email #48 — on caring and thinking and politics and people

[Leon Kraiem]

Dear friends,

First, a correction: Ofer Prison is not “nearly empty.” I wrote that carelessly, thinking only of the general point that Israel released a lot of killers in the ceasefire deal. But, in reality, Ofer Prison has thousands of people detained in it. Someone on this list — let’s call her Dana — reached out to make this point, and she was right to do so. The sentence I wrote was false.

I told this to Dana, that she was right and that I’d probably send out a correction in the morning, and then I told her: If you don’t get anything out of these emails, but it makes you think less of me, I wonder if it might not be best to unsubscribe. I’d rather keep you as a friend and lose you as a reader, than keep you as a reader and lose you as a friend. Sometimes those are the options, and I'd be crazy to choose the other way around.

Of course, implicit in that prescription is a certain ideological ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ which probably ought to be challenged. When you learn a friend has noxious views about the world, and it makes you upset, you’re upset because of what they told you, not that they told you it. Maybe it’s a cop-out to ask for blissful ignorance.

I don’t think so, though. Mostly because there really is a difference between values and beliefs, and while it’s a hard question, I think, whether the former should be a basis for how we treat other people, it’s straightforward to me that the latter should not. If two doctors are both trying to cure your cancer, but they come to mutually exclusive opinions about how best to treat it, they’re both on your side. One may have to win, and the other may have to lose, but they’d be mistaken to take the struggle personally.

--

I was walking the other day in Jerusalem, bummed out after an old mentor ghosted me upon learning where I live these days. (She lives in a different far-off country now, which was going through some serious turmoil, and I wrote her, after some ten years, to ask if she was okay; she was so happy to hear from me, and sent me a long, curious response; but once I answered her questions, the thread went radio-silent. Who knows if that’s why, but it’s hard for me to shake the suspicion.)

Walking, I had the following thought, which sort of bowled me over: Most of the world thinks Israel is committing genocide, and I’ve made (and declined to make) a series of decisions that are hard to justify if most of the world is right. It really sucks when, upon learning about those decisions, people have trouble maintaining a normal friendship with me. But the other people, who don’t have trouble maintaining a normal friendship with me — have they examined the evidence about Gaza, and concluded that most of the world is wrong? Or do they just not care if I’m complicit in a genocide? Because, crap, I think that’s even worse!

When I’m abroad now, and I run into an anti-Israel protest — which has happened a number of times over the last two years — I don’t want the people around me to join in, and start chanting “intifada.” On the other hand, if the people around me throw their hands up in the air and say, “Really?! I’m trying to get to work!” I do sort of want to ask them: “Isn’t genocide a little more important?”

As I wrote about last year, upon returning from another trip to America, I ran away to Israel in large part to escape this lose-lose. There’s a myth these days that October 7 changed Diaspora Jewish opinions about Israel; but from where I stand, everything seems to have followed, to a T, a script that was written after the last Gaza war; the train was sped up, but the tracks were pre-set. It was clear to me, by the time I graduated college, that anti-Zionism had woven itself into the fabric of the sort of Jewish communities that otherwise shared my political, theological, social, etc. values; So, like a number of other people I know, I had to move to Israel to remain a lefty and remain religious, to vote against the government while still supporting the state. 

—

But that is, obviously, not a real solution. First of all, it's not universalizable — most people can’t up and move across the world for the sake of a frictionless Thanksgiving — but more to the point, it’s not even desirable: Thanksgiving friction is good. It means we’re thinking, and it means that we care.

Unfortunately, those two things — caring and thinking — seem, at least in my own experience, to work against each other, as soon as there’s more than one person in the room. I can have a great intellectual conversation about a topic that neither I nor my interlocutor care about; I can also get righteous and inspired, and forge a powerful friendship, around a topic we do care about — but good look thinking critically about it afterward without eventually getting at each other’s throats.

Isn’t that horrendous? If caring about problems makes them harder to solve, that’s on par with bad things happening to good people, in terms of cosmic injustice. There's gotta be a better way. 

—

One better way, I think, might lie in making your character, and your commitment to shared values, so abundantly clear, that people aren’t freaked out when you express a belief that’s different from the conclusion they’ve come to. The trouble is, that’s not a matter of finagling phraseology in an election-eve email, you have to actually be a good person in all areas of your life.

Minutes after I sent off that email yesterday, another friend of mine — let’s call her Rebecca — shot me a text, to make plans to hang out. We hopped on the phone, and talked a little about what I’d written. Rebecca doesn’t live in New York anymore, but she would vote for Mamdani if she did, and she wasn’t convinced by my argument. We had an interesting, respectful conversation, of a type she’s better at having than I am, and it was one of the experiences that provoked this email now.

Then I went for a walk, for the first time since arriving in New York. On my walk, I sent this text to a third friend — let’s call him Alan: “Every time I experience fall, I’m just beside myself at how beautiful it is. I need to do some serious emotional stretching to be able to appreciate how happy Central Park in November makes me.”

When Alan responded, he also referred to my email, expressing gratitude for it. I told him thank you for letting me know, and then I expressed my ambivalence about how the email turned out. “I don’t like sending takes,” I said, in a voice note. “I do occasionally, because sometimes a take is important. But I try to avoid it, and to lead with my feelings instead. That’s the email I would have liked to have written — why I feel the way I do about the election, not why I think what I do about it.”

(To be clear, feelings absent analysis are a terrible basis for deciding who to vote for. But analysis divorced from feelings beg the question of why you’re voting in the first place. Ultimately, this all has to come down to what real, embodied human beings experience. The response to Ben Shapiro’s ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ mantra has always been: ‘no, but your feelings are also facts that you should care about.’)

But it’s like the Central Park thing, I said. Feelings are just harder than thoughts for me.

—

This morning, I got a text from a fourth friend — let’s call her Sharon. She was still undecided about how to vote, having flipped and flopped and flopped and flipped, and she invited me to make my case. This time, I leaned a lot more into my feelings, mostly because she and I have pretty much the same values and pretty much the same beliefs, and so it was really just a personal “how’s this all landing with you?” conversation.

As I said to Dana, if reading what follows can only be bad for our relationship, skip to the next section! But I do think my thoughts may be useful to some people who read this, and I want to get it on the record for my own future reference:

I think Cuomo is a bad guy, but I don’t think he’s a Bad Guy, and I resent the pressure to pretend that he is; he legalized gay marriage, declared and kept New York a sanctuary state throughout the first Trump administration, and while he made a very bad decision about the nursing homes, I remember those daily press conferences during Covid, and everyone I know was grateful for them at the time. The progressive world’s rhetoric about Cuomo reminds me of its rhetoric about Hillary, and Biden, and Kamala — all flawed but basically normal people crushed under the weight of false equivalencies while running against a madman.

I also resent the pressure to downplay the concern about electing someone with no work experience, who believes the economics equivalent of flat-eartherism, to run a city of eight million people. Lives are on the line here. You don’t have to be some old fogie to think empty-CV government-run-grocery-guy should not be in charge of what’s essentially a small country.

And then, the Jewish piece. I gave the “don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining” take in the last email, I won’t rehash it. But I will add this: When I was seventeen, I went to London with my parents. We were there over a weekend, and I thought I’d go to synagogue on Saturday morning. Before Shabbat, I looked up the nearest shul, and I walked over there; I couldn’t find the place, until a security guy popped out of nowhere, asking me who I was and what I was doing there; I explained I wanted to go to services; he wouldn’t let me, though, because I didn’t register in advance and I wasn’t carrying my passport. “I don’t think you’re a terrorist, but I can’t take the chance,” he said. I walked over to the next shul, and I had the same experience.

This, I said to Lily, always stuck with me. That was a decade ago, way before Oct. 7, and it was representative of what it’s like to be Jewish in major world cities other than New York — and it wasn’t only, or primarily, neo-Nazis that these shuls were looking out for; it was anti-Israel usually-jihadists, attacking synagogues in the name of Palestinian liberation. That on this one, literal island, Jews can waltz into houses of worship without fearing for their lives, can’t be taken for granted. Of course what’s happened everywhere else could happen here. Of course! 

And also: I know people at Columbia! I know people at Harvard! Who were terrified during the whole encampment thing, as people all around them cheered for Hamas! I was there myself! The Columbia one had 'streets' named after different terrorists! This is, in fact, personal.

—

One more election-related vignette from the last 24 hours, before I tie this up and crash: I went last night to a Cuomo press conference, armed with a very niche question about a Hasidic endorsement fight in Brooklyn that I didn’t get a chance to ask him, and no one was really the worse off for it. But it was my first time seeing Cuomo in person, and I must say: He does, in fact, come off as a schmuck.

The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, but even in that time, the following things bothered me: When someone heckled him from across the street, the gaggle of supporters they’d wrangled behind him started booing and hissing — you don’t have to be upset about it, but you should really turn around and say ‘No, let’s not,’ even just performatively. He didn’t. Also: He really needs to learn how to say Mamdani’s name. It’s fine to have trouble the first couple times — John McWhorter wrote a good column in the Times explaining why the name is hard for English speakers. But you’re running against the guy, and he’s winning, you’ve gotta look in the mirror and say ‘Mamdani, Mamdani, Mamdani,’ and if you really can’t do it, just call him ‘Zohran.’ Cuomo also seemed a lot less interested in schmoozing with his supporters than I’d expect of a losing candidate on the eve of a crucial Get Out the Vote operation.

That operation, by the way — apparently nonexistent. I filled out his volunteer form twice; no one got back to me. I looked for an in-person event; nothing. I looked for a campaign headquarters; nothing. I’ve heard from other people — wealthy people, organized people! — that they’d tried desperately to work with the campaign, and got no help. It happens to be the case that Zohran is a generational talent of a campaigner, but even if Cuomo were running against some run-of-the-mill not-dead guy, he’d still be punching way below his weight.

I raised this last point with Sharon, who’s actually met Zohran a couple times, because they run in some of the same circles. She recalled that he’s actually a really nice guy — remembers your name, takes his AirPods out to talk to you; he’s also gone to bat for cab drivers when they were getting screwed over in a way they really remember; when he’s on the trail, you can tell he likes people, and loves the city itself. That all tracks to me. He is clearly, in some ways, a better guy than Cuomo. I just think he’s also radicalized, and those aren’t mutually exclusive.

—

I’ve cut about a thousand words out of this email, about beliefs vs. values vs. virtues and vices; maybe I’ll turn that into something one day, there’s good stuff in it. But it’s overly analytical, and too high-resolution, and I’m jetlagged and I need to sleep soon and I won’t solve these problems tonight. The upshot, though, is this: Political arguments are complicated but easy; being a mentsh is simple but hard.

Elections have huge consequences, but all of those consequences boil down to how people get treated, which means that how you treat people is definitionally as important as any decision at the ballot box; every now and then, you get to play a small role in a big process, and it’s important to do that well. But every day, all the time, you play a big role in a bunch of small processes, and it’s equally important — and usually a lot more straightforward — to do those well, too.

I’ve been stateside for 48 hours now; I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how the election will affect the Jews of New York City, and very little time hanging out with my beloved New York City Jews!! And the rest of you, obviously, I just wanted to write that sentence. Please, my beloved New Yorkers, of all races, colors, and creeds — let’s make plans! I want to catch up.

—

From the Holy City, my ancestral home, the greatest place on earth,

I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are,
I will continue to keep you posted.

Leon 

[Leon Kraiem]

(to be clear, I'm the one with the 'noxious views' in the theoretical — i just read this back to myself and realized it could come off the other way around; I obviously don't think my own views are noxious, but I get that someone on the other end might, and simply not reading my emails might not assuage their concerns about maintaining the relationship with me, is the point I wanted to acknowledge; okay, end of addenda, I'm going to sleep)