Uncategorized
A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past
(JTA) — For his 2021 book “How the Word Is Passed,” winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, poet and journalist Clint Smith explored the landscape of American memory — specifically how the history of slavery is explained, commemorated, distorted and desecrated in sites across the United States.
While on tour promoting the book, he explained in an interview Tuesday, he’d often be asked if any country had gotten it right when it came to memorializing its own dark past. “I kept invoking the memorials in Germany, but I had never been to the memorials in Germany,” Smith said. “As a scholar, as a journalist, I felt like I had to do my due diligence and excavate the complexity and the nuance, and the emotional and human texture, that undergirds so many of these places and spaces.”
The result is December’s cover story in the Atlantic, “Monuments to the Unthinkable.” Smith traveled to Germany twice over the past two years, visiting Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, its Topography of Terror Museum, the museum in Wannsee where the Nazis plotted the Final Solution, and the concentration camp at Dachau, talking to historians and curators along the way. As a Black man wrestling with how America accounts for the crimes of its past, he went to learn from the experience of the Germans, who “are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.”
In an interview, Smith talked about the inevitable differences between the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade, the similarities in how two countries — and communities — experience their histories, and how his article could serve as a bridge between African-Americans and Jews in a time of increasing tension between them.
Smith spoke to JTA from his parents’ home in his native New Orleans.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Your book is about the ways America succeeds and fails to come to terms with slavery, and your article is about the ways Germany is, in your phrase, “constructing public memory.” I was struck by someone who warned you, “Don’t go to Auschwitz.” What were they saying?
Clint Smith: It was Frederick Brenner, a Jewish man and a remarkable photographer who has photographed the Jewish Diaspora across the world for the past several decades, who said that, because people are standing [at Dachau] and they’re taking selfies, and it’s like “me in front of the crematorium” and “me in front of the barracks.” That was deeply unsettling to him, especially as someone whose family was largely killed in the Holocaust.
I don’t want to be reductive about it and say that you don’t want people to go to these spaces and take pictures. I think it’s all about the sort of disposition and sensibilities one brings to a space. If someone went to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, I don’t necessarily want them doing puckered-lip selfies in front of a slave cabin. I can understand why people wouldn’t want those places engaged with in that way, but you do want tourists to come, right? I mean, before the pandemic, 900,000 people visited Dachau every year, and part of what brings people to Dachau is seeing and taking a picture of the crematorium, taking a picture of themselves on this land in that space where history happened, and posting it online. And maybe that serves as a catalyst for somebody else to make that journey for themselves.
You did go to Dachau, which you call a “memorial to the evil that once transpired there.”
I am a huge believer in putting your body in the place where history happened. I stood in many places that carry the history of violence: plantations, execution chambers, death row. But I’ve never experienced the feeling in my body that I felt when I stood in the gas chamber at Dachau. And you just see the way that this space was constructed, with the sort of intentional, mechanized slaughter that it was meant to enact on people. The industrialized nature of it was something unlike anything I’d ever experienced before and it made me feel so much more proximate to that history in ways that I don’t think I would have ever experienced otherwise.
Physically standing in a concentration camp and physically standing and putting my body in the gas chamber fundamentally changed my understanding of the emotional texture and the human and psychological implications of it. Because when you’re in those spaces you’re able to more fully imagine what it might have been like to be in that space. And then you can imagine these people, these families, these women, these children who were marched into camps throughout Europe. You can never fully imagine the fear, that sense of desperation that one would have felt, but in some ways, it’s the closest we can get to it if you are someone who did not have family who lived through or survived the Holocaust. It provided me with a radical sense of empathy. And that’s why I took the trip in the first place.
A tourist takes a selfie inside the Memorial to the Murdered Jews Of Europe in Berlin, Sept. 25, 2019. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
By contrast, there are the memorials that are not historical sites, but either sculptural or architectural, like Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, nearly five acres of concrete slabs. What do you think makes an effective memorial that isn’t necessarily the historical place itself, but a specifically memorial project?
Well, for example, the big one in Berlin. It’s just so enormous. The scale and scope of it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I tried to imagine what an American analog would be like. What if in the middle of downtown Manhattan there was a 200,000-square-foot memorial, with thousands of stone columns, dedicated to commemorating the lives of indigenous people who were killed in the early Americas? Or a 200,000-square-foot memorial in the middle of downtown D.C., not far from the White House, to the lives of enslaved people?
With that said, what I found really valuable were the people I spoke to, who had very different relationships to that space. Some thought of that memorial as something that was so meaningful because of its size and because of its scope, and because it was a massive state-sanctioned project. And then there were others who thought that it was too abstract, that it was too passive, even in its name, right, the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” which sounds as if something happened to people without naming the people who enacted the harm and who committed the crime. Those are the sort of nuances and complexities that I wanted to spend more time with, and found really valuable because, in the same way, descendants of enslaved people here in the United States have many different conceptions of what the iconography of slavery should look like or what repair and reparations to slavery should be made.
You write about the “stumbling stones” or “Stolpersteine”: Those are the small brass plaques placed in the streets, inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and placed in front of their last known residence. The stones are exactly the opposite scale of the Berlin memorial.
Right. I think that is the memorial that I was most struck by: the largest decentralized memorial in the world, with 90,000 stones across 30 different European countries. I remember the moment I was walking down the street looking for landmarks and saw my first Stolpersteine, and I only saw it because at that moment the clouds moved and the sun shone off the brass stone. You see the name, the birth date, the deportation date, the death date, the place where the person was killed. You walk past another home, you see seven; you walk past another home, you see 12. You begin to imagine entire lives based on the names and information that exist on these stones. It creates this profound sense of intimacy, this profound sense of closeness to the history and it’s so human, because it’s individual people and individual names.
One of the most valuable things about the stumbling stone project, I think, is all the work that precedes it. It’s the school students who are doing research to find out about the lives of the people who were taken from the home across the street from their school. It’s the people in the apartment complex, who come together and decide that they’re going to figure out who were the Jewish families who lived in that apartment complex before them. And sometimes it’s really remarkable, granular details about people’s lives: what their favorite food was, what their favorite flavor of ice cream was, what the child liked.
Artist Gunter Demnig lays “stumbling stones” that memorialize persecuted or murdered Jews on the streets of Frankfurt. (Boris Roessler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
As Gunter Demnig, the originator of the project, says, 6 million people is a huge abstraction, and now it becomes about one man, one woman, one child, and [people] realize that it truly was not that long ago. There are so many survivors of the Holocaust who are still with us. Gunter Demnig, his father fought for the German army. He represents this generation of people who are engaging in a sort of contrition for the acts of their parents and their grandparents.
You ask in the piece what it would look like for a similar project to be created in the United States as a memorial to enslaved people.
I’m from New Orleans, and the descendant of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was at one point the busiest slave market in the country. And as Barbara Steiner, a Jewish historian, said to me in Germany, entire streets [of New Orleans] would be covered in brass stones! That was such a striking moment for me. That helped me more fully realize the profound lack of markers and iconography and documentation that we have to enslaved people in our landscape here in the United States relative to that of Germany.
Why are physical monuments important? I have sometimes wondered why we spend so much money on the infrastructure of memory — statues, museums, memorials — and if that money could be better used for living memorials, like scholarships for the descendants of victims, say, or programs that study or archive evidence of genocide. Why is it important to see a statue or a museum or even a plaque?
First off, museums and statues and memorials and monuments are by no means a panacea. It is not the case that you put up some memorials or you lay down some Stolpersteine and suddenly antisemitism is gone. Obviously, Germany is a case study and is experiencing its own rise in antisemitism. And that’s something that’s deeply unsettling, and is not going to singularly be solved by memorials and monuments.
With that said, I think there is something to be said to regularly encounter physical markers and manifestations of the violence that has been enacted and crimes that have been done in your name, or to the people that you are the descendant of. I try to imagine Germany without any of these memorials and I think it would just be so much easier for antisemitism to become far more pervasive. Because when your landscape is ornamented by things that are outlining the history that happened there, it is much more difficult to deny its significance, it is much more difficult to deny that it happened, it is much more difficult not to have it shape the way you think about public policy. I do believe that if we had these sorts of markers in the United States, it wouldn’t solve the racial wealth gap, it wouldn’t solve racism, it wouldn’t solve discrimination. It wouldn’t eradicate white nationalism or white supremacy. But I do think it would play some role in recalibrating and reshaping our collective public consciousness, our collective sense of history in ways that would not be insignificant.
And to your point, my hope is that those things are never mutually exclusive. It’s a conversation that’s happening here in the United States with regard to how different institutions are accounting for their relationship to slavery. Universities are coming up with reports, presentations, panels and conferences that outline their relationship to the history of slavery, especially since the murder of George Floyd [in 2020]. Activists and descendants have pushed them to not just put out a report, or put up a plaque or make a monument. It’s also about, well, what are you going to do for the descendants of those people? Harvard, where I went to grad school, put $100 million aside specifically for those sorts of interventions. Places like Georgetown have made it so that people who were the descendants of those who are enslaved have specific opportunities to come to the school without paying. And people of good faith can disagree over whether those initiatives are commensurate with or enough to atone for that past, and I think the answer is almost inevitably no.
Certainly people on what we like to think of as the wrong side of history understood the importance of physical monuments in creating memory.
The origin story of my own book was that I watched the monuments come down in 2017, in my hometown in New Orleans, of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. I was thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city, and there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. What does it mean that to get to school I had to go down Robert E. Lee Boulevard? That to get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway? That my middle school was named after a leader of the Confederacy? And that my parents still live on a street today named after someone who owned 115 enslaved people? The names and iconography are reflective of the stories that people tell and those stories shaped the narratives that communities carry. And those narratives shape public policy and public policy is what shapes the material conditions of people’s lives.
One thing about Germany is that its national project of memory and repentance has been accompanied by a vast reparations program — for Israel, Jewish survivors, their families and programs to propagate Jewish culture. I wonder if you think Germany could have moved ahead without reparations? And can America ever fully grapple with the legacy of slavery without its own reparations?
The short answer is no. America cannot fully move forward from its past without reparations. The important thing is not to be limited and reductive in the way that we conceive of what reparations are or should look like. In some ways, I’m as interested if not more interested in what specific cities and states are doing in order to account for those histories and those crimes. For example, in Evanston, Illinois, they created a specific program to give reparations to Black families who experienced housing segregation, in a certain period of time, given how prevalent redlining was in and around Chicago in the mid-20th century. I know in Asheville, North Carolina, there’s a similar program that’s thinking about how to meaningfully engage in repair to the descendants of communities that were harmed from some of the policies that existed there. This is not to say that those programs themselves are perfect. But I think we sometimes talk about it so much on a federal level, that we forget the local opportunities that exist.
West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signs the reparations agreement between his country and Israel, Sept. 10, 1952. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin Ferencz, from “Reckonings”)
Many people who were redlined or experienced housing covenants — all the sort of insidious manifestations of wealth extraction that were part of Jim Crow — are still alive today. So sometimes it’s not even a question of what you have to give the descendants. Sometimes it’s like, what do you give the actual people who are still here?
That’s an important distinction you make in your article, about the difference between grappling with the past in Germany and the United States. In Germany, there are so few Jews, while in the U.S. we see the living evidence of slavery, not the evidence of absence.
That’s perhaps the greatest difference that allows for both a landscape of memory to be created in Germany, and also allows for Germany to pay reparations in ways that the United States is reluctant to do: Jewish people in Germany represent less than one quarter of one percent of the population of Germany. One of the folks I spoke to told me that Jewish people in Germany are a historical abstraction. Because there’s so few Jewish people left, because of the slaughter of the Holocaust. I think about the reparations that were given to Japanese Americans who were held in incarceration camps during World War II. They got $20,000 checks, which is not commensurate with what it means to be held in a prison camp for multiple years, and cannot totally atone for that. But part of the reason that can be enacted is that there’s a limited amount of people. There are 40 million black people in this country. So the economic implications of reparations are something fundamentally different here in the United States.
So let me ask you if there’s anything else you wanted to mention that we haven’t talked about.
I want to name specifically for your readers that I’m not and would never intend to conflate slavery and the Holocaust. They are qualitatively different historical phenomena that have their own specific complexities and should be understood on their own terms. With that said, I do think it can be helpful to put the two in conversation with one another, specifically in the profound ways that these two monumental periods of world history have shaped the modern world and how they are remembered in fundamentally different ways.
And there are similarities as well, which you write about.
I did find so many parallels. The Jewish people I spent time with in Germany explained that some of the manifestations of racism and anti-Blackness in the United States are not so different from the sort of manifestations of antisemitism that exist in Germany, especially as it relates to public memory. When I was at the museum devoted to the Wannsee conference, the executive director, Deborah Hartmann, told me that she and Deidre Berger [the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation] were talking about how Jewish people did not always have a seat at the table when these monuments and memorials were being built. Jewish people were not allowed to participate beyond a certain extent, because many Germans felt that Jewish people were not objective. Jewish historians couldn’t be taken seriously because they were too close to the history.
That just echoes so much of what Black scholars and historians have been told about their ability, or the lack thereof, to study the history of Black life. The godfather of African-American scholarship, W.E.B. Du Bois, was told by white scholars that he couldn’t be taken seriously because he was too close to the history of slavery.
Meanwhile, Deborah Hartmann talked about how so many of the historians and scholars who played a role in shaping the landscape of memory in Germany were themselves “close to the history,” including former members of the Hitler Youth.
Somebody sent me a message that really meant a lot to me this past week, basically saying that my essay is an exercise in “solidarity via remembrance” — in a moment where, unfortunately, there have been a lot of public manifestations of ideas and antisemitic remarks that might threaten to rupture a relationship between Black and Jewish people. Obviously, we didn’t time it this way: I worked on this piece for a year. But it’s my hope that as someone who is a Black American, who is the descendant of enslaved people, who is not himself Jewish — that my respectful, empathic, curious, journey reflects the long history of solidarity that has existed across Black and Jewish communities and that that I hope we never lose sight of.
—
The post A Black writer explores how Germany remembers its ‘unthinkable’ past appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
The most important thing I’ll take away from 11 years at the Forward
In September 2015, I arrived at the Forward’s Manhattan office for my first day as an intern on the culture desk. I was 22 years old. I wore a blue dress that didn’t really fit, and was awed and slightly terrified by my bevy of talented, perceptive, funny new colleagues.
Now I’m 33. I’ve spent not just my whole career at the Forward, but also, effectively, my whole adult life. I’ve learned to respond to smart, fascinating people with interest, rather than fear. I’ve learned to wear a belt correctly, which wouldn’t have salvaged the blue dress, but might at least have helped. Just shy of 11 years after my first encounter with the savviest, scrappiest Jewish newsroom in the business, I’m moving onto a new chapter. Today is my last day as a member of this one-of-a-kind staff.
I’ve thought a lot, in the last several weeks, about what the point of these years has been. The Forward has given me so much, most of it good. As solid an education in journalism as anyone could hope for. An unfiltered and sometimes painful view of the community of which I am a grateful part. An inbox full of correspondents my loved ones sometimes don’t believe are real. (Consider the case of Gayle Kirshenbaum and Gayle Kirschenbaum, two entirely separate writers who sent me pitches for op-eds within 45 minutes of one another one day this spring.)
I’ve written nearly 1,000 pieces. I’ve edited something like double that amount. I’ve had moments of pride, most recently winning my first New York Press Club Award for a feature on the operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. And I’ve had times of dismay — more of them in the last three years than I care to recount.
Above all, I’ve had friends.
In 2021, I went to my former colleague Aiden Pink‘s wedding. It was the first moment when the world felt almost normal after the COVID pandemic. Several Forward alumni traveled to Minneapolis — at one point a surprising candidate for most common Forward staffer hometown — to celebrate. We had a weekend-long sleepover at Ari Feldman‘s mother’s house. We watched Mamma Mia! We piled into a photobooth to take tipsy pictures at a pizzeria. Jenny Singer and I danced in a fluorescent-lit hallway while guarding the room in which Aiden and his wife, Aniko, were having their first quiet moments together as a married couple. In the last moments of the reception, Molly Boigon performed a flabbergastingly good version of the worm.
When we got back to Ari’s house, the power was out. We lit candles on the dining room table, and had the sort of exhausted, giddy conversation I once associated with a certain kind of night in high school. I am largely against the use of superlatives in writing, as anyone I’ve edited will tell you. But that night was magical.
When I think about my time at the Forward, I think about that weekend in the Twin Cities. I think about the editor who hired me, Adam Langer, who over the years went from boss to pal. I think about PJ Grisar, who was the first person to show up to a party I threw last fall celebrating my 10-year anniversary in New York. I think about my predecessor as opinion editor, Laura Adkins, sending me chicken soup one winter when I averaged more than one cold per month. I think about the glorious era when we used to have weekly in-office parties on Wednesday evenings, during which our onetime art director, Kurt Hoffman, used to break out his ukulele and serenade us all in French.
When new people learned about my job here, they tended to focus first on the parts of it that they correctly thought might be hard. It’s a tough time to be a Jew. I know a lot about all the places where swastikas have shown up recently. Once, someone in the comments of a story poetically referred to me as a “Sharia fascist.”
I’ve been called a kapo more times than I can count. And as I’ve helmed our opinion section over the past two and a half years, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of anguish and ire — much of it well-earned, but some symptomatic of willful blindness or excessive ideological allegiance.
All of that is part of life at the Forward. But I’m always surprised when strangers act like my job must be in some way a burden. Truthfully, working here has always been a joy. Because through bad times in the news — and bad times in the business — I’ve always gotten to work with the most remarkable people.
People who will kick into gear as soon as there’s breaking news, no matter where they are or what they’re doing, then spend an idle lunchtime hour discussing the Muppets to whom we feel most spiritually akin. People who have the sharpest insights on what’s really plaguing the Jewish world; the most surprising perspectives on the movies everyone is talking about; and the greatest appetite for bizarre story ideas, like the time I profiled Sen. Jon Ossoff based exclusively on his time at an elite high school ultimate frisbee team.
I have grown up in this newsroom, and I’ve been shaped by it and the glorious, brilliant, offbeat people to whom it’s introduced me. Seeing the world with the particular gaze the Forward fosters — one that’s skeptical of authority, interested in both tradition and its limitations, highly cultural and wryly funny — has taught me how to think, read and write. It’s taught me how to be the kind of Jew I want to be. I was never a Jewish camp kid; Hillel did nothing for me; the Forward is the only real Jewish community I’ve known.
I can’t yet share details on what’s next for me. (If you’re curious, I’ll share the news on Bluesky once it’s time.) One thing I know for sure is that no matter how fabulous my future colleagues might be, nothing will ever displace the Forward in my heart. It hasn’t just been my workplace. It’s really been my home.
The post The most important thing I’ll take away from 11 years at the Forward appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Dangerous denialism about the realities of Hamas points to an American moral collapse
A terrible mutation afflicts American politics. What began as fury over Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war has evolved, in significant parts of the progressive left, into a pathological hostility toward Israel that has become a driver of political identity and debate. The genocide accusation is increasingly treated not as a contested claim but as settled truth; opposition to Zionism as evidence of virtue; and even Hamas and “armed resistance” can be romanticized or excused.
This week’s victory by Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the Senate, alongside the popularity of voices such as Hasan Piker, suggests this is no longer simply the rhetoric of campus radicals. Israel is being cast as such a singular evil that opposing it can seem almost a prerequisite for occupying the moral high ground.
Which is why what happened to Douglas Murray’s recent book is so interesting. On Democracies and Death Cults confronts precisely this mutation: the extraordinary difficulty much of the Western left now seems to have in distinguishing between a deeply flawed democracy and a murderous Islamist movement committed to its destruction. Yet despite Murray’s prominence and the book’s commercial success, much of the mainstream review culture simply ignored it. In the political climate of August 2026, that silence looks less like an oversight than part of the story.
Douglas Murray has never lacked critics. That is the inevitable consequence of writing about immigration, identity politics and the West’s growing loss of confidence in itself. His earlier books, The Strange Death of Europe and The War on the West, provoked fierce disagreement, but they were treated as books that demanded engagement — reviewed, debated and rebutted.
On Democracies and Death Cults, published last year, received something different.
I believe the reason is plain. This was the first Murray book whose principal purpose was not simply to criticize fashionable ideas in the West but to defend Israel during the most contentious conflict of our time.
Had he written 250 pages arguing that Israel’s campaign in Gaza was criminal, reviews would almost certainly have followed. Instead, he argued that Hamas is a death cult, that Israel is confronting an enemy unlike any conventional military adversary, and that much of the Western left has become morally incapable of distinguishing between a liberal democracy from an organization that celebrates the murder of civilians, including on its own side.
The media appears to prefer to ignore those arguments. And I consider that unfortunate, because I believe Murray is substantially right. If I were still with the mainstream media, where I spent decades of my career, I’m pretty sure I would be swimming against the tide on this, and getting called nasty names.
The most remarkable thing about this book is that it exists at all. Its central proposition ought to be among the least controversial statements in modern politics: Hamas is evil. The fact that an accomplished writer felt compelled to devote an entire book to persuading educated Western readers of that proposition — and that this is controversial — says volumes about what our society has mutated into.
Murray’s achievement is not merely to condemn Hamas but to explain it. He rejects the comforting fiction that it is simply another national liberation movement employing regrettable tactics. Barbarism, he argues, is not incidental to Hamas. It is intrinsic to its worldview.
Hamas does not merely accept death as the price of war. It glorifies death, sanctifies martyrdom and exploits the deaths of its own people as readily as those of its enemies. Its objective is not a negotiated peace or a two-state solution. It has repeatedly opposed such outcomes because it does not seek coexistence with Israel but Israel’s destruction. Unless one regards Israel’s very existence as an occupation to be liberated, Hamas’s own stated aims are impossible to misunderstand.
Murray demonstrates this not through slogans but through reporting.
He describes an organization that — together with its fellow traveler and Iran proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon — systematically embeds itself within civilian life: storing weapons in homes, schools and places of worship, digging tunnels beneath residential neighborhoods and turning civilian suffering into a strategic asset. He recounts Hamas gunmen hiding behind civilians apparently attempting to surrender before opening fire, the abuse of ambulances that inevitably casts suspicion on legitimate ones, and the recruitment of fake journalists and even teachers employed by UN schools. None of this is an aberration. It is the strategy itself.
Murray also describes in excruciatingly graphic detail the evidence he collected of the cruel, vicious murders on Oct. 7, in the rural communities invaded by Hamas and at the Nova music festivals — girls shot in the head as they begged for mercy, boys’ heads bashed in with hammers, grenades lobbed at people cowering. It is unbearable and leaves no doubt about the evil at work.
Nor is Hamas’s contempt for life reserved for Israelis.
One of Murray’s most chilling stories concerns Yahya Sinwar during his years in Israeli prison. Discovering that the sister of a fellow prisoner had allegedly dishonored the family through an affair, Sinwar arranged from prison for her murder in the name of family honor. The anecdote is horrifying not simply because of its brutality but because it reveals a worldview in which individual human life carries almost no value beside ideological or tribal imperatives. The same mentality that celebrates the murder of Israeli civilians is perfectly capable of consuming its own.
Murray’s point is not that Israel is morally perfect. Israel has extremists of its own, including some whose politics deserve unequivocal criticism. But there remains an immense moral gulf between a democracy whose institutions regard civilian deaths as tragedies and an organization that celebrates death itself.
The distinction is visible not merely in military conduct but in culture. When General Gadi Eisenkot, now running for prime minister, lost his son fighting in Gaza, Israel mourned with him. When Ismail Haniyeh’s sons were killed, Haniyeh publicly celebrated their martyrdom. One response grieved the loss of life. The other glorified it. That is not merely a political distinction. It is a civilizational one.
Power of observation
Murray also did something that commentators often do not — he went. He entered Gaza. He entered southern Lebanon. He documented Hezbollah’s tunnel systems intended to facilitate an invasion of northern Israel. He described children’s bedrooms converted into weapons depots and the suffocating grip Hezbollah exerts over the Shiite communities it claims to defend. One may dispute some of his conclusions. It is considerably harder to dismiss his observations.
Yet the most unsettling chapters are not really about Hamas or Hezbollah.
They are about us. Murray argues that large parts of the contemporary Western left have become incapable of recognizing jihadist movements for what they are because they increasingly interpret every conflict through a single moral framework: oppressor and oppressed. Once Israelis are cast as oppressors and Palestinians as oppressed, every other moral consideration recedes. Terrorism becomes “resistance,” massacres become contextual, and universal moral standards give way to political tribalism.
That, he argues, explains not only why so much of the world glosses over Hamas’s obvious evil, but why so many people seemed incapable of extending even the most basic sympathy to the victims of Oct. 7. Why were posters of kidnapped children, elderly civilians and Holocaust survivors torn down on Western campuses? Why was the instinct not to mourn, but to explain away, relativize or even celebrate?
He also asks why the outrage is so selective.
Do those denouncing Israel know that while more than half a million Arabs were displaced during the 1948-49 war, an even greater number of Jews were driven from or compelled to flee Arab countries, most of them finding refuge in Israel as citizens? Do they know that Palestinian refugee status — in neighboring Arab countries culturally and ethnically practically indistinguishable from the Palestinians! — has been uniquely preserved and inherited across generations, while other refugee crises have generally been resolved through resettlement and integration?
Do they know how many Muslims are dying today in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa with scarcely a fraction of the attention devoted to Israel? Do they know that, at roughly the same time as the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Partition of India uprooted many millions of people — Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs — in one of history’s largest and bloodiest population exchanges?
Why does none of this provoke anything resembling the same moral fervor?
Israel is a tiny country, scarcely larger than New Jersey even including the Negev Desert, and closer in populated area to Rhode Island. It is fighting organizations openly committed to its destruction. Yet it has become the singular obsession of the activist left.
Is this extraordinary fixation simply the product of ignorance? Do many of those chanting Hamas slogans know little of the history they claim to invoke? Or is something darker at work? Is Israel judged by standards applied to no other nation because it is the world’s only Jewish state? Is it actually antisemitism??
One need not answer that question categorically to recognize that it cannot simply be dismissed. The sheer selectivity of the outrage demands an explanation. Pretending it does not is no answer at all. And yet the world’s media has ignored the main and probably only book written by an outsider that tries to set the record straight, despite his status as a celebrity public intellectual.
An uncomfortable place
Admiration for Murray does not require agreement with all of his conclusions. Indeed, it is here that I part company with him. His diagnosis of the contemporary progressive left is penetrating and absolutely correct. His political prescription is considerably less persuasive, to me.
Somewhere along the way, Murray’s entirely justified alarm at progressive illiberalism appears to have led him into an accommodation with a populist right that embodies many of the very habits he has spent years criticizing. His tolerance of Benjamin Netanyahu sits uneasily beside his insistence that democracies should be held to the highest standards. More troubling still is his increasing willingness to excuse or support Donald Trump.
I cannot follow him there.
Donald Trump is no defender of the civilization Murray wishes to preserve. Contempt for expertise, hostility toward science, casual and colossal corruption, attacks on independent institutions and the elevation of personal loyalty above constitutional principle are not expressions of the Western tradition. They are threats to it.
Many of us now occupy an uncomfortable place. We believe Hamas is evil and that Israel has every right to defend itself against organizations committed to its destruction. We believe Western civilization, for all its undeniable failures, deserves defending because it produced constitutional government, scientific inquiry, individual liberty and the very tradition of self-criticism that allows us to acknowledge its mistakes.
At the same time, we believe in climate science, vaccination, expertise, the rule of law, sensible gun regulation and a robust social safety net. We reject identity politics that reduces history to oppression, but we reject populism that dismisses knowledge, institutions and liberal norms just as firmly.
And we know Netanyahu is a vile and venal schemer who cannot be trusted. We also know the West Bank occupation is not sustainable and plain wrong – even if the Palestinians twice rejected fair offers for a partition and a state.
Twenty years ago, those views would have described a fairly conventional liberal. Today they seem to describe almost no political constituency at all.
You do not have to agree with everything Murray says or believes or does to understand that On Democracies and Death Cults deserves engagement.
The lack of engagement with On Democracies and Death Cults is almost more revealing than the book itself. Murray’s central claim, that Hamas is a murderous, nihilistic organization whose ideology glorifies death, and which helps the Palestinians not at all, ought not to require elaborate demonstration. It should be self-evident to anyone with any information and minimal intelligence.
Yet much of the mainstream intellectual and media establishment simply chose not to grapple with the argument. That silence reflects a profound unseriousness. Institutions that pride themselves on intellectual openness inadvertently reinforced Murray’s broader thesis: that important parts of the Western intellectual establishment have become unable — or unwilling — to make moral distinctions that once lay at the heart of liberal civilization.
If that diagnosis is even partly correct, we face a genuine crisis. The populist right, with its contempt for expertise, institutions and often for truth itself, cannot be the answer. But neither can a left that increasingly struggles to recognize reality.
I am not prepared to believe that this battle for liberalism has already been lost. Perhaps liberals can beat back the progressive challenge. But it is a battle that must be fought. If the political right continues its descent into populist illiberalism while important parts of the left continue to abandon the moral clarity that once defined liberal democracy, then we are in very deep trouble indeed.
The post Dangerous denialism about the realities of Hamas points to an American moral collapse appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
A Minnesota reggae band gave this Midwestern Jewish teenager the greatest gift of all
It’s late summer. Twelfth grade is starting in two weeks, and I — moody guy that I am — am in a particularly foul one when my friend Blair, who I’ve known since our mothers toted us around in strollers, calls me and tells me there’s a reggae band playing at the Lake Harriet bandshell in a few hours.
“Get your lazy butt outta bed,” he says.
Blair isn’t moody by nature. In fact, he’s happy most of the time, which is one of the reasons I’ve stayed friends with him so long. Seeing a reggae band does sound mildly appealing, even if it means I’ll have to get up and get dressed. An hour later, we’re at the bandshell, and my bad mood is threatening to become a thing of the past.
The sun is dropping fast, and the lake is exhaling mosquitoes, dark clouds of them lifting off the surface and drifting into a sky of pale green. There’s been a tornado watch all afternoon, the radio has been issuing steady warnings, but nobody seems to care. When Shangoya takes the stage, the world narrows to rhythm alone. When the band kicks in, the bass lands in my chest like a second heart. A brake shoe clangs, metal on metal, time being hammered into place. The singer, Aldrich Peter Nelson moves as if nothing in the world has ever resisted him. The music lifts me upward, presses me back down, pins me to the ground, then sends me into the air again.
For a moment, something in me lines up. Not control. Attention. A sense that if I don’t look away, I might be allowed to remain inside the feeling a little longer.
I could do that, I think. I should be up there blowing people away.
After the show, Blair tells me he needs to hightail it home before his 10:30 curfew. “Gimme a couple minutes,” I say. I spot the bass player, a fit-looking dude, around 35, rolling up his cables and wiping down a black Fender jazz bass.
“Hey, how ya doin’?” I say as I walk up to him. “I had a great time listening to you guys. I’m a guitarist, and I think you’d be a lot better with me up there. I could kick some ass, actually.”
He laughs. “How old are you den?”
“I’m seventeen,” I say.
“Me name’s Lloyd. And if ya tink you dat good, maybe I outta take ya numbah jus’ now. Shangoya’s been tinkin’ ’bout a second guitarist.”
I give him my number. I already had it written out.
Six months later, there’s a note on our kitchen table:
Babe, a guy named Roy with an accent called this afternoon and wants you to try out for his band.
Love, Mom
Given the malaise I’d been experiencing since my early graduation and my sentence working in the warehouse at Pickwick, the distribution center for every Musicland record store in the U.S., this news felt like manna from heaven. I wasn’t particularly concerned about the audition either. Since that night I saw Shangoya playing at the bandshell, the image of me up there on stage with them had stayed vivid in my mind. Becoming part of the band felt like a technicality.
On the night of the audition, there are at least a dozen players waiting in the living room of Aldrich Peter Nelson’s small house in South Minneapolis. Most of these guys are in their mid- to late 20s; a couple look like they might be pushing 40. They’re holding expensive guitars and sitting on first-rate amplifiers.
I’m here with the solid-state Kustom Challenger I bought four years earlier with my bar mitzvah money. It’s not exactly a youth model, but it’s certainly no first choice for any pro.
The sound is coming up from the basement. I can hear each player as he auditions.
The first guy is using the same Mu-Tron funk box Andre Cymone was killing me with last year, playing bass with Prince, at the New Year’s Eve show downtown — except this guy’s overusing it. He has no sense of perspective, and instead of adding color, it sounds murky and redundant.
The next player has incredible dexterity. No doubt he’s been woodshedding. For a second, I get a little concerned. After a minute, I relax. What he’s accomplished in speed and fluency, he fucks up with a complete lack of regard for the music itself. He’s stepping all over everything, coming in when he should lay out, drowning out Aldrich Peter Nelson when he’s in the middle of a verse. Instead of making music, this chump is just auditioning his chops.
Shangoya may not be made up of the best studio cats in the world, but they’re way too sensitive and soulful to fall for this.
The next guy heads downstairs. No worries here either. He seems nice enough, but he’s a prog-rocker. His stuff might work for a Genesis cover band, but it makes no sense in reggae or calypso.
Then someone calls up from the basement: “Petah, you ready?”
I pick up my Les Paul and my Challenger and head down.
It’s hot and cramped. The band is clearly in need of a break. Aldrich Peter Nelson smiles, but he’s tired.
“Can you play reggae, mon?” he asks.
“Hell yeah I can,” I say.
Carlos Roque, the drummer, counts off with four clicks of his sticks.
They start a slow groove in A minor. Good tempo. Just right for me.
I’ve never been a shredder. I like to make each note count. I don’t come in right away. I give myself space. I need air around the notes I’m about to release.
When I need some heat, I flick the Les Paul’s toggle to the rear pickup — that fat sound. Then I turn around and twist the Challenger’s volume knob all the way up. I won’t use all that gas, not yet, but I want it in reserve.
I start in with a stream of long Santana-esque notes, let them hang, then travel the neck.
I’m not messing around this evening, not making slick noise. I’m playing things that mean something — sounds that tell the story of a soul in exile. I feel like I’m homing in on an echo, a burgeoning need to return to center, to find bliss, to fly. I want out of the past months, out of the emptiness weighing me down. I’m not auditioning anymore. I’m doing this for myself.
When I need more volume, I take it. The Challenger wasn’t built for this. It sounds like it’s about to blow apart. I hope it does. Right here in this basement, while I imagine the other guys upstairs are quivering, helpless in fear.
When the music stops, Aldrich Peter Nelson smiles — and this time the smile stays.
“What ya tink you can bring to de band if we hire you all jus’ now?” he asks.
I grab a paper towel and wipe my face.
“You see that little amplifier?” I say, pointing to the Challenger. “When I’m onstage with you guys — and I will be — it’s gonna shoot flames.”
The whole band laughs.
I’m not offended. I know what they’re thinking. I’d think the same thing. Who is this 17-year-old white Jewish prick? They can’t control themselves. I get it. It’s overwhelming to witness a true believer.
I played with Shangoya for a little over a year. At that age, a year felt like a long time. The Challenger didn’t shoot flames, not exactly. But it amplified a lot of my guitar playing on stages across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa. I even got to perform a few of my original reggae songs, “Get a Grip” being one of them. It became the B-side of Shangoya’s first single.
To this day, that experience — not just the musical one, but the experience of being accepted into a culture far from my own — remains an incredible gift. Aside from being one of the few Americans, a Jew no less, invited to feel in my bones the rhythms of the Caribbean, I was also, as a young man, embraced warmly by these people, these lifelong friends.
This has meant everything to me.
The post A Minnesota reggae band gave this Midwestern Jewish teenager the greatest gift of all appeared first on The Forward.
