Ride or DEI? Jewish liberals won't easily surrender
But the culture shifts could prevail
Reform vs. Reform: Will the disappearance of DEI programs be better or worse for the Jewish people?
A recent open letter initiated by the Union for Reform Judaism, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the National Council of Jewish Women—signed by over 30 other primarily American organizations of similar assertively progressive persuasion—defends diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the name of Jewish values.
It’s a message that lands to the left of my own politics—but it also makes a number of good points…
Jews who once supported Donald Trump are having second thoughts
On this week’s episode of Bonjour Chai, Avi and Phoebe break down the ways in which Donald Trump is reshaping Canadian politics, from a Jewish perspective and beyond.
A few fingers for the future
In AI video, Jewish celebrities from Scarlett Johansson to Adam Sandler give Kanye the middle finger [JTA]
Outrage over detention of booksellers and raid on Palestinian bookstore in east Jerusalem [PEN America]
Ross Douthat's smart, evocative new invitation to religion makes me wonder, ‘Why aren't Jews writing books like this?’ [Mark Oppenheimer]
Why Gen X women are having the best sex [Mirelle Silcoff, NYT Magazine]
Porn, part of the human experience and possibly Canada's greatest export: Q&A with Pornhub partner Solomon Friedman [National Post]
Okay, just read Phoebe's post on DEI and Judaism. What it seems Phoebe wants to return to is anti-discrimination and equality, which DEI *explicitly* set itself up against, and accused those supporting it of being racist. A good rundown is here: https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/democrats-could-build-a-message-around
"A central tenet of wokeness — or whatever you call the ideology that surged in the 2010s — is that race and gender-neutral concepts like meritocracy and colorblindness are smokescreens for racism. Progressives worked to dismantle identity-blind processes such as standardized tests and blind hiring because they believed that any method that didn’t produce perfect race and gender proportionality was ipso facto biased. They were explicit about this — they even coined a new word to capture the approach: “equity”.
"Of course, now that the wave of wokeness is washing back out, the DEI soldiers-on-an-island-who-don’t-know-that-the-war-is-over often pretend like equity isn’t about decreasing the salience of competence and increasing the salience of race and gender. Unfortunately for them, we all lived through the wave, and we remember. There’s a whole generation that knows that saying “let’s hire the best person regardless of race and gender” might get you cast as Hitler 2.0, and we only compound people’s mistrust when we pretend that we didn’t do the thing that everyone fucking knows that we did.
"Some Democrats will read the paragraphs above and think “well I didn’t do that.” Perhaps, and good for you, but it doesn’t matter: Every person left of center has the stink of this failed policy stuck to us now. The mistake that many liberals — myself one million percent included — made during that era wasn’t one of malice or stupidity, but of cowardice. We stifled our objections to bad policies and tried to sane wash the avalanche of bullshit coming from activists. We should have walked around with a bullhorn yelling “I disagree with much of what’s being said!”, but instead, we typed “I completely agree with the sentiment you’re expressing but wonder if perhaps there might be practical concerns at play” into the Racial Reckoning Slack channel and then prayed not to get fired. We blew it, the albatross is around our necks now, it’s going to be a long way back."
That last paragraph is how we get to this open letter: DEI insinuated itself into institutions by simultaneously proclaiming their mantle of anti-discrimination and demanding obeisance to woke ideas such as "Equity over Equality" and standpoint epistemology. There is also this pithy description of the process from David Burge: https://x.com/iowahawkblog/status/664089892599631872?lang=en
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
I would love it if anti-discrimination and equality were to return as the end goals of liberalism -- those were extremely good for the Jews! More importantly (I'm not a Jewish chauvinist) they were clear and fair for everyone, whereas DEI rubs our faces in "privilege" and attempts to guilt trip us into complying.
But fusing anti-discrimination with DEI is ahistorical (antihistorical, really, since as stated above DEI was in direct *opposition* to mere "colorblindness"). The open letter, and Phoebe's article, read as last-ditch attempts to make good on DEI's blackmail approach: Let us do what we want or the opposition will destroy everything. How about neither, and a return to the sanity of, say, 2010 (with the 2015 Supreme court decision legalizing gay marriage thrown in)? Is Trump going to do that? No, but neither is handing the keys back to DEI.
Hi! Love your podcast, and could you please tell Avi that Chicago Blackhawks fans have been loudly cheering the National Anthem for almost 40 years, and that it has literally zero to do with Trump?
https://hawktalkhockey.com/2016/05/10/31-years-ago-blackhawks-fans-start-cheering-the-anthem/
Also, there was a Quebecois parody of the I Am Canadian commercial (which this American always found a little smug, BTW. Not the parody, the original):
https://youtu.be/TncdhLGjFTE?si=i7oQH63kuU0JwOGx