The Minefield Before Us
Children Of Israel Are Never Alone
Hey, beloved tribe.
I hope everyone is upright at mid-week. Although I understand if you can’t get out of bed and if that’s you, please be gentle with yourself.
It’s the start of a mightily harrowing new era, and I want to talk with you all about our shared intention as we go into it together. Navigating the years ahead will take a plan and the will to practice aspects of it daily. Specifically, I want to talk about a few different traps that I’m always working hard to avoid and that I believe we should all work hard to avoid.
The Rage Trap
Fam, I think the most frightening moment of my Never Alone career came during the seconds spent hovering over, and then hitting, the “publish” button on my “Fuck Ta-Nehisi Coates” post. I’ve spent decades steeped in the literary world and for many years, I was among Coates’ ardent admirers.
And yet, it was by far my most popular post ever. It was the most loved, the most shared across all forms of social media, and it brought in the most new subscribers. No one was more surprised than me. When you get that much reinforcement for something that felt frightening, there’s an urge to do it again and again.
And believe me, I could. I could write a column like that every day. Fuck Sally Rooney. Fuck Viet Thanh Nguyen. Fuck Naomi Klein and Judith Butler and Jonathan Lethem. I could go after the literary world’s most sacred cows every day for a straight year and not even put a dent in the army aligned against us.
Calling out the double standards and hypocrisy of such figures has its place. But it’s not an end in itself, though I’m aware that it’s gratifying. And that’s a kind of trap I want to avoid: doing that kind of thing too often or even continually.
Let’s be real: righteous indignation can feel great, especially when shared. That’s the whole drug driving cancel culture.
I’m far from above this kind of pleasure. There are frenemies I hate-read for the dark pleasure of making fun of them with my real friends. This is nothing to be proud of but it’s deeply, inherently human. My mother, who is truly pretty much a saint, shares my love of the spin on Thumper’s iconic line from the movie Bambi. “If you don’t have something nice to say,” she likes to crack, “come sit next to me.”
In a precarious line of work I’ve carved out from nothing, it is so tempting to just give my readership more of what it seems to crave.
But if I let myself become a perpetual rage machine, I’m Fox News. Truly. That’s 90% of their game: like crack dealers, they’re going to keep feeding people the rage drug for the righteous high it brings.
And we see where that leads. To a place where they’re willing to sacrifice every ideal they supposedly hold dear — the Constitution, backing the Blue, family values, Christianity’s code of ethics, all their own safety nets — for the rush of the drug, for the chance to hurt the people they perceive as their enemies.
Our community is not above that kind of temptation, as we can see every day. The Jews who have thrown in their lots with Trump’s GOP have signed on to climate collapse, the erosion of women’s bodily autonomy, the reversal of trans rights, the end of democracy, and everything else that goes along with putting a sociopath in charge of the free world, in exchange for the deportation of jihadists, the end of funding to UNRWA, the end of conditions for Israel. I am certainly all for deporting jihadists and ending funding for UNRWA. I’m also not sorry that Israel will no longer be hampered by election considerations in a way that leaves her strategically compromised.
But not at the cost of absolutely every other good thing in political life.
Incidentally, slamming Trump here causes subscribers to leave just as surely as slamming the left brings people in the door.
That’s the great fun of standing where I stand, calling things as I see them without regard for partisanship, because I belong to the Jews first and the Democratic Party second. But I am here to build a home on the left for Zionists, so I’m going to keep doing what I do.
The Fear Trap
Another trap we need to somehow resist is the Fear Trap.
This morning, I was inboxed by a beloved friend who sent me the photo below along with a one-sentence message.
“I am not going to be able to survive these announcements every day,” she wrote.
And I get it. Believe me, I get it. On day one, Trump pardoned even the cop-mangling violent insurrectionists, ordered the end of birthright citizenship, withdrew from the Paris Climate Accords, withdrew from the World Health Organization, and ended Biden’s Green Energy initiatives among many other disasters.
I understand wanting to turn away, turn off the news, shut it all out, and focus on whatever goodness and beauty is available to us in our lives. And the latter is very important — we should focus on whatever goodness and beauty is available to us, never more so than now. But to the extent that our mental wellness permits, I also believe it’s more essential than ever to remain informed, vigilant and part of the resistance.
The Exhaustion Trap
Trump’s m.o. has always been to say and do so many outrageous things in immediate succession that his enemies are overwhelmed. He’s going to seize Greenland! Annex Canada! Rename the Gulf of Mexico and Denali!
He’s a troll of the highest order, and he is also every bit as crazy as he seems. He’s counting on wearing us down.
This is all the more reason not to waste energy fulminating. Mass resistance is firing its cylinders so pick your favorite general — Simon Rosenberg of the Hopium Chronicles and Malcolm Nance of Black Man Spy are mine, but there’s also Move On, Robert Reich, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and any number of orgs, big and small, doing important work to preserve our civil liberties and protect the vulnerable. Please join such an effort if you have the bandwidth, and do something, anything, even if you don’t. That can include even a small grassroots donation as you’re able, or a single phone call a day.
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I’ll be real, fam. I’m angry too. I’m afraid too. I’m exhausted too. Truly. Very.
The best antidote I’ve found is to focus on the work, and cherish my community. I’m deeply grateful you’re in mine.
I’ll be back with you on Friday with a Jews Of The Universe column. In the meantime, heartfelt love to you all. Chazak, chazak.
Am Yisrael Chai




"pick your favorite general"
We already have. Her name is Elissa Wald.
Love Malcolm Nance—he is also a vocal supporter of Israel!