I FaceTimed on Friday with Yael, who’s in Tel Aviv, where she says the streets are quiet, if less quiet than they have been; stores have opened; people have left their apartments, everyone talks to their neighbors and all anyone talks of the war.
There’s a feeling of helplessness and also the need for action: bakers bake and give away bread; people donate bicycles, donate clothing and blood and create a database to help find the missing and kidnapped. Yael’s Twitter account has exploded this week, she’s become a light people follow. As has The Free Press, which is running multiple stories daily, including my dear friend Nellie Bowles’ column on Friday, which Yael said was one of the few bright spots of her week. From this week’s “TGIF: Hot Takes on Terrorism”:
The obvious new symbol for members of the Democratic Socialists of America is a Hamas soldier. I can’t believe I never thought of it myself. Who would respect your pronouns more than a Hamas paraglider? Who would agree with the progressive prosecutor movement more than a Hamas paraglider? Hamas paragliders wait to be called out and called in. When I think of straight allies who support my gay rights and dignity, I obviously think of Hamas paragliders. This Is What A Feminist Looks Like (hint: it’s a Hamas paraglider, dummy!). Strong, rebellious, and arriving with panache to do an ethnic cleansing of the Jews? The Hamas paraglider has it all for the modern American left.
Rallies to support the Hamas attack have sprung up across the country and were quickly the coolest place to be if you want universal healthcare and also the genocide of Jews. As one speaker shouted to a cheering crowd in New York at an event promoted by the DSA: “As you might have seen, there was some sort of rave or desert party where they were having a great time, until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters. But I’m sure they’re doing very fine despite what the New York Post says.”
Right.
As my lesbian hero, Berkeley professor Judith Butler, famously put it: “Understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.” Yes, okay, they would kill me and Judy, parade our bodies through the streets, but that’s not the point. We are united.
The above poster was also passed around at the Long Beach State, where Chaya Leah - Yael’s pod partner in “Ask a Jew” - is the head of Hillel. It is a recipe of Chaya Leah’s I’ll be talking about today., and yes, I realize the name “Killer Eggplant Salad” might seem in bad taste but hey, that’s what the recipe says!
Before we get to that, friends and colleagues have been incensed by the coverage this week of the massacres on Israel. Yes, it’s a complicated situation. Also, I am really frakking done with equivocation, as is my friend Batya Ungar-Sargon:
Robby Soave, too, is not having it.
I wish Elon Musk would stop being a Richard and remove the wall between Twitter and Substack, pasting in the tweet from Gray that Robby was referencing:
Michael Moynihan did a solo interview at The Fifth Column with Oren Kessler, who holds dual Israeli-American citizenship and was in New York for his wedding day when news of the atrocities broke.
Fifth Column’s second-Sunday Zoom last week attracted more than 500 people - including me, for the second time ever. We need to talk and listen right now; to check whether the ideas and feelings we are having make sense and, with our need, create and become part of a community. Come on in.
Over at the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf ponders the moral failures we saw on campuses this week. After quoting the support for murder and kidnapping from student groups at Swarthmore, at Harvard, at UVa, Conor writes:
I understand various reasons why advocates for the Palestinian cause might keep quiet––as many supporters of Israel have done after abuses of Palestinians. I understand why, thinking of loved ones in Gaza, they might skip right to anticipating and preemptively denouncing retaliatory attacks, hoping to avert the deaths of still more innocent people. I understand why some observers feel there is a double standard in the West that accords less attention to the killings of Muslim innocents…
What I cannot understand is endorsing, validating, or standing in solidarity with war crimes. That so many student organizations did so is stunning. It commits them to positions anathema not only to the conservatives they often tangle with but to left-leaning liberals and progressives, many of whom now perceive a frightening difference in core values that too many had scarcely pondered before.
And I was moved watching this, from Douglas Murray.
I completely understand if you’re like, Nancy? I’m inundated all day with what’s going on in Israel and Gaza, I am crestfallen, and I am coming to you for some relief and a sweet recipe. On this I shall deliver. But first! Did I go see the Ed Rushca show at MOMA this week? I did. Is the tattoo of my arm of Ruscha’s Parts Per Trillion? It is. Enjoy that, and some of the images of Ruscsa’s I saw this week xx
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