F*ck Ta-Nehisi Coates, part II

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

So as I’ve already mentioned here, I didn’t want to talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates until after the High Holy Days were over. I knew focusing on his new book and its reception would make me frightened and furious and I didn’t want that energy inside my Days of Awe. I knew it would still be at the center of our national conversation after Yom Kippur, and now I’m sorry to say that’s a serious understatement. But I also promised on Monday to bring you the good news on this awful front, and there is some.

First, pushback has come from one especially high place and from one unexpected source. The (brilliant) Parhul Seghal of the sharply left-leaning New Yorker is not a fan of Israel and she is a fan of Coates, so I braced myself for the worst when her review appeared in that vaunted magazine (my longtime personal favorite). It is wildly gratifying that Seghal had the integrity to write the truth about The Message with her reliably lacerating-when-called-for derision.

The book he is promoting feels strangely out of step, slipshod and assembled in haste. “The Message” is stitched together with haphazard reporting, and it suppurates with such self-regard that it feels composed by the very enemy of a writer who has so strenuously scorned carelessness and vague pronouncement, she writes early in the review.

(I confess I had to look up the word “suppurate”. It means to ooze pus. Fucking perfect.)

He offers a desultory tour of Palestine’s past, with largely familiar facts. He doesn’t reckon with Palestinian political history. He doesn’t reckon with the attacks and aftermath of October 7th. His interventions feel directed at declawing certain linguistic battles—say, the objections to characterizing Israel as a “colonial” state, when, as he points out, the revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky celebrated it on those very terms. The frame is kept squarely on what he saw during his trip, a constraint that has the unhappy function of again subordinating the stories he tells, of slotting them into the grand narrative of the education of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The description of Coates’s time in Palestine contains nothing that feels new to those sympathetic to his perspective, and nothing that would meaningfully challenge those who disagree, in part because he does not entertain any objections. To do so would be obscene, the journalist “playing god,” in his words, deciding what perspectives should be considered. “This power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not,” he writes. Rather than engage existing narratives, he wants to “expand the frame of humanity, to shift the brackets of images and ideas.” But falsehood, corruption, and delusions do not go so gently; they must be unravelled, picked apart. One recalls the doggedness of “The Case for Reparations,” whose every aspect—tone, pacing, evidence—was designed to obviate disagreement or reflexive scorn in order to take a topic long regarded as pure fantasy and break down, almost axiomatically, its moral necessity. “I am a writer and a bearer of a tradition, a writer and a steward,” Coates asserts. But stewardship must be demonstrated, not simply announced, and to demonstrate care for a story requires a rigor, a labor of learning and craft, missing in “The Message.”

Equally scorching and gratifying is this takedown by Iranian attorney and activist Elica Le Bon:

She opens with Coates’ speculation, to Trevor Noah, about what he would do if he himself were Gazan: “Well, I — 20 years old, born into Gaza — which is a giant open-air jail, and my little sister has, you know, cancer and she needs treatment because there are no facilities to do that in Gaza and [if] I don’t get the right permit, she might die — and I grow up under that oppression and the wall comes down… am I also strong enough where I say, “This is too far”? I don’t know that I am. You know, I don’t know that I am.”

She has this to say in response to that:

You want to tell me that if you were Hamas, and you couldn’t access those hospitals [that you didn’t build because you poured untold billions into terror instead of medicine or anything else] in a different country that you have no business accessing, and have all of the means to create for yourself, and then you came across Israeli civilians, you want to say: “Gee… I don’t know if I could help myself but to shoot a four-year-old in the face. I don’t know if I could help myself but to rape innocent people. I don’t know if I could help myself but to snap their necks and throw them on the back of a truck and spit on their naked bodies. I don’t know if I could help myself but to drag their naked bodies in the street on motorcycles. I don’t know if I could help myself but to capture a family of five and make them watch as I kill each of their children one by one. I don’t know if I could help myself but to set them on fire. I don’t know if I could help myself but to kidnap innocent people and hold them in terror tunnels for 10 months and shoot them in the head at close range… I just don’t know…"

If you don’t know that you couldn’t help yourself, then you don’t need to be speaking to Trevor Noah on a podcast about faux liberation movements. You need to be under a 5150 hold, okay — “danger to self and others.” If you don’t know that you couldn’t help yourself, you don’t sound like someone who belongs at the forefront of a liberation movement. You sound like someone who belongs in an asylum…

If you can, watch the whole clip — it’s well worth the 8 minutes.

Another invaluable response to Coates’ sudden stance as atrocity apologist comes from Palestinian human rights advocate Hamza on Twitter, whose handle is @HowidyHamza. Hamza regularly and passionately excoriates Israel; a token he is most decidedly not. But he had this response to that sickening clip:

Fortunately, Ta-Nehisis [sic — though I have to think the extra “s” at the end of “Ta-Nehisi,” rendering part of his name as “Isis,” is intentional], not many Palestinians share your viewpoint and would not follow your advice for the dumb extreme-left audience. Do you know why the people who had to go through all the suffering in the Gaza Strip did not join the Jihadists on October 7th? They don't defend raping women and purposefully killing children the way you do because they are humans.

Let's be clear: Hamas did not intend to "liberate their people" or whatever nonsense those idiots keep repeating when they committed the atrocities of October 7th. Luckily, Hamas members were foolish enough to record their crimes, making it obvious that their goal was to kill as many Israelis as possible. Even those who were assisting Gazan patients in receiving medical care in Israel (as you mentioned with the example of a sick Gazan) did not survive Hamas' terrorism and were captured by Hamas. Stop presenting this death cult as a "liberation movement." How can we expect Israeli society to coexist with this terrorist gang if we Gazans are drained, scared, and refuse to live with them? If they perpetrated the October 7th horrors against the Israelis just once, they did it repeatedly against the people of Gaza during the 18 years of kidnapping the Gaza Strip.

Finally, as a sanity-saver, if you want to read conversations that are many levels above the average tenor of social media content, I highly recommend Reddit where there’s a surprising percentage of informed and dispassionate opinions not driven by any agenda, either pro- or anti-Israel. Just regular people who know some history and have some perspective and are remarking on current events as educated consumers.

In response to Coates’ assertion, within The Message, that Israel’s supposed apartheid surpasses even the oppression of Jim Crow [a more ludicrous statement has literally never been written], a Reddit member with the handle DiamondContent2011 said, within a long thread that has many comments of this caliber:

I’m Black and find that comparison deeply offensive. Palestinians were NEVER enslaved, and were invited to be part of a State with full rights / privileges.

They turned it down.

That was NEVER offered to us. We had to fight for it and we didn’t use terrorism.

The whole analogy is contrived, puerile nonsense designed to evoke an emotional response.

Here’s the upshot, fam: this book is getting pushback from many different quarters outside the right-wing — more than I thought. This is not to understate the damage it can and surely will do. But it is nice to know that we aren’t the only ones calling it out.

This is more space than I wanted to allot to Coates and his book, but I couldn’t refrain from sharing the most important sources of validation I’ve seen from all different corners of the national discourse.

Here is some other truly wonderful news: Blimi Marcus, who was featured in my most recent “Jews Of The Universe” column, messaged me a day or two ago, and she had this to say:

Elissa, your followers donated the single largest amount I have ever raised [for her neediest patients] aside from one time when we flew a dying mother home to Jamaica. Thank you, tizku l’mitzvos!!! I’m going to allocate a significant chunk to my most recent patient.

Thank you for making me proud, fam. In the same spirit, I promise you another incredibly uplifting JOTU column on Friday, so please make sure to look for that.

I love you all. I’m sending love and strength.

We will overcome this ghastly moment together and emerge stronger for it, I know we will.

Am Yisrael Chai.