This Week in The Tikvah Fund (3/14)
David Shasha
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik and His Invisible Trumpist Friends
As you may have already noticed, I posted three items on the Tikvah Jewish Leadership Conference this week, paying tribute to the arch-racist Ruth Wisse, as well as Trump Seditionists Mike Pompeo and Tom Cotton.
I was quite intrigued to read Soloveichik’s personal Tikvah e-mail on Thursday night:
Here is the curious part:
My talk that evening will follow the two-day, online Jewish Leadership Conference, which will take place on Sunday, March 14, and Monday, March 15. The gathering will feature an extraordinary array of speakers, from public figures to insightful thinkers and writers such as Dr. Leon Kass, Yuval Levin, and John Podhoretz. Tikvah will also be honoring my dear friend and teacher Professor Ruth Wisse with the 2021 Herzl Prize. And I will be delivering an address on the universal significance of Jewish Jerusalem, in which I will argue that Jerusalem's particularity carries a biblical message to the world.
The names of Pompeo and Cotton do not appear!
Or Ben Shapiro.
Quite an interesting way to list the names and leave out the Trump Sedition.
Shapiro in particular had a good week trolling the man he calls “President Houseplant”:
https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1370007731084607494
How Alana Newhouse of him!
It is all more Chillul Hashem; one more opportunity to mark the Tikvah hypocrisy and its Trump shell game.
All the Neo-Cons are Here! Cole Aronson in Tikvah Tablet
In last week’s newsletter I included a bunch of Neo-Con Tikvah-related articles by up-and-coming Har Etzion White Jewish Supremacist Cole Aronson:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/SCbB2VvoaA0
I neglected at the time to make note of the fact that Aronson just had a piece published in Tikvah Tablet:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/politics-and-the-yeshivish-language
Though he does not mention it by name, the Yale program he is referring to in the article is the Tikvah Scholars Program:
https://tikvahfund.org/hs/tsp2021/home/
The article is replete with our favorite Tikvah macher, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, as well as White Jewish Supremacists Sarah Bunin Benor, Norman Lamm, and Erica Brown.
The idea here is to argue against Yiddish and for YU Modern Orthodoxy in the Tikvah spirit.
I was struck by the following insertion of a Yeshivish defense of Trump:
Here is a defense of Donald Trump’s sanity: “M’heicha teisi are you noyteh to say that Trump has a dibbuk? He’s a groyse friend of Klal Yisroel, and his machatunim are frum!” (“Why are you inclined to say that Trump is a lunatic? He’s a great friend of the Jews and his in-laws are observant.”)
But for me the most telling part of the article is the reference to Yeshivish and our friend John McWhorter:
Yeshivish is, simply put, “one more of the language varieties Jews have created based on the language of their nation in residence,” writes John McWhorter, the Columbia linguist. Yiddish grew from a Jewish German, Ladino from a Jewish Spanish; Bukharan Jews speak a kind of Jewish Persian. “Languages coming together is a default,” McWhorter writes. Four melded to make Yeshivish: English provides the grammar and much of the vocabulary. Yiddish, the vernacular of most Ashkenazi Jews in Europe, is the largest non-English source of words. Next is Hebrew, the language of sacred Jewish texts, excepting the Talmud, which was composed in Aramaic—the fourth influence—and which is studied by the most conspicuous group of Yeshivish speakers: Yeshiva students (bochrim) and their teachers (rebbeim).
I am sure that Aronson is aware of the close connection between the Jewish Neo-Cons led by Bari Weiss and McWhorter’s antagonism for Critical Race Theory and Cancel Culture:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/ocCkHawJzrY/m/1ncbGXfaAQAJ
And that is how young people make it in Tikvahworld.
Bari Weiss is Now FAIR!
Weiss has just alerted us to her participation in a group called FAIR, Foundation against Intolerance and Racism, in a real Orwellian spirit:
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1367527979329286145
Here is the Board of Advisors; see how many of the Neo-Cons you recognize:
https://www.fairforall.org/about/board-of-advisors/
I wanted to make note of one of them, Glenn Loury:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_conservatism#United_States
I once again checked in with Bill Maher this week, and he decided to quote Loury at Charlamagne Tha God:
Tha God apparently did not know who Loury was!
For his edification, here is Loury’s latest Quillette horror, brought to me courtesy of Yoram Hazony’s NatCon e-mail newsletter:
https://quillette.com/2021/02/10/unspeakable-truths-about-racial-inequality-in-america/
But he knows who Joe Biden is:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/lhlDPmYGx2c/m/6NqmjjF8AQAJ
The Neo-Cons are indeed everywhere.
Idiocracy is all around us.
Back to Bakke!
The Jewish Neo-Con anti-Affirmative Action attacks are back:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/wendy-kaminer-race-bias-training
William Clark is their new poster boy – at least that is what Tucker Carlson says:
https://www.foxnews.com/us/lawsuit-nevada-race-christianity-william-clark
His lawsuit is a Right Wing cause:
Outside the courtroom, many old-fashioned liberals, like me, who question the premises and methods of anti-bias training may keep their questions to themselves. The Clarks’ lawsuit, for example, is supported by the International Organization for the Family, which has been labelled a right-wing “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Relatively few liberals will want to risk their reputations by agreeing with the IOF publicly. Liberal Democratic politicians wouldn’t dare.
But then we play the whataboutism game – making that other Right Wing icon Jodi Shaw the “Liberal” foil to Clark:
Still, not all challenges to anti-bias training incorporating critical race theory come from the right. Jodi Shaw, who identifies as liberal, famously resigned from Smith College (my alma mater) after its adoption of a comprehensive anti-white, allegedly anti-racism agenda. Shaw, a Smith alum, posted widely viewed YouTube videos on Smith’s hostile, illiberal environment.
Then we get the obligatory reference to Tikvah Tablet Bari Weiss – and it just goes downhill from there.
Wendy Kaminer is used here because she is Tikvah as well as ACLU:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Kaminer
Kind of like the Dersh:
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Alan-Dershowitz-go-from-being-a-civil-libertarian-to-a-fascist-neocon
The key to Ms. Kaminer’s argument is her use of the notorious Bakke and Fisher cases, which argue for White Privilege and against Diversity:
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/432506.htm
In the post-Trump era we are back to re-litigating all this White Privilege, which is being done under the banner of anti-Anti-Racism.
Iran on the Trumpist Brain
We recently saw how Whore of Trump Newhouse will be going after the new president:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/obama-trump-iran-nuclear
Tikvah Tablet is always good at finding Jews of Middle Eastern origin when it suits their HASBARAH Trumpist purposes!
When it comes to the actual intellectual culture – not so much.
Iran is apparently the place where the Neo-Con Jews will try to attack Biden; implicitly affirming the Trumpist line.
It was something we have seen with the Tikvah embrace of American Seditionist Mike Pompeo:
https://www.jewishleadershipconference.org/speakers/
On Thursday we got this gem from Trumpist Lee Smith:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/iran-deal-inevitable-sequel
You do not need to read more than the first sentence to get the drift of it:
Joe Biden’s commitment to reenter the Iran nuclear deal from which Donald Trump withdrew might strike observers as bizarre.
But, of course, it must include an attack on the Muslim president as well:
After all, Barack Obama’s July 2015 agreement, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was an expensive and comprehensive failure whose underlying premises have been shown over the past six years to be false. By contrast, Trump’s policy of returning to traditional regional alliance structures—boosting allies and deterring enemies—was a success. The United States entered no new Middle East wars and Iran didn’t build a bomb, despite supposedly being “months” or “weeks” away from a nuclear breakout during Obama’s second term in the White House.
The Tikvah Tablet priorities are clear: Trump remains their man.
David Shasha