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- Is This Anything?

REVIEW | 2 AUG 2024, 9:08 PM UTC | UPDATED 5 AUG 2024, 5:27 PM UTC

Is This Anything?

Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise reproduces the nullity at the heart of contemporary American Jewish life.

Mitchell Abidor

Discussed in this essay: Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Random House, 2024. 464 pages.

Displayed prominently on a bookshelf in my living room is a framed cartoon by Liana Finck. The comic depicts two roughly-drawn figures with speech bubbles above their heads, with only one word exchanged back and forth: “Jews.” (The same word, placed in a parenthetical below the caricatures, wittily clarifies their identity.) This print has always struck me as a perfect skewering of me and the many people I know who, if denied the ability to use the word “Jews” or any of its cognates, would be rendered mute.

I thought of this image often while reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s new novel, Long Island Compromise; over the course of its 400-plus pages, we are nearly drowned in a flood of “Jewish” this and “Jewish” that. But oddly and significantly, as I reached the conclusion of the tome, I realized that Finck’s cartoon has more depth than Brodesser-Akner’s book, which struggles to say anything of substance about being a Jew in America today. If the cartoon carries almost novelistic weight, Long Island Compromise never reaches far beyond the level of a cartoon.

This is not to deny that the novel is, for the most part, a fun read. It manages to entertain even as the main characters—members of the wealthy Fletcher family of Middle Rock, an imagined Long Island suburb where the Jewish population exceeds 50% of the total—eventually wear on the reader. The novel opens with the kidnapping of Carl Fletcher, owner of a polystyrene factory inherited from his Holocaust survivor father. He is released after his ransom is paid, but he is never the same: Once a formidable figure, he’s left a wreck of a man who can’t function in the world. In the wake of his trauma, his domineering mother, Phyllis, rules the family—her coldness is rivaled only by that of Carl’s wife, Ruth. After recounting Carl’s abduction, Long Island Compromise tells the story of his three children. Beamer, the eldest, is an unhappily married screenwriter whose professional star fades, triggering his descent into a life of drugs and sexual debauchery. Middle child Nathan is the straightest arrow of the three (which isn’t saying much): He’s a failure of a lawyer, a spineless individual in all regards, and father to twin sons stereotypically named Ari and Josh. The youngest child, Jenny, born after her father’s rescue, is brilliant, but unable to connect with anyone in her life, a detachment she attempts to make up for with her work as a left-wing organizer. The family is, to put it mildly, a mess, and Brodesser-Akner wrings much comedy and pathos out of their plight.

This is all well and good for a literary page-turner, but Long Island Compromise seems to have greater ambitions. Brodesser-Akner has sometimes shied away from the notion that the novel is defined by its Jewishness, saying, for instance, that she doesn’t think of this title or her previous novel Fleishman Is in Trouble as “Jewish books” so much as “books with Jews in them.” Yet the novel’s obsessive preoccupation with American Jewishness suggests that it takes the subject quite seriously—and has something to say about it. The Times was right to call this her “big American Reform Jewish Novel”; the question is what this collection of identity markers adds up to at this point in history.

Brodesser-Akner certainly knows her Jews. She paints an apt and amusing portrait of the Fletchers’ social world, replete with references to the bowling league of the women’s Zionist group Hadassah and to the Sisterhood of the family’s synagogue. The shul’s obsequious Rabbi Weintraub is at the beck and call of materfamilias Phyllis, owing to her affluence and largesse. Even just the names of the secondary characters kept me chuckling throughout the book; Sarah Messinger-Schlesinger was a particular favorite. But despite the novel’s copious allusions to Jewish life, it gradually emerges that Jewishness for the Fletchers—and within Long Island Compromise—is ultimately a hollow enterprise.

For the older generation, Jewishness manifests primarily as a close-minded suspicion of outsiders—a nasty, reflexive opposition to intermarriage and a pathological fear of antisemitism. (When Jenny entertains the idea of going to Berkeley, her grandmother insists that it’s filled with Israel-hating antisemites; curiously, Israel is otherwise almost totally absent from the novel.) But for the younger characters at the book’s center, it barely manifests at all beyond superficial signifiers. They are the fully deracinated children of the American Dream. Accordingly, the novel’s most extended engagement with Jewishness, Nathan’s twins’ lavish bar mitzvah, only highlights the completion of assimilation. The yarmulkes are emblazoned with the Knicks’ logo, and the religious ritual—itself an anemic, sentimental affair—is a mere prelude to a pageant of upper-class Americanness with a Jewish coating. The Fletchers are not alone in this syncretism, to be sure; the history of the Jews in America since the 20th century has been defined by this melding of worlds. But as we can see in this novel, while the collision once proved generative, we have arrived at a juncture where it has no content—a nullity that Brodesser-Akner seems less interested in interrogating than in simply reproducing.

At least one other critic—The Forward’s Mira Fox—likewise found Brodesser-Akner’s approach to American Jewish life wanting. But Fox argues that Jewishness in Long Island Compromise is less empty than exhaustingly familiar, a re-retreading of a Rothian mode of “visceral, all-consuming, generational anxiety.” Brodesser-Akner has confessed to a passion for Philip Roth, writing in the Times in 2018 that until she read him, she “didn’t really know what it meant to be a Jew.” But even as the novel bears his influence in its satirical approach to its often pathetic characters, all of this feels lacquered over its Jewish milieu rather than of a piece with it. While all three Fletcher children are screwed-up, they bear no specifically Jewish scars. If only the author would at least attempt to revive the tried and true mid-century trope of the Jewish neurotic, in which both words have equal weight. Alex Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint, after all, could not be written about as he was if he were a gentile, nor could Bernard Malamud’s many miserable leads; they are haunted and molded by the particular upheavals and opportunities of their existence as Jews in America.

If Long Island Compromise is at all exemplary of contemporary American Jewish fiction, its failure as such forces us to ask: What happened to this once-eminent form and why? What was it that produced the works of Roth, Malamud, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Joseph Heller, Edward Lewis Wallant, and Grace Paley (and before them, Budd Schulberg, Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, and Mike Gold)? One key feature unites such works: the presence of a specifically Jewish history. For instance, in What Makes Sammy Run?—Schulberg’s 1941 chronicle of an unscrupulous, witty, and thoroughly obnoxious young Jew’s progress to the top of Hollywood—the narrator traces protagonist Sammy Glick’s success back to his origins in the Jewish slums of New York and his drive to leave his background behind forever. He is the archetype of the American-born child of Jewish immigrants, Jewish American history personified.

Many of these works are quite direct in their confrontation with distinct Jewish historical patterns of migration, oppression, and loss: To name just a few, Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) tracks the ascent of a greenhorn in the new land; Wallant’s The Pawnbroker (1961) follows a survivor of the camps, who now drags the weight of that experience with him everywhere he goes; and Malamud’s The Fixer (1966) recounts the story of the “Beilis affair,” a notorious 1913 blood-libel case in Kiev. But among the novels of the great age of Jewish fiction, even those most seemingly unconcerned with history bear the imprint of the Jewish past in the tale and in its telling. One example among many: In the climactic moment of the titular novella from Roth’s collection Goodbye, Columbus (1959), narrator Neil Klugman reads the letter that the father of his girlfriend, Brenda Patimkin, sent her after finding her diaphragm while she’s away at college. Neil makes a point of underlining the errors and odd capitalizations in the missive. This simple moment is a précis of American Jewish history. We understand without being told that Brenda’s father, the first-generation plumbing supply man, has not attended school; now his daughter is at a good college and on her way to full immersion in America. Neil, in his mockery of the letter and its writer, is a classic third-generation American Jew. The struggles of those who came before him are something to be left behind, and we can easily imagine that his children will do just that.

The characters at the center of Long Island Compromise are essentially those descendants, and the novel is marked by the glaring absence of Jewish history as a force in their lives. Sure, Grandpa Zelig fled the Holocaust, but this is more a convenient plot device than an albatross around the necks of his children and grandchildren. Indeed, these American Jews, like so many others who generations into their arrival in this country, are post-historical—or else the end of the Jewish American historical line. In Long Island Compromise as in many other recent works, this literary assimilationism has deprived Jewish fiction of its unique punch.

None of this is to say that the Jewish American writer is completely a thing of the past, or that no such writers have managed to wrestle with modern Jews’ relationship to (or severance from) their history. Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander, who place history at the center of their novels, still possess some of the force of their predecessors. Tova Reich’s My Holocaust (2007)—an ingenious satire about the Holocaust as a replacement for Judaism as a religion—seemingly solves the problem of the emptiness by probing it directly. But it is revealing that on The New York Times’ recent list of the “100 best books of the 21st century,” the one most freighted with Jewish history is Austerlitz, by the non-Jewish German writer W.G. Sebald, who was haunted by the crimes of his nation. While a few Jewish authors do appear—like Michael Chabon, for his stunning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, two of the spots belong to the old faithful Philip Roth, and there are more books by George Saunders (three) and Elena Ferrante (three) taken together than by all Jewish novelists combined.

There is nothing to be surprised about in this. As Yiddish and Ladino have faded, religion has lost its grip, and assimilation has run its course, Jewish writers have quite naturally had less experience of or interest in the particular textures of Jewishness that made the former wave of writers so great, and have understandably struggled to make much of what remains. Long Island Compromise proves that two qualities that haven’t been lost are humor and the ability to tell a tale, and that’s not nothing. But is it something?

A previous version of this article misstated the original language of Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky and misidentified a novel by Bernard Malamud.

Mitchell Abidor, a contributing writer to Jewish Currents, is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn. Among his books are a translation of Victor Serge’s Notebooks 1936-1947, May Made Me: An Oral History of My 1968 in France, and I’ll Forget it When I Die, a history of the Bisbee Deportation of 1917. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Liberties, Dissent, The New York Review of Books, and many other publications.

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Chevruta

- (How) Should We Vote?

CHEVRUTA | 1 AUG 2024, 6:06 PM UTC | UPDATED 1 AUG 2024, 6:09 PM UTC

(How) Should We Vote?

An investigation through Jewish text on the ethics of choosing the “lesser of two evils.”

Raphael Magarik in conversation with Rania Batrice

Chevruta is a column that aims to address the ethical and spiritual problems confronting the left. For each installment of the column—named for the traditional method of Jewish study, in which a pair of students analyzes a religious text together—Jewish Currents will match leftist thinkers and organizers with a rabbi or Torah scholar. The activists will bring an urgent question that arises in their own work; the Torah scholar will lead them in exploring their question through Jewish text. By routing contemporary political questions through traditional religious sources, we hope to discover new and unexpected avenues for inquiry into today’s most pressing problems.

You can find an audio version of this conversation here, and a stand-alone source sheet for group study here.

Should leftists vote for the Democratic nominee in the 2024 presidential election? Many have balked at supporting an administration that has funded and armed Israel’s ongoing massacre of Palestinians in Gaza; some are refusing to vote outright, while others are conditioning their vote on a dramatic shift in policy. In February, more than 100,000 Democrats in the swing state of Michigan voted “uncommitted” in the state’s primary to protest Biden’s support for the war on Gaza. Although Biden has now dropped out of the race, and will almost certainly be replaced by his vice president, Kamala Harris, this question remains live. To be sure, animus on the left and among Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans has understandably concentrated on “Genocide Joe,” and there is some speculation that Harris might pivot to the left on Israel. She has made remarks signaling a shift in tone, and she chose not to preside over Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to Congress; nonetheless, she has otherwise spoken and acted in lockstep with the president.

This year, with the sponsors of Israeli atrocities squaring off against a far-right, authoritarian Donald Trump, the stakes feel especially high. But American leftists have long debated our relationship to electoral politics, and to the Democratic Party in particular. Do we choose the lesser of two evils, holding our noses and “voting blue no matter who” in order to avert the environmental, labor, and social catastrophes (to name just a few) that would result from a Republican presidency? Or are there acts that are too morally outrageous to permit such a utilitarian calculus? And regardless of what we choose, are there ways to think about the meaning of voting that go beyond the pieties of mainstream liberal discourse?

I explored these questions with Rania Batrice, a first-generation Palestinian American and political strategist who has devoted her career to electoral work, including as Bernie Sanders’s 2016 deputy campaign manager. She brought a keen awareness of the multiple overlapping and conflicting imperatives confronting progressive voters. For the basis of our conversation—which was recorded while Biden was still running—I chose a legal responsum by Rabbi Menashe Klein, the spiritual leader of the Ungvar Hasidic community in Brooklyn. Klein was known for his extreme antipathy to American public life, permitting tax evasion and prohibiting his Hasidim from serving on juries or studying secular subjects in yeshivas. In this responsum, he grapples with the concern that in voting for a candidate, one might become responsible for their actions in office, many of which would presumably violate Jewish law. While the acts that offend Klein differ radically from those that distress Batrice and me, his wrestling with the question resonated with our own hesitations on many points. His responsum imagines voting differently than it is usually imagined in American political culture, casting it not as a matter of individual conscience, but of bloc solidarity; not as expressive of our deepest values, but as reluctant harm reduction; and performed not out of gratitude to our system of government, but rather with a deep ambivalence to it. I hope our discussion of Klein’s text might help others who are grappling with the question of how to think through their options in the November election.

—Raphael Magarik

Raphael Magarik: Rania, I’d like to start by asking you to tell me a little bit about yourself and what’s bringing you to this question.

Rania Batrice: I’m a first generation Palestinian American. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life working at the intersection of electoral politics, policy creation and advocacy, and coalition building. I was Bernie Sanders’s deputy campaign manager in 2016, and a lot of my work for the last several years has been at the federal level. I’ve done this work for 24 years, and I have felt very clear—even when somebody wasn’t ideal or wasn’t my first pick—that we absolutely had to show up and exercise our right to vote. And while there is still a part of me that is holding onto that, this election cycle, for the first time in my life, it just doesn’t feel so straightforward. We’re facing a very clear existential threat with a second Donald Trump administration. It’s not really a secret what the consequences are. And that pulled so many of us in, in 2020, even if Joe Biden wasn’t our first or even tenth choice. We all fell in line, as we tend to do when we’re facing concurrent crises and existential threats. But it’s not that easy this cycle, because we’re talking about a president who has literally been funding and facilitating genocide. Obviously this is very personal, though even if it weren’t the genocide of my people, I think I would feel the same way. So it’s not so easy this time to just say, “Oh, but it would be so much worse under Donald Trump.”

Raphael: When I was thinking about this question, my mind immediately went to Haredi writers, because I was looking for someone who had a doubled relationship to American democracy. That is to say, in the liberal world, you see a lot of celebration of America’s democratic system of government, the electoral system––Isn’t it wonderful? Everyone should vote with enthusiasm! And that’s not where I think you and I are this year. We are torn and conflicted. So I looked for a source by someone who also felt conflicted, albeit for very different reasons. Someone who felt that America was a place with which they have a vexed relationship—that there are parts they like, but also parts they’re frightened of, and things about voting that frighten them.

We’re going to study a text by Rabbi Menashe Klein.[1] He was born in 1924 in Czechoslovakia and was a Holocaust survivor who was interned in Auschwitz-Birkenau. After the war, he helped recreate the Hasidic community of his childhood—the Ungvar Hasidic dynasty—as the community’s rebbe in Borough Park, Brooklyn.

Klein was a radical figure, known for his sharp rejection of American public culture. For instance, some of his other legal decisions barred his Hasidim from serving on juries or testifying in a secular courtroom. And he absolutely forbade secular learning in the yeshivas that he helped create. He wrote this responsum, or legal answer, sometime in the 1990s in response to a question from one of his followers. Obviously, we’re not treating this text as an authoritative legal source. Rather, I hope that by learning it together, we can deepen our thinking about the problem that you already articulated so sharply. So why don’t you read the question, and we can chew it over together?

Rania reads.

Does one who votes in an election for government have a portion of responsibility for the actions of the elected?

Raphael: What is the question? Can you paraphrase it?

Rania: If I vote for somebody who ends up doing awful, atrocious things, do I, as the individual who voted for them, hold some responsibility?

Raphael: Immediately what I jumped to is: I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. The over 40,000 dead in Gaza, how many of them are on my hands? That would be one version of this question. On the other hand, we vote only for elected officials. We don’t get to vote for AIPAC or Christians United for Israel, or any number of other organizations or structural forces that shape political outcomes. There might be limits on how responsible we are because we’re not voting in a vacuum.

Rania: So often people will run for office and go in with the very best of intentions. And there’s that slippery slope, the small compromises that have you giving up your moral compass. I’ve watched it happen. And so there’s that reality too. Somebody might go in with a steadfast ideology and not come out that way.

Raphael: Implicit in what you’re saying is that there are also different ways of thinking about our own responsibility. Are we responsible for the person’s character? Are we responsible for their overall ideology? Or are we responsible for each and every single thing that they do? Those will each produce different answers.

I’m going to ask you to read Klein’s answer, but I’m going to preface it by saying that towards the end of the paragraph, you’ll see him use this expression, “haters of Israel,” which is a euphemism for the Jewish people. There’s a superstition about saying something bad about the Jewish people, so when you’re going to do that, you use this contronym or euphemism to refer to them indirectly.

Rania reads.

When one participates in an election, it seems as if he were joining and becoming part of all the activities, the policies, and the country, as if he were a part of them and their masses. The candidates and the government claim that every citizen in the state is, generally and particularly, part of the state and that by means of the election, he shows a sense of commitment with respect to the entire country and is a good citizen and a fellow to everyone. But we are obliged as much as possible to separate from them, as it is written, “I have set you apart from other peoples to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26); “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6); and not to be part of the nations, “even when they are in the land of their enemies” (Leviticus 26:44). On the contrary, in the land of the nations, one needs additional distancing, so as not to draw close to them, or God forbid, to mingle with them. Go and see what has happened in our great sins to them and their children. The memory of the haters of Israel has almost, God forbid, disappeared, been wiped away by assimilation, all because of getting too close to them and their ways.

Raphael: What would you say his fears about voting are?

Rania: He really names it. He says the fear is assimilation, the co-mingling of people and ideologies.

I feel conflicted about this thought process. Growing up, as in so many immigrant families, my parents went through an experience of persecution and danger, and then they made it to this country, and had this mentality of: Don’t rock the boat. We’re here, and we’re safe. Keep your head down, blend in. My parents are convinced that I’m going to be killed in the street at any moment because I have strong opinions, and I don’t hide them, and I’m a Palestinian woman, and I don’t hide that either. They live in constant fear for me and my safety. And I don’t like it because I do believe assimilation is how we lose our traditions and our culture—our art and music and language. So there’s part of me that feels connected to that anti-assimilationist streak in what he’s saying. But when it comes to civic participation, there’s the other side of me that thinks that if we remove ourselves, then we literally have no representation. We have no voice in that process. We have no part to play in any of the decisions that are made. So I think I exist with a foot on both sides of that line.

Raphael: Certainly one of his fears is cultural, religious, and linguistic assimilation. But I also think he’s naming something different from that, which is political assimilation. As he says, “the candidates and the government claim that every citizen in the state is intimately connected to the state.” When you vote, you might have your own intentions, but Joe Biden or Kamala Harris are going to construe your vote as if you are endorsing American imperial policy. They will construe your vote as support for the civic religion of American elections. And that’s related to, but also somewhat separate from, cultural or religious assimilation: You’re being brought in as a kind of junior partner in the state project when you vote.

Rania: There’s something to that. If you participate, you’re co-signing. We actually hear this from politicians. Just recently we heard Biden say, “all these people voted for me in this primary,” as a way of claiming legitimacy. He’s the incumbent! There was no primary! But the reality doesn’t matter.

Raphael: If you just had this paragraph from Klein, how would you guess he was going to come down on voting?

Rania: My guess is he’s going to say: No, no voting.

Raphael: Certainly seems so.

Okay, let’s take the second paragraph.

Rania reads.

But on the other hand, in the cities of Europe, the righteous and the leaders of the generation would vote, make efforts, and participate in elections. Also, if we come out against everything, there’s a concern of provoking enmity, which they [i.e. the rabbis] were very concerned about, and especially in a country which, to its credit, gives freedom to all Jews and which, as it currently exists, is a government of kindness. And thus, everyone needs to take a position according to the need of the moment.

Raphael: Now he seems to pivot! What are the reasons he gives for voting?

Rania: It’s interesting because he seemed very clear in the previous paragraph, almost unwavering on the issue, but here he’s talking about how we live in this society, so we can’t come out against everything. He’s talking about the kindness of this country and the freedom that it has afforded.

Raphael: In this last paragraph, you have a sense of him as someone completely traumatized by his experience with a secular government in Europe—a state that became genocidal against Jews. But Klein wants to distinguish between, say, Nazi Germany and the United States, and actually sees the United States positively, at least for the moment.

Rania: Which he says—“as it currently exists.”

Raphael: There is a wonderful sense of him giving credit to America, but in a completely disillusioned way, like, “Who knows? Tomorrow might be different.”

So he has started to pivot, and now he’s going to try and lay out his theory of how this might work. I want to set the stage by explaining one detail: It’s prohibited for Jews to eat on Yom Kippur. There’s a carve out if there’s a health risk. No one is supposed to get sick and die, God forbid, on Yom Kippur. You eat, but the twist is that you eat as little as you can manage to keep yourself healthy, which means you eat little by little. He’s going to use that as an analogy related to voting.

Rania reads.

There’s no way to judge this matter generally; rather everything depends on the place and time. Choose the lesser evil. The matter hinges on each particular candidate that has been set to vote for according to the government’s laws. It is analogous to someone who is sick on Yom Kippur who is fed little by little, i.e. as little as necessary for their health. So too, if there are before us two candidates, one must weigh between them and choose the lesser evil. Certainly, if there is a candidate which will walk in the ways of the Torah, it is preferable to one that will not walk in the ways of the Torah . . . As was said, such a matter really belongs to the leaders of the generation to determine. Thus, in the states of Europe, the leaders of the generation would determine exactly how to behave. One needs to judge this matter according to the needs of the moment . . . and not every person is able to judge such a case.

Raphael: How does Klein think that you should vote?

Rania: It’s interesting because I think a lot of us feel this way during lots of election cycles: You hold your nose, and you vote for the lesser of the two evils.

Raphael: To offer an analogy, I think he’s describing voting as a kind of harm reduction. In essence, he’s saying: Look, methadone is a terrible drug and no one would ever choose to take methadone. But it’s better than heroin. And in fact, heroin at a state facility with a clean needle is a lot better than heroin on the street. That is Klein’s view of voting: not a beautiful thing, but a form of methadone, a way of avoiding something worse.

Rania: I also appreciate that he’s leaving space to examine what is happening at that particular moment in time, in history.

Raphael: Right. Usually a legal responsum delivers a clear-cut answer to a question. And what you’re highlighting is that this responsum refuses to give an answer. This is not a question that can be answered in the ordinary way. I can’t say: “Here is the rule. Now follow it.” This one is a subtle problem of judgment and circumstance. Just because you’ve been holding your nose and voting for the lesser of two evils for 20 years, it might not mean that it’s right to do that in this circumstance.

So what does voting mean for Klein?

Rania: He says it’s up to the leadership to determine how you, the voter, behave. I struggle with that. I was raised Catholic; I went to Catholic school for ten years, and it was—let’s just say—not good. I have an issue with that kind of religious authority. It feels a bit offensive to me, like: You don’t know any better. I’m going to pat you on the head and tell you what to think and you just go pull the lever I tell you to pull.

But I also recognize that not everybody has time to do the deep-dive research, and so when you have somebody like a faith leader giving you advice, it’s human nature to say, “Well, I trust this person.”

Raphael: And, of course, in New York in the second half of the 20th century and beyond, this is how Hasidim actually vote; that is to say, they generally vote in blocs on instruction from the leadership, who make specific transactional deals with elected politicians. And so what we’re getting here is a description—in Jewish religious language—of what we might call machine voting or bloc voting. It’s different from the idea that we vote to express our conscience or realize our deepest commitments in the world. Here, voting is an act of discipline undertaken by an individual who joins with a group to achieve a specific end, and to get some benefit from the state in return.

Rania: Indeed, voting blocs are commonplace. It allows a group of people—whether they’re united by religion or race or anything else—to consolidate enough power to demand attention and resources from politicians. There is something to that; you can’t get too mad about it.

This is Klein’s answer to the worry that voting assimilates you into an American state project: Klein wants you to vote—and feel alienated while doing so.

Raphael: I think this is Klein’s implicit answer to the worry that voting assimilates you into an American state project and civic religion. Klein wants you to vote—and wants you to feel alienated while doing so; that is to say, he wants you to experience voting not as an expression of your core being, but as an impersonal thing, like going to the dentist or getting your car repaired. And I think there is a certain power in thinking about voting that way—simply not as something that relates to my deepest self, but as something I do as an impersonal kind of maintenance.

Why don’t we read the last paragraph?.

Rania reads.

In truth, if a person does not participate in the election, maybe by means of this one will elect a destroyer, who is even worse than the person one was considering voting for. One should choose the lesser evil. As it is written in the Talmud, “to nullify one before the other”[2]: Both are not good, but nonetheless, one should choose the lesser evil and nullify the worse [option] . . . Thus, one needs to ask a sage in these matters and not decide for oneself.

Raphael: What do you think about this idea that if you sit out 2024, you’re voting for a destroyer, Donald Trump?

Rania: This one felt like a gut punch to me. I’m fixated on the word “destroyer,” because it elicits a very vivid picture in my mind. Thinking about this specific moment in time—the destruction of the planet; the destruction of humanity; the continued dehumanization of people based on race, religion, sexual orientation, gender—it’s very real to me. I feel it very deeply. And then, I feel conflicted at the same time because I’m also thinking of the destruction that Joe Biden is perpetrating, the dehumanization that he is responsible for. Is he the only one? No, of course not. But he absolutely took that ball and ran with it and repeated lies from behind the seal of the president. It could get worse, obviously. And yet the destruction is happening. It’s not theoretical, like, “this could happen.” It’s happening right now, actively. And our president, the president that I worked so hard to help elect, is funding and facilitating and excusing that destruction.

Raphael: The language is so poignant: “a destroyer.” I’m not sure what to make of this, but the Hebrew word “hamashchit” is the same word used to describe the destroying angel who kills the firstborns during the ten plagues in Egypt: a quasi-apocalyptic image of a society being dismantled, of people dying en masse. And, of course, what you’re saying is exactly right: What do you do when one candidate is very clearly a kind of destroyer, but the other one isn’t not a destroyer—or is a different kind of destroyer?

Stepping back: Do you think that Klein has answered the initial question?

Rania: I think he has. But by speaking out of both sides of his mouth. In the early part of his answer, it’s this vehement “do not assimilate.” And then we end with “hold your nose and do it,” under the guidance of religious leadership.

Raphael: Some of this may be the genre—Jewish legal writing often has this kind of torturous back and forth. But you’ve helped me see that this is not an ordinary legal question that can be answered straightforwardly. I also think that perhaps, part of how he’s answering the question is by saying, “If you vote the way I’m suggesting, you don’t have to bear responsibility for your vote.” That is to say, the leader of the community will take the responsibility, and it’s on them.

Rania: It just popped into my head that if we were having this conversation in 2020, this would feel much more black and white to me. And it’s so interesting because we’re looking at the exact same candidates four years later, and it’s completely gray and confusing and torturous. If I think about it from a strictly academic perspective and not from an emotional one, it’s a really interesting conundrum, but when I tap back into my humanity, it’s devastating that we’re in this moment.

Raphael: Part of what you’re highlighting is, of course, that you and I don’t have a rebbe that we’re comfortable outsourcing our decisions to. So in some sense, whatever else is useful in this text, that particular answer isn’t that relevant to us. I wonder if there is anything from the text that you are taking with you.

Rania: Even though I’m stuck in this very gray area regarding the top of the ticket, this text still feels applicable to the down ballot races coming up, to the responsibility to ensure that there are better people that get elected into different offices.

But part of the conflict I’m feeling is the thought of our democracy as being only a form of harm reduction. My deep desire is to be somewhere different, for it not to be just about harm reduction but to contain the possibility of actually dismantling and rebuilding a system which is in service of something we can believe in, rather than just trying to put our fingers in all the leaky points. That’s obviously incredibly aspirational, especially this election cycle. For a lot of people, especially young people, there’s this idea of a complete exit from electoralism, an urge to burn it all down. And I understand that urge. I feel it. But I still think that when we completely exit, we have no impact. We have no influence. We have no part in what is happening now—the harm reduction—but also no part in what is hopefully going to be built in the future.

Raphael: I think what makes things work for Klein is that he can be cynical and pessimistic about the electoral system because he has this other sphere of life—the religious world of the synagogue, the yeshiva, and the household—that he is idealistic about and believes is redemptive. And for myself, I’m pessimistic about elections, but I’m optimistic about social movements outside of the voting booth. And so I hope, for instance, that my union will grow and flourish and will make a difference in the world. You can’t be pessimistic and cynical about everything. You can only manage to be a cynical voter if there’s another sphere of life that you care about. Part of what I hear from you is that you’re someone with a deep yearning and hope that the electoral system could be that sphere, could be something different—that this is not the limits of what is possible for American elections or American democracy.

Rania: That’s exactly right. And that’s the struggle. This work makes me want to bang my head against the wall most days. But I am still here doing it, because I don’t believe it has to be this way. And those more nefarious powers-that-be would love nothing more than for us to exit and let them take over. But it’s an act of resistance to continue banging on the door and saying, “this is not enough.”

Footnotes

1

1924–2011

2

The Talmud (bSotah 48a) claims that two forms of singing each promote licentiousness, but Rav Yosef, a 4th-century sage, nonetheless prohibits one form and permits the other based on considerations about which is worse.

Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.

RaffiMagarik

Rania Batrice is a political strategist who has worked at the intersection of politics, policy and advocacy for over 24 years.

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Analysis

- A Legal Justification for Genocide

ANALYSIS | 17 JUL 2024, 7:53 PM UTC | UPDATED 26 JUL 2024, 2:14 PM UTC

A Legal Justification for Genocide

By expanding the human shielding charge to every inch of Gaza, Israel is using a familiar strategy at an unprecedented scale.

Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon

The destruction around al-Shifa Hospital following an Israeli besiegement, April 2nd.

Omar Ishaq/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

On October 27th, in advance of its first invasion of al-Shifa—the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip—the Israeli military released a clip of a three-dimensional model of the medical facility that purported to show how Hamas was using it as its “main headquarters,” with tunnels located directly underneath the medical wards ostensibly serving as a base for the group’s military operations. Following these allegations, which were continuously reiterated by Israel’s military spokesperson and parroted by international media, Israeli forces raided al-Shifa on November 15th. At the time when the soldiers entered the hospital, at least 650 patients and 7,000 displaced Palestinians were still on the premises, but Israel claimed that these people were “human shields” for Hamas; it then proceeded to attack the facility and those within it, damaging the surgical operation room building, blowing up a warehouse storing medicine and medical equipment, blindfolding and interrogating hundreds before taking them to “unknown areas,” and shooting at anyone who tried to flee. Following the attack, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said that 179 bodies were found inside the compound. Israel used similar justifications to besiege the hospital yet again in March, and by the end of that month, it had completely destroyed al-Shifa, transforming its grounds into a mass grave.

Over the past nine months, this pattern has been repeated hundreds of times, with Israel bombing and raiding Gaza’s hospitals, refugee camps, clinics, houses, apartment buildings, children’s pools, schools, universities, mosques, cemeteries, and agricultural lands, all of which it has claimed Hamas was using as a “human shield.” According to the laws of armed conflict, the warring party that uses human shields, rather than the party that kills them, tends to be guilty of a war crime. By casting all the protected sites and people it has bombed as “shields,” Israel thus seeks to shift the responsibility for its mass killings of civilians and sweeping destruction of civilian infrastructure onto Hamas—absolving itself of blame and legal accountability.

Israel is not alone in using the human shielding allegation to justify violence against civilians; this strategy has previously been seen in conflicts ranging from the Vietnam War to the war against ISIS. However, the intensity and scope of how Israel has mobilized the human shields accusation in the past year is unprecedented. Parties alleging the use of human shields have typically restricted the charge to limited territorial areas; in contrast, Israel has cited Hamas’s underground tunnel system to cast every square inch of Gaza as a human shield. This apparently endless multiplication of the human shielding accusation has functioned to erase the possibility of Palestinian civilianness altogether. Indeed, Israel’s ministry of foreign affairs has argued that “the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted” does not mean “that an attack was unlawful,” since these seeming civilians or civilian objects may actually have been human shields. The rationale here is that Palestinian homes are not homes, hospitals are not hospitals, mosques are not mosques, schools are not schools. They might “seem” to be, but they are not what they seem. Instead, each home is a suspected hideout, every hospital a likely arms depot, each mosque a tunnel pier, every school a rocket launch platform—and all legitimate targets for the cutting-edge weaponry that Israel receives from the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy.

This deadly logic has already justified unprecedented carnage. Israel killed more civilians and destroyed more civilian infrastructure in the first three months of its campaign in Gaza than Assad’s regime did in Aleppo and Russian forces did in Ukraine over years. It has, proportionally speaking, wreaked more damage than the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II, destroying or damaging 70% of the Strip’s civilian infrastructure and rendering neighborhood after neighborhood uninhabitable. Furthermore, by deploying the shielding allegation at scale, Israel has created a way to use international humanitarian law—which is technically meant to regulate war and make it more humane—to the opposite effect, essentially carving out a legal justification for genocide.

Human shielding accusations have a long history. Ever since there have been rules against attacking civilians in war, there have been attempts—especially by colonial, imperial, and occupying powers—to evade these prohibitions by alleging that the enemy is using human shields. The laws of war have always included provisions that accommodate such charges. For instance, in 1907, Hague Regulations affirmed that hospitals as well as “places where the sick and wounded are collected” should be spared from sieges and bombardments. But the prohibition is immediately accompanied by an exception—hospitals will enjoy such protections “provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes”—and as early as 1911, this clause was used as a way to disregard the rule. That year, Italian pilots, who had been sent to the colony of Libya to quell a popular revolt, dropped bombs on medical facilities marked with the Red Crescent flag. The bombings generated criticism, including by the International Committee of the Red Cross, but the Italians were quick to declare that their attack was “authorized by international law” due to hospitals’ proximity to military targets, and the likelihood of such facilities “serv[ing] as a safeguard for the enemy.” The Italian military repeated this strategy during its 1935–1936 invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, when it systematically bombarded medical facilities operated by various Red Cross societies, claiming that the Ethiopians were using these field hospitals to shield combatants and military supplies. And the Italians were far from alone: Throughout the 20th century, the human shielding charge was used in places ranging from the Boer wars in South Africa to the Balkan wars to justify attacks on sites and people that, according to the laws of armed conflict, must be protected.

Initially, the scale of the human shielding allegation was limited, with warring parties charging that specific facilities, locations, or groups of people were being used as shields. But in the past two decades, we have witnessed a pivotal shift. In the 2008–2009 Sri Lankan Civil War, for instance, prominent legal scholars framed tens of thousands of civilians as human shields for the militant group Tamil Tigers in order to justify government forces’ lethal violence against them. During the 2016 war against ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, United Nations agencies and Amnesty International characterized 100,000 civilians trapped in close proximity to the fighting as human shields. And starting in 2022, Russian leaders have repeatedly justified the deaths of civilians in Ukraine by using the human shielding allegation. Russia’s Defense Ministry accused Ukrainian “militants” of holding “more than 4.5 million civilians hostage as human shields,” thus applying the shielding charge to a full 10% of Ukraine’s population and positioning them as “not immune from attack” under international law. These instances show that over time, civilians trapped in war zones have become more and more likely to be cast as shields, and increasingly likely to be stripped of certain legal protections as a result.

Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has accelerated these dynamics. Because Hamas has built what are believed to be hundreds of miles of underground tunnels beneath Gaza as part of its guerrilla tactics, evading the eye of Israel’s high-tech surveillance apparatus, the Israeli legal team has invoked the laws of armed conflict to claim that all civilian objects—and every civilian—situated on Gaza’s land surface are potential human shields, and thus not immune from attack. The unprecedented nature of this shielding charge would appear to strain credulity; indeed, Western powers have never accepted similar claims advanced by Russia. However, as a US ally fighting non-white, non-state actors, Israel has found Western politicians and international press very amenable to the narrative that “savage” Palestinian militants are using their own people as fodder. Recently, for instance, Israel killed almost 100 civilians in a single attack purportedly targeting Hamas’s military chief Mohammed Deif. The bombing took place in a zone that Israel itself had designated as a “humanitarian area”; however, the military still portrayed the strike as a legitimate attack against “terrorists hiding among civilians,” and Western media outlets did not hesitate to follow suit in describing the strike as one against Deif rather than displaced Palestinians.

Israel’s unprecedented broadening of the human shielding charge has been facilitated by its legal teams’ decades of experience in interpreting international law as if the exceptions were the rule. As recently as Israel’s 2021 and 2022 Gaza campaigns, the military invoked the human shielding accusation to legitimize airstrikes against civilians, duplicitously invoking international law to justify illegal attacks. Now, the same logic is being applied as justification for genocidal violence, including mass expulsions and killings. One week after its war on Gaza began, Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza—about half of the enclave’s population—to leave their homes. According to international humanitarian law, parties to an armed conflict may not deport or forcibly transfer the civilian population of an occupied territory unless “the security of the civilians involved or imperative military reasons so demand.” In this case, Israel claimed that it was removing Palestinian civilians from their homes as a precaution that would protect them from the epicenter of violence, but in effect Israel transformed this humanitarian norm into a tool of mass expulsion. It has also used a similar strategy to undermine the legal protections of Palestinians in northern Gaza who have been unable or unwilling to leave their homes. Israel is legally required to treat such people, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands in October, as protected civilians. But since it had dropped leaflets instructing people to evacuate, Israel claimed that it could designate all of northern Gaza as a legitimate military target, and that the Palestinian civilians who remained were putting themselves in the line of fire. When Israel launched its attack on the area a few days later, killing thousands of civilians, the military cast the civilians who remained in the north as either terrorist accomplices or human shields.

Tellingly, Israel’s legal defense at the International Court of Justice has put the idea of human shields front and center. In his opening statement, the attorney representing Israel noted that Gaza’s civilian infrastructure is actually “the most sophisticated terrorist stronghold in the history of urban warfare,” and arguing that Hamas, not Israel, was responsible for the destruction of Gaza. The Israeli legal team returned to these arguments again and again, representing the first time in history that human shielding, under the auspices of international law, has been used to carve out a justification for a colonial war of annihilation. Indeed, the moment Israel invokes international law to frame everything above ground in Gaza as a potential shield, it operationalizes the law itself as a tool legitimizing genocide. It’s hard to overstate the frightening consequences of this maneuver. If the international legal apparatus can be used to justify acts that can destroy a people, “in whole or in part,” then the rules-based order created in the aftermath of World War II to regulate war according to humanitarian principles becomes a tool for its own undoing.

Nicola Perugini is an associate professor in international relations at the University of Edinburgh. He is the co-author of The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press 2015) and Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press 2020).

@PeruginiNic

Neve Gordon is a professor of international human rights and humanitarian law in the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Israel’s Occupation, and co-author with Nicola Perugini of The Human Right to Dominate and Human Shields. A History of People in the Line of Fire.

@nevegordon

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Table of Contents

Jewish Currents: 2024 Aug 5

Review

Is This Anything?

Chevruta

(How) Should We Vote?

Analysis

A Legal Justification for Genocide