On the eve of New York's mayoral election

New York City is the most Jewish city in the world outside Israel. Somewhere around 12-14 percent of residents are Jewish; that's over 1.3 million residents of the metropolis.

Zohran Mamdani's successful candidacy for mayor has brought focus on the fears and hopes of that constituency. How can a Muslim who is anti-Zionist be poised to win the job of mayor in New York, most likely with solid support of younger New York Jews?

Perhaps he stands for a hope for their city which that old sleaze former state governor Andrew Cuomo and a GOP perennial joke candidate don't offer. I don't live in New York though I once did and have long had family in the city. But I appreciate the observations of Jewish writers who live in the midst of the fray.

Israel's war on Gaza prompted Brookynite John Ganz to reflect broadly on antisemitism and Zionism. He identifies mirroring varieties of racist corruption in the service of power over others.

I want to make one other remark about Zionism and antisemitism. Both confuse cause and effect to a dangerous degree and begin processes unchained from history and common sense. In the radical Zionist worldview, antisemitism is eternal and endemic; hatred of the Jews preexists any Jewish behavior, so Jewish behavior then doesn’t matter. This is how you get the nihilism and denial that allows the Jewish state to indulge in the very types of criminal activities that led to its creation. “They hate us anyway.” This belief engenders a totally irresponsible and immoral attitude. The existence of antisemitism, the Holocaust, and all the historical suffering of the Jews does not make a permanent moral exception of the Jewish people. Accepting that nihilism is to conspire with antisemites in the creation of antisemitic propaganda. 

The antisemite has a remarkably similar logic, but reversed: the Jews are intrinsically, eternally a criminal species; no historical explanation or context is possible or necessary, because the answer is always there: the Jews are evil itself. Does Zionism come out of a particular historical situation? No, it is just one more emanation of this evil. Does Hamas or Palestinian resistance arise out of a particular historical situation and context? No, it is just one more emanation of this evil. 

Both cut themselves loose from historical time and causality and replace it with a mythic world of eternal racial struggle. In such a conception lies the utter devastation of humanity.

Both Zionism and anti-Zionism often try to hide the ball of racism while taking advantage of its emotional appeals. Zionists often rely on propaganda appeals based on preexisting prejudices that hold their enemies to be subhuman savages and barbarians, and anti-Zionists’ propaganda appeals often try to take advantage of or deepen preexisting prejudices against Jews. They both try to distinguish themselves from intrinsically racist discourses but are parasitic upon them. 

And it’s unclear to me if either can be separated from them. At some point, argue long enough, and they will both exclaim, “They are just a different breed!” They are lower, more evil, more prone to violence, etc. 

The ascendancy of Donald Trump's neo-Nazi fans make clearer thinking about the persistence of vicious antisemitism all the more essential.

• • •

Peter Beinart comes to New York's electoral moment full of passion. For him, the dismissal by some older Jewish leaders of Mamdani reveals a form of idolatry. I don't usually post longer [8 minutes] videos here, but I strongly recommend experiencing Peter's heart-filled little sermon: What Will Establishment Jewish Leaders Sacrifice to Defeat Mamdani?

She cries out against a corrupted faith

She's not pulling any punches. Anthea Butler chairs the Religious Studies department of the University of Pennsylvania. She begins her history and jeremiad White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America with this uncompromising declaration:

Evangelicals, you have a problem. That problem is racism. 

... why do people who identify as as evangelicals vote over and over again for political figures who in speech and deed do not evince the Christian qualities that evangelicalism espouses? 

My answer is that evangelicalism is not a simply religious group at all. Rather, it is a nationalistic political movement whose purpose is to support the hegemony of white Christian men over and against the flourishing of others. 

... evangelicalism is an Americanized Christianity born in the context of white Christian slaveholders. ... Racism in evangelicalism is not only about individual sin. It is about corporate sins of a religious movement that continues to believe itself good and that good is predicated on whiteness and the proximity to power. 

... As an African American woman who once trained in an evangelical seminary, I don't say these thing lightly... Whether ignoring race or hiding behind race, the evangelical whitewashing of race and racism does not work anymore.

This little book recounts the history which led to the evangelical "problem."

From the time that the first Africans were kidnapped to this country as slaves, enslavers sought to ensure the parts of the Christian bible to which they were exposed emphasized obedience to masters. 

... there was even a slave Bible produced in England that omitted passages about freedom.

In the 19th century abolitionists led by Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison repudiated and also reshaped American Christianity; after the Civil War freed the slaves, many Christian denominations split into northern and southern fractions over the continuing challenge of freed Black people in "their" society. The South got the KKK; in the immediate post war period, northern denominations aided education for the freed people. 

But by the early 20th century, Jim Crow segregation and repression were the rule most everywhere. White fundamentalists and Pentecostals created an extensive infrastructure in the interwar era; in the 1950s, Billy Graham became the archetypal white evangelist. Butler describes his uneven outreach to Christian formations of color. By the last decades of the 20th century, white evangelicals had become the base of the current right wing Republican party, organized by the Christian Coalition against abortion, feminism, desegregation of evangelical colleges, and gays. They were ripe for the picking by Donald Trump and MAGA.

Growing up Christian in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 90s, Anthea Butler thought she was part of this movement -- until she discovered she wasn't.

Once upon a time, I was an evangelical. A Pentecostal, to be exact. I was happily ensconced in the Church on the Way and preparing to start Fuller Seminary in the fall of 1992. That spring, the Rodney King verdict came down and the riots happened. I had a front row seat to one of the ways that evangelicals decided to deal with this traumatic event. Evangelical churches decided to come together under the aegis of Church on the Way's Pastor Hayford to hold what they called a "Love LA" service ... It was to be a healing celebration, a chance for racial reconciliation.  

For me, it was the moment I found out that despite my frenetic activity and full-steam participation in the church, I was invisible. For the service, I was sitting by Hayford's mother, who knew me from several other events. She turned to me at the greeting time and said, 'Welcome to Church on the Way.' At that moment, I knew that no matter how much I had worked or served or prayed with people, I was simply a Black person visiting the Church on the Way. Much like many evangelicals of color, I was just a Black person in this white woman's space. I was welcome due to the situation, but I could not possibly be a member of the church she belonged to. That moment encapsulated for me what evangelical attempts at interracial cooperation accomplished. Invisibility.

Butler goes on to ask, what went wrong in the evangelical movement?

... This is a movement that could have and should have moved on from its roots in nineteenth-century racism and slavery revealed in this book. Yet it has not. And that is due to the choices made by leaders and followers within the evangelical movement. 

Why have evangelicals and their leadership made choices over and over again to embrace racism? Because it is what has allowed them to attain and hold political power. ... 

... When evangelicals married their educational and religious institutions to nationalism and political power starting in the 1950s, they gained a foothold that has now become a stronghold. Evangelicals became well educated, and they shaped their historical narrative more around theology and esoteric boundaries, mostly white cultural boundaries, ignoring their social and historical connections to broader American life. ... Trump isn't the reason why evangelicals turned to racism. They were racist all along. 

... class and wealth have encouraged evangelicals to hold onto racism tightly as part of their belief about capitalism, God, and nation. ... 

... Access to power made evangelicalism brittle, and unforgiving. Ideology trumped the gospel. Loving your neighbor turned into loving only those who believe as you do. As a result, evangelicals live in silos to keep themselves pure. ... And, as a result, evangelicals are regarded with disdain by the broader public. Evangelicals wear this as a badge of honor and as a sign of persecution of Christians. Evangelicals are not being persecuted in America. They are being called to account.

Butler speaks directly to others with whom she has shared an evangelical Christian commitment:

... Ask yourself, What are you leaving as the posterity of American evangelicalism? What are the organizations you support leaving behind? Can you see past the individual sin of racism and understand that your votes, your choices, your actions participated in white supremacy and racist policies and policing? ... 

If you asked such questions, you would probably lose friends, and you might even lose your church. Yes, I am asking a lot of you. To step out of the comfortable place you reside in while the world burns is difficult. It is, however, worth it. If you feel one ounce of conviction, then there is hope for you. There may even be hope for our nation. 

I hope these words find root in you. I hope they trouble you. I hope they sear your soul. I hope they make you change. There is only a little time left, but there is time. The time is now.

When Donald Trump won a second term with evangelical acclamation, Butler wrote a preface to a second edition of her book -- a plea that is anguished but determined:

In this dangerous moment for American democracy, White Evangelical Racism continues to provide a concise history of the motivations and goals of evangelicals who seek to create a white Christian nation, where everyone, no matter what race, ethnicity, or creed, will have to live with their leadership and laws. It is not enough for them to have influence with politicians and legislatures, or schools teaching Christian texts. They want Jesus -- or more precisely their view of Jesus -- and by association themselves, to be the center and leaders of civic life in America. Their oft vaunted appeals to the founding of America as a Christian nation are not only a distortion of the nation's history. They are evangelicals' claim to rule and reign in the here and now. 

As you engage this history, think abut what will happen if the United States becomes a theocracy. Consider if you want to live with people who believe that whiteness is the framework, culture should be only "Anglo-Saxon," and religious freedom is only for people who think and believe as they do. 

These are the stakes.

Elections for grown ups; we can do better

As we wait to see how high profile votes in New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia turn out on Tuesday, Philip Bump, data guru formerly of the Bezos Wapo and now out on his own at pbump.net, offers some sensible observations on the thousands of elections he has seen come and go. Professional consultants peddle their snake oil (usually promoting "moderation") to Democrats, but this is what he sees.

Politics has become nationalized and that national conversation benefits the right. So if your campaign recommendations center on meeting Americans where they are, you’re often going to be arguing for acquiescence to right-wing policies and rhetorical frames. You’re going to be agreeing to battle the right in the right’s stadium in a game where the right empowers itself to change the rules. And you’re going to reinforce the idea that Democrats don’t have core beliefs of their own.

Zohran Mamdani

What if, instead, Democrats ran on what they believe in, in terms that sincerely reflect those beliefs? There’s still the problem of the national environment and its accompanying media universe, but by taking this approach candidates can at least better avoid charges that they’re simply pandering or using poll-tested rhetoric. Sincerity can be an affect, certainly, but it’s a lot easier to come off as sincere if you’re actually sincere.

Advocates for following public opinion polling might counter that this approach means endorsing ideas that aren’t popular. 

And, yes. It sure does. But public opinion is not static. We’ve seen, even just this year, how views of major issues like immigration have shifted in response to sincere rhetoric about what’s happening. 

The job of an elected official is to represent their constituents but the job of a candidate isn’t simply to tell those constituents what they want to hear. It’s to make a case as a prospective leader, not a dutiful follower. 

Don't any of these commentators remember Obama -- a Black man forced by skin color to "run on what he believed in"? That the consultant admonition to try to soft pedal what candidates actually think the country needs keeps recurring is testament to the greed of campaign consultants and the timidity of too many Democrats running for office. 

And yet, the Republican Congress is showing itself to be even more vacuous. Do they believe in anything? Perhaps their own inflated importance, though if they don't meet, not even that.

Naturally there is room for any actor with conviction -- even if that conviction is something like "I'm a deserving imposter who wants to steal your country blind." Sigh. 

Halloween cat blogging

 

Out and about in the 'hood, you might see Mio or Janeway in our front window, but this season there are so many feline competitors for your attention.

 

This one presents no threat. Too cute for my taste.

 

Not so sure about this one.

 

Looks more like a pillow than a cat.

 

This one on the sidewalk has more character, though a bit cute.

While two go full ferocity ...

Let them go hungry!

It's not okay to keep food which is readily available from reaching people who are hungry. Period. 

Yet that is what Budget Tsar Russell Vought is doing in order to try to force Democratic Senators to pass Republicans' big bill which takes money from healthcare and gives it as tax breaks to Donald's billionaire buddies. 

Along with other lawlessness, there goes SNAP food aid and some fishermen for desert.

Economist Paul Krugman summarizes this move:

Despite the government shutdown, the SNAP program isn’t out of money. In fact, it has $5 billion in contingency funds, intended as a reserve to be tapped in emergencies. And if the imminent cutoff of crucial food aid for 40 million people isn’t an emergency, what is? ...

He goes on to show a map of where the resulting hunger will be worst; looks to me as if the harm will be most severe in some native tribal areas and in pockets of the deep South that vote for Trump. They are beating up on the most vulnerable people, a lot their own supporters.

The Orange Toddler has other priorities. Like extorting the government for $230 billion in compensation for investigating his crimes during the previous administration.

And turning the People's House into a tacky monument to himself.

SNAP is a pillar of my working poor neighborhood. The little stores will be in trouble, as well as families, many of which include workers who simply don't make enough to get by without help.

This is what MAGA grievance has wrought. 

Alone in public amid randomness and isolation

John Della Volpe introduces himself: 

For more than two decades, I’ve been embedded in the land of young Americans. First millennials, and now Gen Z with an eye on Gen Alpha. From my perch since 2000 as polling director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, at SocialSphere, and as the dad of a few Zoomers and one Zillennial — I spend most of my time talking with, surveying, and thinking about young Americans. 

In the context of New Yorker's mayoral election, he's been talking with young citizens of that city. He reports: After Everything, They Still Want In. You can read it all at the link. 

Twelve young New Yorkers — disillusioned with both parties, abandoned by institutions, and living under daily pressure — still believe in something better. ...

All under 30. Some were born there, some were not. All living in the tension between loving New York and questioning whether it loves them back.

“We love it here,” one said. “But it doesn’t always love us back.”

The conversation didn’t spiral. Everyone stayed grounded. They were proud to live in the “greatest city in the world” — but honest about how much it costs them, in every sense.

He covers ten points; I found myself reflecting on this one:

#7: Fear is everywhere. So is numbness.

Almost every participant described feeling physically unsafe at some point in the last month.

“You’re always calculating... Should I step in? Should I run? Am I going to get hurt just trying to help someone?”

“They’re not there to protect people. They’re there to write tickets.”

The problem wasn’t just crime. It was the feeling of being left alone with it.

I tried to think how this was the same and different from what I felt when I lived for awhile, a long time ago, in the great city. So I raised the question to Della Volpe and he responded: 

janinsanfran: Can you expand on what the fear is about? I know New Yorkers who feel that NYC feels safer than it ever has. 

Lived there myself as a very young person in the 70s -- very sporadically, but not uniformly, seemed unsafe then, in what was then thought a very unsafe area. 

These folks feel what they feel and we must honor that -- but that conclusion seems something that could be expanded on. 

Della Volpe: You’re right — the fear young New Yorkers describe isn’t the same one older generations remember. It’s not about crime rates; it’s about randomness, isolation, and trust.

They’re afraid that anything can happen anywhere — a shove on the platform, a stranger following them — and no one will step in. It’s the sense of being alone in public that feels new.

And even when they know the data shows record-low crime, they don’t feel it. The fear now is less about danger itself, and more about whether anyone — the police, the city, other people — will show up when it happens.

In that gap between statistics and experience, you can feel how much trust has frayed.

Let's hope the experience of the Mamdani campaign is breaking through this isolation. Effectual campaigns can do that. If Mamdani's mayoral term can deliver on some of its promise, that would help too.

On strategic incompetence

As folks who read this blog may know, my Erudite Partner is a regular contributor to the little lefty opinion syndication service, Tom Dispatch. Today he offers her latest commentary on the condition of our condition is in: Trump is Bad at Running the Country But Sometimes That’s Good for Him.

When Tom releases one of her articles, Tom writes his own introduction. Today's Tom commentary is something I want to offer for itself. Here's Tom: 

A plea scratched on a bench in immigration court ... Free my Uncle!

Honestly, who could believe it, if — that is — we weren’t actually living through it? And maybe even then?

I mean, once upon a time, Donald Trump would have been unimaginable as president (or do I mean king, emperor, or simply madman?) of the United States. Hey, you know, the guy who can only imagine White South Africans and right-wing (if not absolutely fascistic) Europeans as immigrants to this country and certainly not anyone from “shithole countries”!

I’d hate to tell my grandfather, who arrived here as a teenager on a ship in the early 1890s with the equivalent of 50 cents in his pocket and, though an impoverished Jewish kid from (now embattled) Lviv, was allowed to stay. ...

Rebecca goes on to explain what she learned in another authoritarian regime and what she is learning accompanying immigrants to their ordeals with Donald Trump's immigration court non-system. Read all about it.

Ronald Reagan against crazy tariffs

  

This ad was posted by the Canadian province (that's Canadian for "state") of Ontario. Ontario is Canada's most populous subdivision, the most industrialized, and contains some of the country's most important cities, including Toronto and the national capital, Ottawa. 

Not surprisingly, the Orange Toddler threw a hissy fit seeing the Republican icon's free trade convictions thrown back at him. 

Ottawa took it down but the point was made, especially for Canadians: the current US incumbent is nuts. 

Where peace once prevailed

Once upon a time, I sailed my little Sunfish dinghy from Grand Island across the Niagara River to eat a picnic lunch. This was just a normal September outing. Today I imagine the Border Patrol might shoot a missile at me.

Peace Bridge between Buffalo. NY and Canada in 2007. Somehow I doubt this image is what that once-tranquil border looks like today.

 

The New York Times reports what Donald Trump's trade and verbal war with Canada is doing to the Niagara Frontier this fall. The two country's integrated economies and cultures have been torn apart.

... Canadians have been scarce at cultural attractions, sporting events and shopping malls in the area since President Trump threatened Canada with tariffs two weeks into his second administration (following through on those threats March 4), and spoke of adding the country as the 51st state.

But that absence has been deeply felt, said Anthony Sprague, general manager of the Buffalo Bisons baseball club, the top minor-league affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays, who are facing off against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. Canadians typically comprise a quarter of the club’s fan base at its downtown Buffalo stadium, he said. This season, that share has shrunk to 10 percent.

The team began receiving season ticket cancellations even before the baseball season got underway in March, Mr. Sprague said. “The narrative was all the same: ‘Nothing against you guys, we love you guys, but we need to take a stand by not coming across the border.’”

Tensions aren’t likely to dissipate anytime soon after Mr. Trump declared an immediate end to trade negotiations Thursday. His decision followed an angry post on Truth Social over an ad sponsored by the province of Ontario featuring President Ronald Reagan denouncing the use of tariffs. ...

The linked article is granular and devastating. Maybe both sides will have to rename the historic bridge?

Arrogant vandalism

She's not preaching this weekend; it's a week off. But she's got a righteous admonition for the Orange Toddler. The Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Kaeton is disgusted and appropriately wroth.

... We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. We are surrounded by destruction on every level, so that the insecurities of one man-boy will be assuaged.

The destruction of the East Wing of the White House stands as a raw, open wound, created by the crass, morally bankrupt, blind arrogance of a narcissist with sociopathic tendencies.

It looks like the kind of revenge Osama bin Laden couldn’t even delight in imagining.

It’s the visualization of all of the other signs and symbols of his arrogance: rewriting history, ignoring foundational constitutional rights like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and due process.

... Why is he doing all this? Apparently, because he thinks he can. And, it makes him feel big and strong because he’s getting his “vengeance”.

... What’s to be done? Well, short of getting Chuck Schumer to write another sternly worded letter, the best course of action seems to be exactly what we are doing: Holding the line on decency, morality, and democratic process while we work the judicial system and put them on record to uphold the law and the Constitution.

... The opposite of arrogance is not humility.

The opposite of arrogance is integrity.

It’s the ability to tell the truth with honesty and authenticity, even when the temptation is to give in to the pressure to conform to the will of those in power.

It’s the conviction to speak out for what’s right, even when your voice shakes.

... I don’t know how this will all end, if Democracy is finally being tested beyond its limits. I only know that this version of Democracy has lasted longer than any modern despot or dictator. ...

I'd call that preaching for such a time as this.