@elbowspeak i think it's a beautiful proposal. i am more than a bit despondent about this stuff. you emphasize pluralism, breaking the monopoly of an authority structure people like me now want nothing whatsoever to do with, and i certainly applaud that. i share your admiration for some alternative traditions. 1/

@elbowspeak but i don't think pluralism is answer enough to our divisions at this point, every pluralism requires a metaconsensus and i think that would be hard at this point. the things we have to agree to disagree about are very high stakes and very fraught. 2/

@elbowspeak further, i think the decades long monopoly you describe has polarized us, with it or excluding oneself from it, and most of us who have excluded ourselves from it have grown so distant that it would take a lot of work, and therefore a powerful reason, to try to reconstruct meaningfully jewish or yiddishkeit cultural life as part of a broader universalism. 3/

@elbowspeak every humane universalism is made of rich subcultures, but boy have the traditions attached to judaism been sullied now by history and current affairs. at this point it's not a matter of resurrection of anything, but of reappropriation, which when oppositional to the existing monopoly of authority sounds great, but then the same symbols we are reappropriating now have very difficult freight with other communities. 4/

@elbowspeak pure epithets — "queer", even "deplorable" — ironically were easier to targets for reappropriation. it'd be like progressive descendants of confederates trying to reappropriate the good parts of what was gone with the wind. it's not that those good parts weren't there, nor that contemporary descendants might not intend something genuinely new, ethical, open to embracing those they once excluded or worse. but traditions they mean to reappropriate have meanings to other communities. 5/

@elbowspeak i applaud you for writing despite all this, none of which i'm sure is new to you. optimism of the will despite pessimism of the intellect is the heart of much practical good in the world. i wish your enterprise well, and if there is any way i can help i would love to. 6/

@elbowspeak maybe if there is something practical i can offer it would be to begin with that radical openness, bring the people historically and currently excluded or worse by the current institutional formation into the project from the start (which implies usefully traducing some boundaries we take for granted about what defines who "we" are). /fin