Professional development mailbag

Salami, antisemitism, and a defense of endowments

To grievance-monger for a bit, DCPS students had a day off last week for Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day and then Veterans’ Day is coming in early November, followed by three days off for Thanksgiving. Somehow, sandwiched between all these holidays, Thursday and Friday of this week the school is also closed for professional development days.

For us in the Slow Boring family, it’s all perfectly workable. But it’s incredibly inconvenient for people with real jobs and I think an underrated problem in the family policy space. At a minimum, consolidate the days off so people can take trips or try to make arrangements with grandparents.

Sigh.

At any rate, median family income hit an all-time high last year (and, to the best of our knowledge, has continued rising this year), as did median household net worth. I know the economy is terrible and everything, but that seems pretty good! I really liked Sarah Mervosh’s account of the high-performing school system run by the US Department of Defense. Important thread here about the significance of California’s new AB 1633 housing law. I’m excited about “Ferrari.”

Now let’s do some questions.

David Muccigrosso: Settle a debate for me. Does the recent hard-left praise for Hamas represent “the same old antisemitism,” or should it be thought of as a newer phenomenon tied up in overboiled anti-imperialist rhetoric?

It’s a little bit both and a little bit neither. I think the key thing is that American racial politics transmogrifies certain kinds of sentiments that are conceptually right-wing as located on the political left. After all, what is Hamas? It’s a Palestinian nationalist branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a fundamentalist politico-religious movement. Religious nationalist movements are right-wing!

Bibi Netanyahu’s Knesset coalition of religious and nationalist parties represents the right of Israeli politics. And Hamas is the right of Palestinian politics.