YES, WE CAN
Children Of Israel Are Never Alone
Hey, beloved tribe.
A belated shavua tov. So much has happened since Friday.
On the domestic front:
I’m heartbroken for President Biden, who has yielded to the unrelenting pressure to cede his bid for a second term.
On the other hand, I am grateful that we can finally stop wasting precious time and energy on infighting and unite behind Vice President Harris. As I posted on my own Facebook page, if the DNC does not accept her as their nominee, I will leave the Democratic party and register as an Independent.
I posted as much on my own page and was met by the predictable response that Harris can’t win, that she’s not officially the nominee yet, and that making her the frontrunner would be a mistake.
I’ll say here what I said there: YES, SHE CAN. She can absolutely win. And in my opinion, it would be the height of idiocy to shaft Harris. The excitement around her is palpable. The party is finally energized. Tens of millions poured into the coffer in just a few hours after Biden endorsed her. Most of her potential primary opponents have also endorsed her. Bypassing her would be an unforgivable insult to Black women, to whom we owe every good political thing we have ever had.
My last three words on this topic for now: LET’S FUCKING GO.
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On the international front:
Fire was exchanged between Israel and the Houthis over the weekend.
A Houthi drone managed to elude Israel’s defenses and strike Tel Aviv, wounding 10 and killing one citizen, Evgeny Ferder.
In response, Israel attacked a major Houthi-controlled port city, Hodeidah, described by Ilan Zalayat, a research fellow at the INSS (Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies) as “the Houthis’ gate to the world.” Per Zalayat, Hodeidah is the only port city in the Houthis’ territory, and oil production yields most of their revenue. It’s also the conduit through which the Houthis receive weaponry from Iran. Furthermore, as he told Haaretz: “It’s their nexus of control over the population.”
To understand this latest development, it helps to have a rudimentary understanding of at least the basic dynamics at play in the cauldron of the Middle East.
Aside from Israel, the Islamic world is embroiled in its own conflicts. One is the tension between moderate and extremist Muslims — those who want to live and let live, and prosper, in peace, vs. those who want to re-establish an Islamic caliphate and forcibly convert, exile or kill all non-Muslims in the vicinity.
Very often these two factions are prominently represented within a single country. In Iran, for instance, countless civilians despise their authoritarian and repressive government to the point of supporting Israel’s attacks on their own regime.
Within Gaza as well, at least some civilians loathe Hamas and seek a peaceful way forward with Israel, while the terror group explicitly seeks to brutally impose Islamist tyranny on the entire region.
Another source of ongoing tension dividing the Middle East, apart from Israel, is the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a split over who should succeed Prophet Muhammad that dates back to the 7th century.
This infighting undergirds the current civil war raging in Yemen since 2014, when Houthi Shiite insurgents mounted an attack on the Sunni government. Iran — whose overarching ambition is to impose upon the region a Shia kingdom from Afghanistan to Morocco — is financing and arming their violence, as is North Korea.
The reason Saudi Arabia was on the verge of normalization with Israel just before October 7th is that the Sunni country fears Iran more than it does the Jewish nation.
Conversely, Iran seems to consider Israel an enemy formidable enough to inspire their aid to Hamas, despite the fact that the terror org is Sunni.
It’s a tangled web, but the Houthis’ ideology could not be more straightforward. Their flag bears the slogans:
God Is The Greatest
Death to America
Death To Israel
A Curse Upon the Jews
Victory to Islam
As an org, the Houthis have no redeeming features. They have attacked countless commercial ships, from a range of different countries, on their way across the Red Sea, with the motive of sabotaging international trade and destabilizing the global economy. They oppress gay citizens, brutally repress people of other faiths, and have reintroduced the human slave trade within the areas of Yemen under their own control. It’s a testament to the vicious anti-Semitism of some American protestors that they would chant outside Columbia:
Houthis, Houthis, make us proud
Turn another ship around!
Imagine hating Jews, or America, so much that you’re capable of supporting the Houthis.
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Finally, a dispatch from my own wheelhouse within the U.S., which is the book world.
Over the weekend, the City Lit Bookstore in Chicago posted this lovely update to their customers:
So what was Gabrielle Zevin’s Zionist crime, you might ask? Well, apparently she once spoke at a Hadassah meeting. Yes, really. Also, one of the characters in her novel — which centers on the relationship between two video game designers — is Israeli.
As I’ve mentioned here before, there’s a viral blacklist circulating everywhere, where every single tenuous petty perceived slight to progressive Orthodoxy is obsessively documented and catalogued.
Seth Mandel of Commentary Magazine listed some of these Thought Crimes. Here are just a few the article touches on:
Pierce Brown — bestselling author of the sci-fi series Red Rising — is on the boycott list for an Instagram post. His transgression? “He lamented the loss of life on October 7 while ignoring the history and reality of Israel’s genocidal, apartheid settler state in Palestine.”
Stephanie Garber, the author of a popular YA series, was branded a Zionist for even less. The blacklist tells us that she “allegedly posted pro-Palestine messaging previously, however she favorably posted a book by SJM to her Instagram story.”
SJM refers to Sarah J. Maas, the Jewish author of a wildly successful fantasy series. She has sold 38 million copies of her books worldwide and they have been translated into as many languages. But being among her tens of millions of fans was enough to get a Jewish author blacklisted despite posting something pro-Palestinian.
Maas herself is also on the list despite never posting anything of a Zionist bent. Why? Because she visited Israel around 20 years ago.
To mention just one more author on the blacklist: Taylor Jenkins Reid, one of my own daughter’s favorite authors, is guilty of posting a photo of former hostage Noa Argamani’s father, along with a quote of his: “I want there to be peace, but I also want my daughter to return.”
If these flimsiest of pretexts don’t convince you that “Zionist” is a code word for “Jew” and a way to dress up anti-Semitic discrimination as progressive virtue, I don’t know what will.
But this is why I’m doing everything I currently do. It’s why I’m running a Jewish book club that’s thousands strong and counting. It’s why I’m launching a Jewish lit mag. And it’s why I’m building a Jewish publishing house.
If you want to support any or all of these initiatives, please do two things:
1) Invite all your Jewish friends here and to the Never Alone Book Club on Facebook;
2) Consider a paid subscription for this newsletter, because those subscriptions are a funding source for all the other projects.
Okay, fam. I’ll be back with you on Wednesday! In the meantime, stay strong, support VP Harris’ bid for the presidency, and support your Jewish family members near and far.
Much love to you all. Chazak chazak.
Am Yisrael Chai.