Category: Religion

Elon Musk Is Not Antisemitic; He Is Anti the Censorship of “a Specific Jewish Group, the Anti-Defamation League”

(p. A15) Major papers like the Journal, New York Times and Washington Post report that advertisers are again fleeing the service previously known as Twitter because, these papers explain, owner Elon Musk endorsed “an antisemitic post.”  . . .

. . .  A user @breakingbaht expressed a lack of sympathy for “Jewish communities” (emphasis added) that allegedly encouraged “the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” while supporting immigration of “hordes of minorities.”

After Mr. Musk responded “You have said the actual truth,” the New York Times cited equally undefined “Jewish groups” as detecting in the original tweet a common antisemitic trope. In one Times account, the phrase “Jewish communities” was transmuted into “Jewish people.”

. . .

The Journal examined the context and suggested Mr. Musk was really exercised about a specific Jewish group, the Anti-Defamation League, which has largely adopted the identitarian and censorship agendas of the progressive left.

For the full commentary, see:

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “BUSINESS WORLD; How Elon Became an ‘Antisemite’.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original version, the phrase “Jewish communities” (but not the rest) is emphasized by italics.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated November 28, 2023, and has the title “BUSINESS WORLD; Opinion: How Elon Became an ‘Antisemite’.”)

Ivy League Presidents Who Cancel Conservative Speech, Are Fine with Speech that Praises Genocide Against Jews

(p. A22) The presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania testified before a House committee on Tuesday [Dec. 5, 2023] about the state of antisemitism on their campuses. It did not go well for them.

. . .

If they are seriously committed to free speech — as I believe they should be — then that has to go for all controversial views, including when it comes to incendiary issues about race and gender, as well as when it comes to hiring or recruiting an ideologically diverse faculty and student body. If, on the other hand, they want to continue to forbid and punish speech they find offensive, then the rule must apply for all offensive speech, including calls to wipe out Israel or support homicidal resistance.

If Tuesday’s hearing made anything clear, it’s that the time for having it both ways, at the expense of Jews, must come to an end now.

For the full commentary, see:

Bret Stephens. “Campus Antisemitism, Free Speech and Double Standards.” The New York Times (Saturday, December 9, 2023): A22.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 8, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

British Colonial Authorities in India “Eased Out” Vaccine Innovator

(p. 19) The story of Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine, little told in the West beyond the world of bacteriology and within the annals of Judaica, is thrilling in its nobility and verve, and it might have better served Schama’s purpose had he devoted the entire book to the tale of a man he so clearly adores.

. . .

He was born in Odessa in 1860, and as a teenager was set to defending his community from the endless Russian pogroms. In time he moved to Switzerland and then to France, where he trained at the Pasteur Institute and, after studying paramecium, threw his energies into the scourge of cholera. He treated himself with an experimental vaccine and took off to India in 1893 to see how it worked.

That it did, brilliantly, and by today’s reckoning his invention saved millions. His more remarkable eventual success came five years later with a vaccine for eradicating bubonic plague.

Schama — by his own admission no biologist — describes the painstaking method of making a plague vaccine with enthralling technical precision. He writes of the gentle and respectful means of extracting the noxious fluids from the swollen buboes that dangled in the intimate parts of the infected and the dying; of the subsequent culturation process, in ghee-covered flasks of goat broth — no cow or pig could be used, since the vaccines would be given to Hindu and Muslim alike — and then of the nurturing of the resulting silky threads that held the trove of bacilli, ready to be injected.

Notwithstanding Haffkine’s immense contribution to India’s public health, the British colonial authorities, haughty and racist by turn, eventually wearied of the man. Their own means of dealing with infection had, after all, relied on brawn and bombast — the wholesale destruction of villages, the eviction of natives, the smothering of everything with lime and carbolic acid. Such schemes had generally failed, and it irritated the burra sahibs that a foreigner, and moreover a keen adherent to an alien belief, could succeed where they had not.

And so Haffkine was eased out, first from his Calcutta laboratory across to Bombay, and then out of the empire’s crown jewel altogether. He later went to Lausanne, where he would spend his final years.

For the full review, see:

Simon Winchester. “The Vaccinator.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, November 5, 2023): 19.

(Note: ellipsis added. In the original only the words “burra sahibs” are in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Oct. 28, 2023, and has the title “Not All Heroes Wear Capes. Some Prefer Lab Coats.”)

The book under review is:

Schama, Simon. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. New York: Ecco Press, 2023.

End Double Standards by Consistently Protecting Free Speech

(p. 5) On Wednesday [Dec. 6, 2023], a dear friend emailed me a viral clip from the House hearing on campus antisemitism in which three elite university presidents refuse to say, under questioning by Representative Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, that calling for the genocide of Jews violates school policies on bullying and harassment. “My God, have you seen this?” wrote my friend, a staunch liberal. “I can’t believe I find myself agreeing with Elise Stefanik on anything, but I do here.”

If I’d seen only that excerpt from the hearing, which has now led to denunciations of the college leaders by the White House and the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, among many others, I might have felt the same way. All three presidents — Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania — acquitted themselves poorly, appearing morally obtuse and coldly legalistic. It was a moment that seemed to confirm many people’s worst fears about academia’s tolerance for hatred of Jews.

. . .

. . . it seems to me that it is precisely when people are legitimately scared and outraged that we’re most vulnerable to a repressive response leading to harmful unintended consequences. That’s a lesson of Sept. 11 but also of much of the last decade, when the policing of speech in academia escalated in ways that are now coming back to bite the left.

. . .

. . . clearly, at many universities, the defense of free speech has been inconsistent. Some elite schools now cloaking themselves in the mantle of the First Amendment to ward off charges of coddling antisemites have, in the past, privileged community sensitivity over unbridled expression. So when university administrators say, as Gay did, “We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,” many in the Jewish community see a galling double standard.

But as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a libertarian-leaning civil liberties group, said in a statement about the hearings, “Double standards are frustrating, but we should address them by demanding free speech be protected consistently — not by expanding the calls for censorship.” Unfortunately, that is not what’s happening.

For the full commentary, see:

Michelle Goldberg. “University Presidents Walked Into a Trap.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, December 10, 2023): 5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 7, 2023, and has the title “At a Hearing on Israel, University Presidents Walked Into a Trap.”)

Most Israelis Will Have No Place to Go If Israel is Destroyed

The video clip above is embedded through YouTube’s “share” feature. It is a clip of the EconTalk episode posted on Mon., Dec. 18, 2023. Host Russell Roberts interviews Haviv Rettig Gur on “An Extraordinary Introduction to the Birth of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.”

As the title claims, the interview really is “extraordinary.” I realize now that when I have thought about Israelis, I have always thought about the Israelis I have known–the ones I have run into at universities in the United States. Haviv showed me that these are the exceptions, that the vast majority of Israelis have no place to go if Hamas succeeds at destroying Israel. I bet the attitudes of many Americans toward what happened on October 7 would be different if they understood this, so I hope this interview is widely viewed.

“Flowers Never Bend, With the Rainfall”

Sometimes when I am in a dark mood I wonder how you keep moving forward when you do not know how much time is left. Some seek an answer in religion. I am more open to a kind of stoicism combined with the other gift of Prometheus: blind hope.

(p. 3) A few months into treatment, I realized that Josh might not make it to the next spring, when we would normally visit my extended family in Greece. I told Dr. Sara that I would like to take my husband to Greece, because he might not get the chance again.

. . .

My diary reminds me that while we were there, I asked Josh what he would do differently in life. “Not get cancer,” he said.

. . .

As for me, I kept hearing the lyrics to a Simon and Garfunkel song in my head: “So, I’ll continue to continue to pretend, my life will never end, and flowers never bend, with the rainfall.” It was my soundtrack.

For the full commentary, see:

Anemona Hartocollis. “My Husband’s Doctor, Onscreen.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sunday, November 20, 2022): 1-3.

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated June 20, 2023 [sic], and has the title “Cancer, My Husband’s Doctor, and Catherine Deneuve.”)

Mass Internment of Hundreds of Thousands of Muslim Uyghurs in Communist China

(p. C3) Tahir Hamut Izgil watched as parks emptied of people, naan bakeries boarded up their windows and, one after another, his friends were taken away.

The Chinese government’s repression of Uyghurs, the predominantly Muslim ethnic minority to which he belonged, had gone on for years in Xinjiang, the group’s ancestral homeland in China’s northwest. But in 2017, it morphed into something more terrifying: a mass internment system into which hundreds of thousands of people were disappearing. Millions lived under intense and growing surveillance.

Izgil, a prominent poet and film director, feared that one day soon, the authorities would come for him. So he did what few have managed — in the summer of 2017, he escaped with his family, and once settled in a Virginia suburb, he wrote about the experience.

In his memoir, “Waiting to Be Arrested at Night,” published this week by Penguin Press, Izgil brings his discerning eye for detail to describe the impact of China’s policies on the people who live under them.

Scholars and journalists have detailed the architecture of the surveillance system against Uyghurs. There have also been memoirs by Uyghur authors and intellectuals in exile. But few possess Izgil’s firsthand knowledge and analytical acuity, said Darren Byler, a leading scholar on Uyghur culture and Chinese surveillance and a professor at Simon Fraser University, in Canada.

“This is the defining account of what it’s like to live through this moment,” Byler said. “This will be the book that, in 10 years or 20 years, people will turn to if they want to understand that moment.”

For the full story, see:

Tiffany May. “The Toll of a Life Spent Under a Heavy Hand.” The New York Times (Tuesday, August 8, 2023): C3.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 1, 2023, and has the title “A Poet Captures the Terror of Life in an Authoritarian State.”)

The book discussed above on the mass internment of the Uyghurs is:

Izgil, Tahir Hamut. Waiting to Be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide. Translated by Joshua L. Freeman. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.

The “Deliciously Guilty Pleasure” and “Disorienting Joy” of California Skiing in August

(p. A20) This weekend, . . . hordes of Californians are smearing pink and yellow zinc oxide on noses, shoving feet into hard plastic ski boots and gliding over to the lifts at Mammoth Mountain for yet another day on the slopes. A reminder: It’s August.

. . .

Unpredictable change is the new status quo.  . . . it can also, in a rare instance like the chance to ski in the dog days of summer, bring a disorienting joy.

. . .

In mid-July [2023], well after all the hot dogs and fireworks, I headed up to the Sierra and ran into so much lingering snow that the road through Yosemite National Park hadn’t yet opened for the season. I took an alternate route, 108 over Sonora Pass, and saw people parking in turnouts, carrying skis up dirt trails through trees, stepping onto sunny snow slopes and linking turns back down to ice chests full of cold drinks before, you know, maybe going for a swim. When I finally got to Kelly’s place, the creek on her high desert property frothed in a fabulous white and clear torrent through sage lands sparkling with superblooming yellow mule’s ear, red paintbrush and white phlox. The big peaks, meanwhile — in the dead heat of a California summer — remained so heavily blanketed in snow that I felt I was seeing them the way Indigenous people must have during the Little Ice Age, 500 years ago.

The premise of California’s secular faith in nature is that water plus sunshine equals enlightenment. In high school I was transfixed by a description on the jacket of Bank Wright’s classic “Surfing California” of “skiing Mount Baldy in the morning and surfing Hermosa Beach in the afternoon.” That struck the teenage me as the absolute perfect way of snatching healthy peace and giddy fun from the predictable maw of adult misery.

. . .

. . . when I drove to Mammoth, put on my favorite cowboy hat against the sun and sipped iced coffee while watching tiny black figures ski down blinding white slopes, the experience was perhaps best likened to the queasy adrenalized thrill of an oncoming manic episode after a long and dark depression — worrisome, yes, bound for nowhere good but, as long as we’re just talking here and now, a deliciously guilty pleasure.

For the full commentary, see:

Daniel Duane. “The Upside of Climate Chaos? Skiing in August.” The New York Times (Monday, August 7, 2023): A20.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 6, 2023, and has the title “It’s August. Californians Are Still Skiing. Don’t Ask.”)

William F. Buckley, Sr. Spent $100,000 to Fund His Son’s Entrepreneurial Start-Up: National Review

In my Openness book, I give reasons why risky innovative start-ups at fragile early stages almost always need to be substantially self-funded. When close relatives invest, I include that as self-funding.

(p. A15) . . . “William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908-1922,” [is] a fascinating if uneven book by the independent historian John A. Adams Jr.

. . .

The business climate in Mexico was promising for foreigners like the Buckleys, thanks to the pro-development policies of its autocratic president, Porfirio Díaz, who would rule the country for more than three decades.

Buckley’s prominence among the American expatriate community made him a natural conduit between officials in the U.S. and Mexico once the latter country was plunged into chaos following the ouster of Díaz in 1911. Buckley was Zelig-like, cropping up repeatedly at key moments. He visited the U.S. Embassy in February 1913 during the Decena Tragíca (Ten Tragic Days), when Francisco Madero, Díaz’s successor, was overthrown in a coup led by Gen. Victoriano Huerta, instigating a spasm of violence that killed thousands in Mexico City.

. . .

Buckley favored Huerta, serving as the regime’s legal counsel in negotiations with the U.S. aimed at preventing hostilities between the two nations. He was thus dismayed by the ascendance of Venustiano Carranza and, later, Álvaro Obregón. Both leaders endorsed the Mexican Constitution of 1917, including Article 27, which asserted national ownership of natural resources while circumscribing the economic power of the church. These provisions horrified Buckley, who was a staunch believer in free-market capitalism as well as a devout Roman Catholic. In the bulletin of the American Association of Mexico, an advocacy group he founded in 1919, Buckley denounced the “dangerous Bolshevist movement” that had taken root in Mexico.

. . .

. . ., Mr. Adams consulted with several Buckley family members, including a descendant based in Mexico City, as well as Judge James L. Buckley, the sole survivor among the 10 children born to Will and his wife, Aloise. Judge Buckley, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, contributed a foreword acknowledging the importance of Mexico to the family’s understanding of itself, writing that “it had somehow permeated our DNA.”

. . .

As another of his offspring once said, Buckley’s experience in Mexico “deepened his frontier suspicions of autocratic [leaders] (and big government in general), and this attitude dyes all his children strongly.” Surely that was true of Buckley’s favorite son, William F. Buckley Jr., who, after serving a short stint with the CIA in Mexico City (he, too, was fluent in Spanish), founded National Review in 1955, which remains one of the leading voices of the conservative movement. The elder Buckley helped fund his son’s upstart venture with a $100,000 contribution from a fortune that traced its origins to Mexico during the most tumultuous period of that nation’s history.

For the full review, see:

Andrew R. Graybill. “BOOKSHELF; Conservatism’s Mexican Roots.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 27, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 26, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘William F. Buckley Sr.’ Review: Conservatism’s Mexican Roots.”)

The book under review:

Adams, John A., Jr. William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908–1922. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023.

Scientists Resurrect “Sweet and Possibly Medicinal” Judean Date Palm Pushed to Extinction by Roman Soldiers

(p. C11) The Judean date palm, prized for its sweet and possibly medicinal fruits, had been a feature of the landscape of biblical Israel. In the aftermath of the failed Jewish rebellion at the fortress of Masada in A.D. 73, Roman soldiers set about destroying the date trees, . . .

. . .

The few remaining Judean palms eventually died out. Yet the species wasn’t gone forever, as Martin Lemelman tells children in a captivating graphic novel,”The Miracle Seed.”

With economical text and expressive panel illustrations, Mr. Lemelman recounts the story of the tree’s astounding 21st-century resurrection. Among the detritus left at Masada, he explains, was an earthenware jar containing six Judean palm seeds.

. . .

“The Miracle Seed” not only reads like an adventure but also exudes an optimism of the kind that children ages 8-14 deserve.

For the full review, see:

Meghan Cox Gurdon. “Coaxing New Life From Ancient History.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 25, 2023): C11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 24, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

The book under review is:

Lemelman, Martin. The Miracle Seed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2023.

Persian King Cyrus Tolerated Diversity of Religion and Culture

(p. C12) After another year that has cried out for inspiring leadership, I grasped glimmers of optimism from Matt Waters’s “King of the World,” a biography of Persian king Cyrus the Great.

. . .

Today Cyrus is revered as a model of pragmatic, benevolent rulership.

. . .

. . . Cyrus imposed or forbade no religion, language, ethnicity, dress code or culture on his native Persians or the many other peoples he ruled. Would that this were the case for his descendants today.

For the full review, see:

Timothy Potts. “12 Months of Reading; Timothy Potts.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 10, 2021): C12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 8, 2022, and has the title “Who Read What in 2022: Thinkers and Tastemakers.”)

The book praised by Timothy Potts is:

Waters, Matt. King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.