Roundup of news on Israel, academia, and Passover
(1) Caroline Glick on Israel’s Iran strike, the Biden administration’s reported consideration of sanctioning an entire IDF unit composed of Orthodox Jews, and the meaning of Passover:
(2) If you want to know more about the Passover Seder, please read this.
(3) Anti-Semitic demonstrations at Yale: a Jewish student is stabbed in the eye by a Palestinian flag.
(4) And at Columbia it’s even worse. The Orthodox rabbi on campus wrote a letter to Jewish students advising them to go home because their safety is so compromised on the campus. You can find much more about the vile goings-on at Columbia in this post.
(5) Recall that the Passover Seder contains this reminder:
In each and every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. And the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.
It takes on special significance this year.
(6) What follows is a repeat of a previous post of mine on Passover.
Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.
I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not solely religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.
A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:
“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”
Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”
Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent decades has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to foster it in places with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.
We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country – more potent in the last couple of years. This is happening despite our long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it.
Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists or their present-day Russian successors. Some of them are cynical and power-mad; some are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.
As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”
Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.
Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom (those of you who’ve been around this blog for a long time will recognize this passage I often quote):
Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?
Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee even of bread.
I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.
Happy Passover!
Watching the sausage made: what happened to the border bill?
This:
The House of Representatives on April 20 rejected another border security bill.
A person might be forgiven if, on reading that, he or she concludes that Republicans didn’t favor it. After all, the GOP controls the House (although barely), right? So shouldn’t it have passed, if the GOP members all voted “yes”?
But here’s why it didn’t pass:
In a vote under suspension of the rules, the House voted 215–199 to block the bill. Because it was not considered under normal rules, it required a two-thirds majority to pass.
The bill was supported by all Republicans and was opposed by all but a handful of Democrats. Five Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the bill. But Republican support alone was not enough to push it over the finish line with the higher threshold.
Well now, that’s certainly interesting. So, why was the bill considered under rules that required two-thirds, rather than normal rules? Again, one would think it could be considered normally, since the GOP controls the House (although I repeat: only barely).
Here’s the rest of the story:
The legislation was considered under suspension of the rules because it had been blocked by conservatives on the House Rules Committee last week in protest to leadership’s decision to move forward on foreign aid legislation.
So it was blocked by the most conservative wing, who wanted to link it to foreign aid and use that as leverage to pass it. As Chip Roy said:
In a post to X, formerly known as Twitter, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas)—among those who blocked the bill in the Rules Committee—said, “Sorry, not sorry, for opposing a crappy rule that is a show vote/cover vote for funding Ukraine instead of border security.”
The move came after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) reneged on an earlier promise to not put Ukraine funding on the floor without border concessions from Democrats.
The reality is that Israeli aid has majority bipartisan support although quite a few Democrats oppose it. The reality is that Ukraine aid has majority bipartisan support although quite a few Republicans oppose it. And the reality is that border security has majority support although most Democrats oppose it. Therefore, all three bills would pass by themselves in the House if they came up for simple majority vote. But a border security bill would die in the Senate, although the foreign aid bills would pass.
And that’s why what I’ll call the Chip Roy wing wanted border security tied to foreign aid – the idea being that such an approach would be the only way to pressure Schumer to let it through. But he knows his own power, and I think it highly unlikely that he would have done so, and then the GOP would have been blamed not only for stiffing Ukraine in its hour of need – but for doing the same to Israel if border security were tied to Israeli aid as well.
Many on the Roy wing call what Johnson did “theater,” and want him gone:
The move received criticism from some of Mr. Johnson’s peers in the House, who have dismissed the tagalong border bill as “theatrics.”
“It’s a theatrics, shiny object; it’s the shiny object for Republicans that are saying, ‘We got to do something for the border,’” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said to the media following the bill’s unveiling.
Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), chair of the House Freedom Caucus, called it “a joke,” “pretend,” and “theater.”
But I contend that what they have been doing on these issues is an even more “pretend” form of theater. They are pretending that somehow a combined bill would have passed the Senate and been signed by Biden, and that Johnson is just stubbornly thwarting them.
For example:
Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) argued that Mr. Johnson should have put a clean Israel bill on the floor and attached a “Remain in Mexico” policy requirement to Ukraine legislation.
Does Ogles think that such a bill, if it passed the House (which it probably would have), would have passed the Senate or even been put to a Senate vote by Schumer? I don’t think so, and as I already said, the failure to support Ukraine in such a bill would have been blamed – successfully – on the GOP. That might have been popular with conservatives, but aid to Ukraine still has majority popular support.
And all three measures – Israeli aid, Ukraine aid, and border security – have majority support in Congress. Just not from the same people. And all three measures would have been passed as standalone bills if border security hadn’t been blocked by the conservatives in the House, forcing it to get a 2/3 vote in order to pass. But although Israel aid and Ukraine aid would also pass in the Senate and be signed by Biden, border security would not. And IMHO that is true whether border security was in a standalone ill or linked with the foreign aid, as the conservatives wished. And so the conservatives didn’t get what they wanted – border security. But they also would not have gotten what they wanted if all three had been linked, and they would have been blamed for abandoning Israel and/or Ukraine in the process.
They don’t see it that way. But I think they believe they have far more power to force the hand of the Democrats than they actually do.
The negotiations on these issues have been especially complicated and hard to follow. But I think it’s incorrect to believe there was a solution in which the conservatives could have gotten what they wanted. For example, this was the situation as it stood on April 14 (remarks in brackets are mine):
The House initially passed its GOP-led Israel support package days after Johnson was elected speaker in October. The package, which paired $14.3 billion in aid to Israel with cuts to IRS funding, was deemed dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate and President Joe Biden vowed to veto it.
Then, in February, the House failed to pass a stand-alone Israel aid bill without those IRS cuts, with many Republicans voting with Democrats to defeat the effort.
That same month, the Senate passed a $95 billion national security package that included aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, but Johnson rejected the deal after killing a bipartisan effort in the Senate to address security at the U.S.-Mexico border [that was a terrible “effort” that would have done nothing to improve the border situation]. And, under pressure from GOP hard-liners who have warned him that tying Ukraine aid to the bill could prove detrimental to his speakership, Johnson has yet to address aid to the war-town country months later. …
“We cannot hope to deter conflict without demonstrating resolve and investing seriously in American strength. The Commander-in-Chief and the Congress must discharge our fundamental duties without delay,” he said of the package that ties aid to Ukraine and Israel. “The consequences of failure are clear, devastating, and avoidable.”
Most people probably are unaware that the aid to Ukraine in the bill that was actually passed was in the form of something Trump had proposed, a “forgivable loan”:
Last week, the factions in the U.S. Congress finally hit on a compromise: military and financial assistance to Ukraine is to be provided in the form of a “forgivable loan.” President Zelensky has agreed to such a compromise solution.
I previously wrote about the “forgivable loan” concept in this post and the comments that follow.
Events both inner and outer: how’s it going?
For the past few months not only has a lot of the news been extremely depressing, but it’s been appearing on so many fronts that I have at least thirty stories to choose from each day for my blog posts. I’m not superwoman and just can’t cover them all, so I pick the ones that either interest me the most or on which I think I have the most interesting things to say, and I leave it at that.
But the residue of all the bad news sticks to me, to a certain extent, even though I try to shed it. And then of course there are personal matters: trying to work on Gerard’s book launch (which seems to involve a thousand surprisingly time-consuming tasks), planning a summer trip out west that should end up being fun but requires juggling the schedules of many people (another surprisingly time-consuming – and frustrating – task), and of course the continual absence of Gerard now that over a year has passed.
If only the news of the world were better. For now we see through a glass, darkly, and so I try to be optimistic. I certainly realize I can’t see the future, and it might be better – even much better – than it looks now. However:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself; …
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
That last poem, by Robert Frost, is especially laconic and deceptively simple – almost like a child’s nursery rhyme. But it says a great deal.
All of the poems convey a sense of foreboding, and it’s hard not to feel that sort of dread today. I don’t think that emotion is the province of one side or another; from what I can see among the people I know, it’s shared by both, although exactly what they dread and their idea of the mechanism by which it could and perhaps will occur is quite different.
And yet, spring is here. I took this photo a few days ago near where I live. What’s unusual about it isn’t apparent in the photo, but it was a bunch of teeny miniature daffodils that had apparently seeded themselves in an area where nothing had been cultivated or purposely planted. They were just standing there alone, a real surprise:
Open thread 4/22/24
The ballet Raymonda: a sampler
If you’re not a ballet lover, you may never have heard of the ballet Raymonda. I’ve seen it quite a few times, and although it’s not my favorite it’s still enjoyable, and I very much like the Glazunov music.
I well remember two ballerinas from American Ballet Theater whose performances in the role were stellar. Luckily, I found videos of each of them doing one of the solos. But unfortunately, the quality of the videos isn’t good; they are blurry and sometimes the music is flat. And yet, unless one goes to the Lincoln Center library and watches videos there (they can’t be taken out), it’s all we have of these great artists.
The quality of these videos makes it seem as though these performances were from 100 years ago. But these are people I saw perform when I was already an adult. The videos appear to have been taken during live performances and have some annoying buzzing and clicking sounds.
But enough complaining.
First, we have Cynthia Gregory, who was tall and elegant, restrained but lovely. This is probably from some time in the early to mid 1970s:
And then we have Martine van Hamel, who was also elegant but had a more delicate and charming quality. She is from the same era. The music is flat, the picture is blurry, but I think she is amazing:
Here is a Russian dancer from the 1980s; actually, she’s Georgian. You can see that her movements are sharper and far more dramatic. She gives it that Russian/Georgian angst. Although her variation lacks the charm and centered stillness of the first two, I like it for its drama. The video quality is much better, of course, although the first few moments of the variation are missing:
And here is a very well-known French dancer who was a technical marvel, circa 1990 or so. Her version is too austere and severe for me, and I get that sense of posing rather than flow:
I had trouble finding more recent performances, but maybe it’s just as well. I assume they’re available, though.
Foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel passes the House
Republicans are more split on aid to Ukraine, while Democrats are more split on aid to Israel. That means, however, that aid to both countries is supported by the majority of Congress through the mechanism of bipartisanship. That’s the way Congress used to function, to the best of my recollection:
The House Rules Committee voted 9-3 to advance the package, with Democratic support being a rare occurrence for Republican bills.
Republican Reps. Chip Roy, Thomas Massie, and Ralph Norman voted against the rule, expressing frustration that aid to Ukraine was not paired with conservative border security provisions.
But that pairing would have meant that it didn’t pass, because it would have lost Democrat support, and it needed Democrat support to pass at all.
Various parts of the package are expected to pass with bipartisan coalitions this weekend.
And that’s what happened:
Speaker Mike Johnson risked his political career to shepherd through over $60 billion in Ukrainian aid on the House floor on Saturday as part of a $95 billion aid package for U.S. allies.
The package in total gives $26 billion to Israel, $60.8 billion to Ukraine and $8 billion to the Indo-Pacific through a combination of military and humanitarian aid.
The package consisting of three separate aid bills was voted on alongside a fourth ‘side car’ that includes a potential TikTok ban and a vehicle to repurpose seized Russian assets for Ukraine.
The bill providing cash for Kyiv – by far the most contentious of the day and the one Johnson could lost his job over – passed 311 to 112.
‘We would rather send bullets to the conflict overseas than our own boys, our troops,’ Johnson insisted after the vote.
The Israel aid bill passed 366 to 58, with opposition largely consisting of progressives who wanted the aid conditioned on a ceasefire.
Many Republicans wanted it paired with border security; I would have strongly preferred that myself. However, you can’t always get what you want:
House Speaker Mike Johnson had previously pushed to pair aid to Ukraine with border security provisions. However, his efforts were met with resistance, leading to several rules failing on the floor, largely due to objections from the right flank of the party. Despite calls from several members of the Republican conference to raise the threshold to bring a motion to oust the speaker, Johnson announced that the House “will continue to govern under the existing rules.”
Those who are against aid to either country (Republicans who oppose Ukraine aid; Democrats who oppose Israel aid) are angry. People want what they want. The reality is the razor-thin Republican House majority and the razor-thin Democrat Senate majority, and the division within Republican and Democrat ranks. The Republicans who oppose what happened can get rid of their Speakers over and over, but that won’t get them what they want either, because the reality of the situation blocks it.
And then there are the people who would be happy with aiding neither Ukraine nor Israel. That’s a much smaller group – nearly entirely in the GOP, as far as I can tell – and it’s not going to get what it wants either, because a bipartisan majority wants something quite different.
NOtE: The Byzantine machinations of Congress are hard to follow, and very few people do so. I can’t say I’ve followed every single back and forth, either.
China’s baby problem
I’ve watched many videos on the reluctance of the young people of China to have children. The problem affects other countries in Asia and the West as a whole as well, but in Europe and the US it’s nothing like as bad as in China – although who knows, we may be headed China’s way.
I’m not sure everything in these China videos is correct in terms of causes or details, but they paint a very grim and similar picture, and they all agree on a couple of things: that the younger generations in China work extremely hard at mostly unrewarding jobs and are exhausted, that they reject family life because they see it as a money and time drain, and that they are narcissistic and very materialistic.
These videos indicate to me that a significant part of the problem is that the Chicoms purposely weakened the family without replacing it with anything else except consumerism, an empty substitute. It sounds as though depression is very widespread there, whether clinically diagnosed or not. Their forced one-child policy meant that many in the younger generations have been only children, with all the indulgence, pressure, and loneliness that sometimes entails. Bigger families would be somewhat foreign to them, and I bet that many have never even been around babies all that much, or learned what the rewards of parenthood or siblinghood can be.
I think refusal to have children may also be a way to rebel in a society that doesn’t offer all that many avenues for rebellion.
Take a look:
I hadn’t seen the following video when I first wrote this post, but it has a great deal of information on how the one-child policy may have influenced the current worrisome phenomenon. That portion begins at minute 10:18, but I think the entire thing is interesting:
“Equity grading”: forced regression towards the mean
[Hat tip: Ace.]
We can’t have students feeling bad about their grades – unless they’re smart and high-achieving students. Then it’s okay.
So let’s eliminate the tails, says California. All students will be equally – or almost equally – mediocre:
No D’s and F’s? No extra credit? Will Bay Area schools’ switch to equity grading help or harm students? Dublin Unified School District says the public school grading system is unfair
Hrihaan Bhutani is already thinking about college. The Dublin High freshman is taking four Advanced Placement classes next year and has crammed his schedule with extracurricular activities to better his chances of getting into an Ivy League school.But a change at the high school designed to get students less focused on grades has done the opposite. Suddenly, in some classes, A’s are almost unachievable, unless you score 100%. And F’s don’t exist. For high-achieving students like Bhutani, the pressure to be perfect is even more of a burden.
“I feel more stressed … now with this new system,” said Bhutani, who is especially sweating his biology class, one of dozens trying a variety of new grading scales under a two-year experiment. “Even if you’re at a 99, you would get moved down to an 85,” he explained, which translates to a world-ending B.
Dublin Unified’s new grading policy will go into effect for all 6th through 12th grade classes next year and is part of a national shift toward “equity grading” — a controversial concept that moves away from traditional grading to better measure how well students understand what they are being taught.
Traditional grades measure how well students understand what they are being taught, if tests are decently designed and assignments for writing papers are relevant.
More:
Next year, the district will restrict all letter grades to a 10% range and remove the practice of awarding zero points for assignments as long as they were “reasonably attempted.” The new policy will also remove extra credit and bonus points that elevated grades, and provide students with multiple chances to make up missed or failed assignments and minimize homework’s impact on a student’s grade.
If an assignment is “reasonably attempted” it wouldn’t be getting a zero anyway. Zero is for not turning it in at all. And the new policy eliminates many opportunities for good students to do exceptionally well at the same time it gives more opportunities for poor students to do better or to seem to do better (“minimizing homework’s impact” – why?).
Here’s the bottom line:
“This will up kids graduating, it will up their numbers,” said Laurie Sargent, an eighth grade English teacher at Cottonwood Creek, a TK-8th grade school in Dublin. “They’ll have fewer kids failing and then that looks good. It’s strategic.”
It’s all about the numbers, and if you eliminate failing than your numbers automatically improve.
I have come to loathe the word “equity,” which has been used in an Orwellian manner for way too long.
I want to highlight this video on Israel’s Iran attack
In case you missed it when I posted it in an addendum yesterday – here’s a fascinating take on what Israel’s attack on Iran was all about:
Open thread 4/20/24
“If Jimmy jumped off a cliff, would you follow him?”
Iran, Israel, and MAD
So, what’s going on between Iran and Israel after Israel launched a limited strike against Iran?:
The primary target seems to have been air defense systems around the Khatami Air Base near Isfahan. This is one of the bases from which last weekend’s attack on Israel was launched. …
Concurrent with the attack in Iran, Israel hit air defense sites in Syria. There are no conclusive reports of damage caused by any of the strikes. The scope of the attack indicates that Iranian nuclear facilities were not the target.
Neither side is making a big deal of the attack.
Is this just some sort of theater? Or is it a prelude to something bigger? I’m not sure that either side is all that sure at the moment. They’re jockeying for position and sizing each other up.
I’ve long thought that Iran won’t do all that much to Israel – except through terrorist proxies as well as worldwide propaganda – until it has nuclear weapons. Even then, it might hesitate – accent on the might – if it thought Israel would destroy it in return.
I read this interesting article at Ace’s recently. It looks at the big picture:
… [T]he Iranian attack [on Israel] was a three-pronged event using slower drones, faster cruise missiles, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. This was different, not just in who was attacking, but the methodology. The success of the defense has got a lot of people thinking and planning and, frankly, worried.
Worried? Why worried? Wouldn’t a successful defense be a good thing? Well:
The creation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile systems (ABMs) [in the Cold War] resulted in a series of negotiations, because this was destabilized the MAD doctrine. A viable ABM system allows one side to defeat a first strike, then free it to launch a strike of their own– and win. So both sides agreed to stop building and limited themselves to one system. The US put its ABM system around some of the missile fields; the Russians put theirs around Moscow.
Now let’s consider a Regional Conflict. Over time nuclear weapons have proliferated. Pakistan, India, China, France, and Great Britian have nukes, and likely others such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, South Africa (maybe), and presumably, Israel. In the bipolar years, nobody gave much thought to Regional Conflicts. Why? Regional powers didn’t have nukes, so why bother. But not anymore. This begs the question then — and the reason a lot of thinkers are busy late into the night — can a Regional Nuclear War be fought, and won?
That would act as an incentive rather than a deterrent – if a country such as Iran thought that was possible.
More:
Can MAD exist in a regional context? I think it can, but the likelihood of weapon use in oneies and twoies goes up dramatically. More so given there are other delivery options: trains, cars, airlines, etc. Better question is can MAD exist in the Middle East? Just how crazy are the muzzies? This would keep me awake at night.
In the short run, a wider war with Iran doesn’t appear to be happening right now. But the situation is highly unstable, and you don’t need me to tell you that. It’s obvious.
And nukes could and almost certainly would change the whole picture.
ADDENDUM:
Hat tip: commenter “sdferr.”
Fascinating take on it: