Autocratic descent, instrumentalized 'antisemitism,' and Ms. Rachel
The raising babies of it all
Trying to get something out every Friday, even if it’s just continuing to share things that friends are doing. Or creating the space for myself to ruminate.
I did listen this week to a couple podcasts featuring my friend Andrew Marantz, who’s a staff writer at the New Yorker and covers, very intelligently, a lot of the things also buzzing along in my brain (contemporary right-wing movements, social media, the manosphere, etc.).
Here he is on Know Your Enemy, talking about the impact of the podcasting space on the 2024 election: how Republican and Democratic strategists approached it differently (spoiler alert! Dems failed miserably); how what we call the “manosphere” exerts influence within and beyond electoral politics as such; how it represents a broader cultural-political phenomenon and consolidation of power.
And here he is on Ezra Klein, debating how far into autocracy we are falling (or rather, what criteria we should be looking at as we continue to have this conversation).
Meanwhile, a text from my college roommate this morning:
hey remember when I was an international student at a US institution?
On that point.
The instrumentalizing of “antisemitism,” used to stifle dissent, by a political movement that could give a shit about actual Jewish people, marches on in truly mind-numbing ways. Let it be said again and again: none of this makes Jews more safe. Punishing students for speaking out against a genocide in Gaza (or ethnic cleansing, whatever the fuck you want to call it) does not make Jews more safe. Starving 14,000 babies does not make Jews more safe. It did not, for that matter, protect the two young Israeli embassy staffers who were assassinated in D.C. this week, any more than that assassin shouting “Free Palestine” will keep Palestinians safe. (Surely it will be used to justify more repression and death.) The wheel turns further.
Back in February of 2024, I wrote:
When I was a kid, whenever the question of Jewishness came up (because my dad wasn’t Jewish, and we didn’t practice anything, so it was always a question), my mom would always deadpan, “well, you’re Jewish enough for Hitler to kill you.” It’s the only thing I knew about my Jewishness for the longest time.
In my adult life, I began sharing this as comic evidence of the degree of my assimilation: that, from millennia of Jewish culture, *this* was the tidbit my mom cared to pass along. (Thanks a lot, mom!) But in the past few months I have started to hear it differently, a kernel of something that she was also passing: that I was a part of a legacy of survival in the face of unimaginable atrocity and oppression. There was pride, an ethics, hiding in that throw away line. A community, even. “We don’t fuck with people who fuck with other people.”
How shattering, then — wrenching, disgusting, utter bottom of feeling — to live through its inversion in this moment: “You are Palestinian enough for Israel to kill you.”
What Israel is perpetrating right now — even and perhaps especially as a response to unimaginable violence and trauma — is about the least Jewish thing I can imagine. Even in my own at times impoverished understanding of my people, I know with every fiber of my being that we do not stand for this. [Which perhaps complicates the idea of a people. Which, I have learned, would be very Jewish.]
*
Maybe my lineage is just the nationless, diaspora Jew. Never have I felt less Jewish than when, emerging from the subway in DC in November, a sea of blue and white Israeli flags engulfed me. People who were supposedly my people.
*
I’m about the most assimilated, not-Jewish Jewish person you can imagine, and even I know that committing genocide is pretty not Jewish!
Much ferocious love to a household favorite of ours, Ms. Rachel, for using her platform to confront the reality for children in Gaza, to not look away.
How grotesque will we let things get?
As we sharpen our faculties around assessing how far down the autocratic rabbit hole we have gone – or the plain old fascist, baby-killing and people-disappearing rabbit hole – I am reminded of a moment in Game of Thrones I often come back to (a show I always thought was an excessively brutal and pessimistic take on the world):
I don’t know how to hold this awful destruction of life, as a parent. What I know is that watching Ms. Rachel wrestle with it in that clip in real time – recovering joy, fighting for joy – continuing to tune to it, while also staying attuned to the horror – feels fucking courageous right now. We must keep our faculties of feeling sharp. This is what they are after. This is what we must help each other protect, at all costs. We lose it and we lose everything.
I’ve got a poem lined up for tomorrow that feels pretty heavy – a response to the Uvalde shooting, on its anniversary, in what is probably part of an ongoing series – and my intention today was to write something lighter, to provide a counterpoint. I sure haven’t done that! But I think I will go ahead and share both anyway. Writing for me has always been a space to touch bottom, to feel around in the weeds and muck and make space for what lingers, untouched, or in need of touching. When my feet feel the bottom, I think, sometimes, I get what I need to spring up.
Much love to all of you heading into the weekend,
A
love. thank you for your courageous words.