Shalom Auslander grapples with the news that his favorite rabbi from high school has fled the US, accused of molesting students:
[T]hat’s what makes this whole sordid tale so personally difficult. Because while my other rabbis encouraged me to be observant, to be a Good Jew, George encouraged my interest in art. He encouraged me to draw, to go to museums. He encouraged me to write, and to read, and to write some more. He encouraged me to not let my friends keep me from my goals, to not let myself get dragged down by the others around me.
Auslander’s affinity for Rabbi George makes the ordeal all the more ghastly for him:
The strange thing about monsters is that, as children, we believe in them and the adults tell us they’re not real, that there are no such things and we should just go back to sleep. And we believe them. But later, as we grow up and become adults and we see the world in all its misery and suffering and injustice and cruelty and shit…we decide to believe in monsters again. Because monsters help us to make sense of the world. Monsters help us feel better about our obviously non-monster selves.
There are monsters, after all, and then there’s…us. If only.
The dysfunctional relationship between Netanyahu and Obama is poised to enter a new phase. Next week, Israeli voters will probably return Netanyahu to power, this time at the head of a coalition even more intractably right-wing than the one he currently leads.
Relatedly, David Remnick reports on the settler movement. A highlight:
Israeli politics continues its seemingly endless trek to the right. Every day, the Web carries the voice of another leader of the settler movement who insists that the settlers are the vanguard now, that the old verities are to be challenged, if not eliminated. Early last year, Benny Katzover, a leader in the settlement of Elon Moreh, told a Chabad paper, Beit Mashiach, “I would say that today Israeli democracy has one central mission, and that is to disappear. Israeli democracy has finished its historical role, and it must be dismantled and bow before Judaism.”
Despite the air of defeat that clings to the left, the center-left vote will still account for around fifty of a hundred and twenty seats. A political shift in its favor is always possible. Assaf Sharon, a leader of Molad, a think tank for the “renewal of Israeli democracy,” told me he believes that the national-religious position that the settlements are “irreversible” is “bullshit.”
(Caption: A man holds up a voting bill for the ultra-Orthodox Shas party during the annual pilgrimage to the grave of Rabbi Baba Sali in the southern Israeli town of Netivot on January 14, 2013. By David Buimovitch/AFP/Getty Images)
Let’s start with the ad’s broken logic. A, the Obama family has Secret Service protection; B, other American families do not; C, because of this, Obama is an elitist and a hypocrite. It’s pretty ludicrous. Malia and Sasha Obama get lots of things because their father won the presidency. They also have a chauffeur; get to ride on a big fancy airplane free of charge and don’t have to endure any TSA-related indignities; live in a beautiful big house rent-free; and so on. By the ad’s logic, all of these are instances of hypocrisy.
[E]ven if the idea [of armed guards in school] were a good idea, the NRA’s sneering references to the president’s family are beyond the pale. As the makers of the NRA ad should know, and probably do know, the First Family has come under years of racially coded attack for their “uppityism,” as Rush Limbaugh phrased it. This latest attack ad looks to many like only one more attempt to enflame an ancient American wound.
The disgraced cyclist has admitted to Oprah that he doped. Alex Massie, who saw this confession coming, recently dubbed Armstrong “the greatest cheat in the history of sport”:
[C]ancer became a carapace protecting Armstrong from the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. Never mind the sport, face up to the fact he inspired so much hope. Maybe so. But the sorry truth is that cancer proved useful to Lance Armstrong. It didn’t just reshape his body and equip him with a startling measure of mental fortitude, it also made his critics wonder if they – I suppose I mean, we – were heels, scoffing sourly at the greatest inspiration of the age. What kind of person reacts to such a noble prospect by wishing to destroy it?
A wise one, as it turns out. Pace Christopher Hitchens, just as it suited Mother Theresa to keep her people poor, so it suited Armstrong to swaddle himself in the community of cancer sufferers. They were his human shields.
I’m not sure what I think about drugging when everyone else around you is drugging. I don’t think lying is a very good idea. I think trying to destroy people for telling the truth is a good deal worse. It’s that all-out war that really sets Armstrong apart. This isn’t just a “doping scandal.” It’s something much creepier.
Michael Specter spells out why Armstrong came clean:
Lance wants to compete in triathlons and other sporting events and U.S.A.D.A. wont let him—unless he owns up to what he did. That’s his reason. He wants to get back on the bike. But he will only race again (and probably not for years, in any case) if he names names, implicates colleagues, coaches, friends—many of the very people he threated to destroy if they ever revealed the truth about him.
Despite having been spectacularly wrong about Lance in the past, I will make one more prediction: Lance will talk and talk and talk. After all, he wants something for himself, and what else matters to him?
In lieu of a comments section, more angry readers light up the in-tray:
WTF? So now Jodie Foster is an “enabler of homophobia“? How is that exactly? Has she made homophobic remarks or films? No. Has she pretended to be straight? No. Has she lied about her sexuality (as opposed to telling everyone it was her own business)? No. Where’s the homophobia, Andrew?
Moreover, she never “mounted an incoherent attack on the coming out of others.” Her plea for privacy was a cri de coeur against the ridiculous, celebrity-obsessed world in which live. It wasn’t an attack on other celebrities, out or otherwise. If anything, it was an attack on us, the general public, and our insatiable appetite for gossip.
Every gay person in the closet is an enabler of homophobia. Every single one. And in the past two decades, silence also equaled death. Yes, I feel strongly about this. I don’t believe in outing but I do believe in helping your community when it is besieged and dying in the hundreds of thousands. And yes, privacy is trumped by mass death. And she was attacking other out gay people with her absurd parody of what coming out entails. Many readers are dissenting along these lines:
So Anderson Cooper is out in his private life, but not out publicly due to privacy concerns (although it is widely known he’s gay). Then he comes out publicly via you and it is a great and brave thing. And Jodie Foster is out in her private life, but not out publicly due to privacy concerns (although it is widely know she is gay). Then she comes out publicly during an awards show, after having done something similar years ago, well before Cooper. But Foster’s actions are horrible, just horrible.
Not her actions. Her rhetoric. Compare Anderson’s honest, reasoned email with Foster’s incoherent, narcissistic rant and veiled attack on other out gay people. She attacked people for coming out at press conferences. Anderson didn’t. She effectively did. And I’ll just ask you one thing. What if she were Jewish, had hidden her Jewishness for “privacy” reasons, and then announced it publicly, while berating those who parade their public identity as Jews as some kind of grandstanding? When you think of it that way, you realize just how soaked in homophobia so much of our public discussion still is. Another:
And Hollywood royalty? Please. If Foster is, she didn’t inherit it; she worked her ass off to beat the odds. What really pains me is how easy it seems for critics to completely dismiss the fact that this woman fought to make the successful transition from child to adult actress and went on to be a director and producer in Hollywood, which, I don’t think I have to point out, is still a very rare occurence in that Boys’ Club. But helping knock down barriers for women in an industry that is shamefully every bit as sexist as it is homophobic counts for nothing because she didn’t officially come out the way that you think she should have?
So why did this feminist icon invite as her date a man who beat and threatened to kill his own wife, who has uttered vile anti-Semitic and homophobic rants? And why did she say he “saved” her? Seriously? You want her to be a feminist icon and ignore that? Why the fuck is he involved in this at all? Unless Foster’s politics are closer to his than we realize. Another reader:
Given that when accepting her Lifetime Achievement Award, the camera kept cutting away to Mel Gibson’s hideous mug, it was kind of weird to read a blurb on Wikipedia today that Jodie Foster has spent the past decade attempting to get a biopic of Leni Riefenstahl made, starring herself as the notorious Nazi filmmaker. Foster thinks Riefenstahl was “complicated” – that perhaps she got a bum rap. I hope Foster really is retiring now.
Maybe her date, Mel Gibson, will finance it. Another:
On the Foster speech, I think you are missing some of her broader point and perhaps willfully conflating her desire for privacy with the issue of sexuality. When I listened to her, I interpreted her statement that “Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was” as a simple statement that we’ll feel nostalgic about a time when we were not under 24 hour surveillance, tracked by the GPS in our phone, monitored in the books we read on our e-readers, or inspected by probing hands simply because we want to catch a plane. I feel that nostalgia. I can’t believe she was thinking that closeted sexuality was a beautiful thing. Really? I think you’re a more astute reader than to think she was speaking only in terms of sexuality. Part of the incoherence of her speech came from the complexity of our identities.
Another:
Sure, everyone is allowed to come out in his or her own way. I am not gay, so I would never presume to suggest there is a “right” way to come out. That being said, what I found most disturbing about Jodie Foster’s rambling and confusing speech (don’t get me started on her “date” Mel Gibson), is that she seemed to be declaring herself on the high road while disparaging anyone who came out publicly. As if protecting one’s privacy – though her speech was a direct contradiction to her argument for privacy – is nobler than standing up for who you are. As if she should be honored for not acknowleding her gayness because that’s how we do it in polite society. Forget that kids are bullied to death for being gay. Forget that she has a fortress of success and money to protect her… SHE is the noble and persecuted one. Give me a break. She can live whatever life she wants, but her speech was disgusting to me.
I just read that you pay your interns. I applaud that! In the ’90s I did a couple of unpaid internships that paved the way for gainful employment, so I have benefitted from the system. I was lucky because my parents could help me out while I was working for free. I agree with the idea of people paying dues, learning the ropes, starting in the mail room, etc. But why not for minimum wage at least? The poor cannot afford to audition for jobs for months the way I could. The rise of unpaid internships as a prerequisite for interesting work is just unfair and perpetuates the class system. Thanks. I’m gonna subscribe now.
We actually pay Dishterns one-and-a-half times the minimum wage and include health insurance. That’s the deal they had with us under the Daily Beast, so that’s the deal we are determined to continue under the new independent Dish. You can help keep our Dishternship a paid one by subscribing here.
(Clockwise from top-left: Maisie Allison (now at The American Conservative), Zack Beauchamp (now at Think Progress), Gwynn Guilford (now at Quartz), Chas Danner (who will serve as the Dish’s tech manager after we go independent), Doug Allen and Tela (current Dishtern and beagle bait, respectively), Brendan James (current Dishtern).
You will probably watch a lot more of this 25-minute tour of the International Space Station than you think:
From the reader who passed it along:
It is my favorite Internet video in years. I couldn’t help but smile a million miles wide as I watched it.
Update from a reader:
I don’t watch anything online that has a TRT of longer than 30 seconds, my attention span ruined by the web. I can barely stand a 5 second preroll ad in front of a video. I scoffed at your preface that “you will probably watch more of this than you think.”
But I watched it all. What a tour guide Williams is.
I was remiss in not pointing out this disgusting piece of filth from the current president of Egypt:
“Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war. This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know – these blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”
He didn’t say this as president of Egypt and he has shown a modicum of restraint toward Israel and the US since being elected. But that doesn’t excuse this kind of eliminationist rhetoric, so appallingly common in the Arab Middle East. Goldblog wonders why more wasn’t made of this in the US press. He’s right to criticize and I should have picked up on it.
But in the last few weeks, we have heard the word “anti-Semite” used promiscuously to describe Chuck Hagel, a man light years away from anything like this kind of poison. And Hagel isn’t the only victim of this kind of smear. Any dissenter from the Greater Israel Lobby – as extreme and as irrational a lobby as the NRA – is given this treatment. Do these fanatics not see that they are constantly trivializing one of history’s great hatreds by tossing this term around so casually to score cheap political points? Do they not understand they are empowering real anti-Semitism by attacking those of us who desperately want Israel to survive and prosper, but who, since 2008, have simply been appalled by the current government’s extremism, intervention in US politics, and contempt for the interests of the US?
Crying wolf when it comes to anti-Semitism is a very, very dangerous game. I’m past being offended. But I’m not past being concerned about the consequences for trivializing it the way so many neoconservatives have.
Would Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal care to refute this – as the Senate Intelligence Committee has insisted? When war criminals use the movie as justification for their torture, will Bigelow and Boal stand up against them? That will tell us a great deal about their motives and their integrity.
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