I appreciate where this article is coming from. Of course we should be concerned with double standards, and the right-wing antisemitism is utterly despicable. But may I respectfully suggest that maybe this isn't just about "punching down at pro-Palestine students of color"?
The reason for the vitriol directed at left-wing institutions is that leftists were the ones *dancing in the streets* when Jews were massacred. If we had seen celebrations in Nashville and Jacksonville instead of New York and London on October 8th, I think the Jewish community would have directed its rage at the right.
Moreover, I think this article whitewashes Hamas apologia as "pro-Palestinian" activism. I've spent some time on a left-wing campus recently. There was a demented feeling of glee in the air. "Pro-Palestinian" activists cheered on the massacre at the vigil for those killed on October 7th. As for the Harvard letter, I think any reasonable person could see why "Israel deserves to be terrorized" isn't simply pro-Palestinian sentiment.
Finally, many of us Jews (especially "elite" Jews) live and work in places that lie somewhere between AOC and Stalin on the political spectrum. I don't think it's odd that Jewish leaders have chosen to focus on left-wing antisemitism in this moment.
I go to Harvard so I've seen these protests firsthand. Some are antisemitic, some are not. Regardless, I'm glad we can agree that there's a terrible double standard here -- I think we need to call out antisemitism wherever it appears, on the right and on the left.
Maya, I think you’d agree that a movement where “only some” of the protests were antisemitic (or even excused Hamas) isn’t great. I very much doubt you’d excuse a rally where only some of the speakers applauded lynchings, or only some of them were Islamophobic.
Something is a double standard when it treats two identical activities differently. But organizing a large-scale public protest and a temporary personal tweet are two very different activities.
elon has more power than every pro palestinian student on every college campus in the US combined. rhetoric matters, and this isn't the first time ** "After buying Twitter, he reinstated prominent right-wing conspiracy theorists (many of whom are also white supremacists), including Nick Fuentes, Ye, Patrick Howley, Pepe Escobar, Santino Rice, Clif High, Scott Ritter, and Sam Hyde. After the Anti-Defamation League published a report that antisemitic hate speech had surged on Twitter after Musk’s takeover, Elon threatened to sue the ADL and accused it of being the “biggest generators” of antisemitism on Twitter. He also liked a tweet promoting the #BantheADL campaign.
Musk has repeatedly tweeted offensive Holocaust-related content. In 2022, he posted a picture of a Nazi soldier and a meme that compared Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler. And last May, Musk compared Holocaust survivor and Jewish billionaire George Soros to Jewish comic book villain Magneto and said he “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization” — which many argued was antisemitic."
I'm going to just keep repeating this. The Attorney General of Texas is now opening an investigation into Media Matters based on Musk's tweet.
There is no way in the world any Attorney General in any state in America is opening an investigation to ADL, AIPAC or any other somewhat Jewish affiliated organization because of any of these campus protests.
Leadership’s rhetoric is not just empty words tho.
When Elon speaks, thousands of his minions obsessively agree, re-spew it, and take action based on those ideas.
I for one expect the people we collectively give with such extraordinary power to act far more responsibly. His speech is far far more impactful than a bunch of college students the world has largely tuned out long ago
Do you really think that the picture of the soldier with carrier pigeons (who would only be identified as a Nazi soldier by someone who is really into WWII military uniforms, as there are no details that would suggest the soldier is a Nazi) and calling Justin Trudeau (who called the trucker protestors Nazis, and who brought an actual Nazi to speak to the Canadian parliament) a Nazi are "Holocaust-related"?
Calling people Nazis has a long history in American politics. Has every violation of Godwin's Law on the internet been "Holocaust-related"? This seems like stretch.
Also, thanks for writing this and engaging with the comments, I don't think I agree with your take but I appreciate getting your perspective!
tbh I think those posts are nazi dogwhistles in the context of everything else he's written, but even if you disagree (which is fair), the other stuff stands for itself. and happy to engage!
This seems like something that could be answered by someone asking him straightforwardly. That said, the "this is the truth" tweet replying to a transparently conspiratorial message definitely doesn't look great.
I'm hyper skeptical about ferreting out dog whistle stuff because so much of it amounts to attempted mind reading, and people who hate others because of their ethnicity, race, or whatever other characteristic will usually come out and say if if they're pushed.
And I have to imagine if there were Charlottesville-like protests of hard right idiots dancing in the streets and cheering the death of Jews, business leaders would be just as adamantly opposed.
Yes, there is such a massive gap between cheering terrorism against Jewish people and criticizing Jewish Progressives for supporting DEI. But both can be considered antisemitism so they're the same.
This idea that there were “leftists dancing j the streets” does not comport to the reality I’ve experienced.
Rather, seems to me that there has been a blanket assumption that anyone with brown skin cheering Hamas is leftists. Meanwhile, from what I can tell, there has always been Muslim fundamentalists among the American population. They are not ‘leftist’ but rather they are religious extremists, generally associated with roght wong politics. But they get lumped with the left because black lives matter and all that. But they don’t have much to do with anything else left wing in America.
"some people have been pro-Hamas, but this is the minority of pro-Palestine protesters in my experience"
I'm not aware of a pro-Palestine protest on the campus at which I work (grad student) that did not repeat "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" ad nauseum.
Now, OK, maybe only a minority of them knew what that meant. But I should think the organizers who coordinated the chants did.
Now, OK, what that means isn't "pro-Hamas" per se. But it's just as bad.
Are there still people who don't know what that (or "Heritage not hate" or "All lives matter") means? I know that I disagree with Matt on this, but I'm pretty skeptical.
"Are there still people who don't know what that means?"
I'm not sure; I threw that line in to indicate that their knowledge (or lack thereof) is not necessary for my argument. But I also try not to underestimate stupidity.
I don’t get it. We can understand that not all of the anti-Israel protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” are pro-Hamas but saying Jewish academics and political funders supported an ideology that is fueling those protests is anti-Semitic?
I see assuming good faith on one side and bad faith on the other. Excusing the literal interpretation of one and extrapolating a nefarious interpretation of the other.
The celebration wasn’t just by “people with brown skin” and certainly not just by Muslim fundamentalists. The undergrads and law students and professors and DSA members who celebrated can for the most part be characterized as leftists.
Sure these tiny handful of cases exists. But If you check out “the people dancing in the streets” immediately following this attack, I think you’ll have a hard time documenting more than a small handful of what you say. Far far more of the people celebrating were quite obviously Muslim.
The DSA, sure. But even that doesn’t fit the grand narratives about decolonization. Same group is against US involvement in Ukraine.
All antisemitism is bad. But there has been a kneejerk reaction to point fingers at the left and conflate Muslim fundamentalism with left wing politics. It doesn’t fit at all
If US Muslims are predominantly aligned with the political right, how come Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who are among the most leftwing members of Congress, were elected from the districts with the country's highest proportions of Muslim voters?
I didn’t say US Muslim’s were aligned with the political right in the USA. As a minority group, Muslim’s are associated with the left, which is an unusual situation given the conservatism baked into Islam.
I said Muslim extremists exist in the US and are typically associated with right wing politics rather than left wing politics. Religious fundamentalism and nationalism movements are generally considered right wing, based in tradition, hierarchy etc, rather than equality, progress etc
Religious fundamentalism of any sort -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever --is obviously conservative in the most general sense, and I think it's true that most Christian fundamentalists in the US tend to vote for Republicans. But Christian ethics are really more compatible with leftwing than rightwing politics -- particularly the idea that amassing wealth is sinful, that charity is especially virtuous when bestowed on someone of alien ethnicity, and that passivity in response to aggression is better than retaliation. Indeed, in light of the Sermon on the Mount, it might well be said that Marxism is a neo-Christian ideology (albeit without the preference for passivity).
Yes, I agree, Christian morality informs liberalism, born out of the Enlightenment and Protestantism. It is very much left wing, founded within an oppressed, occupied society enduring brutal Roman occupation.
I’d never thought about how Muslim morality is perhaps more aligned with right wing sentiment. But seems something is there.
Its important also tho regarding religion and politics….that morality often takes a back seat to the traditions, group interests and institutional interests. Those forces tend to align with right wing politics. Today, we have a real tension between the two. Christian nationalism vs liberalism. It is not a new tension tho — it is hundreds of years old now.
The idea that moneymaking is bad for the soul did not originate with Christianity. Plato elucidated it in Book 8 of The Republic more persuasively than Christ does in gospel accounts of the sermon on the mount. Plato was definitely leftwing -- indeed, proto-Marxist. He said that wealthy citizens typically contrive to exclude the poor from any say in government by establishing a minimum wealth requirement for voting or other participation in civic governance and that as a result the polity is riven into two mutually hostile factions: those meeting the wealth requirement and the disenfranchised others. And because the wealthy oligarchs mistrust the disenfranchised citizens of lesser means they are unwilling to allow them to bear arms or provide them with military training; consequently such oligarchic states are vulnerable to conquest by foreign invaders. In Plato's ideal state neither the rulers nor the "guardians" -- an elite warrior class that would also perform police functions -- would seek enrichment. Indeed, the guardians would have no private property; they'd share common quarters, would have no right of exclusive sexual relations with particular women, and the offspring of their sexual encounters would be raised communally, not knowing who their parents were, nor would their fathers know which of them they'd sired. Can't be much more "collective" than that!
Of course the mere fact that Plato was in favor of X, Y, or Z doesn't prove that X, Y, or Z is either feasible or desirable. He states reasons for drawing his conclusions, but I often find his reasoning confusing or based on premises that seem dubious.
I think many Muslims would tell you that the core tenants of Islam - loving your neighbor as yourself, being kind, taking care of the poor, and struggling against oppression of any kind are also value that would tend to overlap with progressive policies and values in many ways. Muslims in the US have voted for Democrats in elections over the last year at rates of about 69% to 82%. In some cases this might be motivated by fear of Republican policies toward immigration but I think they would say it was primarily because of a perception that Democrats value cultural diversity and freedom of religion AND that their domestic policies about providing a safety net for the poor and protecting God's creation are a better match to what their theology says is morally correct. For some Muslims there is definitely a tension between these overall beliefs and more conservative specific beliefs about topics like the morality of abortion or homosexuality. But the majority of Muslims in America do support same-sex marriage and abortion being legal is almost all circumstances and the vast majority of muslims who express those more liberal views also describe themselves as highly religious, engage in daily prayer, and attend mosque at least once a month. And they have much higher rates of supporting bigger government vs smaller government, more environmental regulation, and belief that public financial support of the poor is beneficial than Catholics, Mainline Protestants, or Evangelical Protestants. So I think an argument could be made that in the US, Muslims are following their religious views to more liberal places than Christians. Obviously there is a contrast between those views and the views in areas where fundementalist Islam is the primary social norm but that is the case for fundamentalism in all faiths. Interestingly the religious group that is most similar to Muslims in the US is Jews in the US.
Yes. My brother lived there for some time. These days it’s populated mostly by rich people with boring politics. It’s not very scary.
And if your lived reality is that a tiny handful of trust fund kid who writes for N+1 magazine are a threat of even politically important, I’d say getting some perspective is in order.
Have you not been paying attention? There was a contingent that celebrated the October 7th as resistance against oppression. A Cornell Professor, speaking at a rally in support, said he felt exhilarated when he heard the news. These were minority sentiments to be sure, but they were still vocally stated and widely reported on. It doesn't take some kind of underground research to have seen all of this.
"Where's all the other support for the Houthis and Hezbollah and ISIS?" Are you being serious? None of those groups invaded the only Jewish state on earth to slaughter and rape Jews. You're intentionally ignoring the context of what this is about. Not to mention ignoring that there literally were Westerners who supported things like ISIS (some of whom flew to the Middle East to literally join their ranks). Your comment seems to stem from willful ignorance of the context of all the points you raised in rebuttal.
Then prey do so. Jews are under unprecdented attack in today's US from both left and right. Feeding into the partisan tendency to ignore the antisemtisim on one's own side via whataboutism about the other side is precisely the no. 1 reason jews feel more isolated than ever. Unfortunately you are exactly playing into this trend. We'd all be better off if each of us called eveyone one out but *especially* the shites in our *own* camp.
Sure, there's always more context, and you're framing the issue with very specific contexts (while leaving out others) to create a narrative to justify certain activities.
It's not like folks were dancing in the street for the Tree of Life shooting. It's not like anyone is celebrating Kristallnacht. It's not like the JVP is being organized against by other pro-palestinian protestors. The broad statements here about motivations are purely fictional.
The context is the very real history the middle east has with theocratic ethnostates states and the perpetual carving up of it by imperialist powers. If there's a level of willful ignorance here, it's easy to see why you're projecting it.
Just as an aside re Kristallnacht, there was a pro-Palestinian rally at McGill scheduled for Kristallnacht advertised with an image of someone breaking the glass window of (presumably) a business. https://nitter.net/lymanstoneky/status/1722670897050337483#m
If this is coincidental, the organizers were really extraordinarily unlucky.
Edit: Looking at this a little more, some of the responses say that it's not a business that's getting its glass smashed, it's maybe a university building.
You specifically stated that the things I mentioned weren't happening and hadn't happened, then asked why those things hadn't happened with other groups. I pointed out examples of how they had happened, and had happened with those other groups.
Of course one of the most complicated conflicts in history has more context, and far more than could be covered in a comments section. I'm not "creating a narrative". You seem to be reading more into my and OP's comments than is there.
I did none of those things and you're now definitively creating a narrative, and telling a fabricated story, on multiple fronts. Please stick to reality if you want this to be productive.
You: Really? Dancing in the streets? "Whitewashes Hamas-apologia as "pro-palestinian"?
Me: There was a contingent that celebrated the October 7th as resistance against oppression. A Cornell Professor, speaking at a rally in support, said he felt exhilarated when he heard the news. These were minority sentiments to be sure, but they were still vocally stated and widely reported on. It doesn't take some kind of underground research to have seen all of this.
You: If that's true, where's all the other support for the Houthis and Hezbollah and ISIS?
Me: None of those groups invaded the only Jewish state on earth to slaughter and rape Jews . . . Not to mention ignoring that there literally were Westerners who supported things like ISIS (some of whom flew to the Middle East to literally join their ranks).
I'm not sure how to make it clearer that I was responding to your explicit claims. I mean, I literally put one of the direct quotes I was responding to in my initial response to you.
"What I heard from some people who cheered 10/7 was that they cheered Palestinians finally breaking through the wall that kept them enclosed in Gaza, not the slaughter that followed."
Yeah, who could have predicted that if Hamas broke through the IDF units, they would slaughter Jews. Extremely surprising.
To use an admittedly extreme analogy, this is kind of like saying that people were just excited that the 9/11 hijackers made their flights on time. The whole point of breaking through the lines was to slaughter and rape innocents.
Having said that, I'm fine with saying that people are idiots and missed the clear purpose of breaking through the lines. But Danny is ignoring the not insignificant number of people who celebrated the resistance while fully acknowledging the slaughter. Some people were ecstatic to see Jews killed, and Danny ignores that. But other people were ecstatic about the resistance demonstrated by Hamas and were merely indifferent or perfectly fine with the killing of innocents. Danny seems to be ignoring those people too.
I'm so perplexed and horrified by the fact that this has to be debated. My initial comment recognizes that these are small minority positions. But they're very real, and easily found. You don't even have to search for them, you just have to not consciously bury your head in the sand when they were reported on. But here we are, pretending like nobody was actively celebrating Hamas' attack. It's mind boggling to me.
Weird that they would celebrate "breaking through the wall" when tens of thousands of Palestinians were "breaking through the wall" by going to Israel to work every day prior to Hamas' attack.
“The end of the British mandate was inseparable from the Nakba” is not really comparable to “we cheered them breaking through the wall but not the attacks on civilians,” since the attacks on civilians were the entire purpose of breaking through the wall.
"What I heard from some people who cheered 10/7 was that they cheered Palestinians finally breaking through the wall that kept them enclosed in Gaza, not the slaughter that followed."
Not buying it. These folks aren't too big on nuance.
Twitter leftists have been spending several years holding up the Yemeni civil war as evidence of the U.S. doing bad, so yeah, there's a lot of tacit support for Houthis out there too.
Your judgement based on "Twitter leftists" is not only bad reasoning, but characterizing the anti-war proposition that America not underwrite either side in the Yemeni civil war, is not "tacit support for Houthis."
Sure, US just doesn't mind ignoring Saudi involvement, and arms trade into the area, because the Saudi's are actually reliable allies or something. Same story where we endorse tyrants and people assume the enemy of my enemy is my friend and enemies of my friends are my enemy.
I completely agree. It’s also easy to punch down at college students because they have limited economic power. Musk on the other hand is still incredibly wealthy even after burning $40 billion dollars. It’s much more difficult to criticize him if he is tangentially involved with your work.
Like we can rail on sexual assaulter Elon Musk because frankly, we have little power.
Disagree. Harvard students are among the most privileged people in human history and should give up the victimhood posture. They are old and smart enough to be accountable for their actions. The fact that Elon Musk isn’t held accountable is a separate matter and not a defense of Harvard students.
I don’t see how this is relevant to “business leaders find it easier to criticize people when there are no consequences than it is to criticize someone who could potentially harm their business.”
Punching down or up usually relates to the status of those speaking.
What you said isn’t false, there just might have been a more relevant comment elsewhere in this thread. I don’t get why it exploded. Maybe it’s a free thread?
My critique of Maya’s piece basically boils down to “cheap talk” as an explanation for why Musk doesn’t get as much criticism from folks in his peer group as those antisemetic college students.
It was crazy that anyone ever believed that titans of capitalist industry were left-wing. That idea was created by right wing pundits annoyed that big tech was trying to slow the flood of misinformation on their sites, because in the process they were shutting down a lot of Trumpist propaganda. The only really left wing thing the tech CEOs did was to push DEI, and that only because they were vulnerable to bad press over their overwhelmingly male and white employee populations. But they really aren't and never have been left wing. They're a little left of center on social issues but decidedly right on economic issues. And CEOs outside of tech are much further to the right than tech.
I can't deny that Slow Boring pieces written by women do seem to draw more ire from the peanut gallery, and I kind of wish I could self-righteously point that out. And yet, *as a woman*, I also can't deny that several of the pieces written by women that got pile-ons have also bothered *me* quite a bit. Is it a coincidence? Is Matt equally willing to challenge and critique draft pieces submitted by women as he is from men? I am not sure. I hope so.
I am endlessly impressed by the SB interns' intelligence, maturity, and hustle, Maya included. However, Maya, there is a large disconnect between your strong, black & white language claiming "most" business leaders are "ignoring" anti-semitism on the right, and the available evidence. I was genuinely shocked that this piece flat-out ignored the tidal wave of companies pulling advertising dollars from X based on this single tweet alone, and making strong statements condemning Elon in the process. Your entire argument hinges on the claim that this isn't happening. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/17/elon-musk-x-companies-pulling-ads-anti-semitism/ I'd love to hear whether this factored into you assessment of the situation and whether it alters anything.
Thanks for putting this out there, being willing to face a lot of critique, and being willing to share an opinion that you know will be outnumbered. I think it's good for us to get challenged regularly. Happy Thanksgiving!
Yep companies pulling ads is important -- but I think the silence from Ackman/most of his prominent peers is very important to note, and the focus of the piece
I guess “some cherry picked business leaders are ignoring Musk anti-semitism whereas many others are divesting from his businesses in a way that does him, personally, enormous financial damage” is not as pithy a headline?
It would be terrible if any of the commenters are punching at Maya *because* she's female, and any so doing should feel ashamed. But it would also be terrible if commenters are pulling their (valid) punches *because* she's female, as there's nothing more patronizing than that.
It's probably a combination of things, and it's probably related to experience more than any other identity trait.
When Matt (a seasoned journalist) generously offers any of his employees (usually a student) the chance to voice their opinion, it's to be expected they aren't the same quality as the thing we've all agreed to pay money for, and that bothers people. That's probably super charged by the fact the guest articles are written by women, who are young, from a different milieu. Some people are just going to have a visceral reaction to this perspective that's so far away of their priors. Judging from the quality of these comments, very little of it has to do with constructive criticism for being a young writer, and mostly relying on strawman characterizations and false conflations, just to dunk on her for stepping out of line.
Maybe it’s just my bad memory, but it seems like Maya leans into culture war stuff a lot more previous interns, that may be what you’re picking up on. Regardless of how well it’s argued, you’re going to annoy some fraction of the audience if you debate whether group X is “punching up or punching down” against Group Y rather than going through the fine details of Trumps economic policies.
I've been writing a lot on Israel recently as a Jewish undergraduate at a school at the heart of the culture wars. It's been important to me to share my perspective, especially as a left-wing Jew with nuanced views on this issue. Feel free to also check out my work for The Forward on this issue -- https://forward.com/authors/maya-bodnick/
The first three were on the NBA, on chatGPT, and on high school debate. They were great, imo, and two of them at least really took advantage of her unique perspective. The last one on Ramaswamy and this one, however, have been more standard partisan fare.
Beat me to it. That debate article in particular was just eye opening and mindblowing to me. And I'm always up for talking more sports, I still think Sports Sunday by Maya would be plenty of fun.
Great point. This feels like a big miss. Maya's post seems to have really over-generalized from what just Bill Ackman said and how much Kara Swisher (& by proxy Scott Galloway) hates Elon.
Additionally, the business leaders are *so loud* they're calling on Linda to resign in protest:
I think it's a good point that businesses have reacted strongly to antisemitic content on Twitter but it's also true that businesses have mostly not reacted overtly to specifically Elon Musk's antisemitic statements, and definitely not in the overt way that some reacted to campus leftist stupidity after 10/7.
Marie: Your writing on Post-Woke is some of the best I've seen, and I can't help but notice that you haven't been active in the last year plus. Are you just overwhelmed by work/family (in which case I have to forgive you)? I hope you get back to it . . .
Aw, man, thanks! I think about getting back to it all the time, I still have quite a few ideas I want to discuss. Life has gotten busier for sure, but also I am a bit more at peace with the fact that "people are wrong on the internet"- I used to feel a sense of urgency that I needed to convince people to change their minds on these things, and I basically came to terms with the fact that people are pretty stubborn. But, hey, maybe I will find some time over the holidays to write.
She seems to be hell bent on ignoring the facts to put her head in the sand for the rabid antisemitism in her own institution via a a failed attempt at whataboutism. There could be many psychological explanations but it’s not promising for her as a thinker and writer and a sad fail for Matt as an editor- he failed us subscribers and he failed her in allowing her to embarrass herself like this.
"pro-Palestinian activism crosses the line into antisemitism, a debatable (though perhaps accurate in some cases)"
Perhaps accurate???
At Harvard after the 7/10 massacre, 33 Harvard organizations blamed Israel for a terror attack committed by Hamas.
Down Mass Ave, at my alma mater, Jewish students were warned not to enter the Institute via Lobby 7, the main entrance, for their own safety, and the Institute did not suspend those threatening Jews and refused to leave. This is after groups chanted "intifada" in front of the student center.
Perhaps antisemitic.
I have no love for Elon Musk, and his tweets were disgusting. He should get criticism for what he said.
But I'm not afraid of Elon Musk assaulting me at my alma mater or cheering the murder and kidnapping of my friends.
Ah, so hate speech, bullying, threats to shoot up Jewish spaces on campus, and so on are not a big deal. Interring attitude. I wonder how much of that would be acceptable if those students were anything but Jewish.
The original comment was arguing that the pro-Palestinian activism crosses into anti-semitism (the article says this argument was "debatable" and "perhaps accurate"), and provided examples of how that activism has clearly been anti-semitic in many instances (meaning it is not "debatable" and is "accurate").
Switching the focus to instead say "is it really a problem if people aren't being attacked with great frequency" is moving the goalposts.
"it would still be reasonable to ask people declaring there's a massive wave of anti-Black racism on campuses to show their work"
Brian did show his work. He provided examples of how there's been a wave of anti-Semitism with real world impacts.
Op wasn’t conflating prejudice with violence- the response (and your comment in defense of it) were. Op was pointing out that prejudice was happening. That’s what my comment about moving the goalposts was referencing.
Wait, what? Are you talking about the incident where some people got in a shoving match, and one of them fell and injured his head and died? Or was there an actual murder somewhere?
If it was a serious question then why didn't you google the answer and form a rebuttal based on what you uncovered? This seems more like a rhetorical question intended to dismiss and minimize the harms caused by active threats to students based solely on their Jewish identity.
What an idiotic attitude you have. Are you going to claim that Jewish students haven’t been physically assaulted and threatened by pro Hamas Leftist shits?
I think the incidents you cited are absolutely antisemitic. I think what Matt was saying (and what I agree with) is that the pro-Palestinian activism is being painted as if all of it is the incidents you cite, which it is not. For example, I think the ceasefire protestors are largely concerned with stopping the killing of Palestinians. I don't really think Ivy League students are in any way representative of the state of pro-Palestinian activism, given that they go to historically antisemitic schools.
I’m not afraid of unempowered students, but rather a flood of antisemitism that can only come with LEADERSHIP acting badly and loosening social restrictions against such
There are quite a few people who will claim that the US brought 9/11 onto itself because of its policies in the Middle East. I don’t agree but it is not a statement based on racial hatred. One can make a similar statement about Israel and 10/7 without being antisemitic
Hi Maya - gonna give you comments as if you were one of my philosophy undergrads.
I think this article would have been more compelling if:
1) It didn't treat hypocrisy as reason to discount the original charges of antisemitism on the left. You could probably make a case to doubt Ackman's motives in particular, which this article also does. But it's muddied and weakened by also trying to sneak in the former. Both Elon's statements and the PSC's can be thoroughly antisemitic. (And in my modern orthodox circle - which, to be fair, is not elite twitter commentariat! - people have been appalled by both.)
2) It didn't jump immediately to, "The rich white guys we hate just want to hurt powerless brown people (implication: because they're racist)." As many other commenters have noted, there are plenty of other reasons that Jewish people might be more upset with the left right now. This article had the potential to explore this complicated web of reasons; the real picture is probably a mix of all of the above. And you could have gone much deeper with exploration of power dynamics and how they lead to silencing. Instead, you kinda took the easy way out, falling back on standard progressive orthodoxies about the corruption of money and racist old white guys. There was potential to do some much deeper and more difficult investigative work here.
3) It didn't bend over backwards to paint the PSC statement as merely "pro-Palestinian" activism. You're trying to talk to people who were horrified by that statement; when you begin the essay by betraying your sympathies to them, it immediately dings your credibility with the readers you're presumably trying to reach. If you can't bring yourself to condemn the PSC, or to acknowledge any non-slimy reasons people would take issue with their statement, then you probably aren't well-situated to actually communicate with the audience you're aiming at.
I think some pro-Palestinian activism at Harvard/in general has been antisemitic (whether in effect or in intention, cc Matt's post on this earlier). But much of it has not. I am not trying to justify leftist antisemitism w/ rightist antisemitism, but rather call out the situation I see present from my perspective as a Jewish undergrad. Reasonable ppl can disagree as to where to draw the line on this, but I'm glad we agree that we should definitely condemn antisemitism both on the left and the right, wherever it appears. Also, see my previous pieces for forward which criticize the left wing & PSC response on this https://forward.com/authors/maya-bodnick/
You’d have done yourself a huge favor if your wrote this in the piece. Even more so if you acknowledged the huge backlash musk faced multiple businesses pulling their ads from Twitter!
You should probably also familiarize yourself with the studies showing Black and Hispanic Americans on average hold views on Jews similar to alt right whites. Unless you can show “poc” antisemites are called out disproportionately to their actual (disproportionate) contribution to the acts themselves your critique fails. One should acknowledge those groups are more prone to Jew hate rather than try to silence criticism of antisemitsm when it comes from certain groups.
For what it’s worth, nothing in this comment requires a patronising tone in the first place. Other commenters state their disagreements without the condescension. Why not just begin with the final part of the first sentence?
Fair enough; after I wrote the bulk of the comment I felt like it was condescending, and wanted to acknowledge that I at least recognized it (I added the first sentence after writing the rest of the comment).
But I probably made it worse rather than better, and you're right that the comment probably would have been kinder without it. I simultaneously had both good intentions and a desire to signal annoyance, and I let the latter win out.
(But I don't feel bad enough to make an edit, because that would erase the likes, and then it's less likely she and others will see this feedback. I am a flawed human.)
You're good, I appreciated reading your feedback on my post & didn't find it to be too snarky or condescending (maybe now that you edited). Thanks for your thoughts & I'm always interested in hearing other perspectives
FWIW, I don't think editing removes likes, but I may be wrong. I'll like the comment I'm responding to if you want to edit it and see if the like still stands.
Would you seriously find it a good post by Matt? It excuses anti-Semitism from the left; it engages in pointless hypocrisy arguments (of the kind Matt explicitly hates); it makes futile appeals to authority (who is Kara Swisher to tell me what the 1% do and don't stand for?), and most egregious of all it totally disregards the many millions of dollars in advertising that have been pulled from Twitter in direct response to Musk's tweet (which kind of contradicts the idea that elites don't care about Musk's antisemitism, something I think Matt would have picked up on).
I'll chime in and add that I didn't realize the article wasn't written by Matt at the start. I was really surprised to see such sloppy thinking. I only realized it had a different author once I got to the comments.
No. Maya did. And I for one thought Matt’s complementary piece sane washing antisemitism was almost as bad. Young women can also write very bad pieces and deserve condemnation for it just lie anyone else. Maybe if she got more honest criticism eg from her boss she wouldn’t have tainted her public record like this. It’s not doing her any favors to judge her by a lower standard based on sex. Have we learned nothing ?
"I thought this was a good insightful piece when I thought it was written by Matt."
Then you didn't read it very carefully. None of it matches Matt's style.
Has he ever begun a paragraph with the fragment "For context:"? Has he ever begun a piece with "As a Jewish Harvard student", so foregrounding his identity? And has the thesis of his piece ever revolved so centrally around the *personal relationships* of *business* elites (as opposed to, say, business elites' contractual relationships or political elites)?
Guilty as charged. I did not notice those phrases that you point to. Maybe if I had been paying better attention I would have figured out that it was not Matt while I was reading it. But in fact, I did not. I just thought it was Matt, writing a good Matt piece.
(I mean, if he had said "As a Jewish Yale student" then all of my alarms would have gone off....)
The best anti Zionist statements always start with as an <elite university> Jewish student, let me tell you what savages Israelis are for trying to eliminated the people who massacred their civilians, and also let me tell you how the pro Hamas Left is actually not for genocide.
When I read Matt's 'stack, I hold his articles to the same standard, every day. And I thought this was one of his good articles which met the standards I expect from him.
When I later found out in the comment section that it was written by Maya, I did not change my standards retroactively.
Why did you think it was good? I'd rather talk about that than all of this yelling at each other. The main point about Elon Musk I agree with wholeheartedly.
This seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Does Elon Musk hold bigoted or conspiratorial views towards Jews? I would assume. But he’s not calling for violence. He works regularly with Jewish employees and coworkers. No Jew would feel unsafe walking into spacex. An angry mob shouting “Palestine should be Arab” or “gas the Jews” is far more threatening. Especially when they’re doing that in solidarity with people who just murdered, mutilated, and raped thousands of Jews.
“Holds bigoted and conspiratorial views towards Jews but isn’t calling for violence” is a pretty low bar. Would you be saying the same thing if this was AOC or Ilhan Omar?
Absolutely I would. I care little for what Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar or Elon Musk think of me or other Jews. Bigoted views of Jews are really widespread and I’m not gonna write people off just because they’re misguided. There are many places I enjoy visiting where I’ll hide my Magen David.
Bigotry in all forms is bad. Part of the reason I go to antisemitic places and spaces is because by revealing my Jewishness only to people I’ve established a rapport with I think I can further understanding. But I don’t think my or any major Jewish orgs goal is to purge anyone from public life for being plausibly bigoted. But if you actively cheer violence and murder I find that far more frightening than simply holding bigoted views. More than twice as a many Americans were killed on 10/7 than at tree of life and yet condemning their murder is surprisingly controversial. If Elon musk had cheered the tree of life attack and called to globalize it and championed the political goals of the murderer - that would be deeply alarming. But he didn’t. Many others reacted that way to 10/7
I’m going to repeat a comment I said earlier because it truly bears repeating here
“George Wallace didn’t explicitly call for violence. He only said ‘segregation now, segregation forever’”
Musk has gained a huge following of fanboys who for whatever reason love every word he says. You really do sure none of them aren’t inspired to act of any of Musk’s musings?
It would be really bad if someone was inspired to act by Musk. But that seems paranoid and unlikely. We just saw the deadliest massacre of American Jews in our countries history - the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Many people from positions of rare power and privilege calling to globalize the intifada. And the intifada is being globalized! From LA to Lyon to Dagestan there have been repeated violent attacks. No need to have absurd speculation about how people might interpret Musk's tweets. My concerns about violent antisemitism are about the people who are saying it!
"Many people from positions of rare power and privilege calling to globalize the intifada."
Elon Musk snapped his fingers and the AG of the second largest state in the country is doing his bidding and investigating Media Matters. Can you please point to me the protestor who has anywhere near this power in America?
I'm sorry, this argument you are making is increasingly just getting farcical.
That wasn't a massacre of Jews - was a broader terrorist attack. But you're right that this is probably an overly semantic argument. The point is more American Jews were killed in Israel last month than in every violent antisemitic attack in the US in the past decade combined. Given the scale and recency its kinda weird to be desperately searching for vaguely bigoted musk tweets to pretend they're comparable to supporting Hamas.
I pointed out to people that conditioning your sympathy for American Jews on Israel’s actions is antisemitic, and it was amazing how people couldn’t see it. It wasn’t just bog standard defensiveness. It was like trying to explain water to a fish.
I just think we have a real example of the behavior Milan described in reference to “ Would you be saying the same thing if this was AOC or Ilhan Omar?”
Yes, we are. Omar at least os also antisemitic. The problem of ignoring left antisemitism is far greater than ignoring right wing one- because nobody ignores the latter! Only by ignoring the facts- like Maya unfortunately did - can you argue that!
Jewish students who dared to not be token Jews for the pro Hamas left have been threatened, assaulted, subjected to hate speech wayyyyy more significant than microaggressions, and had their spaces vandalized. Are you going to claim that Jewish employees at Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX suffered the same? Let’s be serious about the degree to which the pro Hamas left takes its antisemitic vitriol. There’s no comparison.
You know this post noted the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter was apparently inspired by these very same conspiracy theories right?
“George Wallace only said ‘segregation now, segregation forever. He didn’t explicitly call for black people to be lynched. Therefore, it isn’t racist and you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill”.
The number of commentators on here trying to explain that Musk's promotion of pretty violent anti-Semitism as not big deal and not nearly as consequential as college kids protests is absolutely wild.
I'm not even here to defend the worst of these protests. I think a lot of them are in the category are in the "don't agree with it, but ultimately students and anyone else should be allowed to express their opinion". Some really do have some pretty horrible rhetoric expressed which I'm not going to defend. But how in the world can you say with a straight face this is more dangerous than anything Musk is doing.
Because this is not hypothetical. Again, I'll repeat something I've said in other comments, he just got Ken Paxton to open an investigation into Media Matters. Not Israel related, but he's on the record of using his personal access to Starlink to help stymie Ukrainian military operations. Ukraine is a US ally we are militarily supporting with billions of dollars and he's basically admitting to helping the enemy.
Like all these commentators are saying the equivalent of "college kids don't have power now, but in 20 years they could and therefore is more dangerous". Like Elon has immense power right now! And and he's clearly using it! There is no hypothetical here. It's right there in the open.
You are aware that your campus left friends are supporting and celebrating a massacre of 1200 Israeli civilians, most of them Jews, yes? They’re not chanting “by any means” and “River to the Sea” in an abstract way. Or is that the progressive default to imagine Hamas out of existence so hard that all context is lost?
This same logic would invalidate the source inspiration of any terrorism. The Quran and Bible (and probably most Holy Books) have inspired millions of deaths. Hitler killed millions after writing Mein Kampf, and Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot killed millions (each) after reading the Communist Manifesto.
I don't know where you draw the line, exactly, but millions of other people heard Tucker Carlson talk about Great Replacement without being inspired to violence, just as millions have heard All Cops Are Bastards but only half a dozen or so tried or succeeded in murdering cops.
"very same conspiracy theories". It's also hard to say what "same conspiracy" means. I have a feeling if you peaked your head into the rabbit hole that the Tree of Life Shooter was in it wouldn't bear all that much resemblance to what someone like Tucker was saying on Fox and would be a much darker place, just like if you peaked your head into the social media of the most anti-cop groups in the US you would see some crazy s%#t
You’re right. It’s not like the leader of the GOP and likely nominee for President has openly embraced white nationalists like Nick Fuentes or anything.
Good to know for the future when I see your name that you’re an apologist for right wing antisemitism.
Trump is a bad person with bad friends but I don't see what any of that has to do with analogizing Elon to George Wallace. Hopefully someone can come rescue you, though.
The issue is the number of people who otherwise admire Elon, and once he starts promoting these theories, assume that they have some sort of credibility, and other things like "the jewish question" have some validity.
If you really don't want mobs of people with torches shouting "Jews will not replace us," it's probably best to address the folks spreading the theory that jews are trying to replace us.
Nov 21, 2023·edited Nov 21, 2023Liked by Maya Bodnick
Maya, I feel like this piece is weakened by its focus on "Elon's groupies". As someone who is not likely to ever meet Bill Ackman, I don't really care about what Elon's groupies do or do not do. (I also don't believe in second-order shaming: if I'm not going to break off friends with you even if you're friends with Hitler; I will, however, try to convince you to stop hanging out with him.)
But the extent to which Elon is anti-semitic is easy to forget. It's useful to remind me (and I suspect other Slow Boring readers) that he is anti-semitic, because I might otherwise admire a person skilled at building technological companies.
That is to say: I wish you had focused more on arguing that Elon was anti-semitic, and less on arguing about the reception of his anti-semitism amongst other people I am extremely unlikely to interact with.
i feel like i proved he's antisemitic? lmk if i missed anything ** "For context: The “great replacement” that Elon agreed with is a well-known far-right conspiracy theory that claims: (1) brown and Black immigrants are being brought illegally into Western countries to “replace” white voters to achieve leftist political goals, (2) these groups are directing governments to pursue policies that undermine the control of white people over countries, and (3) Jewish elites are the puppet masters driving this. The GRT is pretty well-known; Tucker Carlson promotes it regularly and in 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter cited it in his manifesto.
This isn’t the first time Musk has promoted antisemites.
After buying Twitter, he reinstated prominent right-wing conspiracy theorists (many of whom are also white supremacists), including Nick Fuentes, Ye, Patrick Howley, Pepe Escobar, Santino Rice, Clif High, Scott Ritter, and Sam Hyde. After the Anti-Defamation League published a report that antisemitic hate speech had surged on Twitter after Musk’s takeover, Elon threatened to sue the ADL and accused it of being the “biggest generators” of antisemitism on Twitter. He also liked a tweet promoting the #BantheADL campaign. "
Oh, absolutely. That was my takeaway from the piece. I just feel like that important point was diluted with a lot of material that isn't terribly important.
EDIT: On second thought, I think another interesting piece might have been about when (and where) you feel boycotts are justified. If you think that there should be a distinction between in-college and out-of-college speech, then the question of "Bill Ackman refuses to hire Harvard students who protest Israel, but won't condemn his business colleague; is that a good policy" is much more interesting. But you didn't really do a good job setting the scene w.r.t. Ackman's policy on hiring college students (I'm just guessing that that is in fact his policy), and you never develop a positive theory of boycotts.
By this logic shouldn't we condemn all Marxists because they spread the sort of conspiracy that is known to result in violence against people who own capital? And also violence against Jews, if you read Marx and read Soviet history, there's a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment and a fair amount of murder.
If they are are blaming the Kulaks for crop failures, or repeating Soviet anti-semitism, sure. But otherwise you are painting with a much broader brush than is necessary to draw the connection between Great Replacement theories and anti-Jewish violence.
That's fair. I do think there's a strange thing that happens where eventually, every conspiracy theory ends up blaming Jewish people for everything. E.g. I first heard about "great replacement theory" from a weirdo Bircher guy in like 2011 or 2012, but in his telling the bad guys were the progressive one world government commies, not Jewish people. And now 10 years later, it seems like things have been updated and it's definitely taken on an anti-Semitic tone.
I guess if you're being extremely charitable to people you should ask "and these lizard people - are they just lizard people, or are you talking about the Jews?" before you assume they're being anti-Semitic, but that's asking a lot when your interlocutor is talking about lizard people in the first place.
Idk, I would not necessarily feel super safe working at an Elon company after he made these remarks. Not worried about violence against me, but just uncomfortable! “gas the Jews” is obviously antisemitic, but the Tree of Life shooter promoted the great replacement theory, so it's also a super violent thing to promote. let's call out antisemitism wherever it appears, on the left or the right!
How many 19-year-old young women activists at Harvard do you think are going around beating up Jews? If we start making etiquette in a multiethnic democracy contingent on how safe people feel in rooms, it'll just spiral into a lot of emotivism. People need clear rules on how to talk and behave, and Musk crossed them. That doesn't mean I can see into his soul to discern his true intentions, but he should apologize.
Yeah I was a bit flippant, and I've seen footage of some threatening protests smashing glass. Fair enough. I just think it's a bit weird to conflate the perceived safety of SpaceX headquarters with how the executive should talk about ethnic groups. Musk should take his own advice on Asian and white-bashing by the non-profits he's mad at; it's bad to bash ethnic groups, including Jews!
He does, but the gap is not incomprehensible. The protesters on campuses often overlap with the protestors marching in many cities and towns throughout the US. They impact other non-protesters in too many ways, yet to be measured. Also, these pinheads will later land in positions of power, unless we develop an accurate/reliable ethics test.
Back in the early 2000s, lots of French Jews supported Jean-Marie Le Pen even though he was extremely anti-Semitic, because they liked that he was even more Islamophobic.
Just because Musk prefers Israel to Hamas doesn’t preclude him from fanning the flames of anti-Semitism.
The claim about Le Pen is obviously falsifiable: contemporary comment or survey data or current recollections could provide data to show it was false (or, for that matter, true).
"Just because Musk prefers Israel to Hamas doesn’t preclude him from fanning the flames of anti-Semitism" is not a claim about empirical fact--falsifiability is not relevant--it is a claim about necessary exclusion. Unless there is a valid argument that it is logically impossible for an active antisemite to prefer that Israel prevail over Hamas, Andrew's proposition holds. Since it is clear that people can be both antisemitic and Islamophobic, and nothing requires that Islamophobia cannot be the stronger prejudice, there is nothing excluding the validity of Andrew's statement.
What is in fact unfalsifiable is your own not-entirely-coherent claim that for Andrew, "Anything you don't agree with is due to hatred." There is no way for him to demonstrate that your claim is false, regardless of how that ambiguous statement is construed.
They're not chanting "gas the jews" but they are chanting "globalize the intifada"
I realize there's rhetorical ambiguity there. But that's kinda the point - they know it can and will be heard as an incitement to violence, choose to say it anyways, then deny that that's what they mean.
Fwiw, I don't think any of this really constitutes any reason to feel physically scared. But these fights over campus speech and "safety" have never been about physical safety.
There's probably a paper thin percent of folks who could even tell you what an intifada is. Much less so to the ones who think rich elites are trying to replace whites by importing immigrants.
Even if I buy your read here, I think the implication is "carry out attacks on civilians who openly support Israel", which to me doesn't sound much better than "attack Jewish civilians"
Not defending said chant, but based on my conversations with several people who have protested in support of Palestinians now and in the past, when they refer to intifada, they are thinking of an idealized version of the First Intifada, basically peaceful protests with, at most, stone-throwing at the IDF.
We keep hearing that "From The River To The Sea" doesn't mean the genocide of Jews and that "Defund The Police" doesn't really mean defund the Police. Now we're told that "Intifada" doesn't mean a violent uprising, but peaceful protests, yet the Israeli's are committing "genocide." Left wing activists need: 1. Better marketing and 2. To stop playing games with words.
Helpful to know that's how they're thinking of it. In a similar vein, a friend of mine said she didn't know what "intifada" meant, nor had she heard of either of the Intifadas in Israel. So I think it's true that plenty of people at these protests have good or at least not bad intentions.
But I think there are others and especially leaders who, regardless of what *they* mean by the statements, know how they will be heard, and choose to say them anyways. If you know that someone will hear something as a threat and choose to say it anyways, I think you're at least being a jerk, even if you're not actually guilty of making the threat itself. That's what I meant by this not really being about physical safety. Once called out on how these statements sound, leaders could acknowledge the harm and say "we won't weaponize language associated with past violence, because that distracts from our true cause." Instead, they tend to gaslight and say that no reasonable person would hear them the other way.
BS. Utter and total BS. They are calling for targeting civilians and they know it. Some of them are even saying the quiet part outloud, to much cheers from the crowd. Come on, maan, you know better.
I promise I'm trying to engage in good faith. I'll try to retrace my thinking more explicitly:
Chants to "globalize the intifada" ring to my ears as "perpetrate the tactics of the second intifada globally"
(But you could make the point that "intifada" literally translated means revolution, and doesn't implicate anything about the second intifada. To which I say what I said in my original comment: this to me seems like intentional motte-and-baileying. But that is a different kind of wrong than actual incitement to violence.) That said, this line is a different one than the one you pursued - I took you as taking for granted that "globalize the intifada" expressed support for the intifadas in Israel, by making an analogy to expressing support for Uighur terrorism.
From there, you made the claim that support for the intifada in Israel didn't imply support for attacks on Jews. My inference was that it implied support for attacks on Israeli civilians, in virtue of their complicity/support for the Israeli regime (occupation, whatever).
The second inference, then, was that calls to "globalize" it meant support for terrorism globally against those who are complicit in/support the Israeli regime.
Hopefully this clears up how I arrived at the conclusion I did, and gives you space to point out where you think I've gone awry.
The First Intifada was mostly protest and rioting. But the Second Intifada was terror attacks, suicide bombings, and bus explosions, where over 1000 people were killed.
And if people are calling for another Intifada, of course Jews around the world are going to be terrified.
You can see how protesters in the campus pro-Palestinian protests have not had any issues distinguishing between Jewish students and "Israelis" (not that it's okay to threaten Israelis with terror either!)
"The intifadas were uprisings against the country of Israel and shouldn’t be conflated with Jewish people."
The main force behind the Second Intifada, Hamas, makes it pretty clear in public documents and statements about WHY it opposes the country of Israel (hint: contains too many Jews).
yeah & at harvard a lot of people were falsely doxxed. biz leaders will go overboard on calling students antisemitic, but elon's explicit promotion of antisemitism gets a pass -- even though he's more powerful than all the pro palestine students in the US combined
But this is why your omission of the ad pulls is egregious. Business leaders don’t have the power to not hire Elon Musk like they have to not hire people who signed bad letters; Musk already has a job. The way they can put economic hurt on him is by pulling advertising from Twitter, which they’re doing.
Honestly, the engagement I’ve gotten here after what I said this morning has been deeply saddening.
I wasn’t trying to shame or discredit Maya. But I believe the reasoning she displayed in today’s piece to be flawed in a way which is very common in journalism and commentary in our current zeitgeist. Likewise, I think some of the language she (likely unthinkingly) used borders on disingenuous and shouldn’t be let off easily.
I sought to say as much without filling a ream of paper, in a way which was less impolite than the language I have used to criticize Matt or other commenters for similar failures of logic or knowledge, because she’s an intern and here to learn.
What I thought was restraint seems to have been rewarded with a long series of people who question my motives and moral fiber instead of taking issue with my point.
To Maya’s credit she hasn’t joined in that.
But I’m unsure how the hell I was supposed to make the point that wouldn’t have opened me up to the same bad-faith attempt to delegitimize what I said instead of arguing with it. And that’s just depressing.
I'm out, folks. It's been interesting, informative, and I thank everyone for generally tolerating my abrasiveness. But it's time to move on.
You know, there are certain days where you guys are really lacking in the empathy department. Consider why a Jewish woman might have strong feelings about antisemitism?
Maya is obviously more plugged into elite, woke culture than I am, but her work is very earnest and she tries hard to get the facts right and generally succeeds. She is a fine window into progressive ivy league culture. A little more empathy from commenters would be nice.
This comment section, and perhaps most of Matt's subscribers followed him here from his time at Vox. Whether true or not, the prevailing wisdom is that Matt was essentially forced out of Vox by some of the mega-woke, illiberal voices who went a little crazy when Matt signed an anodyne letter supporting free speech.
All to say, many here are anti-identity politics despite being supporters of the Democratic Party. Your "overly emotional" writings have been (in my memory) focused on how affirmative action has hurt Asian Americans. Perhaps you were doing so as a bank-shot to support identity politics, just for your group. But many folks probably just saw it as anti-affirmative action, which doesn't engender as much pushback.
Maya's post today, though, while hitting on a VERY (the most?) hot topic that has already proven to be unusually adept at attracting commenters, uses language that sure feels very identity-politics friendly. So, she will get more shit that you did.
That is what I think the difference is. If you think differently, say so rather than just imply bigotry onto the commenters.
Frankly, I'm kind of disappointed in Matt. He should have worked with Maya more to shape this piece. I'd like to hope he treats publishing his interns' pieces as a Big Deal for them and works hard to help them shine.
Yes, I think Matt should either shepherd his interns through the composition process, or get guest writers who can pull their own weight more reliably.
>uses language that sure feels very identity-politics friendly.<
Such as?
(Not singling you out, John. But there seem to be a lot of criticisms of Maya's use of language, but no actual quotes of the offending terminology, and where it supposedly goes wrong.)
The headline says "business leaders are ignoring". The text, though, starts with "As a Jewish Harvare student", then proceeds to use "______ of color" used six separate times -- women, young people, students. The "of color" part seems particularly important to her article. Also highlighting the students that were part of the truck-shaming were "Black, South Asian or Arab", as if that were the underlying reason for the criticisms.
I think language like "power is comfortable with power," "elites," and the general critique of "business leaders" is pretty left-wing rhetoric, but if she's got the goods that's fair enough. The problem is this critique flies in the face of front-page stories about businesses pulling their ads from Twitter in direct response to Musk's tweet.
There were definitely some feelings in your piece about Indian Americans in politics, and doing so gave it an intensity and interest Matt’s writing often lacks. On the other hand, you waited until your valedictory to be that free with your feelings.
As long as she gets the facts straight, Maya’s feelings should be welcome. There are many kinds of good writing.
I don't think she does have her facts straight. She didn't say a word about the many companies, including tech companies, pulling their ads from Twitter over Musk's comments.
Did we read the same comments below your "VIvek and me" post? People were swarming over it accusing you of being too emotional. A lot of them got banned! I disagreed with the critique in that case but you're throwing yourself on the wrong grenade here.
No. For ignoring facts in an outrageous manner. Giving her slack for ignoring very well known facts that turn her argument over its head is not a reasonable request.
Can’t we all just get along? 70% of the regular commenters here are really smart. That is rare and beautiful.
I do not share Maya’s preoccupation with antisemitism, but I appreciated the chance to see what a smart, young, Jewish woman who shares my repugnance towards Likud thought about this trope.
SB Comments should be a place where smart people can disagree without being disagreeable. I hope I have honored that ideal and invite my more churlish colleagues to join me.
Thanks David -- as someone who has been looking at comments since Milan left (which I'll be done with now that Ben is starting), I always appreciate civility. although you may want to think about why I care about antisemitism as a jewish woman during a time when it is spiking...
I didn't realize this wasn't a MY piece until after I read it, at which point I scrolled back up to see who the author was because it was clear it wasn't one of his pieces. The post lacked persuasive argumentation or data in support of its claim, failed to account for any counterarguments or address them (not mentioning any of the numerous businesses that have stopped advertising on X explicitly due to Musk's tweet seems particuarly egregious), and came across more as a few anecdotes about how "this guy criticized students but not Musk" and how MTG is still in politics so therefore there's a huge double standard (again, no discussion here of context- she's in an incredibly safe seat, faced SIGNIFICANT criticism from across the political spectrum for her prior statements, and has issued apologies between those statements and when she was given more power within the caucus, etc. etc. etc.).
To imply that people criticizing this article for failing to be as rigorous as this audience expects SB to be are doing so because of sexism is just incredibly lazy.
She is getting the facts very very wrong despite them being well known. Her whole article is based on ignoring facts. Would you be so forgiving of such abysmal failure at basic journalism if she were *not* a young woman?
Yes lol I haven't totally understood the comments here that say we're focusing TOO MUCH on antisemitism. 1) I have a right to care about 2) it's super prevalent -- jews are the most targeted amongst religiously motivated hate crimes in the US and 3) it's been increasing, on both the right and the left. We should call out both! Folks in the comments seem to think I don't think the left has said antisemitic things, but that's not what I'm saying. The focus on the article is elite silence on right wing antisemitism, but that is not to overlook left wing antisemitism, see my 2 pieces for forward https://forward.com/authors/maya-bodnick/
"Yes lol I haven't totally understood the comments here that say we're focusing TOO MUCH on antisemitism"
I've written two comments here critical of your work, so I feel obliged to say: those comments are insane, and I want to thank you for attempting to analyze antisemitism here in the US. (Of course, I'm Jewish too, so maybe my PoV is just equally skewed, but) it seems a very important thing to talk about, particularly if this is one of those causally thin moments that determines whether antisemitism becomes "acceptable" in American society.
I thought her piece was trying to inform or persuade, in which case the criticism is fine. If it was meant to be more "this is how I feel", then I agree with you.
I think I agree... I would actually really like to read a straightforward, heartfelt "this is how I feel" piece from Maya on this topic. To take it to the next level, she could follow in Matt's footsteps where he explores his feelings but also tries to take a step back and challenge them.
She definitely didn't frame it as the latter - and that would be a weird model for a SB column. I think it's on her as a writer to make her goals clear.
Also, you didn't say this here, but I think there's been a lot of Uncle Tom-ing dynamics around Jews and antisemitism lately. Progressives recognize that Clarence Thomas saying something isn't racist doesn't mean it's not racist. Ditto here for antisemitism. Of course, Bill Ackman saying something is antisemitic likewise doesn't mean it is. But I find the "I'm Jewish and I don't find this antisemitic" line to be a bad response when you could debate the issue on the merits instead. Maya's opening line gave me that vibe and immediately put me on the defensive.
Matt’s style tends to be largely unemotional. It is not unreasonable for people who subscribe to a substack in that style to prefer it and not like a style that is more emotional. I don’t think empathy to the author should prevent commenters from commenting that they don’t like the style.
I’m sure no one is complaining about how she feels. It’s a complaint about the writing. I found the piece very weak, poorly reasoned and starting from false premises. Should I not share that opinion because of the author’s Jewish identity?
Did he doubt her reasons for caring here? I can't see the original comment, but the version I can see seems perfectly cordial (if a little too non-specific to be actively helpful)
She is doing enormous damage to her community and seems to be consistently more concerned with her gentile classmates making Harvard hostile to Jews than towards the Jewish community, 99% of whom don't have the privileges in life enjoyed by her antisemitic gentile classmates. There may be psychological excuses for this behavior but it’s still shameful and needs to be called out.
Consider why Jews may have strong feelings about apologia for leftist antisemitism? Maybe consider why an Israeli reader of yours may have very little patience for a whataboutist statement about gross genocide supporting elite racists? There was a way to right about Elon promoting sketchy antisemitism that wasn’t wrapped in a defense of campus Leftists who should pay the price for their hate speech.
So I disagree, I was reading an essay by a Harvard man in The Atlantic published in 1923 on American Jews and I think Maya was roughly about as unsentimental on the situation as he was. People in the comments are getting very annoyed a Harvard woman doesn't think a little Jew-baiting is a big deal unless it's related to her college's donors, but historically Harvard has always cared more about its future national standing than the transcendent questions of justice. That is a rational if selfish motive and I'm not going to cast evil intentions upon her or anyone else at Harvard.
Instead, I ask they find their own money. Harvard and the 100-200 colleges deeply inspired by it can do this with less public subsidy in the form of loans and uncapped 529 plans for undergrad and especially masters programs. They can find the money elsewhere for blaming white settlers for all problems in the world, as they're allowed to do that in a small-l liberal society. People are allowed to have paranoid fears of race domination which are Totally Different and Nothing Like my anti-woke obsessions! I only ask that they stop using my taxes for it.
Elon Musk should apologize for Jew-baiting because he's better than this. I don't think Harvard is much better than this. Donors like Bill Ackman need to quit tattling to HR for a third DEI department on Anti-Semitism and try standing tall like a man. Don't centrist liberal donors who like Musk want to have an actual legacy, like Leland Stanford or Andrew Carnegie? Try making a new institution for training white collar workforces! It's so pathetic to grovel like a stuffy seminary school made by WASPS 400 years ago is the Greatest Thing Since Jesus Christ. Move on from Harvard already! Try doing something new for once!
If Maya's article can help even one more person come to that conclusion, I think that's good and I applaud her for speaking her mind. Everyone is acting like a fussy coward and it's making our country into more like a lame middle-income country full of slackers who dislike successful middle man minorities. I'm tired of it, I don't want America to be more like the rest of the world. I want it and its future leaders to act more American. That starts with spending less money on the German Disease (the modern research university.) Then maybe if we do that, some other German diseases will recede as well.
The thing is, a collection of rooms with instructors and books hasn't changed a whole lot in cost and isn't that expensive! It's everything around it; we've overcapitalized this type of institution with explicit government policy incentives. Frustrated philanthropists should keep an eye out for the coming fire sale of dying small remote private school campuses.
I wish you'd kept the original post as an appendix to this piece, so that we could still read for ourselves the flaws you think are "very common in journalism and commentary in our current zeitgeist", even if you no longer endorse the phrasing.
I hope this isn't out for good. We've disagreed on substance and style before, but I appreciate you for keeping it real and making me consider things a bit more.
I'll be around for a while, can't cancel an annual subscription for a refund midstream, as is suggested by the term, lol.
But at the moment I have some challenges going on in the real world, and as such am reevaluating how much time I devote to consuming and bickering over the implications of policy news anyway. If one were stalking me since last month they'd have seen my paid subscriptions on Substack drop from 4 to 1 and unpaid ones get cut back by three-quarters.
I'm not sure I'll re-up come renewal, we'll cross that bridge when I'm feeling a little bit less irritated, but I do need to spend less time arguing with you folks.
My "Who? Where?" policy on Israel-Palestine was clearly a better choice than whatever the hell I decided to do this morning.
I hope you get your real world orders in a good and happy place, certainly prioritize that. And even if you cut back on activity here, it's still activity.
Nothing too terrible, just a few things requiring some attention.
I plan to try to stay out of the topic du jour discussions unless they’re something I have deep knowledge about. Maybe pop in in the evenings to shoot the shit on lighter topics.
Revisit this in a couple months when the subscription comes due and decide then.
Sounds good. I know there are certain times and topics when I just want to peace out, and I hope you find the right balance and still end up staying in some capacity.
Just wanted to say that I enjoy your presence in the comments section. I frequently wonder if I spend too much time in this comment section, and in the scheme of things, I don't post that much. Best of luck with your real-world challenges.
Don’t leave! You make great points and might make them even better if you moderated your tone.
The moderation here is simply the best. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but you have earned a longish leash by being a established commenter and have been allowed a nice little platform. You have been challenged and chided and respected all at once! Compare that to Hanania banning me for saying he doesn’t look like an ubermensh.
We are actually paying for it though?? Like when you go to a movie and you don't like it do you bite your tongue to avoid criticizing something a lot of people worked really hard on?
Seems like a silly analogy. The people who worked hard on the movie won't be there to hear my criticisms in the car on the way home. A more analogous situation would be me patronisingly telling a young director how she should make films in front of an audience of hundreds of film fans, and yeah, I think would generally refrain from doing that.
I assume Maya was free to keep comments closed if she didn't want discussion of her article; she's also free not to read them if she doesn't want to hear it. And if anyone is just name-calling that's bad and they shouldn't do it (I got blocked by Freddie DeBoer when I called him out for doing just that that with Maya specifically). But if discussion of the article's merits is off-limits, it shouldn't be published, at least not with comments, at least not for money.
One possible difference is that you probably don't couch those criticisms in an entirely patronising comment about his writing style as if you were his English tutor.
This is ... extrapolating a lot from a small sample size.
My first thought was that because she was still in college that's why there was more pushback, and that the same would apply to Milan and has nothing to do with gender.
Are you two grown men really so sensitive that you cannot handle disagreement with your criticisms without complaining about "tone policing" and people "mistak[ing] kindness for weakness"? This is an Internet comment section, it really is not that deep.
Ben Dreyfus had an insightful comment from a bystander perspective that he already knows there’s tons of anti-semites on the right, so it’s existence feels status quo. Whereas he was apparently unaware of the anti-semitism on the left, and so it’s causing him a lot more anxiety and pain
But Elon Musk plays a very particular role in the American information ecosystem as well as crucial roles in transportation, telecommunications, etc so his views really do warrant a lot of attention I think.
Ben nailed it. The guy wearing a Storm Trooper uniform and openly parading his anti-semitism doesn't worry me as much as the leftists who steep their anti-semitism in the cloak of "human rights" - I know the Storm Trooper guy's true intentions.
However, as a generally left wing Jew it's been pretty shocking to see people who claim to care about human rights completely abandon those principles when it comes to Jews, which just goes to show how much more insidious left wing anti-semitism is than from what we see on the right.
IMO this is the bravest article Slow Boring has ever published. We are 1 day out from the richest man on earth filing suit against one of his critics, backed by multiple senior Republican operatives/officials. Huge kudos to Matt for publishing it and for Maya to writing it. I shudder to think what Matt and especially Maya's engagement on Twitter looks like right now.
It is important whether the argument is it's correct. I'm astounded that this seems to be disputed. The White House said "We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms" about Musk's tweet, and I've seen numerous screenshots of random ultra-right websites high fiving about Musk, both in this case and in others.
The comments sections is full of focus on campus politics, as if two wrongs make a right, and as if students, even at Harvard, are comparable to the richest man on earth, who controls of one of the world's premier social media platforms as well as a key military communication network. Or arguments how the article could've been better crafted which, even if true, also in no way excuses Musk's conduct.
I strongly agree with the headline and the general thesis of what Maya wrote, and have not ever condoned Musk's behaviors -- whether his blatant disregard for securities laws, his willing embrace of anti-semites, his baseless charges of "pedophile" against the British caver or his general hucksterism around things like The Boring Company. His obvious genius in bringing Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink to fruition can be celebrated while still condemning all the rest. He is, in so many ways, the reincarnation of Henry Ford. I would like to see more people criticize him.
I also wish Maya would have written a better article making the case for such criticism.
Glad to hear it! I think the main disadvantage of being in a “place of privilege” is the temptation to unproductively wallow in guilt but not realize one is more likely to be coddled, flattered etc than hear harsh truths. Basically, kudos devoid of substance may feel nice but are a waste of your time.
Instead I would shut out both the guilt and the pandering and focus more on seeking out an intellectual “fight club” where you’re allowed to actually receive serious pushback to learn from rather than cruise on mediocrity facilitated connections and wealth.
Whatever your background and internal thoughts, one can and should only judge you by your public writing. Based on that I haven’t seen enough evidence that you’re aware of thought outside the most hard core “progressive” bubble. If you are - you’d do well to show it and engage with it in your writing, it would make your argument much more convincing. If you are not- you should do so. Nobody is infallible and we can’t have rational justification to conclude we’re right if we don’t actively seek out all views expressed by their proponents.
You’d do well to read Jeff G’s comment from 40 min ago. It doesn’t add much in terms of pointing your substantive failures (other pointed out you ignored the ad pull from Twitter, sane washed campus antisemitism etc). However I think it might help clarify why your writing here just puts you in a very bad light in many people’s eyes. It’s not just the problems on substance. You have serious blindspots in tone as well as substance you should address if you want to be taken seriously beyond the “woke” crowd (and eg convince those not already of your view).
I read Maya's piece as critiquing prominent economic elites for their unwillingness to call out influential antisemitic voices on the right, in contrast to their concerted critique of the antisemitic (and in some cases merely anti-Zionist) left. I think this is a valid observation that's not undermined by several days' worth of corporate ad pulls affecting one (of the many) of those right wing antisemitic voices.
It's not undermined *at all*? Like it's not even relevant? Sure, Musk is "one of the many" but it's the one that two-thirds of the piece is about and the only one mentioned by the piece that's actually recent.
There is a version of this article that goes “business leaders have shown they know denouncing antisemitism is bad, it is important that they do so for right wing figures like Elon musk as well” - the title of they piece seems to suggest that this is what the article would be about.
But the last paragraph summarizes what the main focus of the article is: frustration with “punching down” at “students of color”. The comments are replying to the focus of the article.
While there is truth to the commentary about Ackman's (and other business leaders') silence or defense of Musk and others, I would highlight that you yourself are doing something very similar by actively downplaying the criticism and actions of your own Harvard peers in this framing. "Criticisms of Israel" and "debatable" antisemitism is how you describe those Harvard students who actively seek the destruction of the Jewish state, who call for violence against Jews, and who celebrated the murder of innocent civilians on 10/7.
I'm gonna make a provocative case inspired by a Ross Douthat column; similar to anti-immigration politics in the US, anti-Israel politics attracts some people with ethnic/racial prejudices, some people upset with what they see as an unjust status quo, and a lot of people who don't really know. Unlike anti-immigration politics, anti-Israel politics is much less popular, and marginal movements attract marginal people. The important question is the endgame. If anti-immigration protestors say their vision of America is a 90% supermajority of non-Hispanic whites, that's unreasonable and bad. Likewise, if anti-Israel protestors say their vision of Israel-Palestine means the removal of most Jews in the area, that's unreasonable and bad. But this is in fact not how all the groups concerned with Arabs in Palestine see the situation, which you can ask them about.
There are lots of people who want different or incoherent endgames and who sincerely believe the Israeli rightist government is mistreating the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza with American funding. They could envision that Congress cutting that funding will lead to a better outcome in the region. Likewise, one could envision Congress ending the current wave of immigration where most of the people here simply intermarry over time like they did after 1924 rather than one gigantic national pogrom going after the Slavs, Italians, and Jews. Democracy can aggregate and make peaceful sense of many conflicting, incoherent, or even bad ideas. I personally think the latter is more likely than the former, like a lot of center-right voters in the US. But people disagree.
#2 and #3 seem to have little distinction between them wrt this topic. I doubt the motivations of the members of 2 and 3 are so cleanly separated by race
Sometimes non-white PMCs get a really strong hate boner towards whites if they perceive themselves as sexually undesired and attribute it to their race instead of individual personal characteristics. It's basically just a weird special case of high school mentality in adults.
I think it’s probably true that antisemitism is used as a cudgel against those criticising Israel. But I don’t think these elites are only targeting the left and ignoring the right because they enjoy punching down. It seems more likely it’s the opposite, right wing cranks don’t pose any real threat to Israel or co to yes American support for Israel (the Republican Party is fully committed to defending Israel). By contrast the left, and Ivy League activists hold tons of power (culturally, through the NGOs they staff, as political staffers in the Democrat party etc). It is very easy to see how such groups can whip up support for Palestine one a way that harms Israel’s interests, both with the public and in Congress (the squad and allies).
>It seems more likely it’s the opposite, right wing cranks don’t pose any real threat to Israel or co to yes American support for Israel<
I think you're butteressing one of Maya's points: powerful people hypocritically give a pass to *right wing* antisemitism because it doesn't pose an immediate* political risk to their preferred policy outcomes. In short, nobody ever claimed hypocrisy isn't rational, or grounded in perceptions of self-interest.
(*Emphasis on "immediate." I very much doubt normalizing antisemitic rhetoric is really in the longerm policy/political interests of many of these folks. But short-termism and political expediency are rarely in short supply these days.)
I think the other fact that I think Maya correctly alludes to but maybe bears elaborating; 0.1%s are themselves a class of people who are going to defend their own.
Bill Ackman is basically in his own defending a "good ole boy" I know this phrase is really more about a very particular type of person from the South, but I think it's the same principle. They probably have met each other a number of times at say Aspen, or Jackson Hole or a variety of other venues the mega wealthy see each other. I suspect this is a huge part of Ackman's pretty asinine defense of Musk.
The other factor too is how Ackman personally feels more threatened by. A 0.1% probably feels like he's way less personally threatened by right wing bigots. Left wing Harvard students can become left wing lawyers with clout who may actually have ability to go after his business one day.
I think the other thing to consider is that Bill Ackman is just probably a POS and we should read his public pronouncements accordingly.
The white christian nationalists sitting in government and the zionist armageddonist christian voting block definitely form a greater threat to peace in the middle east, and arab and jewish life alike. Especially compared to the left wing college students and social science teachers quoting Hannah Arendt. Far more influence than actual American jews, let alone zionist jews.
My mom worked for an evangelical magazine and wrote Christian children's books, and watched the 700 Club every day, and no one in our family has heard of Christian Zionism until I saw a Vice documentary about it. As Just Some Guy said, the support for Israel has much more to do with them being an ally of America in a region full of countries that have traditionally been enemies of/harbored enemies of America.
A simpler way to put it is that Evangelicals are sort of Christian Salafis, in that they wish to go back to the good old days of piety, and if you go back far enough Christianity becomes a messianic Jewish sect.
I wonder if this is regional? Maybe there are some states packed with Christian Zionists and they just don't communicate with the larger Evangelical world?
It's not. Davie here is just lying, which he does frequently if he thinks it'll make you mad. I also grew up evangelical, and my mom is someone who reads shit like "The Bible Code" and even *she* doesn't know about Christian Zionism.
Maybe it's much more popular in the South? I grew up in NYC/CT (and actually went to the same elementary school as Yglesias, an Episcopal school with a lot of Jewish kids). Perhaps our coastal elite-ism insulated us from some of this stuff.
Hilarious. This article lost me at “elite backlash against pro-Palestinian activism on campus, including aggressive efforts to wreck the careers of young people over their criticisms of Israel.” I.e. the first sentence. The use of code words like elite (hello, if you’re at Harvard YOU are the elite) shows me it’s going to be thumb on the scales all the way.
But I get the myopia: left antisemitism is less bad BY DEFINITION. We’re the left: the good guys. “We can’t do an antisemitism! Get serious!”
Why even bother? “Oh the poor things won’t take their place in the PMC.” Now pretend the students were burning crosses instead of merely calling for Palestine to be Judenrein.
And as always ideologues are tone-deaf. Maybe a little more attention to affect: the foaming rage and violence that has characterized the “Palestinian activists.” (And concomitant need for Jews to hide in libraries (Cooper Union), shelter in place (Cornell), etc.) Meanwhile millions (yes millions) of Afghans are being forcibly displaced from Pakistan. The left: crickets. Just like the crickets as Syria has killed Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands. Spare me the hypocrisy.
I mean I understand it’s gotta be rough when your whole life you thought of yourself as on the side of the angels, and it turns out your team is deeply uninterested in 2000 years of persecution. I guess that’s why Matty trotted out this woman. But more “it’s not anti-antisemitism, it’s covert racism”? Fuck off out of here with that.
Wasn't there a new round of companies pulling ad funding from Twitter? That should count as not ignoring.
Speaking of which, I do thank Elon for turning that site into such garbage (mostly by promoting awful blue checks) my usage has dropped 90%+ over the last year.
Elon's tweet reads to me more like appreciating a "Leopards Eating People's Faces Party"-ish meme (about woke jews being betrayed by wokeness) than endorsing great replacement theory.
I think its notable that the form of anti-semitism Musk seems to sign is is more malicious than the form seen on the Left.
It at least very much seems that anti-semitism on the Left comes from a "good" place. Basically, it comes from looking at at the Israel-Palestine conflict and siding with the Palestinians as the side they see as being oppressed. Opposition to Israel sometimes gets expanded to Jewish people more broadly on the assumption that they support Israel. While I don't agree with them (I tend to support Israel) it's not entirely irrational or really based on Jewishness. The Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and, while I tend to side a bit more with Israel, I don't think that siding with the Palestinians is irrational. They shouldn't allow their criticism of Israel to spill over to Jewish people broadly, but its amazingly common for people to do this (look at prejudice against Germans during WWI and WWII, Japanese during WWII, Arabs/Muslims during the war kn terrorism, Chinese as the cold war with China has started up). And, in the case of Israel, there is some truth to the idea that the average American Jewish person probably at least broadly supports Israel. This isn't to defend the Left, exactly, but to point out that anti-semitism on the Left is fairly banal and would likely be mostly or entirely resolved through a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
On the other hand, anti-semitism of the right tends to be more insidious. It isn't rooted in a legitimate position on a complicated issue, it's rooted in conspiracy theories and beliefs that Jewish people are inherently evil and plotting against non-Jews. There isnt really a way to look at it and say "i see where they are coming from, but they've made some errors or gone to far." This is the sort of anti-Semitism Musk is trading.
You touch on a point that I’ve been thinking about recently. It is common amongst elites, even heterodox types, to malign the right as bad all the way down. But the left is often given the “but they have good intentions” caveat, even when disagreeing with them.
I think that bad people with bad ideas are less dangerous than good people with bad ideas. Good people get the benefit of the doubt. That can be the difference between their bad ideas taking hold or not.
In the future, I am going to consciously give less quarter to “good people” with bad ideas.
There has been a lot of cheering of dead Russians. I personally think this sort thing is bad and feel bad for the Russians killed in Ukraine, many of whom were drafted, and their families, even if I think their deaths are necessary. But I also think that this way of thinking is so common that I'm the outlier and can see how it easily translates over to a Palestinian partisan celebrating 10/7.
I appreciate that it must be hard to write a piece and then publish it and get so many negative comments. Hang in there!
I'll try to say it as gently and politely as I can, and I'm offering this in good faith, not trying to add to the pile-on:
I think your piece would have been received better had you not evaded the difference between "pro-Palestine" and "pro-Hamas" or "pro-terrorism." You repeatedly use the word "pro-Palestine" to refer to protesters who cheered on the Hamas massacre, who repeated the phrase "from the river to the sea" (implying the destruction of Israel and the expulsion or extermination of Israel Jews), and who claimed that the Jews had it coming to them.
There are ways to be pro-Palestine and anti-Hamas. Nick Kristof, a highly respected opinion columnist for the NYT, has done so repeatedly since 10/7, and no one has cancelled him (although many commenters accused him of being a bleeding heart). The thing is, he unequivocally condemns Hamas, and his pro-Palestine stance is along the lines of "the lives of innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians are as precious as Jewish lives" and "how terrible that Gazan children have been killed by IDF" and the like.
Had Harvard students protested the loss of innocent civilian life in Gaza without supporting/glorifying Hamas's hideous actions, the reaction would have been very, very different.
None of this is to excuse Musk, whom I used to admire as a forward-thinking inventor, and who has revealed himself to be a scumbag.
I'm really sorry to hear that. That's horrible. No one should be cancelled for lamenting the loss of innocent life or for feeling sorry for civilians on the "other side."
I thought the letter was pretty bad. Like, not “should forever be expelled from polite society” bad, but certainly something that would put someone’s job at risk during such a fraught time.
Kristoff has been great. He’s never said anything close to what this letter did.
I appreciate where this article is coming from. Of course we should be concerned with double standards, and the right-wing antisemitism is utterly despicable. But may I respectfully suggest that maybe this isn't just about "punching down at pro-Palestine students of color"?
The reason for the vitriol directed at left-wing institutions is that leftists were the ones *dancing in the streets* when Jews were massacred. If we had seen celebrations in Nashville and Jacksonville instead of New York and London on October 8th, I think the Jewish community would have directed its rage at the right.
Moreover, I think this article whitewashes Hamas apologia as "pro-Palestinian" activism. I've spent some time on a left-wing campus recently. There was a demented feeling of glee in the air. "Pro-Palestinian" activists cheered on the massacre at the vigil for those killed on October 7th. As for the Harvard letter, I think any reasonable person could see why "Israel deserves to be terrorized" isn't simply pro-Palestinian sentiment.
Finally, many of us Jews (especially "elite" Jews) live and work in places that lie somewhere between AOC and Stalin on the political spectrum. I don't think it's odd that Jewish leaders have chosen to focus on left-wing antisemitism in this moment.
I go to Harvard so I've seen these protests firsthand. Some are antisemitic, some are not. Regardless, I'm glad we can agree that there's a terrible double standard here -- I think we need to call out antisemitism wherever it appears, on the right and on the left.
Maya, I think you’d agree that a movement where “only some” of the protests were antisemitic (or even excused Hamas) isn’t great. I very much doubt you’d excuse a rally where only some of the speakers applauded lynchings, or only some of them were Islamophobic.
"a terrible double standard here"
Something is a double standard when it treats two identical activities differently. But organizing a large-scale public protest and a temporary personal tweet are two very different activities.
elon has more power than every pro palestinian student on every college campus in the US combined. rhetoric matters, and this isn't the first time ** "After buying Twitter, he reinstated prominent right-wing conspiracy theorists (many of whom are also white supremacists), including Nick Fuentes, Ye, Patrick Howley, Pepe Escobar, Santino Rice, Clif High, Scott Ritter, and Sam Hyde. After the Anti-Defamation League published a report that antisemitic hate speech had surged on Twitter after Musk’s takeover, Elon threatened to sue the ADL and accused it of being the “biggest generators” of antisemitism on Twitter. He also liked a tweet promoting the #BantheADL campaign.
Musk has repeatedly tweeted offensive Holocaust-related content. In 2022, he posted a picture of a Nazi soldier and a meme that compared Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler. And last May, Musk compared Holocaust survivor and Jewish billionaire George Soros to Jewish comic book villain Magneto and said he “wants to erode the very fabric of civilization” — which many argued was antisemitic."
"elon has more power than every pro palestinian student on every college campus in the US combined."
So? That doesn't mean he exercises that full power in each and every one of his actions. He posted a Tweet.
"rhetoric matters, and this isn't the first time"
Sure. But rhetoric matters less than physical actions, and deserves proportionately smaller consequences.
I'm going to just keep repeating this. The Attorney General of Texas is now opening an investigation into Media Matters based on Musk's tweet.
There is no way in the world any Attorney General in any state in America is opening an investigation to ADL, AIPAC or any other somewhat Jewish affiliated organization because of any of these campus protests.
Leadership’s rhetoric is not just empty words tho.
When Elon speaks, thousands of his minions obsessively agree, re-spew it, and take action based on those ideas.
I for one expect the people we collectively give with such extraordinary power to act far more responsibly. His speech is far far more impactful than a bunch of college students the world has largely tuned out long ago
Do you really think that the picture of the soldier with carrier pigeons (who would only be identified as a Nazi soldier by someone who is really into WWII military uniforms, as there are no details that would suggest the soldier is a Nazi) and calling Justin Trudeau (who called the trucker protestors Nazis, and who brought an actual Nazi to speak to the Canadian parliament) a Nazi are "Holocaust-related"?
Calling people Nazis has a long history in American politics. Has every violation of Godwin's Law on the internet been "Holocaust-related"? This seems like stretch.
Also, thanks for writing this and engaging with the comments, I don't think I agree with your take but I appreciate getting your perspective!
tbh I think those posts are nazi dogwhistles in the context of everything else he's written, but even if you disagree (which is fair), the other stuff stands for itself. and happy to engage!
This seems like something that could be answered by someone asking him straightforwardly. That said, the "this is the truth" tweet replying to a transparently conspiratorial message definitely doesn't look great.
I'm hyper skeptical about ferreting out dog whistle stuff because so much of it amounts to attempted mind reading, and people who hate others because of their ethnicity, race, or whatever other characteristic will usually come out and say if if they're pushed.
(FWIW, you posted this in response to me, not Maya.)
😬 oops
And I have to imagine if there were Charlottesville-like protests of hard right idiots dancing in the streets and cheering the death of Jews, business leaders would be just as adamantly opposed.
Yes, there is such a massive gap between cheering terrorism against Jewish people and criticizing Jewish Progressives for supporting DEI. But both can be considered antisemitism so they're the same.
This idea that there were “leftists dancing j the streets” does not comport to the reality I’ve experienced.
Rather, seems to me that there has been a blanket assumption that anyone with brown skin cheering Hamas is leftists. Meanwhile, from what I can tell, there has always been Muslim fundamentalists among the American population. They are not ‘leftist’ but rather they are religious extremists, generally associated with roght wong politics. But they get lumped with the left because black lives matter and all that. But they don’t have much to do with anything else left wing in America.
+1 -- some people have been pro-Hamas, but this is the minority of pro-Palestine protesters in my experience
"some people have been pro-Hamas, but this is the minority of pro-Palestine protesters in my experience"
I'm not aware of a pro-Palestine protest on the campus at which I work (grad student) that did not repeat "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" ad nauseum.
Now, OK, maybe only a minority of them knew what that meant. But I should think the organizers who coordinated the chants did.
Now, OK, what that means isn't "pro-Hamas" per se. But it's just as bad.
Are there still people who don't know what that (or "Heritage not hate" or "All lives matter") means? I know that I disagree with Matt on this, but I'm pretty skeptical.
"Are there still people who don't know what that means?"
I'm not sure; I threw that line in to indicate that their knowledge (or lack thereof) is not necessary for my argument. But I also try not to underestimate stupidity.
I don’t get it. We can understand that not all of the anti-Israel protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” are pro-Hamas but saying Jewish academics and political funders supported an ideology that is fueling those protests is anti-Semitic?
I see assuming good faith on one side and bad faith on the other. Excusing the literal interpretation of one and extrapolating a nefarious interpretation of the other.
This column is what it attacks in others.
The celebration wasn’t just by “people with brown skin” and certainly not just by Muslim fundamentalists. The undergrads and law students and professors and DSA members who celebrated can for the most part be characterized as leftists.
Sure these tiny handful of cases exists. But If you check out “the people dancing in the streets” immediately following this attack, I think you’ll have a hard time documenting more than a small handful of what you say. Far far more of the people celebrating were quite obviously Muslim.
The DSA, sure. But even that doesn’t fit the grand narratives about decolonization. Same group is against US involvement in Ukraine.
All antisemitism is bad. But there has been a kneejerk reaction to point fingers at the left and conflate Muslim fundamentalism with left wing politics. It doesn’t fit at all
I would say that a movement that cares deeply about racial equality should not tolerate antisemitic Muslim fundamentalists.
If US Muslims are predominantly aligned with the political right, how come Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who are among the most leftwing members of Congress, were elected from the districts with the country's highest proportions of Muslim voters?
I didn’t say US Muslim’s were aligned with the political right in the USA. As a minority group, Muslim’s are associated with the left, which is an unusual situation given the conservatism baked into Islam.
I said Muslim extremists exist in the US and are typically associated with right wing politics rather than left wing politics. Religious fundamentalism and nationalism movements are generally considered right wing, based in tradition, hierarchy etc, rather than equality, progress etc
Religious fundamentalism of any sort -- Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever --is obviously conservative in the most general sense, and I think it's true that most Christian fundamentalists in the US tend to vote for Republicans. But Christian ethics are really more compatible with leftwing than rightwing politics -- particularly the idea that amassing wealth is sinful, that charity is especially virtuous when bestowed on someone of alien ethnicity, and that passivity in response to aggression is better than retaliation. Indeed, in light of the Sermon on the Mount, it might well be said that Marxism is a neo-Christian ideology (albeit without the preference for passivity).
Fascinating.
Yes, I agree, Christian morality informs liberalism, born out of the Enlightenment and Protestantism. It is very much left wing, founded within an oppressed, occupied society enduring brutal Roman occupation.
I’d never thought about how Muslim morality is perhaps more aligned with right wing sentiment. But seems something is there.
Its important also tho regarding religion and politics….that morality often takes a back seat to the traditions, group interests and institutional interests. Those forces tend to align with right wing politics. Today, we have a real tension between the two. Christian nationalism vs liberalism. It is not a new tension tho — it is hundreds of years old now.
The idea that moneymaking is bad for the soul did not originate with Christianity. Plato elucidated it in Book 8 of The Republic more persuasively than Christ does in gospel accounts of the sermon on the mount. Plato was definitely leftwing -- indeed, proto-Marxist. He said that wealthy citizens typically contrive to exclude the poor from any say in government by establishing a minimum wealth requirement for voting or other participation in civic governance and that as a result the polity is riven into two mutually hostile factions: those meeting the wealth requirement and the disenfranchised others. And because the wealthy oligarchs mistrust the disenfranchised citizens of lesser means they are unwilling to allow them to bear arms or provide them with military training; consequently such oligarchic states are vulnerable to conquest by foreign invaders. In Plato's ideal state neither the rulers nor the "guardians" -- an elite warrior class that would also perform police functions -- would seek enrichment. Indeed, the guardians would have no private property; they'd share common quarters, would have no right of exclusive sexual relations with particular women, and the offspring of their sexual encounters would be raised communally, not knowing who their parents were, nor would their fathers know which of them they'd sired. Can't be much more "collective" than that!
Of course the mere fact that Plato was in favor of X, Y, or Z doesn't prove that X, Y, or Z is either feasible or desirable. He states reasons for drawing his conclusions, but I often find his reasoning confusing or based on premises that seem dubious.
I think many Muslims would tell you that the core tenants of Islam - loving your neighbor as yourself, being kind, taking care of the poor, and struggling against oppression of any kind are also value that would tend to overlap with progressive policies and values in many ways. Muslims in the US have voted for Democrats in elections over the last year at rates of about 69% to 82%. In some cases this might be motivated by fear of Republican policies toward immigration but I think they would say it was primarily because of a perception that Democrats value cultural diversity and freedom of religion AND that their domestic policies about providing a safety net for the poor and protecting God's creation are a better match to what their theology says is morally correct. For some Muslims there is definitely a tension between these overall beliefs and more conservative specific beliefs about topics like the morality of abortion or homosexuality. But the majority of Muslims in America do support same-sex marriage and abortion being legal is almost all circumstances and the vast majority of muslims who express those more liberal views also describe themselves as highly religious, engage in daily prayer, and attend mosque at least once a month. And they have much higher rates of supporting bigger government vs smaller government, more environmental regulation, and belief that public financial support of the poor is beneficial than Catholics, Mainline Protestants, or Evangelical Protestants. So I think an argument could be made that in the US, Muslims are following their religious views to more liberal places than Christians. Obviously there is a contrast between those views and the views in areas where fundementalist Islam is the primary social norm but that is the case for fundamentalism in all faiths. Interestingly the religious group that is most similar to Muslims in the US is Jews in the US.
Dancing in the streets? You live near Stalinists? This all seems rather off.
The dancing in the streets is true, but I admit the Stalin comment was just a joke!
There are many Marxist-Leninists in departments of wasted human potential and unemployment studies.
Yes. My brother lived there for some time. These days it’s populated mostly by rich people with boring politics. It’s not very scary.
And if your lived reality is that a tiny handful of trust fund kid who writes for N+1 magazine are a threat of even politically important, I’d say getting some perspective is in order.
Really? Dancing in the streets? "Whitewashes Hamas-apologia as "pro-palestinian"?
If that's true, where's all the other support for the Houthis and Hezbollah and ISIS?
Have you not been paying attention? There was a contingent that celebrated the October 7th as resistance against oppression. A Cornell Professor, speaking at a rally in support, said he felt exhilarated when he heard the news. These were minority sentiments to be sure, but they were still vocally stated and widely reported on. It doesn't take some kind of underground research to have seen all of this.
"Where's all the other support for the Houthis and Hezbollah and ISIS?" Are you being serious? None of those groups invaded the only Jewish state on earth to slaughter and rape Jews. You're intentionally ignoring the context of what this is about. Not to mention ignoring that there literally were Westerners who supported things like ISIS (some of whom flew to the Middle East to literally join their ranks). Your comment seems to stem from willful ignorance of the context of all the points you raised in rebuttal.
This is obviously antisemitic, and we should call that out.
Then prey do so. Jews are under unprecdented attack in today's US from both left and right. Feeding into the partisan tendency to ignore the antisemtisim on one's own side via whataboutism about the other side is precisely the no. 1 reason jews feel more isolated than ever. Unfortunately you are exactly playing into this trend. We'd all be better off if each of us called eveyone one out but *especially* the shites in our *own* camp.
Sure, there's always more context, and you're framing the issue with very specific contexts (while leaving out others) to create a narrative to justify certain activities.
It's not like folks were dancing in the street for the Tree of Life shooting. It's not like anyone is celebrating Kristallnacht. It's not like the JVP is being organized against by other pro-palestinian protestors. The broad statements here about motivations are purely fictional.
The context is the very real history the middle east has with theocratic ethnostates states and the perpetual carving up of it by imperialist powers. If there's a level of willful ignorance here, it's easy to see why you're projecting it.
Just as an aside re Kristallnacht, there was a pro-Palestinian rally at McGill scheduled for Kristallnacht advertised with an image of someone breaking the glass window of (presumably) a business. https://nitter.net/lymanstoneky/status/1722670897050337483#m
If this is coincidental, the organizers were really extraordinarily unlucky.
Edit: Looking at this a little more, some of the responses say that it's not a business that's getting its glass smashed, it's maybe a university building.
You specifically stated that the things I mentioned weren't happening and hadn't happened, then asked why those things hadn't happened with other groups. I pointed out examples of how they had happened, and had happened with those other groups.
Of course one of the most complicated conflicts in history has more context, and far more than could be covered in a comments section. I'm not "creating a narrative". You seem to be reading more into my and OP's comments than is there.
I did none of those things and you're now definitively creating a narrative, and telling a fabricated story, on multiple fronts. Please stick to reality if you want this to be productive.
You: Really? Dancing in the streets? "Whitewashes Hamas-apologia as "pro-palestinian"?
Me: There was a contingent that celebrated the October 7th as resistance against oppression. A Cornell Professor, speaking at a rally in support, said he felt exhilarated when he heard the news. These were minority sentiments to be sure, but they were still vocally stated and widely reported on. It doesn't take some kind of underground research to have seen all of this.
You: If that's true, where's all the other support for the Houthis and Hezbollah and ISIS?
Me: None of those groups invaded the only Jewish state on earth to slaughter and rape Jews . . . Not to mention ignoring that there literally were Westerners who supported things like ISIS (some of whom flew to the Middle East to literally join their ranks).
I'm not sure how to make it clearer that I was responding to your explicit claims. I mean, I literally put one of the direct quotes I was responding to in my initial response to you.
This seems analogous to defending the confederacy for “supporting states rights” and waving a confederate flag, ignoring what the “right” was
Perfect analogy, thank you.
Have you ever heard of the term "false analogy."
"What I heard from some people who cheered 10/7 was that they cheered Palestinians finally breaking through the wall that kept them enclosed in Gaza, not the slaughter that followed."
Yeah, who could have predicted that if Hamas broke through the IDF units, they would slaughter Jews. Extremely surprising.
To use an admittedly extreme analogy, this is kind of like saying that people were just excited that the 9/11 hijackers made their flights on time. The whole point of breaking through the lines was to slaughter and rape innocents.
Having said that, I'm fine with saying that people are idiots and missed the clear purpose of breaking through the lines. But Danny is ignoring the not insignificant number of people who celebrated the resistance while fully acknowledging the slaughter. Some people were ecstatic to see Jews killed, and Danny ignores that. But other people were ecstatic about the resistance demonstrated by Hamas and were merely indifferent or perfectly fine with the killing of innocents. Danny seems to be ignoring those people too.
I'm so perplexed and horrified by the fact that this has to be debated. My initial comment recognizes that these are small minority positions. But they're very real, and easily found. You don't even have to search for them, you just have to not consciously bury your head in the sand when they were reported on. But here we are, pretending like nobody was actively celebrating Hamas' attack. It's mind boggling to me.
correction, we can *hope* they are "small mihnority positions" but i see no strong evidence for that.
Weird that they would celebrate "breaking through the wall" when tens of thousands of Palestinians were "breaking through the wall" by going to Israel to work every day prior to Hamas' attack.
“The end of the British mandate was inseparable from the Nakba” is not really comparable to “we cheered them breaking through the wall but not the attacks on civilians,” since the attacks on civilians were the entire purpose of breaking through the wall.
"What I heard from some people who cheered 10/7 was that they cheered Palestinians finally breaking through the wall that kept them enclosed in Gaza, not the slaughter that followed."
Not buying it. These folks aren't too big on nuance.
Twitter leftists have been spending several years holding up the Yemeni civil war as evidence of the U.S. doing bad, so yeah, there's a lot of tacit support for Houthis out there too.
Your judgement based on "Twitter leftists" is not only bad reasoning, but characterizing the anti-war proposition that America not underwrite either side in the Yemeni civil war, is not "tacit support for Houthis."
Get real dude.
America is not doing that. The anti-war side has brain worms.
Sure, US just doesn't mind ignoring Saudi involvement, and arms trade into the area, because the Saudi's are actually reliable allies or something. Same story where we endorse tyrants and people assume the enemy of my enemy is my friend and enemies of my friends are my enemy.
That's the brain rot here.
I completely agree. It’s also easy to punch down at college students because they have limited economic power. Musk on the other hand is still incredibly wealthy even after burning $40 billion dollars. It’s much more difficult to criticize him if he is tangentially involved with your work.
Like we can rail on sexual assaulter Elon Musk because frankly, we have little power.
Disagree. Harvard students are among the most privileged people in human history and should give up the victimhood posture. They are old and smart enough to be accountable for their actions. The fact that Elon Musk isn’t held accountable is a separate matter and not a defense of Harvard students.
I don’t see how this is relevant to “business leaders find it easier to criticize people when there are no consequences than it is to criticize someone who could potentially harm their business.”
Ah, sorry. I have no argument with that statement. Just the characterization of “punching down”
Punching down or up usually relates to the status of those speaking.
What you said isn’t false, there just might have been a more relevant comment elsewhere in this thread. I don’t get why it exploded. Maybe it’s a free thread?
My critique of Maya’s piece basically boils down to “cheap talk” as an explanation for why Musk doesn’t get as much criticism from folks in his peer group as those antisemetic college students.
If anyone at all actually "danced in the streets" then obviously they all did, or at least they all did it in their heads /s
It was crazy that anyone ever believed that titans of capitalist industry were left-wing. That idea was created by right wing pundits annoyed that big tech was trying to slow the flood of misinformation on their sites, because in the process they were shutting down a lot of Trumpist propaganda. The only really left wing thing the tech CEOs did was to push DEI, and that only because they were vulnerable to bad press over their overwhelmingly male and white employee populations. But they really aren't and never have been left wing. They're a little left of center on social issues but decidedly right on economic issues. And CEOs outside of tech are much further to the right than tech.
I can't deny that Slow Boring pieces written by women do seem to draw more ire from the peanut gallery, and I kind of wish I could self-righteously point that out. And yet, *as a woman*, I also can't deny that several of the pieces written by women that got pile-ons have also bothered *me* quite a bit. Is it a coincidence? Is Matt equally willing to challenge and critique draft pieces submitted by women as he is from men? I am not sure. I hope so.
I am endlessly impressed by the SB interns' intelligence, maturity, and hustle, Maya included. However, Maya, there is a large disconnect between your strong, black & white language claiming "most" business leaders are "ignoring" anti-semitism on the right, and the available evidence. I was genuinely shocked that this piece flat-out ignored the tidal wave of companies pulling advertising dollars from X based on this single tweet alone, and making strong statements condemning Elon in the process. Your entire argument hinges on the claim that this isn't happening. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/17/elon-musk-x-companies-pulling-ads-anti-semitism/ I'd love to hear whether this factored into you assessment of the situation and whether it alters anything.
Thanks for putting this out there, being willing to face a lot of critique, and being willing to share an opinion that you know will be outnumbered. I think it's good for us to get challenged regularly. Happy Thanksgiving!
Yep companies pulling ads is important -- but I think the silence from Ackman/most of his prominent peers is very important to note, and the focus of the piece
I guess “some cherry picked business leaders are ignoring Musk anti-semitism whereas many others are divesting from his businesses in a way that does him, personally, enormous financial damage” is not as pithy a headline?
Does any of this take away from the vile antisemitism of those ‘progressive’ student groups?
It would be terrible if any of the commenters are punching at Maya *because* she's female, and any so doing should feel ashamed. But it would also be terrible if commenters are pulling their (valid) punches *because* she's female, as there's nothing more patronizing than that.
It's probably a combination of things, and it's probably related to experience more than any other identity trait.
When Matt (a seasoned journalist) generously offers any of his employees (usually a student) the chance to voice their opinion, it's to be expected they aren't the same quality as the thing we've all agreed to pay money for, and that bothers people. That's probably super charged by the fact the guest articles are written by women, who are young, from a different milieu. Some people are just going to have a visceral reaction to this perspective that's so far away of their priors. Judging from the quality of these comments, very little of it has to do with constructive criticism for being a young writer, and mostly relying on strawman characterizations and false conflations, just to dunk on her for stepping out of line.
Maybe it’s just my bad memory, but it seems like Maya leans into culture war stuff a lot more previous interns, that may be what you’re picking up on. Regardless of how well it’s argued, you’re going to annoy some fraction of the audience if you debate whether group X is “punching up or punching down” against Group Y rather than going through the fine details of Trumps economic policies.
I've been writing a lot on Israel recently as a Jewish undergraduate at a school at the heart of the culture wars. It's been important to me to share my perspective, especially as a left-wing Jew with nuanced views on this issue. Feel free to also check out my work for The Forward on this issue -- https://forward.com/authors/maya-bodnick/
Maya has five pieces so far: https://substack.com/profile/103976442-maya-bodnick
The first three were on the NBA, on chatGPT, and on high school debate. They were great, imo, and two of them at least really took advantage of her unique perspective. The last one on Ramaswamy and this one, however, have been more standard partisan fare.
Beat me to it. That debate article in particular was just eye opening and mindblowing to me. And I'm always up for talking more sports, I still think Sports Sunday by Maya would be plenty of fun.
Yea the debate article was a standout - introduced me to something I had no clue about but was really fascinating
glad y'all liked it, I got a lot of blowback for that one but it was important for me personally to write as it's an issue i feel strongly about
This story just broke yesterday, so probably too late to be included in her article, but it's another example of investors responding negatively
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/20/tech/tesla-elon-musk-suspension/index.html
Great point. This feels like a big miss. Maya's post seems to have really over-generalized from what just Bill Ackman said and how much Kara Swisher (& by proxy Scott Galloway) hates Elon.
Additionally, the business leaders are *so loud* they're calling on Linda to resign in protest:
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/linda-yaccarino-elon-musk-advertising-resign-x-twitter
I'm just bitter that she can get through to Kara Swisher and that hedge fund managers joke with her.
I think it's a good point that businesses have reacted strongly to antisemitic content on Twitter but it's also true that businesses have mostly not reacted overtly to specifically Elon Musk's antisemitic statements, and definitely not in the overt way that some reacted to campus leftist stupidity after 10/7.
Fellow woman here. I agree with everything you said.
Marie: Your writing on Post-Woke is some of the best I've seen, and I can't help but notice that you haven't been active in the last year plus. Are you just overwhelmed by work/family (in which case I have to forgive you)? I hope you get back to it . . .
Aw, man, thanks! I think about getting back to it all the time, I still have quite a few ideas I want to discuss. Life has gotten busier for sure, but also I am a bit more at peace with the fact that "people are wrong on the internet"- I used to feel a sense of urgency that I needed to convince people to change their minds on these things, and I basically came to terms with the fact that people are pretty stubborn. But, hey, maybe I will find some time over the holidays to write.
She seems to be hell bent on ignoring the facts to put her head in the sand for the rabid antisemitism in her own institution via a a failed attempt at whataboutism. There could be many psychological explanations but it’s not promising for her as a thinker and writer and a sad fail for Matt as an editor- he failed us subscribers and he failed her in allowing her to embarrass herself like this.
"osuschologcpa" → sociological?
Yikes. My phone typing can be horrendous. Fixed. Thanks !
I do agree that Slow Boring pieces written by women seem to face more opprobrium, but the sample size is small.
"pro-Palestinian activism crosses the line into antisemitism, a debatable (though perhaps accurate in some cases)"
Perhaps accurate???
At Harvard after the 7/10 massacre, 33 Harvard organizations blamed Israel for a terror attack committed by Hamas.
Down Mass Ave, at my alma mater, Jewish students were warned not to enter the Institute via Lobby 7, the main entrance, for their own safety, and the Institute did not suspend those threatening Jews and refused to leave. This is after groups chanted "intifada" in front of the student center.
Perhaps antisemitic.
I have no love for Elon Musk, and his tweets were disgusting. He should get criticism for what he said.
But I'm not afraid of Elon Musk assaulting me at my alma mater or cheering the murder and kidnapping of my friends.
serious question, how many jewish students at ivy league plus colleges have been killed or injured by pro Palestinian activists?
It's obviously not a serious question, and not relevant to the discussion.
the scale of harm is always serious and relevant
Ah, so hate speech, bullying, threats to shoot up Jewish spaces on campus, and so on are not a big deal. Interring attitude. I wonder how much of that would be acceptable if those students were anything but Jewish.
If the students being accosted were Black, do you think the same nothing would happen to the people accosting them?
I can’t imagine MIT telling black students not to go to class because they aren’t safe walking through the main lobby...
we need to know how many incidents there have been to know whether the response has been adequate
If no one is hurt or killed is it not an “incident”?
The original comment was arguing that the pro-Palestinian activism crosses into anti-semitism (the article says this argument was "debatable" and "perhaps accurate"), and provided examples of how that activism has clearly been anti-semitic in many instances (meaning it is not "debatable" and is "accurate").
Switching the focus to instead say "is it really a problem if people aren't being attacked with great frequency" is moving the goalposts.
"it would still be reasonable to ask people declaring there's a massive wave of anti-Black racism on campuses to show their work"
Brian did show his work. He provided examples of how there's been a wave of anti-Semitism with real world impacts.
Op wasn’t conflating prejudice with violence- the response (and your comment in defense of it) were. Op was pointing out that prejudice was happening. That’s what my comment about moving the goalposts was referencing.
There was literally a Jewish guy murdered by a college professor in LA. Elon musk hasn’t killed anyone as far as I know
Wait, what? Are you talking about the incident where some people got in a shoving match, and one of them fell and injured his head and died? Or was there an actual murder somewhere?
The passive voice previously reserved just for police officers is now popular across a wide set of demographics.
Well but this is being charged as involuntary manslaughter, not murder.
Sure. I wouldn't have commented if someone had replied with that, vs "fell and died."
If it was a serious question then why didn't you google the answer and form a rebuttal based on what you uncovered? This seems more like a rhetorical question intended to dismiss and minimize the harms caused by active threats to students based solely on their Jewish identity.
What an idiotic attitude you have. Are you going to claim that Jewish students haven’t been physically assaulted and threatened by pro Hamas Leftist shits?
I think the incidents you cited are absolutely antisemitic. I think what Matt was saying (and what I agree with) is that the pro-Palestinian activism is being painted as if all of it is the incidents you cite, which it is not. For example, I think the ceasefire protestors are largely concerned with stopping the killing of Palestinians. I don't really think Ivy League students are in any way representative of the state of pro-Palestinian activism, given that they go to historically antisemitic schools.
I think you’ve got that backwards.
I’m not afraid of unempowered students, but rather a flood of antisemitism that can only come with LEADERSHIP acting badly and loosening social restrictions against such
I would hardly call Harvard students "unempowered."
But I understand your point.
Privileged not empowered, at least not yet. Students have power over their grades.
Cheers
There are quite a few people who will claim that the US brought 9/11 onto itself because of its policies in the Middle East. I don’t agree but it is not a statement based on racial hatred. One can make a similar statement about Israel and 10/7 without being antisemitic
Hi Maya - gonna give you comments as if you were one of my philosophy undergrads.
I think this article would have been more compelling if:
1) It didn't treat hypocrisy as reason to discount the original charges of antisemitism on the left. You could probably make a case to doubt Ackman's motives in particular, which this article also does. But it's muddied and weakened by also trying to sneak in the former. Both Elon's statements and the PSC's can be thoroughly antisemitic. (And in my modern orthodox circle - which, to be fair, is not elite twitter commentariat! - people have been appalled by both.)
2) It didn't jump immediately to, "The rich white guys we hate just want to hurt powerless brown people (implication: because they're racist)." As many other commenters have noted, there are plenty of other reasons that Jewish people might be more upset with the left right now. This article had the potential to explore this complicated web of reasons; the real picture is probably a mix of all of the above. And you could have gone much deeper with exploration of power dynamics and how they lead to silencing. Instead, you kinda took the easy way out, falling back on standard progressive orthodoxies about the corruption of money and racist old white guys. There was potential to do some much deeper and more difficult investigative work here.
3) It didn't bend over backwards to paint the PSC statement as merely "pro-Palestinian" activism. You're trying to talk to people who were horrified by that statement; when you begin the essay by betraying your sympathies to them, it immediately dings your credibility with the readers you're presumably trying to reach. If you can't bring yourself to condemn the PSC, or to acknowledge any non-slimy reasons people would take issue with their statement, then you probably aren't well-situated to actually communicate with the audience you're aiming at.
(Edited to remove some non-productive snark.)
I think some pro-Palestinian activism at Harvard/in general has been antisemitic (whether in effect or in intention, cc Matt's post on this earlier). But much of it has not. I am not trying to justify leftist antisemitism w/ rightist antisemitism, but rather call out the situation I see present from my perspective as a Jewish undergrad. Reasonable ppl can disagree as to where to draw the line on this, but I'm glad we agree that we should definitely condemn antisemitism both on the left and the right, wherever it appears. Also, see my previous pieces for forward which criticize the left wing & PSC response on this https://forward.com/authors/maya-bodnick/
You’d have done yourself a huge favor if your wrote this in the piece. Even more so if you acknowledged the huge backlash musk faced multiple businesses pulling their ads from Twitter!
You should probably also familiarize yourself with the studies showing Black and Hispanic Americans on average hold views on Jews similar to alt right whites. Unless you can show “poc” antisemites are called out disproportionately to their actual (disproportionate) contribution to the acts themselves your critique fails. One should acknowledge those groups are more prone to Jew hate rather than try to silence criticism of antisemitsm when it comes from certain groups.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-race-ethnicity-and-politics/article/abs/antisemitic-attitudes-among-young-black-and-hispanic-americans/5465F2124BC3D44B40521D2CD000D023
For what it’s worth, nothing in this comment requires a patronising tone in the first place. Other commenters state their disagreements without the condescension. Why not just begin with the final part of the first sentence?
Fair enough; after I wrote the bulk of the comment I felt like it was condescending, and wanted to acknowledge that I at least recognized it (I added the first sentence after writing the rest of the comment).
But I probably made it worse rather than better, and you're right that the comment probably would have been kinder without it. I simultaneously had both good intentions and a desire to signal annoyance, and I let the latter win out.
Completely understandable! You made valid criticisms of the argument :)
(But I don't feel bad enough to make an edit, because that would erase the likes, and then it's less likely she and others will see this feedback. I am a flawed human.)
Edit: for test
You're good, I appreciated reading your feedback on my post & didn't find it to be too snarky or condescending (maybe now that you edited). Thanks for your thoughts & I'm always interested in hearing other perspectives
FWIW, I don't think editing removes likes, but I may be wrong. I'll like the comment I'm responding to if you want to edit it and see if the like still stands.
Oh I think you're right! It temporarily removed both the like and the comment, but after a few seconds they both showed back up. Thanks for the help!
Oh, good to know. I also thought editing removed Likes.
I'm late to this party but I think these are the best critiques of the piece.
I thought this was a good insightful piece when I thought it was written by Matt.
But now that I see it was written by a woman, and a young person, I hate it.
And I'm going to turn the condescension and tone-policing up to 11.
Tut-tut, young woman! Tut-tut! How dare you disagree with your elders?
We shall tell you what to think, what to say, and how to say it!
I'm writing this after about 70 comments are in, and the SB commentariat has really embarrassed itself today.
Would you seriously find it a good post by Matt? It excuses anti-Semitism from the left; it engages in pointless hypocrisy arguments (of the kind Matt explicitly hates); it makes futile appeals to authority (who is Kara Swisher to tell me what the 1% do and don't stand for?), and most egregious of all it totally disregards the many millions of dollars in advertising that have been pulled from Twitter in direct response to Musk's tweet (which kind of contradicts the idea that elites don't care about Musk's antisemitism, something I think Matt would have picked up on).
I'll chime in and add that I didn't realize the article wasn't written by Matt at the start. I was really surprised to see such sloppy thinking. I only realized it had a different author once I got to the comments.
I thought I’d accidentally clicked on a different substack!
No. Maya did. And I for one thought Matt’s complementary piece sane washing antisemitism was almost as bad. Young women can also write very bad pieces and deserve condemnation for it just lie anyone else. Maybe if she got more honest criticism eg from her boss she wouldn’t have tainted her public record like this. It’s not doing her any favors to judge her by a lower standard based on sex. Have we learned nothing ?
"I thought this was a good insightful piece when I thought it was written by Matt."
Then you didn't read it very carefully. None of it matches Matt's style.
Has he ever begun a paragraph with the fragment "For context:"? Has he ever begun a piece with "As a Jewish Harvard student", so foregrounding his identity? And has the thesis of his piece ever revolved so centrally around the *personal relationships* of *business* elites (as opposed to, say, business elites' contractual relationships or political elites)?
"Then you didn't read it very carefully."
Guilty as charged. I did not notice those phrases that you point to. Maybe if I had been paying better attention I would have figured out that it was not Matt while I was reading it. But in fact, I did not. I just thought it was Matt, writing a good Matt piece.
(I mean, if he had said "As a Jewish Yale student" then all of my alarms would have gone off....)
What did you like about it?
The best anti Zionist statements always start with as an <elite university> Jewish student, let me tell you what savages Israelis are for trying to eliminated the people who massacred their civilians, and also let me tell you how the pro Hamas Left is actually not for genocide.
I didn't like the article and am probably one of the people you're making fun of, but this comment cracked me up
Please point to the parts of the text that you feel are fairly summarised as 'apologia'.
"... not among the usual suspects who regularly comment here...."
Interesting. I had not noticed that.
Because I don't tend to notice who says things, just what they say.
Just what you would say, Goliath!
WE'RE BACK
Get my name out of your mouth!
As a feminist, I hold articles written by women to lower standards
When I read Matt's 'stack, I hold his articles to the same standard, every day. And I thought this was one of his good articles which met the standards I expect from him.
When I later found out in the comment section that it was written by Maya, I did not change my standards retroactively.
Why did you think it was good? I'd rather talk about that than all of this yelling at each other. The main point about Elon Musk I agree with wholeheartedly.
This seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill. Does Elon Musk hold bigoted or conspiratorial views towards Jews? I would assume. But he’s not calling for violence. He works regularly with Jewish employees and coworkers. No Jew would feel unsafe walking into spacex. An angry mob shouting “Palestine should be Arab” or “gas the Jews” is far more threatening. Especially when they’re doing that in solidarity with people who just murdered, mutilated, and raped thousands of Jews.
“Holds bigoted and conspiratorial views towards Jews but isn’t calling for violence” is a pretty low bar. Would you be saying the same thing if this was AOC or Ilhan Omar?
Absolutely I would. I care little for what Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar or Elon Musk think of me or other Jews. Bigoted views of Jews are really widespread and I’m not gonna write people off just because they’re misguided. There are many places I enjoy visiting where I’ll hide my Magen David.
Bigotry in all forms is bad. Part of the reason I go to antisemitic places and spaces is because by revealing my Jewishness only to people I’ve established a rapport with I think I can further understanding. But I don’t think my or any major Jewish orgs goal is to purge anyone from public life for being plausibly bigoted. But if you actively cheer violence and murder I find that far more frightening than simply holding bigoted views. More than twice as a many Americans were killed on 10/7 than at tree of life and yet condemning their murder is surprisingly controversial. If Elon musk had cheered the tree of life attack and called to globalize it and championed the political goals of the murderer - that would be deeply alarming. But he didn’t. Many others reacted that way to 10/7
I’m going to repeat a comment I said earlier because it truly bears repeating here
“George Wallace didn’t explicitly call for violence. He only said ‘segregation now, segregation forever’”
Musk has gained a huge following of fanboys who for whatever reason love every word he says. You really do sure none of them aren’t inspired to act of any of Musk’s musings?
It would be really bad if someone was inspired to act by Musk. But that seems paranoid and unlikely. We just saw the deadliest massacre of American Jews in our countries history - the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Many people from positions of rare power and privilege calling to globalize the intifada. And the intifada is being globalized! From LA to Lyon to Dagestan there have been repeated violent attacks. No need to have absurd speculation about how people might interpret Musk's tweets. My concerns about violent antisemitism are about the people who are saying it!
"Many people from positions of rare power and privilege calling to globalize the intifada."
Elon Musk snapped his fingers and the AG of the second largest state in the country is doing his bidding and investigating Media Matters. Can you please point to me the protestor who has anywhere near this power in America?
I'm sorry, this argument you are making is increasingly just getting farcical.
Dude, more American Jews died on 9/11 than on 10/7.
That wasn't a massacre of Jews - was a broader terrorist attack. But you're right that this is probably an overly semantic argument. The point is more American Jews were killed in Israel last month than in every violent antisemitic attack in the US in the past decade combined. Given the scale and recency its kinda weird to be desperately searching for vaguely bigoted musk tweets to pretend they're comparable to supporting Hamas.
I pointed out to people that conditioning your sympathy for American Jews on Israel’s actions is antisemitic, and it was amazing how people couldn’t see it. It wasn’t just bog standard defensiveness. It was like trying to explain water to a fish.
Both AOC and Omar have kept their mouths shut out of tact and reading the room. They are not the best examples. Tlaib got censured.
I think those are good examples. Keeping your mouth shut out of tact and reading the room is better than the alternative.
I just think we have a real example of the behavior Milan described in reference to “ Would you be saying the same thing if this was AOC or Ilhan Omar?”
We have already observed the response.
Yes, we are. Omar at least os also antisemitic. The problem of ignoring left antisemitism is far greater than ignoring right wing one- because nobody ignores the latter! Only by ignoring the facts- like Maya unfortunately did - can you argue that!
Jewish students who dared to not be token Jews for the pro Hamas left have been threatened, assaulted, subjected to hate speech wayyyyy more significant than microaggressions, and had their spaces vandalized. Are you going to claim that Jewish employees at Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX suffered the same? Let’s be serious about the degree to which the pro Hamas left takes its antisemitic vitriol. There’s no comparison.
But isn’t calling for violence.
Those Jews between the river and the sea would beg to differ
This got 20 “likes”?! WTF.
You know this post noted the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter was apparently inspired by these very same conspiracy theories right?
“George Wallace only said ‘segregation now, segregation forever. He didn’t explicitly call for black people to be lynched. Therefore, it isn’t racist and you’re making a mountain out of a mole hill”.
+1 -- I think it's really important to recognize how violent this conspiracy theory is! Elon is mask off antisemitic by promoting it
The number of commentators on here trying to explain that Musk's promotion of pretty violent anti-Semitism as not big deal and not nearly as consequential as college kids protests is absolutely wild.
I'm not even here to defend the worst of these protests. I think a lot of them are in the category are in the "don't agree with it, but ultimately students and anyone else should be allowed to express their opinion". Some really do have some pretty horrible rhetoric expressed which I'm not going to defend. But how in the world can you say with a straight face this is more dangerous than anything Musk is doing.
Because this is not hypothetical. Again, I'll repeat something I've said in other comments, he just got Ken Paxton to open an investigation into Media Matters. Not Israel related, but he's on the record of using his personal access to Starlink to help stymie Ukrainian military operations. Ukraine is a US ally we are militarily supporting with billions of dollars and he's basically admitting to helping the enemy.
Like all these commentators are saying the equivalent of "college kids don't have power now, but in 20 years they could and therefore is more dangerous". Like Elon has immense power right now! And and he's clearly using it! There is no hypothetical here. It's right there in the open.
You are aware that your campus left friends are supporting and celebrating a massacre of 1200 Israeli civilians, most of them Jews, yes? They’re not chanting “by any means” and “River to the Sea” in an abstract way. Or is that the progressive default to imagine Hamas out of existence so hard that all context is lost?
This same logic would invalidate the source inspiration of any terrorism. The Quran and Bible (and probably most Holy Books) have inspired millions of deaths. Hitler killed millions after writing Mein Kampf, and Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot killed millions (each) after reading the Communist Manifesto.
I don't know where you draw the line, exactly, but millions of other people heard Tucker Carlson talk about Great Replacement without being inspired to violence, just as millions have heard All Cops Are Bastards but only half a dozen or so tried or succeeded in murdering cops.
"very same conspiracy theories". It's also hard to say what "same conspiracy" means. I have a feeling if you peaked your head into the rabbit hole that the Tree of Life Shooter was in it wouldn't bear all that much resemblance to what someone like Tucker was saying on Fox and would be a much darker place, just like if you peaked your head into the social media of the most anti-cop groups in the US you would see some crazy s%#t
This is a terrible analogy. Segregation was enforced by state violence, and George Wallace was the leader of the state doing the enforcing.
Hey Matt. You comfortable knowing this commentator is an apologist and defender of the worst right wing bigotry out there?
You’re right. It’s not like the leader of the GOP and likely nominee for President has openly embraced white nationalists like Nick Fuentes or anything.
Good to know for the future when I see your name that you’re an apologist for right wing antisemitism.
Trump is a bad person with bad friends but I don't see what any of that has to do with analogizing Elon to George Wallace. Hopefully someone can come rescue you, though.
The issue is the number of people who otherwise admire Elon, and once he starts promoting these theories, assume that they have some sort of credibility, and other things like "the jewish question" have some validity.
If you really don't want mobs of people with torches shouting "Jews will not replace us," it's probably best to address the folks spreading the theory that jews are trying to replace us.
agree. elon's groupies struggle to call him out for bigotry, and business leaders don't want to lose deals so they're quiet (as swisher said)
Maya, I feel like this piece is weakened by its focus on "Elon's groupies". As someone who is not likely to ever meet Bill Ackman, I don't really care about what Elon's groupies do or do not do. (I also don't believe in second-order shaming: if I'm not going to break off friends with you even if you're friends with Hitler; I will, however, try to convince you to stop hanging out with him.)
But the extent to which Elon is anti-semitic is easy to forget. It's useful to remind me (and I suspect other Slow Boring readers) that he is anti-semitic, because I might otherwise admire a person skilled at building technological companies.
That is to say: I wish you had focused more on arguing that Elon was anti-semitic, and less on arguing about the reception of his anti-semitism amongst other people I am extremely unlikely to interact with.
i feel like i proved he's antisemitic? lmk if i missed anything ** "For context: The “great replacement” that Elon agreed with is a well-known far-right conspiracy theory that claims: (1) brown and Black immigrants are being brought illegally into Western countries to “replace” white voters to achieve leftist political goals, (2) these groups are directing governments to pursue policies that undermine the control of white people over countries, and (3) Jewish elites are the puppet masters driving this. The GRT is pretty well-known; Tucker Carlson promotes it regularly and in 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter cited it in his manifesto.
This isn’t the first time Musk has promoted antisemites.
After buying Twitter, he reinstated prominent right-wing conspiracy theorists (many of whom are also white supremacists), including Nick Fuentes, Ye, Patrick Howley, Pepe Escobar, Santino Rice, Clif High, Scott Ritter, and Sam Hyde. After the Anti-Defamation League published a report that antisemitic hate speech had surged on Twitter after Musk’s takeover, Elon threatened to sue the ADL and accused it of being the “biggest generators” of antisemitism on Twitter. He also liked a tweet promoting the #BantheADL campaign. "
"i feel like i proved he's antisemitic?"
Oh, absolutely. That was my takeaway from the piece. I just feel like that important point was diluted with a lot of material that isn't terribly important.
EDIT: On second thought, I think another interesting piece might have been about when (and where) you feel boycotts are justified. If you think that there should be a distinction between in-college and out-of-college speech, then the question of "Bill Ackman refuses to hire Harvard students who protest Israel, but won't condemn his business colleague; is that a good policy" is much more interesting. But you didn't really do a good job setting the scene w.r.t. Ackman's policy on hiring college students (I'm just guessing that that is in fact his policy), and you never develop a positive theory of boycotts.
Musk isn't calling for violence against Jews, but he's spreading the sort of conspiracy that is known to result in violence against Jews.
By this logic shouldn't we condemn all Marxists because they spread the sort of conspiracy that is known to result in violence against people who own capital? And also violence against Jews, if you read Marx and read Soviet history, there's a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment and a fair amount of murder.
If they are are blaming the Kulaks for crop failures, or repeating Soviet anti-semitism, sure. But otherwise you are painting with a much broader brush than is necessary to draw the connection between Great Replacement theories and anti-Jewish violence.
That's fair. I do think there's a strange thing that happens where eventually, every conspiracy theory ends up blaming Jewish people for everything. E.g. I first heard about "great replacement theory" from a weirdo Bircher guy in like 2011 or 2012, but in his telling the bad guys were the progressive one world government commies, not Jewish people. And now 10 years later, it seems like things have been updated and it's definitely taken on an anti-Semitic tone.
I guess if you're being extremely charitable to people you should ask "and these lizard people - are they just lizard people, or are you talking about the Jews?" before you assume they're being anti-Semitic, but that's asking a lot when your interlocutor is talking about lizard people in the first place.
Idk, I would not necessarily feel super safe working at an Elon company after he made these remarks. Not worried about violence against me, but just uncomfortable! “gas the Jews” is obviously antisemitic, but the Tree of Life shooter promoted the great replacement theory, so it's also a super violent thing to promote. let's call out antisemitism wherever it appears, on the left or the right!
"I would not necessarily feel super safe working at an Elon company....Not worried about violence against me, but just uncomfortable!"
I do not think the word "safe" means what you think it means.
"... the Tree of Life shooter promoted the great replacement theory, so it's also a super violent thing to promote."
This is...quite the non sequitur. By extension, any worldviews held or espoused by prior who do violence become violent things?
The Audrey Hale manifesto had some things to say about white privilege. Is 'white privilege' a violent thing to promote?
> The Audrey Hale manifesto had some things to say about white privilege. Is 'white privilege' a violent thing to promote?
Shhhh - you weren't supposed to see that!
This is one of the dumbest things i have ever read.
How many 19-year-old young women activists at Harvard do you think are going around beating up Jews? If we start making etiquette in a multiethnic democracy contingent on how safe people feel in rooms, it'll just spiral into a lot of emotivism. People need clear rules on how to talk and behave, and Musk crossed them. That doesn't mean I can see into his soul to discern his true intentions, but he should apologize.
Some of their young male colleagues are. I don’t think you understand the situation.
Yeah I was a bit flippant, and I've seen footage of some threatening protests smashing glass. Fair enough. I just think it's a bit weird to conflate the perceived safety of SpaceX headquarters with how the executive should talk about ethnic groups. Musk should take his own advice on Asian and white-bashing by the non-profits he's mad at; it's bad to bash ethnic groups, including Jews!
Musk has such vaster power than the pinheads yelling on the street that the gap is incomprehensible.
He does, but the gap is not incomprehensible. The protesters on campuses often overlap with the protestors marching in many cities and towns throughout the US. They impact other non-protesters in too many ways, yet to be measured. Also, these pinheads will later land in positions of power, unless we develop an accurate/reliable ethics test.
Back in the early 2000s, lots of French Jews supported Jean-Marie Le Pen even though he was extremely anti-Semitic, because they liked that he was even more Islamophobic.
Just because Musk prefers Israel to Hamas doesn’t preclude him from fanning the flames of anti-Semitism.
Huh?
It is not Andrew who is confused, Sam.
The claim about Le Pen is obviously falsifiable: contemporary comment or survey data or current recollections could provide data to show it was false (or, for that matter, true).
"Just because Musk prefers Israel to Hamas doesn’t preclude him from fanning the flames of anti-Semitism" is not a claim about empirical fact--falsifiability is not relevant--it is a claim about necessary exclusion. Unless there is a valid argument that it is logically impossible for an active antisemite to prefer that Israel prevail over Hamas, Andrew's proposition holds. Since it is clear that people can be both antisemitic and Islamophobic, and nothing requires that Islamophobia cannot be the stronger prejudice, there is nothing excluding the validity of Andrew's statement.
What is in fact unfalsifiable is your own not-entirely-coherent claim that for Andrew, "Anything you don't agree with is due to hatred." There is no way for him to demonstrate that your claim is false, regardless of how that ambiguous statement is construed.
The idea that "support of Israel" is not compatible with "antisemitism against disapora jews" is precisely the confusion this article is about!
Yeah, that's my impression too.
They're not chanting "gas the jews" but they are chanting "globalize the intifada"
I realize there's rhetorical ambiguity there. But that's kinda the point - they know it can and will be heard as an incitement to violence, choose to say it anyways, then deny that that's what they mean.
Fwiw, I don't think any of this really constitutes any reason to feel physically scared. But these fights over campus speech and "safety" have never been about physical safety.
There's probably a paper thin percent of folks who could even tell you what an intifada is. Much less so to the ones who think rich elites are trying to replace whites by importing immigrants.
Even if I buy your read here, I think the implication is "carry out attacks on civilians who openly support Israel", which to me doesn't sound much better than "attack Jewish civilians"
Not defending said chant, but based on my conversations with several people who have protested in support of Palestinians now and in the past, when they refer to intifada, they are thinking of an idealized version of the First Intifada, basically peaceful protests with, at most, stone-throwing at the IDF.
We keep hearing that "From The River To The Sea" doesn't mean the genocide of Jews and that "Defund The Police" doesn't really mean defund the Police. Now we're told that "Intifada" doesn't mean a violent uprising, but peaceful protests, yet the Israeli's are committing "genocide." Left wing activists need: 1. Better marketing and 2. To stop playing games with words.
Helpful to know that's how they're thinking of it. In a similar vein, a friend of mine said she didn't know what "intifada" meant, nor had she heard of either of the Intifadas in Israel. So I think it's true that plenty of people at these protests have good or at least not bad intentions.
But I think there are others and especially leaders who, regardless of what *they* mean by the statements, know how they will be heard, and choose to say them anyways. If you know that someone will hear something as a threat and choose to say it anyways, I think you're at least being a jerk, even if you're not actually guilty of making the threat itself. That's what I meant by this not really being about physical safety. Once called out on how these statements sound, leaders could acknowledge the harm and say "we won't weaponize language associated with past violence, because that distracts from our true cause." Instead, they tend to gaslight and say that no reasonable person would hear them the other way.
BS. Utter and total BS. They are calling for targeting civilians and they know it. Some of them are even saying the quiet part outloud, to much cheers from the crowd. Come on, maan, you know better.
Why are you continuing to make yet more conflations?
I promise I'm trying to engage in good faith. I'll try to retrace my thinking more explicitly:
Chants to "globalize the intifada" ring to my ears as "perpetrate the tactics of the second intifada globally"
(But you could make the point that "intifada" literally translated means revolution, and doesn't implicate anything about the second intifada. To which I say what I said in my original comment: this to me seems like intentional motte-and-baileying. But that is a different kind of wrong than actual incitement to violence.) That said, this line is a different one than the one you pursued - I took you as taking for granted that "globalize the intifada" expressed support for the intifadas in Israel, by making an analogy to expressing support for Uighur terrorism.
From there, you made the claim that support for the intifada in Israel didn't imply support for attacks on Jews. My inference was that it implied support for attacks on Israeli civilians, in virtue of their complicity/support for the Israeli regime (occupation, whatever).
The second inference, then, was that calls to "globalize" it meant support for terrorism globally against those who are complicit in/support the Israeli regime.
Hopefully this clears up how I arrived at the conclusion I did, and gives you space to point out where you think I've gone awry.
The First Intifada was mostly protest and rioting. But the Second Intifada was terror attacks, suicide bombings, and bus explosions, where over 1000 people were killed.
And if people are calling for another Intifada, of course Jews around the world are going to be terrified.
You can see how protesters in the campus pro-Palestinian protests have not had any issues distinguishing between Jewish students and "Israelis" (not that it's okay to threaten Israelis with terror either!)
The second intifada destroyed the Israeli left and the peace camp.
Agreed
"The intifadas were uprisings against the country of Israel and shouldn’t be conflated with Jewish people."
The main force behind the Second Intifada, Hamas, makes it pretty clear in public documents and statements about WHY it opposes the country of Israel (hint: contains too many Jews).
I don't know. Who gets to be massacred in Hebron in 1929 in this hypothetical?
yeah & at harvard a lot of people were falsely doxxed. biz leaders will go overboard on calling students antisemitic, but elon's explicit promotion of antisemitism gets a pass -- even though he's more powerful than all the pro palestine students in the US combined
But this is why your omission of the ad pulls is egregious. Business leaders don’t have the power to not hire Elon Musk like they have to not hire people who signed bad letters; Musk already has a job. The way they can put economic hurt on him is by pulling advertising from Twitter, which they’re doing.
EDIT:
Honestly, the engagement I’ve gotten here after what I said this morning has been deeply saddening.
I wasn’t trying to shame or discredit Maya. But I believe the reasoning she displayed in today’s piece to be flawed in a way which is very common in journalism and commentary in our current zeitgeist. Likewise, I think some of the language she (likely unthinkingly) used borders on disingenuous and shouldn’t be let off easily.
I sought to say as much without filling a ream of paper, in a way which was less impolite than the language I have used to criticize Matt or other commenters for similar failures of logic or knowledge, because she’s an intern and here to learn.
What I thought was restraint seems to have been rewarded with a long series of people who question my motives and moral fiber instead of taking issue with my point.
To Maya’s credit she hasn’t joined in that.
But I’m unsure how the hell I was supposed to make the point that wouldn’t have opened me up to the same bad-faith attempt to delegitimize what I said instead of arguing with it. And that’s just depressing.
I'm out, folks. It's been interesting, informative, and I thank everyone for generally tolerating my abrasiveness. But it's time to move on.
You know, there are certain days where you guys are really lacking in the empathy department. Consider why a Jewish woman might have strong feelings about antisemitism?
Maya is obviously more plugged into elite, woke culture than I am, but her work is very earnest and she tries hard to get the facts right and generally succeeds. She is a fine window into progressive ivy league culture. A little more empathy from commenters would be nice.
Right. And I just can’t help but noticing that I was never given near as much shit for being overly emotional. Wonder why…
This comment section, and perhaps most of Matt's subscribers followed him here from his time at Vox. Whether true or not, the prevailing wisdom is that Matt was essentially forced out of Vox by some of the mega-woke, illiberal voices who went a little crazy when Matt signed an anodyne letter supporting free speech.
All to say, many here are anti-identity politics despite being supporters of the Democratic Party. Your "overly emotional" writings have been (in my memory) focused on how affirmative action has hurt Asian Americans. Perhaps you were doing so as a bank-shot to support identity politics, just for your group. But many folks probably just saw it as anti-affirmative action, which doesn't engender as much pushback.
Maya's post today, though, while hitting on a VERY (the most?) hot topic that has already proven to be unusually adept at attracting commenters, uses language that sure feels very identity-politics friendly. So, she will get more shit that you did.
That is what I think the difference is. If you think differently, say so rather than just imply bigotry onto the commenters.
Frankly, I'm kind of disappointed in Matt. He should have worked with Maya more to shape this piece. I'd like to hope he treats publishing his interns' pieces as a Big Deal for them and works hard to help them shine.
I’m genuinely curious what issue you found with the piece that Matt should have fixed?
I personally love how well reported it is - most people writing takes on the internet never even bother to call anybody!
Yes, I think Matt should either shepherd his interns through the composition process, or get guest writers who can pull their own weight more reliably.
What a weirdly condescending and presumptuous thing to say. Can you imagine hearing someone say this about your professional writing?
>uses language that sure feels very identity-politics friendly.<
Such as?
(Not singling you out, John. But there seem to be a lot of criticisms of Maya's use of language, but no actual quotes of the offending terminology, and where it supposedly goes wrong.)
The headline says "business leaders are ignoring". The text, though, starts with "As a Jewish Harvare student", then proceeds to use "______ of color" used six separate times -- women, young people, students. The "of color" part seems particularly important to her article. Also highlighting the students that were part of the truck-shaming were "Black, South Asian or Arab", as if that were the underlying reason for the criticisms.
I think language like "power is comfortable with power," "elites," and the general critique of "business leaders" is pretty left-wing rhetoric, but if she's got the goods that's fair enough. The problem is this critique flies in the face of front-page stories about businesses pulling their ads from Twitter in direct response to Musk's tweet.
There were definitely some feelings in your piece about Indian Americans in politics, and doing so gave it an intensity and interest Matt’s writing often lacks. On the other hand, you waited until your valedictory to be that free with your feelings.
As long as she gets the facts straight, Maya’s feelings should be welcome. There are many kinds of good writing.
I don't think she does have her facts straight. She didn't say a word about the many companies, including tech companies, pulling their ads from Twitter over Musk's comments.
Did we read the same comments below your "VIvek and me" post? People were swarming over it accusing you of being too emotional. A lot of them got banned! I disagreed with the critique in that case but you're throwing yourself on the wrong grenade here.
I’m a woman and I find this comment overly emotional.
No. For ignoring facts in an outrageous manner. Giving her slack for ignoring very well known facts that turn her argument over its head is not a reasonable request.
It’s because women tend to be subject to greater scrutiny than men. It’s stupid. It’s misogyny.
Can’t we all just get along? 70% of the regular commenters here are really smart. That is rare and beautiful.
I do not share Maya’s preoccupation with antisemitism, but I appreciated the chance to see what a smart, young, Jewish woman who shares my repugnance towards Likud thought about this trope.
SB Comments should be a place where smart people can disagree without being disagreeable. I hope I have honored that ideal and invite my more churlish colleagues to join me.
Thanks David -- as someone who has been looking at comments since Milan left (which I'll be done with now that Ben is starting), I always appreciate civility. although you may want to think about why I care about antisemitism as a jewish woman during a time when it is spiking...
This comment is needlessly vitriolic
None of us doubt that you could have done it. But just think how you could bond with Milan over Sanskrit lessons!
I didn't realize this wasn't a MY piece until after I read it, at which point I scrolled back up to see who the author was because it was clear it wasn't one of his pieces. The post lacked persuasive argumentation or data in support of its claim, failed to account for any counterarguments or address them (not mentioning any of the numerous businesses that have stopped advertising on X explicitly due to Musk's tweet seems particuarly egregious), and came across more as a few anecdotes about how "this guy criticized students but not Musk" and how MTG is still in politics so therefore there's a huge double standard (again, no discussion here of context- she's in an incredibly safe seat, faced SIGNIFICANT criticism from across the political spectrum for her prior statements, and has issued apologies between those statements and when she was given more power within the caucus, etc. etc. etc.).
To imply that people criticizing this article for failing to be as rigorous as this audience expects SB to be are doing so because of sexism is just incredibly lazy.
She is getting the facts very very wrong despite them being well known. Her whole article is based on ignoring facts. Would you be so forgiving of such abysmal failure at basic journalism if she were *not* a young woman?
Yes lol I haven't totally understood the comments here that say we're focusing TOO MUCH on antisemitism. 1) I have a right to care about 2) it's super prevalent -- jews are the most targeted amongst religiously motivated hate crimes in the US and 3) it's been increasing, on both the right and the left. We should call out both! Folks in the comments seem to think I don't think the left has said antisemitic things, but that's not what I'm saying. The focus on the article is elite silence on right wing antisemitism, but that is not to overlook left wing antisemitism, see my 2 pieces for forward https://forward.com/authors/maya-bodnick/
"Yes lol I haven't totally understood the comments here that say we're focusing TOO MUCH on antisemitism"
I've written two comments here critical of your work, so I feel obliged to say: those comments are insane, and I want to thank you for attempting to analyze antisemitism here in the US. (Of course, I'm Jewish too, so maybe my PoV is just equally skewed, but) it seems a very important thing to talk about, particularly if this is one of those causally thin moments that determines whether antisemitism becomes "acceptable" in American society.
I thought her piece was trying to inform or persuade, in which case the criticism is fine. If it was meant to be more "this is how I feel", then I agree with you.
I think I agree... I would actually really like to read a straightforward, heartfelt "this is how I feel" piece from Maya on this topic. To take it to the next level, she could follow in Matt's footsteps where he explores his feelings but also tries to take a step back and challenge them.
She definitely didn't frame it as the latter - and that would be a weird model for a SB column. I think it's on her as a writer to make her goals clear.
Also, you didn't say this here, but I think there's been a lot of Uncle Tom-ing dynamics around Jews and antisemitism lately. Progressives recognize that Clarence Thomas saying something isn't racist doesn't mean it's not racist. Ditto here for antisemitism. Of course, Bill Ackman saying something is antisemitic likewise doesn't mean it is. But I find the "I'm Jewish and I don't find this antisemitic" line to be a bad response when you could debate the issue on the merits instead. Maya's opening line gave me that vibe and immediately put me on the defensive.
🙄
Matt’s style tends to be largely unemotional. It is not unreasonable for people who subscribe to a substack in that style to prefer it and not like a style that is more emotional. I don’t think empathy to the author should prevent commenters from commenting that they don’t like the style.
There is emotion in Matt’s style, it’s just a wry, broey kind of emotion. Let the ladies play too! It’s more fun that way.
I’m a woman, so don’t appreciate being mansplained about letting ladies play or having my gender assumed based on my comment.
I’m sure no one is complaining about how she feels. It’s a complaint about the writing. I found the piece very weak, poorly reasoned and starting from false premises. Should I not share that opinion because of the author’s Jewish identity?
Did he doubt her reasons for caring here? I can't see the original comment, but the version I can see seems perfectly cordial (if a little too non-specific to be actively helpful)
She is doing enormous damage to her community and seems to be consistently more concerned with her gentile classmates making Harvard hostile to Jews than towards the Jewish community, 99% of whom don't have the privileges in life enjoyed by her antisemitic gentile classmates. There may be psychological excuses for this behavior but it’s still shameful and needs to be called out.
Consider why Jews may have strong feelings about apologia for leftist antisemitism? Maybe consider why an Israeli reader of yours may have very little patience for a whataboutist statement about gross genocide supporting elite racists? There was a way to right about Elon promoting sketchy antisemitism that wasn’t wrapped in a defense of campus Leftists who should pay the price for their hate speech.
I am like “she’s still a college student.” She has a lot less experience writing than MattY and others. This internship is a learning experience.
Empathy is actually really tough to do.
Agreed :)
So I disagree, I was reading an essay by a Harvard man in The Atlantic published in 1923 on American Jews and I think Maya was roughly about as unsentimental on the situation as he was. People in the comments are getting very annoyed a Harvard woman doesn't think a little Jew-baiting is a big deal unless it's related to her college's donors, but historically Harvard has always cared more about its future national standing than the transcendent questions of justice. That is a rational if selfish motive and I'm not going to cast evil intentions upon her or anyone else at Harvard.
Instead, I ask they find their own money. Harvard and the 100-200 colleges deeply inspired by it can do this with less public subsidy in the form of loans and uncapped 529 plans for undergrad and especially masters programs. They can find the money elsewhere for blaming white settlers for all problems in the world, as they're allowed to do that in a small-l liberal society. People are allowed to have paranoid fears of race domination which are Totally Different and Nothing Like my anti-woke obsessions! I only ask that they stop using my taxes for it.
Elon Musk should apologize for Jew-baiting because he's better than this. I don't think Harvard is much better than this. Donors like Bill Ackman need to quit tattling to HR for a third DEI department on Anti-Semitism and try standing tall like a man. Don't centrist liberal donors who like Musk want to have an actual legacy, like Leland Stanford or Andrew Carnegie? Try making a new institution for training white collar workforces! It's so pathetic to grovel like a stuffy seminary school made by WASPS 400 years ago is the Greatest Thing Since Jesus Christ. Move on from Harvard already! Try doing something new for once!
If Maya's article can help even one more person come to that conclusion, I think that's good and I applaud her for speaking her mind. Everyone is acting like a fussy coward and it's making our country into more like a lame middle-income country full of slackers who dislike successful middle man minorities. I'm tired of it, I don't want America to be more like the rest of the world. I want it and its future leaders to act more American. That starts with spending less money on the German Disease (the modern research university.) Then maybe if we do that, some other German diseases will recede as well.
The thing is, a collection of rooms with instructors and books hasn't changed a whole lot in cost and isn't that expensive! It's everything around it; we've overcapitalized this type of institution with explicit government policy incentives. Frustrated philanthropists should keep an eye out for the coming fire sale of dying small remote private school campuses.
I wish you'd kept the original post as an appendix to this piece, so that we could still read for ourselves the flaws you think are "very common in journalism and commentary in our current zeitgeist", even if you no longer endorse the phrasing.
Ehh, Bethany covered it better above than I did anyway, no big loss.
BuzzFeed, you mean the Pulitzer prize winning organisation?
I hope this isn't out for good. We've disagreed on substance and style before, but I appreciate you for keeping it real and making me consider things a bit more.
I'll be around for a while, can't cancel an annual subscription for a refund midstream, as is suggested by the term, lol.
But at the moment I have some challenges going on in the real world, and as such am reevaluating how much time I devote to consuming and bickering over the implications of policy news anyway. If one were stalking me since last month they'd have seen my paid subscriptions on Substack drop from 4 to 1 and unpaid ones get cut back by three-quarters.
I'm not sure I'll re-up come renewal, we'll cross that bridge when I'm feeling a little bit less irritated, but I do need to spend less time arguing with you folks.
My "Who? Where?" policy on Israel-Palestine was clearly a better choice than whatever the hell I decided to do this morning.
bro bicker with me. Don't make me beg.
I hope you get your real world orders in a good and happy place, certainly prioritize that. And even if you cut back on activity here, it's still activity.
Nothing too terrible, just a few things requiring some attention.
I plan to try to stay out of the topic du jour discussions unless they’re something I have deep knowledge about. Maybe pop in in the evenings to shoot the shit on lighter topics.
Revisit this in a couple months when the subscription comes due and decide then.
Sounds good. I know there are certain times and topics when I just want to peace out, and I hope you find the right balance and still end up staying in some capacity.
Just wanted to say that I enjoy your presence in the comments section. I frequently wonder if I spend too much time in this comment section, and in the scheme of things, I don't post that much. Best of luck with your real-world challenges.
Don’t leave! You make great points and might make them even better if you moderated your tone.
The moderation here is simply the best. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but you have earned a longish leash by being a established commenter and have been allowed a nice little platform. You have been challenged and chided and respected all at once! Compare that to Hanania banning me for saying he doesn’t look like an ubermensh.
Good feedback dude, really put her in her place. I'm so sorry for you having to suffer through reading it.
We are actually paying for it though?? Like when you go to a movie and you don't like it do you bite your tongue to avoid criticizing something a lot of people worked really hard on?
Seems like a silly analogy. The people who worked hard on the movie won't be there to hear my criticisms in the car on the way home. A more analogous situation would be me patronisingly telling a young director how she should make films in front of an audience of hundreds of film fans, and yeah, I think would generally refrain from doing that.
I assume Maya was free to keep comments closed if she didn't want discussion of her article; she's also free not to read them if she doesn't want to hear it. And if anyone is just name-calling that's bad and they shouldn't do it (I got blocked by Freddie DeBoer when I called him out for doing just that that with Maya specifically). But if discussion of the article's merits is off-limits, it shouldn't be published, at least not with comments, at least not for money.
One possible difference is that you probably don't couch those criticisms in an entirely patronising comment about his writing style as if you were his English tutor.
You do see the irony in complaining about people having the nerve to disagree with and criticize your arguments, right?
Unironically, you should definitely do that. Most people find direct criticism less aggravating than patronising condescension.
EDIT: Okay, to be fair, you shouldn't be 'a brutal asshole' to anybody. But yes, be direct, that would be infinitely better.
This is ... extrapolating a lot from a small sample size.
My first thought was that because she was still in college that's why there was more pushback, and that the same would apply to Milan and has nothing to do with gender.
I have no printable remarks about this phenomenon and will thus hold my tongue.
Are you two grown men really so sensitive that you cannot handle disagreement with your criticisms without complaining about "tone policing" and people "mistak[ing] kindness for weakness"? This is an Internet comment section, it really is not that deep.
Ben Dreyfus had an insightful comment from a bystander perspective that he already knows there’s tons of anti-semites on the right, so it’s existence feels status quo. Whereas he was apparently unaware of the anti-semitism on the left, and so it’s causing him a lot more anxiety and pain
That's a reasonable reaction. I'm not shocked, for example, that a lot of Blake Masters' Twitter fans hate Jews.
https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1726718490101551422
But Elon Musk plays a very particular role in the American information ecosystem as well as crucial roles in transportation, telecommunications, etc so his views really do warrant a lot of attention I think.
Elon Musk’s antisemitic views have received a lot of attention!
And, they've gotten it, right? I've read multiple NYT articles about businesses pulling ads from Twitter in response to that tweet.
And they got it!
Ben nailed it. The guy wearing a Storm Trooper uniform and openly parading his anti-semitism doesn't worry me as much as the leftists who steep their anti-semitism in the cloak of "human rights" - I know the Storm Trooper guy's true intentions.
However, as a generally left wing Jew it's been pretty shocking to see people who claim to care about human rights completely abandon those principles when it comes to Jews, which just goes to show how much more insidious left wing anti-semitism is than from what we see on the right.
IMO this is the bravest article Slow Boring has ever published. We are 1 day out from the richest man on earth filing suit against one of his critics, backed by multiple senior Republican operatives/officials. Huge kudos to Matt for publishing it and for Maya to writing it. I shudder to think what Matt and especially Maya's engagement on Twitter looks like right now.
It is important whether the argument is it's correct. I'm astounded that this seems to be disputed. The White House said "We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms" about Musk's tweet, and I've seen numerous screenshots of random ultra-right websites high fiving about Musk, both in this case and in others.
The comments sections is full of focus on campus politics, as if two wrongs make a right, and as if students, even at Harvard, are comparable to the richest man on earth, who controls of one of the world's premier social media platforms as well as a key military communication network. Or arguments how the article could've been better crafted which, even if true, also in no way excuses Musk's conduct.
I strongly agree with the headline and the general thesis of what Maya wrote, and have not ever condoned Musk's behaviors -- whether his blatant disregard for securities laws, his willing embrace of anti-semites, his baseless charges of "pedophile" against the British caver or his general hucksterism around things like The Boring Company. His obvious genius in bringing Tesla and SpaceX and Starlink to fruition can be celebrated while still condemning all the rest. He is, in so many ways, the reincarnation of Henry Ford. I would like to see more people criticize him.
I also wish Maya would have written a better article making the case for such criticism.
I think balanced and respectful criticism as you've provided is good. Many of the comments have not been that.
Thank you! & Engagement on Twitter has been good lol
I hope you’re actually reading critical comments, too. Listening only to pandering will not serve you well in life.
Yep I am -- some of them have been a bit rude, but I am always interested in criticism (& ideally it's productive!)
Glad to hear it! I think the main disadvantage of being in a “place of privilege” is the temptation to unproductively wallow in guilt but not realize one is more likely to be coddled, flattered etc than hear harsh truths. Basically, kudos devoid of substance may feel nice but are a waste of your time.
Instead I would shut out both the guilt and the pandering and focus more on seeking out an intellectual “fight club” where you’re allowed to actually receive serious pushback to learn from rather than cruise on mediocrity facilitated connections and wealth.
Oh I'm a debater I love intellectual fight clubs :) although everyone has limits.
P.S.
Whatever your background and internal thoughts, one can and should only judge you by your public writing. Based on that I haven’t seen enough evidence that you’re aware of thought outside the most hard core “progressive” bubble. If you are - you’d do well to show it and engage with it in your writing, it would make your argument much more convincing. If you are not- you should do so. Nobody is infallible and we can’t have rational justification to conclude we’re right if we don’t actively seek out all views expressed by their proponents.
You’d do well to read Jeff G’s comment from 40 min ago. It doesn’t add much in terms of pointing your substantive failures (other pointed out you ignored the ad pull from Twitter, sane washed campus antisemitism etc). However I think it might help clarify why your writing here just puts you in a very bad light in many people’s eyes. It’s not just the problems on substance. You have serious blindspots in tone as well as substance you should address if you want to be taken seriously beyond the “woke” crowd (and eg convince those not already of your view).
Hopefully we can get kritiks outside those limits some day!
I think the part that's easy to dispute is that economic elites don't care about Musk's tweet, given how much money in ads has been pulled over it.
I read Maya's piece as critiquing prominent economic elites for their unwillingness to call out influential antisemitic voices on the right, in contrast to their concerted critique of the antisemitic (and in some cases merely anti-Zionist) left. I think this is a valid observation that's not undermined by several days' worth of corporate ad pulls affecting one (of the many) of those right wing antisemitic voices.
It's not undermined *at all*? Like it's not even relevant? Sure, Musk is "one of the many" but it's the one that two-thirds of the piece is about and the only one mentioned by the piece that's actually recent.
There is a version of this article that goes “business leaders have shown they know denouncing antisemitism is bad, it is important that they do so for right wing figures like Elon musk as well” - the title of they piece seems to suggest that this is what the article would be about.
But the last paragraph summarizes what the main focus of the article is: frustration with “punching down” at “students of color”. The comments are replying to the focus of the article.
Amen!. Put into words so much better than what I've been attempting to do.
There is nothing brave about excusing the abysmal failure of your own institution and “Stockholm syndrome” like trying to defend those hating you.
Well put.
While there is truth to the commentary about Ackman's (and other business leaders') silence or defense of Musk and others, I would highlight that you yourself are doing something very similar by actively downplaying the criticism and actions of your own Harvard peers in this framing. "Criticisms of Israel" and "debatable" antisemitism is how you describe those Harvard students who actively seek the destruction of the Jewish state, who call for violence against Jews, and who celebrated the murder of innocent civilians on 10/7.
I'm gonna make a provocative case inspired by a Ross Douthat column; similar to anti-immigration politics in the US, anti-Israel politics attracts some people with ethnic/racial prejudices, some people upset with what they see as an unjust status quo, and a lot of people who don't really know. Unlike anti-immigration politics, anti-Israel politics is much less popular, and marginal movements attract marginal people. The important question is the endgame. If anti-immigration protestors say their vision of America is a 90% supermajority of non-Hispanic whites, that's unreasonable and bad. Likewise, if anti-Israel protestors say their vision of Israel-Palestine means the removal of most Jews in the area, that's unreasonable and bad. But this is in fact not how all the groups concerned with Arabs in Palestine see the situation, which you can ask them about.
There are lots of people who want different or incoherent endgames and who sincerely believe the Israeli rightist government is mistreating the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza with American funding. They could envision that Congress cutting that funding will lead to a better outcome in the region. Likewise, one could envision Congress ending the current wave of immigration where most of the people here simply intermarry over time like they did after 1924 rather than one gigantic national pogrom going after the Slavs, Italians, and Jews. Democracy can aggregate and make peaceful sense of many conflicting, incoherent, or even bad ideas. I personally think the latter is more likely than the former, like a lot of center-right voters in the US. But people disagree.
She is ignoring well known facts, and Matt did her a disservice by not alerting her to them. It’s very bad.
#2 and #3 seem to have little distinction between them wrt this topic. I doubt the motivations of the members of 2 and 3 are so cleanly separated by race
What is the distinction?
Sometimes non-white PMCs get a really strong hate boner towards whites if they perceive themselves as sexually undesired and attribute it to their race instead of individual personal characteristics. It's basically just a weird special case of high school mentality in adults.
I think it’s probably true that antisemitism is used as a cudgel against those criticising Israel. But I don’t think these elites are only targeting the left and ignoring the right because they enjoy punching down. It seems more likely it’s the opposite, right wing cranks don’t pose any real threat to Israel or co to yes American support for Israel (the Republican Party is fully committed to defending Israel). By contrast the left, and Ivy League activists hold tons of power (culturally, through the NGOs they staff, as political staffers in the Democrat party etc). It is very easy to see how such groups can whip up support for Palestine one a way that harms Israel’s interests, both with the public and in Congress (the squad and allies).
>It seems more likely it’s the opposite, right wing cranks don’t pose any real threat to Israel or co to yes American support for Israel<
I think you're butteressing one of Maya's points: powerful people hypocritically give a pass to *right wing* antisemitism because it doesn't pose an immediate* political risk to their preferred policy outcomes. In short, nobody ever claimed hypocrisy isn't rational, or grounded in perceptions of self-interest.
(*Emphasis on "immediate." I very much doubt normalizing antisemitic rhetoric is really in the longerm policy/political interests of many of these folks. But short-termism and political expediency are rarely in short supply these days.)
I think the other fact that I think Maya correctly alludes to but maybe bears elaborating; 0.1%s are themselves a class of people who are going to defend their own.
Bill Ackman is basically in his own defending a "good ole boy" I know this phrase is really more about a very particular type of person from the South, but I think it's the same principle. They probably have met each other a number of times at say Aspen, or Jackson Hole or a variety of other venues the mega wealthy see each other. I suspect this is a huge part of Ackman's pretty asinine defense of Musk.
The other factor too is how Ackman personally feels more threatened by. A 0.1% probably feels like he's way less personally threatened by right wing bigots. Left wing Harvard students can become left wing lawyers with clout who may actually have ability to go after his business one day.
I think the other thing to consider is that Bill Ackman is just probably a POS and we should read his public pronouncements accordingly.
The white christian nationalists sitting in government and the zionist armageddonist christian voting block definitely form a greater threat to peace in the middle east, and arab and jewish life alike. Especially compared to the left wing college students and social science teachers quoting Hannah Arendt. Far more influence than actual American jews, let alone zionist jews.
This is a complete farce.
My mom worked for an evangelical magazine and wrote Christian children's books, and watched the 700 Club every day, and no one in our family has heard of Christian Zionism until I saw a Vice documentary about it. As Just Some Guy said, the support for Israel has much more to do with them being an ally of America in a region full of countries that have traditionally been enemies of/harbored enemies of America.
Evangelicals didn't use to support Israel so strongly. What do you think caused that change? I don't think 9/11 was that important, but maybe you do.
A simpler way to put it is that Evangelicals are sort of Christian Salafis, in that they wish to go back to the good old days of piety, and if you go back far enough Christianity becomes a messianic Jewish sect.
As someone who also grew up Evangelical, I would say it's understated.
The Left Behind series was a big deal, leading to a complete series, and even a rebooted movie with Nicholas Cage.
Oodles of Christians travel every year to Jerusalem and Mount Megido thinking we'll eventually fulfill the prophesy.
I wonder if this is regional? Maybe there are some states packed with Christian Zionists and they just don't communicate with the larger Evangelical world?
It's not. Davie here is just lying, which he does frequently if he thinks it'll make you mad. I also grew up evangelical, and my mom is someone who reads shit like "The Bible Code" and even *she* doesn't know about Christian Zionism.
Maybe it's much more popular in the South? I grew up in NYC/CT (and actually went to the same elementary school as Yglesias, an Episcopal school with a lot of Jewish kids). Perhaps our coastal elite-ism insulated us from some of this stuff.
Hilarious. This article lost me at “elite backlash against pro-Palestinian activism on campus, including aggressive efforts to wreck the careers of young people over their criticisms of Israel.” I.e. the first sentence. The use of code words like elite (hello, if you’re at Harvard YOU are the elite) shows me it’s going to be thumb on the scales all the way.
But I get the myopia: left antisemitism is less bad BY DEFINITION. We’re the left: the good guys. “We can’t do an antisemitism! Get serious!”
Why even bother? “Oh the poor things won’t take their place in the PMC.” Now pretend the students were burning crosses instead of merely calling for Palestine to be Judenrein.
And as always ideologues are tone-deaf. Maybe a little more attention to affect: the foaming rage and violence that has characterized the “Palestinian activists.” (And concomitant need for Jews to hide in libraries (Cooper Union), shelter in place (Cornell), etc.) Meanwhile millions (yes millions) of Afghans are being forcibly displaced from Pakistan. The left: crickets. Just like the crickets as Syria has killed Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands. Spare me the hypocrisy.
I mean I understand it’s gotta be rough when your whole life you thought of yourself as on the side of the angels, and it turns out your team is deeply uninterested in 2000 years of persecution. I guess that’s why Matty trotted out this woman. But more “it’s not anti-antisemitism, it’s covert racism”? Fuck off out of here with that.
That’s pretty much sums it up nicely!
Thx.
Wasn't there a new round of companies pulling ad funding from Twitter? That should count as not ignoring.
Speaking of which, I do thank Elon for turning that site into such garbage (mostly by promoting awful blue checks) my usage has dropped 90%+ over the last year.
Elon's tweet reads to me more like appreciating a "Leopards Eating People's Faces Party"-ish meme (about woke jews being betrayed by wokeness) than endorsing great replacement theory.
I think its notable that the form of anti-semitism Musk seems to sign is is more malicious than the form seen on the Left.
It at least very much seems that anti-semitism on the Left comes from a "good" place. Basically, it comes from looking at at the Israel-Palestine conflict and siding with the Palestinians as the side they see as being oppressed. Opposition to Israel sometimes gets expanded to Jewish people more broadly on the assumption that they support Israel. While I don't agree with them (I tend to support Israel) it's not entirely irrational or really based on Jewishness. The Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and, while I tend to side a bit more with Israel, I don't think that siding with the Palestinians is irrational. They shouldn't allow their criticism of Israel to spill over to Jewish people broadly, but its amazingly common for people to do this (look at prejudice against Germans during WWI and WWII, Japanese during WWII, Arabs/Muslims during the war kn terrorism, Chinese as the cold war with China has started up). And, in the case of Israel, there is some truth to the idea that the average American Jewish person probably at least broadly supports Israel. This isn't to defend the Left, exactly, but to point out that anti-semitism on the Left is fairly banal and would likely be mostly or entirely resolved through a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
On the other hand, anti-semitism of the right tends to be more insidious. It isn't rooted in a legitimate position on a complicated issue, it's rooted in conspiracy theories and beliefs that Jewish people are inherently evil and plotting against non-Jews. There isnt really a way to look at it and say "i see where they are coming from, but they've made some errors or gone to far." This is the sort of anti-Semitism Musk is trading.
You touch on a point that I’ve been thinking about recently. It is common amongst elites, even heterodox types, to malign the right as bad all the way down. But the left is often given the “but they have good intentions” caveat, even when disagreeing with them.
I think that bad people with bad ideas are less dangerous than good people with bad ideas. Good people get the benefit of the doubt. That can be the difference between their bad ideas taking hold or not.
In the future, I am going to consciously give less quarter to “good people” with bad ideas.
There has been a lot of cheering of dead Russians. I personally think this sort thing is bad and feel bad for the Russians killed in Ukraine, many of whom were drafted, and their families, even if I think their deaths are necessary. But I also think that this way of thinking is so common that I'm the outlier and can see how it easily translates over to a Palestinian partisan celebrating 10/7.
Hi Maya,
I appreciate that it must be hard to write a piece and then publish it and get so many negative comments. Hang in there!
I'll try to say it as gently and politely as I can, and I'm offering this in good faith, not trying to add to the pile-on:
I think your piece would have been received better had you not evaded the difference between "pro-Palestine" and "pro-Hamas" or "pro-terrorism." You repeatedly use the word "pro-Palestine" to refer to protesters who cheered on the Hamas massacre, who repeated the phrase "from the river to the sea" (implying the destruction of Israel and the expulsion or extermination of Israel Jews), and who claimed that the Jews had it coming to them.
There are ways to be pro-Palestine and anti-Hamas. Nick Kristof, a highly respected opinion columnist for the NYT, has done so repeatedly since 10/7, and no one has cancelled him (although many commenters accused him of being a bleeding heart). The thing is, he unequivocally condemns Hamas, and his pro-Palestine stance is along the lines of "the lives of innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians are as precious as Jewish lives" and "how terrible that Gazan children have been killed by IDF" and the like.
Had Harvard students protested the loss of innocent civilian life in Gaza without supporting/glorifying Hamas's hideous actions, the reaction would have been very, very different.
None of this is to excuse Musk, whom I used to admire as a forward-thinking inventor, and who has revealed himself to be a scumbag.
I'm really sorry to hear that. That's horrible. No one should be cancelled for lamenting the loss of innocent life or for feeling sorry for civilians on the "other side."
I thought the letter was pretty bad. Like, not “should forever be expelled from polite society” bad, but certainly something that would put someone’s job at risk during such a fraught time.
Kristoff has been great. He’s never said anything close to what this letter did.