Summer Thoughts on Democracy 06/25/24
The trickiest thing about publishing is the holding pattern: you wait for a decision, while your content sits in idle. Silence does not mean dormant–it’s a sign that a lot is percolating. Despite the quiet, know that I continue to write feverishly: my commitment to supporting Israel, fighting antisemitism and bringing the hostages home is steadfast. And Tikkun Now is busy! We are bringing an amazing Israeli NOVA exhibition to Europe later this year, soft landing in Germany in the Fall, then moving onto the States in 2025. We are working with several museums and galleries on showcasing Jewish and Israeli artists, starting in Toronto and LA. And we have partnered with over two dozen global Holocaust Museum’s to update their narrative. We have done a disservice to ourselves since the war, equating antisemitism solely with the Holocaust. It’s a problem well before it reaches that level.
As work has accelerated, my personal life has tried to keep pace. After a long year of searching in Florida, we finally bought a home in Miami. Real estate in South Florida feels like bloodsport, so it was no small feat. We also sent our kids to a Jewish “free range” camp, which essentially means no tech for a month. It’s a 1980’s summer. You’re welcome, kids! I expect them to have good dispositions and make an alarming amount of eye contact when they return, though we’ll see how long I stick to my guns about iPhone time limits. It’s an exhausting daily argument and supports the case that parents are the real anxious generation, not kids. There are too many ways to helicopter parent and it’s fundamentally changed our role. I don’t want to monitor, help and console everything, especially in real time. I want my kids to be independent. They can do hard things - they just need to figure it out on their own.
As an experiment, I deleted social media this week and have noticed a decline in anxiety. No joke, after only one week. This blog is still my personal catharsis. It’s like an escape hatch for smaller ideas that I can’t (or won’t) submit for publishing. I think that ideas are life forms, living and evolving, and it needles me when they are confined to my head. I keep returning to nascent thoughts about my Harvard graduation. I am not rehashing chatter about speaker deviations, disruptive protesters, the DEI office neglecting to order sashes for Jewish students, and the main speeches' use of antisemitic tropes. Nope. I think about the commencement speech that could have been: a powerhouse of historic importance that not only spoke to the omnipresent Israeli war, but our current election and other global events.
These speeches are opportunities for thought leadership. American and Canadian academics are demoralized and are being driven away. There is a legitimate crisis in higher education. So these speeches, with their opportunities for quick-consumption soundbites, are important. Think George C. Marshall in 1947, announcing the Marshall Plan to save Europe, or an exiled Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in 1978, issuing warnings to the West. I listened to the latter this weekend and knitted together his statements into three main categories - they all ring true today.
IDEOLOGY: Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism; radicalism had to surrender to socialism; and socialism could never resist communism. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy. Socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.
SOCIETY: Even biology knows that habitual, extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask. A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. Should one point out that from Ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?
HUMANITY: The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals….It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations. There are meaningful warnings, which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen. Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.
The 20th century had many sophisticated and well-funded campaigns to undermine democracy, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens' confidence in their elected leaders. Add in some shiny social media and AI to further blur fact from fiction, and democracy can be toppled. We need to give our democracies a wellness check. One tool is measuring Antisemitism. It is a proven “canary in the coal mine” for determining societal rot and a leading indicator of a democracy’s health. Forget about Bibi’s visit to Congress last night, where he was greeted by more protesters than Congresspeople; forget about the gaslighting by our Presidential candidates; forget about the media bias in their campus coverage; just think about your own personal experience. Would you feel comfortable even being a Jew right now? Publicly acknowledging that you’re a Jew? Openly wearing a kippah or Magen David necklace? It’s different when it’s a first person question. How strong do you think our democracy really is?
Am Yisrael Chai
Kelly
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