Cancel This

Children of Israel are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

Thank you so much to everyone who responded to my poll about Zoom concerts. I was very pleased that so many of you are interested.

Here I’d just like to say that I know a Zoom concert doesn’t offer the same feeling as live one, but I envision a format that’s almost a hybrid of a conversation / Q&A with a few songs in the mix. Imagine, for instance, having Matisyahu all to ourselves for an hour, getting to ask him questions and taking emotional sustenance from his presence, spliced in with some of his songs, sung in real time just for us. This is a dream right now, but I’m willing to bet it’s within reach. Im tirtzu…

Another thought I had was a Jewish book club. What if some of us met virtually from time to time to talk about a new Jewish or Jewish-relevant book?

I just posted on Facebook about Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History, by Nellie Bowles. As I said there, I bought it on Tuesday — its publication day — and then I stayed up all night reading it. I loved it. I related to it. I identified with it.

I'm on the left side of the American political aisle and I will always be on the left. I want to save the planet and save our democracy and have universal healthcare and end voter suppression. I will always believe in marriage equality and trans dignity; I will always believe Black lives matter; I will always believe in reproductive freedom for women; I will always want the rich to pay their fair share of taxes, and so on.

I would rather drink my own urine than vote for Trump.

But I also think the left is on its way to becoming as sick and dysfunctional as the right. These last 7 months have shown me that too much of the left cares as little about facts or the truth as the right. That too much of the left is as hate-driven and violent as the right. That too much of the left is way more interested in hyper-policing and bullying and punishing its own than in achieving anything good for our country.

"Morning After" is wildly accessible, unpretentious, candid, absorbing and persuasive. I recommend it very highly. And I thought: wouldn’t it be great if a bunch of us read it and then convened online to talk about it?

Nellie Bowles, the author and a former New York Times reporter, owns her own recent complicity in the worst aspects of the left, which is one of the book’s many strengths. In one chapter, she talks about cancel culture, which leftists often insist is not a real thing — By ‘cancellation’, do you mean some people might not buy your book if you’re a racist scum? — but most certainly is a real thing that sometimes happens for good reasons and other times seems to happen on the flimsiest of whims, like a new Asian author’s debut fantasy novel getting pitchforked before publication because it touches on slavery (a worldwide scourge not remotely limited to the U.S.’ formative sins).

Here are some quotes from the cancel culture chapter:

The first time I was consciously part of canceling someone, it felt incredible. I do remember the pleasure.

The situation was pretty clear-cut: a close friend was canceling someone. And I could help.

It was playing out on Twitter, which sounds silly and light. ‘It’s Twitter, not real life’ is the phrase people say. But for the media class — the people who decide what books go on tour and what books get reviewed, what books you hear about, what books show up at the tech campus circuit — it’s the artery system. And the author was getting dragged. Then of course the articles come out about it. Twitter is where stories get ginned up.

A drumbeat of rage was growing against the author. I felt the rage too.

I joined in hard. My friend never asked me to do anything, but I wanted to do something to defend her. A good ally is assertive and doesn’t need to be asked.

To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends.

The easy criticism of a cancellation is: you went after someone who agrees with you on almost everything but some minor tiny differences? Some small infraction? It seems bizarre. But that’s the point.

A cancellation isn’t about finding a conservative and yelling at them. It’s about finding the betrayer in your midst. It’s about sniffing them out at your coffee shop and your office. They look and talk like you. They blend in perfectly. But they’re not like you.

So what turned Nellie Bowles away from this seductive and heart-warming pastime?

One day, there was a woman I tried to cancel but failed at spectacularly. She was hired as a colleague at the Times and was already a known heterodox. She came along with an older conservative guy, both from The Wall Street Journal, both then to our Opinion pages. I wrote to their boss to complain about the hires. When the editor in chief was in town, I made sure to ask him in front of our team why these two had been hired.

Then I happened to be in New York one day. The young heterodox writer sent me an idea for a story, and I said since I’m in town maybe we should get coffee. I told my editor I was going to set her politics straight.

I don’t know what to say other than that when we met, I fell in love immediately. I knew immediately. Our early dates were fights about politics, and I couldn’t get enough.

That woman was Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, and now Nellie Bowles is her wife and staff writer. She has also converted to Judaism and I, for one, am very glad to have her in the tribe.

I will confess that I myself believed Bari had gone to the dark side for a while. I no longer believe that. I’m a Free Press fan. I hope to write for them one day.

In the meantime, I would devoutly love to talk about books like this one and many others with you.

So if I could ask you to take a couple more polls, one of them today, I’d like to gauge how much interest there might be in a few different cultural and artistic offerings and then bring the ones you want most into being. I feel like I’m always imploring you to lean into our Jewish community, to take sustenance from our tradition and culture and intellect and art… and the other day it occurred to me that I shouldn’t just tell you to go find it but instead I should bring it to you. So my plan is to try a few different things in the next little while.

Eventually, if enough of us got into, say, a book club, we could really create support for Jewish writers who are facing incredible adversity and discrimination now within the lit world. It would make me feel really good to be able to do that.

We Jews are no strangers to blacklists. But we’ve never let them hold us back. When Jews were discriminated against in hospitals and medical schools, we built our own hospitals and we built our own med schools — and the best ones too, I might add.

We built our own colleges. We built our own museums. We built our own theaters. We built Hollywood. We can build our own publishing houses if it comes to that.

So if I can prevail upon your good graces one more time, could you take two seconds to answer this:

Okay, fam, I will be back with you on Monday! I hope you all have a lovely Sabbath and restorative weekend.

I love you all. Shabbat shalom. Am Yisrael Chai.