American Jews Have Ceased to Be Cool, and They Should Stop Trying

Between 1956 and 1961, three of America’s biggest celebrities—Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sammy Davis, Jr.—converted to Judaism. In 2022, one of America’s biggest celebrities, Kanye West, became one the country’s most prominent anti-Semites. John Podhoretz reflects on what this says about the changing place of Jews in the United States, and suggests that they might no longer be, in Davis’s words, “a swinging bunch of people.”

We may not have our Christmas mornings booked, and we may not paint Easter eggs, but we are not on the sidelines any longer. In fact, as shown in the disgraceful lack of Jewish participation in the lawsuits targeting the new Ivy League discrimination against Asians—a recapitulation in almost every respect of the barriers put up against us once upon a time—many Jews are themselves now beneficiaries of the ancillary boons that come from generations of elite education and professional networking, boons that they do not wish to sacrifice.

Therefore, whatever we are and whatever we can be, we cannot be cool. Cool has a transgressive aspect, and Jews are the ultimate A students who want to please the teacher and get in good with the administration. Nor can we hope to win over the likes of West with efforts to convince him that Jews also have a history of oppression, and that Jews today are under a new kind of threat—a threat that he himself represents in part. Indeed, West’s own conduct shows how potentially double-edged the undeniable Jewish success in non-Jewish America might be in the long term. Throughout history, Jews who have made their mark in Diaspora societies have seen their unexpected prominence used as a weapon against them.

There is a strange but alluring temptation, therefore, to lean into the victimization of Jews over the past few years as a means of producing a more favorable atmosphere, the sort that might cause a West to consider conversion rather than becoming a modern-day mouthpiece for the ideas in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

But this would be exactly the wrong tack to take. For one thing, it would be a disgraceful way to respond to the violence being done to Jews today, and an intellectually indefensible way to instruct young Jews on how to respond to attacks on their identities as Jews.

Read more at Sapir

More about: American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Celebrity, Popular culture

Why South Africa Has Led the Legal War against Israel

South Africa filed suit with the International Court of Justice in December accusing Israel of genocide. More recently, it requested that the court order the Jewish state to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip—something which, of course, Israel has been doing since the war began. Indeed, the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) has had a long history of support for the Palestinian cause, but Orde Kittrie suggests that the current government, which is plagued by massive corruption, has more sinister motives for its fixation on accusing Israel of imagined crimes:

ANC-led South Africa has . . . repeatedly supported Hamas. In 2015 and 2018, the ANC and Hamas signed memoranda of understanding pledging cooperation against Israel. The Daily Maverick, a South African newspaper that previously won an international award for exposing ANC corruption, has reported claims that Iran “essentially paid the ANC to litigate against Israel in the ICJ.”

The ANC-led government says it is motivated by humanitarian principle. That’s contradicted by its support for Russia, and by [President Cyril] Ramaphosa’s warmly welcoming a visit in January by Mohamed Dagalo, the leader of the Sudanese-Arab Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Ramaphosa’s smiling, hand-holding welcome of Dagalo occurred two months after the RSF’s systematic massacre of hundreds of non-Arab Sudanese refugees in Darfur.

While the ANC has looted its own country and aided America’s enemies, the U.S. is insulating the party from the consequences of its corruption and mismanagement.

In Kittrie’s view, it is “time for Congress and the Biden administration to start helping South Africa’s people hold Ramaphosa accountable.”

Read more at The Hill

More about: International Law, Iran, South Africa