🛣️Charting the path back from the censorship wilderness🚷
The JAFFA guide to encouraging free speech at the neighbourhood level.
“Everyone’s a critic”. That’s a refrain that I’ve heard my entire life, or even said myself. It’s easier to tear something down than create it, and sometimes when one gets lost the road to getting back on track is much longer than the original journey. I have spent several years being a critic of the Anti-Defamation League, and I stand by everything I’ve written or said. In following up to my previous article however, the fact remains that they are a massive institution with national or even global reach, while those of us standing against it are often anonymous bloggers and commenters that wouldn’t even attract a second glance.
That does not change in one step. I’ve proposed a Jewish Alliance for the First Amendment (JAFFA) to provide a counterbalance to what I believe is real social damage to the Jewish community. I believe it is pointless to bemoan damage if we are not building to rectify it. Imagine living in a house with a rotting foundation, leaky roof and cracking drywall. At a certain point one might conclude that it’s better to tear down the existing structure and start afresh, but does he wait until the house is condemned or worse yet someone gets injured in an accident caused by its derelict condition? The ideas I put forward here aren’t meant to require us to be savvy non-profit executives or even quit our day jobs, but they will demand more than just scrolling through Facebook feeds and unfortunately like most things in life they could expose one to social and professional risk.
1. Associate with free speech fellows in your real life.
You’re probably reading this because it’s in your email or was shared on a social media forum, and that’s great. The advent of the internet and information revolution made it much easier for us to connect even as total strangers. But keyboard activism has its limits. While many corporations and public figures fear online vitriol, the successful ones eventually find at a certain point that online campaigns often are just hollow talk by a small group of troublemakers. For example in 2020 a petition made the rounds demanding that Trader Joe supermarkets discontinue certain items with humorous ethnic names like "Trader Jose's" or "Trader Ming's". After at first issuing a statement agreeing with petitioners about the brand names being insensitive, the chain did some surverys and research that found that their average customer actually was very satisfied and unoffended with the label. They then declined to change the products. Find real people that also feel stifled and in need of an outlet for their voice. Ideally this would be people that you know and have met in person, but not everyone lives in the middle of a bustling neighbourhood.
For those that do however this isn't always easy. I used to know through the internet a guy whom I'll call Louis. He was a dad and a member with his wife and children at a Reform Jewish temple in Connecticut. Many times he would lament to me that the rabbi of his congregation was a raging feminist activist who would use the pulpit to talk almost exclusively about politics to the exclusion of everything else. He happened to have conservative social and political views. Louis was only attending the temple because it was his wife's social scene, and otherwise had very little interest in either the people or the activities there. To my knowledge the only place he could be himself socially was online. This is one of the reasons that I increasingly hear people say that they are so in fear of having their political views revealed that they are adopting the terminology of being "closeted" as is usually said about gays that live a double life lest their disapproving family discover the truth. The irony is that the people at the temple would have probably accepted Louis much easier if he had come out as gay and renounced his marriage than if they had discovered he feels different on certain key political questions.
But the online outlet isn't a real alternative either. Even if Louis needs to keep attending the temple for the sake of his marriage, he would be much more effective and fulfilled if he found a real circle of friends to associate with that have similar perspectives. So how does one do that? Nowadays it's not as easy as it might have been even less than a decade ago. Do you remember hearing terms like doxxing and cancellation nearly as much in 2013 as you do today in the context of social media? Those have been turned into literal life missions by those that would want free speech dead. The most absurd cancellation story I heard was from 2019 when University of Iowa student Carson King was exposed for having written a racially charged tweet in 2016. The only reason King was in the news anyway was over his efforts to raise money for a local children's hospital in Des Moines. I believe the best approach to re-oxygenating the environment for free speech is through subtle provocation. Wear something that might start a conversation. Recently we had our Labor Day barbecue in my driveway. I was wearing a t-shirt that I'd bought with the caption "WUHAN JAMES" and then in a different font "Taking my talents to China". It had been one of the last clean shirts in my dresser, but all of the family members around me took notice and laughed because of the widespread impression that LeBron James will support any media promoted cause unless it risks his livelihood as evidenced by his refusal to criticize China's political repression. I'm thinking next time maybe I will wear the shirt to the public library or a park.
2. Samizdat and Guerrilla Marketing
Have you ever gotten into your car after a long day and groaned when you see a flier on your windshield, which might even look like a parking ticket? (This is even more terrible if it's been raining hard). Recently this happened to me while leaving the hospital after visiting a patient. I took the flier off the window, and even though I was going to toss it into the trash I skimmed over what it said. In this case it was a strange evangelist newsletter, but even after I threw it away I was still thinking about it. This is one effective, if potentially annoying, way to spread a message. Obviously in the internet age it is taken for granted that the best ways to reach people are through the internet or social media on their digital devices, and those are indeed very powerful. Print media publications, especially original copies, are gaining an added importance nowadays due to what is called flushing down the "memory hole", meaning when online or digital publishers retroactively edit portions of a piece of media in order to omit information that could contradict the authorities' preferred narrative. This was a central plot point of George Orwell's 1984 and recently has come into relevance as books by authors like Roald Dahl are being edited for sensitivity to certain audiences that may find them offensive.
In actual communist nations dissidents devised ways around the censorship. One of them was called samizdat, which is a Russian expression meaning "self-published". Because access to printing presses was often restricted in these countries, sometimes opponents would literally type out copies of books or pamphlets on typewriters, or pass the same copy of a banned publication from person to person. Sometimes a shipment of banned texts would be smuggled in from a western country and regime opponents would hide it in places where passersby may happen upon it in order to wake them up, or it would bear a title page or cover that was totally different from the actual contents in order to pass as a permitted book. This approach is only slightly more insurgent than leaving a flier on someone's windshield. In fact in college I once found a book that was likely left for this exact purpose, with a slight difference. I had the provocative title Away with all G-ds! I picked it up and started flipping through it only to find out that it was really just an anti-religious screed by American communist activist Bob Avakian. Of course they weren't doing this to escape persecution, his group RevComUSA has never been under threat of legal banning. But the person who left it on the table likely was hoping the provocative - even blasphemous - title would spark the curiosity of the person who saw it. Ironically I often would see the same tactic from missionary groups that would leave flip books in public bathrooms. It's pretty clear that both the Christians and the atheists still see the value of placing their gospel in print in the hands of their target audience.
This is how I propose that JAFFA turns from just an idea into a real group. Print out articles (like this one ) or other texts and leave them in a place with high traffic of our target audience. Leave information for them to
3. "Anti-Semitism" is fake. . . but Jew hatred is real, and is not going away.
My last article addressed the role that the Anti-Defamation League has had in worsening the problem of Jew hatred through its censorious activities. Notice that I used the term "Jew hatred", which I prefer to "anti-Semitism". The reason for this is that the word "anti-Semitism" itself is a euphemism cooked up in 1881 by German radical Wilhelm Marr as a more palatable alternative to "Jew hatred" (judenhaas). While he himself had deeply anti-Jewish views, Marr wanted his ideas to have intellectual heft separated from religion. Therefore he coined the term "Semitism" (semitismus in German) from the name of the biblical figure Shem, son of Noah and Abraham's progenitor, as a synonym for Judaism in order to encompass what he saw as the malign influence of the Jew in society. This evolved into antisemitismus. Ironically modern day commentators have questioned the term "anti-Semitism" because they argue that Semites may include other peoples such as Arabs, Assyrians and other ethnic groups of the Middle East. This is not true, because the term was used by Marr in order to describe the people he knew and encountered, the Jews of 19th century Germany, not to create a broad category to include ethnicities and cultures that he may not have ever met.
By now you're probably asking "who cares?" My point in rehashing these semantics is that just like a lot of the hysteria over it the very term anti-Semitism is predicated on a dishonest agenda. The ADL in 2018 published its "Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents" for the previous year and found that they had increased by 57%, which it called the largest year-on-year increase on record. At the time it listed 1,986 incidents as a major cause for alarm. This year it published the report for 2022, which found that there were 3,697 such incidents, a 36% increase over the previous year. However comparing one year to the next provides a lot of confusion, as the ADL has recently adjusted its data collection practices to include categories of crime that had previously not been counted. Furthermore, what is one to make of the anti-Jewish hatred that occurs in response to the ADL, such as when it says that so-called anti-Semitic criticism of it by Musk could lead to actual hate attacks against Jews?
Personally, I have an approach that I find more effective, if at the same time very unsatisfying: Not every anti-Jewish expression by a celebrity or politician really needs our full attention. Examples of this are the blow-ups over certain statements made by hip hop artist Kanye West (AKA "Ye") and basketball star Kyrie Irving. In West's case his entire professional career went down the drain, including creative partnerships with Adidas. Kanye's episode started in October 2022 when he started making bizarre tweets including one where he vowed to go "death con 3 (sic) on JEWISH PEOPLE" and to claim that he as a black person is actually Jewish. The ADL would proceed to write up a long report to be followed by several updates on Kanye West's tweets and rantings. Did those remarks actually warrant that reaction? On the one hand it is indisputable that Kanye West is a major tier 1 celebrity with great cultural cachet in the music and fashion industries, however at the same time he has always had the reputation of having manic episodes on live broadcasts. This was true in 2005 when he proclaimed that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" during a Hurricane Katrina telethon, as well as when he climbed onto the stage during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to dispute giving an award to Taylor Swift. Only a few months later West declared that he no longer hates Jews. . . after watching actor Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street. And while it is true that Kanye's statements are credited with inspiring about 30 anti-Jewish crimes of vandalism and harassment, I tend to wonder if that would have happened had the ADL and the media instead decided to give him less attention.
I don't mean to say that we should just acquiesce to the Jew haters when we encounter them in real life. It's your job to pick your battles and not accept the victim's fate, rather than relying on a non-profit institution that claims its mission is to eliminate anti-Semitism, a laughably unattainable goal. I graduated from college in 2016 and there was a period when I was there that I heard hateful remarks or ridicule daily from other students, some of them were even my friends. Once it even led to a loud argument with one of them. It's obviously an unpleasant memory, but now seven years later I am glad to say that that's all it was to me.
4. Casting choices are not an existential threat
Recently there was an uproar when actor Bradley Cooper was accused of committing "Jewface" by wearing a prosthetic nose while playing composer Leonard Bernstein in the film Maestro. They contended that this was anti-Semitic as Cooper is not Jewish and there is a common trope of Jews having large beak-like noses. To their credit the ADL for once took the side of reason and disputed the notion that Cooper's role was anything other than a tribute to Bernstein. But as for those that were hyperventilating over it, I can only wonder what result they are expecting out of this. When I was in high school there was an even bigger uproar over perceived anti-Jewish messaging in The Passion of the Christ, directed by Mel Gibson. At the time Jewish communal and elected officials like New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind were insisting that the negative portrayal of Jews in the film would lead to outbreaks of violence. The ADL, then under director Abe Foxman, condemned the film and its choices of how to portray the persecution, trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Whatever one's thoughts on the film, The Passion was much more violent and controversial than Maestro, and yet there was no wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in its wake.
Every time I see an example of a group complaining about negative portrayals of it in film it reminds of how it would sound if a child is asked by his parents how school was. Because he had nothing to good to report, his answer ignores anything he learned or accomplished and focuses only on nasty insults that his classmates said about him.
5. Reject the use of censorious terms in your conversations
The use of specific language is crucial to steering the thoughts of the people reading or listening. Certain terms have therefore entered the popular lexicon that have the effect of delegitimizing or disparaging particular beliefs and ideas. One of the most pernicious examples that I started to hear several years ago was "anti-vaxxer", and even before COVID I noticed it being used to attack the Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein. Even though Stein was, if anything just a mild critic of vaccines as such, and had never advocated against their use, Politico still refused to admit that the accusation against her in 2016 was untrue; they opted instead to inject nuance about how she was critical of pharmaceutical companies and therefore used the same arguments as anti-vaxxers. So do the facts even matter? The reason people like Stein are labeled with terms like anti-vaxxer is because they function as epithets, and signal to the audience that a certain person or group is illegitimate or dangerous.
Often when the case against the target is so weak, the epithet will be modified by a weasel word, like adjacent. This is meant to imply that the person may not be directly connected to the problematic belief or idea, but he has said or done something that is similar enough for him to be included in the same category. For those that remember 9th grade geometry, adjacent is used to describe two angles that have a common vertex but do not overlap, and therefore their arcs do not intersect. The most laughable example of the use of adjacent that I remember in my personal life happened on a local message board that I have since been banned from. A woman complained that the move Sound of Freedom was "Q Anon adjacent", because it deals with the topic of child abuse and human trafficking. That was it, there was no other connection to the Q Anon conspiracy network or anything of that type. When I looked up the phrase "Q Anon adjacent" while writing this, the first article that popped up was one critiquing the movie. Censorious word messaging can be so effective that for some people it's almost like popping a cassette tape into their brain and having them repeat it.
The most loaded censorious term is conspiracy theory/theorist. Much has been made of the alleged role of the CIA in bringing the term into popular parlance in order to discredit critics of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which seems to have been exaggerated. However, nowadays one of the worst ways to dismiss an idea or belief is to label it as a conspiracy theory. The truth is that there are many far-fetched beliefs that people have had about events ranging from the Apollo 11 moon landing to (my favourite) whether ex-Beatle Paul McCartney is an impostor switched or the real one who was killed in a car accident in 1966. For much of my life Americans were allowed to speculate and debate about these topics, with believers and sceptics each laying out their case. But lately this type of behaviour has been placed out of bounds. A conspiracy theorist is engaging in misinformation, perhaps even disinformation, and we cannot allow this type of speech to undermine citizens' trust in institutions like elections, public health, or climate change.
I have debated people from a sceptical position on topics like the September 11 attacks and QAnon, but I tried not to stoop to dismissing them using terms like conspiracy theorist. Doing so shuts down a dialog. Censorious terms are basically mute buttons that prevent people from intelligently listening.
Lastly, on behalf of myself and JAFFA (again, just me for now lol) we wish you a happy and healthy New Year 5784 שנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו.