Sullivan persona non grata in of Katharine Hepburn, who called trans circles. And Davis doesn’t herself Jimmy when she was a Naomi Schaefer Riley is a want to go down that road. She child, wore her brother’s clothes, resident fellow at the American En- now realizes the error of her old and wished she was a boy because terprise Institute and visiting fellow ways. In the book, she writes: she thought “boys had all the fun.” at Independent Women’s Forum. “While the piece expressed full Even as recently as the ’70s and

38 Politics & Ideas : April 2020 ’80s, Davis rightly notes, there she doesn’t want to live in a society seemed to be many more tomboy- We treat where girls who have gender-non- ish characters on television and in i conforming interests are not asked movies. Where is today’s version children whether they want to be boys, then of Punky Brewster or The Bad what exactly does she want? News Bears? as small The answer is just to get rid Davis cites a survey from the adults, able of these categories altogether: 1970s noting that 78 percent of “What does it look like to physi- college women said they were to make their cally transition from a woman, tomboys growing up. Today, it is own decisions but not to become a man?” she somewhere between a third and a wonders. Davis quotes approving- half. What happened? When and about clothes ly from a gender theorist named why did being a tomboy become and makeup Kate Bornstein about the non- less cool? Davis blames capitalism gendered future she imagines: and war. “During each war,” she and sexuality. “Sure, some people will hew to the writes, “economic times were tight, Nowadays, this binary edges, but everybody else and women filled men’s roles while will be mixed together in gender they went off to fight: War begat means that we soup, able to grab any ingredients feminism. And often the children allow nine-year- they want from around the circle. of feminists were raised as tom- Rather than see the in-between boys. But as money flowed into olds to decide place as a no-man’s—no person’s— the economy and the middle class land, see it as a legitimate, healthy surged later in the twentieth centu- when they respectable spot.” ry, more items were gendered. This need hormone And those ingredients? Well, serves two purposes: to sell twice Davis breathlessly cites the direc- as much stuff and to push women therapy. tor of a clinic who says they have back into their places.” “gender non-binary kids coming… The result, says Davis, was that asking for, for example, a touch the 1990s “produced the most in part the result of the fact that of testosterone…. We have some hyper-gendered childhoods yet.” we treat children as small adults, young adults saying, ‘I just want The explosion of pink things and able to make their own decisions my breasts removed. They don’t princesses, well documented in about clothes and makeup and match who I am. I’m not a man. Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate sexuality. This once meant that But I’m not a woman either.’” Chop My Daughter, is certainly the re- we were supposed to be lax about off a little here, add a little there. sult in part of clever marketing. when they could go out on dates. Throw it all in the pot. What could But the success of the marketing But now it means that we allow go wrong? was not masterminded by corpo- nine-year-olds to decide when they At the end of her original op-ed, rate America’s male chauvinists. need hormone therapy. Davis defends her daughter, who In fact, the success of princesses Back in the 1970s, most Ameri- she says is “happy with her body and Bratz dolls had just as much cans were pretty content not to and comfortable with the way she do to with changes in family expec- think of nine-year-olds as being looks.” She tells all the teachers tations of children—ones largely sexual creatures at all. But today and pediatricians and busybodies pushed by feminists and other that’s no longer an option. to back off when they are, in ef- liberationist types. Which brings us back to Da- fect, asking whether her daughter Davis is right that girls and boys vis’s original conundrum. If talking would like to lop off any body were once dressed in the same way about “tomboys” is problematic be- parts or ingest life-altering drugs. when they were young and that it cause doing so suggests that prefer- If only she had done the same for is only in more modern times that ences such as dressing like a boy or the thousands of other children we have felt the need to make sar- wanting to play sports are not re- caught up in this madness, Tom- torial distinctions between them ally part of a “gender identity,” then boy wouldn’t be the intellectual at younger ages. But that is at least what exactly does it mean? And if calamity it is.q

Commentary 39 K–12 education at large, but still these schools are vital ladders out of poverty for the families that they The Ravitches serve. Ravitch earned her reputation half a century ago as a clear-eyed historian of education, but Slaying of Sin Goliath is no history. Rather, it is a celebration of a far-flung collection of teachers and parent activists and a handful of academics and elected Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Plotted on a graph, the scores officials Ravitch stitches together Resistance to Privatization earned over the past 40 years by into something she calls (again and the Fight to Save America’s America’s 17-year-olds on the Na- with capital letters) “The Resis- Public Schools tional Assessment of Educational tance.” What they are resisting, she By Diane Ravitch Progress resemble nothing as much says, is the “privatization” of public Knopf, 352 pages as a dead man’s EKG. Some discon- education. They are heroes fighting tent is warranted. If there had been for democracy and against the dark Reviewed by Robert Pondiscio transformative gains to be wrought forces of plutocracy. from the academic standards, test- Ravitch’s portrait of these new HE education-reform ing, and accountability playbook “great school wars” (to borrow the movement Diane of the past few decades, we should title of the book that made her rep- Ravitch mercilessly have seen them by now. It is a pain- utation in 1965) is extraordinarily mocks in her new ful but sad fact that since the 1983 biased. She describes infuriating book, Slaying Goli- A Nation at Risk report launched instances of corruption and fraud, T ath, deserves serious scrutiny. Its the modern ed-reform movement, particularly among online charter- policies and preferences have dom- the policymakers, philanthropists, school operators, with untold mil- inated and reshaped American ed- and social entrepreneurs Ravitch lions of public dollars misspent. ucation for over three decades. The lumps together under the rubric Yet she takes no notice of similar rhetoric of reform is stirring and of “The Disruptors,” and whom she corruption and criminality in the ennobling. It calls out shameful derides as “masters of chaos,” have vastly larger public-school systems and persistent achievement gaps overreached and underperformed. she champions. between black and white children That is the story she wishes to tell When school boards resist the and a complacent status quo in in Slaying Goliath. Disruptor agenda, she asserts, they public schools that allows those But Ravitch also overreaches and represent the “democratically con- gaps to persist. But reform’s moral underdelivers, often wildly. It is trolled” will of parents and those capital has been spent on things simply factually incorrect to assert people who take what she believes that parents don’t like very much, of The Disruptors that “not one of to be “principled stands” to defend notably an aggressive testing and their efforts has succeeded.” Amer- public schools. But when school accountability regime that injects ica’s major cities are now home boards embrace reform, it’s a “take- itself between parents and the to hundreds of high-performing over by right-wing ideologues” who schools they like. The regime has charter schools that didn’t exist “smugly ignored parents, students, reshaped children’s experience of 20 years ago, run by organiza- and teachers who questioned schooling, too often reducing it to tions such as KIPP, Uncommon them.” Democracy rocks when it an exhausting cycle of prep-and- Schools, Achievement First, Suc- serves The Resistance. When The test. And to what end? cess Academy, YES Prep, and IDEA Resistance faces resistance, how- Public schools. They have created ever, it’s the corrupting influence of Robert Pondiscio is senior reliable pathways for historically “Dark Money” (more caps) spent by fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham In- underserved low-income black and billionaire privatizers. stitute and a former inner-city pub- brown students to go to college A casual reader of Slaying Goli- lic-school teacher. His book, How the by the thousands. Perhaps that is ath might get the impression that Other Half Learns, was published small beer compared with the gen- there was once a time when all had last fall by Penguin. eral lassitude that besets American been well in American education

40 Politics & Ideas : April 2020 and that the children of both rich seem more concerned with com- and poor, black and white, used There batting institutional racism and to skip off hand-in-hand each day i dismantling white supremacy, and to bask in the nurturing glow of is no focusing their energies on housing, gifted teachers in democratically segregation, policing, and immi- controlled common schools—until small amount gration, than on teaching kids to the dark moment when malefac- of frustration read. tors of great wealth plundered Ravitch’s view of education re- it all. Not one paragraph sug- that a movement form is both inspired by and stuck gests that the ed-reform move- once dedicated in the moment when she changed ment, whatever its shortcomings, sides, morphing as she did from was an earnest response to a to the (perhaps one of reform’s most dependable public-education system that had naive) idea that allies to its severest critic. She once betrayed its ideals and left millions served as an assistant secretary of of children unprepared for lives of education was education during the elder Bush’s upward mobility and engaged citi- the cure for administration and was a member zenship. The Manichean caricature of the Hoover Institution’s Koret of education reform scribbled in poverty, has Task Force on K–12 Education. She Slaying Goliath dismisses even the morphed into a authored a shelf of books that were possibility that there might be men education-reform touchstones, in- and women of goodwill among The wholly owned cluding Left Back, The Schools We Disruptors who are authentically Deserve, even National Standards concerned with the well-being of subsidiary of in American Education: A Citizen’s children. Instead, there are only Social Justice, Guide, all of which argued for and dupes or whores. All you need to defended many of the policies she know is who signs their paychecks. Inc. now vigorously attacks. Ravitch’s project is to make What happened? For a time, two-dimensional heroes of The exist any longer. Nor does the ed- trying to suss out the causes of her Resistors and then bask in their ap- reform world Ravitch evokes. flip was ed reform’s most popular plause. Never mind that we spend “Disrupters say that schools parlor game. The most common over $700 billion a year on pub- should be run like businesses,” explanation was ugly and mean- lic education—nearly $14,000 per Ravitch claims. In truth, that cliché spirited. An irresponsible article in student nationwide—in the Unit- hasn’t been tossed about in reform The New Republic in 2011 function- ed States. According to Ravitch, circles in well over a decade, and ally outed Ravitch, rationalizing schools are still underfunded, hol- even then such words were rarely her apostasy as payback for New lowed out, and starved for re- spoken by those seriously engaged York City schools chancellor Joel sources. In her eyes, this behemoth in education. “The Corporate Dis- Klein’s refusing to hire her part- is David. Those who expect better rupters are indifferent to poverty ner Mary Butz to run a principal- results or merely a decent school and racial segregation,” she insists, training program. (Her new book for their kids represent Goliath. revealing the degree to which her is dedicated to Butz, whom Ravitch jeremiad is disconnected and dat- has since married.) The idea that a HE CRITIQUE in Slaying ed. Insofar as an education-reform serious academic would overthrow Goliath is frozen in time, movement remains today, 20 years a lifetime of scholarship to avenge T stuck at a point a decade into the century, it is obsessed with a petty slight was and is deeply un- ago when the ed-reform move- issues of poverty and race. Indeed, serious. The tireless effort Ravitch ment was at the peak of its power there is no small amount of frustra- has devoted to her anti-reform and prestige, when scowling D.C. tion, particularly on the right, that crusade should leave no doubt that schools chief Michelle Rhee was a movement once dedicated to the her conversion is earnest. on the cover of Time wielding a (perhaps naive) idea that educa- The main achievement of Slay- broom, and Newsweek’s cover sug- tion was the cure for poverty, has ing Goliath is that Ravitch, perhaps gested a simplistic remedy to our morphed over time into a wholly unwittingly, has crafted a playbook educational ills: We must fire bad owned subsidiary of Social Jus- on how to avoid paying a price teachers. These magazines barely tice, Inc. These days, ed reformers for past misdeeds. Cancel culture

Commentary 41 routinely exiles artists and intel- teous teeth in urban classrooms profit organizations and advocacy lectuals from public life for untow- with Teach For America. Brimming campaigns. Then they are inevita- ard comments made decades ago. with technocratic self-assurance bly humbled by the complexity of Ravitch was more than a casual and indignation at educational social forces weighing down stu- chronicler; she was a significant inequity, untainted by failure and dent achievement and the sheer intellectual architect, present at driven by what Martin Luther King weight of politics and institutional the birth of many of the reforms Jr. called “the fierce urgency of inertia. Slaying Goliath is, to put it she now derides. Turning against now,” these swaggering zealots fan mildly, not that book. In the guise them not with thoughtful critiques out to launch charter schools and of an indictment of reformist fail- but bursts of vitriol and rage has run school districts, seek elected ure, it is a celebration of status quo earned her not just a pass but office, and launch dozens of non- indifference.q adoration and acclaim from the very Resistance figures who might otherwise be canceling her. Her new acolytes are her audi- ence, but other readers may find Slaying Goliath depressing, even nihilistic. Is there nothing to be The Year the done? One thing Ravitch has not changed her mind about is what a good public education looks like: “Educators and parents want stu- Sky Fell dents to have a genuine education with a full and balanced curricu- lum that includes science, foreign languages, history, literature, phys- Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, to appease an armed insurrection, ical education, the arts, and civics, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry the Saudi government sharply re- not just prep for standardized tests That Unraveled Culture, versed what precious little social in reading and mathematics.” Hear, Religion, and Collective progress had been made and, in a hear! It is tempting to wonder Memory in the Middle East revolution from above, trans- whether 50 million America school By Kim Ghattas formed the country into an even children might be better off today Henry Holt and Co., 400 pages more regressive and repressive had Resistance Ravitch directed place than it already was. The her considerable energies and in- Reviewed by Michael J. Totten Saudi and Iranian governments, tellect to rallying her new friends once grudging allies, became and fans to bring that vision to frui- N THE Greater Middle East, sworn, bitter enemies determined tion. It may surprise her to learn, the year 1979 felt like the to export their own revolutions to even now, that there are significant end of the world. Ameri- the whole Muslim world, across numbers among those she regards cans know it as the ominous the Middle East and beyond, in- as villains who would march in that date of the Iranian Revolu- cluding to Afghanistan, which co- army, myself included. But the pa- I tion, the hostage crisis, and the rise incidentally had just been invaded rade has long since passed. Reform of the grim-faced, murderous Aya- by the Soviet Union. may be a disappointment, but what tollah Khomeini. But those weren’t Nearly all the worst disasters preceded it didn’t work either. the only pivotal events that un- that have swept across the Muslim Ravitch the historian understood folded back then. The scarcely world in the past four decades that. Ravitch the polemicist has no known siege of Mecca occurred at can be traced at least in part back time for such complications. the same time, and it was equally to that year. That’s the thesis of Had she put her mind to it, dreadful—and fateful. In an effort the masterful book Black Wave, Ravitch might have written a ver- by Beirut-born, Emmy Award–win- sion of The Best and the Brightest Michael J. Totten is the au- ning journalist Kim Ghattas. She about the education-reform era thor of nine books, including Where traveled from Egypt and Iraq to in which a new generation of Ivy the West Ends and The Road to Iran and Pakistan, and no matter League “whiz kids” cut their righ- Fatima Gate. where she went, the people with

42 Politics & Ideas : April 2020 whom she spoke let loose a tsu- forward and effectively forced the nami of emotion when she asked The royal family to go all-in on the ex- how that year had devastated them i quisitely bigoted Wahhabi subsect and their countries. She felt as if Middle of Sunni Islam, and the royals felt she were “conducting national or obliged to do so lest the insur- regional therapy.…Everyone had a East in the mid- gency gather strength and remove story about how 1979 had wrecked 20th century them from power. Bin Baz, Ghattas their lives, their marriage, their writes, “drove a hard bargain that education, including those born was hardly an would haunt the kingdom and the after that year.” idyllic utopia. whole region for decades, a bargain Even close observers of the that would make the Saudis feel region can be forgiven for not But aside from like time had stopped in its tracks.” quite realizing that things are the Arab–Israeli Women weren’t allowed to an- much worse now than they used chor the news anymore. Their faces to be. The Middle East in the mid- conflict, the wars were scrubbed from newspaper 20th century was hardly an idyllic were less endless, photos, and they were fired from utopia. Authoritarianism was the their jobs and sent home. Beach norm, with rule by Turkish and the culture resorts closed. Whip-wielding au- European empires only recently more open, and thorities forced citizens to pray five shrugged off. But aside from the times a day. Arab–Israeli conflict, the wars were sectarian mass Simultaneously in Iran, Ayatol- less endless, the culture more open, lah Khomeini banned dancing and sectarian mass murder a thing murder a thing and alcohol. Children were told of the history books. Optimists of the history they’d have molten metal poured weren’t laughed out of the room. into their ears on Judgment Day Beirut, Cairo, and even Kabul en- books. if they listened to music. Khomei- joyed semi-liberal golden ages be- ni’s revolutionaries burned down fore sliding into decline. Iran under family couldn’t break the siege on movie theaters and other suppos- the leadership of the authoritarian its own, so it resorted to summon- edly decadent businesses. They yet progressive Shah Mohammed ing French paratroopers—to a city laid waste to more than just mod- Reza Pahlavi was pro-Western, had where non-Muslims are otherwise ern Iranian culture. They actively friendly relations with Israel, and banned forever from entering—to waged war against Iran’s history, seemed to have a shining future lay waste to the rebels. What could traditions, and historical memory. ahead of it. One could argue with have and arguably should have Ghattas writes: “Khomeini had no a straight face that whole swaths been an isolated event instead attachment to the grandeur of the of the Muslim world were in bet- marked a turning point. Persian empire, or the cultural ter shape than half of Europe, the The insurrectionists had a list and intellectual richness of its Communist half with a Soviet boot of demands for Saudi Arabia: Sever history; only to his own sense of on its neck. ties with the West, stop exporting importance.” Execution by stoning Ghattas treads familiar ground oil to the imperialists, banish all made a comeback. Universities describing the Iranian Revolution foreigners, and purge impure cler- closed for three years. Humani- and its cruel aftermath, but the ics. As Ghattas points out, these ties courses were rewritten and Saudi half of the story is less well- demands weren’t terribly different Islamized. “The purge was every- known to her Western audience. from Osama bin Laden’s years later, where,” Ghattas writes. “A reign of While the ayatollah railed against and they created a terrible crisis for terror that would last ten years.… the Shah and his Western allies in the House of Saud. Its custodian- Everything became a crime, yield- Tehran, 300 totalitarian-minded ship of Mecca and Medina is the ing an entrenched paranoia and Saudi insurgents from the spec- foundation of its leadership of the darkness that rolled over the coun- tacularly backward Najd desert Islamic world, and if it can’t handle try.” The Shah’s regime was brutal, captured the Grand Mosque in the job, perhaps it should be given but he wouldn’t even qualify as a Mecca, took thousands of hostages, to somebody else. bat boy in the league Khomeini and engaged in a deadly standoff The hopelessly reactionary blind played in. The new Islamic govern- with the government. The royal cleric Abdul Aziz bin Baz stepped ment, “in a paroxysm of depravity,”

Commentary 43 executed 75 times as many people petrodollars exporting their harsh as the Shah’s notorious SAVAK. The and alien Wahhabi subsect to dis- There were two Islamist revo- i tant countries with no such tradi- lutions in 1979, not just the more region- tion. And they backed their own to- infamous Iranian one. As if they talitarian proxies when they found didn’t constitute enough hell to wide export of it useful, from Saddam Hussein in be unleashed at once, Soviet tanks twin revolutions Iraq to the Taliban in Afghanistan. rolled across the border from Uz- The region-wide export of these bekistan into Afghanistan to prop is the black twin revolutions is the black wave up a local Communist govern- wave of Kim of Ghattas’s title, “the torrent that ment. The United States jumped in flattens everything in its path” and and backed a movement of Islamic Ghattas’s title. that has “changed who we are and fighters, hoping to give Moscow It’s ‘the torrent hijacked our collective memory.” its own black eye after the hu- The Iranians have even chosen miliating Vietnam War. The Saudis that flattens to back non-Shia militias and ter- waded in, too, not just to punch everything in its rorist organizations in the Pales- back at the Eurasian heathens but tinian territories, not because the to keep the Russians out of Paki- path’ and that ayatollahs have any warm feelings stan, bolster their own bona fides has ‘changed for the drinkers and womanizers in as the Muslim world’s leaders after the Palestine Liberation Organiza- being challenged in Mecca, and who we are tion or the Sunni fundamentalists provide a pressure-release valve of Hamas, but because the Iranians, for their own fanatics who would and hijacked as Shias and Persians, hoped to win gleefully impale themselves on our collective support as the hegemons of a Sunni- Russian tanks instead of on their Arab-majority region by hitching own Great Mosque. memory.’ a ride on the anti-Zionist train, a But the Saudis had too many move that was particularly effective extremists to export; their narrow- the Persian Gulf. And neither revo- after Egypt had betrayed that cause minded religious and education lution had provincial aspirations. It by signing a peace treaty with Israel. establishment kept creating more wasn’t enough to suppress women, “Who would wipe the shame from of them as if it were running an free thinking, and fun inside their the forehead of Arab men now?” assembly line. The 9/11 hijackers, own borders. Each did its worst to Ghattas asks rhetorically. For more almost all of whom were Saudi, export its revolution abroad, as the than a decade now, every Arab state “did not stand out in their country; Russians had done with their own but Syria has inched closer to a cold they were unremarkable, repre- after 1917, and their revolutions, peace with Israel. But Iran and its senting the average Saudi man of similar as they may have been, proxies soldier on, even though the that generation, the generation of were mutually incompatible. Each Palestinian cause has always been 1979, the fateful year around which capital wished to be the leader of foreign to Iranians, one that barely most of them were born. It was as the whole Muslim world, so each registered as a blip before the 1979 though they had been born and had to take down the other. And revolution, when Iran and Israel raised for nothing else but death in one of them was Sunni while the were still allies. the fireball of a raging hell, victims other was Shia. Hatred between the Saudis and and killers at once.” Over the next several decades the Iranians is more than political; and going all the way up through it’s personal and visceral. Kho- T WOULD have been tragic the present, Iran armed and trained meini once blasted the Saudis as enough had the dark revolu- sectarian Shia militias—Hezbollah “the camel grazers of Riyadh and Itions in Iran and Saudi Arabia in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army in the barbarians of Najd, the most taken over marginal Muslim-ma- Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and so infamous and the wildest members jority countries (like Chad, per- on—to wage civil wars inside their of the human family.” The Saudis, haps, or maybe Bangladesh), but own countries and wars against for their part, fear and loathe the instead they erupted simultane- “imperialist” non-Muslims such as Iranians as Persians and heretical ously in two large oil-rich nations Americans and Israelis. The Saudis, Shias who might one day spon- facing off against each other across meanwhile, spent untold billions of sor an anti-royal insurgency in

44 Politics & Ideas : April 2020 the heavily Shia Eastern Province, to Europe’s between 1945 and the raelis and emphatically involves which just happens to be where fall of the Berlin Wall. Those who the Saudis and the Iranians (and most of the oil is. choose to blame the Arab–Israeli the Russians), exposes the blame- Beyond the oppressed and mur- conflict or American foreign-policy America and blame-Israel crowds dered victims in their own coun- blunders for most of the Middle as the blinkered fools that they are. tries, the Saudi–Iranian rivalry has East’s ills are drastically wide of Ghattas barely touches on this in so far killed millions in Iraq, Syria, the mark. Syria’s civil war, which her book, but she doesn’t have to. Lebanon, Yemen, and Afghanistan. scarcely involves Americans or Is- It’s obvious.q The black wave has even washed over countries where the Saudis and the Iranians haven’t faced off directly or through their proxies. Egypt has seen a dramatic decline, partly because so many from its poorer classes have spent time as Not-So-Great temporary workers in Saudi Ara- bia and come home transformed into ultra-conservative quasi-Wah- Great Society: A New History of money leaving the country, habis, and also because the Egyp- By Amity Shlaes Johnson called for a moratorium tian middle class has since rejected Harper, 528 pages on all American tourism outside the West and turned to the Saudis the Western Hemisphere for two for inspiration and fashion. The Reviewed by Kyle Smith years. He used the FBI and CIA to headscarf, for instance, has be- track his political enemies. Oh, and come a status symbol for women. ’M TRYING to picture how imagine if President Trump were Before 1979, less than a third of far the media would turn up forcing hundreds of thousands of Egypt’s women bothered to wear the outrage meter if Presi- men to go to war in an obscure cor- it, but a decade later, two-thirds dent Trump governed like ner of the world for poorly defined were covering themselves, and Lyndon Johnson, and I reasons, and that tens of thousands today hardly any woman in the I can’t do it; my imagination isn’t of these young men, disproportion- whole country dares to go outside expansive enough. In Great Soci- ately poor and members of minor- without one. ety: A New History, Amity Shlaes ity groups, were getting killed or And the Saudis have done ex- presents a deeply researched, maimed. traordinary damage in Afghani- briskly told account of an era of Shlaes leaves Vietnam mostly stan, not only by supporting the tumult that was promoted and in to one side, though, presenting in- Taliban financially and diplomati- many cases even funded by the stead a panorama of the blithe and cally but by actively training the federal government. If you want bizarre methods that Washington Taliban to replicate the dreaded re- to be reassured that we of the used in upending America in the ligious Saudi police—the Commit- Trump Era enjoy the privilege of interest of destroying racism and tee for the Promotion of Virtue and relatively placid times, this is the poverty. Her portrait of the Great the Prevention of Vice—just as the book to read. Society’s signature actors contains Iranians replicated their own Revo- Johnson once said, of Martha’s multitudes. There are capitalist lutionary Guard Corps abroad, first Vineyard, “we ought to blow up business titans, labor leaders such and most famously by establishing that goddamned island.” He (ac- as the canny UAW chief Walter Hezbollah in Lebanon. cording to some accounts) grabbed Reuther with his vision of turn- “There was something so ex- the Fed chair William McChesney ing America into a Scandinavian traordinary about 1979,” Ghattas Martin by the lapels while shoving social-welfare democracy, intellec- writes, “with its cascade of events… him against the wall and barked, tuals such as Daniel Patrick Moyni- that to some it felt as if the sky were “Martin, my boys are dying in Viet- han, mayors such as Sam Yorty of falling to earth.” The Saudi–Iranian nam and you won’t print the mon- Los Angeles, community activists, rivalry for supremacy in the Middle ey I need.” To reduce the amount cabinet secretaries, and the presi- East is as central to and defining dent who demanded the legislation of that region’s modern history as Kyle Smith is National Review’s and spending that set all of the the American–Soviet rivalry was critic-at-large. above in motion.

Commentary 45 I should say presidents, plural; ing illustration of how the statist/ Richard Nixon, after campaigning Amity progressive thirst can never be against everything Johnson did, i slaked; no matter how much mon- not only continued with the Great Shlaes’s ey is being spent, no matter how Society but poured even more re- many protective regulations are sources into Johnson’s programs Great Society put in place, it is never enough. As and introduced new ones of his is a devastating Washington forced its way into ev- own. Nixon’s mass codification of ery economic and social question, Johnson’s vision yielded a society illustration of the style of architecture employed in which federal intrusion in most how the statist/ in the bonanza of federal con- everything down to the contents struction to house the new agen- of school lunches is simply taken progressive cies, fittingly, was brutalism. It’s for granted. thirst can never the kind of amusingly harmonious How did we get here? Sh- detail Shlaes never misses. laes shows how, immediately af- be slaked; no As she did in The Forgot- ter JFK’s assassination, Johnson matter how ten Man, her New Deal history handpicked his own Kennedy, in which we encounter Franklin brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, to much money Roosevelt fixing the price of gold lead the new poverty department, while lounging in bed, Shlaes dubbed the Office of Economic Op- is being spent, keeps landing on perfectly ap- portunity. Shriver’s strategy was no matter how posite moments that didn’t turn indirect: He sought to distrib- up in the history books. Over ute monies to community-activist many protective the course of a decade, America groups. Some of these groups were regulations are became a place at war with itself, coached to agitate in the streets in a thousand different ways. In as Democratic mayors such as put in place, it is St. Louis, police patrolled the Yorty and Chicago’s Richard Daley never enough. Pruitt-Igoe housing projects to (who wanted to direct the funds make sure fathers weren’t pres- themselves) reacted with bewil- ent with their families, on pain of derment. Daley could not quite aired in June 1965 hosted by the withdrawing their apartments. In believe that the Woodlawn Orga- disc jockey Murray the K called the same complex, administrators nization on Chicago’s South Side, It’s What’s Happening, Baby! This had to budget $1,700 a day to undo which worked with gang mem- was in essence a 90-minute adver- vandalism, for instance, replacing bers to create chaos, was getting tisement for the OEO’s wonderful copper wiring stolen and resold by Shriver’s funding. Via the Newark menu of community services, and the building’s own tenants. Community Union Project, “oc- it implicitly pleaded with the youth Meanwhile Shriver’s “commu- cupying a mayor’s office was now to sign up for groovy job training nity-action” groups morphed into a federally sanctioned activity,” Sh- and civics classes instead of throw- armies of litigators, as the fed- laes writes. She quotes one activist ing rocks at police. erally funded legal team of the who crowed: “The War on Poverty Gradually the OEO grew and California Rural Legal Assistance became a government for those of evolved into the social-services Fund set the stage for a new era of us in opposition.” blob we know today, a vast inter- suing the government by success- Johnson ordered his aide Bill locking web of handouts intended fully demanding greater welfare Moyers to “just put a stop to it at to make good on Johnson’s famous payments based on novel legal once,” meaning money for riot- June 4, 1965, vow, in a commence- theories. CRLA, by the way, had its ers, even as Shriver kept coming ment address at Howard Univer- initial request for a federal grant up with more and more creative sity, to deliver “equality as a fact of $750,00 rejected by the OEO— ways to spend. His office was re- and equality as a result” to black which insisted it take $1.3 million sponsible for a ludicrous variety- America. That didn’t happen, of instead. In the War on Poverty, the television propaganda special that course, but the book is a devastat- lawyers won.q

46 Politics & Ideas : April 2020 Culture & Civilization

Wreck Side Story

How to ruin a which won 10 Oscars, most Ameri- ending with three of the four prin- cans are at least generally familiar cipal male characters having died great and singular with the 1957 show in which direc- violently in full view of the audi- musical tor-choreographer Jerome Rob- ence. While Oklahoma!, Carousel, bins, composer Leonard Bernstein, South Pacific, and The King and I By Terry Teachout librettist Arthur Laurents, and lyri- also contained violent deaths, they cist Stephen Sondheim turned were sited in the larger context F all the great Broad- Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet of the untragic idealism that is a way musicals to have into a bloody tale of love, hate, big- defining feature of the formula for opened between Ok- otry, and death on the mean streets successful Broadway musicals that lahoma! in 1943 and of Manhattan. Not only does the was developed and perfected by Fiddler on the Roof film, which makes (fairly) faithful Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote O in 1964, the bookends of the genre’s use of Robbins’s vaultingly vital the books and lyrics for the four golden age, the one best known to street-kid choreography and Bern- aforementioned shows.* But West contemporary audiences is proba- stein’s tuneful score, continue to be Side Story, in which the mutual bly West Side Story. Because of the telecast, but the original stage mu- hatred of the Jets and Sharks is a success of the 1961 screen version, sical has been revived three times portrait in miniature of the larger on Broadway and is regularly pro- racial tensions of America in the Terry Teachout is Commen- duced throughout the U.S. and ’50s, is different, and was promptly tary’s critic-at-large and the dra- around the world. recognized as such. When Felix ma critic of the Wall Street Journal. Yet West Side Story is in cer- Frankfurter, the Supreme Court Satchmo at the Waldorf, his one- tain crucial ways uncharacteristic man play about Louis Armstrong, of the theatrical genre to which * See my “Why Musicals Succeed” (Com- mentary, March 2016) for a discussion has been produced off Broadway it belongs. It is, to begin with, a of this formula, which West Side Story and throughout America. tragedy rather than a comedy, follows closely in other respects.

Commentary 47 justice, saw the show, he al- ske, a Puerto Rican writer legedly told Bernstein that and translator, dismissed “the history of America is West Side Story as a “nar- now changed.” rative ghetto,” a no-longer- No less unusual are the tolerable manifestation music and choreography. of “America’s colonizing Robbins claimed that he and power to determine who his collaborators had sought Puerto Ricans get to be.” The hortatory title of her to see if all of us—Lenny angry piece left no doubt who wrote “long-hair” mu- as to the only outcome that sic, Arthur who wrote seri- Schorske and her fellow ous plays, myself who did progressives would regard serious ballets, Oliver Smith as acceptable: “Let West [the set designer] who was Side Story and Its Stereo- a serious painter—could types Die.” bring our acts together and One may take leave to do a work on the popular doubt that they will do stage. so any time soon, but it is certainly likely that some Yet none of them felt any schools whose drama pro- need to dilute their distinc- grams cannot fully cast the tive styles to make West Sharks without resorting Side Story more accessible to the use of white per- to ordinary viewers. In par- formers (as was the case ticular, Bernstein’s dynamic Top, West Side Story (1961) ‘The Dance at the with both the original stage score incorporates the jag- Gym’ and below, in the 2020 version of production and the film) ged rhythms and dissonant West Side Story at the Broadway Theatre. will choose not to stage harmonies of the modern West Side Story at all in- classical music he was writing for merstein had previously written stead of fending off the protests of the concert hall, just as Robbins’s with Richard Rodgers. “woke” students and their fellow choreography fuses the familiar On the other hand, the present- travelers. steps of urban social dance with day popularity of West Side Story Moreover, there is a growing the more complex movement vo- can also be explained by one of its belief in theatrical circles that West cabulary of the neoclassical ballets less widely remarked features: The Side Story is in need of renovation he had been making since 1944 for show’s principal characters are all for reasons other than its politics, American Ballet Theatre and, later, teenagers. Hence it is ideally suited starting with the over-familarity of the New York City Ballet. for performance by high-school Robbins’s choreography. Of the six Nor did they need to do so: and college students, who identi- revivals that I have reviewed since West Side Story was a hit, running fied with the adolescent angst of 2006, five either reproduced his for 732 performances before be- Tony and Maria long before Dear steps literally or were “newly” cho- ing filmed, and six of its songs—“I Evan Hansen taught savvy produc- reographed in a manner on which Feel Pretty,” “Maria,” “One Hand, ers that their solipsistic suffering his example had left the clearest One Heart,” “Something’s Coming,” could lure teenagers to Broadway. of marks. In addition, many of his “Somewhere,” and “Tonight”—had And with the release next Decem- dances were reused in Jerome Rob- by then become standards. Its ber of Steven Spielberg’s remake of bins’s Broadway, the 1989 revue success was a tribute to the dis- West Side Story, a new generation of his musical-comedy work, and cernment of the show’s earliest of youngsters may respond at least entered the repertory of the New audiences, who had been prepared as warmly to the plight of the Jets York City Ballet six years later as a by then to appreciate a “serious” and the Sharks. freestanding piece called West Side musical by the structural innova- But will they? In an op-ed pub- Story Suite. Add to this the revised tions and heightened emotional lished earlier this year in the New versions prepared by Robbins for intensity of the shows that Ham- York Times, Carina del Valle Schor- the 1961 film and you will likely

48 Culture & Civilization : April 2020 come away inclined to feel that for is primarily a political statement, proscenium-sized screen on which all its self-evident artistic excel- and so every element of the show are alternately projected scenes of lence, West Side Story is past due that contradicts this interpretation the streets of New York and live- for judicious refurbishing.* has been jettisoned. (As a result, his TV pictures of the cast in motion. production runs for an hour and 45 These latter images dwarf the NTER IVO van Hove, the minutes, an hour shorter than the real-life cast members and make it Belgian stage director who 2009 Broadway revival directed by difficult to look at the performers E is Broadway’s trendiest di- its own librettist, Arthur Laurents.) for more than a few seconds at a rector of big-budget revivals. His As well as dropping “I Feel Pretty,” time. Instead, the viewer’s eye is postmodern stagings of Arthur one of the show’s best-loved songs, irresistibly drawn to the screen. In Miller’s A View From the Bridge he has also cut its most ambitious addition, the video is embarrass- and The Crucible received near- dance number, an extended sec- ingly “on the nose,” never more so universal critical praise, as did his ond-act dream ballet set to the song than in “Gee, Officer Krupke.” One 2018 mounting of Lee Hall’s stage “Somewhere” in which Tony and of the most brilliantly and bitterly version of Paddy Chayefsky’s Net- Maria envision the Jets and Sharks thought-provoking musical-come- work. Ben Brantley of the New York reconciling in a never-never land of dy numbers ever written, “Krupke” Times, van Hove’s most prominent mutual trust and respect. is reimagined here as a didactic po- fan, has called his work “illuminat- Robbins would never have sanc- lice-brutality bit with clunkily obvi- ingly unorthodox,” adding, “This tioned this cut, for the ballet is the ous video clips of white policemen must be what Greek tragedy once show’s dramatic pivot point, the beating up black suspects. It is no felt like, when people went to the moment when the tragic meaning small feat to stage “Krupke” in such theater in search of catharsis.” of West Side Story—that love is ca- a way that it gets not a single laugh, Van Hove’s approach to West pable of vanquishing hatred but is but that is what happens here. Side Story, which opened in New not always powerful enough to do As this example shows, van York in February, is typical of his so—is given its most complete ex- Hove and De Keersmaeker have Broadway work. It is, he says, pression. But, then, all of Robbins’s denuded West Side Story of the “a West Side Story for the 21st choreography, not just the “Some- humor, romanticism, and sexiness century,” and like so many Euro- where” ballet, has been replaced that help to give point to the pean stage productions, it exem- by new dances made by Anne grim funeral procession that is the plifies the clean-sweep approach Teresa De Keersmaeker, a Dutch show’s harrowing last scene. The of Regietheater. A German word choreographer with no experience original West Side Story starts in whose literal meaning is “director’s in staging musical comedy. The one place, dramatically speaking, theater,” the neologism refers to fundamental problem with her and ends in another, whereas van the conviction long prevalent in work here is not that it’s new but Hove’s dour version goes nowhere Europe, especially in the world of that it’s tedious and unmusical. at all. It is hard to convey in words opera, that the director of a revival (I came away feeling as though how wrong-headed the results are: is co-equal in creative importance the chorus had spent the evening One must see them in the theater to the actual author. In addition to walking.) It is not enough simply to fully appreciate their relentless being completely conceptualized, to get rid of Robbins’s dances: You banality. Regietheater-style revivals do not must replace them with something But while most of the reviews seek to illuminate the intended at least as compelling, and De of van Hove’s revival were posi- meaning of a show. Instead, their Keersmaeker comes nowhere near tive, others pointed to a turning of directors feel free not merely to doing so. the critical tide against van Hove’s change the settings of the shows As for van Hove’s staging, it is, approach. Ben Brantley, for in- they stage but to cut and rewrite like the rest of his Broadway work, stance, unexpectedly attacked him the texts in order to bring them an assemblage of navel-gazing min- for smothering West Side Story into closer accord with their own imalist tricks slathered with politi- in gratuitous video effects, with interpretations. cal sauce. Foremost among them results that he described as “curi- For van Hove, West Side Story is the absence of a set: His West ously unaffecting,” saying, “There Side Story is performed on a huge are a lot of split screens and a lot of * Spielberg’s film version has been recho- open stage. Instead, the upstage frankly clichéd, commercial-style reographed by Justin Peck, a member of the New York City Ballet and that com- wall of the 1,761-seat Broadway images of characters running and pany’s resident choreographer. Theatre has been replaced with a brooding.” Even more telling was

Commentary 49 Alexandra Schwartz’s New Yorker Broadway’s silver- and golden-age world of violence, and prejudice review: “The production is an in- musicals were written in whole or breeds violence.” furiating example of what happens part by first- and second-genera- Yet it is still widely felt, espe- when a powerful style calcifies into tion Jewish immigrants who might cially by gay men of a certain age, shtick.…He wants to make us see reasonably have been expected to that West Side Story is at least as an iconic work with new eyes, but take a bleak view of American life. much “about” homosexuals as Jews all we can see is him.” Such quips Instead, they embraced the natu- or Puerto Ricans. In particular, are the shoals on which reputa- ral optimism of their newfound “Somewhere,” whose offstage per- tions run aground and sink. land, an attitude now generally former sings of an imaginary “place interpreted as a purposeful act of for us” where “we’ll find a new way HATEVER the merits self-assimilation—and never more of living…a way of forgiving,” has of van Hove’s produc- so than in the case of Oscar Ham- come to be regarded as an unof- W tion, the question re- merstein, a highly assimilated Jew ficial anthem of gay liberation, and mains: What is West Side Story who was also the single most influ- the song is accordingly sung by gay really about? Is it a tale of ’50s ential figure in the development of men’s choruses all over the world. gang warfare viewed through the the postwar musical. Moreover, it is easy to imagine a distorting prism of white privilege? As for the sexuality of the chief gender-swapped revival of West Or, as van Hove seems to believe, is makers of West Side Story, it was Side Story in which Tony becomes it better understood as an extended undiscussable in 1957 and for de- “Toni,” thereby making his illicit theatrical metaphor for American cades afterward. Not only were all love for Maria even more trans- racism of all kinds? And might its four men public figures, but Ber- gressive of the conservative mores symbolism be sufficiently open to nstein was married with children, of 1957, in much the same way justify other, even more radical while Robbins and Sondheim had that Bobby, the sexually ambiguous interpretations? been and would continue to be- central character of Sondheim’s It is too rarely noted that West come involved with women at vari- Company, is currently being played Side Story was the work of a cre- ous times in their lives (Robbins by a woman, Katrina Lenk, in that ative team consisting mainly of even announced his engagement pioneering musical’s new Broad- white men who were both Jewish to the dancer Nora Kaye in 1951). way revival. and homosexual.* In our identity- Still, those who knew them best Such, at any rate, is one of the obsessed culture, we take it for agreed, then as now, that they were myriad possibilities awaiting the granted that these are relevant primarily homosexual, a concur- directors of future revivals of West considerations in any properly rence exceptional to the point of Side Story, though it is at least as informed discussion of the show. singularity for the creative teams likely that they will opt instead to But even the Jewishness of Ber- of golden-age Broadway musicals, play the show “straight.” For one nstein, Laurents, Robbins, and the vast majority of which were the need not purge West Side Story of Sondheim went almost entirely work of mixed groups of straight political incorrectness, much less unmentioned in 1957, despite the and gay artists. quarry it for hitherto unsuspected fact that the Montagues and Capu- All this notwithstanding, none subtexts, to be thrilled anew by its lets were Catholics and Jews in the of the creators of West Side Story still-potent mixture of romanti- earliest drafts of the book. Only seems ever to have suggested that cism and anguish. While it is far later in the show’s gestation did the show might have a gay subtext. from perfect—indeed, I find it the opposing gangs evolve into Indeed, Laurents, who was never cloying when performed with any- the Jets, a mixed group of Polish-, shy in later life about discussing his thing less than iron conviction—it Irish- and Italian-American teen- sexuality in public and considered remains a masterpiece of its kind, a agers, and the Sharks, a band of himself a political activist, said musical that, as its creators hoped, Puerto Rican émigrés. more than once that its underly- coaxed the best out of them all. That West Side Story started ing sensibility was Jewish, making And if West Side Story is, as I now life as a story of anti-Semitism no mention of homosexuality. The believe, a show for young people, it is far from surprising. Most of closest that he came to hinting that also has the power to remind view- there might have been more to it ers long past their youth of what its * Oliver Smith was gay but not Jewish, than that was when he observed songs and dances meant to us in while Jean Rosenthal, the lighting de- that West Side Story is about “the the days when we, too, were full of signer, was a lesbian. idea that love is destroyed in a dreams.q

50 Culture & Civilization : April 2020 strikes, inflation, bank failures, Bolshevism, the black mar- Tom Stoppard’s ket, modern art. The Jews got blamed for everything before the war and when the war was Great Jewish Play over they got blamed for that. Vienna has become subservi- ent, emasculated, and Hermann, The foremost Ludwig asserts that “a Jew can whose identity as a Viennese bour- be a great composer. He can be the geois, seriously circumscribed 25 dramatist in the toast of the town. But he can’t not years earlier, is now resigned English language be a Jew.” The first part ofLeopol - to his country’s Germanification. dstadt ends with Hermann having The Hydra of Marxism and nation- has produced a to acknowledge as much after he alism flourishes. masterpiece at 82 challenges to a duel an officer, By 1938 Jews are leaving Aus- Fritz, who has made an insulting tria. Freud has gone to England. By Wynn Wheldon insinuation about his wife. An English journalist will take Nellie and her son home with OM Stoppard’s new FRITZ: In my regiment an officer him to Britain. Even as she ac- play, Leopoldstadt, is not permitted to fight a Jew. cepts having to go into exile, she which recently open- HERMANN: I’m a Christian. wonders, “How can it be worse?” ed at Wyndham’s The- FRITZ: This is painful for me. Her mother Eva insists that “we’re atre in London, con- HERMANN: I’m a Christian, used to this… it will pass.” cernsT the fates of two haute bour- damn you! The final scene is set in the geois Viennese families in the peri- FRITZ: Let me put it this way. same place as most of the pre- od from 1899 to 1955. As the play In my regiment, an officer is ceding action, an apartment in opens, there are 16 characters on not permitted to fight someone Vienna. We are now in 1955, and stage, almost all of them Jewish. At whose mother was a Jew. the occupying powers have with- the close, there are three. drawn. The three characters pres- Vienna 1899 is the city of Freud, “Since a Jew is devoid of honor ent are Nathan, who has survived Klimt, Mahler, Schnitzler. Ten per- from the day of his birth,” Fritz says, Auschwitz, his aunt Rosa, who cent of its population is Jewish. “it is impossible to insult a Jew.” had emigrated to the U.S. long Great strides have been made. Says Hermann returns home to partici- before the war, and his cousin the patriarchal Hermann Merz: “My pate in a full-scale seder: “It is still Leo, Nellie’s Anglicized son. Leo’s grandfather wore a caftan, my fa- our duty to retell the story of how knowledge of his family, including ther went to the opera in a top hat, we were brought out of Egypt…” his natural father, has just been and I have the singers to dinner”— This is the final line of the act. revealed to him. At the urging of though “obviously prejudice doesn’t The play moves on to 1924, after Nathan, he is vividly reminded disappear overnight” and he has the Treaty of Versailles has reduced that he had once lived in the become “Christianized.” His son Vienna to postimperial poverty. apartment, by an incident, wit- Jacob is circumcised and baptized Hermann’s textile business no lon- nessed by the audience at the end in the same week. Hermann regards ger has a sustainable market. Jacob of the previous scene, in which the Vienna as “the Promised Land” and has lost an arm and his spirit in the boy had cut his hand. The sudden sees little point in Zionist dreams of Great War. Nellie, Jacob’s cousin, recollection reduces Leo to tears. a Levantine home. “Do you want to has “caught politics at the university Rosa presents Leo with a family do mathematics in the desert?” he and now goes on socialist picnics.” tree. He looks at it. “Emilia died in asks of his brother-in-law Ludwig. She insists that “there are more her own bed”, says Rosa. important things now than being a And now Tom Stoppard, mas- Wynn Wheldon’s latest book Jew,” to which Jacob responds: ter of the baroque phrase, the is The Fighting Jew: The Life and paradoxical clause, uses a dreadful Times of Daniel Mendoza, Cham- Well wave your red flag, the simplicity of language to produce pion Boxer (Amberley, 2019). Jews will get blamed anyway— as powerful a lament as theater has

Commentary 51 ever heard. With the solemn timing Presciently recognizing the sometimes through the surface of a funeral drum beat, Leo reads danger Germany posed to his of an ornamental pond on a still out the names, learning them for Jewish employees, Thomas Bata, day, the dark, gross, inhuman the first time, one by one, and Rosa the founder of the company, re- outline of a carp gliding slowly responds, one by one. This is what employed them throughout the past; when you realize suddenly drama can do that documentary world. Whether this was how the that the carp were always there struggles with: It can make us weep Strausslers found their way to below the surface, even while at truth. Stoppard has hinted that Singapore is not entirely clear, but the water sparkled in the sun- Leopoldstadt may be his last play. there they lived until the Japanese shine, and while you patronized In which case these are the words threatened. His mother, Martha, the quaint ducks and the su- he leaves us with: brother Peter, and Tomáš, were percilious swans, the carp were evacuated before the fall of the city, down there, unseen. It bides its LEO: Sally ending up in British India. Eugene, time, this quality. And if you do ROSA: Auschwitz left behind, was killed. catch a glimpse of it, you may LEO: Mimi In Darjeeling the five-year-old pretend not to notice or you ROSA: Auschwitz Tom was sent to a school run by may turn suddenly away and LEO: Bella American Methodists, and Martha romp with your children on the ROSA: Auschwitz remarried a British army major, grass, laughing for no reason. LEO: Hermine Kenneth Stoppard. The new family The name of this quality is grief. ROSA: Auschwitz soon found itself back in England, LEO: Heini and young Tom (never ‘Thomas’), The lecture was given the same ROSA: Auschwitz now eight, at boarding school in year that Stoppard began to reveal Nottinghamshire, before attending the extent of his Jewishness, a OM STOPPARD was made Pocklington school in Yorkshire, self-discovery that led directly, and a Commander of the Order founded in 1514. decades later, to Leopoldstadt. T of the British Empire in He did not go to university. He 1978, a knight bachelor in 1997, and would probably say he regrets this, TOPPARD made his name in 2000 was awarded the Order of but it likely made him the superior with the tremendous riff of Merit (of which there are only 24 jack-of-all-trades that contributes Swit that is Rosencrantz and members in the Commonwealth so much to that ‘Stoppardian’ ad- Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). A at any one time). He is an avid jective. He became a journalist, a further paradox began to emerge. follower (and formerly player) of theater reviewer, was impressed Play after extraordinary play fol- cricket. He is tremendously Eng- by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot but lowed, and the English suspicion of lish. Indeed, he may be the most thought such things beyond him cleverness never seemed to extend respected living English writer. But until he saw a play, Next Time I’ll to him. This is because he inhabits as in all things Stoppardian,* para- Sing to You, by the little-known a particular strain of English hu- dox pokes its finger in and waggles. English absurdist James Saun- mour that runs through Burton and He was born Tomáš Straussler ders, and recognized something Shakespeare and Sheridan to Oscar on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, in Moravia, he might have a stab at. Saunders’s Wilde and G.K. Chesterton—and, in what was then Czechoslovakia play had a lasting impact. Stoppard in the 1960s, when Stoppard was and is now the Czech Republic. quoted the following passage from on the rise, to Spike Milligan and His father Eugene worked as a it in a lecture given at the New York Monty Python. It wears its knowl- doctor for Bata shoes, which pro- Public Library in 1999: edge lightly, and it is not satire. It vided its workers and their fami- has to do with how language can be lies with housing, shops, schools, There lies behind everything, played with, English, so mongrel, and a hospital. and you can believe this or not being a perfect medium for such as you wish, a certain qual- japes. Of The Importance of Being * “Stoppardianism combines perplexing ity which we may call grief. Earnest, which provided a kind of but undoubted rationalism with baroque linguistic precision to create comic plots It’s always there, just under underpinning for his spellbinding filled with paradoxical uncertainties that the surface, just behind the play Travesties, Stoppard said, ad- somehow generate complex but logically façade, sometimes very nearly miringly, that “[it] is important, but satisfying results,” William V. Demasters, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stop- exposed, so that you can dimly it says nothing about anything.” He pard see the shape of it as you can see was seen as a wit and slapped on the

52 Culture & Civilization : April 2020 Adrian Scarborough, left, and Luke Thallon in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt at Wyndham’s Theater in London. wrist for not being more “political,” a fairly early point in his career, Circle, which concerned Solidar- by which was meant left-leaning. has been writing plays that would ity’s victory over Communism in But he was not interested in what win the approval of most small “c” Poland. “Squaring the circle” was he called “committed theater.” And conservatives (the way he has de- the metaphor Stoppard used to so he was accused of being “cold.” scribed himself, though he has also demonstrate that human rights Perhaps he was: “I burn with no put “timid libertarian” on record). and totalitarianism are incompat- cause,” he wrote. Actually, he was “What worries me,” he has said, “is ible. He urged the boycott of the being disingenuous. not the bourgeois exception but the 1980 Moscow Olympics, not in What his British fans and crit- totalitarian norm.” reaction to the Soviet invasion of ics did not grasp was the degree to In the 1970s and ’80s, his anti- Afghanistan, but in protest at Com- which Stoppard also appealed to Communist activism for Amnesty munist restrictions on individual the dissidents of Eastern Europe, International, Charter 77, and as a freedom. In later plays, such as the but for quite different reasons. Un- member of the Committee for the Coast of Utopia trilogy (2002) and like the state-subsidized left-wing Free World, was complemented by Rock ’n’ Roll (2006), Stoppard went playwrights who were the toast of plays such as 1977’s Every Good Boy again to Eastern Europe to further bien-pensant London, in Commu- Deserves Favour (which was dedi- question the delusions, and reveal nist Europe, Stoppard was seen as cated to Soviet dissident Vladimir the dangers, of political idealism. the natural ally of Vaclav Havel, his Bukovsky); a television play that Stoppard’s conservatism is that fellow Czech. On a recent Times of same year called Professional Foul kind that allows—paradoxically— Israel blog, the filmmaker Inna Ro- (dedicated to Vaclav Havel, while a degree of anarchy and chaos gatchi wrote: “No one who is anyone the Czech leader-to-be was under that socialism cannot afford. His in the cultural world of Central and house arrest); 1978’s Night and concern is and has always been for Eastern Europe just cannot imagine Day (dedicated to Paul Johnson the rights and freedoms of the in- him- or herself without Stoppard as shortly before Margaret Thatcher’s dividual: “The collective ethic can one’s essentially formative part.” first election victory the follow- only be the individual ethic writ The fact is that Stoppard, from ing year); and 1984’s Squaring the large,” declaims Professor Ander-

Commentary 53 son in Professional Foul, before his that unlocks the memory of his Czech government hosts turn on It is presence in the apartment—the the fire alarm to shut him down. If i cut hand. In 1999, in the first issue we detect in Stoppard the spirit of perhaps of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, J. S. Mill, we might better call him among the Gwyneths and Hillarys a liberal (of the best, old-fashioned a stretch to say and Angelinas, was an article by sort), though we can perhaps also that grief has Stoppard entitled “On Turning Out hear Michael Oakeshott’s “conver- to Be Jewish.” He tells a story about sation of mankind” echoing in his been Stoppard’s a visit to Zlin, the town of his birth. multitude of themes. great subject, There he meets a woman, who was He was keen on Margaret treated for a cut hand by his father, Thatcher: “I had a weary contempt but a melancholy Eugene Straussler. for the to-ing and fro-ing of party sense of human politics. Then along came this wom- Zaria holds out her hand, which an who seemed to have no manners folly operates still shows the mark. I touch it. at all and who said exactly what she beneath the In that moment, I am surprised thought.” He admired the way she by grief, a small catching up of dealt with the trades-unions and surface of all all the grief I owe. I have noth- their protection rackets. Most of his plays. In ing which came from my father, all he shared her attitude to Com- nothing he owned or touched, munism: “We had this luxury of Leopoldstadt, but here is his trace, a small scar. opinionating without penalty, while just two hours away by plane people folly becomes Stoppard subsequently suggest- were being locked up for mild dis- pure evil. ed that this immensely moving sent. I just found it offensive.” moment lost its power with each Stoppard’s stylistic radicalism, telling of the story. But the doctor and his wit, and his cleverness have in the play, who stitches the wound, saved him from the opprobrium sisters, only Irma had survived. is Leo’s grandfather. He is played by of the cultural elite. I daresay fol- All of his grandparents had been Ed Stoppard, Eugene Straussler’s lowing his death he will be turned Jewish (he had previously thought grandson. So, maybe not entirely. upon by the new puritans, but for only one had been so). All had been Leopoldstadt might be said to re- the moment we have a different murdered. It has taken almost turn us to that James Saunders play triumph in Leopoldstadt, which 30 years for the impact of those that impelled Stoppard into drama, is concerned with the appalling revelations to make its way to the and those lines he chose to end effects of Communism’s twin totali- stage. Stoppard is 82. his lecture on: “There lies behind tarianism, National Socialism. Leopoldstadt is by some dis- everything, and you can believe tance Stoppard’s most autobio- this or not as you wish, a certain TOPPARD’S MOTHER rare- graphical play. Which is not to say quality which we may call grief.” It ly spoke about her Jew- that it is all that autobiographical. is perhaps a stretch too far to say S ishness. “She was without He has moved his “family” from that grief has been Stoppard’s great religion,” he has said, and he Czechoslovakia to Vienna (a place subject, but a melancholy sense of himself was largely ignorant of he has visited frequently in his human folly operates beneath the his extended family’s fate until the writing, and that has, of course, the surface of all his plays. In Leopol- early 1990s, when a series of revela- irresistible attraction of all those dstadt, folly becomes pure evil, no tions concluded with the visit of a great names, names that changed longer on the surface, in a play so grand-daughter of his mother’s sis- the world); he replaces Singapore vast it is unlikely to get very many ter Irma who had lived in Buenos with Shanghai, and so on. revivals, and that will never tour. It Aires since the war. She met him Leo, the character who had end- will surely travel to New York, and for lunch at the National Theatre, ed up in England at the age of eight must be seen, as it is a work, “epic and drew him a family tree. It was and, like Stoppard, was brought up and intimate,” as its marketers are the first time Stoppard was told all proudly British, is introduced as rightly describing it, of profound the names of his Czech family. He a young man in the final scene of contemporary and sadly possibly learned that of his mother’s three the play. I mentioned the incident unending pertinence.q

54 Culture & Civilization : April 2020 HOLLYWOOD COMMENTARY continued from page 56 spring to introduce art dangles from the ceiling, and shiny floors make advertisers to their fall season premieres. Movie pre- your shoes go clickety-clackety in loud echoes as you mieres still require worldwide press junkets—flights march to the desk, hand over your ID, and wait to be to Paris and Rome and Singapore and Dubai—each designated a non-threat. with a party and paparazzi and deluxe gift bags for the The lobbies and the art collections no longer pack press. There are still major film markets at Cannes and the same wallop now that the entertainment business Berlin and Toronto. Amazon and has split into a thousand new gal- Netflix—two enterprises you’d as- axies of streaming services, video sume would be immune to this kind At some point, it’s safe to games, old-line broadcasters, the- of excess—are enthusiastic and vis- atrical studios, AR, IR, and Silicon ible presences at film festivals like say, the current coronavirus Valley start-ups. For that matter, TriBeCa and Sundance. scare will be over. In the neither do the storied and romantic People in the entertainment studio gates. It’s just not the same business aren’t stupid. Let me re- meantime, it’s serving when you’re heading onto the lot to phrase that: People in the entertain- as a kind of psychic break shoot a 10-minute show for Quibi. ment business aren’t stupid about for Hollywood, a kind of A recent survey by Buffer, a money. They are perfectly capable social-media-management software of noticing that the old, expensive force majeure requiring company, found that once people ways of doing business no longer every player to play start working from home, they tend suit a streaming, on-demand world. to like it. In the same way, once the No television network, for instance, by the new rules. big talent agencies weigh the loss in wants to forgo the annual, pointless prestige and pizzazz from a home- Upfront pageant—a holdover from bound gchat workforce against the the era of three broadcasting networks and fall televi- savings in office rent and art-curatorial services, maybe sion premieres that coincided with the introduction some of them will decide it’s better—and more profit- of Detroit’s new models. It’s not that they don’t realize able—to, as they say in Silicon Valley, “go Bedouin.” it’s all a waste of time. They just don’t want to go first. At some point, it’s safe to say, the current coro- And now they don’t have to. COVID-19 is doing navirus scare will be over. In the meantime, it’s serv- it for them. ing as a kind of psychic break for Hollywood, a kind Two major movie premieres—including the lat- of force majeure requiring every player to play by the est installment of the James Bond franchise—have new rules. What if, you can hear CFOs across the 323, been pushed to next autumn. Upfront presentations 818, and 310 area codes, what if we just never go back have been cancelled. Coachella music festival is post- to the way it was? poned. South By Southwest, the arts and culture con- That ProMED email has continued to alert me ference in Austin, has been cancelled. Location shoots, to biothreats from humans and livestock. Just this studio travel, live-audience comedies, pilot produc- week, in fact, in among the latest news on COVID-19, I tions, Broadway shows—almost every part of the learned about seven new cases of African Swine Fever entertainment business has been curtailed, trimmed in Asia. But the real news, for me anyway, is in the pages back, eliminated. of the Hollywood Reporter, which keeps a daily count And the agents? They’re staying home. of the old ceremonies and traditions that are cancelled The question is, when all of the agents go home, in the wake of corona. The Reporter is my new ProMed. will anybody really notice? In-person meetings at a Stay inside, the experts tell us. Isolate yourself large talent agency are enjoyable and fun only for the and practice social distancing. Which is something talent agents. Normal, well-adjusted people dread the audience has been doing since Facebook first went meetings of any kind, but especially ones that begin online, since Netflix started streaming. Now, at last, in cavernous marble-clad lobbies where lethal-looking the business that serves the audience is catching up.q

Commentary 55 HOLLYWOOD COMMENTARY No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Self- Quarantine!

ROB LONG

OR THE past 10 years, I have received a mis- God, no,” said the agent, with emphatic urgency. “God, sive, twice daily, from the International Society no, don’t even put that out there. No, no, it’s just the F of Infectious Diseases. It’s called the ProMED virus, the coronavirus. It’s a whole liability thing, can’t email, and it lists in excruciating detail the various expose employees and clients blah blah blah.” infectious diseases that have been reported that day, “Blah blah blah?” worldwide—all of them, human, plant, and livestock. “You know what I mean. But for the time being, Why did I sign up for this? Beats me. I’m not if you wanted to come in for a meeting or something, really the bio-paranoid type. In fact, I am writing this we’re not doing that.” on a five-year-old MacBook Air with what must be the He is employed at a large and powerful agency, filthiest keyboard around. Next to it is my phone, and one that spent an eye-popping amount of money on let’s not get into where that’s been. So maybe I just its offices. Talent agencies do that. Decades ago, when have an academic interest in the end of the world. Mike Ovitz helmed CAA, he commissioned I.M. Pei to For the past 10 years, I have dutifully scrolled design the building. Gersh, the boutique talent agency, through the ProMED email and parsed the scientific is a vest-pocket museum of contemporary art. The mumbo jumbo and read about livestock deaths in Af- idea, I guess, is to command everyone in the lobby, rica and measles outbreaks in West Los Angeles and “Behold our Frank Stella, and Obey!” ho-hummed, tapped the phone, and shoved it deep That kind of intimidation is hard to do by remote into my (infested with bacteria) pocket, utterly and conferencing. totally unalarmed. Hollywood still operates on what we might call “We’re not trying to be alarmist,” a talent agent the Leni Riefenstahl model: If you want to project in Los Angeles told me last week. “But we’re shutting power, better be prepared to put on a show. From the down the office. We’re going to work from home, have icy and theatrical lobbies of the major talent agen- meetings by Skype or Zoom.” cies to the endless series of Long Marches down the “Wow,” I said. “You guys having money trouble? awards-show red carpet, the various power centers of Is the rent in Century City too high?” the entertainment business spend considerable time “No, no, no, no, no, God, no, no, nothing like that, and money marshaling crowds. Oscar hopefuls throw lavish dinners and parties to woo Academy voters. Rob Long has been the executive producer of six TV Television networks stage theatrical extravaganzas— series. the “Upfronts”—every continued on page 55

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

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

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