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The Rise of the New JacobinsBY CHRISTINE ROSEN

The Boys from LaupheimANDREW BERGMAN

Jews Who Let Jew-Haters Off the Hook

KARYS RHEA & KEREN TOLEDANO // MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK

Christopher Caldwell’s Brilliant Provocation

BARTON SWAIM

Commentary

Wreck Side StoryTERRY TEACHOUT

Reflections on a VirusJOHN PODHORETZ //

ROB LONG

APRIL 2020

Com

mentary APRIL 2020 : VOLUM

E 149 NUM

BER 4

Tom Stoppard’s

Octogenarian Masterpiece

WYNN WHELDON

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N EW YORK, New York, a hell of a town. We are hunkered down, and who knows when we will hunker up. For the past few years, online

mobs have enjoyed the lubricious thrill of the “cancel culture” they have created—tanking careers and liveli-hoods and reputations. Well, welcome to the real can-cel culture, where there are no basketball games, no parades, no large parties, and in short order, maybe no live theater, no movies, no nothing.

I turn 59 this month. I feel like I have lived through four unprecedented events in my lifetime. The first two were glorious: In 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. In 1989, we watched as the Berlin Wall was brought down by revel-ers with pickaxes—with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Evil Empire to follow.

The third was the opposite of glorious: 9/11. I lived in Brooklyn Heights at the time, with a window that looked out on Lower Manhattan and Ground Zero a mile away as the crow flew. I watched for months as a black-and-purple gash in the sky hovered over the site like a demonic version of the divine “pillar of cloud” that followed the Hebrews as they journeyed out of Egypt. When the wind changed, I could smell the burn-ing plastic from the cords and electrical equipment that had helped create the sky gash.

The coronavirus is the fourth. Now, I am by na-ture both an optimist and an anti-alarmist. My usual reaction to warnings about dangers is a deep skepti-cism followed by an almost irrational annoyance. This is due in part to the common discussion in the United States over the past half-century. It inclines toward hysteria—hysteria that usually has a larger ideological and often anti-capitalist purpose.

The number of things we’ve been told were go-ing to kill us that didn’t—products like alar, salt (called “The New Villain” on a 1982 Time magazine cover), saccharin, nitrites in hot dogs, and supposed threats like nuclear winter, population growth, acid rain, the list goes on and on—has made my bullshit detector uncommonly sensitive and possibly hyperactive.

And so I greeted reports of the virus with usual calm. After all, hadn’t we been here before, with bird flu and SARS and MERS and H1N1—all global terrors that entirely evaded me, my family, my friends, even my enemies? How bad could this be, really? Besides which, I have been blessed with ridiculously, even un-justly good health (considering how I might fairly be accused of having abused the gift).

But I am part of an active Jewish community in New York, and we are almost all one degree of separa-tion from one another—and when a lawyer living in New Rochelle came down with the coronavirus and gave it to a child of his at a day school in Riverdale, it wasn’t even a week before it became clear I could not risk visiting my nonagenarian parents because I was too close to the outbreak and they were in the highest of high-risk groups.

It seems like once again, Jews are the canaries in the coal mine. It’s like the old joke: “Lord, would You mind choosing someone else for a change?”

If we do not respond properly to this pandemic, some blame will have to be laid at the feet of our Chick-en Little culture. We live in a wondrously free and pros-perous country whose residents are constantly being bombarded with messages that they are at existential risk when they are not. The irresponsibility of that hysteria-mongering is now all too painfully clear.q

The Virus and the Chicken Little Culture

EDITOR’S COMMENTARY

JOHN PODHORETZ

Commentary 1

Articles

Christine TheRiseoftheNewJacobins 13Working for the revolution with or without Bernie Sanders.

Andrew TheBoysfromLaupheim 18Of my father and his savior, the movie pioneer Carl Laemmle.

Karys LettingAnti-SemitesBeTheirGuide 23A progressive Jewish organization is committed

to letting preferred Jew-haters off the hook.

Barton TheClosingoftheAmericanExperiment? 27Christopher Caldwell’s brilliant provocation.

April2020Vol.149:No.4

Politics & Ideas

Josef FreeingtheCaptives 33Genius and Anxiety,

by Norman Lebrecht

Tal TheLotteryIsn’tRigged 35The Theology of Liberalism,

by Eric Nelson

Naomi BoyOhBoy 38Tomboy,

by Lisa Sellin Davis

Joffe

Rosen

Bergman

RheaandKerenToledano

Swaim

SchaeferRiley

Fortgang

Politics & Ideas

Robert TheRavitchesofSin 40Slaying Goliath, by Diane Ravitch

MichaelJ. TheYeartheSkyFell 42Black Wave, by Kim Ghattas

Kyle Not-So-Great 45Great Society, by Amity Shlaes

Culture & Civilization

Terry WreckSideStory 47How to ruin a great and singular musical.

Wynn TomStoppard’sGreatJewishPlay51 The foremost dramatist in the English language

has produced a masterpiece at 82.

Monthly Commentaries

Teachout

Editor’sCommentary

JohnPodhoretzThe Virus and the Chicken Little Culture

ReaderCommentary

Letterson the February issue

MediaCommentary

ChristineRosenElizabeth Warren’s

Amiable Panting Dogs

9

11

56

1

4

7

WashingtonCommentary

MatthewContinettiPrimary Lessons

JewishCommentary

MeirY.SoloveichikWhat We Need to Remember

HollywoodCommentary

RobLongNo, Mr. Bond, I Expect

You to Self-Quarantine!

Pondiscio

Totten

Smith

Wheldon

To the Editor:

ELI LAKE has written a very good article about the investigation

into the Trump campaign (“The FBI Scandal,” February). I’d add only one important point: Police reports, including wiretap warrants, are considered to be under oath, and falsification of a police report is felony perjury. Intentional exclusion of ex-culpatory evidence counts as misrep-resentation. There is criminal expo-sure here. What the FBI did counts as more than simply bad behavior.

GeorgeDouglasLos Angeles, California

1

To the Editor:

MY CONCLUSIONS are much the same as Eli Lake’s, but

with one notable variation: I believe

that John Brennan played a more dominant and crucial role in the scandal. James Comey, the FBI, and to a lesser extent James Clapper were initially duped by Brennan but soon became enthusiastic par-ticipants in the faulty investigation.

Brennan was the force behind turning the legitimate investiga-tion of Russian influence in the 2016 election into an investigation of Trump-Russia collusion. Both Comey and Clapper initially pushed back on Brennan before eventu-ally acquiescing.

I have spent some spare time trying to understand the Russia-Trump collusion fiasco, and I’m still trying to sort it all out. But I greatly appreciate your having pro-vided your insights.

DaleRoweRaleigh, North Carolina

1

Eli Lake writes:

GEORGE DOUGLAS is correct that falsifying information for

a warrant is a serious crime. The in-spector general agrees. He referred Kevin Clinesmith for criminal in-vestigation. It’s up to the Justice Department to determine whether and how he will be charged. It’s also possible that U.S. attorney John Durham’s report will recommend more criminal charges.

There is, as Dale Rowe writes, circumstantial evidence that John Brennan was an early adopter of the Steele dossier. Though it’s significant that the CIA’s Russia analyst dismissed Steele’s report-ing. Again, this is something that John Durham is investigating, and I await his findings.

WhatNextfortheFBI?

4 April 2020

READER COMMENTARY

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TheWealthTaxGetsWorseTo the Editor:

DAVID Bahnsen makes a strong case against a Warren/Sand-

ers–style wealth tax, but there are additional problems (“The Wealth-Tax Horror,” February).

Many public securities have daily quotations that would not reflect the realizable value for a large minority holding that came to market. The varying consider-ations around such block discounts are common issues in estate-tax audits. Similarly, private-equity, real-estate, and venture-capital partnership interests often provide net-asset value estimates. But these may be very different from the ac-tual prices at which occasional sec-ondary market transactions occur. Moreover, sales of these interests often require the permission of the general partner to admit the new holder into the limited partner-ship, and such permission may be arbitrarily withheld. Many private-equity, venture-capital, and real-estate vehicles carry with them obligations to meet unpredictable capital calls by the general partner that may not even occur during the partnership’s life. Similarly, the reductions in wealth attributable to various forms of debt or pledges can be as complex and fraught as the valuation of assets. Rich people often have myriad and intricate obligations associated with their ongoing activities.

6 Letters : April 2020

RevisitingEllison

Finally, the government is a silent partner in all appreciated assets to the extent of the tax share of realized appreciation. Will these implicit obligations be deductions in determining taxpayer wealth subject to the new tax? The can-didates’ proposals don’t appear to address this vexing problem of accounting for deferred taxes, i.e., those taxes that would be owed on the proceeds from a sale of assets, in calculating net wealth. In a com-plex and progressive income-tax system, what tax rates would be as-sumed for these purposes? Should prospective state and local taxes also be taken into consideration? Bernie Sanders has proposed mar-ginal federal capital-gains rates as high as 63 percent and a New York City resident presently can incur another 13 percent, so this issue would be vital, especially for busi-ness founders with low-cost stock.

In effect, the current wealth tax proposals would require the equivalent of valuing and set-tling an estate—every year—for those above, or near, the wealth-tax threshold. The assembled data might slake Professors Piketty and Saenz’s curiosity; but it would do so at the cost of an enormous financial burden and managerial distraction to those actually or potentially sub-ject to such a levy.

PaulJ.IsaacNew York City

1

David Bahnsen writes:

THE DETAILS that Paul J. Isaac adds are very much in line

with the critique I offer in my case against Warren’s tax. The dis-connect between market pricing

of low-liquidity assets with non-realizable net-asset value marks is just another example of the broader point I make regarding the infeasibility of the Warren/Sanders wealth tax.

But his letter also brings up a point I did not previously con-sider. Like a 706 estate-tax return for an estate that does not exceed the estate-tax exclusion amount, would the Warren/Sanders wealth tax actually require someone who was, say, $10 million beneath the

level to owe on the tax to prove they were beneath the level, incurring potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in expense each year in tax, legal, audit, and appraisal work, all to show that no tax was really owed? If not, what would the cut-off be? People below the wealth-tax threshold should be just as concerned as those above it!

1

To the Editor:

THE ESTEEMED and always entertaining Joseph Epstein

has again delivered a masterpiece of critical analysis in his article on Ralph Ellison (“Ralph Ellison in Opposition,” February). As a white, Orthodox Jew, and having read Ellison’s Invisible Man more than 40 years ago in college, I don’t think I ever really under-stood the multiple and nuanced layers of the black experience in America. Later, after being told by the self-appointed academic guardians of culture that be-cause I was not black I couldn’t possibly understand it and that any attempts to do so would be considered “cultural appropria-tion,” I chose to not even try. After reading Epstein’s remarkable es-say, especially his comments on Ellison’s independence of mind and thought, and his almost Vic-tor Frankl–like maintenance of dignity and restraint in the face of degradation, I want to reread

Invisible Man with a new sense of understanding and appreciation.

AlanA.MazurekGreat Neck, New York

1

To the Editor:

JOSEPH EPSTEIN’S article on Ralph Ellison prompted me to

reread Invisible Man. Doing so has been therapeutic for someone ex-hausted by the current preoccupa-tion with social justice. Put off by the incessant reminders of our racist legacy, I, ironically, needed remind-ing of the true abuse that Negroes (to use Ellison’s preferred term) have suffered in America. Invisible Man certainly does this. Remark-able is Ellison’s refusal to succumb to a mentality of bitter victimhood. As Epstein notes, Ellison’s heroes are Armstrong and Ellington, not Miles Davis. Inspirational. Thank you for publishing Epstein’s piece.

RobertC.DunnJr.Augusta, Missouri

IN May 2019, Time magazine put Elizabeth War-ren on its cover. In describing the Massachusetts senator’s stumping on the campaign trail, reporter

Haley Edwards gushed, “Just as her diagnosis of the problem reaches a crescendo, she takes a step back and performs a rhetorical swan dive into crystalline pools of policy: and here, she says, is how we fix it.” She said Warren was leading a “populist political revolution”—albeit a revolution that was, at the time, polling at just 8 percent. Projecting an image of her own behavior around the candidate, Edwards even described War-ren’s dog as “panting amiably.”

Time wasn’t the only outlet to garland Warren in this way. The Guardian declared her “the intellectual powerhouse of the Democratic party” in April 2019; GQ announced, “Elizabeth Warren Deserves Your Undivided Attention,” in May; and the HuffPo went so far as to de-fend Warren’s skin-care routine as recently as January.

So favorable was the coverage of Warren in the early months of her campaign that supporters of Bernie Sanders felt shortchanged. The progressive magazine In These Times was so annoyed by the liberal media’s

more favorable approach to Warren that they studied MSNBC’s coverage and found that “Warren had the lowest proportion of negative coverage of all three can-didates (just 7.9 percent of all her mentions) and the highest proportion of positive mentions (30.6 percent).”

The uncritical coverage continued after a CNN-sponsored town-hall meeting on LGBTQ issues. After Warren was asked a planted question about opposi-tion to gay marriage, she delivered a clearly rehearsed response: “I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that,” she said, adding, “Then just marry one woman—I’m cool with that. Assuming you can find one.” The Washington Post’s Annie Linskey devoted a story to Warren’s manufactured zinger, noting the millions of positive responses it received on Twitter and arguing, “She is quick-witted and sharp-tongued in a way that has played well in the Democratic primary and could prove effective against President Trump.”

Warren’s fabulations about her Native American heritage and her claim that she was fired from a teach-ing job because she had been pregnant at the time would have derailed almost any other candidate, but in Warren’s case neither gained traction because main-stream media outlets didn’t ask too many questions.

In fact, the pregnancy story likely wouldn’t have appeared in mainstream media outlets at all if it hadn’t

Christine Rosen is our senior writer. With this piece, her monthly column changes its focus from gen-eral social commentary to media criticism.

Elizabeth Warren’sAmiable

Panting Dogs

MEDIA COMMENTARY

CHRISTINE ROSEN

Commentary 7

first been broken by Collin Anderson at a conservative outlet, the Washington Free Beacon. Publications such as the New York Times covered it only after Warren was forced to respond. And the Times downplayed the fact that Warren had lied by spending most of the story dis-cussing the legal history of pregnancy discrimination, which Warren had not, herself, suffered.

Even as her campaign began to founder in the polls, positive coverage continued. As Jack Shafer (one of the few non-sycophantic media observers of Warren) noted in Politico, “Warren got twice as many mentions on cable news as Buttigieg over the last three months of 2019, when she experienced the steepest decline in her Real Clear Politics poll. But she still took second place in mentions behind only Biden.”

Then she tanked in the first four states that actu-ally voted. On Super Tuesday, she came in third in her home state. Despite the efforts of her superfans in the media to sell Democratic-primary voters on the virtues of Elizabeth Warren, they were not buying. She with-drew from the race.

Warren’s journey to oblivion pained reporters. As Annie Linsky and Amy Wang of the Washington Post wrote in the immediate aftermath, “Elizabeth Warren attracted big crowds. She won rave reviews in nearly every debate. Her organization was second to none. She developed plans, a strategy and a message. Yet when voting started, she not only lost, she lost by a lot.”

The media class that had spent a year celebrat-ing Warren almost perfectly reflected the average War-ren supporter. FiveThirtyEight’s Clare Malone noted matter-of-factly that “the media and its dominant de-mographic group (college-educated white people) are Warren’s base.” To a media establishment still nursing its wounds over Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in 2016, she seemed like a political Athena, sprung fully formed from the Senate and armed to wage a kinder, gentler form of class warfare than Bernie Sand-ers while simultaneously breaking the presidential glass ceiling.

The tenor of the response among Warren-supportive media outlets demonstrates the extent of their misguided overinvestment in her—an investment that didn’t extend to other female candidates such as Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar. The New York Times claimed, “Ms. Warren’s impact on the race was far greater than just the outcome for her own candidacy.” Writing in Salon, Amanda Marcotte raged, “Americans apparently couldn’t see that she is a once-in-a-generation talent and reward her for it with the presidency. That is a shameful blight on us.” The headline for a story in Politico simply read: “‘White men get to be the default:’ Women lament Warren’s demise.”

The public mourning continued on television. Trying to make sense of it all with Representative Abigail Spanberger, NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell con-fessed, “Well, Congresswoman, you brought up exactly a moment that was so emotional for me frankly and for a lot of others watching,” then played a clip of Warren saying, “One of the hardest parts of this is all those pin-ky promises and all those little girls who are going to have to wait four more years. That’s going to be hard.”

Self-described “feminist journalist” Lauren Duca was more blunt. In a Substack post that she wrote “while sobbing into my partner’s chest,” she described a “pain not unlike the one that followed Donald Trump’s election and Brett Kavanaugh’s confir-mation to the Supreme Court. The agony of watching Elizabeth Warren be diminished by the mainstream media has been infuriating. To watch that dismissal be reflected at the polls is almost unbearable.” She lamented that Warren, whom she called “a geyser of brilliance and enthusiasm powered by pure love of de-mocracy” was what everyone should have wanted and claimed, “We should all be so furious that we’ve been bullied into not only accepting less, but collectively fretting that, for a woman, the best of the best is still not good enough.”

Many other journalists also sought to pin the blame for Warren’s decline on sexism. CBS News political reporter Caitlyn Huey-Burns tweeted, “We cannot talk about Warren’s fail without talking about the sexism so prevalent in American politics.” Writing in the New York Times, Lisa Lerer asked plaintively, “Was it always going to be the last men standing?” Megan Garber of The Atlantic identified the culprit as “internalized misogyny,” suggesting that it was not Warren’s weaknesses as a politician, but the sexist false consciousness of nonwhite, non-college-educated Democratic voters, that led them to reject Warren.

But this gynocentric wishful thinking on the part of female reporters was belied by all the evidence of voters’ intentions. When reporters bothered to talk to actual voters, many of those voters were clear that they were going to cast their ballots based on who they thought could win against Trump, not on gender. “I’m not going to vote for someone simply because we share identity,” one young woman told the Times, by way of explanation for her vote for Biden over Warren.

Just before Super Tuesday, Duca tweeted, “Eliza-beth Warren is the president we deserve.” Given the willful disregard of the weaknesses of her candidacy on the part of the journalists covering her, and their failure to acknowledge their own biases, Warren’s fail-ure was the punishment her panting media followers deserved.q

8 April 2020

ON FEBRUARY 9, the day before the New Hampshire primary, Joe Biden held a slim lead over Bernie Sanders in the Real Clear

Politics average of national Democratic-primary polls. That advantage collapsed after Sanders won New Hampshire. It fell ever further after Sanders swept the Nevada caucuses the following week.

Then something remarkable happened. After Biden won the South Carolina primary on February 29, his national polling numbers spiked. By the time he won 10 of the 14 states on Super Tuesday, March 3, Biden was back on top. All in 72 hours. Call him the once and future front-runner. This stunning comeback did more than reestablish Biden’s position. It also re-inforced some longstanding rules of politics. Let’s look at four of them.

First, late entrants rarely win. Michael Bloom-berg announced his campaign for president on No-vember 24. His supporters argued that he had Biden’s positive aspects (experience in office and a moderate tone) without Biden’s liabilities (weak fundraising and a tendency to go off on rhetorical flights of fancy that leave audiences puzzled if not concerned).

It was thought that Democratic voters spooked by Sanders would embrace the former New York may-or as their last opportunity to defeat Donald Trump. “He might not be exactly what they had in mind,” John M. Ellis said of Bloomberg in the Washington Post, “but by Super Tuesday he’ll look like Brad Pitt.”

Danny DeVito is more like it. Bloomberg with-

drew from the race on March 4, having amassed a measly 61 delegates and winning, of all places, American Samoa with 175 votes out of 351 cast. Then he joined the ranks of men who have entered cam-paigns late in the game to great fanfare only to wind up as losers.

General Wesley Clark, the former NATO com-mander, shot to the top of the Gallup poll within a week of announcing his candidacy on September 17, 2003. A month later, however, the general withdrew from contention in Iowa. He pinned his hopes on New Hampshire. His third-place finish there was enough for him to compete in seven states, includ-ing South Carolina, the following week. He ended up winning Oklahoma by a slim margin. He was out the next day.

The late Fred Thompson (1942–2015), senator from Tennessee, faced a similar problem four years lat-er. He entered the Republican primary on September 5, 2007, and departed on January 22, 2008, a few days after finishing third in South Carolina. Conservatives heralded Thompson as a natural communicator and principled statesman who would draw contrasts with the moderate mush of John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney. And Thompson was gifted, and decent, and funny. He was also more interested in watching SportsCenter on the campaign bus than in mixing it up with supporters.

Sometimes late entrants join the race out of ego. Sometimes they make the mistake of believing their own press. Bloomberg fell prey to both temptations. Like Clark and Thompson, he had to play catch-up with opponents who had been running for president

Matthew Continetti is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Primary Lessons

WASHINGTON COMMENTARY

MATTHEW CONTINETTI

Commentary 9

10 April 2020

for two years by the time voting began. “He went from zero to 80 in one night,” one of Clark’s aides said of his boss in 2004. And soon ran out of gas.

Second, money isn’t everything. “Mike Bloom-berg builds a general election campaign to show strength for his primary bid,” Jeff Zeleny of CNN wrote in December. “He’s paying top dollar to some of the most talented political strategists in the country, including hiring key operatives from Barack Obama’s previous campaigns. He’s hiring hundreds of staffers and opening offices in pivotal swing states. He’s spend-ing more money on advertising than all of his leading rivals combined.”

Indeed, he was. And all for nothing. The Wall Street Journal estimates that Bloomberg spent “at least $620 million” of his $64 billion fortune to win, in the end, an island 4,800 miles from the mainland. For a time, it seemed as if every other ad on television was paid for by Bloomberg’s campaign. His fellow billionaire Democratic as-pirant, environmentalist and impeachment activist Tom Steyer, spent around $250 million for his own failed candidacy.

These numbers cause fainting spells in the of-fices of Democracy 21 and other groups agitating for campaign-finance reform. But they had no discern-ible effect on the outcome of the primary. Nor did Jeb Bush’s $130 million in the 2016 Republican contest, or for that matter Hillary Clinton’s $768 million in the general election where she outspent Donald Trump by about 2 to 1. (Trump benefited from an advantage in “earned media,” or free publicity.)

“The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived,” wrote Joseph Schumpeter, “will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette.” It’s the same with campaign donations. No amount of pos-itive advertising can substitute for a flawed candidate. Money doesn’t decide elections. Voters do.

Third, woke doesn’t work. The Democrats who assumed that a presidential election is actually a competition to see who can be the most “woke” did not make it past Super Tuesday. The first to flop was Van-ity Fair cover model Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, whose proclamation, “Hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15” scared more people than it persuaded. He dropped out November 1.

Next to go, on December 6, was Kamala Harris. Her ambush of Biden for opposing bussing in de facto segregated school districts 40-plus years ago won her

applause from the social-justice left. But it couldn’t make up for her clumsy defense of Sanders’s Medicare for All proposal, or for her record as a prosecutor in San Francisco and California, or for her awkward style on the trail.

Julián Castro’s turn came on January 6. Remark-ably, his plans to decriminalize illegal immigration, abolish Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and guarantee abortion rights for trans women—the prize is yours if you figure that one out—failed to catch fire.

Finally, there was Elizabeth Warren. Her wonky “I have a plan for that” persona and devotion to taking selfies with liberal Democrats won her rave reviews from the press, filled as it is with wonks and liberal Democrats.

The problem with plans is that they are subject to scrutiny. Voters blanched when they looked at the tax hikes necessary to finance Warren’s transformation of American capitalism and her abolition of private

insurance. By the end of the campaign, Warren was promising that her nomi-nees for secretary of educa-tion would be interviewed and approved by a “young trans person.” She failed to win a single contest and dropped out March 5.

Finally, electability matters. It’s a slippery term, “electability.” How can one know who has the best shot to defeat an incum-bent months before the general election begins in earnest? Elusive and undefined it may be, but notions of “electability” count for a lot when challenging a sit-ting president.

The primary voters who handed Bob Dole vic-tory in South Carolina in 1996 thought he was the most electable Republican against President Bill Clinton. In 2004, Democrats went with John Kerry because they believed he had the best shot at defeating George W. Bush. In 2012, a large majority of Republicans told pollsters such as Gallup that Mitt Romney was the most electable candidate against President Barack Obama. Recently the Economist surveyed online bet-ting markets and found that Biden has the best chance of defeating Trump.

Democrats in South Carolina, Virginia, Texas, and Minnesota must have noticed the president’s ea-gerness to face Bernie Sanders this fall. They decided not to give Trump what he wanted and chose Biden instead. They went for the most “electable” candidate.

Were they right? Or did they make the same mistake as the opposition in 1996, 2004, and 2012?q

Electabilitymatters.It’saslipperyterm,‘electability.’Elusiveand

undefineditmaybe,butnotionsof‘electability’countforalotwhenchallengingasittingpresident.

A T THE age of five, Anatoly Sharansky expe-rienced his first miracle. Joseph Stalin, bus-ily fanning the flames of the “Jewish doctors

plot” conspiracy and planning a mass deportation of Soviet Jews, was suddenly struck by a stroke and died days later. Young Anatoly’s father, a journalist who knew much that Soviet state propaganda would never reveal, secretly informed his son of the significance of what had occurred:

Dad took me aside, made sure that no one was

around (we then lived in a communal apart-

ment), and said that a miracle had happened.

The miracle that saved the Jews from the

destruction that was being prepared.... But he

asked us, me and my older brother, who was

then 7 years old, to behave like everyone else.

And I remember that then in the kindergarten

I cried with everyone and sang along with all

the songs about Stalin’s beloved. And I did not

know who cries sincerely, and who cries like

me. This was the beginning of my double life

of a Soviet man.

Only years later, following his own Jewish journey, did Sharansky understand what his father had meant, in that officially atheist society, by quietly

referring to Stalin’s death as a “miracle.” The stroke occurred on the holiday of Purim in the year 1953, and just as in the Book of Esther, the anti-Semitic inten-tions of a modern-day Haman were suddenly undone.

Sharansky’s description of his father’s whis-pered exuberance is all the more poignant because one of the central liturgical pieces of Purim takes pains to curse the villains of the story and to bless its heroes. By engaging in moral clarity, we thereby contrast ourselves with Haman’s Persia, where moralities are reversed, where a villain is praised and all genuflect before him, where Jews are targeted, and the queen of Persia feels forced to hide the fact that she is Jew-ish. As Rabbi Yoel bin Nun put it, the book of Esther intends to teach of the possibility of providence in a kingdom “which constitutes the antithesis of the Di-vine Kingdom, a kingdom devoid of any sacred quality and of anything associated with the Name of God.” It is hard to think of any better modern parallel to biblical Persia than the USSR.

Yet at the same time that Sharansky experienced an internal Purim celebration, a very different Jewish reaction took place elsewhere. In Israel, kibbutzim associated with the militantly secular and ardently socialist Hashomer Hatzair movement mourned Sta-lin openly and sincerely. “Joseph Vissaranovich Stalin is no more,” wailed the headline of the daily socialist Hebrew paper Hamishmar. The contrast could not be more striking: A future refusenik, destined to be the most prominent prisoner of Zion, lives in an evil empire and in his heart celebrates the death of a moral monster. Meanwhile, days after Purim, Jews in the first

MeirY.Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City and the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.

What We Need to Remember

JEWISH COMMENTARY

MEIR Y. SOLOVEICHIK

Commentary 11

free state of Israel in two millennia mourned one of history’s greatest tyrants.

This contrast was brought to my attention by Sharansky’s daughter Rachel. In a 2016 piece, she elo-quently criticized heads of state who offered words of praise for Fidel Castro following his passing—who mourned, rather than celebrated, his death. Sharan-sky’s reflections, and those of his daughter, are worth revisiting today, given Bernie Sanders’s much-publicized praise for some of Castro’s policies, which seemed to parallel his compliments for Soviet society expressed in the 1980s. It is true, Rachel Sharansky wrote, that many who suffered under Castro ap-peared to be eulogizing him in 2016; but perhaps they were doing so “with celebration raging in their hearts.”

Rachel Sharansky is correct, and reading her reflection in light of today’s events, it is difficult not to see Sanders and Sharansky as embodiments of two philosophical and political paths paved in the 20th century. Both men are promi-nent activists on the world stage; both seem to speak in the name of justice and human dignity. Yet they are mirror images of each other. Sanders spent time in Israel during its infancy, in a socialist kibbutz. He speaks fondly and proudly of that experience and utilizes it to criticize the Israel of the present day, and for its purported bigotry. One senses that he, like others of his ilk, resents the fact that the Jewish state is not the secular workers’ wonderland that some hoped it would be.

Sharansky walked a different path. Originally a Zionist activist without a devout connection to Hebrew scripture, he describes in his 1988 memoir Fear No Evil how his time in the Gulag inspired him to bond with the biblical God, and how this faith inspired him in his resistance to the very tyrannical society that Sanders spoke so kindly about. Strikingly, Sharansky and his fellow prisoners called their Bible

study together “Reaganite readings,” linking them-selves to a president who had declared 1983 “the Year of the Bible”—and thereby to a statesman who had dubbed the Soviet empire “evil.” In this, Sharansky’s own evolution parallels what Israel itself became over time—not only less socialist and more Western, but also more religious, more biblically connected. More, one might say, Jewish.

Sharansky’s discovery of the divine, and its con-nection to his activism, is worth remembering today as the debates of 20th century seem to have returned in the 21st. One hears American Jews, in political rheto-ric, invoking the phrase tikkun olam, fixing the world,

as a value central to Judaism. Yet the actual phrase, derived from the Aleinu prayer, is le-taken olam be-malkhut Shaddai—to fix the world through the kingdom of God. True “social justice” through secularism is unsustainable. As Rabbi Jona-than Sacks notes, if the atheistic So-viets ended up violating the human rights for which they claimed to fight, it was because “when human beings arrogate supreme power to themselves, politics loses its sole secure defense of freedom.” The exiling of God leads “to the eclipse of man.”

As I write these words, Sand-ers’s campaign is going down to defeat across the country, and his praise for Castro is being cited as a political turning point. Yet study-ing the exit polls, one cannot miss

the ardent love that many of America’s youth seem to bear for the senator’s expressed beliefs. The story of Sharansky’s childhood Purim miracle is therefore worth revisiting. The central obligation of the Purim season is zakhor, remembrance of what true villainy once was, and to apply those lessons to our society to-day. Only then can we learn to do as Anatoly Sharan-sky was taught by his father: to praise the good, and curse the wicked, and to never resist calling evil by its name.q

12 April 2020

OnehearsAmericanJews,inpoliticalrhetoric,

invokingthephrasetikkunolam,fixingthe

world,asavaluecentraltoJudaism.Yettheactual

phrase,derivedfromtheAleinuprayer,isle-takenolambemalkhut

Shaddai—tofixtheworldthroughthekingdomofGod.True‘socialjustice’

throughsecularismisunsustainable.

The Rise of the New JacobinsWorking for the revolution with or without Bernie Sanders

By Christine Rosen

WELCOME to the revo-lution,” Waleed Shahid, a spokesperson for the progressive group Jus-tice Democrats, told the New York Times the day after Senator Ber-

nie Sanders won the Nevada Democratic primary caucus. Whether or not Sanders eventually wins the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2020, the movement he’s been leading since he declared his intention to be the party’s nominee in 2015 has gained new converts, especially among younger Americans. And it has been increasingly outspoken about its in-tentions to not merely reform American democracy

but replace it with something less democratic and far more socialist.

Writing in Jacobin, a Democratic Socialist pub-lication, about what a blueprint for such a new move-ment would look like, Seth Ackerman notes, “We need to realize that our situation is more like that facing opposition parties in soft-authoritarian systems, like those of Russia or Singapore. Rather than yet another suicidal frontal assault, we need to mount the electoral equivalent of guerrilla insurgency.” The insurgency he is promoting would put candidates loyal to the social-ist movement on the ballot throughout the United States—but not as fringe third-party candidates. As Democrats.

Sanders’s effort to advance the revolution was dealt a setback on Super Tuesday. Even so, what he set into motion five years ago has moved beyond him Christine Rosen is senior writer at Commentary.

Commentary 13

14 The Rise of the New Jacobins : April 2020

to some degree. Elaine Godfrey, a reporter for the At-lantic, watched returns on Super Tuesday with some in the Sanders vanguard and summed up the mood as follows: “Although every one of the supporters I spoke with was disappointed—and decidedly less confident than before—they offered the same promise: The revolution would continue, with or without Bernie Sanders.” And there is evidence they are right to be optimistic: An NBC News exit poll of Super Tuesday voters in California, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas all showed more favorable than unfavorable opinions of socialism (53 percent in California had a positive view, for example).

Sanders and his progressive supporters fre-quently liken their movement’s revolutionary fervor to the socialist upheavals of earlier eras (particularly those in Nicaragua and Cuba) while also peddling a seemingly more reasonable Scandinavian-socialist-style economic transformation that promises free health care and free college (while criticizing the ef-fects of the free market). This socialist origin story is finding purchase with progressive-minded young people not because they have suddenly acquired a so-phisticated understanding of revolutionary politics or macroeconomics, or because socialist ideals have sud-denly been proven sound elsewhere in the world, but because the “revolution” is being marketed to them as the answer to the challenges their generation faces—including student debt, high housing costs, foreign wars, and Donald Trump.

One of the most potent activist vehicles for this message is a group that formed in January 2017 in the wake of Sanders’s 2016 Democratic-primary loss to Hillary Clinton: the Justice Democrats. It is a PAC (political action committee), although you might not know it given how often media outlets refer to it (as NPR did recently) in more flattering terms as a “pro-gressive organization,” or (as the New York Times did) a “grassroots organization.”

Justice Democrats—founded by Cenk Uygur, Kyle Kulinski, Saikat Chakrabarti, Corbin Trent, and Zack Exley—claims it “encourages” candidates to run. That’s not quite right. In practice, it functions as a socialist American Idol: Justice Democrats actively recruits and stages tryouts to identify possible can-didates to run against Democratic incumbents not

progressive enough to pass their litmus tests. Those include support for Medicare for All (and the abolition of private health insurance); environmental reforms along the lines of the Green New Deal; a federal jobs guarantee; and the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, among others.

Justice Democrats takes contributions from individual donors, and although it makes a lot of noise about “supporting” the candidates it endorses, in fact it funnels most of its money to other PACs (such as their partner PAC, Brand New Congress, and their dark-money sister PAC, Organize for Justice), who then offer “consulting” services to candidates mounting primary challenges to Democrats. In return, those candidates are expected to adhere to the Justice Democrats platform.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Justice Democrats raised $2.7 million in 2017 and spent almost all of it. But how it was spent reveals an odd definition of “support” for the supposedly ordinary progressive-minded Americans they are en-couraging to run for office. Among the U.S. House candidates promoted by Justice Democrats in 2018, most received less than $1,000 from the group, with a few reporting astonishingly small amounts of money (pity John Heenan of Montana, who received only $7—and lost his primary bid). Rashida Tlaib, by contrast, received the most ($6,997), followed closely by Alexan-dria Ocasio-Cortez ($5,000).

Justice Democrats spent only $62,844 in total for all House and Senate candidates they supported. So where did the rest of the money they raised go? The Federal Election Commission has been asking the same question and is looking into possible campaign-finance violations (and seriously dodgy ethics) related to Justice Democrats’ work for AOC’s campaign.

AOC is, of course, the group’s biggest star (and the only one of the 12 candidates it recruited in 2018 to win her race); her defeat of Democratic incumbent Representative Joe Crowley in the Bronx in a primary challenge was hailed as the biggest political upset of 2018. Justice Democrats also endorsed (but did not recruit) the other members of the so-called 2018 Squad—Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. All but Pressley are official campaign surrogates for Sanders.

The socialist origin story is finding purchase with progressive-minded young people because the ‘revolution’ is marketed as the answer to their generation’s challenges.

What Justice Democrats and AOC market is a socialist feeling, as one of their promotional videos reveals. In it, a few leaders of the group and AOC sit in a sun-dappled diner discussing their mission in vague, emotionally laden bromides more suited to a wellness conference than a revolution. “If everyday people don’t feel comfortable in their own skin at the most powerful levels of government, then what’s the point?” AOC asks, during a discussion of why more progressives need to run for office. Another woman nods and says, “You can just be your whole self” if you join Justice Democrats.

As for revolution: “You can make 10 years’ worth of change in one term,” AOC says.

Well, yes. And an arsonist can do 10 years’ worth of damage with one lit match. That doesn’t make it something to encourage. What’s most striking about the sentiments in the video and in much of Justice Democrats’ and AOC’s rhetoric is how individualistic it sounds considering they are recruiting on behalf of a collectivist political ideology.

This is part of a broader intellectual confusion rampant among Sanders supporters as well: They seem uninterested in exploring the trade-offs that an embrace of Sanders-style socialism would require. They are, for now, satisfied with vague claims that equality will triumph and billionaires will be punished, but they assume that government takeovers of major sectors of the economy will have little impact on individual liberty. And yet the would-be hipster entrepreneur who wants to start a cannabis business under a Sanders-style socialist government will face a very different set of choices (and much more limited options) than under our current system, with all of its flaws.

No matter. As Justice Democrats spokesman Shahid recently told BuzzFeed: “The world completely changed after AOC’s victory.” Of course, “the world” changed only if you live in the world of progressive bubbles. Ocasio-Cortez’s unexpected triumph came in an extraordinarily liberal district, far more liberal than just about everywhere else in the nation. According to the Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index, which measures how much more conservative or lib-eral a district is compared with the national average, AOC’s district scores as D+29. Compare those scores to that of the most liberal state in the country, Hawaii, which scores D+18, or Sanders’s home state of Ver-

mont, with a score of D+15.Thus far, the AOC-effect appears to be nontrans-

ferable in 2020. Most of the candidates the Justice Democrats have promoted in the primaries have not performed well. The group’s efforts to plump for “the next AOC”—26-year-old Jessica Cisneros, who chal-lenged Democratic House incumbent Henry Cuellar in Texas—was a failure, albeit a closely run one. Several other Justice Democrats/AOC-endorsed candidates also lost their primary races. Judged solely by their electoral showing, their movement might seem to have lost momentum.

But the message they are selling has obvious appeal, especially among younger Americans, and it is backed by a great deal more “dark money” on the pro-gressive left than the amount Justice Democrats have raised. As Politico reported, a group called the Sixteen Thirty Fund, based in Washington, “spent $141 million on more than 100 left-leaning causes” during the 2018 midterm elections, including funding progressive Democratic candidates who were happy to cash their dark-money checks while railing against the nefarious influence of money in politics. One individual donated $51.7 million to the Fund; so much for denunciations of “late capitalism.” The group funds stunts like one by Demand Justice, which recently “projected a video of Christine Blasey Ford accusing Kavanaugh of assault on the side of a truck outside a Washington gala where Kavanaugh was speaking.”

T HAT MOVEMENT has gained new support from progressive intellectuals at publications such as Jacobin, which is the closest thing to

a Bernie Sanders house organ you can find (Noam Chomsky called it “a bright light in dark times”). The quarterly, which is unabashedly democratic socialist in its politics, began online in 2010 and then expanded into print in 2011. Its founder, Bhaskar Sunkara, told Idiom magazine that it was “largely the product of a younger generation not quite as tied to the Cold War paradigms that sustained the old leftist intellec-tual milieus.” Jacobin also sponsors socialist reading groups, has a scholarly journal called Catalyst, and a partnership to produce books with Random House. Its motto is taken from a line in “The Internationale”: “Reason in revolt.”

Commentary 15

What’s most striking about the sentiments in much of Justice Democrats’ rhetoric is how individualistic it sounds considering they are promoting a collectivist ideology.

16 The Rise of the New Jacobins : April 2020

Jacobin was “founded with the understanding that a better world is possible and will come into being by challenging capitalism and those who profit from class society,” according to its website, and editorially it is more honest about its ambitions than Sanders is, frequently noting the hopelessness of the Democratic Party and arguing for its demise in favor of building a new socialist political movement.

The most recent issue, “Political Revolution,” sets the tone with a little violent rhetoric from Eugene Debs (America’s other homegrown socialist and one of Sand-ers’s heroes): “There are those who deplore war, revo-lution, and rebellion. Manifestly, war is to be lamented, if it is waged to enthrone or to perpetuate wrong, but it expands to superlative grandeur if it is for the purpose of establishing justice and breaking the fetters of slav-ery. In such cases every blow struck for the downtrod-den sends thrills of joy throughout the world.”

But today’s downtrodden Jacobin readers have different complaints from those expressed by Debs’s late-19th-century railway-worker supporters, and they have an odd view of what socialist “superlative gran-deur” should look like. As one contributor, Danny Katch, wrote, “most of us only experience the excite-ment of capitalism as something happening some-where else: new gadgets for rich people, wild parties for celebrities, amazing performances to watch from your couch.” Relegated to the role of capitalism’s un-witting voyeurs, they lament “our jobs being replaced by that incredible new robot, our rent becoming too expensive ever since the beautiful luxury tower was built across the street.”

Like many other Jacobin contributors, Klatch cherry-picks from the revolutionary socialist past to find examples of flourishing; he notes that just after the Russian revolution, socialist disruption prompted a great deal of creativity ( just look at the great posters) and implies that it could do the same today. He fails to carry through his historical analogy, however, perhaps since it ended with quite a few of those artistically cre-ative Russian souls in the Gulag.

Klatch distinguishes between good socialists (like Sanders) and “elitist socialists, whose faith rests more on five-year development plans, utopian blueprints, or winning future elections than on the wonders that hundreds of millions can achieve when

they are inspired and liberated.” But what is Bernie Sanders-style socialism, with its Green New Deals and Medicare for All and attacks on the oil and financial industries, as well as its generally negative view of private property and private wealth, if not a call for elite planning for government seizure of large sectors of private enterprise and industry?

Sanders and his supporters (such as AOC and the Democratic Socialists of America) have also called for policies such as the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency and policies that ef-fectively would create open borders. Even with a “good socialist” at the helm, the transfer of decision-making to the federal government on such a scale (and at great expense to American taxpayers) represents a sharp break with previous eras’ understanding of the role of government. This isn’t the New Deal. It’s a new way of governance, one the majority of Americans over the age of 35 are rightfully suspicious about supporting.

Today’s defenders of socialism in publications like Jacobin appeal not to the policies of authoritarian rulers likes Stalin or Castro, but to vague menaces sup-posedly threatening everyday Americans: “The des-pots of the 21st century that stand in the way include precarity, poverty, plutocracy, structural racism, and mass incarceration,” writes law professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy. And they look to the state to fix them.

Which is why the claim that “real” socialism has never really been tried before (a favorite canard of the new progressive left) is so often invoked to paper over the movement’s intellectual inconsistencies and ahistorical claims. It also allows for a cafeteria-like approach to socialism, as demonstrated by Britton-Purdy—who, annoyed that New York Times columnist David Brooks declared that Bernie Sanders is “what replaces liberal Democrats,” defended Sanders not by invoking Marx but. . . John Stuart Mill.

“Sanders is the genuine candidate of the liberal tradition Brooks invokes,” Britton-Purdy argues, “John Stuart Mill, John Locke, the Social Gospel movement and the New Deal.” Indeed, in Britton-Purdy’s render-ing, Sanders is truly a socialist man for all seasons. “If there is such a thing as an honest conservatism in these parts, Sanders might even be its candidate,” writes Britton-Purdy. This view is echoed by Brooks’s Times colleague Charles Blow, who argued vigorously that

The claim that ‘real’ socialism has never really been tried before is often invoked to paper over the movement’s intellectual inconsistencies and ahistorical claims.

Commentary 17

Build-a-Bear-style socialism was a good thing because “the absolute definition isn’t quite fixed.”

But such arguments are not the inoculation against criticism that eager socialists seem to think they are. If your most persuasive talking point is that no one has been able to implement the salvific revolu-tion you’re promoting (at least without murdering mil-lions of innocent people), and your leader (Sanders) is impatient when asked to spell out the details of how his plan will do it right this time, you’re left with only two options: blind faith in the dear leader, or ideologi-cal zeal. Sanders, like Trump, has cultivated both loyal-ties among his base, but at the expense of persuasion and compromise and other democratic ideals.

“We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, eco-nomic rights are human rights. That is what I mean by democratic socialism,” Sanders said in a 2019 speech. He sounds like he’s reading from a United Nations pamphlet at these moments, but the policies he has in mind are all far more radical than such banalities sug-gest. Medicare for All would end private health insur-ance and cost $34 trillion according to the center-left Urban Institute. The Green New Deal would require massively intrusive regulation of free markets. As James Pogue, a Sanders supporter who covered the primary race in New Hampshire for The Baffler, noted, “everyone I spoke to seemed clear about what the Sanders campaign now represented—not a delighted fuck-you vote for a truth-teller, not a part of a huge up-

swell of new primary voters, but a deliberate, informed vote for a specific set of policies and a reimagining of the market’s central role in all of our lives.”

The larger cohort of Sanders supporters isn’t that sophisticated. Writing in the Atlantic, Annie Lowrey described young people who have “warmed up to re-distributive politics” because they look at single-payer health systems in Canada and elsewhere and think, “We’re rich! We could have that!” This is how younger Americans understand socialism—and Sanders’s sooth-saying about “human rights” plays into that.

Even the taint of the murderous regimes of social-isms past has faded: A poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation about American attitudes to socialism found that “70 percent of mil-lennials say they are likely to vote socialist,” and the percentage who say they are “extremely likely” to vote socialist has doubled from 2018 to 2019. As well, 15 per-cent of millennials “think the world would be better off if the Soviet Union still existed” and 57 percent “think the Declaration of Independence better guarantees freedom and equality over the Communist Manifesto.”

In 2017, Justice Democrats co-founder Cenk Uygur told the Washington Post that 2020 would be the year his movement’s ideas would “more sig-nificantly take over the Democratic Party.” That may have been premature, but as Sanders himself tweeted recently, “I’ve got news for the Republican establish-ment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.” He didn’t put a date to it.q

Sanders, like Trump, has cultivated both blind faith and ideological zeal among his base, but at the expense of persuasion and compromise and other democratic ideals.

The Boys from LaupheimOf my father and his savior, the movie pioneer Carl Laemmle

By Andrew Bergman

IN MARCH 1973, I drove onto the Burbank lot of Warner Brothers to begin a polish of my script Black Bart, the second title of the phenomenon that morphed into Blazing Saddles. (The first was Tex X, rejected due to the studio’s reluctance to have an “X” leering from the marquee.) I was 28, simultane-

ously awestruck and giddy, my heart racing, but as I passed through the studio gates, an immense sadness engulfed me and tears began to run down my cheeks. This reaction was at once surprising and entirely logi-cal, because while I drove alone in my rented Camaro, a ghostly passenger sat beside me—my father Rudy Bergman, whose turbulent but not atypical history had led me to this piercing moment.

Rudy Bergman was a German-Jewish refugee, born in Laupheim, Germany, on November 14, 1911. He was a tall, shy, funny man who often referred to Hitler as “my travel agent.” He had fled Deutschland

in 1937, arriving in New York with no money and no prospects; America was not then in the deepest morass of the Great Depression, but it was still on life support and work was scarce. My dad was initially routed into a holding pattern of menial jobs, at one point selling Fuller Brushes door to door, a task for which he was spectacularly ill-suited. Shlepping a sample case and ringing strange doorbells was a considerable come-down for a person born into relative prosperity, but my father found the situation more comic than tragic, and it left no scars. Rudy was a man for whom bitterness was an unknown sensation.

I say that he knew relative prosperity. Middle-class Jews in Weimar Germany lived not extravagantly but very, very well, with far more domestic help than I ever experienced in my years as a hotsy-totsy writer-di-rector. Laupheim was a small but not insignificant town in Southern Germany and its bourgeoisie employed bat-talions of maids and nannies and laundresses; parents basically saw their kids at bath time, in a snapshot of to-getherness before or after dinner. Rudy was the eldest of the three children born to Paula and Edwin Bergmann,

Andrew Bergman is a screenwriter, film director, and novelist.

18 April 2020

the part owner of Bergmann Wigs, a pro-ducer of hairpieces and associated products that exists to this day, more than 80 years after the Nazis seized its Laupheim factory. In fact, some performances at the Metro-politan Opera still utilize ancient Berg-mann wigs. (The second ‘n’ was dropped when my father arrived in New York.)

The Bergmanns were an interesting bunch. My grandfather Edwin, who died when I was two, was intrigued by photog-raphy; my grandmother Paula, who was not permitted, in the custom of the time, any profession whatsoever except for curating headaches and joint pain, revealed herself later to be a spectacular and witty corre-spondent, writing hilarious letters in her second language. The star of the family was my father’s younger sister Margaret (Gretel), a world-class high-jumper whose racial ban-ishment from the German Olympic team on the eve of the 1936 Games became an inter-national cause célèbre that eventually in-spired both a documentary (HBO’s Hitler’s Pawn) and feature (Berlin 1936) film. She died in Queens in 2017 at age 103, by then lionized in Germany (with stadia named after her) and very much at peace after years of anger at her stolen opportunities. After Gretel immigrated to the U.S., she became an American woman’s high-jump and shot-put champion, despite never having thrown the shot in her life! Unfortunately, she ex-hausted the family’s athletic genes.

While aunt Gretel was a budding sports star, Rudy was living a relatively unfocussed and, dare I say, frivolous existence. Photos of the time feature my dad and his pals blearily wielding beer steins in their beloved Zum Ochsen saloon or lounging on bucolic hill-sides with a variety of smiling women. His memories of Germany were unfailingly pleasant, even after his bru-tal displacement. In truth, he had lived a more leisurely and unstressed life pre-Hitler than his own kids did in the scrappy lower-middle-class world of 1950s Queens.

Rudy took a while finding himself, cushioned by the family’s comfortable condition. After fruitless stints

in business schools in Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Frankfurt, he turned to music, believing that his pas-sion for piano might be more than a phase. He studied the instrument under the Hungarian composer Matyas Seiber at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, which maintained a jazz department until the Nazis shuttered it in 1933. It was a turning point; those lessons, however brief, ignited a creativity that was at his very essence. A life in business was simply not for him. My dad was an ingenious fellow, endlessly curious and enthusiastic, whether playing Gershwin tunes, painting, or taking (and developing) remarkable black-and-white photo-

My dad was an ingenious fellow, endlessly curious and enthusiastic, whether playing Gershwin tunes, painting, or taking remarkable black-and-white photographs.

Circa 1929–30. Left to right: Rudy Bergmann, Gretel Bergmann, and Walter Bergmann.

Commentary 19

graphs in both Germany and New York that formed an indelible record of refugee life in the 1930s and ’40s.

I’m not claiming that Rudy was some kind of Leonardo, but he was a particular type of artistically inclined immigrant who, either by genetic inclina-tion, too-cushy childhood, or just a born-lucky Welt-anschauung, instinctively shied away from ambition. It just wasn’t in him, as it hadn’t been in the makeup of his father, either. The Bergmanns were basically reticent people, even superstar Gretel. But in his early twenties, with a mercantile career clearly not in the cards, Rudy had to figure something out.

E NTER Carl Laemmle.Laupheim was also the hometown of

Herr Laemmle, the genial founder of Universal Pictures. That turned out to be not merely a lucky hap-penstance for my father, but also an important factor in launching my black sheriff and me on the road to Burbank.

“Uncle Carl” Laemmle was an authentic pioneer of the movie business—and a far more benevolent soul than founding ogres like Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, or the Warner brothers. Laemmle had immigrated from Laupheim to New York in 1884 and almost im-mediately entrained to Chicago. He was then 17. After working as a bookkeeper for a clothing manufacturer, Laemmle abruptly pivoted and purchased a small mov-ie theater in Chicago. He acquired an immediate appe-tite for this electrifying blend of art and commerce and headed for Southern California to make his fortune.

Despite his full embrace of Hollywood and its palmy lifestyle, Laemmle never forgot Laupheim or its beery inhabitants. Blessedly, he was a soft touch; thanks to his largesse, my father gained employment at Universal Pictures in Berlin (the famed UFA), doing odd jobs and loving both Weimar Berlin and the louche ambiance of movie work. I can testify that once one has lived and breathed on a movie set, the rest of life can seem wan and low-stakes, lacking the minute-by-minute fizz of film production. So it is not surprising that Rudy developed a crush on show business that lasted for the rest of his all-too-short life.

Exiting Germany gained urgency once anti-Semitism was codified by the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935—which, for openers, stripped Jews

of their citizenship and forbade intermarriage. At this juncture, Rudy once again turned to Laemmle, who provided an affidavit vouchsafing that my father and his fellow Jewish townsmen were guaranteed jobs in the U.S. and would not become wards of the state.

By offering his assurance in this way, Uncle Carl saved the lives of at least a thousand people, whose situation became increasingly dire as Hitler’s race war escalated in lethality and it became obvious that the Western democracies had no more appetite for Jews than the Nazis.

Thus, I owe my life—and hence my children and grandchildren’s lives—to this mild-mannered soul with a fortune built from a multitude of coins dropped by Americans famished for this new entertainment. Those early moviegoers, in their derbies and flouncy dresses, the boys in knickers and newsboy caps, lined up to drop their nickels into the pocket of Uncle Carl, who ulti-mately used this amassed small change to do more tan-gible good than the leaders of the so-called free world.

Rudy was all too cognizant of his debt to Uncle Carl and remained so for the rest of his life. A 1931 biography of Laemmle by John Drinkwater held an honored place in my family’s bookcase, and Laemmle’s name was pronounced with reverence throughout my childhood and beyond. He was a kind of patron saint, underscored by the fact that my mother, born in the Black Forest town of Kippenheim, had no Laem-mle watching over her and was helpless to prevent her parents’ deportation and subsequent gassing at Auschwitz (events excruciatingly detailed in Michael Dobbs’s recent book, The Unwanted). My childhood apartment was small and the Holocaust took up a great deal of space. It wasn’t spoken of all that often, but it was as much a part of our home as the wallpaper.

What did my dad do once he retired the Fuller Brushes? He realized that he possessed a marketable skill, particularly in a country moving almost uncon-sciously into wartime: He was fluent in German and English. Be a translator! Rudy had a terrific ear, re-lated to his musicality, and also a gift for mimicry. He had learned English at an early age, and when he ar-rived in New York, he placed a dictionary next to the toilet to increase his vocabulary. By 1940, he claimed to have begun dreaming in English, which he identi-fied as the landmark moment of his assimilation.

I owe my life to Carl Laemmle, a mild-mannered soul with a fortune built from a multitude of coins dropped by Americans famished for new film entertainment.

20 The Boys from Laupheim : April 2020

Commentary 21

With this skill, Rudy found work at the New York Daily News, listening to German shortwave broadcasts and translating them for the news desk. The Daily News in the 1940s had a daily circulation of more than 2 million copies, rising to a nearly unimaginable 4.7 mil-lion on Sundays. My dad was suddenly the ears for mil-lions of New Yorkers, but as the war ended, he moved beyond the largely mechanical work of translation to the Radio-TV desk. Now a newsman proper, he became infatuated with the Runyonesque world of New York’s mightiest tabloid—a universe of underpaid and wise-cracking journalists, press agents hyping their clients, and ink-smeared typesetters working on massive lino-type machines in Dickensian conditions. Despite the abysmal wages, he loved this all-so-metropolitan world.

As I learned to read, I began to recognize my dad’s name in print, bylining his columns and reviews, and it was a thrill each time, as it is merely to write “Rudy Bergman” now, 49 years since his death, with the magi-cal belief that I can summon him back to life, a cold coal suddenly glowing red. I joyously recall a morning

in junior high school when outraged girls began casti-gating me for Rudy having referred to Elvis Presley as “Elvis the Pelvis” after an early appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. They read my Dad’s column! Sadly, it didn’t give me much social traction; then again, at age 11 and barely over five feet tall, nothing would. But it was a portent of frothy, showbiz fun in the offing.

More important, my father’s love of comedy became a kind of ongoing seminar for me. He was the first person in New York to notice Ernie Kovacs’s revo-lutionary performing style; as a result, he and Kovacs established a friendship that endured until the come-dian’s fatal 1962 automobile crash. One day, Rudy ap-peared on Kovacs’s live afternoon TV show, introduced as a critic who had “graciously volunteered” to observe the broadcast. I had gained permission to skip school and watched in wonder as my dad appeared, bound in ropes and roughly dumped behind a typewriter. Rudy played along, deadpan, as the prop-loving Kovacs continually cut to him during the broadcast, once with a clothespin attached to his nose, another time with

My father’s love of comedy became a kind of ongoing seminar for me. He was the first person in New York to notice Ernie Kovacs’s revolutionary performing style.

The Laemmle family meets in Laupheim, 1920.

22 The Boys from Laupheim : April 2020

smoke billowing from his typewriter.Rudy’s ambitions went well beyond journalism.

He wrote comedy, submitting sketches to Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, all politely rejected, and then began writing gags for another Jewish exile, the won-drous pianistic comedian Victor Borge. He and my Dad were made for each other, with their shared refugee sensibility and love of music and wordplay. Also, my father worked cheap, which Borge happily obliged.

At the time, the Dane was starring in Comedy In Music, a one-man show that ran for three years on Broadway. It was my first experience at the theater, and it was both sidesplitting and entrancing. To watch this brilliant combination of verbal wit (the famed “phonet-ic punctuation” routine) and physical comedy (falling off the piano bench) was a revelation to nine-year-old me. And the laughter! That roar from a live audience, the helpless submission to a surefire gag, was the first taste of a drug I would be addicted to until this very day.

Borge’s timing was extraordinary. Years later, I had the pleasure of working with George Burns, who had encyclopedic comic knowledge. When I brought up Borge’s name, George flatly declared that only Jack Ben-ny had better timing. The best routine that Rudy wrote for Borge relied entirely on timing. It was the “self-winding watch” bit. While playing Liszt, Borge abruptly paused and began rotating his left wrist, explaining that he had just purchased a self-winding watch. A laugh. He resumed playing, still ruminating about the watch, explaining that the hotel operator phoned him nightly every few hours, awakening him to wiggle his wrist. But that wasn’t all: Because said operator also possessed such a watch, Borge periodically had to wake himself up to phone her back! He then catalogued the watch’s myriad features—telling time in different zones, cataloguing sunrises and phases of the moon, before announcing, “It is now low tide in Honolulu!” Rudy sold this gag—used in perpetuity by Borge and included in his classic Comedy in Music album—for a total of $150.

I F THE EXPERIENCE was not all that remunera-tive for my father, it was certainly intoxicating for me. On Saturdays, Rudy and I would take

the Flushing train into Manhattan to visit Borge after his matinee performance at the Golden Theater and

deliver some fresh material. We would sit in Borge’s dressing room, listening to the explosive laughter from below. At about four o’clock we would hear thunderous applause, and then Borge’s poodle would run up the stairs and into the room, followed by the Dane himself, unfastening his black tie. As cheap as Borge was, he was unfailingly kind and funny to me. One weekend he invited us all to his massive estate in Connecticut, where I developed an immediate and futile crush on his daughter Sanna. When I played my first piano re-cital at Turtle Bay Music School, he immediately called our Corona home and accused me of stealing his act.

I felt entirely at ease around him, and I have no doubt the experience conditioned me to feel social com-fort around the high and mighty of show business, an ex-perience that proved invaluable once I was put in a writ-ing room with the likes of Mel Brooks and Richard Pryor as my very first professional experience. Even Marlon Brando, whom I directed in The Freshman, could be handled once I discovered his fatal weakness for Borscht Belt comedy. I had been inoculated against awe.

When I decided to pursue a writer’s life, instead of that of a history professor, my old man was entirely supportive. As long as I didn’t become a newspaper-man, he was content. (Talk about prescience!) When he read the 90-page novella called Tex X, he proudly told my mother: “The little shit writes better than I do.”

When I sold the story to Warners in late May of 1971, he was over the moon. I took the E train out to Forest Hills to celebrate with him and my mother and to bid them adieu before a long-planned trip to Italy. One week later, I received a postcard from Rudy, simply saying, “How’s Tex X?” If he never was going to make it to Hollywood, his kid was.

That postcard was our last communication because on June 14, 1971, he collapsed and died in Genoa. Years later, reclined on my analyst’s couch, I wondered if my success was in any way connected to Rudy’s demise, if the acceptance of the Bergman name by Warner Brothers meant that he was now free to go. I prefer to think that he just had a bad heart, but the two events are forever comingled in my mind. In any case, I do not doubt his presence in my Camaro on that sunny March day in 1973. From Laupheim to Burbank, the circle had been closed.q

That roar from a live audience, the helpless submission to a surefire gag, was the first taste of a drug I would be addicted to until this very day.

Letting Anti-Semites Be Their GuideA progressive Jewish organization is committed to letting preferred Jew-haters off the hook

By Karys Rhea and Keren Toledano

ASTRANGE NOTION has found purchase in progressive circles. It holds that nominally marginal-ized and oppressed groups, most notably Muslims and African Americans, cannot themselves espouse hateful views. According

to this thinking, white people maintain a monopoly on hate, and every expression of hate by someone who is nonwhite is linked to some form of white or Western influence, whether colonialist, capitalist, or Christian.

This idea is also frequently embraced by those doing the hating. Consider the strain of anti-Semitism endemic to Palestinian society, where government-run

television, media, textbooks, and mosques encour-age violence against Jews, praise Hitler, characterize Jews as “apes and pigs,” and deny the Holocaust. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah move-ment, widely taken to be the most moderate wing of Palestinian politics and the best chance for a partner in peace with Israel, recently released a video claiming that Jews “led the project to enslave humanity” and that Jewish behavior is responsible for anti-Semitism.

To many on the hard left, this moral inversion fits comfortably with Marxist theories about class struggle and power. When a class of people is deemed to lack power, their misdeeds are recast as noble ef-forts to obtain that power—even when those misdeeds might include terrorist acts against innocent civilians.

Never mind that the historical record is wholly at odds with Fatah’s explanation for Jew-hatred. Islamic anti-Semitism has been a fundamental part of Middle

Karys Rhea is a Counter-Islamist Grid fellow at the Middle East Forum. Keren Toledano is a writer and artist in New York City.

Commentary 23

East culture for more than a millennium. Long before capitalism and Western colonialism, Jews were treated as second-class citizens, or “dhimmis,” under Islamic law, and they endured frequent pogroms, humiliation, and brutal oppression. Thus, denying the historical re-cord is a necessity if one is set on absolving the wicked.

The lengths to which some will go in their denial

is exemplified by a New York–based progressive or-ganization called Jews for Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ). Founded in 1990 by the academic and activist Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark and the activist Donna Nevel, JFREJ claims it is inspired by Jewish tradition to dismantle racism and economic exploitation. On its website, the organization highlights its work with Black Lives Matter and its efforts to fight Islamophobia and dismantle ICE, among other things. JFREJ has published a guide called “Understanding Anti-Sem-itism” that takes readers through the leftist looking glass into a world where oppressor and oppressed bear little resemblance to their real-life counterparts. It is worth looking at this organization’s rhetoric as it helps shine a light on the current pathways of anti-racist ac-tivism and how it acts as a cover for Jew-hatred.

The authors of “Understanding Anti-Semitism” blame Christian dogma and hierarchies for the cre-ation of Jew-hatred while writing off centuries of anti-Semitism in the Arab-Muslim world. They even reframe the dhimmi status imposed on Jews, cast-ing it as a “protection” of the sultan. And while they acknowledge that this protection was bought through heavy taxation and that it facilitated “sporadic attacks, forced conversions and mass killings of Jews,” they claim that no specific “anti-Jewish ideology” persisted in the Arab-Muslim world because, after all, other non-Muslims were also oppressed. How the presence of additional prejudices makes anti-Semitism less big-oted is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Muslim anti-Semitism culminated in nearly 1 million Jews of Araby ethnically cleansed, forcibly dispossessed, and expelled from their homes in the 20th century alone.

It is telling that the JFREJ guide discusses “Is-lamophobia” but omits mention of the persecution of Christians currently rampant in the Arab-Muslim world. It misleadingly blames “white Christian na-

tionalism” for the vast majority of domestic terrorist attacks in the United States, conveniently ignoring that 2019 saw roughly an even number of casualties at the hands of white-nationalist terrorists and jihad-ists. JFREJ also doesn’t mention that in 2017 alone, groups such as al-Shabab and the Taliban carried out nearly 11,000 Islamist attacks worldwide, resulting in

26,000 casualties. Just as JFREJ exonerates

Muslims wholesale for anti-Semitism, the group exempts racial minorities for it as well. In an interview with the De-mocracy Now radio show in late December, JFREJ executive director Audrey Sasson referred

to New York City’s recent onslaught of anti-Semitic at-tacks as a manifestation of white nationalism—despite the fact that the majority of incidents were perpetrated by African Americans. In the December 28th stabbing attack on five Hasidic Jews at a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York, for example, the assailant was a 37-year-old black male who reportedly Googled topics such as “Why did Hitler hate Jews,” “Zionist Temples in Staten Island,” and “Prominent companies founded by Jews in America.”

Some leftist Democratic politicians have dab-bled in similar scapegoating. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, claimed that the rash of hate crimes in New York City was a “right-wing” problem. On Twitter, Representative Rashida Tlaib blamed “white supremacy” for the Jersey City shooting at a ko-sher supermarket that took the lives of three Jews and a non-Jewish police officer, even though both perpe-trators were African Americans and one was affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelites—a black supremacist and anti-Semitic hate group.

De Blasio later backtracked on his comments, and Tlaib deleted her tweet. But JFREJ has upheld the notion that there is no anti-Semitism apart from white suprem-acy, including retweeting an article from the socialist magazine Jacobin that claimed the best way to fight anti-Semitism “is to reject the centrist idea that anti-Semitism transcends politics,” and declared it was “pernicious” to point out that Jew-haters exist on the left and the right.

Yet every week, it seems, another video appears on social media, or in the news, showing a black American verbally or physically attacking a visibly Jewish victim. The attacks range from anti-Semitic ti-rades to throwing objects, spitting, beating, stabbing, and shooting. Indeed, one could rightly describe these frequent and vicious assaults on Jews as a slow-motion pogrom.

Just as Jews for Racial & Economic Justice exonerates Muslims wholesale for anti-Semitism, the group exempts racial minorities for it as well.

24 Letting Anti-Semites Be Their Guide : April 2020

What is JFREJ’s solution to this problem? Ap-parently, the first step is to deny that it is happening at all. The group’s website claims that the real issue is “white Jews’ preoccupation with black anti-Semitism,” stoked by “a false narrative...that focuses on conflict between white Jews and black non-Jews.” And who does the organization see as the true “architects of this conflict”? Get ready for it: “Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South forcing African-Americans to flee to north-ern cities”—Ku Klux Klan terrorists, that is, who were last active a century ago.

The second part of the solution is no less con-founding. In Sasson’s recent interview, she said: “Our focus is to build solidarity with other groups targeted by anti-Semitism.” Other groups targeted by anti-Semitism? The very formulation defies intelligibility.

But it is revealing nonetheless. Sasson’s true intention is to deny that anti-Semitism—understood as a specific hatred against Jews—even exists. JFREJ subordinates the uniqueness of the Jewish plight to a larger narrative about racism—one that ironically ex-cludes the Jews. This explains why, at New York City’s January 5th “March Against Anti-Semitism,” JFREJ chose to publicize the event as a generalized rally against “hate.” In their promotional material, they even mentioned Islamophobia before saying a word about anti-Semitism.

What we see here are leftist Jews leveraging their “Jewishness” to perpetuate a logical and moral perversion. In a similar fashion, the November 2019 issue of Jewish Currents featured Vermont sena-tor and Democratic candidate for president Bernie Sanders conflating the fight against anti-Semitism with Palestinian liberation: “The forces fomenting anti-Semitism are the forces arrayed against op-pressed people around the world, including Palestin-ians.…The struggle against an-ti-Semitism is also the struggle for Palestinian freedom.”

Once anti-Semitism is grouped with bigotry in general, it can be ignored in favor of more fashionable concerns: namely, systemic racism in the United States. In her interview, Sasson asserted that attacks on Jews, if committed by minori-ties, arise from “rightful anger about real problems.” Since black Americans are perceived to be a marginal-ized group, their hate crimes must be rationalized as an understandable, if misguided, rebellion against oppression—as opposed to the manifestation of anti-Semitism that they are.

By this reasoning, Nation of Islam leader Louis

Farrakhan—who famously compared Jews to “ter-mites,” called Jews “bloodsuckers,” “great and master deceivers,” and the “enemy of God and the enemy of the righteous”—hates Jews because of some misplaced grudge against the system. And so when Farrakhan refers to Hitler as “a very great man” and attributes gay marriage, abortion, and anal sex to the “Satanic influ-ence of the Talmudic Jews,” he is merely reacting to the evil of the white, Christian West.

In actuality, what we know about the Nation of Islam and groups such as the Black Hebrew Israelites is that their members have been actively enlisting peo-ple of color for decades, setting up shop and drumming up hatred in local communities. They preach that Jews are to blame for the plight of African Americans and draw an equivalence between black suffering in the U.S. and Palestinian suffering in the Middle East. This line of anti-Semitism gained particular strength after the assassination of Martin Luther King, a Zionist and friend of the Jews. King’s tragic departure from the national conversation paved the way for his views to be overtaken by those in the tradition of Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, who wedded his ideas on black power to a sci-fi version of Islam and made anti-Semitism an enduring feature of the Nation of Islam.

JFREJ has actually aligned itself with Farrakhan supporters. On its website, the group proudly states that it lets the priorities of the marginalized groups with which it partners “guide [its] actions.” Thus JFREJ has partnered with two former leaders of the Women’s March: Tamika Mallory, an African Ameri-can, and Linda Sarsour, a Muslim American. Both women have voiced admiration for Louis Farrakhan. And Sarsour’s record of anti-Semitic statements in the name of Palestinian activism is well-known. She has said, for example, that Israel is “built on supremacy”

and “on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else.” She also tweeted: “Nothing is creepier than Zionism.” Sarsour earned an approving retweet from former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke when she tweeted: “Israel should give free citizenship to US politicians. They are more loyal to Israel than they are to the American people.” But, as one headline on JFREJ’s website says, “JFREJ Stands with Linda

Once anti-Semitism is grouped with bigotry in general, it can be ignored in favor of more fashionable concerns: namely, systemic racism in the U.S.

Commentary 25

26 Letting Anti-Semites Be Their Guide : April 2020

Sarsour (Again, Always, with Love).” If people like Sarsour guide JFREJ’s actions, it’s no wonder that the group whitewashes hate crimes against Jews.

Above all, JFREJ prizes its “alliances” and read-ily dismisses the sins of its allies—even when those sins run counter to the group’s stated beliefs. In her interview, Sasson rightly described anti-Semitism as a

“tool that punches up against Jews, in that it portrays Jews as powerful.” But this is precisely the conspiracist brand of anti-Semitism espoused by anti-Israel groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace, with whom JFREJ partners. These outfits rely on an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist framework that sees the Jewish collective (i.e., Israel) as the oppressive power and that equates Zionism with Palestinian suffering.

Either Sasson is displaying willful blindness or she has been corrupted by the very suggestion she claims to condemn: that Jews are the oppressor class, and Pal-estinians their hapless victims. The latter stance seems more convincing given the activist left’s penchant for pitting the powerful against the weak. As John-Paul Pa-gano has written, if Jews are perceived as the oppressor

class, then overt anti-Semitism becomes “easy to disguise as a politics of emancipation,” and punching up at Jews becomes “a form of speaking truth to power.”

While it is true that abusers are often themselves the victims of abuse, and that a person’s experience of oppression may contribute to the ways in which he oppresses other people, it is intellectually dishonest

to claim that this is somehow exculpatory. And while it is laudable to condemn all forms of bigotry, there is something obscene about automatically holding up the perpetrator of a hate crime as a victim and subsequently elevating his griev-ances above the violence done

to the actual injured party. Regarding such violence, Sasson’s vigilance is wanting. On Democracy Now, she argued against greater security measures for Jews and claimed that the “answer to what is happening is not more policing.”

Anti-Semitism has long been a feature of ex-treme left-wing and Islamist ideologies—from Soviet Communism to Hezbollah’s exterminationist creed. As everyone knows, it has also been a feature of fascism and Nazism. It is incumbent on both the left and right to root out the Jew-haters in their midst. But some progressive groups have instead embraced them—as a display of progressive virtue, no less. As is often the case when bigotry is given the gloss of victimhood, it is the Jews who will bear the brunt of the abuse.q

Above all, JFREJ prizes its ‘alliances’ and readily dismisses the sins of its allies—even when those sins run counter to the group’s stated beliefs.

The Closing of the American Experiment?Christopher Caldwell’s brilliant provocation

By Barton Swaim

THE COMMON interpretation of the 2016 election put forward by the American left over the last three years holds that Donald Trump won by arousing the coun-try’s latent racism and driving bigots to the polls. He spoke of

building a wall along our southern border to keep out Mexican criminals, and he didn’t straightforwardly disavow “birtherism”—the belief that Barack Obama was not born in the United States—until September 2016, thus signaling to racists across the Upper Mid-west that he sympathized with their hatreds. One of

this theory’s flaws, other than the supposition that millions of Americans are racists, is its reliance on the belief that Trump speaks in code. Its promoters frequently use the term “dog whistle.” But what would lead anybody to believe that Donald Trump is capable of rhetorical subtlety?

Christopher Caldwell never mentions Donald Trump’s name in The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, but the book offers its own race-related interpretation of the ’16 election. It is a vastly more sophisticated, thoughtful, and generous version than the one spat out by left-liberal pundits in their pique, but Caldwell also believes that that election was mainly about race. “By the election year of 2016,” he writes, “Americans would be so scared to speak their mind on matters even tangential to civil rights that

Barton Swaim is an editorial-page writer at the Wall Street Journal.

Commentary 27

their political mood was essentially unreadable. Amer-icans’ grievances against diversity were now bottled up, in a way that was reminiscent of French people’s late-19th-century obsession with reconquering Alsace and Lorraine. (‘Think of it always,’ the 19th-century French statesman Léon Gambetta had said. ‘Speak of it never.’)”

That state of quiet frustration is where the book ends. It begins a half-century before, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Caldwell’s overarching argument is that the civil-rights law inaugurated a completely new worldview in American politics and government and abrogated its predecessor. “The changes of the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution,” Caldwell writes.

They were a rival constitution, with which the

original one was frequently incompatible—

and the incompatibility would worsen as the

civil-rights regime was built out. Much of what

we have called “polarization” or “incivility” in

recent years is something more grave—it is the

disagreement over which of the two constitu-

tions shall prevail: the de jure constitution of

1788, with all the traditional forms of jurispru-

dential legitimacy and centuries of American

culture behind it; or the de facto constitution

of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of le-

gitimacy but commands the near-unanimous

endorsement of judicial elites and civic educa-

tors and the passionate allegiance of those

who received it as a liberation.

This gives one some idea of why Trump’s 2016 victory was a shock. Many of the people who voted for him had been reluctant openly to express the anxiet-ies that led them to make that decision. To question any component of the civil-rights law, or to reveal the suspicion that there is something deeply amiss about the way white liberal elites have handled the matter of race over the last half-century, is to risk the accusation of racism and to associate oneself with nostalgists for segregation. Such accusations wrongly assume that specific legislation passed in the 1960s was the only way to redress the wrongs of racial discrimination in the public and private spheres, but American elites,

especially those in politics and the media, are now almost totally incapable of holding nuanced discus-sions about race. Querying the rationale behind that law and the modern understanding of the world to which it gave birth is nothing less than an act of secu-lar blasphemy. In 2010, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky broadly suggested that there were problems with the Civil Rights Act and couldn’t say whether he would have voted for it; he was castigated for it in the media so relentlessly that he wound up issuing a lengthy press release in essence denying that he was a racist who wanted to take us back to the days of segregation.

But the Civil Rights Act, Caldwell contends, didn’t simply repeal the clearly unconstitutional sys-tem of segregation. “The civil-rights movement was not precisely a movement of civil rights, in the sense of giving American blacks access to the ordinary rights of cives, or citizens,” he writes. “If it had been, the laws would not have required changing, only enforcing.” What Congress fashioned in the early 1960s was not a guarantee of civil rights but a conception of hu-man rights and an “anti-racist regime” that explicitly carved up the American people along lines of race.

The 1964 law—together with the 1972 amend-ment assigning enforcement provisions to Title VII, as well as a body of Supreme Court rulings defining various types of discrimination as violations of the law—redefined the American polity. The federal gov-ernment soon adopted a new understanding of its purpose: to remake American society according to en-lightened theories of racial justice. Federal authorities, and, to a lesser extent, state authorities empowered by state-level versions of the Civil Rights Act, could henceforth monitor and meddle in private affairs even in the absence of any evidence of racial discrimination. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), for example, the Su-preme Court ruled unanimously that the Duke Power Co. could not impose aptitude tests on job applicants if such tests adversely affected minority applicants, even if there was no intention to exclude them.

The right of association, furthermore, long held to be implicit in the First Amendment’s guarantee of free assembly, was effectively neutered by the law. This point is obvious, but you don’t often hear it mentioned, even by conservatives, since to do so would seem to put one on the side of segregationism and other forms of

His overarching argument is that the 1964 civil-rights law inaugurated a completely new worldview in American politics and government and abrograted its predecessor.

28 The Closing of the American Experiment? : April 2020

bigotry. If a restaurant won’t serve black people, say, the Civil Rights Act empowers the government to ar-raign the restaurant’s proprietor. The proprietor in that case would deserve every bit of public ridicule coming to him, but the question is not whether one approves or disapproves of such repellent behavior. The question is whether it’s wise or practical to allow federal authori-ties to monitor hundreds of thousands of private busi-nesses for patterns of behavior that are extremely dif-ficult to detect and even define. Customers themselves are far better equipped to carry out that task. Indeed, with the assumptions undergirding the civil-rights revolution now firmly part of the American moral out-look, the public is now probably too well equipped to punish the unenlightened. A world in which all forms of prejudice must be ferreted out by the authorities is a world in which the proprietor of an Indiana pizzeria had better give the right answer about same-sex mar-riage when asked about it by a local news affiliate. If he doesn’t, he can expect to be harassed and shamed and threatened and, eventually, driven out of business.

But the real significance of the Civil Rights Act, in Caldwell’s account, wasn’t the act itself. There are cogent arguments for and against the constitutionality of different parts of the sprawling law. Its cultural and historical importance lay, rather, in the way its prem-ises about law and society came to dominate the minds of American elites.

T HE AGE of Entitlement is a work of history, not a work of sociological analysis. It does not conclude with a list of solutions or proposals.

But this is no ordinary work of history. It engages and dazzles the reader in the way the histories of A.J.P. Tay-lor once did. Caldwell, as those who know his journal-ism and his 2010 book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe will know, has a marvelous talent for pointing out the unacknowledged contradictions and perversi-ties in the outlooks of both left and right.

The overarching theme of the last half-century is this: that the war generation, the so-called Great-est Generation, the people who wrote, passed, and implemented the 1964 Civil Rights Act, felt they’d triumphed over the gates of hell in 1945. In many ways they had, but their confidence and pride led them, as policymakers and managers of the 1950s and ’60s, to

arrogance and innumerable follies. They sought to re-make the world by force of will. Whatever they wanted to do henceforth—obliterate racism by fiat, establish an American stronghold in Southeast Asia, enjoy the benefits of sex without the responsibilities of child-rearing—they felt they could do.

They could also build a welfare state without the means to pay for it. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Caldwell observes, was “the institutional form into which the civil rights impulse hardened.” The modern American welfare state is in many ways the neces-sary outworking of the civil-rights movement, or at least of the movement as it was interpreted by whites. Desegregation, he writes, was “the most massive undertaking of any kind in the history of the United States,” involving “endurance, patience, and prohibi-tive expense,” requiring as it did not just the abroga-tion of segregation laws but the creation of a byzantine web of government entities, from higher education to housing policy, designed to manage and enforce the integration of races in every sphere of American life. The work is still far from done.

The Great Society, indeed, was only one of the massive and massively expensive projects carried out by an American political class that believed itself invincible. Another was the Vietnam War. Johnson, Caldwell points out, “frequently described the war as a New Deal–style project and even launched a Mekong River Redevelopment Commission to industrialize, as far as possible, the vast, ramifying waterway that entered the South China Sea south of Saigon.” Johnson said: “I want to leave the footprints of America in Viet-nam. I want them to say, ‘When the Americans come, this is what they leave—schools, not long cigars.’”

“It was the war itself, and not the protests against it,” Caldwell writes, “that was the sister move-ment to the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society.”

By the mid-1970s, white Americans had begun to realize how costly it would be to carry out the goals of the civil-rights law and attendant programs, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan was there to tell them they could have it both ways. “The rhetoric that brought Reagan two landslides,” Caldwell writes, “was, among other things, a sign that Americans were unwilling to bank-roll with their taxes the civil rights and welfare revolu-tion of the 1960s and the social change it brought in

A world in which all prejudice must be ferreted out by the authorities is a world in which the proprietor of a pizzeria had better give the right answer about same-sex marriage.

Commentary 29

30 The Closing of the American Experiment? : April 2020

its train.” The solution? Deficit financing. “Once debt was used as a means to keep the social peace, it would quickly run into the trillions.”

Another consequence of the belief that we could have anything we wanted, cost-free—the belief that America could simply decree itself into the multiracial harmony to which it was entitled—was the criminal-ization of anything that stood in the way of absolute equality and fulfillment. The civil-rights law’s empow-ering of federal authorities to manage private affairs was modest compared with the social phenomenon that flowed out of it: political correctness.

For centuries, the conflicts between individual sexual needs, on the one hand, and society’s need for order and stability, on the other—Caldwell asks us to think of Romeo and Juliet or the angst-ridden lyrics of gay pop singer Morrissey—were tragic manifestations of the human condition. They were not political; they could not be managed or corrected by force of law; that is what made them tragic. Now, though, writes Caldwell, “with the tools provided by civil rights law, they appeared quite political. . . . No longer was the irreconcilability of individuals’ and society’s sexual priorities a tragedy or a disagreement. Recast in the categories of civil rights law, it was a crime, a crime that was being committed against a whole class of peo-ple. The customs and traditions in the name of which it was being committed were mere alibis.”

Some of the most penetrating passages of The Age of Entitlement are those in which the author lays bare the assumptions behind fashionable words and phrases. Under the permanent civil-rights revolution, liberal elites had to go on pretending that the objects of their paternal solicitude—racial minorities and, later, women and gays—were still the disadvantaged and persecuted people and groups they were before. And so the word “subversive”

became a term of praise in academia . . . but

it was deployed in an unusual sense. “Sub-

versive” scholars were supporting the very

same things the government was mustering

all its budgetary and enforcement power, and

the corporate and foundation sector all its

funding and ingenuity, to bring about. Rarely

did professors now seek to subvert (as they

had in the past) promiscuity or atheism or

pacifism. Today’s “subversive” opinions—that

there ought to be more blacks in positions

of authority, that a gay relationship is just as

good as a straight one—were given special

protection by civil rights laws, and there were

now hundreds of thousands of people at all

levels of government and business who had

been trained to impose them.

“Subversive,” like “transgressive” and “revolu-tionary,” has come to mean establishmentarian and mainstream. This goes some way toward explaining why today’s liberals so often sound, attitudinally at least, like conservatives—or rather like cardigan-wearing fuddy-duddies lamenting the changing times. It is no longer conservatives but liberals who must defend the existing regime. They, to use the popular term, own it.

The way liberals will need to defend the civil-rights regime is nicely illustrated by an early review of Caldwell’s book. The review, by Jonathan Rauch in the New York Times, is about as snide as you would expect, calling the book “overwrought and strangely airless” and suggesting, predictably, that Caldwell half-believes that “Southern segregationists were right all along.” In fact he states clearly what should have been obvious to any thinking person, namely “that government-sponsored racial inequality was a contra-diction of America’s constitutional principles and an affront to its Christian ones.” Snideness aside, though, the Times review conveniently amalgamates the out-lawing of segregation and Jim Crow, on the one hand, and the massive civil-rights apparatus and attendant ideology, on the other—as if the one could never have been accomplished without the other.

Rauch, in other words, simply sidesteps the point of the book. “I worry about the illiberal excesses of identity politics and political correctness,” the reviewer writes, “but I think excesses is what they are, and I think they, too, can be worked through. Being a homosexual American now miraculously married to my husband for almost a decade, I can’t help feeling astonished by a his-tory of America since 1964 that finds space for only one paragraph briefly acknowledging the civil rights move-ment’s social and moral achievements—before hasten-

Today’s liberals so often sound, attitudinally at least, like conservatives—or rather like cardigan-wearing fuddy-duddies lamenting the changing times.

Commentary 31

ing back to ‘But the costs of civil rights were high.’” It’s worth noting, and I wonder if Rauch has ever

noticed, that phrases like “the civil rights movement’s social and moral achievements” are used almost exclu-sively by white people. Blacks speak glowingly about members of the civil-rights movement, especially Martin Luther King, but they do not typically glory, as Rauch does about his status as a gay married man, in the advantages and privileges they enjoy as a result of the movement’s achievements. You don’t need to deny the courage of black civil rights leaders, or question the rightness of their cause, to wonder why that is. Perhaps it’s because to speak airily of the civil-rights movement’s “social and moral achievements” is to sug-gest that the justice and equality the movement sought have been achieved already. Blacks know they have not. Perhaps it’s also because the adjectives in that phrase—“social and moral achievements”—seem de-signed to highlight the virtue of whites, as if the main value of the civil-rights movement was to unburden white people of their guilt.

Nor is it quite right to dismiss the twisted ideologies and vicious practices constantly issuing from the race and identity worldview as so many “excesses.” Political correctness has now morphed into a cruel and arbitrarily coercive set of protocols that keep well-meaning people in a state of fear. Civil-rights laws have expanded to include so many protected classes that small and midsized businesses are obliged to keep expensive attorneys permanently on retainer to tell them if anything in their policies or language falls afoul of the law. Caterers, florists, and churches across the country are pressured to partici-pate against their wishes in same-sex weddings, mani-festly in the hope that a court decision will force them to accede to the civil-rights agenda. Innocent people see their reputations ruined and their families threat-ened because they spoke a misguided word about race or gender or sexual identity in a public forum. Accom-plished scholars are shouted down and assaulted on allegedly elite college campuses because they wrote

something on race disfavored by the arbiters of racial justice. Mainstream news organizations’ fixation on race intensifies with each passing year, almost as if there is no topic worth considering apart from its relationship to race, as jaded subscribers reluctantly decide to get their news elsewhere or not at all. Blacks continue to falter in educational achievement, and black neighborhoods continue to struggle with vio-lent crime, decade after decade, even as government agencies run mostly by whites keep encouraging the dependency and illegitimacy that ensure failure. But at least white liberals can go on congratulating them-selves for their moral superiority and pretending all is basically as it should be.

T HE AGE of Entitlement calls to mind a best-seller of 33 years ago, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, a book that

outraged the country’s liberal elite by contending that American higher education’s unthinking emphasis on “openness” had become a kind of moral and intel-lectual idiocy. Caldwell’s is a less pretentious book than Bloom’s, and the latter’s strange and impractical counsel to return to the virtues and ideals of classical Greek authors has no correlative in Caldwell’s book. But like Bloom, Caldwell writes with a nearly unparal-leled fluency and authority, and like The Closing of the American Mind, The Age of Entitlement poses a direct challenge to contemporary pieties.

And yet Caldwell’s book has had a quieter recep-tion. Judging by its Amazon sales ranking six weeks after its publication date, The Age of Entitlement is selling well, but it has not been the media sensation that Allan Bloom’s book was. It has not scandalized the American elite in the way that, by every objec-tive measure, it should. Is that because, in the age of Donald Trump, the elite are not so easily scandal-ized? Maybe. But I wonder if it’s also because liberal academics and intellectuals simply aren’t mentally prepared to engage with a work that is so—what’s the word?—subversive.q

Civil-rights laws have expanded to include so many protected classes that even small businesses are obliged to keep expensive attorneys permanently on retainer.

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Commentary 33

Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947By Norman LebrechtScribner, 437 pages

Reviewed by Josef Joffe

WHY THE Jews? By a liberal de-finition of trib-al membership (meaning those

with at least one Jewish parent), there are around 17 million Jews in the world—about the population of Kazakhstan. An ancient civiliza-tion, Kazakhstan boasts a 99.5 per-

cent literacy rate, but while it has produced writers and scientists, their names are not exactly house-hold words.

Contrast this with the Jews. They invented monotheism, Hol-lywood, gefilte fish, relativity, and free will (Adam chose to eat the apple). Over the centuries, Jewish über-achievers range from Marx, Freud, Proust, Kafka, and Ein-stein to Mahler, Mendelssohn-Bar-tholdy, Gershwin, and Dylan; to Disraeli and Leon Blum; to Jonas Salk (polio vaccine) and Paul Eh-rlich (chemotherapy); to Silicon Valley titans such as Sergei Brin and Larry Ellison; to Kirk Douglas, Steven Spielberg, and Seinfeld. Not to mention Groucho. Or Helena Rubinstein and Estée Lauder, who cooked up modern cosmetics.

So how did the Jews, who make up .2 percent of mankind, “change the world?” This is the question Norman Lebrecht asks in the sub-title of his new book, Genius and Anxiety. “I am not about to make a case for Jewish exceptionalism,” he answers, “nor do I believe that Jews are genetically gifted above the av-erage.” Instead, he ascribes Jewish seichel to “culture and experience rather than DNA.” It’s all due to numeracy, literacy, and critical rea-soning—the stuff of Talmudic study.

Lebrecht keeps referring to the causal role of the Talmud through-out his book, suggesting that even Freud and Einstein, who had never set foot in a yeshiva, were some-how formed by Talmudic sages who kept arguing ad infinitum for some 300 years at the beginning

Freeing the Captives

Josef Joffe is on the editorial council of the weekly Die Zeit and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institu-tion.

Politics & Ideas

34 Politics & Ideas : April 2020

of the first millennium following the destruction of the Temple. But it is a long trip from Babylon and Jerusalem to Vienna and Berlin, from the Talmudic giants to the secularized, even areligious Jews of the 19th and 20th centuries, many of whom (or their parents) had converted to Christianity.

So let’s posit, as Lebrecht sug-gests we should, that somehow the ancient masters of pilpul hand-ed the art of disputation down through the generations. After all, Freud’s father, Jacob, a wool mer-chant, was a Torah scholar.

But if “like father, like son” is the transmission belt, there are two problems.

One is conceptual. The Talmud, a commentary on the law span-ning some 2,700 pages, amounts to a closed system. Talmudic think-ing may be summed up as “turn and turn the Torah.” Its scholars demonstrated their brilliance by construing ever finer distinctions, skewering the arguments of their colleagues, or invoking the au-thority of the masters. Cracking paradigms was not their business. Subversive thought—say, placing sex at the center of the human con-dition, as did Freud, or confront-ing the ear, as Arnold Schönberg’s painful atonality did—was not the Talmudic way. Both Freud and Schönberg play starring roles in Genius and Anxiety, along with Einstein, because they overturned ancient dispensations rather than delving into Mishna and Gemara.

The second is a logical problem. If the Talmud is the ur-cause, Jew-ish worldly success and attainment should have been the story of the Hebrews throughout the ages. Yet Lebrecht situates his account in the hundred years between 1847 and 1947, and rightly so. Apart from rare titans such as Maimonides, Jews did not excel in world-histor-ical terms in the centuries before,

nor did they break the mold. The question “why the Jews?” should therefore be amended to “Why the Jews in those hundred years, in the midst of modernity?”

Sheer smarts is not enough; the conditions had to be right as well. In the 19th century, the Jews were released from the ghetto, gaining full civic rights throughout Europe. Add to that circumstance histori-cal serendipity in the forms of ur-banization, industrialization, and globalization. With their literacy, occupational flexibility, and lust for learning, the Jews were perfectly prepared for this new world. An age-old order based on working the land and plying the trades, from which Jews were excluded, began to give way to a knowledge-based economy.

It was tailor-made for eter-nal outsiders with their pent-up ambitions and energies. Lebrecht quotes Gustav Mahler: “A Jew is like a swimmer with a short arm.

He has to swim twice as hard to reach the shore.” But now, the wa-ter was a lot warmer.

In a revolutionary economy—think chemistry and physics, plas-tics and pharmaceuticals, aviation and telephony—the future beats the past while talent and drive dwarf the wrong faith and ancestry. The exclusion of the Jews had held them back throughout the ages, as had insider networks, guild power, and xenophobia. Suddenly, a wondrous market opened up in which grow-ing demand for new skills and per-spectives met an ample supply. The victims of hatred and persecution embodied modernity unleashed.

Modernity, in fact, was the new Promised Land for the outsider pushing in. As the Jew could bring new tools and thoughts to bear on old ways, he could leave Torah and Talmud and move into science, technology, literature, and the arts. Just one statistic: One-third of Germany’s Nobel Prizes up to 1932 went to Jews. Where they were still barred from banks and corpora-tions, as they were in America, Jews went off to Hollywood, where Laemmle, Goldwyn, and the War-ner Brothers revolutionized mass entertainment. It was these outsid-ers who grasped the globe-span-ning power of celluloid and then went on to interpret the American Dream for the rest of the world. Alienation and anxiety have never spelled a greater advantage.

A S LEBRECHT chronicles the rise of the modern Jew and his triumphs, he

never ignores the dark side. For instance, he invites us to listen to the heartbreaking confrontation between Arnold Schönberg and his friend Wassily Kandinsky, the painter, who had ascribed “only evil to the actions of the Jews.” Ending the friendship, the com-poser thunders: “What is anti-

iBoth Freud

and Schönberg play starring roles in Genius and Anxiety, along with Einstein, because they overturned ancient dispensations rather than delving into Mishna and Gemara.

Commentary 35

Semitism to lead to if not acts of vi-olence.…You are perhaps satisfied with depriving Jews of their civil rights. Then certainly Einstein, Mahler, I, and so many others will have been gotten rid of.” And it would be to no avail, Schönberg as-sures him: “Jewry has maintained itself unaided against the whole of mankind for 20 centuries.” For Jews “are evidently so constituted that they can accomplish the task that their God has imposed on them: to survive in exile, uncor-rupted and unbroken, until the hour of salvation comes!”

So Schönberg sets off to com-pose Moses and Aron a 12-tone opera that celebrates Jewish moxie and revolutionizes Western mu-sic, to boot. In America, heroic resistance comes in a comic strip, crafted by two Depression-era kids, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Super-man is still a hit around the world, having spawned innumerable mov-ies and series. What made them do it? Siegel answers: “Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless…Jews in Germany.” A year behind Super-man, two Jews created Batman, the avenger of the innocents.

Note that both superheroes go by perfectly WASP names: Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne. Neither has ever been near a Torah or a Talmud. But both are Jewish characters, as Goebbels fumed in 1940. In the age of emancipation, as covered by Leb-recht, Jews had quickly figured out that they could flourish only if they defined their particularist interest in freedom, equality, and justice as universal goods. So, Jews were the first universal nation, which delivered to them a tidy edge. The message ran: “We don’t want this for us, but for all of mankind.”

This ethos helped to speed their rise but did not bring about salva-tion. Indeed, the price of success was deadly—the near-extinction of

European Jewry in the Shoah. Le-brecht, a storyteller par excellence, brilliantly chronicles a Golden Cen-tury. Each chapter is a gem, spar-kling with historical insight and finely drawn portraits of famous and less-well-known Jews. It is a book not just about Jews and their achievements but also about moder-nity—how Jews transformed West-ern ways of thinking and doing. It is intellectual history at its best.

Is The Jewish Century, to recall

Yuri Slezkine’s pathbreaking oeuvre, over? After a post-Shoah pause, an-ti-Semitism is again forging ahead. In his penultimate paragraph, Le-brecht strikes a wistful note: “The sense of otherness is back. Jews, we are told, are different. They have…a divided loyalty. The Jewish Ques-tion reopens—what is to be done about the Jews…The story is not over yet.” Neither is modernity, a natural habitat for the Jews once ghetto walls had crumbled.q

The Lottery Isn’t RiggedThe Theology of Liberalism: Political Philosophy and the Justice of GodBy Eric NelsonHarvard University Press, 244 pages

Reviewed by Tal Fortgang

IN HIS new book, The Theol-ogy of Liberalism, Harvard’s Eric Nelson effortlessly combines early Christian theology, modern political

philosophy, historical scholarship, literature, and economic theory to present a cogent but unorthodox critique of one of the great foes of liberal democratic capitalism: the philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002). Rawls’s case for redis-tributionist policies rests on the notion of an assumed “lottery of

souls,” undergirding his 1972 work, A Theory of Jus tice. The “lot-tery of souls” posits that an indi-vidual’s station in life is the prod-uct of luck and that social or economic inequality is therefore presumptively unjust.

Nelson’s argument is that this assumption is riddled with in-consistencies nearly “rising to the level of incoherence,” and that Rawls’s argument is rooted not in common sense but rather in a metaphysical understanding of the universe Rawls does not hon-estly acknowledge.

Nelson argues that our liberal democratic tradition is based on the assumption that man is to be held accountable for his own actions and rewarded for good deeds. But if man cannot truly “earn” anything on his own, then each person’s station in life is a mere accident, lacking any con-nection to morality or justice. This

Tal Fortgang is a senior re-search assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.


is Rawls’s argument. He says jus-tice must compel us toward a doc-trine of greater equality, demand-ing redistribution in accordance with the “difference principle”—according to which inequality of any kind is permissible only to the extent that it might benefit the least well-off.

The Theology of Liberalism is designed to refute Rawls’s conten-tion that our station in life is mor-ally arbitrary, undeserved, and unaffected by individual merit or agency. To do so, Nelson goes back to the beginning. He argues that Rawlsians have unwittingly repur-posed for modern ends ancient Christian disputes about whether people can warrant God’s favor by their deeds.

The position that man can in-dependently deduce what is just and claim that he deserves his own reward is “Pelegianism”—an early Christian heresy that rejects the doctrine of original sin and posits that man can freely choose moral-ity or immorality on his own. Since man’s good deeds are of his own making, Pelegianism asserts, his deeds can serve as evidence that he deserves salvation. The alternative is anti-Pelagianism, which Nelson identifies as the precursor to the Rawlsian principle of moral arbi-trariness.

What does a recondite ancient theological debate have to do with ongoing political disputes? Con-sider the natural-law liberalism of Martin Luther King Jr., who defended disobedience of man-made law because “an unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” King argued in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” that segregation was merely an act of a legislature that failed to “[square] with…the law of God.” It was King’s argument that segrega-tion violated human equality—an indelible feature of the Bible’s

higher law—and therefore could not be just.

Our understanding of the just society depends on what we be-lieve constitutes this higher law. That in turn is itself deeply in-formed by whether we view man-kind as preternaturally damned or capable of freely chosen virtue. If humans can ascertain and freely choose what is virtuous, we can be rewarded accordingly, merit-ing unequal rewards that might otherwise seem unjust. But if our virtuous or productive behavior is not really to our credit, then inequalities of many sorts are pre-sumptively unjust.

Political liberalism, the Pelagian analogue, claims that man must be free to exercise his liberty in order to pursue justice. Such thinking distinguishes liberalism, which es-chews coercion in favor of the free-dom to do wrong, from theocracy

or monarchy. Only in such a system may individuals justly be rewarded for doing right.

Rawlsian anti-Pelagians claim that successful humans are pre-programmed with intelligence, ambition, and other inborn char-acteristics that direct them to be socially or economically produc-tive. It is therefore unjust when individuals are rewarded with property in accordance with their deeds, since such rewards simply reflect this programming.

If this theory of “program-ming” seems absurd, its account of human nature might be at fault. Moral-arbitrariness theory presumes a disembodied spirit of a future person participating in this lottery before being assigned its place on Earth. Do not confuse this account for biological or social determinism. It is, in fact, pre-biological. For, to maintain the claim that perfect arbitrariness explains every individual’s station, it must reject those things that are not arbitrary—by which I mean the conscious and subconscious choices of a person’s forebears that brought them into being. Such as: whom a person chooses to marry; where a person chooses or is forced by circumstance to live; what religion (if any) one’s ancestors choose to practice. All are formative, fundamental, and, yes, unchosen by future genera-tions—but they are not arbitrary. Yet moral-arbitrariness theory ig-nores choices made in the past and considers every birth as the begin-ning of the world anew.

The Rawlsian anti-Pelagian ac-count, in short, treats a human being’s experience as beginning somewhere beyond this world. A spirit, endowed by some force of nature with thoughts, traits, and personality, is somehow both de-termined by its programming and distinct from the body in which

iWhat we

understand to be a just society depends on what we believe constitutes a higher law. That in turn is itself deeply informed by whether we view mankind as preternaturally damned or capable of freely chosen virtue.

Commentary 37

it is subsequently placed, which is formed at least in part by the choices of its forebears.

Nelson’s book exposes the logi-cal contradiction here: Rawls and his disciples are effectively coun-tering traditional accounts of hu-man freedom with a spiritualist account of human unfreedom.

This account implies that any person we now know could have been programmed in a number of different ways. But those wouldn’t be different versions of the same person—those would be different people entirely (especially if our programming is highly determin-istic). We would therefore be hard-pressed, to say the least, to create a fundamentally more equal version of the society we have—which is supposedly a reflection of the programming of its individuals—without creating a society of en-tirely different people.

These claims have political ramifications, Nelson reminds us. Note the theory of “privilege”—another word for a set of suppos-edly unearned advantages—that undergirds so much current pro-gressive thinking. Progressives be-lieve that history, in concert with oppressive cultural norms that are not objectively valuable, con-fers advantages on certain groups and individuals. These need to be recognized and ultimately “lev-eled off,” in Nelson’s term. In this progressive account, nothing an individual achieves is really de-served, because so much beyond an individual’s control happened to facilitate it and likely at the expense of other equally morally worthy individuals, no less.

Privilege theory is not pre-cisely the same as pure Rawlsian redistributionism, but it relies on a similar account of every indi-vidual’s participation in a kind of genetic lottery. Choices made by

past generations mean that every individual’s station in life today is unearned, whether that station is positive or negative. Therefore, redistribution—or “economic jus-tice”—is a moral necessity.

Nelson lays bare more than just the weakness of progressive redistributionism. He also shows how its anti-liberal underpinnings actually invited the contemporary secular form of the old specter of Jew-hatred. Preceding Rawls in anti-merit analysis was Karl Marx, whose call for the abolition both of Jews and capitalism hinged on an argument against merit itself. Marx’s criticism of liberalism’s ten-dency to estrange individuals from each other was for Marx, in Nel-son’s words, “a manifestation of its essential ‘Jewishness.’”

Marx saw the link between Jews and liberal capitalism in the prevalence of “bargaining,” which Marx calls “the worldly cult of the Jew” and identifies as political and economic liberalism’s alienating mechanism. “The liberal contracta-rian tradition,” writes Nelson, was to Marx “merely the application of this Jewish ‘bargain’ mentality to the relationship between citizens,” under which claims are leveled and justice adjudicated. Such bargain-ing is not just dehumanizing but absurd, in the anti-Pelagian view, and would be eradicated “in a high-er phase of communist society,” in Marx’s words.

The dogma of Marxist econom-ics, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” is not just an alternative to capitalism. It is fundamentally distinct from the liberal view that one may deserve unequal reward proportional to unequal produc-tion, an idea that Marx calls “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right.” Marx detested the Jewish view that “we can fulfill our side of the bar-

gain [with God] and thereby merit our reward.”

These anti-Jewish currents in Marxism flow neatly into Rawls’s anti-Pelagianism, a theological bent on display in his Princeton undergraduate thesis, written in 1942 before Rawls became disil-lusioned with God and Christian-ity. The thesis confirms to Nelson the connection between Rawls’s theological and political anti-Pelagianism, displaying Rawls’s rejection of merit and liberal politics well before he published his landmark A Theory of Justice in 1972.

“The bargain scheme of re-demption,” wrote Rawls of the notion that man can make claims on God’s justice, “manifests itself in the barrier of legalism in reli-gion [Judaism] and in contract theories in politics.” Legalism, to the young Rawls, is the Judaized form of Pelagianism. It encour-ages man to accumulate merit through freely chosen adherence to the law and performance of commandments, and to present it to God as evidence of his desert.

This view of justice was reject-ed by the apostle Paul and deemed worthy of abolition by Marx, and it speaks to the corruption of Ju-daism, according to Rawls: “The best efforts in Judaism were so corrupted—not the worst, but the best,” Rawls wrote, for Judaism is mired in delusion about merit and God’s justice. Marxist and Rawlsian redistributionism, we must conclude, opposes not just the Jews but Judaism, rejecting the nature of man and God that the Hebrew Bible offers. Nelson’s sobering, rigorous, and difficult analysis reveals that Jews have every reason to find the logic of redistributionism troubling at its core, because at its core, it is a re-jection of Judaism itself.q


Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be DifferentBy Lisa Sellin DavisHachette, 307 pages

Reviewed by Naomi Schaefer Riley

LISA Sellin Davis is sor-ry. Very sorry. In 2017, she wrote an op-ed ti-tled “My Daughter Is Not Transgender. She

Is a Tomboy.” The woke Internet lost its collective mind and now Davis has written an entire book to apologize. Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different includes some interesting cultural anthropology, but mostly it is an exercise in trying to get herself back in the good graces of the Brooklyn neighbors she has offended.

In the original piece, she de-scribes how many adults (in-cluding doctors and teachers) ask whether her seven-year-old daughter, who wears “track pants and T-shirts… has shaggy short hair” and “has friends who are mostly boys,” wants to identify as a boy. Davis gushes: “In many ways, this is wonderful: It shows a much-needed sensitivity to gender nonconformity and transgender issues. It is considerate of adults to ask her—in the beginning.” But then, she adds, “when they continue to question her gender

identity—and are skeptical of her response—the message they send is that a girl cannot look and act like her and still be a girl.”

Davis’s article was widely shared, including among people who worry that the transgender movement is actually moving girls and women back to a pre-feminist state. All the cultural and legal work involved in ensuring, for in-stance, that women’s sports are a legitimate enterprise will unravel as boys and men will compete for those same titles. And all the work that went into assuring girls that they can be interested in areas that are traditionally male will be undone by the suspicion that girls with those interests are “really” boys.

Andrew Sullivan has noted a similar effect of the transgender movement on the logic of gay rights. He criticizes the current idea of “gender identity” because it relies on old-fashioned stereo-types. “A boy with a penchant for Barbies and Kens is possibly a trans girl—because, according to stereotypes, he’s behaving as a girl would,” he writes. “So instead of enlarging our understanding of gender expression—and allow-ing maximal freedom and variety within both sexes—the concept of ‘gender identity’ actually narrows it, in more traditional and even regressive ways.”

Such speculation has rendered Sullivan persona non grata in trans circles. And Davis doesn’t want to go down that road. She now realizes the error of her old ways. In the book, she writes: “While the piece expressed full

support of trans kids, to many, the op-ed smacked of transpho-bia and ignorance.” Her critics, she says, suggested she “blamed adults’ narrow views of gender on the increasing visibility and ac-ceptance of trans people.” Now she knows they are right: “I have since learned after two years of study, that conflating a young child’s de-sire for a haircut or a football with gender identity was very much the fall-out from a hyper-gendering childhood.”

She has consulted with a num-ber of experts on gender identity as well as the University of New Hampshire’s “Bias-Free Language Guide.” So now she knows that the word “tomboy” is “problematic/outdated” and should be replaced by “children who are gender non-conforming, children who are gender variant.”

Gender nonconforming, she ex-plains, “can include anyone of any gender, doing gender in all kinds of ways.” It is unfortunate that Davis has gone down this road because the question she asks in the be-ginning is actually an interesting one. For generations, American history and culture had a strong tradition of tomboys. From Jo in Little Women to Jo on The Facts of Life, we used to accept the idea that girls didn’t all have to dress like princesses.

Particularly as families left the stuffy East Coast and headed West, they could embrace a more “all hands on deck” attitude. The plucky stories of the tomboys in Little House on the Prairie and Caddie Woodlawn have been passed down from mothers to daughters for generations. Think of Katharine Hepburn, who called herself Jimmy when she was a child, wore her brother’s clothes, and wished she was a boy because she thought “boys had all the fun.” Even as recently as the ’70s and

Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American En-terprise Institute and visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.

Boy Oh Boy

Commentary 39

’80s, Davis rightly notes, there seemed to be many more tomboy-ish characters on television and in movies. Where is today’s version of Punky Brewster or The Bad News Bears?

Davis cites a survey from the 1970s noting that 78 percent of college women said they were tomboys growing up. Today, it is somewhere between a third and a half. What happened? When and why did being a tomboy become less cool? Davis blames capitalism and war. “During each war,” she writes, “economic times were tight, and women filled men’s roles while they went off to fight: War begat feminism. And often the children of feminists were raised as tom-boys. But as money flowed into the economy and the middle class surged later in the twentieth centu-ry, more items were gendered. This serves two purposes: to sell twice as much stuff and to push women back into their places.”

The result, says Davis, was that the 1990s “produced the most hyper-gendered childhoods yet.” The explosion of pink things and princesses, well documented in Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter, is certainly the re-sult in part of clever marketing. But the success of the marketing was not masterminded by corpo-rate America’s male chauvinists. In fact, the success of princesses and Bratz dolls had just as much do to with changes in family expec-tations of children—ones largely pushed by feminists and other liberationist types.

Davis is right that girls and boys were once dressed in the same way when they were young and that it is only in more modern times that we have felt the need to make sar-torial distinctions between them at younger ages. But that is at least

in part the result of the fact that we treat children as small adults, able to make their own decisions about clothes and makeup and sexuality. This once meant that we were supposed to be lax about when they could go out on dates. But now it means that we allow nine-year-olds to decide when they need hormone therapy.

Back in the 1970s, most Ameri-cans were pretty content not to think of nine-year-olds as being sexual creatures at all. But today that’s no longer an option.

Which brings us back to Da-vis’s original conundrum. If talking about “tomboys” is problematic be-cause doing so suggests that prefer-ences such as dressing like a boy or wanting to play sports are not re-ally part of a “gender identity,” then what exactly does it mean? And if

she doesn’t want to live in a society where girls who have gender-non-conforming interests are not asked whether they want to be boys, then what exactly does she want?

The answer is just to get rid of these categories altogether: “What does it look like to physi-cally transition from a woman, but not to become a man?” she wonders. Davis quotes approving-ly from a gender theorist named Kate Bornstein about the non-gendered future she imagines: “Sure, some people will hew to the binary edges, but everybody else will be mixed together in gender soup, able to grab any ingredients they want from around the circle. Rather than see the in-between place as a no-man’s—no person’s—land, see it as a legitimate, healthy respectable spot.”

And those ingredients? Well, Davis breathlessly cites the direc-tor of a clinic who says they have “gender non-binary kids coming… asking for, for example, a touch of testosterone…. We have some young adults saying, ‘I just want my breasts removed. They don’t match who I am. I’m not a man. But I’m not a woman either.’” Chop off a little here, add a little there. Throw it all in the pot. What could go wrong?

At the end of her original op-ed, Davis defends her daughter, who she says is “happy with her body and comfortable with the way she looks.” She tells all the teachers and pediatricians and busybodies to back off when they are, in ef-fect, asking whether her daughter would like to lop off any body parts or ingest life-altering drugs. If only she had done the same for the thousands of other children caught up in this madness, Tom-boy wouldn’t be the intellectual calamity it is.q

iWe treat children

as small adults, able to make their own decisions about clothes and makeup and sexuality. Nowadays, this means that we allow nine-year-olds to decide when they need hormone therapy.


Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools By Diane RavitchKnopf, 352 pages

Reviewed by Robert Pondiscio

THE education-reform movement Diane Ravitch mercilessly mocks in her new book, Slaying Goli-

ath, deserves serious scrutiny. Its policies and preferences have dom-inated and reshaped American ed-ucation for over three decades. The rhetoric of reform is stirring and ennobling. It calls out shameful and persistent achievement gaps between black and white children and a complacent status quo in public schools that allows those gaps to persist. But reform’s moral capital has been spent on things that parents don’t like very much, notably an aggressive testing and accountability regime that injects itself between parents and the schools they like. The regime has reshaped children’s experience of schooling, too often reducing it to an exhausting cycle of prep-and-test. And to what end?

Plotted on a graph, the scores earned over the past 40 years by America’s 17-year-olds on the Na-tional Assessment of Educational Progress resemble nothing as much as a dead man’s EKG. Some discon-tent is warranted. If there had been transformative gains to be wrought from the academic standards, test-ing, and accountability playbook of the past few decades, we should have seen them by now. It is a pain-ful but sad fact that since the 1983 A Nation at Risk report launched the modern ed-reform movement, the policymakers, philanthropists, and social entrepreneurs Ravitch lumps together under the rubric of “The Disruptors,” and whom she derides as “masters of chaos,” have overreached and underperformed. That is the story she wishes to tell in Slaying Goliath.

But Ravitch also overreaches and underdelivers, often wildly. It is simply factually incorrect to assert of The Disruptors that “not one of their efforts has succeeded.” Amer-ica’s major cities are now home to hundreds of high-performing charter schools that didn’t exist 20 years ago, run by organiza-tions such as KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, Suc-cess Academy, YES Prep, and IDEA Public schools. They have created reliable pathways for historically underserved low-income black and brown students to go to college by the thousands. Perhaps that is small beer compared with the gen-eral lassitude that besets American

K–12 education at large, but still these schools are vital ladders out of poverty for the families that they serve.

Ravitch earned her reputation half a century ago as a clear-eyed historian of education, but Slaying Goliath is no history. Rather, it is a celebration of a far-flung collection of teachers and parent activists and a handful of academics and elected officials Ravitch stitches together into something she calls (again with capital letters) “The Resis-tance.” What they are resisting, she says, is the “privatization” of public education. They are heroes fighting for democracy and against the dark forces of plutocracy.

Ravitch’s portrait of these new “great school wars” (to borrow the title of the book that made her rep-utation in 1965) is extraordinarily biased. She describes infuriating instances of corruption and fraud, particularly among online charter-school operators, with untold mil-lions of public dollars misspent. Yet she takes no notice of similar corruption and criminality in the vastly larger public-school systems she champions.

When school boards resist the Disruptor agenda, she asserts, they represent the “democratically con-trolled” will of parents and those people who take what she believes to be “principled stands” to defend public schools. But when school boards embrace reform, it’s a “take-over by right-wing ideologues” who “smugly ignored parents, students, and teachers who questioned them.” Democracy rocks when it serves The Resistance. When The Resistance faces resistance, how-ever, it’s the corrupting influence of “Dark Money” (more caps) spent by billionaire privatizers.

A casual reader of Slaying Goli-ath might get the impression that there was once a time when all had been well in American education

Robert Pondiscio is senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham In-stitute and a former inner-city pub-lic-school teacher. His book, How the Other Half Learns, was published last fall by Penguin.

The Ravitches of Sin

Commentary 41

and that the children of both rich and poor, black and white, used to skip off hand-in-hand each day to bask in the nurturing glow of gifted teachers in democratically controlled common schools—until the dark moment when malefac-tors of great wealth plundered it all. Not one paragraph sug-gests that the ed-reform move-ment, whatever its shortcomings, was an earnest response to a public-education system that had betrayed its ideals and left millions of children unprepared for lives of upward mobility and engaged citi-zenship. The Manichean caricature of education reform scribbled in Slaying Goliath dismisses even the possibility that there might be men and women of goodwill among The Disruptors who are authentically concerned with the well-being of children. Instead, there are only dupes or whores. All you need to know is who signs their paychecks.

Ravitch’s project is to make two-dimensional heroes of The Resistors and then bask in their ap-plause. Never mind that we spend over $700 billion a year on pub-lic education—nearly $14,000 per student nationwide—in the Unit-ed States. According to Ravitch, schools are still underfunded, hol-lowed out, and starved for re-sources. In her eyes, this behemoth is David. Those who expect better results or merely a decent school for their kids represent Goliath.

T HE CRITIQUE in Slaying Goliath is frozen in time, stuck at a point a decade

ago when the ed-reform move-ment was at the peak of its power and prestige, when scowling D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee was on the cover of Time wielding a broom, and Newsweek’s cover sug-gested a simplistic remedy to our educational ills: We must fire bad teachers. These magazines barely

exist any longer. Nor does the ed-reform world Ravitch evokes.

“Disrupters say that schools should be run like businesses,” Ravitch claims. In truth, that cliché hasn’t been tossed about in reform circles in well over a decade, and even then such words were rarely spoken by those seriously engaged in education. “The Corporate Dis-rupters are indifferent to poverty and racial segregation,” she insists, revealing the degree to which her jeremiad is disconnected and dat-ed. Insofar as an education-reform movement remains today, 20 years into the century, it is obsessed with issues of poverty and race. Indeed, there is no small amount of frustra-tion, particularly on the right, that a movement once dedicated to the (perhaps naive) idea that educa-tion was the cure for poverty, has morphed over time into a wholly owned subsidiary of Social Jus-tice, Inc. These days, ed reformers

seem more concerned with com-batting institutional racism and dismantling white supremacy, and focusing their energies on housing, segregation, policing, and immi-gration, than on teaching kids to read.

Ravitch’s view of education re-form is both inspired by and stuck in the moment when she changed sides, morphing as she did from one of reform’s most dependable allies to its severest critic. She once served as an assistant secretary of education during the elder Bush’s administration and was a member of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. She authored a shelf of books that were education-reform touchstones, in-cluding Left Back, The Schools We Deserve, even National Standards in American Education: A Citizen’s Guide, all of which argued for and defended many of the policies she now vigorously attacks.

What happened? For a time, trying to suss out the causes of her flip was ed reform’s most popular parlor game. The most common explanation was ugly and mean-spirited. An irresponsible article in The New Republic in 2011 function-ally outed Ravitch, rationalizing her apostasy as payback for New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein’s refusing to hire her part-ner Mary Butz to run a principal-training program. (Her new book is dedicated to Butz, whom Ravitch has since married.) The idea that a serious academic would overthrow a lifetime of scholarship to avenge a petty slight was and is deeply un-serious. The tireless effort Ravitch has devoted to her anti-reform crusade should leave no doubt that her conversion is earnest.

The main achievement of Slay-ing Goliath is that Ravitch, perhaps unwittingly, has crafted a playbook on how to avoid paying a price for past misdeeds. Cancel culture

iThere is no

small amount of frustration that a movement once dedicated to the (perhaps naive) idea that education was the cure for poverty, has morphed into a wholly owned subsidiary of Social Justice, Inc.


routinely exiles artists and intel-lectuals from public life for untow-ard comments made decades ago. Ravitch was more than a casual chronicler; she was a significant intellectual architect, present at the birth of many of the reforms she now derides. Turning against them not with thoughtful critiques but bursts of vitriol and rage has earned her not just a pass but adoration and acclaim from the very Resistance figures who might otherwise be canceling her.

Her new acolytes are her audi-ence, but other readers may find Slaying Goliath depressing, even nihilistic. Is there nothing to be done? One thing Ravitch has not changed her mind about is what a good public education looks like: “Educators and parents want stu-dents to have a genuine education with a full and balanced curricu-lum that includes science, foreign languages, history, literature, phys-ical education, the arts, and civics, not just prep for standardized tests in reading and mathematics.” Hear, hear! It is tempting to wonder whether 50 million America school children might be better off today had Resistance Ravitch directed her considerable energies and in-tellect to rallying her new friends and fans to bring that vision to frui-tion. It may surprise her to learn, even now, that there are significant numbers among those she regards as villains who would march in that army, myself included. But the pa-rade has long since passed. Reform may be a disappointment, but what preceded it didn’t work either. Ravitch the historian understood that. Ravitch the polemicist has no time for such complications.

Had she put her mind to it, Ravitch might have written a ver-sion of The Best and the Brightest about the education-reform era in which a new generation of Ivy League “whiz kids” cut their righ-

teous teeth in urban classrooms with Teach For America. Brimming with technocratic self-assurance and indignation at educational inequity, untainted by failure and driven by what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now,” these swaggering zealots fan out to launch charter schools and run school districts, seek elected office, and launch dozens of non-

profit organizations and advocacy campaigns. Then they are inevita-bly humbled by the complexity of social forces weighing down stu-dent achievement and the sheer weight of politics and institutional inertia. Slaying Goliath is, to put it mildly, not that book. In the guise of an indictment of reformist fail-ure, it is a celebration of status quo indifference.q

Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East By Kim GhattasHenry Holt and Co., 400 pages

Reviewed by Michael J. Totten

IN THE Greater Middle East, the year 1979 felt like the end of the world. Ameri-cans know it as the ominous date of the Iranian Revolu-

tion, the hostage crisis, and the rise of the grim-faced, murderous Aya-tollah Khomeini. But those weren’t the only pivotal events that un-folded back then. The scarcely known siege of Mecca occurred at the same time, and it was equally dreadful—and fateful. In an effort

to appease an armed insurrection, the Saudi government sharply re-versed what precious little social progress had been made and, in a revolution from above, trans-formed the country into an even more regressive and repressive place than it already was. The Saudi and Iranian governments, once grudging allies, became sworn, bitter enemies determined to export their own revolutions to the whole Muslim world, across the Middle East and beyond, in-cluding to Afghanistan, which co-incidentally had just been invaded by the Soviet Union.

Nearly all the worst disasters that have swept across the Muslim world in the past four decades can be traced at least in part back to that year. That’s the thesis of the masterful book Black Wave, by Beirut-born, Emmy Award–win-ning journalist Kim Ghattas. She traveled from Egypt and Iraq to Iran and Pakistan, and no matter where she went, the people with

Michael J. Totten is the au-thor of nine books, including Where the West Ends and The Road to Fatima Gate.

The Year theSky Fell

Commentary 43

whom she spoke let loose a tsu-nami of emotion when she asked how that year had devastated them and their countries. She felt as if she were “conducting national or regional therapy.…Everyone had a story about how 1979 had wrecked their lives, their marriage, their education, including those born after that year.”

Even close observers of the region can be forgiven for not quite realizing that things are much worse now than they used to be. The Middle East in the mid-20th century was hardly an idyllic utopia. Authoritarianism was the norm, with rule by Turkish and European empires only recently shrugged off. But aside from the Arab–Israeli conflict, the wars were less endless, the culture more open, and sectarian mass murder a thing of the history books. Optimists weren’t laughed out of the room. Beirut, Cairo, and even Kabul en-joyed semi-liberal golden ages be-fore sliding into decline. Iran under the leadership of the authoritarian yet progressive Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was pro-Western, had friendly relations with Israel, and seemed to have a shining future ahead of it. One could argue with a straight face that whole swaths of the Muslim world were in bet-ter shape than half of Europe, the Communist half with a Soviet boot on its neck.

Ghattas treads familiar ground describing the Iranian Revolution and its cruel aftermath, but the Saudi half of the story is less well-known to her Western audience. While the ayatollah railed against the Shah and his Western allies in Tehran, 300 totalitarian-minded Saudi insurgents from the spec-tacularly backward Najd desert captured the Grand Mosque in Mecca, took thousands of hostages, and engaged in a deadly standoff with the government. The royal

family couldn’t break the siege on its own, so it resorted to summon-ing French paratroopers—to a city where non-Muslims are otherwise banned forever from entering—to lay waste to the rebels. What could have and arguably should have been an isolated event instead marked a turning point.

The insurrectionists had a list of demands for Saudi Arabia: Sever ties with the West, stop exporting oil to the imperialists, banish all foreigners, and purge impure cler-ics. As Ghattas points out, these demands weren’t terribly different from Osama bin Laden’s years later, and they created a terrible crisis for the House of Saud. Its custodian-ship of Mecca and Medina is the foundation of its leadership of the Islamic world, and if it can’t handle the job, perhaps it should be given to somebody else.

The hopelessly reactionary blind cleric Abdul Aziz bin Baz stepped

forward and effectively forced the royal family to go all-in on the ex-quisitely bigoted Wahhabi subsect of Sunni Islam, and the royals felt obliged to do so lest the insur-gency gather strength and remove them from power. Bin Baz, Ghattas writes, “drove a hard bargain that would haunt the kingdom and the whole region for decades, a bargain that would make the Saudis feel like time had stopped in its tracks.”

Women weren’t allowed to an-chor the news anymore. Their faces were scrubbed from newspaper photos, and they were fired from their jobs and sent home. Beach resorts closed. Whip-wielding au-thorities forced citizens to pray five times a day.

Simultaneously in Iran, Ayatol-lah Khomeini banned dancing and alcohol. Children were told they’d have molten metal poured into their ears on Judgment Day if they listened to music. Khomei-ni’s revolutionaries burned down movie theaters and other suppos-edly decadent businesses. They laid waste to more than just mod-ern Iranian culture. They actively waged war against Iran’s history, traditions, and historical memory. Ghattas writes: “Khomeini had no attachment to the grandeur of the Persian empire, or the cultural and intellectual richness of its history; only to his own sense of importance.” Execution by stoning made a comeback. Universities closed for three years. Humani-ties courses were rewritten and Islamized. “The purge was every-where,” Ghattas writes. “A reign of terror that would last ten years.… Everything became a crime, yield-ing an entrenched paranoia and darkness that rolled over the coun-try.” The Shah’s regime was brutal, but he wouldn’t even qualify as a bat boy in the league Khomeini played in. The new Islamic govern-ment, “in a paroxysm of depravity,”

iThe Middle

East in the mid-20th century was hardly an idyllic utopia. But aside from the Arab–Israeli conflict, the wars were less endless, the culture more open, and sectarian mass murder a thing of the history books.


executed 75 times as many people as the Shah’s notorious SAVAK.

There were two Islamist revo-lutions in 1979, not just the more infamous Iranian one. As if they didn’t constitute enough hell to be unleashed at once, Soviet tanks rolled across the border from Uz-bekistan into Afghanistan to prop up a local Communist govern-ment. The United States jumped in and backed a movement of Islamic fighters, hoping to give Moscow its own black eye after the hu-miliating Vietnam War. The Saudis waded in, too, not just to punch back at the Eurasian heathens but to keep the Russians out of Paki-stan, bolster their own bona fides as the Muslim world’s leaders after being challenged in Mecca, and provide a pressure-release valve for their own fanatics who would gleefully impale themselves on Russian tanks instead of on their own Great Mosque.

But the Saudis had too many extremists to export; their narrow-minded religious and education establishment kept creating more of them as if it were running an assembly line. The 9/11 hijackers, almost all of whom were Saudi, “did not stand out in their country; they were unremarkable, repre-senting the average Saudi man of that generation, the generation of 1979, the fateful year around which most of them were born. It was as though they had been born and raised for nothing else but death in the fireball of a raging hell, victims and killers at once.”

IT WOULD have been tragic enough had the dark revolu-tions in Iran and Saudi Arabia

taken over marginal Muslim-ma-jority countries (like Chad, per-haps, or maybe Bangladesh), but instead they erupted simultane-ously in two large oil-rich nations facing off against each other across

the Persian Gulf. And neither revo-lution had provincial aspirations. It wasn’t enough to suppress women, free thinking, and fun inside their own borders. Each did its worst to export its revolution abroad, as the Russians had done with their own after 1917, and their revolutions, similar as they may have been, were mutually incompatible. Each capital wished to be the leader of the whole Muslim world, so each had to take down the other. And one of them was Sunni while the other was Shia.

Over the next several decades and going all the way up through the present, Iran armed and trained sectarian Shia militias—Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mahdi Army in Iraq, the Houthis in Yemen, and so on—to wage civil wars inside their own countries and wars against “imperialist” non-Muslims such as Americans and Israelis. The Saudis, meanwhile, spent untold billions of

petrodollars exporting their harsh and alien Wahhabi subsect to dis-tant countries with no such tradi-tion. And they backed their own to-talitarian proxies when they found it useful, from Saddam Hussein in Iraq to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The region-wide export of these twin revolutions is the black wave of Ghattas’s title, “the torrent that flattens everything in its path” and that has “changed who we are and hijacked our collective memory.”

The Iranians have even chosen to back non-Shia militias and ter-rorist organizations in the Pales-tinian territories, not because the ayatollahs have any warm feelings for the drinkers and womanizers in the Palestine Liberation Organiza-tion or the Sunni fundamentalists of Hamas, but because the Iranians, as Shias and Persians, hoped to win support as the hegemons of a Sunni-Arab-majority region by hitching a ride on the anti-Zionist train, a move that was particularly effective after Egypt had betrayed that cause by signing a peace treaty with Israel. “Who would wipe the shame from the forehead of Arab men now?” Ghattas asks rhetorically. For more than a decade now, every Arab state but Syria has inched closer to a cold peace with Israel. But Iran and its proxies soldier on, even though the Palestinian cause has always been foreign to Iranians, one that barely registered as a blip before the 1979 revolution, when Iran and Israel were still allies.

Hatred between the Saudis and the Iranians is more than political; it’s personal and visceral. Kho-meini once blasted the Saudis as “the camel grazers of Riyadh and the barbarians of Najd, the most infamous and the wildest members of the human family.” The Saudis, for their part, fear and loathe the Iranians as Persians and heretical Shias who might one day spon-sor an anti-royal insurgency in

iThe region-

wide export of twin revolutions is the black wave of Kim Ghattas’s title. It’s ‘the torrent that flattens everything in its path’ and that has ‘changed who we are and hijacked our collective memory.’

Commentary 45

the heavily Shia Eastern Province, which just happens to be where most of the oil is.

Beyond the oppressed and mur-dered victims in their own coun-tries, the Saudi–Iranian rivalry has so far killed millions in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Afghanistan. The black wave has even washed over countries where the Saudis and the Iranians haven’t faced off directly or through their proxies. Egypt has seen a dramatic decline, partly because so many from its poorer classes have spent time as temporary workers in Saudi Ara-bia and come home transformed into ultra-conservative quasi-Wah-habis, and also because the Egyp-tian middle class has since rejected the West and turned to the Saudis for inspiration and fashion. The headscarf, for instance, has be-come a status symbol for women. Before 1979, less than a third of Egypt’s women bothered to wear it, but a decade later, two-thirds were covering themselves, and today hardly any woman in the whole country dares to go outside without one.

And the Saudis have done ex-traordinary damage in Afghani-stan, not only by supporting the Taliban financially and diplomati-cally but by actively training the Taliban to replicate the dreaded re-ligious Saudi police—the Commit-tee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice—just as the Iranians replicated their own Revo-lutionary Guard Corps abroad, first and most famously by establishing Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“There was something so ex-traordinary about 1979,” Ghattas writes, “with its cascade of events…that to some it felt as if the sky were falling to earth.” The Saudi–Iranian rivalry for supremacy in the Middle East is as central to and defining of that region’s modern history as the American–Soviet rivalry was

to Europe’s between 1945 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Those who choose to blame the Arab–Israeli conflict or American foreign-policy blunders for most of the Middle East’s ills are drastically wide of the mark. Syria’s civil war, which scarcely involves Americans or Is-

raelis and emphatically involves the Saudis and the Iranians (and the Russians), exposes the blame-America and blame-Israel crowds as the blinkered fools that they are. Ghattas barely touches on this in her book, but she doesn’t have to. It’s obvious.q

Great Society: A New HistoryBy Amity ShlaesHarper, 528 pages

Reviewed by Kyle Smith

I’M TRYING to picture how far the media would turn up the outrage meter if Presi-dent Trump governed like Lyndon Johnson, and I

can’t do it; my imagination isn’t expansive enough. In Great Soci-ety: A New History, Amity Shlaes presents a deeply researched, briskly told account of an era of tumult that was promoted and in many cases even funded by the federal government. If you want to be reassured that we of the Trump Era enjoy the privilege of relatively placid times, this is the book to read.

Johnson once said, of Martha’s Vineyard, “we ought to blow up that goddamned island.” He (ac-cording to some accounts) grabbed the Fed chair William McChesney Martin by the lapels while shoving him against the wall and barked, “Martin, my boys are dying in Viet-nam and you won’t print the mon-ey I need.” To reduce the amount

of money leaving the country, Johnson called for a moratorium on all American tourism outside the Western Hemisphere for two years. He used the FBI and CIA to track his political enemies. Oh, and imagine if President Trump were forcing hundreds of thousands of men to go to war in an obscure cor-ner of the world for poorly defined reasons, and that tens of thousands of these young men, disproportion-ately poor and members of minor-ity groups, were getting killed or maimed.

Shlaes leaves Vietnam mostly to one side, though, presenting in-stead a panorama of the blithe and bizarre methods that Washington used in upending America in the interest of destroying racism and poverty. Her portrait of the Great Society’s signature actors contains multitudes. There are capitalist business titans, labor leaders such as the canny UAW chief Walter Reuther with his vision of turn-ing America into a Scandinavian social-welfare democracy, intellec-tuals such as Daniel Patrick Moyni-han, mayors such as Sam Yorty of Los Angeles, community activists, cabinet secretaries, and the presi-dent who demanded the legislation and spending that set all of the above in motion.

Kyle Smith is National Review’s critic-at-large.

Not-So-Great


I should say presidents, plural; Richard Nixon, after campaigning against everything Johnson did, not only continued with the Great Society but poured even more re-sources into Johnson’s programs and introduced new ones of his own. Nixon’s mass codification of Johnson’s vision yielded a society in which federal intrusion in most everything down to the contents of school lunches is simply taken for granted.

How did we get here? Sh-laes shows how, immediately af-ter JFK’s assassination, Johnson handpicked his own Kennedy, brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, to lead the new poverty department, dubbed the Office of Economic Op-portunity. Shriver’s strategy was indirect: He sought to distrib-ute monies to community-activist groups. Some of these groups were coached to agitate in the streets as Democratic mayors such as Yorty and Chicago’s Richard Daley (who wanted to direct the funds themselves) reacted with bewil-derment. Daley could not quite believe that the Woodlawn Orga-nization on Chicago’s South Side, which worked with gang mem-bers to create chaos, was getting Shriver’s funding. Via the Newark Community Union Project, “oc-cupying a mayor’s office was now a federally sanctioned activity,” Sh-laes writes. She quotes one activist who crowed: “The War on Poverty became a government for those of us in opposition.”

Johnson ordered his aide Bill Moyers to “just put a stop to it at once,” meaning money for riot-ers, even as Shriver kept coming up with more and more creative ways to spend. His office was re-sponsible for a ludicrous variety-television propaganda special that

aired in June 1965 hosted by the disc jockey Murray the K called It’s What’s Happening, Baby! This was in essence a 90-minute adver-tisement for the OEO’s wonderful menu of community services, and it implicitly pleaded with the youth to sign up for groovy job training and civics classes instead of throw-ing rocks at police.

Gradually the OEO grew and evolved into the social-services blob we know today, a vast inter-locking web of handouts intended to make good on Johnson’s famous June 4, 1965, vow, in a commence-ment address at Howard Univer-sity, to deliver “equality as a fact and equality as a result” to black America. That didn’t happen, of course, but the book is a devastat-

ing illustration of how the statist/progressive thirst can never be slaked; no matter how much mon-ey is being spent, no matter how many protective regulations are put in place, it is never enough. As Washington forced its way into ev-ery economic and social question, the style of architecture employed in the bonanza of federal con-struction to house the new agen-cies, fittingly, was brutalism. It’s the kind of amusingly harmonious detail Shlaes never misses.

As she did in The Forgot-ten Man, her New Deal history in which we encounter Franklin Roosevelt fixing the price of gold while lounging in bed, Shlaes keeps landing on perfectly ap-posite moments that didn’t turn up in the history books. Over the course of a decade, America became a place at war with itself, in a thousand different ways. In St. Louis, police patrolled the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects to make sure fathers weren’t pres-ent with their families, on pain of withdrawing their apartments. In the same complex, administrators had to budget $1,700 a day to undo vandalism, for instance, replacing copper wiring stolen and resold by the building’s own tenants.

Meanwhile Shriver’s “commu-nity-action” groups morphed into armies of litigators, as the fed-erally funded legal team of the California Rural Legal Assistance Fund set the stage for a new era of suing the government by success-fully demanding greater welfare payments based on novel legal theories. CRLA, by the way, had its initial request for a federal grant of $750,00 rejected by the OEO—which insisted it take $1.3 million instead. In the War on Poverty, the lawyers won.q

iAmity Shlaes’s

Great Society is a devastating illustration of how the statist/progressive thirst can never be slaked; no matter how much money is being spent, no matter how many protective regulations are put in place, it is never enough.

Commentary 47

Culture & Civilization

How to ruin a great and singular musicalBy Terry Teachout

OF all the great Broad-way musicals to have opened between Ok-lahoma! in 1943 and Fiddler on the Roof

in 1964, the bookends of the genre’s golden age, the one best known to contemporary audiences is proba-bly West Side Story. Because of the success of the 1961 screen version,

which won 10 Oscars, most Ameri-cans are at least generally familiar with the 1957 show in which direc-tor-choreographer Jerome Rob-bins, composer Leonard Bernstein, librettist Arthur Laurents, and lyri-cist Stephen Sondheim turned Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a bloody tale of love, hate, big-otry, and death on the mean streets of Manhattan. Not only does the film, which makes (fairly) faithful use of Robbins’s vaultingly vital street-kid choreography and Bern-stein’s tuneful score, continue to be telecast, but the original stage mu-sical has been revived three times on Broadway and is regularly pro-duced throughout the U.S. and around the world.

Yet West Side Story is in cer-tain crucial ways uncharacteristic of the theatrical genre to which it belongs. It is, to begin with, a tragedy rather than a comedy,

ending with three of the four prin-cipal male characters having died violently in full view of the audi-ence. While Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I also contained violent deaths, they were sited in the larger context of the untragic idealism that is a defining feature of the formula for successful Broadway musicals that was developed and perfected by Oscar Hammerstein II, who wrote the books and lyrics for the four aforementioned shows.* But West Side Story, in which the mutual hatred of the Jets and Sharks is a portrait in miniature of the larger racial tensions of America in the ’50s, is different, and was promptly recognized as such. When Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court

Wreck Side Story

Terry Teachout is Commen-tary’s critic-at-large and the dra-ma critic of the Wall Street Journal. Satchmo at the Waldorf, his one-man play about Louis Armstrong, has been produced off Broadway and throughout America.

* See my “Why Musicals Succeed” (Com-mentary, March 2016) for a discussion of this formula, which West Side Story follows closely in other respects.

48 Culture & Civilization : April 2020

justice, saw the show, he al-legedly told Bernstein that “the history of America is now changed.”

No less unusual are the music and choreography. Robbins claimed that he and his collaborators had sought

to see if all of us—Lenny

who wrote “long-hair” mu-

sic, Arthur who wrote seri-

ous plays, myself who did

serious ballets, Oliver Smith

[the set designer] who was

a serious painter—could

bring our acts together and

do a work on the popular

stage.

Yet none of them felt any need to dilute their distinc-tive styles to make West Side Story more accessible to ordinary viewers. In par-ticular, Bernstein’s dynamic score incorporates the jag-ged rhythms and dissonant harmonies of the modern classical music he was writing for the concert hall, just as Robbins’s choreography fuses the familiar steps of urban social dance with the more complex movement vo-cabulary of the neoclassical ballets he had been making since 1944 for American Ballet Theatre and, later, the New York City Ballet.

Nor did they need to do so: West Side Story was a hit, running for 732 performances before be-ing filmed, and six of its songs—“I Feel Pretty,” “Maria,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Something’s Coming,” “Somewhere,” and “Tonight”—had by then become standards. Its success was a tribute to the dis-cernment of the show’s earliest audiences, who had been prepared by then to appreciate a “serious” musical by the structural innova-tions and heightened emotional intensity of the shows that Ham-

merstein had previously written with Richard Rodgers.

On the other hand, the present-day popularity of West Side Story can also be explained by one of its less widely remarked features: The show’s principal characters are all teenagers. Hence it is ideally suited for performance by high-school and college students, who identi-fied with the adolescent angst of Tony and Maria long before Dear Evan Hansen taught savvy produc-ers that their solipsistic suffering could lure teenagers to Broadway. And with the release next Decem-ber of Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, a new generation of youngsters may respond at least as warmly to the plight of the Jets and the Sharks.

But will they? In an op-ed pub-lished earlier this year in the New York Times, Carina del Valle Schor-

ske, a Puerto Rican writer and translator, dismissed West Side Story as a “nar-rative ghetto,” a no-longer-tolerable manifestation of “America’s colonizing power to determine who Puerto Ricans get to be.” The hortatory title of her angry piece left no doubt as to the only outcome that Schorske and her fellow progressives would regard as acceptable: “Let West Side Story and Its Stereo-types Die.”

One may take leave to doubt that they will do so any time soon, but it is certainly likely that some schools whose drama pro-grams cannot fully cast the Sharks without resorting to the use of white per-formers (as was the case with both the original stage production and the film) will choose not to stage West Side Story at all in-

stead of fending off the protests of “woke” students and their fellow travelers.

Moreover, there is a growing belief in theatrical circles that West Side Story is in need of renovation for reasons other than its politics, starting with the over-familarity of Robbins’s choreography. Of the six revivals that I have reviewed since 2006, five either reproduced his steps literally or were “newly” cho-reographed in a manner on which his example had left the clearest of marks. In addition, many of his dances were reused in Jerome Rob-bins’s Broadway, the 1989 revue of his musical-comedy work, and entered the repertory of the New York City Ballet six years later as a freestanding piece called West Side Story Suite. Add to this the revised versions prepared by Robbins for the 1961 film and you will likely

Top, West Side Story (1961) ‘The Dance at the Gym’ and below, in the 2020 version of

West Side Story at the Broadway Theatre.

Commentary 49

come away inclined to feel that for all its self-evident artistic excel-lence, West Side Story is past due for judicious refurbishing.*

E NTER IVO van Hove, the Belgian stage director who is Broadway’s trendiest di-

rector of big-budget revivals. His postmodern stagings of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge and The Crucible received near-universal critical praise, as did his 2018 mounting of Lee Hall’s stage version of Paddy Chayefsky’s Net-work. Ben Brantley of the New York Times, van Hove’s most prominent fan, has called his work “illuminat-ingly unorthodox,” adding, “This must be what Greek tragedy once felt like, when people went to the theater in search of catharsis.”

Van Hove’s approach to West Side Story, which opened in New York in February, is typical of his Broadway work. It is, he says, “a West Side Story for the 21st century,” and like so many Euro-pean stage productions, it exem-plifies the clean-sweep approach of Regietheater. A German word whose literal meaning is “director’s theater,” the neologism refers to the conviction long prevalent in Europe, especially in the world of opera, that the director of a revival is co-equal in creative importance to the actual author. In addition to being completely conceptualized, Regietheater-style revivals do not seek to illuminate the intended meaning of a show. Instead, their directors feel free not merely to change the settings of the shows they stage but to cut and rewrite the texts in order to bring them into closer accord with their own interpretations.

For van Hove, West Side Story

is primarily a political statement, and so every element of the show that contradicts this interpretation has been jettisoned. (As a result, his production runs for an hour and 45 minutes, an hour shorter than the 2009 Broadway revival directed by its own librettist, Arthur Laurents.) As well as dropping “I Feel Pretty,” one of the show’s best-loved songs, he has also cut its most ambitious dance number, an extended sec-ond-act dream ballet set to the song “Somewhere” in which Tony and Maria envision the Jets and Sharks reconciling in a never-never land of mutual trust and respect.

Robbins would never have sanc-tioned this cut, for the ballet is the show’s dramatic pivot point, the moment when the tragic meaning of West Side Story—that love is ca-pable of vanquishing hatred but is not always powerful enough to do so—is given its most complete ex-pression. But, then, all of Robbins’s choreography, not just the “Some-where” ballet, has been replaced by new dances made by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a Dutch choreographer with no experience in staging musical comedy. The fundamental problem with her work here is not that it’s new but that it’s tedious and unmusical. (I came away feeling as though the chorus had spent the evening walking.) It is not enough simply to get rid of Robbins’s dances: You must replace them with something at least as compelling, and De Keersmaeker comes nowhere near doing so.

As for van Hove’s staging, it is, like the rest of his Broadway work, an assemblage of navel-gazing min-imalist tricks slathered with politi-cal sauce. Foremost among them is the absence of a set: His West Side Story is performed on a huge open stage. Instead, the upstage wall of the 1,761-seat Broadway Theatre has been replaced with a

proscenium-sized screen on which are alternately projected scenes of the streets of New York and live-TV pictures of the cast in motion. These latter images dwarf the real-life cast members and make it difficult to look at the performers for more than a few seconds at a time. Instead, the viewer’s eye is irresistibly drawn to the screen. In addition, the video is embarrass-ingly “on the nose,” never more so than in “Gee, Officer Krupke.” One of the most brilliantly and bitterly thought-provoking musical-come-dy numbers ever written, “Krupke” is reimagined here as a didactic po-lice-brutality bit with clunkily obvi-ous video clips of white policemen beating up black suspects. It is no small feat to stage “Krupke” in such a way that it gets not a single laugh, but that is what happens here.

As this example shows, van Hove and De Keersmaeker have denuded West Side Story of the humor, romanticism, and sexiness that help to give point to the grim funeral procession that is the show’s harrowing last scene. The original West Side Story starts in one place, dramatically speaking, and ends in another, whereas van Hove’s dour version goes nowhere at all. It is hard to convey in words how wrong-headed the results are: One must see them in the theater to fully appreciate their relentless banality.

But while most of the reviews of van Hove’s revival were posi-tive, others pointed to a turning of the critical tide against van Hove’s approach. Ben Brantley, for in-stance, unexpectedly attacked him for smothering West Side Story in gratuitous video effects, with results that he described as “curi-ously unaffecting,” saying, “There are a lot of split screens and a lot of frankly clichéd, commercial-style images of characters running and brooding.” Even more telling was

* Spielberg’s film version has been recho-reographed by Justin Peck, a member of the New York City Ballet and that com-pany’s resident choreographer.


Alexandra Schwartz’s New Yorker review: “The production is an in-furiating example of what happens when a powerful style calcifies into shtick.…He wants to make us see an iconic work with new eyes, but all we can see is him.” Such quips are the shoals on which reputa-tions run aground and sink.

W HATEVER the merits of van Hove’s produc-tion, the question re-

mains: What is West Side Story really about? Is it a tale of ’50s gang warfare viewed through the distorting prism of white privilege? Or, as van Hove seems to believe, is it better understood as an extended theatrical metaphor for American racism of all kinds? And might its symbolism be sufficiently open to justify other, even more radical interpretations?

It is too rarely noted that West Side Story was the work of a cre-ative team consisting mainly of white men who were both Jewish and homosexual.* In our identity-obsessed culture, we take it for granted that these are relevant considerations in any properly informed discussion of the show. But even the Jewishness of Ber-nstein, Laurents, Robbins, and Sondheim went almost entirely unmentioned in 1957, despite the fact that the Montagues and Capu-lets were Catholics and Jews in the earliest drafts of the book. Only later in the show’s gestation did the opposing gangs evolve into the Jets, a mixed group of Polish-, Irish- and Italian-American teen-agers, and the Sharks, a band of Puerto Rican émigrés.

That West Side Story started life as a story of anti-Semitism is far from surprising. Most of

Broadway’s silver- and golden-age musicals were written in whole or part by first- and second-genera-tion Jewish immigrants who might reasonably have been expected to take a bleak view of American life. Instead, they embraced the natu-ral optimism of their newfound land, an attitude now generally interpreted as a purposeful act of self-assimilation—and never more so than in the case of Oscar Ham-merstein, a highly assimilated Jew who was also the single most influ-ential figure in the development of the postwar musical.

As for the sexuality of the chief makers of West Side Story, it was undiscussable in 1957 and for de-cades afterward. Not only were all four men public figures, but Ber-nstein was married with children, while Robbins and Sondheim had been and would continue to be-come involved with women at vari-ous times in their lives (Robbins even announced his engagement to the dancer Nora Kaye in 1951). Still, those who knew them best agreed, then as now, that they were primarily homosexual, a concur-rence exceptional to the point of singularity for the creative teams of golden-age Broadway musicals, the vast majority of which were the work of mixed groups of straight and gay artists.

All this notwithstanding, none of the creators of West Side Story seems ever to have suggested that the show might have a gay subtext. Indeed, Laurents, who was never shy in later life about discussing his sexuality in public and considered himself a political activist, said more than once that its underly-ing sensibility was Jewish, making no mention of homosexuality. The closest that he came to hinting that there might have been more to it than that was when he observed that West Side Story is about “the idea that love is destroyed in a

world of violence, and prejudice breeds violence.”

Yet it is still widely felt, espe-cially by gay men of a certain age, that West Side Story is at least as much “about” homosexuals as Jews or Puerto Ricans. In particular, “Somewhere,” whose offstage per-former sings of an imaginary “place for us” where “we’ll find a new way of living…a way of forgiving,” has come to be regarded as an unof-ficial anthem of gay liberation, and the song is accordingly sung by gay men’s choruses all over the world. Moreover, it is easy to imagine a gender-swapped revival of West Side Story in which Tony becomes “Toni,” thereby making his illicit love for Maria even more trans-gressive of the conservative mores of 1957, in much the same way that Bobby, the sexually ambiguous central character of Sondheim’s Company, is currently being played by a woman, Katrina Lenk, in that pioneering musical’s new Broad-way revival.

Such, at any rate, is one of the myriad possibilities awaiting the directors of future revivals of West Side Story, though it is at least as likely that they will opt instead to play the show “straight.” For one need not purge West Side Story of political incorrectness, much less quarry it for hitherto unsuspected subtexts, to be thrilled anew by its still-potent mixture of romanti-cism and anguish. While it is far from perfect—indeed, I find it cloying when performed with any-thing less than iron conviction—it remains a masterpiece of its kind, a musical that, as its creators hoped, coaxed the best out of them all. And if West Side Story is, as I now believe, a show for young people, it also has the power to remind view-ers long past their youth of what its songs and dances meant to us in the days when we, too, were full of dreams.q

* Oliver Smith was gay but not Jewish, while Jean Rosenthal, the lighting de-signer, was a lesbian.

Commentary 51

The foremost dramatist in the English language has produced a masterpiece at 82By Wynn Wheldon

TOM Stoppard’s new play, Leopoldstadt, which recently opened at Wyndham’s The- atre in London, con-

cerns the fates of two haute bour-geois Viennese families in the peri-od from 1899 to 1955. As the play opens, there are 16 characters on stage, almost all of them Jewish. At the close, there are three.

Vienna 1899 is the city of Freud, Klimt, Mahler, Schnitzler. Ten per-cent of its population is Jewish. Great strides have been made. Says the patriarchal Hermann Merz: “My grandfather wore a caftan, my fa-ther went to the opera in a top hat, and I have the singers to dinner”—though “obviously prejudice doesn’t disappear overnight” and he has become “Christianized.” His son Jacob is circumcised and baptized in the same week. Hermann regards Vienna as “the Promised Land” and sees little point in Zionist dreams of a Levantine home. “Do you want to do mathematics in the desert?” he asks of his brother-in-law Ludwig.

Ludwig asserts that “a Jew can be a great composer. He can be the toast of the town. But he can’t not be a Jew.” The first part of Leopol-dstadt ends with Hermann having to acknowledge as much after he challenges to a duel an officer, Fritz, who has made an insulting insinuation about his wife.

FRITZ: In my regiment an officer

is not permitted to fight a Jew.

HERMANN: I’m a Christian.

FRITZ: This is painful for me.

HERMANN: I’m a Christian,

damn you!

FRITZ: Let me put it this way.

In my regiment, an officer is

not permitted to fight someone

whose mother was a Jew.

“Since a Jew is devoid of honor from the day of his birth,” Fritz says, “it is impossible to insult a Jew.” Hermann returns home to partici-pate in a full-scale seder: “It is still our duty to retell the story of how we were brought out of Egypt…” This is the final line of the act.

The play moves on to 1924, after the Treaty of Versailles has reduced Vienna to postimperial poverty. Hermann’s textile business no lon-ger has a sustainable market. Jacob has lost an arm and his spirit in the Great War. Nellie, Jacob’s cousin, has “caught politics at the university and now goes on socialist picnics.” She insists that “there are more important things now than being a Jew,” to which Jacob responds:

Well wave your red flag, the

Jews will get blamed anyway—

strikes, inflation, bank failures,

Bolshevism, the black mar-

ket, modern art. The Jews got

blamed for everything before

the war and when the war was

over they got blamed for that.

Vienna has become subservi-ent, emasculated, and Hermann, whose identity as a Viennese bour-geois, seriously circumscribed 25 years earlier, is now resigned to his country’s Germanification. The Hydra of Marxism and nation-alism flourishes.

By 1938 Jews are leaving Aus-tria. Freud has gone to England. An English journalist will take Nellie and her son home with him to Britain. Even as she ac-cepts having to go into exile, she wonders, “How can it be worse?” Her mother Eva insists that “we’re used to this… it will pass.”

The final scene is set in the same place as most of the pre-ceding action, an apartment in Vienna. We are now in 1955, and the occupying powers have with-drawn. The three characters pres-ent are Nathan, who has survived Auschwitz, his aunt Rosa, who had emigrated to the U.S. long before the war, and his cousin Leo, Nellie’s Anglicized son. Leo’s knowledge of his family, including his natural father, has just been revealed to him. At the urging of Nathan, he is vividly reminded that he had once lived in the apartment, by an incident, wit-nessed by the audience at the end of the previous scene, in which the boy had cut his hand. The sudden recollection reduces Leo to tears.

Rosa presents Leo with a family tree. He looks at it. “Emilia died in her own bed”, says Rosa.

And now Tom Stoppard, mas-ter of the baroque phrase, the paradoxical clause, uses a dreadful simplicity of language to produce as powerful a lament as theater has

Wynn Wheldon’s latest book is The Fighting Jew: The Life and Times of Daniel Mendoza, Cham-pion Boxer (Amberley, 2019).

Tom Stoppard’s Great Jewish Play


ever heard. With the solemn timing of a funeral drum beat, Leo reads out the names, learning them for the first time, one by one, and Rosa responds, one by one. This is what drama can do that documentary struggles with: It can make us weep at truth. Stoppard has hinted that Leopoldstadt may be his last play. In which case these are the words he leaves us with:

LEO: Sally

ROSA: Auschwitz

LEO: Mimi

ROSA: Auschwitz

LEO: Bella

ROSA: Auschwitz

LEO: Hermine

ROSA: Auschwitz

LEO: Heini

ROSA: Auschwitz

T OM STOPPARD was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in

1978, a knight bachelor in 1997, and in 2000 was awarded the Order of Merit (of which there are only 24 members in the Commonwealth at any one time). He is an avid follower (and formerly player) of cricket. He is tremendously Eng-lish. Indeed, he may be the most respected living English writer. But as in all things Stoppardian,* para-dox pokes its finger in and waggles.

He was born Tomáš Straussler on July 3, 1937, in Zlin, in Moravia, in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now the Czech Republic. His father Eugene worked as a doctor for Bata shoes, which pro-vided its workers and their fami-lies with housing, shops, schools, and a hospital.

Presciently recognizing the danger Germany posed to his Jewish employees, Thomas Bata, the founder of the company, re-employed them throughout the world. Whether this was how the Strausslers found their way to Singapore is not entirely clear, but there they lived until the Japanese threatened. His mother, Martha, brother Peter, and Tomáš, were evacuated before the fall of the city, ending up in British India. Eugene, left behind, was killed.

In Darjeeling the five-year-old Tom was sent to a school run by American Methodists, and Martha remarried a British army major, Kenneth Stoppard. The new family soon found itself back in England, and young Tom (never ‘Thomas’), now eight, at boarding school in Nottinghamshire, before attending Pocklington school in Yorkshire, founded in 1514.

He did not go to university. He would probably say he regrets this, but it likely made him the superior jack-of-all-trades that contributes so much to that ‘Stoppardian’ ad-jective. He became a journalist, a theater reviewer, was impressed by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot but thought such things beyond him until he saw a play, Next Time I’ll Sing to You, by the little-known English absurdist James Saun-ders, and recognized something he might have a stab at. Saunders’s play had a lasting impact. Stoppard quoted the following passage from it in a lecture given at the New York Public Library in 1999:

There lies behind everything,

and you can believe this or not

as you wish, a certain qual-

ity which we may call grief.

It’s always there, just under

the surface, just behind the

façade, sometimes very nearly

exposed, so that you can dimly

see the shape of it as you can see

sometimes through the surface

of an ornamental pond on a still

day, the dark, gross, inhuman

outline of a carp gliding slowly

past; when you realize suddenly

that the carp were always there

below the surface, even while

the water sparkled in the sun-

shine, and while you patronized

the quaint ducks and the su-

percilious swans, the carp were

down there, unseen. It bides its

time, this quality. And if you do

catch a glimpse of it, you may

pretend not to notice or you

may turn suddenly away and

romp with your children on the

grass, laughing for no reason.

The name of this quality is grief.

The lecture was given the same year that Stoppard began to reveal the extent of his Jewishness, a self-discovery that led directly, and decades later, to Leopoldstadt.

S TOPPARD made his name with the tremendous riff of wit that is Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern Are Dead (1967). A further paradox began to emerge. Play after extraordinary play fol-lowed, and the English suspicion of cleverness never seemed to extend to him. This is because he inhabits a particular strain of English hu-mour that runs through Burton and Shakespeare and Sheridan to Oscar Wilde and G.K. Chesterton—and, in the 1960s, when Stoppard was on the rise, to Spike Milligan and Monty Python. It wears its knowl-edge lightly, and it is not satire. It has to do with how language can be played with, English, so mongrel, being a perfect medium for such japes. Of The Importance of Being Earnest, which provided a kind of underpinning for his spellbinding play Travesties, Stoppard said, ad-miringly, that “[it] is important, but it says nothing about anything.” He was seen as a wit and slapped on the

* “Stoppardianism combines perplexing but undoubted rationalism with baroque linguistic precision to create comic plots filled with paradoxical uncertainties that somehow generate complex but logically satisfying results,” William V. Demasters, The Cambridge Introduction to Tom Stop-pard

Commentary 53

wrist for not being more “political,” by which was meant left-leaning. But he was not interested in what he called “committed theater.” And so he was accused of being “cold.” Perhaps he was: “I burn with no cause,” he wrote. Actually, he was being disingenuous.

What his British fans and crit-ics did not grasp was the degree to which Stoppard also appealed to the dissidents of Eastern Europe, but for quite different reasons. Un-like the state-subsidized left-wing playwrights who were the toast of bien-pensant London, in Commu-nist Europe, Stoppard was seen as the natural ally of Vaclav Havel, his fellow Czech. On a recent Times of Israel blog, the filmmaker Inna Ro-gatchi wrote: “No one who is anyone in the cultural world of Central and Eastern Europe just cannot imagine him- or herself without Stoppard as one’s essentially formative part.”

The fact is that Stoppard, from

a fairly early point in his career, has been writing plays that would win the approval of most small “c” conservatives (the way he has de-scribed himself, though he has also put “timid libertarian” on record). “What worries me,” he has said, “is not the bourgeois exception but the totalitarian norm.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, his anti-Communist activism for Amnesty International, Charter 77, and as a member of the Committee for the Free World, was complemented by plays such as 1977’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (which was dedi-cated to Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky); a television play that same year called Professional Foul (dedicated to Vaclav Havel, while the Czech leader-to-be was under house arrest); 1978’s Night and Day (dedicated to Paul Johnson shortly before Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory the follow-ing year); and 1984’s Squaring the

Circle, which concerned Solidar-ity’s victory over Communism in Poland. “Squaring the circle” was the metaphor Stoppard used to demonstrate that human rights and totalitarianism are incompat-ible. He urged the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, not in reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but in protest at Com-munist restrictions on individual freedom. In later plays, such as the Coast of Utopia trilogy (2002) and Rock ’n’ Roll (2006), Stoppard went again to Eastern Europe to further question the delusions, and reveal the dangers, of political idealism.

Stoppard’s conservatism is that kind that allows—paradoxically—a degree of anarchy and chaos that socialism cannot afford. His concern is and has always been for the rights and freedoms of the in-dividual: “The collective ethic can only be the individual ethic writ large,” declaims Professor Ander-

Adrian Scarborough, left, and Luke Thallon in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt at Wyndham’s Theater in London.


son in Professional Foul, before his Czech government hosts turn on the fire alarm to shut him down. If we detect in Stoppard the spirit of J. S. Mill, we might better call him a liberal (of the best, old-fashioned sort), though we can perhaps also hear Michael Oakeshott’s “conver-sation of mankind” echoing in his multitude of themes.

He was keen on Margaret Thatcher: “I had a weary contempt for the to-ing and fro-ing of party politics. Then along came this wom-an who seemed to have no manners at all and who said exactly what she thought.” He admired the way she dealt with the trades-unions and their protection rackets. Most of all he shared her attitude to Com-munism: “We had this luxury of opinionating without penalty, while just two hours away by plane people were being locked up for mild dis-sent. I just found it offensive.”

Stoppard’s stylistic radicalism, and his wit, and his cleverness have saved him from the opprobrium of the cultural elite. I daresay fol-lowing his death he will be turned upon by the new puritans, but for the moment we have a different triumph in Leopoldstadt, which is concerned with the appalling effects of Communism’s twin totali-tarianism, National Socialism.

S TOPPARD’S MOTHER rare-ly spoke about her Jew-ishness. “She was without

religion,” he has said, and he himself was largely ignorant of his extended family’s fate until the early 1990s, when a series of revela-tions concluded with the visit of a grand-daughter of his mother’s sis-ter Irma who had lived in Buenos Aires since the war. She met him for lunch at the National Theatre, and drew him a family tree. It was the first time Stoppard was told all the names of his Czech family. He learned that of his mother’s three

sisters, only Irma had survived. All of his grandparents had been Jewish (he had previously thought only one had been so). All had been murdered. It has taken almost 30 years for the impact of those revelations to make its way to the stage. Stoppard is 82.

Leopoldstadt is by some dis-tance Stoppard’s most autobio-graphical play. Which is not to say that it is all that autobiographical. He has moved his “family” from Czechoslovakia to Vienna (a place he has visited frequently in his writing, and that has, of course, the irresistible attraction of all those great names, names that changed the world); he replaces Singapore with Shanghai, and so on.

Leo, the character who had end-ed up in England at the age of eight and, like Stoppard, was brought up proudly British, is introduced as a young man in the final scene of the play. I mentioned the incident

that unlocks the memory of his presence in the apartment—the cut hand. In 1999, in the first issue of Tina Brown’s Talk magazine, among the Gwyneths and Hillarys and Angelinas, was an article by Stoppard entitled “On Turning Out to Be Jewish.” He tells a story about a visit to Zlin, the town of his birth. There he meets a woman, who was treated for a cut hand by his father, Eugene Straussler.

Zaria holds out her hand, which

still shows the mark. I touch it.

In that moment, I am surprised

by grief, a small catching up of

all the grief I owe. I have noth-

ing which came from my father,

nothing he owned or touched,

but here is his trace, a small scar.

Stoppard subsequently suggest-ed that this immensely moving moment lost its power with each telling of the story. But the doctor in the play, who stitches the wound, is Leo’s grandfather. He is played by Ed Stoppard, Eugene Straussler’s grandson. So, maybe not entirely.

Leopoldstadt might be said to re-turn us to that James Saunders play that impelled Stoppard into drama, and those lines he chose to end his lecture on: “There lies behind everything, and you can believe this or not as you wish, a certain quality which we may call grief.” It is perhaps a stretch too far to say that grief has been Stoppard’s great subject, but a melancholy sense of human folly operates beneath the surface of all his plays. In Leopol-dstadt, folly becomes pure evil, no longer on the surface, in a play so vast it is unlikely to get very many revivals, and that will never tour. It will surely travel to New York, and must be seen, as it is a work, “epic and intimate,” as its marketers are rightly describing it, of profound contemporary and sadly possibly unending pertinence.q

i It is perhaps

a stretch to say that grief has been Stoppard’s great subject, but a melancholy sense of human folly operates beneath the surface of all his plays. In Leopoldstadt, folly becomes pure evil.

Commentary 55

HOLLYWOOD COMMENTARY

spring to introduce advertisers to their fall season premieres. Movie pre-mieres still require worldwide press junkets—flights to Paris and Rome and Singapore and Dubai—each with a party and paparazzi and deluxe gift bags for the press. There are still major film markets at Cannes and Berlin and Toronto. Amazon and Netflix—two enterprises you’d as-sume would be immune to this kind of excess—are enthusiastic and vis-ible presences at film festivals like TriBeCa and Sundance.

People in the entertainment business aren’t stupid. Let me re-phrase that: People in the entertain-ment business aren’t stupid about money. They are perfectly capable of noticing that the old, expensive ways of doing business no longer suit a streaming, on-demand world. No television network, for instance, wants to forgo the annual, pointless Upfront pageant—a holdover from the era of three broadcasting networks and fall televi-sion premieres that coincided with the introduction of Detroit’s new models. It’s not that they don’t realize it’s all a waste of time. They just don’t want to go first.

And now they don’t have to. COVID-19 is doing it for them.

Two major movie premieres—including the lat-est installment of the James Bond franchise—have been pushed to next autumn. Upfront presentations have been cancelled. Coachella music festival is post-poned. South By Southwest, the arts and culture con-ference in Austin, has been cancelled. Location shoots, studio travel, live-audience comedies, pilot produc-tions, Broadway shows—almost every part of the entertainment business has been curtailed, trimmed back, eliminated.

And the agents? They’re staying home.The question is, when all of the agents go home,

will anybody really notice? In-person meetings at a large talent agency are enjoyable and fun only for the talent agents. Normal, well-adjusted people dread meetings of any kind, but especially ones that begin in cavernous marble-clad lobbies where lethal-looking

art dangles from the ceiling, and shiny floors make your shoes go clickety-clackety in loud echoes as you march to the desk, hand over your ID, and wait to be designated a non-threat.

The lobbies and the art collections no longer pack the same wallop now that the entertainment business

has split into a thousand new gal-axies of streaming services, video games, old-line broadcasters, the-atrical studios, AR, IR, and Silicon Valley start-ups. For that matter, neither do the storied and romantic studio gates. It’s just not the same when you’re heading onto the lot to shoot a 10-minute show for Quibi.

A recent survey by Buffer, a social-media-management software company, found that once people start working from home, they tend to like it. In the same way, once the big talent agencies weigh the loss in prestige and pizzazz from a home-bound gchat workforce against the

savings in office rent and art-curatorial services, maybe some of them will decide it’s better—and more profit-able—to, as they say in Silicon Valley, “go Bedouin.”

At some point, it’s safe to say, the current coro-navirus scare will be over. In the meantime, it’s serv-ing as a kind of psychic break for Hollywood, a kind of force majeure requiring every player to play by the new rules. What if, you can hear CFOs across the 323, 818, and 310 area codes, what if we just never go back to the way it was?

That ProMED email has continued to alert me to biothreats from humans and livestock. Just this week, in fact, in among the latest news on COVID-19, I learned about seven new cases of African Swine Fever in Asia. But the real news, for me anyway, is in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter, which keeps a daily count of the old ceremonies and traditions that are cancelled in the wake of corona. The Reporter is my new ProMed.

Stay inside, the experts tell us. Isolate yourself and practice social distancing. Which is something the audience has been doing since Facebook first went online, since Netflix started streaming. Now, at last, the business that serves the audience is catching up.q

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F OR THE past 10 years, I have received a mis-sive, twice daily, from the International Society of Infectious Diseases. It’s called the ProMED

email, and it lists in excruciating detail the various infectious diseases that have been reported that day, worldwide—all of them, human, plant, and livestock.

Why did I sign up for this? Beats me. I’m not really the bio-paranoid type. In fact, I am writing this on a five-year-old MacBook Air with what must be the filthiest keyboard around. Next to it is my phone, and let’s not get into where that’s been. So maybe I just have an academic interest in the end of the world.

For the past 10 years, I have dutifully scrolled through the ProMED email and parsed the scientific mumbo jumbo and read about livestock deaths in Af-rica and measles outbreaks in West Los Angeles and ho-hummed, tapped the phone, and shoved it deep into my (infested with bacteria) pocket, utterly and totally unalarmed.

“We’re not trying to be alarmist,” a talent agent in Los Angeles told me last week. “But we’re shutting down the office. We’re going to work from home, have meetings by Skype or Zoom.”

“Wow,” I said. “You guys having money trouble? Is the rent in Century City too high?”

“No, no, no, no, no, God, no, no, nothing like that,

God, no,” said the agent, with emphatic urgency. “God, no, don’t even put that out there. No, no, it’s just the virus, the coronavirus. It’s a whole liability thing, can’t expose employees and clients blah blah blah.”

“Blah blah blah?”“You know what I mean. But for the time being,

if you wanted to come in for a meeting or something, we’re not doing that.”

He is employed at a large and powerful agency, one that spent an eye-popping amount of money on its offices. Talent agencies do that. Decades ago, when Mike Ovitz helmed CAA, he commissioned I.M. Pei to design the building. Gersh, the boutique talent agency, is a vest-pocket museum of contemporary art. The idea, I guess, is to command everyone in the lobby, “Behold our Frank Stella, and Obey!”

That kind of intimidation is hard to do by remote conferencing.

Hollywood still operates on what we might call the Leni Riefenstahl model: If you want to project power, better be prepared to put on a show. From the icy and theatrical lobbies of the major talent agen-cies to the endless series of Long Marches down the awards-show red carpet, the various power centers of the entertainment business spend considerable time and money marshaling crowds. Oscar hopefuls throw lavish dinners and parties to woo Academy voters. Television networks stage theatrical extravaganzas—the “Upfronts”—every

Rob Long has been the executive producer of six TV series.

HOLLYWOOD COMMENTARY

No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Self-

Quarantine! ROB LONG

continued on page 55

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Despite frequent misconceptions, U.S. aid to Israel is no gift—but actually a calculated expense that ensures our regional interests and the safety of our country and its troops—one that delivers a higher return on investment than foreign aid to any other nation.

What are the facts? Several American politicians have proposed withhold-ing U.S. aid to Israel unless it does more to support a Palestinian state, such as ceasing to build housing in Judea-Samaria (the West Bank). This proposal ignores the real purpose of U.S. aid to Israel and confuses the relationship of Israel’s settlements to a Palestinian peace process.

A bit of context helps explain this discon-nect: Consider that the U.S. currently spends $143.25 billion a year on military operations and aid for Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Contrast that amount with the overwhelming value America receives for its $3.8 billion investment in Israel.1) U.S. funds do not support Israel’s day-to-day military operations, but rather are largely used to pur-chase world-class armaments, such as U.S.-manufactured F-35 stealth fighters, and to develop, with the U.S., new advanced weapon systems, such as Iron Dome, Arrow 3 and David’s Sling missile defenses. Note that fully 70% of the U.S. investment in Israel must be spent to purchase U.S. military equipment—which supports U.S. high-tech defense jobs and our industrial base.2) The nations and forces that threaten Israel also threaten U.S. interests—these include Iran, Syria, and U.S.-designated terror groups like Hizbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda and ISIS. Remember that Israel destroyed both Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons factory in Iraq in 1981 and a nuclear facility in Syria in 2007. Recall that Israel has attacked proxies of America’s number one enemy—Iran—in Syria and Lebanon more than 200 times in recent years. Israel assists Egypt in fighting al Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula. No nation—anywhere—battles jihadists more assertively than Israel.3) Our ally Israel is ranked the 8th most powerful nation globally, based on economic and political influence, international alliances and military strength. Israel is not only America’s strongest Middle East ally, it is also one of our strongest globally. 4) No U.S. troops need to be stationed in Israel. While U.S. forces never do Israel’s fighting for it, the Jewish state does collaborate with the U.S. on the X-band radar system, which helps both countries

monitor regional threats. Israel is also a world leader in cybersecurity and intelligence gathering, providing the U.S. a priceless feed of classified information about Iran, Syria, Russia, al Qaeda, Hizbollah and Hamas. In addition, Israel worked with the U.S. to weaken Iranian nuclear weapons operations using the Stuxnet virus, and last year Israeli agents penetrated Iran’s secret nuclear warehouse in Teheran, taking documents that proved Iran’s cheating on the 2015 nuclear deal.

5) Israel serves as a port of call for U.S. troops, ships, aircraft and intelligence operations. Strategically located on the Mediterranean and Red Seas, Israel guards critical waterways used for international shipping and military activities. As U.S. Representative Steve Rothman (D-N.J.) puts it, “For about 2 percent of what the U.S. spends in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan this year, Americans can take pride in the return on our investment in aid to Israel.”

Those who seek to link U.S. investment in Israel to creation of a Palestinian state, make a fundamental mistake: First, it would be foolhardy for the U.S. to jeopardize its regional security interests—or those of our valued ally, Israel—for the sake of the unrelated matter of Palestinian sovereignty. Second, after the Palestinians’ refusal of three generous offers of land for peace by Israel since 2000, as well as their refusal to negotiate with Israel since 2010, it’s unfair to hold Israel solely respon-sible for their statelessness.U.S. aid to Israel dramatically limits U.S. need to send troops to the explosive Middle East and ensures Israel can support U.S. interests in the region. Indeed, our investment in Israel is returned many times over—often not the case for other U.S. aid. Thus, any linkage of the U.S. investment in Israel with a Palestinian state is misguided. U.S. aid to Israel helps guarantee our own security, but also the safety of one of our greatest allies.

Aid to Israel Makes the U.S. SaferU.S. aid to Israel is really not aid at all. The $3.8 billion sent annually to Israel is an investment in our own country’s security, returning many times its cost.

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Facts and Logic About the Middle EastP.O. Box 3460, Berkeley, CA 94703James Sinkinson, PresidentGerardo Joffe (z"l), FounderFLAME is a tax-exempt, nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. Its purpose is the research and publication of facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the United States, Israel and other allies in the region. You tax-deductible contributions are welcome.

Linkage of U.S. aid to Israel with a Palestinian state is misguided.

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