@MisuseCase @Alon @BenRossTransit as you say, the conflation of zionism and judaism has been a joint project, shared by antisemites with accusations of dual loyalty, and zionists who have actively and cynically promoted it. most diaspora jews have sat in a blurred middle space, resentful of and disagreeing with the conflation on one hand, but wanting to be supportive of israel on the other. i think that kind of fudge or balance is much less supportable now.
@Alon @BenRossTransit it sounds like you are referring to antizionism more than antisemitism. sure, oct 7 gave a lot of the most horrific sort of antizionists license to express an awful, bloody glee. but you misunderstand what i am talking about. i think an era is definitively over, for the jewish diaspora more than israel, thanks to israel’s response. israelis already feel the world hates and misunderstands them, and their government is working to prove them right. 1/
@Alon @BenRossTransit but the jewish diaspora, in the west, in the aspiring west of eastern europe with its long, dark history, has been able to rely on a kind of caution and immunity conferred by the moral absolute of the holocaust. i think that’s gone. i think the transformation will be tectonic over time. it will polarize the diaspora into a much more distinctive and aggrieved community on the one hand and integrationists who increasingly disavow their historical jewish identity. 2/
@Alon @BenRossTransit like so many right wing projects, right wing israelis are creating the world that proves correct their own cynicism. the polarization of israeli politics will infect the hitherto squish ambivalence of the typical liberal diasporite. those who embrace a jewish identity will increasingly be conflated with zionism and its now very brutal branding, and will face much less apologetic disdain from liberal-to-left quarters and more openly presented swastikas from the right. 3/
@Alon @BenRossTransit those who disclaim jewish identity in order to disavow zionism will test our grandparents’ proposition that whatever you think you are, they will always know you as a jew. /fin
when will AI replace expensive professional athletes?
@BenRossTransit i think israel, which was winning a slow war of consigning the palestinian cause to irrelevance on oct 6, is making the case against the possibility of a civilized zionism and therefore of “israel’s right to exist” as an explicitly jewish state despite the tensions of that formulation with contemporary liberal values. 1/
@BenRossTransit i don’t think you are fairly characterizing the piece. but whatever, i hold no brief for, know nothing about, its author. 2/
@BenRossTransit but if you don’t understand that a lot of people who were never israel’s enemies, including much of the jewish diaspora, now see project of Israel as we have understood it since 1947 as a definitive failure, as something unsupportable, rather than something simultaneously awkward and hopeful, then you are choosing not to understand. 3/
@BenRossTransit and if you don’t understand how the character of Israel’s actions is likely to give license to forms and degrees of antisemitism that for almost eighty years has been entombed by the moral clarity of the holocaust, well your not understanding won’t protect you, or me. 4/
@BenRossTransit i’ll just leave this there. /fin
@adamgreenfield @BenRossTransit (i hadn't yet seen this response! i'll untag you from further correspondence. sorry!)
@BenRossTransit @adamgreenfield if this is all you take from the essay, i don't think you are giving it a fair read. i don't think it is a diatribe. i think the author is pretty sad about the take on history he describes. as a jew growing up in america in gentler times, i certainly perceived how we made the shoah into a universal touchstone, a point of black and white in a world of gray. sometime this was to good purpose, sometime it was disingenuous. 1/
@BenRossTransit i think whatever your reaction to this detail or that in the piece, the author is correct that the current conflict has put an end to the era during which the shoah will serve as a universal moral touchstone. it remains a horror, unjustifiable and unforgivable and astonishing in its technical modernity, sure. but it can no longer stand out of time, it becomes horror and atrocity yet again enmeshed in the matrix of horror and atrocity that is all of human history. 2/
@BenRossTransit we, the jews, are no longer special, history's perennial dispossessed, perennial victims. we got ourselves a state, an army, bombs and atom bombs. and we've had our turns on the side of atrocity opposite from victims. 3/
@BenRossTransit that was true a year ago as well, but a year ago it was still somewhat credible to say, to feel, that once the horror of the shoah is in the balance, still we are so much more sinned against than sinning. quantitatively that is still true. Gaza's deaths aren't 6 million. but there are questions of the character of the action. that, more than the number, made the shoah the shoah. 4/
@BenRossTransit bombing, starving, and shooting a trapped population of civilians — even while you genuinely try to get them away from precisely where you are bombing and shooting, except when you have to shoot them because in their starvation they are threatening as they sack your aid trucks — that is a character of activity the world will not set aside as small beside the horrors we have suffered. i don't think the world will be wrong to not set it aside. but i certainly fear what's next. /fin
as you get older, you find it harder to be young.
“Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.” #PankajMishra https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza
"Here’s the hidden truth of education: You don’t know what you’re preparing for. You don’t know. Your teacher doesn’t know. Your school doesn’t know. Your future employer doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really." @inthehands https://innig.net/teaching/liberal-arts-manifesto
ht @llimllib
"Investors got the message: don't compete with Amazon. They can remain predatory longer than you can remain solvent." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/
when i find myself elongated and dripping off a roof it’s a miracle.
A great profile of my sister #AdelleWaldman, whose new book "Help Wanted" is about to come out.
by #EmilyGould
https://www.thecut.com/article/adelle-waldman-help-wanted-interview.html
oh thank god. https://mastodon.social/@macrumors/112022245140125726
not everybody has a price, but everybody is mortal, and their successors and heirs are often much more reasonable.
no one should be powerful except as part of constituting everyone.
i feel therefore i am.
@akhilrao there are questions of control that concern me. NASA always used private contractors, but NASA seemed, at least to the ordinary layperson, to remain in control — they bid out to contractors, and could shift to others. it seems like we are entering an era where SpaceX holds a monopoly on core competences that continued space development and exploration requires. that terrifies me. and a good track record so far is like Amazon being low margin and great for consumers, in the beginning.
when someone is fishing for compliment, take the bait.
who would be your dream-team cast for a reality production of Sartre’s “No Exit”?
@dpp @scottsantens they don’t like stimulus checks either. they hate taxes, and UBI smells like taxes. what they like most is a pliable workforce and a politics hostage to “business confidence”. they like that more than they like a brisk economy. people beyond money in the sense of unmet consumption wants often turn to power as their core concern.
Michal Kalecki called it in 1943 https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-employment/