About Joe Weber

Now the Jerry and Karla Huse Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska's College of Journalism and Mass Communications, I worked 35 years in magazines and newspapers. I spent most of that time, 22 years, at BUSINESS WEEK Magazine, leaving in August 2009 as chief of correspondents. So far, I have worked in central New Jersey, New York City, Denver, Dallas, Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Beijing, Shanghai and Lincoln, Nebraska. The adventure continues.

The vulgarian strikes anew

Posted on October 20, 2024 by Joe Weber

Donald Trump plumbs new depths in taSTELESSNESS

Trump and Arnold Palmer, source: People Magazine

In 1988, the cofounders of the now-defunct Spy magazine came up with a memorable description for Donald J. Trump. He long hated the moniker they had for him: “short-fingered vulgarian.”

But the label stuck. Veterans of the 2016 campaign will recall how the epithet figured into that race. Marco Rubio even criticized Trump’s small hands, saying: “And you know what they say about guys with small hands.”

Crude? No doubt. But Rubio was just descending to Trump’s level – it was his response to Trump’s “little Rubio” crack. And it is all part of a coarse style of politics that Trump has pioneered and perfected, and that he is repeating.

After a Saturday rally in the Pennsylvania hometown of golf great Arnold Palmer, for instance, Trump once again dominated the headlines and the airwaves by making a crude comment about the deceased champion’s genitals.

“Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women,” Trump said at the Latrobe gathering. “This is a guy that was all man…. When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable,’” Trump said with a laugh. “I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”

You gotta hand it to Trump for that seemingly idle spur-of-the-moment crack. Not only did it garner attention – at which Trump is a master – but it confirmed the views of many of Trump’s devotees about their guy. To them, he is a) refreshingly as blunt and coarse as they are, b) virile enough to salute another’s machismo, and c) the kind of man’s man they want in the White House.

Was this an indirect dig at the idea of a woman as president? A sexist statement that suggests Vice President Kamala Harris could not, as chief executive, command the levers of power as well as the macho Trump could? Well, when a narcissist talks, he generally talks about himself one way or another, and with Trump, a passionate golfer, it’s not a stretch to believe that he wanted to bask in the reflected glory of Palmer, to have voters think of him in the same boorish way.

Ironically, Palmer, who died in September 2016, found Trump appalling. Palmer’s daughter, Peg Palmer, in 2018 recalled a moment when her father saw Trump on television during the 2016 presidential campaign, as The Palm Beach Post reported.

“My dad and I were at home in Latrobe. He died in September, so this was before the election,” she said in a conversation with author Thomas Hauser. “The television was on. Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust — like ‘uck’ or ‘ugg’ — like he couldn’t believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in. Then he said, ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was’ and walked out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”

Palmer, she said, “had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

Trump’s focus on manhood is hardly new, though. He has long been preoccupied with genital matters.

As Jezebel reported, when Trump’s former aide Stephanie Grisham wrote in her 2021 book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now,” that porn star Stormy Daniels said in an interview that Trump’s penis looked like a “toadstool,” the former president called Grisham “to assure her that his penis was, in fact, not shaped like a toadstool or small.”

Indeed, in 2016, he defended his endowment against Rubio’s comments during a primary presidential debate. “Look at those hands, are they small hands?” Trump said at the time, raising them for the audience to evaluate. “And, he referred to my hands – ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”

Of course, it’s an open question whether Trump’s continuing coarseness will deepen his problems with women voters. No doubt, many of his followers – male and female – will warm to his crudeness or dismiss it as Trump being Trump. But, for more thoughtful women, his vulgarity may confirm anew their worst senses about the man.

Many may recall that the thrice-married often philandering felon is on the hook for more than $90 million after juries found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, for instance. Indeed, Trump’s vileness may remind some that at least 26 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, including assault, since the 1970s. His late ex-wife, Ivana, even accused him in a divorce deposition of raping her in a 1989 fit of rage (though she later amended her comment to suggest she felt “violated,” but not criminally raped).

Trump’s problems with women go beyond a sense of decency and his having the “morals of an alley cat,” as President Joe Biden memorably suggested in their debate.

An October New York Times/Siena College national poll found Harris ahead with 56 percent of the likely vote among women now, with Trump getting just 40 percent. That is similar to the breakdown of the final vote in 2020, when Biden garnered 57 percent of the female vote to Trump’s 42 percent, according to exit polls, though Trump appears to have captured a slender majority of the white-woman vote that year.

Indeed, his overall gender gap has driven Trump recently to reach out to women. He appeared in an all-woman town hall in Georgia aired on Fox last week, where he declared himself to be the “father of IVF,” praised Alabama Sen. Katie Britt as a “fantastically attractive person,” and parried a sharp question about his abortion stance: “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”

As the BBC reported, Trump replied by walking the tightrope he has maintained for much of the campaign, taking credit for ending nationwide abortion rights, while also saying abortion policy should be left to the states. Democrats have hammered away at the idea that a patchwork of policies could emerge from such an approach, forcing women to travel for abortions.

At times, Trump has sounded at best as condescending to women. Consider his remarks at a September gathering in Pennsylvania: “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. … You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today,” Trump said. “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”

He added that “Women will be healthy, happy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”

For some women quizzed by the Associated Press about his comments, Trump hit just the wrong notes in that session.

“This notion that women need to be protected, that women are somehow weak or vulnerable — this sort of protectionist, patronizing tone … I think for a lot of women will just add to that sense of he doesn’t understand their lives, that he doesn’t understand where they are on a whole host of issues,” said Debbie Walsh, the director of the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University.

And Jennifer Lawless, chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia, added: “This kind of language is just more evidence that Donald Trump is out of touch with American women… Not only is the sentiment paternalistic, but the fact that he uttered these words while simultaneously berating women for caring about reproductive rights is stunning.”

To be sure, Trump’s latest bawdiness may just be lost over time, replaced in coming days by new and fresh rambling vulgarity. At the same rally where he saluted Palmer, he called Harris a “shit vice president,” as his crowd roared its approval. If he goes still further down the low road he’s been on, who knows what sort of denigration he might come up with?

The bigger question is: when will Americans wake up to just how perverse – in almost all ways – this candidate is? When will they be as revolted as Palmer was?

When doing the right thing goes tragically awry

Posted on October 17, 2024 by Joe Weber

Sinwar’s survival led to much death. Will his death do the opposite?

Yuval Bitton holds a poster of his deceased nephew; source: allisraelnews

Dr. Yuval Bitton, an Israeli dentist, was working in the Nafcha Prison in 2004 when an inmate complained to him about neck pain and balance issues. Bitton thought the prisoner was suffering from a stroke, so he and a colleague took him to an Israeli hospital, where the man was diagnosed with a brain abscess and quickly operated on.

The prisoner, Yahya Sinwar, was serving four life sentences for murder after killing at least four Palestinians he believed were collaborators. But, after 22 years in prison, he and more than 1,000 others were released in 2011 in a deal for Hamas to free an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, after five years as a captive. Sinwar promised to repay Bitton for saving his life.

Sinwar, a psychopath who killed some of his victims with his own hands and was known among Palestinians as the Butcher of Khan Younis, found a perverse way to thank Bitton and Israel. He masterminded the terrorist attacks that killed some 1,200 in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including Bitton’s 38-year-old nephew, Tamir Adar, and the capture of more than 240 hostages.

Of course, Sinwar now is dead, killed by Israeli soldiers in a gun battle in Rafah in southern Gaza. Does this mark the beginning of the end in at least one of Israel’s battlegrounds?

“To the Hamas terrorists I say: your leaders are fleeing, and they will be eliminated,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised address. Speaking to Palestinians in Gaza, he added: “Hamas will no longer rule Gaza. This is the beginning of the day after Hamas, and this is an opportunity for you, the residents of Gaza, to finally break free from its tyranny.”

But will Gazans take heed? Will they now turn on the rudderless remnant of Hamas hiding among them? Will Palestinian mothers beg their sons to desert? After tens of thousands have been killed, will the nearly 2 million remaining Gazans find ways to seek peace?

As Israeli soldiers comb through the wreckage that is Gaza, will residents disgusted by Hamas tyranny guide them to the many miles of tunnels where, perhaps, thousands of remaining Hamas terrorists hide? Will Gazans guide Israelis to the places where, perhaps, some hostages from the Oct. 7^th attacks still survive? Some 97 remain unaccounted for.

Some Gazans have at least turned gunmen away from schools and other shelter areas, according to The New York Times. “We will quickly kick anyone who has a gun or a rifle out of this school,” said Saleh al-Kafarneh, 62, who lives at another government school in Deir al Balah and said he locked the gates at night. “We don’t allow anyone to ruin life here, or cause any strike against those civilians and families.”

As the newspaper reported, Israel has increased the rate of its airstrikes on schools turned shelters to target what it calls Hamas command-and-control centers. It says militants have “cynically exploited” these sensitive sites, including UN areas, as locations for planning operations.

Source: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Embedding its fighters in such areas – and thus spawning killings of civilians in scenes broadcast around the world — fits Sinwar’s sadomasochistic and sociopathic vision. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the terrorist leader infamously pointed to civilian losses as “necessary sacrifices,” mentioning national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France.

In an April 11 letter to the now-dead Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

One has only to watch cable news coverage – and read much of global print coverage – to see how Sinwar’s views of turning his people into martyrs has turned Israel into a pariah in many quarters. No doubt, the carnage that has taken so many Gazan lives has cost Israel much of the world’s sympathy, with at least 14 condemnatory votes in the UN last year alone. And demonstrators on lots of college campuses, like useful idiots, have fallen in line behind Sinwar’s lead.

In addition to isolating Israel in much of the world, Sinwar triggered a seven-front war with his invasion of the country. Months ago, Netanyahu listed the battlegrounds as Iran, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militants in Iraq, militant groups in Syria as well as Palestinian fighters in the West Bank.

This monstrous figure’s legacy is astonishing. But the bloodshed surely will not end with his death alone. Indeed, Netanyahu made this clear in his address:

“The mass murderer who murdered thousands of Israelis and kidnapped hundreds of our citizens was eliminated today by our heroic soldiers,” he said. “And today, as we promised to do, we came to account with him. Today, evil has suffered a heavy blow, but the task before us is not yet complete.” Netanyahu added that the war “is not over yet.”

Certainly, beheading the snake marks a major turn. It could hasten an end to some of the worst fighting — or so some optimists are arguing.

“This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, and it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination,” Vice President Kamala Harris said. “And it is time for the day after to begin without Hamas in power.”

Just how long this “opportunity” will take to realize, however, is fraught. Much turns now on how Israel and its neighbors react.

“Sinwar’s elimination could provide the Israeli government with several off-ramps and openings to start to end the war in Gaza,” argues Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a resident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Programs. “The chaos within Hamas following Sinwar’s death may provide a chance to exploit uncertainties and divisions to expedite the release of the remaining Israeli hostages and the implementation of a general stand-down and demobilization within Hamas.”

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, source: The Times of Israel

Alkhatib, who grew up in Gaza City and advocates coexistence, offers a few suggestions:

“Israel, Arab nations, and the United States should now offer mass amnesty for remaining Hamas members who lay down their arms and stop fighting. They should also offer financial rewards to those who either turn in Israeli hostages or provide information leading to the whereabouts of remaining abductees,” he contends. “Israel should make clear its intention to pull out of Gaza and avoid the reoccupation of the Strip in the immediate future. And Gaza should be opened up for Arab, international, and Palestinian Authority figures and professionals to come in and begin stabilizing the war-torn Strip to initiate the ‘day after.’”

But he also raises troubling questions, such as: Who can Israel and Arab nations negotiate with when it comes to Gaza and Hamas’s future role (should there be one)? Who within Hamas in Gaza will control the issue of Israeli hostages, and who could command enough authority to make the group’s rank-and-file members release the hostages? Will Hamas splinter into small, disconnected cells inside Gaza, or can an interim leader emerge to keep the organization together?

For now, Sinwar’s death prompted some scattered celebrations in Israel. “Beachgoers in Tel Aviv erupted in cheers,” The Washington Post reported. “Families of soldiers killed in Gaza posted videos of themselves dancing with pictures of their lost relatives. Flag-waving celebrants filled a traffic circle in Carmel.”

But no real celebration can emerge until surviving hostages come home and the fighting ends. Most Israelis crave nothing more than peace and the lengths they go to to save lives are extraordinary at times — both of their countrymen (see Shalit) and of others.

Bitton, the dentist most responsible for saving Sinwar, has said he doesn’t regret saving the former prisoner, even if his death years ago may have spared Israel of so much agony since. Part of that has to do with the obligations every doctor has to save lives, he said.

“Second, these are our values both as Jews and Israelis. We aren’t taught to hate our enemies,” Bitton said. “We don’t desire vengeance. We know the righteousness of our path, why we are here and what we need to do in order to survive.”

He harked back to a visit to Israel by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1979.

“I was a 13-year-old boy,” Bitton said. “I stood by the side of the road waving the Israeli and Egyptian flags together with my entire school. We cheered the person who up until then had been our greatest enemy. This was the man who had said that he was ready to sacrifice a million Egyptian soldiers to destroy Israel. But when he spoke to us in the language of peace, we responded in kind.”

Over several years, Bitton spent hundreds of hours talking with Sinwar. The terrorist used his time in prison to study Israel in depth, often taking courses in areas such as history through an open-studies program. The conversations gave Bitton exceptional insights into the thinking in terrorist groups.

In 2007, Bitton joined the prison service’s intelligence branch.

“I became the intelligence officer of Ketziot Prison, where 3,000 terrorists were being held. The entirety of the Hamas leadership in Yehudah and Shomron was in Ketziot at the time,” Bitton said. “After that, I had a number of other positions including as head of the terror department. I was responsible for the intelligence that was collected from the 12,000 security prisoners in the system. “

In 2015, he was promoted to head the entire intelligence division, a position he held for four and a half years. He left the service in 2022.

“So, although we don’t hate our enemies, we also know who they are and what they are capable of,” Bitton said.

Sinwar, of course, was capable of astonishing savagery as well as indifference to the sufferings of his own people. He was part of a culture of martydom that has long hobbled Palestinian efforts toward coexistence.

Tragically, Sinwar’s life made an enormous and awful difference. Surely, his death will have a substantial impact. But until and unless his culture’s glorification of death is shattered, his horrific legacy will live on.

Foul language, debasement and politics

Posted on October 10, 2024 by Joe Weber

Just how far down can we go?

When the sketch comedy show “In Living Color” debuted on Fox in 1990, it introduced America to a wonderful phrase, “Clutch the pearls.” And, as our culture has continued to descend toward some unfathomable bottom, pearl-clutching has become ubiquitous, moving beyond shocked high-society ladies.

So, gentle reader, kindly indulge me while I engage in a bit of it (though I own no pearls).

Actor Sam Elliott, known for portraying cowboys and other men’s men, has just broken some new ground in this area in a fresh ad for Kamala Harris, available here:

In his deep, sonorous tones, Elliott says the vice president has “more courage, more honor, more guts” than Donald J. Trump has ever had. And he tells the bros — presumably the targets of the ad — to shake off anything holding them back. “If it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that … it’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”

Will it work? Who knows? It takes a lot to cut through the clutter, especially with young male voters. Some 36 percent of likely male voters between 18 and 29 favor Trump, compared with only 23 percent of young women, according to the Harvard Youth Poll. While such results suggest that Harris enjoys a commanding lead among young people of both sexes, chipping away at Trump’s support among the bros can only help her.

But one thing about the ad is a bit unsettling — and here comes my pearl-clutching. “Are we really going back down that same f—-ing broken road or are we moving forward …?,” Elliott asks. So, unless there’s some editing, that ad — produced by a Republican anti-Trump group, The Lincoln Project — will not run on network TV.

Perhaps the language — including a word many of us have been known to use at times — is just fine, given the places on social media where the ad runs. That’s where the target demographic is, after all.

Howard Stern and Harris, source: Rolling Stone

Indeed, such demographics and all others are being keenly pursued by Harris and her vice presidential nominee. Tim Walz. That’s why Harris has appeared in such media as Howard Stern’s satellite radio show, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and the Call Her Daddy podcast and Walz opted for “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” To be sure, Harris has also sought out the older demographics by sitting for a “60 Minutes” interview, but she wants the younger folks, too.

Still, the unsettling thing about the Elliott ad is that it’s part of a continuing debasement of political culture. Coarse language is just a part of that, a symbol of it.

Sadly, we can lay the blame for this squarely on Trump. This process began, of course, in 2016 with Trump’s juvenile nicknaming of his opponents — Crazy Hillary, Birdbrain for Nikki Haley, Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren, etc. And that has continued with Crazy Kamala, Comrade Kamala and Tampon Tim. Trump is also known for his coarseness in his rallies, dropping f-bombs with regularity. “Let’s indict the motherf—-er,” he infamously said of Biden at a California GOP meeting last year.

To be sure, some Democrats have aired once-private vulgarities in public, too. In 2019, then newly elected Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib in vowed to “impeach the motherf—-er,” referring to Trump, in a meeting of the liberal group MoveOn.org.

And, as reported by The Washington Post, Harris has been known to be proud of her proficiency in profanity in private — but rarely in public. Last May, though, she bluntly described her thoughts about breaking barriers in a conversation at the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies.

“We have to know that sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open,” Harris said. “Sometimes they won’t, and then you need to kick that f—ing door down.”

But Trump and his followers degrade language in public on a regular basis. As president, he referred to African nations as “s—holes” and called Joe Biden a “son of a b—-” and, earlier, famously boasted of grabbing women “by the p—-,” of course. His supporters have gleefully echoed his vileness at rallies, wearing T-shirts that say “Biden sucks, Kamala swallows.” Trump’s crowds seem to exult in the freedom he gives them to act, well, like a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton memorably put it.

As the Post pointed out, there is a long history of presidents swearing in private, and maybe a growing level of acceptance for public profanity from leaders. But now Americans are hearing a woman in Harris’s position using unbecoming language, an unfamiliar reality, according to presidential historian Tevi Troy.

“There’s the question of whether it’s appropriate for a president to be cussing. Then there’s the second question of whether it’s considered ladylike to be cussing,” said Troy, who has studied presidents and profanity. “So she’s operating in both spheres, and we’re in uncharted territory.”

This goes beyond public language, though. After all, using decent language — in any setting — is just a matter of showing respect for others. And Trump is a master of disrespect. Recall how he mocked a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski, by mimicking his physical challenges.

Trump seems to delight his crowds by waxing profane about many people— Blacks, gays, immigrants, non-Christians of all sorts. In her criticism, Clinton derided Trump followers as racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and Islamaphobic, and those labels likely still apply to many of them. The attacks work for Trump.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have displayed extraordinary disrespect for legal Haitian immigrants, for instance, in their attacks on residents of Springfield, Ohio. Their demonization and villainization works to whip up fear and racism among his white followers, as it confirms their sense of superiority by invoking tropes such as the eating of household pets.

“The power of such baseless accusations by Trump and Vance lies not in their factual basis, but in their resonance with long-standing racial fears about Black and brown people,” Princeton Prof. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús writes in Time Magazine. “These anxieties transcend the specific moment of misinformation. Rather they tap into a fears rooted in Christian bias and cultural stigma and then perpetuated by law enforcement, animal rights groups, politicians, and white communities who see non-white immigrants as existential threats to the purity of American neighborhoods.”

Ever since Trump derided southern border-crossers as criminals and rapists in 2016, he has found a ready market among fearful white followers. One hears of people in lily-white areas rushing out to buy guns to protect themselves from the invading hordes Trump has described.

“Fear, like hope, can be very motivating and is not inherently bad. The challenge is to identify when fear is being used deceptively,” Dolores Albarracin, a professor of psychology, business, and medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in an American Psychological Association piece in 2020. “For example, intentional distortion of evidence is within the realm of disinformation and often foments fear for political purposes.”

Certainly, the denigration of Haitian immigrants falls into the latter category. Trump campaign lies about the pets were denied by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and local Springfield, Ohio, officials, but Trump followers breezed right on by the facts. “Bomb threats, school closings, rallies, and more have come at the cost of misinformation and baseless claims,” the Columbus Dispatch reported. “Associating eating pets with immigrants is often considered a longstanding trope that exposes racism and discrimination.”

Such cultural debasement by Trump extends to the media and other institutions, as well, of course. The former president has long excoriated the media and his recent refusal to appear on “60 Minutes,” for fear that his misstatements would be called out by fact-checkers, just underscores that.

He has also demeaned the legal system (and not exclusively over his 34 felony convictions, as well as the $88 million in judgments he must pay a woman he raped, E. Jean Carroll). And he has similarly discredited the FBI, intelligence agencies and the military.

Of course, if Trump wins on Nov. 5, we can expect more of the same. If he loses — and if the GOP consigns him to the political dustbin — perhaps we can hobble back to a culture of normalcy. The Elliott video for Harris is not an official campaign ad and it’s highly unlikely Harris would greenlight such language in forthcoming ads. We could also expect that a President Harris would likely keep her salty language behind closed doors.

Celebrating the best of American culture is a lot of what Harris is about. Trump is all about something else entirely.

Catching the antisemitism of the day

Posted on October 7, 2024 by Joe Weber

Ta-Nehisi Coates comes up short after his visit to Israel

In 1596, Shakespeare caught the antisemitic spirit of the age with “The Merchant of Venice.” His Shylock lends money to a Christian, Antonio, on the condition that the moneylender can slice off a pound of Antonio’s flesh if he defaults. When Antonio fails to pay, he’s spared the knife only because another character argues that the security was about flesh, not blood, and thus Shylock couldn’t collect.

Still, Shylock comes up even shorter. He is charged with conspiring against a Venetian citizen and his fortune is seized. He gets to keep half his estate by converting to Christianity – something his daughter separately does when she runs off with a Christian man.

The Nazis loved the play. More than 50 productions were mounted in Germany between 1933 and 1939, Smithsonian Magazine reported.

Today, we see a similar phenomenon with a celebrated modern author, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Though his work is nowhere near as distinguished as The Bard’s, Coates reflects today’s widespread antisemitic sensibility with his latest offering, “The Message.” And, like Shakespeare, his work is generating a lot of heat. The book “is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion,” argues one critical writer, Coleman Hughes. Others differ, of course.

Coates offers a central chapter in the book about his visit in the summer of 2023 to the West Bank. There, he writes, he saw cisterns on the roofs of Palestinian homes that collected rainwater that the householders depend on. He contrasted the primitive plumbing with Israeli settlements on the West Bank where “you can find country clubs furnished with large swimming pools.”

To Coates, the different systems smacked of the segregated South. “On seeing these cisterns, it occurred to me that Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself,” he wrote. “And more, it occurred to me that there was still one place on the planet—under American patronage—that resembled the world that my parents were born into.”

His writing offers what a reviewer in The New Yorker called Coates’s version of moral clarity. It seeks to join the struggles of brown Palestinians with Black Americans, echoing views that have long been interlaced with antisemitism.

Jay Caspian Kang, source: Character Media

“Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians,” reviewer Jay Caspian Kang writes. “The struggles cannot be disentangled and written off as foreign or complicated.”

Indeed, Coates seeks to simplify the long pained Middle Eastern conflict. And he gives the century-old tensions an odd – and strained — racial cast. Coates “is casting off what he sees as the white standards of writing and its addiction to ‘complexity’ and stating, instead, his version of moral clarity,” Kang writes.

Really now — “white standards of writing”? Where might one find such things?

For his part, Coates describes his book as an effort to debunk the complexities he claims that journalists invoke to obscure Israel’s occupation, as The Free Press reports. The writer complained in an interview with New York magazine that the argument that the conflict was “complicated” was “horseshit.” That was just how defenders of slavery and segregation described these plagues a century ago. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

Never mind how much Palestinian terrorists have sought – over decades and by the bloodiest means possible – to obliterate an entire state. Never mind that just a year ago, such terrorists raped, murdered and pillaged, demonstrating a savagery far exceeding the treatments West Bank residents get, even in the admittedly lopsided Israeli military courts.

In fairness, Coates visited months before the ghoulish violence of Oct. 7th last year, and before the Gaza and Lebanese wars. His 10-day trip was his first in-depth encounter with the conflict. As The Jerusalem Post reports, half of the trip was guided by writers associated with the Palestine Festival of Literature, or Palfest, and the other half was led by Israeli left-wing activists associated with the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence.

Clearly, he was not deeply immersed in the area and that showed. But, even given his shallow — and perhaps heavily propagandized — acquaintance with the issues, one has to wonder how he could be so blind to the reasons Israelis fenced off the Palestinian territories. Was he that ignorant of the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000, when thousands on both sides died?

Was he that unaware of the infamous Passover Massacre of 2002, when terrorists killed 30 people in the Israeli city of Netanya. Did he not know that this spurred the reoccupation of the West Bank and spawned the fences? Was he blind to the very many peace deals that Palestinians walked away from?

Simplicity and simple-mindedness are two different things. A journalist – and Coates is foremost a reporter – needs to bring a basic understanding of history to his work. Just looking around doesn’t cut it. But Coates seems to prefer simple-mindedness.

Since his book came out, the press has been filled with a good bit of argument over sharp questions that a CBS journalist, Tony Dokoupil, posed to Coates on Sept. 30 on the usually light-fare CBS Mornings show. The reporter challenged Coates’s one-sided view, mainly for its gaps:

“Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it?,” Dokoupil asked. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and the Second Intifada, the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits? And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?”

Coates responded that there is “no shortage in American media” of reporting about such matters. He is most concerned, he argued, with “those who don’t have voice.” Further, he said he is offended by states built on the idea of “ethnocracy.” He claimed there are two tiers of citizenship in Israel, one for Jews and one for Palestinians.

Never mind that coverage on CNN and other outlets overwhelmingly deals with the sufferings of Gazans and West Bank residents, paying relatively little mind to the displacement and deaths among Israelis. Never mind that those allegedly lacking a voice have found plenty on American campuses. Never mind, too, that Israeli Jews include people of a crazyquilt of ethnicities and that the single largest group, in fact, are brown peoples of Sephardi backgrounds. Never mind that Palestinian Israelis vote and have had elected representatives in the Knesset since the founding of the state.

Really, Coates, how can you omit so much?

For Dokoupil’s probing questions in a fairly short exchange, he was criticized by a top executive at CBS, Adrienne Roark, who was reportedly seconded by network chief Wendy McMahon. In a staff meeting on Oct. 7, of all dates, Roark argued the interview was not in line with the network’s commitment to neutrality and did not uphold the network’s standards. Without elaborating on the punishment for Dokoupil, if there was one, she said the matter had been addressed internally.

To be sure, Dokoupil, who has written about his conversion to Judaism, did bring some passion to his questions. That’s perhaps not surprising because his ex-wife lives in Israel along with their two children. Indeed, he said that the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” given its characterization of Israel. He said the book “delegitimizes the pillars of Israel.”

Still, the journalist didn’t raise his voice. And he did what a good journalist does – he elicited answers from Coates that shed light on the author’s views.

And Dokoupil’s questions were defended by the network’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford. “I thought our commitment was to truth,” Crawford said, according to an audio recording of the meeting published by the Free Press. “And when someone comes on our air with a one-sided account of a very complex situation, as Coates himself acknowledges that he has, it’s my understanding that as journalists we are obligated to challenge that worldview so that our viewers can have that access to the truth or a fuller account, a more balanced account. And, to me, that is what Tony did.”

At least one other journalist touched on the same ground days before the network host did.

In a piece for The Atlantic, author Daniel Bergner wrote: “The more relentless Coates becomes in his prosecution of Israel, the more he loses his way. His habitual unwillingness just to recognize conflicting perspectives and evidence, even if only to subject them to counterarguments, undermines his case. Might it have been worth noting that Israel is surrounded by Arab states and populations committed to its annihilation? That to a great degree, Palestinian leadership as well as many Palestinian people share this eliminationist view, which might help explain the forbidden roads and onerous checkpoints? That Baruch Goldstein’s unforgivable mass murder came on the heels of others, by Muslims of Jews, near the same sacred tomb? That, some would argue, the Palestinians have rejected two-state proposals running back to the late 1930s, when the British put forth a plan that would have granted the Jewish people only about 20 percent of the land that is now controlled by Israel?”

Regrettably, Coates’s views are not out of line with those of many in the progressive ranks. One Black writer on X said Dokoupil’s approach reflected “his Jewishness, his feelings, his knee-jerk Zionist defense mechanisms – but what’s also present is a very white, very American thing: his white supremacy.” The Palestinian-Italian comedian Dean Obeidallah claimed the journalist “repeatedly attacks and smears Ta-Nehisi Coates for daring to discuss Palestinian humanity in his new book.”

There’s no doubt that Coates is remarkably talented. His candor about his tortures at the hands of an abusive father and his fear of other Black people in Baltimore, described in Between the World and Me, is exceptional (he ultimately sees his mishandling as a product of white racism). And his imaginative flights in The Water Dancer are entrancing and powerful.

But his lack of a basic understanding about the Middle East reveals a huge gap in his knowledge. He lacks the substance of a Thomas Friedman, who has written eloquently and fairly about the region, for instance, or any number of other journalistic observers who’ve spent a lot longer than 10 days in the area.

Do his generalizations and simplifications add up to antisemitism? If not, they come awfully close. They echo much of what Americans have heard in coarser form from such figures as Louis Farrakhan and even the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Certainly, the pathology can be surprisingly subtle. Even today, scholars debate whether Shakespeare was indulging in antisemitism or merely exploring it. After all, the playwright gives Shylock one of the more moving monologues in the play:

“Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

Shakespeare appeared to offer some human fellowship and even sympathy for Jews in that monologue, at least. Coates, for his part, showed little understanding even in a visit to Yad Vashem, where he saw a row of soldiers there “safeguarding nothing less than the evil of the Jewish state,” Bergner wrote. Coates saw an evil barely obscured by the “moral badge of the Holocaust.”

It’s extraordinary how a person who can see so many other things so clearly can be so blinded.

Dickens would have been proud

Posted on October 2, 2024 by Joe Weber

JD Vance’s performance on the debate stage was quite Dawkins-like

In 1838, Charles Dickens gave us a most memorable character in Oliver Twist. His Jack Dawkins is a masterful pickpocket, a marvel at skillful deception. He’s known as the Artful Dodger.

JD Vance makes the fictional character look like a piker.

To be sure, Yale Law School can point to the GOP vice presidential nominee as a superbly trained graduate. He’s articulate, can be gentlemanly and can master complex facts well.

Consider what another grad of the school had to say about him:

“At our shared alma mater Yale Law School, I used to have to debate people like JD Vance all the time— phony strivers who will lie and say anything to get ahead,” former Obama Administration aide and CNN commentator Anthony Kapel “Van” Jones tweeted before last night’s debate. “They are hard to beat. Coach Walz will be constrained by his decency. Let’s see if a good, big hearted man can beat a pretender with a high IQ, but low integrity.”

Vance told a lot of whoppers, but give some thought to his biggest dodge of the night. When Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, pressed him on whether Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, Vance ducked. He was unwilling to contradict or offend his senior running mate, who still maintains he won. “Tim, I’m focused on the future,” he said. Walz’s retort: “That is a damning, that is a damning non-answer.”

As for his focus on the future, Walz pushed on Trump’s efforts to lay the groundwork for the public to not accept a Trump-Vance loss. Vance’s flagrantly dishonest answer was that Trump “peacefully gave over power on January the 20^th.” Huh, did he forget Jan. 6, 2021, as so many Republicans seem eager to do?

As The Wall Street Journal recounted, “JD Vance deflected when asked about comments he made after Jan. 6, 2021, saying that he would have allowed Congress to entertain alternative slates of electors from key swing states, a power that the U.S. Constitution and federal law don’t grant to the vice president.”

But Walz, to his credit, hammered home the point.

“He lost the election,” Walz said. “This is not a debate. It’s not anything anywhere other than in Donald Trump’s world, because, look, when Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage. What I’m concerned about is where is the firewall with Donald Trump? Where is the firewall if he knows he could do anything, including taking an election and his vice president’s not going to stand to it. That’s what we’re asking you, America. Will you stand up? Will you keep your oath of office even if the president doesn’t?”

Yes, Walz often came across as fuzzy, even inarticulate. Until he was pressed, for instance, he didn’t own up to misspeaking about being in Hong Kong during China’s suppression of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. He had, in fact, been to China soon afterward and, mostly on school trips, visited some 30 times later. Walz also botched a reference to Iran, instead garbling his words and saying: “But the expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there.”

Chalk that sort of thing up to nervousness and, as some commentators have suggested, to his and Kamala Harris’s refusals to grant more major new outlet interviews. Such interviews can be great opportunities to hone answers to difficult questions. Mark it down, too, to a congressman and governor who spent most of his career teaching high school kids and serving in the Army National Guard, not polishing untruths at the likes of Yale.

By contrast, consider Vance’s tapdancing on abortion, a major challenge for Republicans who crave the independent non-evangelical women’s vote. Vance denied his documented past support for a national ban on abortion, insisting he sought only to set “a minimum national standard” – whatever that means.

And consider his dodge on choice, as he insisted that abortion should be a states’ rights matter, with different states free to set different policies – no matter whether that forces women to travel to find such care (which caused the death of one such Georgia woman, as Walz noted). Vance also repeated the anti-abortion movement’s saccharine and insincere arguments about giving women other choices:

“I want us, as a Republican Party, to be pro-family in the fullest sense of the word. I want us to support fertility treatments,” Vance said.” I want us to make it easier for moms to afford to have babies. I want it to make it easier for young families to afford a home so they can afford a place to raise that family. And I think there’s so much that we can do on the public-policy front just to give women more options.”

There were many more such examples in Vance’s too-smooth-by-half presentation.

“Vance repeatedly stretched, twisted and abandoned the facts (e.g., minimizing climate change as ‘crazy weather patterns,’ denying increased manufacturing under the Biden-Harris administration, claiming the administration ‘lost’ more than 300,000 children, misrepresenting his own position on abortion, claiming Trump saved the Affordable Care Act), or simply ducked the question (e.g., deporting children, seizing federal lands for housing, refusing to certify the 2020 election),” Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post put it in her newsletter.

For his part, she wrote, “Walz landed jabs on Vance’s extremism and went after felon and former president Donald Trump for ‘fickle’ and irresponsible leadership (e.g., brushing off traumatic brain injuries inflicted on soldiers by Iran as ‘headaches,’ calling climate change a ‘hoax’).”

Rubin also gave the Democrat high marks for a couple scorching lines: On gun violence: “Sometimes it is just the guns,” Walz said. And on abortion rights: “How can we as a nation say that your life and your rights, as basic as the right to control your own body, is determined on geography?”

She argued that “Vance came across as slick, rude (interrupting the moderators and whining about being fact-checked) and preprogrammed.” By comparison, she argued that Walz was a “happy warrior.”

Maybe, maybe not. But some of the best assessments of the night came from opinion-writers for The New York Times, most of whom gave the debating victory to Vance – but only on style points. Consider their left-handed compliments:

“Vance did an excellent job of impersonating a decent man,” Farah Stockman said. And Binyamin Applebaum added: “He made Trumpism sound polite, calm and coherent.” Maybe the most trenchant view came from Jamelle Bouie, who said: “Vance won this debate. It’s not hard to see why. He has spent most of his adult life selling himself to the wealthy, the powerful and the influential. He is as smooth and practiced as they come. He has no regard for the truth. He lies as easily as he breathes.”

Some voters may make up their minds based solely on these debate performances. And, if they read the fact-checks, that may be enough for them to see Vance for who he is, not who he cast himself as. Certainly, they ought to look past the hail-fellow-well-met façade that Vance presented, paying mind instead to the Vance who feeds red meat to the mobs at Trump campaign events.

“Less obvious is the disconnect between the Vance we saw last night and the Vance who’s been stoking fear with tales of pet-eating immigrants and problematic elections on the campaign trail,” Fortune’s Diane Brady wrote.

In the end, few voters will make their choice based on the No. 2 men on the tickets. Surely, Trump and Harris will stand at the fore on Nov. 5.

Hulu’s The Artful Dodger, source: The Michigan Daily

Still, the artful dodger did show up his boss in one major respect. Trump’s lies are often easy to read, sometimes given away by his capo-like rage-filled body language (and dutifully recorded by legions of fact-checkers). Vance tells his at times with a doe-eyed ease and conviction that almost masks an Ivy League sneer.

“I cannot imagine many voters would switch sides based on this outing,” Rubin wrote. “But perhaps some voters will conclude that someone as condescending and nasty as Vance should not be a heartbeat from the presidency.”

Marketing can move from silly to dangerous

Posted on October 1, 2024 by Joe Weber

Trump’s badly timed opportunism is anything but PresidentiaL

On a recent Southwest flight, the attendant gave out little bags of pretzels bearing some peculiar language. “My mom and I created Stellar Snacks in 2019 with a dream of crafting pretzels infused with passion,” the writing on the bag said. “It’s not just a pretzel … it’s a labor of love.”

Oh, really now.

Yes, marketing is important. And yes, it’s normal for marketers to stretch the truth just a bit to sell their wares.

But there are times when we must call BS for what it is. That’s kinda the way it is in our presidential election race now, too.

There’s an extraordinary amount of BS out there as we get closer to Nov. 5. Today, for instance, Donald J. Trump offered this reaction to the missile attack by Iran on Israel:

“Under ‘President Trump,’ we had NO WAR in the Middle East, NO WAR in Europe, and Harmony in Asia, No Inflation, No Afghanistan Catastrophe,” Trump posted on his Truth Social outlet. “Instead, we had PEACE. Now, War or the threat of War, is raging everywhere, and the two Incompetents running this Country are leading us to the brink of World War III. You wouldn’t trust Joe or Kamala to run a lemonade stand, let alone lead the Free World.”

Never mind that in 2018 Trump pulled the U.S. out of a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal, ratcheting up hostilities between the countries. Ignore the fact that an Iran-backed group then, in December 2019, launched rockets at an Iraqi military base, killing a U.S. contractor and wounding our soldiers and others, and provoking retaliatory strikes in Iraq and Syria by the U.S. Never mind that in the following month, the U.S. killed the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, triggering missile attacks on U.S. forces and killing some of them.

This was peace?

The truth – as opposed to the marketing – is that tensions between Israel and Iran, as well as between Iran and the U.S. have been a constant for many years. They are erupting now, all in the wake of the October 7, 2023,invasion in Israel by Iran-backed Hamas. That triggered Israel’s Gaza invasion and led to increasing rocket attacks on Israel by Hezbollah. And that, in turn, set off the Israeli reaction in Lebanon that has led us to today’s missile attacks by Iran.

But none of those historical facts deter Trump from arguing that these eruptions — and others — would never have happened had he been in the White House again.

“If I was in charge, October 7th never happens, Russia/Ukraine never happens, Afghanistan Botched Withdrawal never happens, and Inflation never happens,” Trump claimed. “If I win, we will have peace in the World again. If Kamala gets 4 more years, the World goes up in smoke.”

His claims sound wonderful. They are also ahistorical nonsense.

How would Trump have halted Hamas, whose members built extraordinary tunnel networks in Gaza for years, including during his term? What could he have done to deter the group that he hadn’t done before, as it burrowed beneath Gaza? The terrorist group’s timing likely had more to do with it seeing a chance to take advantage of tumult in Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic problems. Indeed, Hamas’s war-triggering actions likely had even more to do with the threat it saw in then-growing Saudi-Israel rapprochement and diminishing support in Gaza for the group.

As for Russia and Ukraine, the latest war’s roots go back at least to 2014, a couple years before Trump’s ascension to power. Back then, Russian paramilitaries took over Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk areas and Russia then invaded Crimea, taking control of the region. Thousands of Russian soldiers flooded in over the next several years and fierce fighting raged between 2017 and 2019, during Trump’s term. Did Trump do anything to toss Russia out? Despite a peace agreement, Russia then began its fullscale invasion in early 2022. It was all of a piece.

And, as for Afghanistan, one can only wonder why Trump maintained U.S. troops there during his entire term. It was clear for many years that the U.S. had won nothing enduring in the country since 2001. So why did Trump leave the withdrawal from one of America’s longest and least successful wars to his successor? Why were American soldiers still dying there on his watch?

Trying to rewrite history in the self-serving way Trump is doing may fool some of his backers. After all, they likely see him as a strongman who can set the world aright and cure domestic and foreign ills. In his rhetoric, Trump offers strength, harmony and peace.

But was there really harmony and peace during his tenure – at home or overseas? Recall that George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by police in May 2020, in Minnesota, during Trump’s last year in office. The event triggered protests nationwide, with disturbances in well over 100 cities. As for peaceful relations overseas, recall the coronavirus tensions with China in 2020 and Beijing’s clampdown on Hong Kong, as tensions between the U.S. and China grew. Were these times of tranquility?

For all of his business failures – which include six bankruptcies – Trump is a clever marketer. “The Apprentice” turned him from a struggling developer with a bad rep in New York into a national emblem of tough-minded leadership, never mind that the show was a venue in which facts never mattered.

Now, Trump’s efforts to rewrite history will likely con some of his devotees just as the “reality” show did. Perhaps they are the sort of folks who can believe that pretzels can be “infused with passion.”

But will he fool anyone with a passing acquaintance with facts? Anyone who has some understanding of history?

What is happening now in the Middle East is extraordinarily dangerous. Keeping full scale war at bay will require delicate diplomacy, and even with that a far greater explosion may well be unavoidable. If Trump were a decent leader, he would keep his mouth shut about that and, maybe, even support President Biden’s efforts.

But then, this is a man who sells sneakers, Bibles and even a picture book bearing a cover with the image of him raising his fist after being grazed by a bullet. You can get Trump’s signature on the book for $499. This is a man who brought public a social media company, Trump Media & Technology Group, through a shady offering, only to have it fall from its March 2022 high of $97.54 a share to the current $16 (no doubt, with many of his followers taking the hit).

The would-be president’s marketing is shameless. Now, at a time of global peril, it’s also dangerous.

When is cancellation warranted?

Posted on September 27, 2024 by Joe Weber

A Connecticut teacher faces heat over refusing to share a stage with a Jewish autho

When I attended an all-boys prep school in New Jersey many decades ago, one of my history teachers was a chapter leader in the John Birch Society. He routinely spouted bizarre Communist-infiltration theories, had us read conspiracy-oriented books and tried to recruit students to sell for Amway.

He lost his job at the school.

Should that happen now to Aisha Abdel Gawad at the prestigious all-girls Greenwich Academy in Connecticut? Should parents at the K-12 school think twice about sending their daughters there, as an alum of the school suggests in The Wall Street Journal?

Gawad is the writer who refused last weekend to appear on a literary panel discussion at an Albany book festival with a Jewish writer, Elisa Albert, who supports Israel. The festival director cancelled the session, saying Gawad and another writer didn’t want to share the stage with a Zionist.

Never mind that the panel had nothing to do with Zionism or Judaism. It was about “Girls, Coming of Age.”

And never mind that, to Gawad, Albert’s unpardonable sin was to write a piece lambasting those who defended Hamas after it murdered some 1,200 people and carried off a couple hundred hostages nearly a year ago.

Never mind that Albert’s piece, “An Open Letter to Hamas’ Defenders” in Tablet magazine expressed sympathy for Palestinians, even as it condemned their terrorist oppressors. “We weep for the plight of the Palestinian people and for the ignorance and naïveté of so many who believe that anyone but Hamas is responsible for their current suffering,” Albert wrote.

To Gawad, Albert’s criticism of Hamas and its supporters “mocked anyone who expressed grief over Palestinian life.” To be sure, Albert used sarcasm to make her point, as she began with “Hi terror apologist!” That was enough for Gawad to say that sharing the dais with such an outspoken Jew “did not feel like a safe forum.”

What would Albert have done, one wonders? Would she have pulled out an Uzi? Would she have strapped on a suicide vest? Would she have kidnapped Gawad and taken her off to a tunnel for 11 months?

More likely, Albert would have discussed her latest book of essays, “The Snarling Girl.” Her collection of 16 essays deal with feminism, childbirth, medicine, life in Los Angeles and Albany and, yes, her Judaism. The last includes things such as the stress of being a “perfect hostess, perfect Jewess” at a Passover seder, the legacy of Philip Roth, a visit to a mikvah, and antisemitic comments she’d received.

Still more likely, Albert would have sought to bridge the gulf between her and Gawad.

In fact, in a new Tablet post, Albert invites Gawad to her Shabbos table, offering to break bread and talk to one another. Albert writes “… the last thing on earth anyone needs is more anger, more resentment, more fighting, more hatred, more blood, more violence, heads to roll. Haven’t we had enough, yet, of anger, fear, suspicion, hatred, fighting, bloodshed?”

In that same piece, Albert defends Zionism. To her, it “is the belief that the State of Israel has the right to exist. Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people (literally aka ‘Israel’) has the right to self-determination, peace, and safety in our ancestral homeland.”

And, as a proponent of a two-state solution, she adds: “Zionism precludes no other peaceful nationalist ambitions or aspirations.”

Would that sort of conciliation be enough for Gawad? Would she join Albert in sharing challah so they could civilly air their disagreements?

Probably not.

Gawad’s refusal to share a platform with Albert is a new wrinkle on the longstanding Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions effort. That’s the 18-year-old drive that blacklists Jews, especially Israelis in academic institutions and others. The aim is to pressure Israel to accept, among other things, a right for Palestinians who fled in 1948 to return to their homes. That, of course, would destroy Israel. It would make it impossible demographically for the Jewish state to exist.

Indeed, BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti has said “we oppose a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. No Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine.”

Gawad’s decision to boycott a panel that would include Albert is of a piece with some of the more bizarre BDS efforts. Backers sought to boycott McDonald’s because a franchise in Israel offered free meals to Israeli soldiers. And BDS called for a boycott of an upcoming Disney movie that that features an Israeli superhero, Sabra, a fictional member of spy-agency Mossad. And some have called on supporters to shun Disney altogether.

Over the last few years, BDS backers have risen to the fore in several academic organizations. They won a vote for a resolution last May in the American Sociological Association, by a 58.8 percent margin, condemning Israel’s actions in Gaza and criticizing “Zionist occupation.” For all of its fury over the deaths in Gaza, however, there was no condemnation of Hamas in the resolution — its murderousness, apparently, wasn’t worth noting.

More recently, in August, BDS backers succeeded in getting the American Association of University Professors to support academic boycotts, rescinding its longstanding opposition to them. In a case of Orwellian logic, the AAUP argued that “when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance academic freedom.”

So, should Gawad continue to teach at the Greenwich Academy? Should she be shunned for her refusal to sit next to a Zionist? Should her boycott of Albert lead to the school, in effect, boycotting her?

Well, Emma Osman, an editor at The Wall Street Journal and a graduate of the academy, puts the matter in terms of how some of Gawad’s students may be affected. She wonders what things might be like for some of them now.

“I imagine myself back in school, seated around Ms. Gawad’s table,” she writes. “Would I feel my voice was ‘heard and valued’? Would I feel comfortable raising a view that I knew Ms. Gawad disagreed with? Could she grade my essay objectively knowing it was written by someone she might label a ‘Zionist’?”

The head of the school, Margaret Hazlett, defended Gawad initially. But, as pressures have grown, she more recently said that the teacher’s actions “showed a lack of judgment” and “reflected poorly on GA.”

Indeed, Gawad has already lost another prestigious gig as a result of her action. The Wilton Library terminated her as its first writer in residence, a $30,000 position. In explaining the move, officials there write: “We continue to be passionate about the free exchange of ideas. We remain dedicated to our mission to ‘inform, enrich, connect, and inspire our community,’ and to maintain an environment where everyone is made to feel safe and welcome.”

So, should she be fired from Greenwich Academy, as well, because it’s entirely possible some students will now feel unsafe and unwelcome in her classroom? Under intense fire now, Gawad claims that she, in fact, opposes all forms of discrimination and hatred.

“I oppose anti-Semitism and have dedicated my professional and personal life to not only fighting anti-Semitism, but also racism, Islamophobia, and hatred of all kinds,” Gawad wrote in a response to press inquiries. “I find it deeply hurtful and saddening that the festival chose to make public my private choice.”

But does she oppose the venomous hatred that led a terrorist group to murder hundreds of innocents? To rape and kill wantonly? There’s been no word from her on that, at least not publicly. Not a hint of criticism from her of Hamas and its ilk.

My former history teacher’s wrong-headed, at-times vicious and certainly ill-informed views made many of us in the classroom pretty uncomfortable. His attacks on some of us over our opposition to the Vietnam War at times got quite personal. And, in the end, his intellectual and emotional shortcomings and attitudes did him in.

Ultimately, that teacher’s position was untenable, his views were just too noxious. Gawad’s antisemitic act — whether she sees it as that or not — may in the end have the same effect.

Easy fixes sometimes are anything but

Posted on September 25, 2024 by Joe Weber

Contrasting the Trump and Harris economic planS

Politicians like easy-sounding solutions to complex problems, particularly on the economic front. Their fixes often are aimed at pleasing voters who know little or nothing of economics. At times, their efforts smack of pandering and might even be harmless.

But, at other times, they can be quite dangerous — as seems likely with the plans of Donald J. Trump. Just mull over what 16 Nobel laureate economists have to say:

“The outcome of this election will have economic repercussions for years, and possibly decades, to come,” warns a letter signed by Columbia Prof. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank; Harvard Prof. Claudia Goldin, former director of the Development of the American Economy program at the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research, and 14 other Nobelists. “We believe that a second Trump term would have a negative impact on the U.S.’s economic standing in the world and a destabilizing effect on the U.S.’s domestic economy.”

They caution that Trump’s plans, including his goal to impose tariffs of 10 percent to 20 percent on foreign goods and 60 percent on Chinese-made products, will do exactly the opposite of what he’s been promising as he has attacked the Biden-Harris administration for inflation. Just as inflation rates are coming down, those duties would kickstart a price-spiral anew.

“Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast,” the economists argue. “There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets. Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation.”

And listen to some of those folks, who’ve crunched the numbers on Trump’s plans:

“The Peterson Institute for International Economics think-tank in Washington calculates that 20 per cent across-the-board tariffs combined with a 60 per cent tariff on China would trigger a rise of up to $2,600 a year in what the average household spends on goods,” reports the Financial Times. “They say that the tariffs would disproportionately hit the low-income households that Trump claims his economic policies help protect.”

And the Peterson Institute is hardly alone. The Tax Policy Center, concurs, albeit with slightly different figures because Trump has floated both 20 percent and 10 percent global tariffs.

“A worldwide 10 percent tariff and a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods proposed by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would lower average after-tax incomes of US households in 2025 by about $1,800, or 1.8 percent,” writes center senior fellow Howard Gleckman, a former BusinessWeek colleague. “They’d reduce imports into the US by about $5.5 trillion, or 15 percent, from 2025–2034.”

The consensus among the experts is that Trump’s plan would hit consumers hard. The effect would show up not only in finished goods made overseas, but in anything manufactured in the U.S. with foreign-made components, as the higher costs would filter through the system. Thus, there would be no escaping the higher prices.

Beyond just ratcheting up inflation, Trump’s plans could drive down gross domestic product and employment.

“Candidate Trump has proposed significant tariff hikes as part of his presidential campaign; we estimate that if imposed, his proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” says another nonpartisan group, the Tax Foundation.

The kick in the teeth that Trump could deliver to the nation may also come at a tough time, as the economy slows under the Federal Reserve’s so-called “soft-landing” approach. The Fed, the independent group that has the job of reining in inflation, recently lowered interest rates by a substantial half-point in the federal funds rate. That’s because its leaders believe that inflation is moving toward a sustainable 2 percent annual rate, the Fed’s target, without driving unemployment up to unacceptable levels.

The Federal Reserve, source: Investopedia

As the Fed tries to balance employment and inflation, it is no doubt mindful that the national jobless rate recently rose to 4.2 percent after dipping as low as 3.4 percent, a 54-year-low, earlier in the year. The Fed is following classic economic theory: when the jobless rate is too low, higher wages kick up inflation; when unemployment is too high, of course, that’s a red light for the economy.

In time, the lower interest rates that the Fed has engineered should deliver an upward jolt to the economy. That will set the stage for the next president – whoever that is – to bask in the glow of sustainably low unemployment with reasonable inflation. But that president’s policies, if they are inflationary, could tip the balance.

As the experts see it, the outlook under a Trump presidency is hardly cheerful, particularly if his tariffs trigger an all-out global trade war. “The last time we were in a trade war under Trump, the global manufacturing cycle went into a recession,” Julia Coronado, a former Fed economist who now runs the MacroPolicy Perspectives consultancy, told the Financial Times.

Recall that, during Trump’s term, the economy slipped into recession from February to April 2020, a few months before his tour in the White House ended. Covid drove that downturn, which was marked by a jobless rate of 14.8 percent in April of 2020. When Trump left office, the jobless rate had fallen to 6.4 percent and it fell substantially after that, in part thanks to the infrastructure-spending policies of President Joe Biden.

Contrast Trump’s plan with Harris’s blueprint for stimulating housing construction, particularly for the middle class. She wants to boost housing supply by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, providing incentives for state and local investment in housing and creating a $40 billion tax credit to make affordable projects feasible for builders. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s, and Jim Parrott, a housing adviser under the Obama administration, estimate that America has a shortfall of three million homes right now, and Harris aims to close that gap. The two are advising her campaign on these plans.

Ben Harris of the Brookings Institution, a former chief economist of the U.S. Treasury, concurs that the plan is sound. “Critics assail the high cost of subsidies to developers, but they are the best tool the federal government has to incentivize homebuilding,” he writes. “We desperately need more affordable homes in America – millions of them – and the only practical way to boost supply quickly and meaningfully is to offer financial incentives to local governments to expand zoning for affordable housing and to developers to build it. The vice president proposes to do both.”

To be sure, Harris’s plan to provide $25,000 to first-time homebuyers is drawing less praise.

Calling that “a really bad idea,” Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, says: “The ultimate beneficiary of that credit is not going to be first-time home buyers. It’s going to be people selling homes.” Economics writer Peter Coy of The New York Times echoes that, saying the plan would do nothing to boost housing stock, but only demand. “Sellers surely would take advantage of the increased demand by raising their prices,” Coy writes. “So a big portion of the taxpayer money that was intended for home buyers would wind up in the pockets of sellers.”

But it’s far from clear how the construction stimulation efforts and the aid to homebuyers would offset one another. A rush of homebuilding in theory should lead to lower prices, and the numbers of people likely to be involved in her $25,000 support effort seem relatively small.

Moody’s estimates that Harris’s down-payment plan would help some 11.7 million more first-time homebuyers, including 2.75 million first-time Black and Latino homeowners. This is just 3.2 million more first-time homebuyers and 1 million more Black and Latino first-time homebuyers than would take place without her plan.

For her part, Harris is doing some pandering by proposing to attack alleged price-gouging, particularly in grocery costs. Quoting a campaign statement, The Washington Post reported that Harris wants to implement “the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on food and groceries — setting clear rules of the road to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

The details were not clear, the Post reported. But it said Harris would aim to enact the ban within her first 100 days, in part by directing the Federal Trade Commission to impose harsh penalties on firms that break new limits on so-called gouging. The statement did not define gouging or excessive profits.

As Alexander Henke, an economics professor at Howard University, told the school newspaper, Harris’s “vague” plan appears to be more like a political economy move than an economic one, tapping into popular sentiment against price gouging by delivering poll-tested messaging. And Harris should know better — she studied economics at Howard and her father, Donald, is a retired Stanford University economics professor.

What’s more, this horse long ago left the barn. Most of the inflation is now behind us, suggesting that the economy is resolving the inflation on its own and there would be few prosecutions.

Just look at the numbers. Prices for food overall rose 9.9 percent in 2022, faster than in any year since 1979, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The hike was especially sharp in so-called food-at-home prices, up 11.4 percent. But the rises have slowed since then, climbing last year by 5.8 percent overall and by 5 percent for food-at-home. This year, the department expects prices for all food to increase 2.3 percent, with food-at-home prices rising just 1.2 percent.

What drove up prices in prior years? Were greedy corporations taking advantage of consumers? Were nefarious or misguided Biden-Harris policies driving up the price of eggs (something VP nominee JD Vance embarrassingly got wrong in a Pennsylvania grocery store photo-op)?

Not according to experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They point to post-Covid volatility in global commodity prices and a sharp rise in wages for grocery-store workers (likely related to a shortage of such workers). When such “input” costs rise, everyone in the production and retail chain tries to sustain their profit margins. As it happened, foodmakers showed no margin gain in recent years, while retailers showed only a modest uptick in already-thin margins.

Other key elements of the plans of both candidates suggest far different approaches — Trump would take a largely top-down tack while Harris, as she puts it, aims to build the economy from the middle class out. She hit hard on this theme in a Sept. 25 address on the economy and her idea are spelled out on her website.

Harris would boost the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and she has promised not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. She wants to restore and expand the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit, including a $6,000 child tax credit for the first year of a newborn’s life. She would also increase the tax deduction for start-up businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, a move she argues would stimulate innovation among all-important small businesses.

By contrast, Trump wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 15 percent for companies that make their products in the U.S. He already cut the rate from 35 percent during his 2017-2021 presidency. It’s long been known that such moves deplete government revenues. Trump also said he would end taxes on overtime pay and on tips (the tips idea is one Harris also suggests). And Trump also aims to exempt Social Security income from taxes, unmindful apparently of how the Social Security system, even under the current system, will likely be insolvent by 2035 unless policymakers impose a fix.

Trump also wants to extend individual tax cuts he pushed through Congress in 2017, including for the wealthiest Americans. Experts estimate that would reduce revenue over a decade by about $3.3 trillion to $4 trillion.

Harris has also proposed hiking taxes on high-income earners. Americans earning below about $100,000 annually would continue to pay no taxes on long-term capital gains and higher-income families earning up to $1 million would continue paying up to a maximum rate of 20 percent. But those who earn $1 million a year or more would see a rise in the tax rate on their long-term capital gains to 28 percent.

Whether soaking the rich a bit, as Harris proposes, is good or bad economically, it may sell politically. And, if nothing else, it’s likely to do far less harm than Trump’s tariffs would.

Nebraska may matter again

Posted on September 22, 2024 by Joe Weber

How antidemocratic efforts could sway a presidential election

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” French journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote in 1849. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Consider 1968 and 2024. There are big differences, of course, but in some ways the years are echoing one another, especially in the pivotal role Nebraska may again play in a presidential election.

Nebraska’s public TV station in 2008 produced a documentary about the state’s key role in the election of over a half-century ago. The piece, “‘68: The Year Nebraska Mattered,” ably charted the ways presidential contenders courted support in the state.

The documentarians may have even more reason to revisit the theme about this year.

Recall that in 1968, the country was beset by often-violent polarization. Vietnam was tearing us apart, pitting young people against old, conservatives against liberals. Racism was a huge issue, as the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. provoked rioting across the country.

An openly racist strongman candidate for president thought Nebraska was so important to his campaign that he appeared in Omaha. George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, came to the state to court voters for his American Independence Party. His visit triggered rioting in the then-small city and he drew condemnation from the state’s Republican governor, Norbert Tiemann, among many others.

Meanwhile, Democrats also stormed the state for their primary. Sens. Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy both came to woo convention delegates, hoping to beat incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the nomination. On the Republican side, Richard Nixon vied with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to his left and Ronald Reagan on the party’s right. Nixon, who was trying for a comeback after losing the 1960 presidential election, stumped for voters in Omaha, too.

As it turned out, Nixon swept Nebraska for the GOP ticket. While Kennedy won over the Nebraska Democrats, his assassination on June 5 left the party ultimately with Humphrey. And, in the end, Nixon prevailed nationally, overwhelming both Wallace and Humphrey that November.

Now, Nebraska is looming large again – even larger this time — as Donald J. Trump presses legislators in the state to overturn its practice, dating back to legislation in 1991, of splitting its Electoral College votes by Congressional district. Nebraska will have five such electoral votes and Trump fears that he will lose one such vote, that of the 2^nd District, comprising Omaha and its suburbs. While the state overall went for Trump in 2020, he lost that Omaha area electoral vote.

The district has gone twice for Republicans and twice for Democrats in the last four presidential elections, as reported by the Nebraska Examiner. To avoid a repeat of his 2020 loss, Trump wants the state legislature to switch over to the winner-take-all system that prevails in other states, a change that would, in effect, disenfranchise many Omaha-area voters, as the rest of Nebraska tends to go GOP.

As polls suggest that there will be a tight vote nationally, just a single vote in the Electoral College could put Harris over the top, giving her the 270 she would need. Thus, Trump’s electoral gamesmanship.

Unsurprisingly, the opportunistic Republican governor of Nebraska, Jim Pillen, backs Trump’s efforts. But, so far, he hasn’t amassed enough support among the state’s legislators to do this. Pillen went so far as to bring a couple dozen Republican legislators to his mansion to hear an in-person pitch for eliminating the electoral rule from Sen. Lindsey Graham, as the Examiner reported. Trump also spoke by phone beforehand with some of the attendees.

The only other state to have a similar split-vote rule is Maine, which has taken that approach since 1969. So far, however, legislators in the Democratically dominated state have balked at making a change, even though that could help Democrats by taking away a likely GOP single electoral vote. Trump carried a single Maine district in both 2016 and 2020, getting one of the state’s four votes.

The states each award a single Electoral College vote to the winner in each of their congressional districts, plus two votes to the statewide winner of the popular vote.

Maine pioneered the split-vote system as part of an effort to push the country toward a system where the popular vote matters more than the Electoral College does, as the Bangor Daily News reported. Recall that five presidents, including George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016, lost the popular vote but prevailed in the college vote. Trump was swamped in both in 2020, though he continues to deny that.

Trump’s effort to overturn the Nebraska split-vote practice is of a piece with his general antidemocracy approach, of course. His supporters recently enacted a rule in Georgia to require counting ballots by hand, which would likely delay results and, according to critics, could lead to many errors. The change is being challenged in court.

Recall that Trump infamously tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes to put him over the top in the state in 2020. Trump’s phone call to the official was filled with a slew of false claims by the former president, as the Brennan Center documented.

Recall, too, Trump’s efforts to discredit elections all across the country. More than 60 court cases went against him, including many that involved judges appointed by Trump and other Republicans.

If he does win this fall, Trump’s intentions to subvert democracy are troubling, whether they involve electoral manipulation, concentrating more power in the White House or summoning the military to suppress dissent. His plans — some of which are based on Project 2025, despite his disavowal of the document — have been criticized by such nonpartisan groups as the ACLU and Protect Democracy, along with Democratic leaders from President Biden on down.

Trump has long been an admirer of autocrats, even praising one, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, by name in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. The former president warmed to the idea of being a dictator on day one in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity. And his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, recently shared a stage with autocrat-loving Tucker Carlson, a disgraced former Fox News host turned podcaster. Carlson did a fawning interview with Vladimir Putin and recently gushed over a Holocaust denier on his podcast.

If Trump defeats Harris — with or without overturning the Nebraska system — his bid to upend the longstanding split-vote approach in Nebraska may just be a sign of what more is to come. Much has changed since the state made a difference in 1968, but we again see a racist demagogue with a strongman approach trying to make a mark in Nebraska at a time of great polarization. The biggest difference this time is that he’s got much of the state’s Republican establishment behind him.

State Sen. Mike McDonnell, source: Nebraska Examiner

The choice of whether to toss out split-voting could be close — maybe even a matter of a single vote in Nebraska’s Republican legislative ranks. Fittingly, that may hinge on local Omaha politics, according to the Examiner. State Sen. Mike McDonnell, a labor leader and Democrat-turned-Republican, aspires to run for mayor of the city.

Would his constituents want to support someone who made their votes irrelevant? When he switched parties, McDonnell said he opposed a shift to winner-take-all. A spokesman said he’s sticking with that stance — for now.

And will antidemocratic efforts prevail nationally? If so, the path to those may begin in the state capitol of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Holden Caulfield’s flawed creator

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Joe Weber

A new book offers insights into J.D. Salinger

On D-Day in June 1944, J.D. Salinger landed at Utah Beach with 23,000 other Allied soldiers. They were the lucky ones, as the Germans only lightly defended that stretch of seafront. Some 197 of them were killed or wounded, far less than the 2,400 gunned down at Omaha Beach, five miles away. Still, the trauma of that battle – and gorier ones to come – left deep scars on the budding writer, then 25.

Salinger explored his wounds a bit in “The Magic Foxhole,” an unpublished short story in the archives at the Princeton University Library. In the piece, a chaplain wanders among the dead and wounded on that bloody beach, frantically searching for his eyeglasses. He is shot to death.

“Critics have pointed out the symbolism of God’s messenger finally being killed—the death of God—after searching for the clarity of battle that his eyeglasses might have provided,” Stephen B. Shepard writes in Salinger’s Soul: His Personal and Religious Odyssey.

In Shepard’s superb analysis of this enigmatic and much-read writer, Salinger comes across as something like that fictional chaplain. Spiritually lost and seeking relief amid the ugliness of the world, he wanders about, damaged and confused.

Salinger, for his part, abandoned the religion of his youth, trying to soothe his chronic depression in various Eastern creeds. He ran through a string of wives and lovers. He alienated or cut off friends and family.

It’s no wonder that he lived most of his life in hermitic seclusion on a mountaintop in New Hampshire.

“Passionate yet detached. Raised Jewish, but a practitioner of mystical Hinduism,” Shepard writes about Salinger’s many contradictions. “No sex in his books, but plenty in his life. A great believer in the power of love, but not so ready to give it. An adult with sophisticated views, but a man of arrested development in his romantic interests. A person with ‘a cast-iron ego’ who spent a lifetime seeking solace in God.”

Under Shepard’s unsparing eye in this short but absorbing work of literary analysis and journalism, Salinger emerges as self-centered and selfish, often disloyal, more than a bit creepy, and sometimes quite cruel.

Of course, he gave us memorable characters, most notably Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey Glass and their family. Indeed, Catcher still sells 200,000 copies a year, totaling 65 million, making it one of the best-selling books of all time. Salinger made the cover of Time in 1961, when Franny and Zooey was published.

Joyce Maynard, now 70. Source: The New Yorker

But the writer’s life was a mess. To take just one example, Salinger famously seduced an 18-year-old college freshman Joyce Maynard, when he was 53. Then, after living with her for 10 months, he callously dismissed her.

While vacationing with him in Florida, Maynard broached the idea of having children. “I can never have any more children,” the father of two told her. “You better go home now. You need to clear your things out of my house.” He gave her $100 the next morning and put her in a cab to the airport.

Maynard was one of many young women the thrice-married Salinger wooed and won. Each was “in the last minute of her girlhood,” a phrase he memorably wrote in one of his stories

Claire Douglas, source: Digital Commonwealth

Salinger couldn’t abide pregnancy, it seems, perhaps because it shattered his idealized vision of (or one might say his lechery for) girls on the cusp of adulthood. His marriage to Claire Douglas, whom he had met when she was a high school student and he was in his thirties, ended in 1967, a few years after she gave birth to their second child. Salinger’s sister told his daughter Peggy that Douglas had “a suicidal depression when she realized that her pregnancy only repulsed him.”

Claire couldn’t handle the isolation he imposed on them in their home in rural Cornish, New Hampshire. When their daughter was born, Claire was 22 and he was 37, and he seemed to leave her largely alone, abandoning her to spend his days in a cinderblock writing studio he had built.

“Up by 6:00 AM, he ate breakfast, packed his lunch, then went to his writing bunker, where he worked nonstop—draft after draft—until dinnertime, often returning to his bunker after dinner,” Shepard writes. “He had a phone installed in his bunker, along with an army cot, but made it clear to Claire that he didn’t want to be disturbed for anything less than a dire emergency.”

Salinger racked up a lot of broken relationships, often with people who had helped his career.

As a 20-year-old taking night courses at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, he was mentored by an adjunct professor, Whit Burnett, who cofounded Story magazine and published a few Salinger stories. But, when Burnett ‘s partner in a book imprint, the Lippincott Company, vetoed the idea of publishing a collection of Salinger’s pieces in a book, Salinger blamed the late Burnett and didn’t speak to him for years.

Salinger in 1948 told A.E. Hotchner, an editor at Cosmopolitan, that he planned to submit a story he called “Scratchy Needle on a Phonograph Record” about the death of blues singer Bessie Smith. Sounding much like a prima donna, Salinger said not one word could be changed.

Unbeknownst to Hotchner, however, the title was changed to “Blue Melody.” When Hotchner shared the magazine with him, Salinger blew up, accused the editor of deceit. The late Hotchner never saw him again.

Margaret “Peggy” Salinger, source: Simon & Schuster

Salinger even became estranged from his only daughter, who described him in a memoir as cold, manipulative and abusive, as Shepard tells us. The father Peggy describes is weird, drinking his own urine and sitting in an “orgone box,” a closet-sized cabinet for storing psychic energy.

Perhaps his driven self-absorption was necessary for Salinger to give us such fascinating and enduring characters. Despite his many successes, he endured a lot of rejections in the competitive post-war publishing world, one dominated by such figures as Ernest Hemingway, whom Salinger befriended in wartime Paris, and Norman Mailer (who dismissed him as “no more than the greatest mind ever to stay in prep school”).

The wartime experiences of both the latter writers – and many others — did much to shape their work. With Salinger, only a modest bit of his combat experiences appears in his fiction. Indeed, as he focused on young fictional characters, he seems to have tried to suppress the ugliness he saw in Europe. Instead, he seemed to immerse himself in imagined youthful innocence, perhaps taking refuge in it.

But the psychic ravages of the war may well be the key to understanding this peculiar man.

After landing on D-Day, Salinger’s regiment fought its way toward a French port city, Cherbourg, Shepard tells us. As the men moved street by street, under German fire the whole way, many were slaughtered. Of some 3,000 of Salinger’s fellow soldiers, only 1,100 remained by the end of June 1944; the rest were killed, wounded or missing. The regiment suffered the highest rate of casualties of any in the war.

Soon after, in January 1945, Salinger fought in the especially ghastly Battle of the Bulge. Then, in April, came what Shepard calls the author’s most devastating wartime experience. He saw the horrors that fleeing Nazis left at a slave labor camp that was a satellite of Dachau. Bodies of Jews, starved or shot, lay about the camp. Others, too sick to leave, were burned to death in their barracks.

“You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live,” Salinger told his daughter. He was hospitalized for a time in Germany for combat stress,

Salinger did draw on such wartime experiences in crafting a few of his stories, including one of his most famous, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” In it, the fictional Seymour Glass, an ex-sergeant like Salinger, suffers a nervous breakdown and commits suicide.

Of course, Salinger didn’t kill himself. He died in 2010 at 91. At the time, he was married to Colleen O’Neill, whom he had met when she was 22 and he was in his early 60s. They married in 1988, and that marriage endured.

Whether Salinger ever found the personal peace that he thought his Eastern religion, Vedanta, promised is unclear. His son Matt, in a family statement upon his death, said: “Salinger had remarked he was in this world but not of it,” evoking that philosophy.

Matt, a successful actor, has been combing through his father’s unpublished work with an eye toward releasing it in the next couple years. Though he wrote constantly, Salinger didn’t publish anything after 1965, so we may soon see a wealth of material emerge.

Shepard’s work is well-timed to anticipate the flood.

The former longtime editor of BusinessWeek (full disclosure: I worked for him for about 20 years) and the founding dean emeritus of the graduate journalism school at City University, Shepard draws on biographies of Salinger. He also alludes to most of the author’s work, using it to flesh out his personality.

Much about the man still puzzles Shepard. But this reclusive figure who made an enduring mark on American literature has given us all much to puzzle over.

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