I nearly always avoid simply reposting long stretches of another writer's opinions or an item from WaPo or The Times or some other journalistic outlet. This is a commentary site, not a news clipping service, and so it strikes me as eminently logical that I should post commentary, emphasis on mine. The work is more laborious, yet it's a labor of love — excuse the cliché (something else I avoid like the plague, as William Safire quipped in his 1968 volume, Political Dictionary.)
From the above rule of "P.M.C." exclusivity I exempt Jewish-American commentator Peter Beinart. I confess I'm not entirely sure why. I began reposting segments of his online talks, from The Beinart Notebook, when the Israeli government chose to annihilate not Hamas so much as thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, mostly women and children. The Israel-Palestine War — not the Israel-Hamas War — or better yet "The Israeli War on Palestinians" will perhaps be recorded by history as the darkest stain on the 21st century. Israel's murderous ignominy will also be a monumental disgrace not only because of what it did in, and to, Gaza, but because its unspeakable acts there will forever overshadow the unspeakable acts of Hamas, 7 October 2023. The 1,200 victims of that appalling day did not deserve to have it remembered for what followed.
What followed and persists in following have been the weekly concern of Prof. Beinart's online commentary, segments of which I select for reposting (today, all of it). I strive to reduce his remarks to their absolute core, since, as noted, I'm averse to burdening you the reader with streams of material you haven't time for; moreover, I'm not "into" merely reprinting what others have so thoughtfully produced. I suppose that largely clears up my uncertainty as to why I exempt Beinart from my general rule: What he has to say is consistently sharp -- so sharp, my interventions would be but nuisances, and wholly superfluous. This week he addressed testimony given before the education and workforce committee of the Republican House, itself a stain on the 21st century.
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I watched a good chunk of last week’s hearings with the president of Columbia, and the heads of the Board of Trustees, and one of the people leading their antisemitism commission. And there was one moment in particular that stuck out to me. A congressman named [Jim Banks, R-Ind.] got a hold of some kind of pamphlet that had been put out I think by students of the School the Social Work, which referenced the term, Ashkenormativity.
Ashkenormativity, I guess, is the idea that you kind of make Ashkenazi Judaism normative, and you don’t pay attention to the fact that many Jews are not Ashkenazi and not from European heritage. So, this congressman was very upset that the term Askanormativity had showed up in some document that was given out to Columbia students and went around and asked the people on the panel what they thought. And one of the heads of the Board of Trustees said the phrase Ashkenormativity was "shockingly offensive."
Now, I don’t really see what’s shockingly offensive about a term which tries to suggest that people tend to assume that the culture of Ashkenazi Jews is the culture of all Jews. But what bothered me—and deeply, deeply depressed me—was this discourse of the use of a phrase, Askanormativity, in some pamphlet at Columbia University as being shockingly offensive when in this entire hearing—at least the long stretches that I watched—there was not a single reference to Palestinians being killed in Gaza. Not a single reference. You could watch that and literally not know that a single child in Gaza had died. Shockingly offensive? The term Askanormativity in a pamphlet is shockingly offensive? What about the fact that 26,000 children in Gaza, 2% of the children in Gaza, have either been killed or injured; that 1,000 children in Gaza have had one or both of their legs amputated; that all of the universities have been partially or entirely destroyed; that 30 of the 36 hospitals have been destroyed?
Listening to one member after another basically talk about how they decry antisemitism, how they hate antisemitism, and what a huge problem it is, and then finding these kinds of absurd examples of what they claim is antisemitism — I was revolted. I hate a discourse of antisemitism which makes it seem like our lives matter and Palestinian lives don’t matter. That’s not the fight against antisemitism that I want to be part of. It’s also not a fight against antisemitism that I think will be effective because it’s essentially a discourse led by Republicans who want to enlist Jews in a project of white Christian supremacism in the United States. I think they’re using American Jews as part of their project of trying to establish, or re-establish, certain kinds of hierarchies in the United States about which lives matter and which lives don’t. And they’re inviting us to be on the dominant side, on the powerful side, a Judeo-Christian nation, i.e., not a Muslim nation. Those Republican members of Congress who talked about how upset they are about the antisemitism of Columbia, they are the same people who are gonna enthusiastically vote for Donald Trump, who hangs out with white nationalists.
So, perhaps one thing we might remember this Pesach, this Passover, as we hold our seders, is that we believe in a G-d who hears all people, a G-d who sees all people, who sees the cries and the pain of all people, and we do not believe that it is only Jewish pain, that it’s only Jewish suffering, that it’s only Jewish oppression, that matters. There is a voice in our tradition, a very, very powerful voice, which says that G-d hears, that G-d sees the oppression of all people — and for goodness’ sake, in this moment, nowhere more than the suffering of the people in Gaza. And so, those members of Congress, those right-wing Republican members of Congress, they may not hear, they may not see the suffering in Gaza. And those leaders at Columbia who are just prostrating themselves to say whatever these members of Congress wanted, they may not hear, they may not see the suffering of people in Gaza. But G-d, our G-d, sees, and hears, and that seems to me something for us to say this Pesach.
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