Notes from D.C. 05/17/24
Milestone alert! What started as a 12-person friends and family email has organically grown to a blog with 18,000 individual subscribers. Stunned! Many of you actually read it too, given the multitude of notes on my grammatical errors last time. Whoops. I promise to reread it more than once before posting. I know the rule of thumb is to do this out loud, but trust me, these aren't formally brainstormed and edited. They're riffs about issues that needle me, coupled with a healthy dose of way-too-personal information. And 18,000 isn’t a random number. “Chai” is the 18th letter in the Hebrew alphabet and it also means life. It’s a Jewish symbol of good fortune, used from pendant necklaces to monetary gifts given in multiples of $18. $3600 for the wedding! $180 for the bar mitzvah! Even a bad-math $118 works, just to sneak in the number 18. You get my drift: 18 is lucky. I’m thrilled and thankful that you’re listening and spreading the word.
So, I spent the last three days in D.C. I had the honor of viewing the Constitution and Declaration of Independence before opening hours; the stillness was deafening and the experience humbling. It set the tone for the week: I attended an outstanding CAJM conference for Jewish and Holocaust Museums; spoke on an Antisemitism panel at the National Archives and with several congresspeople; and visited Congress in support of Israeli funding and bringing the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History under the Smithsonian umbrella. Everyone was extremely respectful, but there were uncomfortable conversations about indigeneity, conflation, and the diversity of Jewish-American opinion (we are not a monolith). Most wanted to skirt any discussion of those now universally-recognized false figures that the UN accepted from Hamas via UNRWA: “of course, we knew those numbers were circumspect! of course they’re half!” Great. Now please issue a formal acknowledgement or a journalistic retraction. An apology is unnecessary at this point; just amplify the truth.
Other than the loss of human life, truth is the real casualty of war, isn’t it? How does one ensure honesty or integrity, when everyone and everything has an agenda, acknowledged or unintentional. I acknowledge that I have an agenda. The past few decades, most U.S. states have formally moved away from teaching Civics. Social Studies, History and other cool liberal arts classes (fave genre!) are taught in its stead. We need a Federal-level shift to course correct. It’s unrealistic to expect a certain level of participation if people don’t understand the privilege and obligation of citizenship. And that brings me full circle to my last blog, about the power of language. Whether it's coming from a much-needed Civics class, a trip to a Holocaust Museum, the Network News or yours truly, we need to tighten up our language. These levers would certainly help combat antisemitism:
Teach that the Jewish Holocaust was Global, not just European. It perpetuates the misconception that Jews are rich, white Europeans. Today, ⅔ of the Jews in Israel are people of color. While the greatest number of casualties and location of most Nazi camps were in Europe, the war impacted Jews everywhere. Ever heard of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem? Does the Farhud ring a bell? We need to do a better job telling our story and explaining our diversity. To paraphrase Young, without these stories, Holocaust museums are not fully recognized efforts. The Nazis not only wanted to eradicate the Jews, but to completely erase thousands of years of Jewish history from memory. By not remembering the Sephardic and Mizrahi communities that were almost, if not entirely, lost, we have unwittingly completed the job for them.
Conflation. Just because you combine two or more ideas into one, doesn’t mean that they’re equal. Moreover, treating similar but disparate concepts as the same is not just conflation, it’s lying. Antizionism IS in fact Antisemitism. Jews are NOT the new Nazis. This shameful misuse of language quickly deteriorates into other, more easily recognizable red flags like “by any means necessary” or “rape as resistance.” Hard no.
Misuse of Words. Dust off the dictionary! Zionism means the support of a Jewish ancestral homeland in Israel. That’s it. Genocide means deliberately killing a group to destory that entire nation. Israel is fighting another war it didn’t start, trying to recover its people. It is not trying to eradicate Palestinians forevermore. If genocide was the goal, that would have successfully concluded last October. A Colonizer appropriates places from indigenous people for their own establishment. Jews, from Judea & Samaria, not Arabs, from the Arabian Peninsula, are native to Israel. To my knowledge, the world does not have another successful reestablishment of a native people back on their (many-times-over) colonized land. I’d like to believe that people are stymied because of the lack of examples, not racism. I could go down the list with fun words like Intifada, but you get my drift. I would like to point out my latest bugaboo though: conspiracy versus conspiracy theory. A Conspiracy is the action of plotting or conspiring to do something harmful or unlawful, whereas Conspiracy Theory is a belief that some secret but influential organization is responsible for an event or phenomenon. Slippery.
AI and Algo-Control. Sometimes humans don’t control the truthfulness of language. Ever consider that technology might have a political view? Creepy thought. Our dear friend Alexa answers that she doesn’t know where Israel is, but can locate Palestine. She can’t tell you what the Holocaust is, but offers a dissertation-length explanation of the Nakba. There is an ongoing struggle with politicized programmers and companies, poor internal policing and genuine algo mistakes. Who is going to fix this and when? Aside from ethical and professionalism issues, how is this even legal?
Intent versus Result. Put on your legal hats for a moment and prepare for some morbidity. If someone falls asleep at the wheel and kills their family if 3, they are presumably tried for manslaughter. They didn’t intend to kill, but they did. Now, if this person premeditates to kill their family of 3, but the police foil the attempt and arrest them beforehand, they’re charged with premeditated murder. It’s a greater charge than the previous scenario because of the intent. The outcome was actually lesser, but they have the greater charge because of their malintent. Hamas intended and continues to intend to kill all Jews (not just Israeli’s). Israelis want their hostages back, to contain the crisis, to enable 250,000 internal refugees to return home safely without rocket fire, and to stop the war. It’s a massive difference that boils down to intent.
Social Media. I’m zeroing in on TikTok, which has way more pro-Hamas than pro-Israel videos: the ratio is 52:1. Mic drop. Its proprietary algo is particularly divisive in youth populations, where over ⅓ use it as a primary news source. American youth now express less favorable views of Israel and are significantly more critical of it in this war. Think about how language and access to news, just via this one app, has driven societal disconnect: 20% of youth support Israel versus 80% in older demographics. That’s not a slow societal shift, rather the result of pointed and divisive cultural influence. There’s also the resurgence and recasting of horrible content, like Bin Laden’s Letter to America, which trended in praise of 9/11 and garnered 14 million unobstructed views. GenZ’s al Queda sympathizers blamed America for the attack, like it was a comeuppance for its role on the 20th century world stage. Most weren’t alive in 2001, but I marvel that we fell this short in educating them. In disgust, I tip my hat to the Muslim Brotherhood. After receiving a terrorist designation, it morphed to continue fund youth causes in person and online (think SJP), social media content (Pallywood) and moved its people into shockingly high positions of power (Maher Bitar). They played the long game well: they knew it was three-dimensional chess, when we thought it was simple checkers. It’s time for Congress to reset the board.
Shabbat Shalom and Am Yisrael Chai!
Kelly