Uncategorized
Ben Lerner’s tale of three hotels is a lyrical novel of loss and human potential
Transcription
By Ben Lerner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25, 144 pages
As we scroll through the final portion of human history before it gets permanently revised by AI, Ben Lerner has written a lyrical novel of loss.
This three-part novel from the author of Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and the Pulitzer finalist The Topeka School, presents loss in many forms: loss of recognition which leads to a confusion of identities; loss of memory which prompts whole new stories; or just, in a banal but usefully metaphorical way, the loss of the unnamed protagonist’s iPhone when he drops it in the sink near the start of the first section, “Hotel Providence.” This tech misadventure means that he will have to use an old landline to dial up his daughter before her bedtime and to rely on his frail human memory to remember the final interview he has with Thomas, his mentor and father figure.
As in his previous autofictional trilogy, Lerner uses a narrator — a writer who, like Lerner, went to Brown University — who hovers between being him and not. A writing assignment has brought him back to his alma mater, but the visit to his professor is more than just a work project. The initial piece and, as it turns out, later pieces about the trip, will be labors of love — with all the agita that accompanies those. The absent digital transcript of his interview at Brown seems to be what gives this book its name as well as what marks him as brave or foolhardy in the eyes of his peers at a later colloquium about Thomas. But the existence of the book as a “transcription” also avows the possibilities of human creativity in the face of transmission losses.
Transcription begins on a train journey and, just to prove that it is about moving away from the here and now, its first words also imply the start of a dream state: “I was falling asleep on a train.” Through the narrator, Lerner tells us as clearly as he can, that he is writing (script) in transit — and investigating how it is to rewrite from a place that is not your own. As the narrator along with Max — Thomas’ son who becomes a second narrator — recount their travels into adulthood, the book’s journey into the unknown is haunted by Freud’s dictum “where id was, there ego shall be.” Caught between fatherhood and filiation, they navigate a world that seems equal parts Escher and Kafka.
The book comprises three sections, each named for a hotel — a place to stay while dislocated: “Hotel Providence,” “[Hotel Villa Real],” and “Hotel Arbez.” The first is set punningly in Providence, the second is set in a hotel referred to in square brackets as if interposed later by editors, and the final one sits half in France and half Switzerland. Indeed, Max is named for the wartime owner of the hotel, since “during the German occupation, the Nazi soldiers could enter the French side of the hotel, but not ascend to the upper rooms, where Max Arbez helped shelter Jews and members of the Resistance. A kind of impossible staircase.”
Hotel Providence, which is located near Brown, is a name to conjure with, and Lerner — a decorated poet as well as a Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellow — conjures with it briefly as he takes his narrator to the interview. On the way, every landmark has either changed or been infused by memory, every person he sees is overlaid by his imagination. Without his phone he feels hypersensitive to his surroundings — “my body was able to convert the strangeness of being screenless into a kind of supersensitivity” — but unlike augmented reality, his senses overlay meaning, not information.
As the narrator walks through Providence, the ghosts of his time frame his vision — “the older woman in the long down coat leaving the List Art Center as I passed became Caroline Sharpe, a professor who told our class, after someone complimented her necklace, that she kept a cyanide capsule in its opal locket for use in case of nuclear war.” Generational perception, shaped by how his daughter Eva views the world, also changes how he sees the streets around him. Plus, he has to actually deal with the real world in the shape of a woman who hails him by name. She “approached me with the confidence of someone sure she’d be recognized” but when she is not recognized, “she discerned my confusion and offered, mercifully, Chloe.”
Reminded by Chloe of their mutual friend Anisa, the protagonist drifts off into one of his more significant digressions, detailing the web of lies she spun, that took him further away from his college girlfriend after a split. That girlfriend, Mia, is now his wife and mother of his child, yet we never hear how the rupture was mended. In a slender volume of scarce novella length, the story of Anisa’s lies takes up valuable real estate and hits us before we get to the ostensibly major characters. The “botanical models made by glass artists” that he and Anisa see at the Natural History Museum at Harvard become the underlying metaphor for how art is created. Their story is the story upon which this story is written.
Transcription works by exploring the specific and allowing it to stand in for the general. For example, almost no one understands the magic of technology but the narrator’s parenthetical aside about a text to his dead iPhone “(I don’t understand where a message lingers, or for how long, when there isn’t a device to receive it.)” has almost spiritual connotations for a novelist who is also an award-winning poet. When he asks Chloe about Anisa, social media is able to complete the specific web of acquaintance but at the same time we remain deeply unconnected: “We’re not in touch, Chloe said, but I know from Instagram that she’s in Atlanta.”
Thomas, the mentor who left post-War Europe for Rhode Island, is described by his son, Max, as “kind of a cross between Wonka and Bergman.” Max, who is the main narrator of the third section “Hotel Arbez,” is only a year older than the narrator and the two were friendly for a while at college. Thomas confuses them with one another as, increasingly, we do as readers. Their lives, their young daughters, their relationship with Thomas, merge. Max recounts the difficulty of looking after a distant elderly parent, while bringing up a child. He feels the distance from family, as many of us did, most keenly over the pandemic. The scenes of phone calls and visits that take place during and after the COVID period are intensely moving: what is done and what is said, despite what cannot be said.
The narrator’s relationships with Anisa and Mia, the near twinning of Max and the narrator, the fraught, heavy, insecure filiation of Max, narrator, Rosa and the others at the colloquium with Thomas, all of these spill over one another in ways that are endlessly reflective.
Many have written about the difficulties of conveying meaning from one person to another, from one generation to another, from one language to another. Translation, for example, is often viewed with distrust — “translation is treason” as the saying goes — but for Lerner, transcription is a new way of thinking about how we write meaning down or across or over. The concept becomes a way of thinking about translation, transmission and also, in the sense of over-writing, palimpsests — pages written over previous writing. Transcription is a function that our machines and AI can produce, but it is also the word that we use for expressing our genetic inheritance: DNA code expresses its nature through transcription into RNA.
In our age of Zoom, where we meet through machines and delegate our next steps to transcriptions and AI, it makes sense for Lerner to probe the nature of those pregnant gaps between humans that we all too often assume are filled with facts and decisions.
In the second part “[Hotel Villa Real],” the narrator continues to think about the Anisa episode about which Chloe reminded him. He googles Andrés, the Spaniard that Mia had had a fling with decades ago, an episode embroidered and extended by Anisa at the time. As if to compare the nature of testimony, he is made aware by his friend Rosa, a curator at the host institution, that his colleagues felt that he had “falsified” Thomas’ “testament” in the paper he had given, confessing that he had not recorded the final interview. Rosa says they feel his account of the night is a “deepfake.” The narrator finds it inconceivable that he is not trusted, but revisiting that evening, especially in the wake of the Anisa episode, makes it feel somehow suspect.
There is a convenient transactional conceit that a transcription will be complete or accurate but it is a convention intended for business, not for life. Everyone knows that even if Zoom transcriptions were not filled with errors, inconsistencies and nonsense, they would be woefully inadequate records of how humans experience one another. What we hear can have transactional value but, without context of the whole gestalt — the smells, the sounds, the body language of the person that we are interviewing — to claim that a recorded and transcribed interview is more accurate than a curated memory by a trusted author is to mistake the idea of veracity itself.
The closing epitaph from an artisan about how to “become a glass modeler of skill” is just the final example of how the glass touchscreens that enclose our lives are the least interesting of the ways of understanding our existence. We have no “secret apparatus” to form our worlds, but we increase our abilities by honing them from parent to child, “the touch increases in every generation.”
For Lerner, the Jewishness of his writing is in what he cannot escape: whether that is noticing the fringe cultists of Neturei Karta holding Free Palestine signs at a protest in the background of his daughter‘s FaceTime as he talks to her from abroad, the quirk of Hotel Arbez that gave Jews safe harbor from the Nazis, or the murky European history of his mentor with his Holocaust survivor wife. But in the end, what is more Jewish than a book written to study how we write and how we transmit wisdom, knowledge, information, behavior, and mistakes from generation to generation.
The post Ben Lerner’s tale of three hotels is a lyrical novel of loss and human potential appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Mamdani says ‘I can’t tell you I support’ Israel as a Jewish state
(JTA) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he could not endorse states that privilege one religion over another, including Israel and Saudi Arabia, during a one-on-one interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.
“Democratic Socialists of America now says they no longer favor a two-state solution. “Is that the way you see it as well? Karl asked in the interview, which came days after Mamdani’s endorsed Democratic socialist candidates for Congress swept their New York Democratic primaries.
Among them, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier campaigned on platforms that included opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel and support for Palestinian rights.
Mamdani replied to Karl: “The way I see it is equal rights for all people. And I think that that’s the truth for Israel. It’s the truth for any country in the world.”
When pressed by Karl that Israel is in fact a Jewish state and “that’s in the charter, that’s the way it is now,” Mamdani said he has consistently stated he supports “the state of Israel as a state with equal rights.”
However, he added, “I believe that any state that privileges one religion over the other is one that I can’t tell you I support, whether it be Israel or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else.”
The backlash to Mamdani’s comments was quick. In a statement Sunday, Ambassador Ofir Akunis, Consul General of Israel in New York, said, “Mamdani, we do not need your recognition of the Jewish state. If you knew a little history, instead of spending all day inciting and spreading hatred, you would know that Israel’s Declaration of Independence guaranteed full equality for all its citizens. That has been the reality since the day our state was established.”
Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, posted on X, “Mamdani is either willfully ignorant or maliciously mendacious,” adding that “Israel has no official state religion.”
He also stated that there are multiple countries for which Islam is the state religion, with additional Muslim-majority countries declaring Islam as the state religion in their constitutions.
Karl also asked Mamdani about his broader views on Israel, which became a prominent issue during the New York Democratic primaries, particularly among candidates who support Israel and continued U.S. military aid.
Mamdani said voters made it clear that “they were tired of tens of billions of dollars being spent in our taxpayer dollars to violate international law to kill thousands of civilians.”
He added that currently “Palestine is described as if there is a ceasefire,” but more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during it. He said New Yorkers want to “follow international law, to believe in the humanity for all.”
Karl also pressed the mayor on the Poetica coffee shop incident in Brooklyn last week, where staff refused to take New York Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman’s money for a coffee purchase, calling him a “genocide enabler” because he supports Israel.
Mamdani said while he has “political disagreements” with Goldman (who lost his seat to Mamdani-backed Brad Lander), “I do believe that that’s a response that goes beyond that.”
And when asked about rising antisemitism in New York City, the mayor said that while Jews are a minority of the city’s population, they constitute a majority of victims of the hate crimes committed in the city. ”That’s something that’s unacceptable,” he said.
Akunis said, however, that “The surge in antisemitism across the United States, and particularly in New York, is the result of ignorance and a lack of knowledge, combined with a fundamental hatred of the Jewish people.”
He added, “I once again warn that Mamdani’s inflammatory rhetoric will end in very serious and violent acts against Jewish and Israeli communities throughout the city.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Mamdani says ‘I can’t tell you I support’ Israel as a Jewish state appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims
(JTA) — Two people lean down from an abstract version of a rail car. Their outstretched hands reach towards a family gathered around the car’s opening. The adults on the ground reach back, either to get help stepping into the car or to say good-bye.
That’s one side of the artist rendering of what will be a Holocaust monument. On the other side, train tracks lead to the entrance of the Nazis’ largest death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. A message across the top reads, “They were here. We remember.”
The sculpture by artists David Wilson and Stephen Hayes, called “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” is emotional on its own. But what makes the project planned for Charlotte, North Carolina, especially noteworthy is what will be alongside it.
Charlotte is the planned home for what its organizers believe is the first memorial plaza in the United States to both honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and remember the Holocaust in the same space. The Circle of Humanity: Monuments for Unity and Remembrance in Marshall Park will feature the 8-foot bronze statue of King currently in the park plus the new Holocaust monument.
Linking the two will be paved walkways, educational reflections and digital resources on the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement and the combined history of African Americans and Jews in the U.S. School and tour groups will take part in interactive educational experiences.
To those who might wonder why these monuments belong together, Rabbi Ya’aqov Walker points to a common inheritance. “You could just describe it plainly: white supremacy in continental Europe and white supremacy in the southeastern United States,” said Walker, who is Black and serves on the project’s education committee.
The groups also share deep resilience and desire for change, he said, which led to a significant Jewish presence in the civil rights movement in the United States 20 years after the Holocaust.
“It was very prescient in their minds, from King to any major civil rights leader who was committed to nonviolence, to study and learn what the Jewish experience was, and to build relationships with rabbis as fellow spiritual leaders,” said Walker, who co-leads the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance.
The new monument will replace a small one dedicated in 1979 that’s hidden in overgrown foliage. Project partners include the Charlotte Black/Jewish Alliance, Mecklenburg County, Queens University of Charlotte, the Stan Greenspon Holocaust Education Center, and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg branch of the NAACP.
After a national search for artists that yielded 57 design proposals, a review committee narrowed the choices to eight finalists. Wilson and Hayes, who are Black and live in Durham, North Carolina, were one of two teams asked to submit their concepts. Though they had never designed a sculpture based on a Jewish theme, they were compelled by its juxtaposition to the King monument, “creating a broader dialogue about injustice, courage and the consequences of hatred,” Wilson told county commissioners during a recent public meeting.
David Wilson, left, and Stephen Hayes are the designers of “In Transit: The Weight of Absence,” the winning design for the Circle of Humanity memorial in Charlotte’s Marshall Park. (Courtesy Circle of Humanity)
Their presentation moved Commissioner Leigh Altman, who is white, to reveal that her great-grandparents and many of their children were murdered in the Holocaust. About 25 to 30 Holocaust survivors live in the Charlotte area today.
“This shared partnership for me is a reminder across one of history’s worst genocides and the worst legacy of what America has done wrong, and brought it together to find a commonality, which was a failed obligation to recognize the humanity of others and to fight for it,” she said.
The second finalist team, Miriam Gusevich and Sal Pirrone from Washington, D.C., envisioned an abstract sculpture with thousands of silver circles to represent those killed by the Nazis. The proposed structure opened to a skylight in the shape of a Star of David. Members of Gusevich’s family died in the Holocaust.
“Circle of Humanity” organizers held 12 community feedback sessions, including at synagogues, a Black church and Johnson C. Smith University, a historically Black university. About 850 community members participated. More than 100 completed written surveys on their preferences. Ultimately, a majority favored the rail car image. At one session, participants audibly gasped when “In Transit” was revealed.
It’s yet to be determined which materials will be used to render the piece. Options range from cast and fabricated metal to large-scale 3-D printing. What likely won’t change is the sculpture’s bronze hue and structure.
“The skin tones can be interpreted in many ways, and it looks very similar to an auction block” used in the trafficking of enslaved people, Walker noted. He recalled that during a feedback session at a Black church, some church members teared up to see the reminder of family separation.
Urban Design Partners in collaboration with Groundworks Studio will develop the plaza, in a design called “Woven Histories.” Potential elements include a stone walkway with a plaid design. The plaid pays tribute to the dress that civil rights pioneer Dorothy Counts-Scoggins wore on the day in 1957 when she faced down an angry white mob to become the first Black student to attend a segregated high school in Charlotte.
The plaza will include benches and may incorporate decorative stone books. Like the monument design, the concept is still open to changes based on additional community feedback. The planned budget is just under $1 million, including a $100,000 endowment for programming and maintenance. If fundraising efforts are successful and the timeline stays on track, the plaza is scheduled to open in May 2027.
Marshall Park has particular resonance as the setting. It is part of the former Brooklyn, a Black neighborhood razed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal. More recently, Marshall Park has been a familiar site for protests and political demonstrations.
The idea for the innovative combination began with a discussion between Rev. Corine Mack, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg NACCP, and Rabbi Judy Schindler, Sklut professor of Jewish studies at Queens University of Charlotte and executive director of Spill the Honey, a national non-profit which produces arts and educational materials intended to empower the Black-Jewish alliance to combat racism and antisemitism.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. memorial statue in Charlotte’s Marshall Park, created by renowned sculptor Selma Burke, was dedicated on April 5, 1980. (Courtesy Arrowmount School of Arts and Crafts)
“It all came out of the same conversation, looking at the Civil Rights movement, looking at the rise in racial slurs and antisemitism, and just really understanding that we have to do something to elevate the importance of not only our cultures, but what love would look like in this country,” Mack said. “I thought it was important that we went back to the root of the civil rights movement, which was us collaborating.”
She acknowledges a few phone calls from members of Charlotte’s Black community who expressed concern about the collaboration in light of the war and political divides opened after the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Others were unclear about the benefits of bringing the two histories together. But no vocal opposition has emerged to the project. Organizers say on-site education about the history of Black-Jewish ties in America is essential.
Charlotte has its own claims to this history. Humorist and social critic Harry Golden lived in the city and published his commentaries in The Carolina Israelite, a newspaper whose subscribers included Congressional members and well-known writers. In “The Vertical Negro Plan” in 1956, he pointedly noted that whites seemed to have no trouble standing next to Black Americans. It was only when Black people wanted to sit “that the fur begins to fly.” His tongue-in-cheek solution? Remove the seats at schools and lunch counters.
In 1971, attorney Adam Stein, father of N.C. Gov. Josh Stein, was part of the legal team who argued Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education before the Supreme Court. The case began the era of busing for school integration nationwide. Busing for that purpose officially ended in Charlotte in 2002, when the Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to lower-court ruling recognizing local schools as adequately desegregated .
Now, supporters hope the Circle of Humanity will be a catalyst for Black-Jewish collaborations in other cities. Schindler, named after a great-aunt who was killed during the Holocaust, wants the gathering spot to be a place not only for remembrance, but for inspiration and beginnings.
“It’s really important to me that we bring joy to this work,” she said, envisioning the opening ceremony filled with klezmer music as well as both soul food and Jewish noshes. She cautions against “letting those to seek to harm us control our thoughts and our struggles and our fears. We need to celebrate our culture and who we are with pride and joy, so I pray that this will be a centerpiece for cultural celebration of all sorts.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post In North Carolina, a memorial project will honor Martin Luther King and Holocaust victims appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Tennessee GOP leaders denounce ‘No wars for Jews’ mailers bearing Young Republicans name
(JTA) — A rural Tennessee region was rocked this week after thousands of homes received mailers encouraging them to join the local Young Republicans chapter with a campaign platform including “No wars for Jews.”
The flyers led to a dramatic showdown at a local GOP meeting, including a state lawmaker’s cry of “I am a Jew!” and a rejoinder from Austin Lee, the young man behind the flyers: “We will not fight wars for you.” Cops escorted the provocateur out.
“Let’s face it, we read about antisemitism and anti-Black or white nationalism, right?” the lawmaker, State Rep. Scott Cepicky, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We hear about this stuff, and people are like, ‘Well, you know, that’s over there, or that’s in another state, that’s not here.’ Let me tell you something. It came to Maury County.”
The mailers, which encouraged recipients to “support” Lee, also said “Stop the Great Replacement” (a reference to the antisemitic Great Replacement Theory), “Ban Islam and Hinduism” and “Men in charge.”
“Nonwhite foreigners have invaded our country and are replacing White Americans,” read the flyers, viewed by JTA and reportedly sent to around 2,000 households with young white men. “Efforts at mass deportations have failed. No one is coming to save us; we must solve this problem ourselves.”
The flyers were mailed mainly in Maury County, 50 miles south of Nashville, as well as some surrounding counties. In addition to Lee’s name and an invitation to join the Maury County Young Republicans, they contained the prominent logo of the Tennessee Young Republicans — invoking broader concerns that a younger generation of Republicans are trending toward antisemitic and white nationalist ideas.
However, local Republican leaders told JTA the mailers were sent out without permission; that Lee holds no formal leadership role in the county GOP; and that the county’s Young Republicans chapter is currently inactive.
The county GOP chair strongly denounced the content of the mailers to JTA.
“It’s appalling that somebody would send this out,” Jason Gilliam told JTA about his reaction to the flyers. “This kind of thing really disgusts me. I mean, I have an Israeli flag on my bumper — not that that means anything.”
Gilliam said he first became aware of the flyers on Sunday, after households had begun receiving them. At a local GOP meeting the next day, Cepicky condemned the flyers by invoking his own Jewish ancestry.
“I’m a Jew, I’m an Ashkenazi Jew,” Cepicky told the crowd at the GOP meeting in a video taken and later posted by Lee himself. “My family left Israel, moved to Central Europe. In the 30s, you know what happened in Central Europe with Jews. My family immigrated to the United States.”
After Cepicky threatened to “pursue the law on these individuals” who distributed the mailer, Lee, who was also in attendance at the meeting, identified himself.
Cepicky accused Lee of spreading rhetoric “espoused in Europe” in the 1930s. Lee responded, “It was right then, and it is right now. We will not fight wars for you.” Lee was later escorted from the event by law enforcement. Lee has on social media cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “war for Jews.”
Cepicky told JTA he felt compelled to denounce Lee’s antisemitism in part because he was standing in front of a replica of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution at the meeting.
“It was behind me, and it spurred me to say, ‘That doesn’t say, “We the Christians,” or, “We the Jews,” or, “We the Islamics,” or, “We the men, we the women.” It doesn’t say that,’” he said. “It says, ‘We the people.’”
Cepicky told JTA that he is a practicing Christian who discovered his Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on 23andMe. He said his family arrived sometime after the 1917 Russian Revolution. He made his first trip to Israel in 2024, to visit the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and helped found the Tennessee Israel Caucus in the state legislature shortly thereafter.
Gilliam and Cepicky both described Lee to JTA as an infrequent attendee at county GOP meetings who holds no leadership role with the party, and said the county Young Republicans chapter was inactive. They added they would be pushing for an investigation into what they said was his unauthorized use of the county and state Young Republicans name on his mailers.
In social media posts and other interviews following the meeting, Lee continued to assert that he was the president of Maury County Young Republicans. He also referred to Cepicky multiple times as “Jewish Representative Scott Cepicky.”
“I took over that chapter,” Lee said in an interview Wednesday with a local radio station, claiming he had used a “process” to reactivate the local Young Republicans group. He declined to answer questions about who funded his mailers.
In a statement to media, the statewide Tennessee Young Republicans said the use of their logo “was not authorized” and said the group “did not, and does not, authorize, endorse, or support the recent communications published by the Maury County Young Republicans.”
As of press time, the Tennessee Young Republicans list Maury County as an active chapter on their website. Efforts by JTA to contact the group’s statewide director were unsuccessful. In recent months, official Young Republicans chapters across the country have become embroiled in antisemitism controversies.
Whether Lee has any more solid connection with local GOP officials was a matter of dispute. Gilliam claimed he had first been introduced to Lee by Aaron Miller, a local elected GOP county commissioner with whom Gilliam has since had a falling-out over unrelated matters. Asked about his relationship to Miller on the radio, Lee declined to comment.
Reached by JTA on Friday, Miller denied he had any connection to Lee beyond that “we had beers a couple of times.”
“I don’t agree with his politics. I don’t agree with his approach,” Miller told JTA. “I got a mailer and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, this is interesting.’”
Lee did not respond to a JTA request for comment.
Miller did say that young men, feeling unrepresented by the current Republican Party, are seeking out “alternatives to liberal democracy.” He has advocated for the county GOP to reach out more to the population, he said.
“Anything where you’re going to approach an entire group of people with a blanket mindset, I think that’s wicked,” he said. “We’re all made in God’s image.”
Gilliam and Cepicky told JTA that, in addition to the antisemitism, they strongly objected to the mailers’ anti-immigrant rhetoric and misogyny. At a time of Republican-led immigration crackdowns on the national level, and as national figures including Vice President JD Vance have downplayed the rise of antisemitism within the party, these local GOP leaders loudly insisted such forces should be stamped out.
“This kind of stuff is absolutely not going to be allowed. I will not stand for it,” Gilliam said. “If you don’t cut the head off the snake, it’s going to come back, right? It’s not going to stop. It’s only going to fester. It’s going to grow. And this kind of thing, the roots need to be yanked out of the ground.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Tennessee GOP leaders denounce ‘No wars for Jews’ mailers bearing Young Republicans name appeared first on The Forward.
