Liberal Jew here. Respectfully, my Left plays the same game, with much of the Democratic Socialists normalizing, if not calling for, anti-Semitism because of their objections to Israel's policies. My, more centrist, Left all too often tolerates this expressing "understanding" what drives "globalize the intifada."
That happens, and I call it out, but much less often than people claiming they are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic.
As I said, I'm deeply critical of the current government. Saying Israel should use 5000 lb bombs instead of 10,000 pound bombs? Legit criticism. Saying the West Bank settlement construction makes a Palestinian state impossible? Legit criticism. Saying Israel should be tougher on the Jewish West Bank Settler group "hilltop youth?" Legit criticism; the hilltop youth are Jewish terrorists.
But anti-Zionism and attacking Israel's *existence * *IS* anti-Semitic: calling Israel a "colonizing settler" state is basically saying Israel has no right to exist, and Jews, unique among peoples of the world, have no right to self-determination. That's anti-Semitic. Calling for "Palestine river to sea?" Anti-Semitic, for the reasons mentioned above. Denying the archeological and historical truth that Jews have an unbroken 3500 year connection to the land? Anti semitism; this polemic denies a fundamental part of Jewish identity as part of an effort to delegitimize Israel.
"calling Israel a "colonizing settler" state is basically saying Israel has no right to exist"
I'd call the US a colonizing settler state, because it is. Those facts about the US are literally drilled into us in our elementary school textbooks. Does that mean the US has no right to exist? Does that mean I'm anti-American? No, not at all. The first statement doesn't imply any of the other stuff.
I want to speak to you as a fellow person of Jewish descent. Please: do not do the thing you just did in your post, where you manufactured a new definition of antisemitism that isn't antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. I've been to parts of the world that lost so many Jews that their numbers are now the hundredths of a percent, and people there (the children of the children of) *still* have an entire liturgy of vicious antisemitic insults they can pull out at the drop of a hat. That's antisemitism. I've given up understanding what causes people to be like this. Whatever causes it, we need to take it seriously and remind people it exists, not corrupt it with nonsense definitions. Israel has an army and nuclear weapons and can take care of itself. Jews everywhere else can't.
When the ONLY country you attack as "colonial -settler-nazi-Zionist" is Israel, it's a problem.
Again, criticizing Israeli is 100% legit. Criticizing the government, Bibi, policy: all fair game. Criticizing the CONCEPT of Israel is different. That isn't done for any other country.
This is not a new definition of anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism is attacking the concept of Israel, the concept of Jewish self determination.
There is a reason Israel is the only large Jewish population in all of Eurasia and Africa: all other Jews were killed, chased away, or fled. (The largest Jewish population outside of Israel and the Western Hemisphere is France (300,000), and they fled Algeria because the anti-colonial uprising there considered the Algerian Jews, who had been there for more than 1000 years, as not-Algerian.
Again, anti-Zionism is the statement that Jews are ok if they give up being everything Jewish other than bagels. That is anti-Semitic, and this isn't a new definition of anti-Semitism.
If someone says they want Israel wiped off the map, I'm fine with whatever definition you want to give it. I don't want the definitions stretched beyond that, to criticisms or even legitimate statements about Israel. That's how we get to the bad place.
The anti-zionists claim "they are not anti-Semitic, in fact they have Jewish friends"
Except to be an "acceptable Jew" to them, you have to give up the Jewish part of your Jewish identity. Israel has been a fundamental part of Jewish identity for thousands of years. Every wedding has a glass broken to symbolize the destruction of the Temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty. For 2000 years, most Jews left a corner of a wall in their home unfinished to symbolize the loss of Israel. The idea is being in "galut," (exile) has been a defining part of our experience for 2000 years.
Finally, we Jews decided, no more exile, no more persecution, no more not being accepted because we are Jewish.
Quick comment, meant with respect. You define yourself as “person of Jewish descent.” Not as a Jew, but as a person with Jewish ancestors.
It sounds to me like you don't identify as Jewish. That's your right, and I have no issue with that. But I do want to point that out in our conversation of what constitutes anti-Semitism. My lived experience is as a Jew. It seems, by your own words, that yours is not.
If I'm wrong, I sincerely apologize. And again, I mean no disrespect.
My father is Jewish and my mother isn’t. He was a professor of religion and a student of the Holocaust, so he spent a lot of my childhood raising me to understand what happened in the 1930s and 1940s and how he was convinced it would happen again. (He was generally not that intense of a person, but on this subject he was a little.) He also raised me to understand and appreciate Jewish culture, since that’s my family‘s culture. But he let me choose how I wanted to practice organized religion, and I chose (but let’s be honest, likely with a lot of influence from my parents) not to be religiously observant in either of my parents’ religions. This wouldn’t be a dealbreaker for many Jews if my mother had been Jewish rather than my father, but since my blood runs from the wrong parent I don’t call myself Jewish.
I have a very specific childhood memory of visiting a concentration camp and my father showing me the half-yellow star the Nazis made for kids like me. Although I don’t know if he ever said this explicitly, I was brought up to understand that the kind of people who made those stars would never hesitate to identify me as Jewish, but that other Jews might. This conversation isn’t the first time I’ve felt the truth of that statement.
You seem to have missed Noah's entire (larger) point!
In a full-fledged liberal democracy, the INDIVIDUAL (not the ethnic group) is the unit of "self-determination." That's the very situation in which Jewish Americans have flourished (even as a minority), both as Americans and as Jews.
Yes, "Israel has been a fundamental part of Jewish identity for thousands of years.... The idea of being in 'galut' (exile) has been a defining part of our experience for 2000 years." But "Next year in Jerusalem" doesn't require a demand for "Jewish sovereignty" or a "Jewish State" upon our Return.
The problem is ethnocracy (or ethnonationalism) -- on all sides.
Israel has a right to exist, and Jews have a right to live in our entire ancient homeland (from the river to the sea!) -- but not necessarily in a "Jewish State." And (FWIW) I'm equally opposed to any ethnonationalist "Palestine" whose very raison d'etre (and distinction from Israel) is "Jews not welcome here."
Israel has a right to exist -- as a liberal democracy, where all individuals are entitled to equal protection, regardless of ethnicity. If we've learned anything worthwhile about statecraft in 2,000 years of wandering the globe (most recently in America), THAT's a homeland worth defending.
Do you understand the difference? If not, look up the name "Judah Magnes," and consider the notion of pluralism -- as espoused by the great liberal (Jewish) scholar, Isaiah Berlin.
Or for that matter, just go see "Fiddler on the Roof"!
Your unitary "individual" with a right of self determination is part of a group.
Jews have thrived in America, yes. But everywhere else they were not considered citizens until Napoleon, and the French accepted Jews that stopped being Jewish. They had to excise Jerusalem from their prayer books. That's why Reform Jews pray in "Temples," not "synagogues." They had to publicly claim they were French, or German, and had no Jewish connection to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, that their "Tempe" in Paris or Munich was enough.
But that wasn't enough. You see, so long as Jews weren't citizens and's were at the bottom of the hierarchy, Christians knew they weren't at the bottom. Not that Jews had rights, this was insufferable. And modern anti-Samaritan was born.
Is not so different from why so many poor Southern whites who didn't own slaves were willing to die for slavers. So long as blacks were "in their place," these poor whites knew they weren't at the bottom.
As to Israel, it's 2 million Arab citizens (20% of the population) have full rights. I'm not saying it's perfect: there is absolutely discrimination, and that is outrageous and unacceptable.
The vast majority of Palestinians (and some Israelis) won't accept the idea of TWO states! What kind of crazy fantasy world do you live in where you imagine they will precisely coexist in a single state?
There is zero chance Israel will accept an Arab "right of return" to their families former homes, because a majority Arab state will undermine the very idea of Jewish self-determination. And please show me one other refugee problem in the world that was solved this way. Did Polish IDPs kicked out of the parts of Poland and that Russia nationalized after ww2 get their homes? Did the Germans who were kicked out of part of Germany to house the Polish IDPs were resettled in German territory given to Poland? What about the Pakistani and Indians? What about the Jews from Algeria, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East?
I'm all for two states once there is a Palestinian leadership that can credibly deliver on peace. I'm deeply critical is Israel for not crushing the hilltop youth terrorists with the full force of the law.
But your one state? Dream on. But please keep your dreams to yourself. They further undermine the unlikely chance of a reality with two peaceful states.
It's worth noting here that Noah Smith is Jewish. Go back and read what he wrote: "As soon as you start judging people as a group, the rightists win.... This is a form of racial collectivism.... It turns out that individualism is a bit like free speech — a principle that lots of people tend to support when their tribe is losing, only to abandon it as soon as they’re back on top."
You say, "As to Israel, its 2 million Arab citizens (20% of the population) have full rights. I'm not saying it's perfect: there is absolutely discrimination, and that is outrageous and unacceptable."
For starters, how about repealing the "Nation-State Law"?
"Jewish sovereignty," my ass!
"Israel" and "Palestine" are the same (home)land -- embroiled in a bloody civil war, from the river to the sea -- and Israel needs a Lincoln.
PS: If (and when) your notion of "group rights" fully takes hold in America (as I fear it threatens to do) -- and if American Jews must flee to Israel -- we'll be bringing our liberal notions of individualism and pluralism with us (along with our recognition of how "collective rights" [AKA the Oppression Olympics] ruined America).
Of course, with such an influx of Jews, full-fledged liberal democracy (as opposed to an ethno-state) will no longer pose a "demographic threat." If America has failed, perhaps it will then be up to us Jews to show the world how different people can get along.
I know Noah Smith is Jewish. I didn't accuse him of anything; I only accused the Left, of which I am a part, of being problematic as well.
I'd love to get rid of the Nation-State Law. Please file some in an apologist for Israel.
Israel does not need a Lincoln. BOTH sides need a Lincoln. If I can stereotype Palestinians, and I know this is unfair, they fall into two broad camps. The smaller number who are in favor of coexistence and the larger group that deny that Jews have any historical connection to the land, and therefore insist the only solution is that Israel disappear.
To be fair, I'll stereotype Jews: those who believe the Palestinians don't exist as a people, and those who would accept a Palestine on the condition that it would be guaranteed to be peaceful. Polls show that the majority of Israelis will not accept a Palestinian state. But, IN THE SAME POLLS, a majority of Israelis WOULD accept a Palestinian state if there was a firm guarantee that it would be peaceful.
Finally, if you want to deny Jews the right of Jewish sovereignty, what's the case for a Palestinian state? They shouldn't have group rights either!!!!!!
Mamdani is wrong to turn the mayor's office in NYC into a soapbox for one side or the other of the bitter religious hatreds that fuel the Israeli/Arab wars. But then he's a populist too, just like Trump.
Noahs article reminds us of how we can take bad actors (the Somalis in Minn. who were ripping the system) and turning them into poster children that show that the whole group is immoral. Good ole racism.
How about the ubiquitous phrase, "Globalize the intifada?" The murders outside the museum in DC and in Manchester?
The kosher supermarket in my neighborhood has a full-time armed guard now because of threats and incidents. Why is that? Why now?
I was assaulted on the streets of NYC in March, by someone yelling anti-Semitic BS and "Free Palestine."
That citation enough for you?
Look, I have zero issue with criticizing Israel. I happen to be very critical of some Israeli policies and of the current government. For example, I believe cutting off food aid in March was a war crime.
I am also a strong supporter of Israel. (This is the same as opposing the bad stuff my 19-year old son does, but also loving and supporting him because he's my son.)
But it's one thing to attack the government and policies. It's another to delegitimize the EXISTENCE of a Jewish state and the idea of Jewish self-determination. And it's another to attack Jews around the world because of something that happens 7 time zones away.
If you can't see that, then, respectfully, you are the problem.
Re food aid: @Aizenberg55 has a lot of stuff on the distribution of food to Gaza on X. I think there may have been some pockets of hunger due to hoarding (some by Hamas), but it seems a lot of this was overstated.
Agreed, it was. There are different categories of crime: premeditated murder (genocide) is not the same as negligent homicide.
At the time, Israel had good data suggesting there was a six month supply of food in Gaza. But they confused calories per person (gdp per capita, which is an average) with the distribution of food supply (median income).
An amateur economist would have predicted that cutting off aid would result in soaring prices and hoarding, which means your "pockets of hunger" hit the most vulnerable and poor, who, incidentally, are the ones least connected to Hamas. Hence, cutting off food aid was akin to negligent homicide - not genocide, but a crime.
I somewhat agree, but I’d place the crime more on the hoarders and Hamas than on Israel.
It seems to be in Hamas’ interest to have civilian deaths that they can blame on Israel, hence the 100s of km of tunnels for Hamas, but no bomb shelters for civilians.
I agree Hamas' entire strategy was to maximize civilian deaths. But Israel should have known better. Because after two year's, they should have known better. What they did here was wrong and stupid.
One other point: there's Mamdani's "NYPD boots are laced by the IDF." The NYPD maintains counterterrorism programs around the world with some 15+ countries, Israel is one. Qatar (funder Hamas and home to most of its leadership) is another. Some 15, yes, FIFTEEN, NYPD OFFICERS are associated with the Israeli liaison office each year. (I don't have Qatar numbers.)
imagine, after a massacre of Uyghurs, protests broke out on US university campuses. And they extended to the point of Chinese students (Americans of Chinese descent, naturalized Chinese students, and foreign) pursued by fellow students to (1) stop visiting China, (2) break off contact with family in China, (3) stop speaking Chinese, and so on. That's what happened to Jewish students: give up a fundamental part of your Jewish identity if you want to be accepted; otherwise you'll be harassed.
Mamdani's comments are in that vein: denounce a fundamental part of Jewish identity, and I'll protect you from anti-Semitism. Look at his comments after the Park East Synagogue protesters shouldering "death to Jews." He denounced BOTH sides. No other group in America has ever been asked to denounce their identity for acceptance. Ever.
So there are a lot of strains of thought in your two comments.
1) Globalize the Intifada! is not a great slogan since the Intifada is originally a call to violence.
2) On the assault and armed guards, racists are gonna racist and Free Palestine is a nice veneer to throw on garden variety antisemitism. Every time a random Jewish person gets attacked while someone yells "Free Palestine," Netanyahu gets his wings.
3) The delegitimizing the "existence of Israel" is a complex set of thoughts.
Let's break it down.
A) Should there be a Jewish state?
Sure, why not? There are issues around privileging a given ethnicity over another, but it's essentially the same thing a state like France, Bulgaria or Slovakia has to contend with, so this isn't uniquely delegitimizing
B) Does said Jewish state get to control area of biblical Judea and Samaria just because their own Holy book says so?
No, not a good justification.
C) Does the current Israeli government being controlled by the settlers who believe EXACTLY that, present a problem for people abroad who want to see the Israeli state as a fundamentally liberal, democratic, secular state?
Yes.
D) Is the current Israeli government fragrantly violating International law and its own commitments to other countries by allowing the mass settlement and dispossession of the West Bank?
Yes.
E) Does said Jewish state have the right to maintain control of the Palestinians without giving them any say in the governance of said state?
No. That's wrong. Universal suffrage is one of the key tenets of democratic legitimacy. Either let the Palestinians have their own state, or make them into Israeli citizens with voting rights..
4) The China example is interesting, but I think you are missing the point. The idea is to force a change in Israel via international pressure as what happened with South Africa. I think it won't work and, when targeted towards individuals and not institutions, it's an excuse/justification for racism, but that's not the main point of difference in your example.
China is just not vulnerable to an international pressure campaign in the way that Israel is.
If, however, mainland China ever got into a war with Taiwan, I imagine Chinese students would get a lot of uncomfortable questions about whether they PERSONALLY believed it was ok to kill people in the name of Chinese reunification.
Also, while I can't speak for you personally, my understanding is that Israel is not a fundamental part of JEWISH identity. It's a fundamental part of ISRAELI Identity.
The Romans destroyed the second temple in the year 70, and then, as most religions do when something secular and factual conflicts with their particular fairy stories, the religious authorities adjusted. (See the Mormons recanting the idea that black people had the curse of Cain and Ham in the 1970s) Rabbinical Judaism realized that they didn't ACTUALLY need the temple to maintain god's covenant and it continued on fine for next 1000 + years.
"No other group in America has ever been asked to denounce their identity for acceptance. Ever."
What do you think happened to Native Americans? Or just forget about Japanese internment? Or black people trying to pass as white? People worried about Kennedy being elected in 1960, because, as a Catholic, he would HAVE to take orders from the Pope.
Are you Jewish or familiar with Jewish prayer and life over the last 2,000 years? Because saying that Jews were perfectly fine without a Jewish state is wrong. Jews end Yom Kippur and the Seder with “Next Year in Jerusalem” for a reason.
Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self determination in their ancestral homeland because they will never be safe or accepted outside of it. Hertzl wasn’t religiously observant; he didn’t circumcise his son and had a Christmas tree in his house. But he had eyes and a brain. After reporting on the Dreyfus trial and the widespread antisemitism in France, he came to the conclusion that no matter how assimilated a Jew might be, they would still be seen as an other.
A non-antisemitic anti-Zionist would be going out of their way to convince Jews that Israel is unnecessary, that they are safe and a welcome part of society. Ask Jews in the Diaspora if they feel safe and welcomed by anti-Zionists. Obviously, they don't, because virtually all anti-Zionists are antisemites.
Your objections don’t jibe with reality. First, Jews are from the land of Israel. DNA shows it. The artifacts in the ground show it. The recorded history shows it. Would you object to Native Americans returning to their ancestral homelands?
Second, I don’t think there’s a democratic state more committed to secularism than France. The virulent antisemitism of the democratic, secular, enlightened France of the 1890s is what inspired modern Zionism. And nothing has changed. Ask a Jew today living in France how well the state is protecting them.
I'm just going to respond to two points, because they cover it all. Should there be a Jewish state and should it include Judea and Samaria?
The argument for Israel isn't that "some god gave us the lands 3500 years ago." I happen to be religious, but no, that's not the point.
The argument is that everywhere else we lived we were persecuted and massacred for 2000 years, except for the USA, where anti-Semitism is becoming normalized, so stay turned.
90% of Israelis are refugees or children of refugees. Do you know that THREE YEARS after the Holocaust, close to a million Jews still lived in DP sites, many in/on former concentration camps, because NO COUNTRY wanted them? Only in 1948, were they able to go to Israel, and these people went straight from the boats to the war. They constituted 25% of the Israeli army in the war of independence.
So yes, there is a moral imperative for Jewish self-determination, and anyone who says otherwise is a bigot and anti-Semite.
As far as Judea and Samaria, show me a Palestinian society ready to coexist, and I personally go there and uproot settlements. But every poll shows Hamas winning an election on the West Bank. And without the West Bank, Israel is 9 miles wide. Hamas penetrated 20 miles into Israel on 10/7. The military occupation is the reason 10/7 happened in Gaza and not also in the West Bank.
Is it fair? No. Does it radicalize Palestinians? Yes, some. But there was no occupation in 1966, and no Palestinian inclination to make peace.
So reluctantly, because I see no other option to protect Israelis, Israel has to maintain a military presence. I want it to be different. The occupation poisons and morally corrodes both Israelis and Palestinians. But until you have a feasible solution based on more than "thoughts, prayers, hopes, and dreams," we are where we are.
Israel stays in Judea and Samaria, but because of the Bible, or god, but the legitimate need to defend its borders and people.
Unfortunately the tactics of the left are also based on making you judge and hate others - ironically this sometimes circles round to both ends of the spectrum focused on hating the same groups of people.
It's because they're both identitarian at their core. They raise the status of different identity groups, but they both agree that dividing society and distributing status and loyalty based on identity is the goal.
Where I live (Scotland, UK) reasonable people are not really present in the political debate any more. I feel my views are not represented by any party
This is an uncharacteristically weak and incoherent argument from Noah. It’s well-intended as a counterpoint to the Stephen Miller types but full of double-standards and wishful thinking. E.g., mentioning selection effects in Indian vs Somali immigration but not taking them seriously and claiming that Fremont CA proves anything. It’s a larger scale version of “well, my roommate at Harvard was from x country, therefore people from that country have y characteristic.” That kid who made it to Harvard was probably four standard deviations from his country’s mean in intelligence, conscientiousness, etc. And the same effects are true to a lesser degree of most Indian immigrants to the US. Yes, MAGA is terrible and Stephen Miller is a horrible person. Maybe they are all motivated by racism and trying to hide behind a veneer of economic and cultural concerns. But this intentional obfuscation of the role of cultural norms and selection effects on immigrant outcomes is not helpful in building a robust and fair immigration system that will be acceptable to the average American.
Migrant self selection is a real phenomenon. The people who choose to leave their homes and families and cultures are systematically different from those who stay. They may choose to keep some aspects of their culture and religion, but there is a reason they left -- they are less attached than most. And they *want* to be in America.
Now, this is going to be much more so with immigrants from a place like India, which is generally safe and stable, versus a place like Somalia where many people need to flee to survive. But that means we need to lean into cultural assimilation, and help/encourage immigrants to melt into the melting pot. Moving away from the melting pot ideal is another huge mistake the left has made in recent years, and we need to get back to it.
I agree but its complicated. This is what we experience in Europe: there are two ways to immigrate to Europe, labor immigration and refugees. Labor immigrants from outside Europe are selected with strict rules and are often better educated immigrants that.assimilate easy. Refugees is a different story. There are many countries in areas surrounding Europe that are according to European standards unsafe, not just the ones devastated by war. Europe is forced by treaties to accept them. People from these countries are aware of this (or if not, the people smugglers will tell them). And although you could qualify many of them as economic migrants looking for a better life in a more safe place, they know they do not make a chance as a labor immigrants, so they try the refugee route. And if you add up the facts that they often have little education and have grown up in a different culture, assimilation is quite difficult for them. Even getting a job is not easy so many rely on European welfare. And as you say the left does not help here because they are against assimilation, they see this as extreme right. I do not see an easy way out except a complete overhaul of the current refugee treaties.
How culture travels is complex. It's likely that fairly significant concentrations of people from another culture are required to create an implantation of that culture in the host country. The best account of the transmission of culture between generations that I know of is that parents seed the cultural values in their children who then reinforce and amplify these through their peer groups. But the media now probably plays a very similar role to parents in this cultural seeding process. So unless a guest culture is quite numerous, segregated from the rest of society and excludes media from its social life (in the style of the Mennonites or Amish), then it is likely to be diluted rather than becoming a long-term holdout against the majority culture.
The culture of migrants is also selected and not necessarily be representative of the culture they came from. The migrants may be better educated or less rural than the population at home, or over-represent a given region.
As one random example, Nigerians in Nigeria are half Muslim, but almost all Nigerian immigrants to the US are Christian, which removes one obstacle to blending in with the majority of Americans.
Most Western European immigrants to the US, on top of being from relatively rich countries, are disproportionately from the economic and educational elite of those countries. We don’t take in the French and British working classes.
The wisest comment: "It turns out that individualism is a bit like free speech — a principle that lots of people tend to support when their tribe is losing, only to abandon it as soon as they’re back on top."
And people tend to forget that blades / policies can cut in both directions, so thinking of how something can turn against you if you are on the downside is prudent.
There are quite a lot of true believers in freedom of speech, though. But there are no true individualists whatsoever. We are a social species to our core.
mmm - well if you give individualists a very narrow meaning, I wouldn't per se understand it that way myself although probably the very ideological Libertarians - who really to me are like photo-negatives of Bolsheviks - may.
One of the best weapons individualists have against racists is that racism tends to correlate with a bunch of really loathsome personal traits. And just as it behooves liberals not to become racist against white people, it also behooves them not to echo those negative traits.
Racist coalitions tend to be made up of unpleasant people. Racism is an ideology that appeals mostly to fools, failures and the unhappy. You'll get a few Calvin Candy skull-measurers who try to cover it all in an academic gloss, but most of the rank-and-file coalition tend to be very stupid, simple, and unpleasant to be around. The kind of people who will go on about the glory of the White Race are typically made up of the worst examples of it, unpleasant people with few accomplishments of their own. It's a fundamentally evil ideology, traditionally endorsed by the simplest thinkers and the most polluted souls.
This is a lot of why liberalism was able to win so thoroughly in the 20th century, even when the Klan and its supporters were endemic and powerful in American life. Being around racists all the time is really unpleasant and ordinary people just don't like it. For liberals, this means that part of fighting effectively against racism is policing bad actors in our own coalition to make sure we draw an effective contrast.
When fighting against something like MAGA makes it vitally important to aggressively target antisocial behavior among our own, proving that we won't accept lawbreaking or cruelty or anarchy in the name of emotional catharsis. The single best weapon we have against racism is that being around racists is horrible. We need to contrast that by making sure that liberalism is fun and positive and accepting. This is the other place Wokescolds in the 2010s really messed up. Not only in their ideology, but in their willingness to allow a lot of cruelty and norm-breaking against potential allies in their attempted defense of it.
Excellent point. But I think its not quite that simple. That 'endemic Klan' period lasted for generations, from say the 1870s to the 1930s. Our modern eyes would label the US culture of that six decades in the US as one of widespread and institutionalized racial violence and ethnic cleansing. While I am certain that there were many Americans who were disgusted by that during that period, they were not numerous or loud enough to put an end to it.
Following a recent comment of Noah's he said that what happened in US politics recently is that all the folks that remember WWII have effectively died off... I would say that WWII is what broke the back of the US's entrenched racism. It is established that the Nazis were inspired by and studied aspects of Jim Crow. But the horrors of the holocaust (and perhaps that they were applied to nominally white people) shone a light on the logical endpoint of racism as a philosophy.
So the fact that we had a (very strongly opposed) Civil Rights Movement, finally, a decade after WWII is not a coincidence. But now that that generation is gone, many Americans may have lost the thread of why racism is bad, exactly, and individualism is good.
I think that a lot of people are often implicitly racist in their decisions and in some societies people will be racist if you ask them about it, but the kind of people who talk a lot about race and make racism a big part of their explicit political identity tend to be extremely odious in other ways.
The skull-measuring types and the guy who turns every conversation into a rant about the Jews are just really unpleasant. They can't help themselves, and it's a big part of why they lose. It's the kind of thing you only make into your identity if you're unhappy in your life and want a scapegoat.
Racism is the default all over the world. A significant majority of the population of Earth is racist against you, and this is true for every single person on Earth. This is how it always has been and always will be. We are a tribal species for better or for worse (mostly worse). Best to recognize this and find ways to mitigate the impact instead of trying to caricature it as some sort of evil that can be eliminated.
Absolutely! The attitude and rhetoric of the pro-Palestine left in the US was incredibly damaging to both their movement and to liberalism more broadly, even when many of their individual criticisms of the actions of Israel in Gaza were directionally correct.
As with so many things, I actually think the important thing is to be able to move back and forth between different conceptual frames, to think about things on different levels of abstraction, to draw conclusions and heuristics from each frame, and then to synthesize all of it into a complicated picture that offers different advice for different contexts.
I think this is the only way to ever hope to be an adult person living in the real world who is, as much as humanly possible, usually both fair and kind AND wise.
For certain, if I’m sitting across from a Somali on the bus, I should treat them with respect and as an individual.
But also, I would be insane to support a political proposal to bring 100,000 Somali immigrants into my town.
Any political outlook that ignores the truth of that last observation is doomed to fail. But, worse, it is practically guaranteed to ultimately empower political movements that ignore the truth of the previous observation.
100k Indians could *potentially* go well, dependent on proper selectivity. 100k Somalis are guaranteed to be terrible. This is because different types of people are different on a deep level, both in ways that manifest as individuals and which manifest in group behavior. I’m referring here to both hereditary biological differences as well as deeply situated cultural differences, of a kind which in practice mostly behave like genetic characteristics even though they are technically not and e.g. adopted children will inherit them from their adopted parents, not bio parents.
I don’t think I’ve ever been south of Castro Valley in the east bay. And even then I was really just driving on my way to Dublin.
The only mental association I have with the name fremont is that I think maybe that was the “cross of gold” speech guy, but I am gathering from context clues that there are a lot of Indians there and that it’s a nice place.
I would expect there to be a very different lists of pro’s/con’s with 100,000 highly selected Indians than with 100,000 Somalis. I agree with that.
Either way, I don’t think “don’t judge people by groups” is a totally complete picture of what reasonable people, even liberal people , actually do. Or even what they should do.
There are, I think, about 67k Indians in Fremont. I advise taking a trip there and seeing what it's like.
I think if you haven't been to some of these immigrant-heavy locations, it's easy to sort of mentally imagine a dirty, chaotic Little India or whatever. But then you go there and it's the nicest, cleanest suburb you've ever been to, with clean shiny malls and fancy restaurants and manicured parks and beautiful houses and so on. A real eye-opening experience.
Noah, I love you man. I am not saying this to be mean or snarky or anything else like that. But I truly don’t get how this response is being addressed to me based on anything I’ve said here. I don’t have any problem *at all* picturing an Indian-immigrant heavy suburb that’s extremely nice. That’s the easiest thing in the world to imagine. I don’t see why a trip there would be eye opening.
Oh sorry. Guess I didn't understand. My point is that whether 100k people from some country makes a place nicer depends a lot on WHICH 100k people come from that country.
The "'cross of gold' speech guy" was William Jennings Bryan. (John C.) Fremont was the first Republican to run for President, in 1856 (four years before Lincoln) -- and, ironically, he was already famous for killing (American) Indians. ;-)
The point you’re making is more about 100,000 people than the problem of Somali immigrants as a group- 1000 would seem less problematic. That, I believe, explains the relative resistance to more immigrants from Latin America compared to other regions; we already have a lot and others should be given a turn within a limit to the overall number of immigrants we should be willing to admit at a time.
I wouldn’t accept 1000 or even 100 Somalis in my neighborhood. If you want to know how much damage a even a small dysfunctional immigrant group can do, look up Denmark’s experience with 100 Palestinian refugees.
Congratulations on your Nobel Prize for bigotry. If the simple fact of knowing someone’s ethnicity is enough to reach that conclusion, well, we’ve seen what a group of 100 people like you can do and it’s far worse than 100 random Somalis.
No sorry Noah, we shouldnt have to deal with somali misbehavior and welfare use even in the off chance it turns out to be growing pains. Somali immigration is straightforwardly bad.
If you are unwilling to admit this you arent interested in having a functioning country
Some of them were my ancestors. But if the US government had decided that Italian immigration was just causing too much trouble and not a net benefit, I couldn't blame them. The USA owed them absolutely nothing just like we owe the Somalis nothing today. Hypotheticals about what future descendants would do are meaningless.
My Italian ancestors came over around 1900ish - there was a big wave 1890-1920.
Fast forward 50 years from the end of that wave to 1970. Would there be reason to object to Italian immigrants? Most had fully integrated and intermarried. That was true by the 1940s-50s even, less than 30 years after the end of the wave.
The big tranches of Somali refugees arrived around 30 years ago. How’s that going?
I’ve spent lots of time in Minny and interfaced with Somalis (mostly in lower tier jobs: restaurants, cab/uber drivers, etc). Most seem like decent people (and speak English quite well). I can like them as individuals and I hold no animus toward their country (only sympathy and shock) while at the same time believing that another wave of Somali refugees would not be in the interests of the USA.
That’s pragmatism, not hate and Seems to fly in the face of Noah’s argument. That’s because my view of treating every individual with respect and open-mindness (at least initially) has nothing to do with mass admission of refugees and whether that is good for the country. The success of educated Indian H1B holders also has nothing to do with masses of refugees. I’m all for companies being able to apply for H1Bs for educated and qualified Somalis (or anyone). Pakistan isn’t aligned with the kind of country we want the US to be, yet educated and qualified Pakistanis have done well in the US. Britain has taken a more mass/non-selective immigration approach there and suffered as a result. Looking pragmatically at results and altering policies to benefit the citizens of a country is not hate. Is some of the rhetoric by Trump hateful and designed to rile people up! Sure, and I don’t like it.
I also didn’t like it when Dems accused Repubs (Mitt Romney) of launching a “war on women”, when Biden accused Repubs of wanting to “put blacks back in chains”, when they targeted Catholics, embraced hateful and discriminatory DEI as a policy and implemented racialist/discriminatory policies and programs using taxpayer money.
Populism is about finding an enemy or “other” and blaming them for all of your troubles, and making hate of that “other” part of the ritual for in group inclusion.
This started under Obama, not Trump. And the Dems were able to institutionalize hate for the “other” (ie Republicans, evangelicals, Catholics, cisgender white men, now Jews) not only amongst their partisans and the media, but also into academia and governments
I don’t recall too many liberals decrying this hateful environment. Too often they embraced it.
I am not a populist and don’t want to hate anyone. I don’t like when Trump’s populism posits China or illegal immigrants as the “enemy”, but is that really worse than classifying white men, Christians, conservatives as enemies?
That wasn't really about immigration, though - that was about "which side of this war between the Germans and the English are German-speaking, German-culture Americans on?" And it wasn't entirely unreasonable - I think Lindbergh's isolationism was probably enhanced by the fact that intervention would be on the English side.
(Just for reference, I grew up in a very Germanic community - I heard those stories a lot.)
I mean, I think it was about immigration. We had whole grassroots organizations to send people out to German families and homes during the day and "Americanize" them.
Yeah and the germans were otherwise productive. With somalis today, the average somali is not a net contributor, we have a large welfare state and a political culture that valorizes minorities (not one that demands assimilation akin to the americanization campaign circa ww1).
One relevant point I've read is that immigration in the mid 1800s was fairly selective, as it cost roughly a year's middle-class European income to get across the Atlantic. With the development of the steamship, the cost of immigrating dropped significantly, and with it, the class-selection of immigrants became much weaker. Hence the flood of poor and poor-ish Eastern and Southern European immigrants.
One factor that no one talks about in these immigration arguments is the effect of immigration on the immigrants themselves. Think of the huge increase in well-being that they and their descendants gain from immigrating, and thus the huge increase in total utility that humanity gains. Even if we discount this benefit by a large fraction due to feeling that their group is not a part of our group, or that immigration has negative side effects, I would argue that the benefits to the immigrants is large enough to outweigh this. If needed, we can mitigate the negative side effects by requiring assimilation to a greater extent than we do now.
Caring about the well-being of immigrants over the well being of the host country is how you end up with UK. They’re allowing immigrants (including violent sex criminal immigrants) to stay because they’d be treated badly (because they’re violent sex offenders) in their home country.
Completely agree. Refugee immigration has gone out of style since we let in Vietnamese/Salvadoran/Somali refugees in the 80s and 90s, and I suppose I understand why - if you have a fixed number of immigration spots the US benefits more if the immigrants are highly educated. But the base case for an Indian immigrant is they get a tech job in Hyderabad instead of San Francisco. The base case for the Somali refugee is they starve to death.
It's interesting how much of MAGA consists of importing to the right the victimology that leftists have practiced for decades.
I think the victory of gay marriage was such an overwhelming vindication of the politics of victimhood that much of the right concluded "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Ever since, right-wing politics has consisted mostly of white people, mostly the less educated, posturing as victims and lashing out against their imagined victimizers.
Though the less-educated whites have had a bad few decades, if you compare their incomes to the country as a whole. Back around 1950, it is said that the average employed white male high-school graduate earned more than the median American worker overall. And there certainly were a lot of well-paying unionized manufacturing jobs for men with strong backs. But the economic value of such people has declined significantly. They've got good reason to think that the recent changes have been to their disadvantage; whether this makes them "victims" depends on your personal philosophy.
If it makes you feel better the most hateful people tend to be the most online. I live in a liberal area but most people interact with people from different racial and religious backgrounds all the time and get along pretty well
> Somalis, on the other hand, are an extremely poor group, with very high poverty rates and much lower income than Haitians, or immigrants in general; this is due to the fact that most of them are refugees or descendants of refugees, which are the least selected type of immigrants. Somalis are Muslim, unlike Haitians, which makes them both visually distinct (because of the hijab) and mentally associated with civilizational conflict.
Sounds like a great reason to not let them in. Why should we treat all groups equally when it comes to immigration? All cultures are not equal and are not equally compatible with ours. Of course it would be better to treat everyone as an individual, but that's simply not possible with an immigration system. You have to rely on profiling and averages. The selective immigration system you mention is absolutely better than the non-selective one, but that also isn't treating people like individuals. It profiles on other things like having an advanced degree. This works very well because an immigrant with an advanced degree has a much higher probability of being employed and a much lower probability of causing trouble than one without it. So it's obvious that this type of profiling is useful. But then what if an immigrant from Mexico is much more likely to be employed and much less likely to be a trouble maker than an immigrant from Somalia? Why should we not favor immigrants from Mexico over immigrants from Somalia in the same way we favor educated and rich immigrants over uneducated and poor?
Education selection is far from the only method of selection -- in fact, it's not the most common one at all.
The most common types of selection are for EMPLOYABILITY and CRIMINALITY.
Our skills-based immigration system selects people based on who gets a JOB in America. That will select against people who can't find good jobs (since only higher-paying jobs can afford to sponsor immigrants).
And we deport people for crime. That selects for immigrants who don't commit crimes.
So yes, we have selection mechanisms to deal with all of this stuff you're talking about; we don't need to resort to racial profiling.
You got me curious Noah, and I googled “what criteria were used to allow Somalis into the USA.”
“Somalis have entered the U.S. primarily through Temporary Protected Status (TPS), granted due to Somalia's ongoing civil war, conflict, famine, and instability, allowing legal stay and work for those already present; and through traditional refugee/asylum processes, requiring proof of persecution for race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group, with eligibility criteria focused on safety and humanitarian need rather than just nationality, all while subject to background checks.“
I’m not sure how easy it is to do background checks in a place like Somalia.
I do think it’s a danger to condemn whole populations, but I also think we need to be careful. We want people that will assimilate and that are eager to be American.
Actually, the biggest selection is for being closely related to someone who is already here. And the selection for unauthorized immigration is likely to be completely different. Some reformers have advocated for making employability much more important as a criterion, but they've never gotten traction. Even the H-1b visa proram is markedly unpopular (other than among employers and highly-educated wanna-be immigrants).
"Somalis, on the other hand, are an extremely poor group, with very high poverty rates."
Huh, it's almost as if a group's typical characteristics and culture can be used to predict whether they will be a positive or negative if they immigrate.
The Somalis who came here in the 90s are, from what I understand, mostly US citizens, and they should be afforded every right that entails. And individuals should always be judged as individuals, not as members of groups. But to pretend that the culture or the group that someone comes from doesn't matter when determining who we should allow to immigrate into this country is absurd.
"it's almost as if a group's typical characteristics and culture can be used to predict whether they will be a positive or negative if they immigrate" <-- Then why are Indian and Pakistani and Filipino Americans so rich, and their neighborhoods are so nice, when their ancestral countries are so poor?
Pakistani neighborhoods are absolutely not nice. They are hubs of Islamic extremism. Look up Epic City in Texas - thank God the governor stopped it. And Epic City was spearheaded by an “integrated” Pakistani American with an engineering degree and a college professorship!
My best guess for Fremont would be that Indians that moved to Fremont are the brightest and most motivated in their cohort, so I would expect them to succeed in the US. My best guess for Juarez would be primarily that the drug cartels don't have significant power, which has all sorts of ramifications. I would guess the next biggest factor would be the average hispanic in El Paso was born and raised in the high trust society of the United States, while the average hispanic in Jaurez was born and raised in the relatively low trust society of that part of Mexico.
I don't think ethnicity or genes is determinative of a person's or group's outcome or whether they would assimilate into the United States. But the culture and upbringing (and religion!) that someone has absolutely is a factor.
> "What happened to judging people based on the content of their character? What happened to the colorblind society?"
Progressivism happened. Progressives showed their true colors. When they have cultural and political power they pursue explicitly anti-white goals and values.
Now they say, "It's racist and wrong to condemn a group of people based on the bad actions of a few individuals." ...Huh? This is all they did for over a decade! They turned every institution of media, education, and politics into a platform to endlessly denigrate (and when they could get away with it) legally marginalize white people *as a group*. They justified this based on of the actions of individuals. Anyone who disputes this is being dishonest. This is what happened in American public life from 2013-2024 and everyone knows it.
Progressivism has shown that anti-white racism is part of its ideological core. Either no one does identity politics, or everyone does.
I think there's a bit of a difference between an article calling to "stop" all white people, like the one you linked and a statement from Trump saying we won't allow refugee immigration from a specific country.
Trump might be racist in his heart, I'm not sure, but clearly here he is talking specifically about not wanting Somalian refugees in America, not eliminating Somalians as a group on principle or condemning "Somalianism" as a global plague, the way leftists do with white people.
I...don't think so? Racial groups are not nationalities. AFAIK, Trump is not recommending we deport ethnic Somalians with American citizenship or nth-generation naturalized immigrants the way lefties believe white Americans should (hypothetically) be removed from "stolen land" (or made subjects of minority indigenous rule). Trump is saying that we should send Somali nationals here on refugee or worker status back to their country of origin.
If he were arguing for a policy to deport an entire ethnicity regardless of citizenship I'd agree with you.
Would love a knock-down drag-out between you and Andrew Sullivan on where to draw the policy line on immigration.
Sullivan being what I'd call an immigration minimalist--for it in principle (he is an immigrant after all), but only in numbers that don't threaten the culture and that the populace finds acceptable.
I don't agree with it--like you and many of your readers I think, I'm more expansionist, for practical and sentimental reasons--but Sullivan's view is much more legitimate and harder to argue against than, say O. Cass on tariffs.
Different cultures have different values. I do not know anything abut Somali culture. But one should not waive away the possibility that it is antithetical to American culture--or at least, its aspirations. The language used by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller is intemperate and proves nothing. But I think that if we write about it as being irresponsible, we should delve into the facts of the case; not merely say that judging a group of immigrants by their origin is wrong.
(Yes, I believe the MLK quotation is the correct aspiration. but that does not mean that groups cannot be judged based on their collective actions.)
Assimilation is a strange and mixed bag, though. If you read "Albion's Seed", there are four substantial regional cultures that were established by immigrants from very narrow parts of England and those cultures have persisted until this day. (I can make an argument that Trumpism and a number of other social movements are deeply embedded in the "borderer" or Scots-Irish culture established in Appalachia over two centuries ago.)
In general, Noah, I agree that we are and should be a melting pot, and though in some circles that no longer is a fashionable goal, it remains mine. And historically, most emigrant groups have assimilated. But some have not--at least not yet. The Hasidim come to mind as one such group. i do not know whether Somalis will be another.
Do we have a record of Muslim emigrants who come as a large group assimilating? I can't think of one yet. And France, for example, is having difficulties in that regard.
The Trump reaction and language are despicable. Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). His xenophobic rant is nothing new. Just fill in the target ethnicity he chooses to attack that day. Yesterday it was Afghans; another day it was Nigerians; and another Black South Africans.
It’s amazing to me how many people on the right have just now discovered bigotry in their ranks, particularly as it pertains to antisemitism. Who knew a movement dedicated to ethnonationalism would be full of antisemites? That’s never happened before except for literally every single time. It was beyond delusional to think bigotry against Haitians, Muslims and Mexicans would spare Jews. When you tolerate cranks and bigots of all sorts in the name of getting tax cuts you’re going to wind up getting stuck with antisemitism, racism and xenophobia.
Liberal Jew here. Respectfully, my Left plays the same game, with much of the Democratic Socialists normalizing, if not calling for, anti-Semitism because of their objections to Israel's policies. My, more centrist, Left all too often tolerates this expressing "understanding" what drives "globalize the intifada."
Let's call out hate everywhere, ok?
Yes, and just as often, pro-Israel Jews conflate anti-Israel views with anti-Semitism. Both are making the same mistake.
That happens, and I call it out, but much less often than people claiming they are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic.
As I said, I'm deeply critical of the current government. Saying Israel should use 5000 lb bombs instead of 10,000 pound bombs? Legit criticism. Saying the West Bank settlement construction makes a Palestinian state impossible? Legit criticism. Saying Israel should be tougher on the Jewish West Bank Settler group "hilltop youth?" Legit criticism; the hilltop youth are Jewish terrorists.
But anti-Zionism and attacking Israel's *existence * *IS* anti-Semitic: calling Israel a "colonizing settler" state is basically saying Israel has no right to exist, and Jews, unique among peoples of the world, have no right to self-determination. That's anti-Semitic. Calling for "Palestine river to sea?" Anti-Semitic, for the reasons mentioned above. Denying the archeological and historical truth that Jews have an unbroken 3500 year connection to the land? Anti semitism; this polemic denies a fundamental part of Jewish identity as part of an effort to delegitimize Israel.
See the difference?
"calling Israel a "colonizing settler" state is basically saying Israel has no right to exist"
I'd call the US a colonizing settler state, because it is. Those facts about the US are literally drilled into us in our elementary school textbooks. Does that mean the US has no right to exist? Does that mean I'm anti-American? No, not at all. The first statement doesn't imply any of the other stuff.
I want to speak to you as a fellow person of Jewish descent. Please: do not do the thing you just did in your post, where you manufactured a new definition of antisemitism that isn't antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. I've been to parts of the world that lost so many Jews that their numbers are now the hundredths of a percent, and people there (the children of the children of) *still* have an entire liturgy of vicious antisemitic insults they can pull out at the drop of a hat. That's antisemitism. I've given up understanding what causes people to be like this. Whatever causes it, we need to take it seriously and remind people it exists, not corrupt it with nonsense definitions. Israel has an army and nuclear weapons and can take care of itself. Jews everywhere else can't.
When the ONLY country you attack as "colonial -settler-nazi-Zionist" is Israel, it's a problem.
Again, criticizing Israeli is 100% legit. Criticizing the government, Bibi, policy: all fair game. Criticizing the CONCEPT of Israel is different. That isn't done for any other country.
This is not a new definition of anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism is attacking the concept of Israel, the concept of Jewish self determination.
There is a reason Israel is the only large Jewish population in all of Eurasia and Africa: all other Jews were killed, chased away, or fled. (The largest Jewish population outside of Israel and the Western Hemisphere is France (300,000), and they fled Algeria because the anti-colonial uprising there considered the Algerian Jews, who had been there for more than 1000 years, as not-Algerian.
Again, anti-Zionism is the statement that Jews are ok if they give up being everything Jewish other than bagels. That is anti-Semitic, and this isn't a new definition of anti-Semitism.
If someone says they want Israel wiped off the map, I'm fine with whatever definition you want to give it. I don't want the definitions stretched beyond that, to criticisms or even legitimate statements about Israel. That's how we get to the bad place.
I NEVER criticized criticism of Israel. Ever!
Anti-semitism comes in many flavors.
The anti-zionists claim "they are not anti-Semitic, in fact they have Jewish friends"
Except to be an "acceptable Jew" to them, you have to give up the Jewish part of your Jewish identity. Israel has been a fundamental part of Jewish identity for thousands of years. Every wedding has a glass broken to symbolize the destruction of the Temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty. For 2000 years, most Jews left a corner of a wall in their home unfinished to symbolize the loss of Israel. The idea is being in "galut," (exile) has been a defining part of our experience for 2000 years.
Finally, we Jews decided, no more exile, no more persecution, no more not being accepted because we are Jewish.
This is not multicultural. This
Quick comment, meant with respect. You define yourself as “person of Jewish descent.” Not as a Jew, but as a person with Jewish ancestors.
It sounds to me like you don't identify as Jewish. That's your right, and I have no issue with that. But I do want to point that out in our conversation of what constitutes anti-Semitism. My lived experience is as a Jew. It seems, by your own words, that yours is not.
If I'm wrong, I sincerely apologize. And again, I mean no disrespect.
My father is Jewish and my mother isn’t. He was a professor of religion and a student of the Holocaust, so he spent a lot of my childhood raising me to understand what happened in the 1930s and 1940s and how he was convinced it would happen again. (He was generally not that intense of a person, but on this subject he was a little.) He also raised me to understand and appreciate Jewish culture, since that’s my family‘s culture. But he let me choose how I wanted to practice organized religion, and I chose (but let’s be honest, likely with a lot of influence from my parents) not to be religiously observant in either of my parents’ religions. This wouldn’t be a dealbreaker for many Jews if my mother had been Jewish rather than my father, but since my blood runs from the wrong parent I don’t call myself Jewish.
I have a very specific childhood memory of visiting a concentration camp and my father showing me the half-yellow star the Nazis made for kids like me. Although I don’t know if he ever said this explicitly, I was brought up to understand that the kind of people who made those stars would never hesitate to identify me as Jewish, but that other Jews might. This conversation isn’t the first time I’ve felt the truth of that statement.
Thanks for an honest and sincere reply. Apologies for my delay in responding: it was the sabbath, and I was offline.
Seth Weissman:
You seem to have missed Noah's entire (larger) point!
In a full-fledged liberal democracy, the INDIVIDUAL (not the ethnic group) is the unit of "self-determination." That's the very situation in which Jewish Americans have flourished (even as a minority), both as Americans and as Jews.
Yes, "Israel has been a fundamental part of Jewish identity for thousands of years.... The idea of being in 'galut' (exile) has been a defining part of our experience for 2000 years." But "Next year in Jerusalem" doesn't require a demand for "Jewish sovereignty" or a "Jewish State" upon our Return.
The problem is ethnocracy (or ethnonationalism) -- on all sides.
Israel has a right to exist, and Jews have a right to live in our entire ancient homeland (from the river to the sea!) -- but not necessarily in a "Jewish State." And (FWIW) I'm equally opposed to any ethnonationalist "Palestine" whose very raison d'etre (and distinction from Israel) is "Jews not welcome here."
Israel has a right to exist -- as a liberal democracy, where all individuals are entitled to equal protection, regardless of ethnicity. If we've learned anything worthwhile about statecraft in 2,000 years of wandering the globe (most recently in America), THAT's a homeland worth defending.
Do you understand the difference? If not, look up the name "Judah Magnes," and consider the notion of pluralism -- as espoused by the great liberal (Jewish) scholar, Isaiah Berlin.
Or for that matter, just go see "Fiddler on the Roof"!
I haven't missed the point.
Your unitary "individual" with a right of self determination is part of a group.
Jews have thrived in America, yes. But everywhere else they were not considered citizens until Napoleon, and the French accepted Jews that stopped being Jewish. They had to excise Jerusalem from their prayer books. That's why Reform Jews pray in "Temples," not "synagogues." They had to publicly claim they were French, or German, and had no Jewish connection to the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, that their "Tempe" in Paris or Munich was enough.
But that wasn't enough. You see, so long as Jews weren't citizens and's were at the bottom of the hierarchy, Christians knew they weren't at the bottom. Not that Jews had rights, this was insufferable. And modern anti-Samaritan was born.
Is not so different from why so many poor Southern whites who didn't own slaves were willing to die for slavers. So long as blacks were "in their place," these poor whites knew they weren't at the bottom.
As to Israel, it's 2 million Arab citizens (20% of the population) have full rights. I'm not saying it's perfect: there is absolutely discrimination, and that is outrageous and unacceptable.
The vast majority of Palestinians (and some Israelis) won't accept the idea of TWO states! What kind of crazy fantasy world do you live in where you imagine they will precisely coexist in a single state?
There is zero chance Israel will accept an Arab "right of return" to their families former homes, because a majority Arab state will undermine the very idea of Jewish self-determination. And please show me one other refugee problem in the world that was solved this way. Did Polish IDPs kicked out of the parts of Poland and that Russia nationalized after ww2 get their homes? Did the Germans who were kicked out of part of Germany to house the Polish IDPs were resettled in German territory given to Poland? What about the Pakistani and Indians? What about the Jews from Algeria, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East?
I'm all for two states once there is a Palestinian leadership that can credibly deliver on peace. I'm deeply critical is Israel for not crushing the hilltop youth terrorists with the full force of the law.
But your one state? Dream on. But please keep your dreams to yourself. They further undermine the unlikely chance of a reality with two peaceful states.
You DID miss the point.
It's worth noting here that Noah Smith is Jewish. Go back and read what he wrote: "As soon as you start judging people as a group, the rightists win.... This is a form of racial collectivism.... It turns out that individualism is a bit like free speech — a principle that lots of people tend to support when their tribe is losing, only to abandon it as soon as they’re back on top."
You say, "As to Israel, its 2 million Arab citizens (20% of the population) have full rights. I'm not saying it's perfect: there is absolutely discrimination, and that is outrageous and unacceptable."
For starters, how about repealing the "Nation-State Law"?
"Jewish sovereignty," my ass!
"Israel" and "Palestine" are the same (home)land -- embroiled in a bloody civil war, from the river to the sea -- and Israel needs a Lincoln.
PS: If (and when) your notion of "group rights" fully takes hold in America (as I fear it threatens to do) -- and if American Jews must flee to Israel -- we'll be bringing our liberal notions of individualism and pluralism with us (along with our recognition of how "collective rights" [AKA the Oppression Olympics] ruined America).
Of course, with such an influx of Jews, full-fledged liberal democracy (as opposed to an ethno-state) will no longer pose a "demographic threat." If America has failed, perhaps it will then be up to us Jews to show the world how different people can get along.
So what else is new?
I know Noah Smith is Jewish. I didn't accuse him of anything; I only accused the Left, of which I am a part, of being problematic as well.
I'd love to get rid of the Nation-State Law. Please file some in an apologist for Israel.
Israel does not need a Lincoln. BOTH sides need a Lincoln. If I can stereotype Palestinians, and I know this is unfair, they fall into two broad camps. The smaller number who are in favor of coexistence and the larger group that deny that Jews have any historical connection to the land, and therefore insist the only solution is that Israel disappear.
To be fair, I'll stereotype Jews: those who believe the Palestinians don't exist as a people, and those who would accept a Palestine on the condition that it would be guaranteed to be peaceful. Polls show that the majority of Israelis will not accept a Palestinian state. But, IN THE SAME POLLS, a majority of Israelis WOULD accept a Palestinian state if there was a firm guarantee that it would be peaceful.
Finally, if you want to deny Jews the right of Jewish sovereignty, what's the case for a Palestinian state? They shouldn't have group rights either!!!!!!
That's true, but it's much, much more problematic when political figures deploy it as a position.
The last thing NYC, my city, needs, is to import the bitterness and violence of Arabs/Israelis into our city political life.
Mamdani is wrong to turn the mayor's office in NYC into a soapbox for one side or the other of the bitter religious hatreds that fuel the Israeli/Arab wars. But then he's a populist too, just like Trump.
A pox on both of them.
Example #5140 of how Populism is a cancer.
“… because of their objections to Israel's policies.”
I don’t think this is actually why, to be honest.
Noahs article reminds us of how we can take bad actors (the Somalis in Minn. who were ripping the system) and turning them into poster children that show that the whole group is immoral. Good ole racism.
The DSA "Calling for Antisemitism because they object to Israel's policies."
Citation needed.
Are they saying, "Fight the perfidious jews because the Jewish State of Israel is doing bad things."
Also, this seems to minimize Israel's own role in claiming to speak for and represent Jewish people worldwide.
How about the ubiquitous phrase, "Globalize the intifada?" The murders outside the museum in DC and in Manchester?
The kosher supermarket in my neighborhood has a full-time armed guard now because of threats and incidents. Why is that? Why now?
I was assaulted on the streets of NYC in March, by someone yelling anti-Semitic BS and "Free Palestine."
That citation enough for you?
Look, I have zero issue with criticizing Israel. I happen to be very critical of some Israeli policies and of the current government. For example, I believe cutting off food aid in March was a war crime.
I am also a strong supporter of Israel. (This is the same as opposing the bad stuff my 19-year old son does, but also loving and supporting him because he's my son.)
But it's one thing to attack the government and policies. It's another to delegitimize the EXISTENCE of a Jewish state and the idea of Jewish self-determination. And it's another to attack Jews around the world because of something that happens 7 time zones away.
If you can't see that, then, respectfully, you are the problem.
Re food aid: @Aizenberg55 has a lot of stuff on the distribution of food to Gaza on X. I think there may have been some pockets of hunger due to hoarding (some by Hamas), but it seems a lot of this was overstated.
Agreed, it was. There are different categories of crime: premeditated murder (genocide) is not the same as negligent homicide.
At the time, Israel had good data suggesting there was a six month supply of food in Gaza. But they confused calories per person (gdp per capita, which is an average) with the distribution of food supply (median income).
An amateur economist would have predicted that cutting off aid would result in soaring prices and hoarding, which means your "pockets of hunger" hit the most vulnerable and poor, who, incidentally, are the ones least connected to Hamas. Hence, cutting off food aid was akin to negligent homicide - not genocide, but a crime.
I somewhat agree, but I’d place the crime more on the hoarders and Hamas than on Israel.
It seems to be in Hamas’ interest to have civilian deaths that they can blame on Israel, hence the 100s of km of tunnels for Hamas, but no bomb shelters for civilians.
I'm not letting Hamas off the hook.
I agree Hamas' entire strategy was to maximize civilian deaths. But Israel should have known better. Because after two year's, they should have known better. What they did here was wrong and stupid.
One other point: there's Mamdani's "NYPD boots are laced by the IDF." The NYPD maintains counterterrorism programs around the world with some 15+ countries, Israel is one. Qatar (funder Hamas and home to most of its leadership) is another. Some 15, yes, FIFTEEN, NYPD OFFICERS are associated with the Israeli liaison office each year. (I don't have Qatar numbers.)
imagine, after a massacre of Uyghurs, protests broke out on US university campuses. And they extended to the point of Chinese students (Americans of Chinese descent, naturalized Chinese students, and foreign) pursued by fellow students to (1) stop visiting China, (2) break off contact with family in China, (3) stop speaking Chinese, and so on. That's what happened to Jewish students: give up a fundamental part of your Jewish identity if you want to be accepted; otherwise you'll be harassed.
Mamdani's comments are in that vein: denounce a fundamental part of Jewish identity, and I'll protect you from anti-Semitism. Look at his comments after the Park East Synagogue protesters shouldering "death to Jews." He denounced BOTH sides. No other group in America has ever been asked to denounce their identity for acceptance. Ever.
So there are a lot of strains of thought in your two comments.
1) Globalize the Intifada! is not a great slogan since the Intifada is originally a call to violence.
2) On the assault and armed guards, racists are gonna racist and Free Palestine is a nice veneer to throw on garden variety antisemitism. Every time a random Jewish person gets attacked while someone yells "Free Palestine," Netanyahu gets his wings.
3) The delegitimizing the "existence of Israel" is a complex set of thoughts.
Let's break it down.
A) Should there be a Jewish state?
Sure, why not? There are issues around privileging a given ethnicity over another, but it's essentially the same thing a state like France, Bulgaria or Slovakia has to contend with, so this isn't uniquely delegitimizing
B) Does said Jewish state get to control area of biblical Judea and Samaria just because their own Holy book says so?
No, not a good justification.
C) Does the current Israeli government being controlled by the settlers who believe EXACTLY that, present a problem for people abroad who want to see the Israeli state as a fundamentally liberal, democratic, secular state?
Yes.
D) Is the current Israeli government fragrantly violating International law and its own commitments to other countries by allowing the mass settlement and dispossession of the West Bank?
Yes.
E) Does said Jewish state have the right to maintain control of the Palestinians without giving them any say in the governance of said state?
No. That's wrong. Universal suffrage is one of the key tenets of democratic legitimacy. Either let the Palestinians have their own state, or make them into Israeli citizens with voting rights..
4) The China example is interesting, but I think you are missing the point. The idea is to force a change in Israel via international pressure as what happened with South Africa. I think it won't work and, when targeted towards individuals and not institutions, it's an excuse/justification for racism, but that's not the main point of difference in your example.
China is just not vulnerable to an international pressure campaign in the way that Israel is.
If, however, mainland China ever got into a war with Taiwan, I imagine Chinese students would get a lot of uncomfortable questions about whether they PERSONALLY believed it was ok to kill people in the name of Chinese reunification.
Also, while I can't speak for you personally, my understanding is that Israel is not a fundamental part of JEWISH identity. It's a fundamental part of ISRAELI Identity.
The Romans destroyed the second temple in the year 70, and then, as most religions do when something secular and factual conflicts with their particular fairy stories, the religious authorities adjusted. (See the Mormons recanting the idea that black people had the curse of Cain and Ham in the 1970s) Rabbinical Judaism realized that they didn't ACTUALLY need the temple to maintain god's covenant and it continued on fine for next 1000 + years.
"No other group in America has ever been asked to denounce their identity for acceptance. Ever."
What do you think happened to Native Americans? Or just forget about Japanese internment? Or black people trying to pass as white? People worried about Kennedy being elected in 1960, because, as a Catholic, he would HAVE to take orders from the Pope.
This isn't some new line of American thought.
Are you Jewish or familiar with Jewish prayer and life over the last 2,000 years? Because saying that Jews were perfectly fine without a Jewish state is wrong. Jews end Yom Kippur and the Seder with “Next Year in Jerusalem” for a reason.
Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to self determination in their ancestral homeland because they will never be safe or accepted outside of it. Hertzl wasn’t religiously observant; he didn’t circumcise his son and had a Christmas tree in his house. But he had eyes and a brain. After reporting on the Dreyfus trial and the widespread antisemitism in France, he came to the conclusion that no matter how assimilated a Jew might be, they would still be seen as an other.
A non-antisemitic anti-Zionist would be going out of their way to convince Jews that Israel is unnecessary, that they are safe and a welcome part of society. Ask Jews in the Diaspora if they feel safe and welcomed by anti-Zionists. Obviously, they don't, because virtually all anti-Zionists are antisemites.
I object to the two parts of that characterization of Zionism, namely, "in their ancestral homeland" and "never be safe or accepted outside of it."
Right of self determination and freedom from discrimination? Absolutely.
The basic secular democratic state seems to do that fine.
Your objections don’t jibe with reality. First, Jews are from the land of Israel. DNA shows it. The artifacts in the ground show it. The recorded history shows it. Would you object to Native Americans returning to their ancestral homelands?
Second, I don’t think there’s a democratic state more committed to secularism than France. The virulent antisemitism of the democratic, secular, enlightened France of the 1890s is what inspired modern Zionism. And nothing has changed. Ask a Jew today living in France how well the state is protecting them.
I'm just going to respond to two points, because they cover it all. Should there be a Jewish state and should it include Judea and Samaria?
The argument for Israel isn't that "some god gave us the lands 3500 years ago." I happen to be religious, but no, that's not the point.
The argument is that everywhere else we lived we were persecuted and massacred for 2000 years, except for the USA, where anti-Semitism is becoming normalized, so stay turned.
90% of Israelis are refugees or children of refugees. Do you know that THREE YEARS after the Holocaust, close to a million Jews still lived in DP sites, many in/on former concentration camps, because NO COUNTRY wanted them? Only in 1948, were they able to go to Israel, and these people went straight from the boats to the war. They constituted 25% of the Israeli army in the war of independence.
So yes, there is a moral imperative for Jewish self-determination, and anyone who says otherwise is a bigot and anti-Semite.
As far as Judea and Samaria, show me a Palestinian society ready to coexist, and I personally go there and uproot settlements. But every poll shows Hamas winning an election on the West Bank. And without the West Bank, Israel is 9 miles wide. Hamas penetrated 20 miles into Israel on 10/7. The military occupation is the reason 10/7 happened in Gaza and not also in the West Bank.
Is it fair? No. Does it radicalize Palestinians? Yes, some. But there was no occupation in 1966, and no Palestinian inclination to make peace.
So reluctantly, because I see no other option to protect Israelis, Israel has to maintain a military presence. I want it to be different. The occupation poisons and morally corrodes both Israelis and Palestinians. But until you have a feasible solution based on more than "thoughts, prayers, hopes, and dreams," we are where we are.
Israel stays in Judea and Samaria, but because of the Bible, or god, but the legitimate need to defend its borders and people.
Unfortunately the tactics of the left are also based on making you judge and hate others - ironically this sometimes circles round to both ends of the spectrum focused on hating the same groups of people.
The whole horseshoe idea is real the fringe or outer left/right are essentially the same
It's because they're both identitarian at their core. They raise the status of different identity groups, but they both agree that dividing society and distributing status and loyalty based on identity is the goal.
Agreed - and it damages the reasonable people on both sides
Where I live (Scotland, UK) reasonable people are not really present in the political debate any more. I feel my views are not represented by any party
This is an uncharacteristically weak and incoherent argument from Noah. It’s well-intended as a counterpoint to the Stephen Miller types but full of double-standards and wishful thinking. E.g., mentioning selection effects in Indian vs Somali immigration but not taking them seriously and claiming that Fremont CA proves anything. It’s a larger scale version of “well, my roommate at Harvard was from x country, therefore people from that country have y characteristic.” That kid who made it to Harvard was probably four standard deviations from his country’s mean in intelligence, conscientiousness, etc. And the same effects are true to a lesser degree of most Indian immigrants to the US. Yes, MAGA is terrible and Stephen Miller is a horrible person. Maybe they are all motivated by racism and trying to hide behind a veneer of economic and cultural concerns. But this intentional obfuscation of the role of cultural norms and selection effects on immigrant outcomes is not helpful in building a robust and fair immigration system that will be acceptable to the average American.
You're making the same point I made, Mark. Why do you think you're disagreeing with me? Read my post again!!
Migrant self selection is a real phenomenon. The people who choose to leave their homes and families and cultures are systematically different from those who stay. They may choose to keep some aspects of their culture and religion, but there is a reason they left -- they are less attached than most. And they *want* to be in America.
Now, this is going to be much more so with immigrants from a place like India, which is generally safe and stable, versus a place like Somalia where many people need to flee to survive. But that means we need to lean into cultural assimilation, and help/encourage immigrants to melt into the melting pot. Moving away from the melting pot ideal is another huge mistake the left has made in recent years, and we need to get back to it.
I agree but its complicated. This is what we experience in Europe: there are two ways to immigrate to Europe, labor immigration and refugees. Labor immigrants from outside Europe are selected with strict rules and are often better educated immigrants that.assimilate easy. Refugees is a different story. There are many countries in areas surrounding Europe that are according to European standards unsafe, not just the ones devastated by war. Europe is forced by treaties to accept them. People from these countries are aware of this (or if not, the people smugglers will tell them). And although you could qualify many of them as economic migrants looking for a better life in a more safe place, they know they do not make a chance as a labor immigrants, so they try the refugee route. And if you add up the facts that they often have little education and have grown up in a different culture, assimilation is quite difficult for them. Even getting a job is not easy so many rely on European welfare. And as you say the left does not help here because they are against assimilation, they see this as extreme right. I do not see an easy way out except a complete overhaul of the current refugee treaties.
How culture travels is complex. It's likely that fairly significant concentrations of people from another culture are required to create an implantation of that culture in the host country. The best account of the transmission of culture between generations that I know of is that parents seed the cultural values in their children who then reinforce and amplify these through their peer groups. But the media now probably plays a very similar role to parents in this cultural seeding process. So unless a guest culture is quite numerous, segregated from the rest of society and excludes media from its social life (in the style of the Mennonites or Amish), then it is likely to be diluted rather than becoming a long-term holdout against the majority culture.
The culture of migrants is also selected and not necessarily be representative of the culture they came from. The migrants may be better educated or less rural than the population at home, or over-represent a given region.
As one random example, Nigerians in Nigeria are half Muslim, but almost all Nigerian immigrants to the US are Christian, which removes one obstacle to blending in with the majority of Americans.
Most Western European immigrants to the US, on top of being from relatively rich countries, are disproportionately from the economic and educational elite of those countries. We don’t take in the French and British working classes.
Do you claim that these people’s children will return to their country’s mean?
The wisest comment: "It turns out that individualism is a bit like free speech — a principle that lots of people tend to support when their tribe is losing, only to abandon it as soon as they’re back on top."
And people tend to forget that blades / policies can cut in both directions, so thinking of how something can turn against you if you are on the downside is prudent.
There are quite a lot of true believers in freedom of speech, though. But there are no true individualists whatsoever. We are a social species to our core.
mmm - well if you give individualists a very narrow meaning, I wouldn't per se understand it that way myself although probably the very ideological Libertarians - who really to me are like photo-negatives of Bolsheviks - may.
One of the best weapons individualists have against racists is that racism tends to correlate with a bunch of really loathsome personal traits. And just as it behooves liberals not to become racist against white people, it also behooves them not to echo those negative traits.
Racist coalitions tend to be made up of unpleasant people. Racism is an ideology that appeals mostly to fools, failures and the unhappy. You'll get a few Calvin Candy skull-measurers who try to cover it all in an academic gloss, but most of the rank-and-file coalition tend to be very stupid, simple, and unpleasant to be around. The kind of people who will go on about the glory of the White Race are typically made up of the worst examples of it, unpleasant people with few accomplishments of their own. It's a fundamentally evil ideology, traditionally endorsed by the simplest thinkers and the most polluted souls.
This is a lot of why liberalism was able to win so thoroughly in the 20th century, even when the Klan and its supporters were endemic and powerful in American life. Being around racists all the time is really unpleasant and ordinary people just don't like it. For liberals, this means that part of fighting effectively against racism is policing bad actors in our own coalition to make sure we draw an effective contrast.
When fighting against something like MAGA makes it vitally important to aggressively target antisocial behavior among our own, proving that we won't accept lawbreaking or cruelty or anarchy in the name of emotional catharsis. The single best weapon we have against racism is that being around racists is horrible. We need to contrast that by making sure that liberalism is fun and positive and accepting. This is the other place Wokescolds in the 2010s really messed up. Not only in their ideology, but in their willingness to allow a lot of cruelty and norm-breaking against potential allies in their attempted defense of it.
Excellent point. But I think its not quite that simple. That 'endemic Klan' period lasted for generations, from say the 1870s to the 1930s. Our modern eyes would label the US culture of that six decades in the US as one of widespread and institutionalized racial violence and ethnic cleansing. While I am certain that there were many Americans who were disgusted by that during that period, they were not numerous or loud enough to put an end to it.
Following a recent comment of Noah's he said that what happened in US politics recently is that all the folks that remember WWII have effectively died off... I would say that WWII is what broke the back of the US's entrenched racism. It is established that the Nazis were inspired by and studied aspects of Jim Crow. But the horrors of the holocaust (and perhaps that they were applied to nominally white people) shone a light on the logical endpoint of racism as a philosophy.
So the fact that we had a (very strongly opposed) Civil Rights Movement, finally, a decade after WWII is not a coincidence. But now that that generation is gone, many Americans may have lost the thread of why racism is bad, exactly, and individualism is good.
I think that a lot of people are often implicitly racist in their decisions and in some societies people will be racist if you ask them about it, but the kind of people who talk a lot about race and make racism a big part of their explicit political identity tend to be extremely odious in other ways.
The skull-measuring types and the guy who turns every conversation into a rant about the Jews are just really unpleasant. They can't help themselves, and it's a big part of why they lose. It's the kind of thing you only make into your identity if you're unhappy in your life and want a scapegoat.
Racism is the default all over the world. A significant majority of the population of Earth is racist against you, and this is true for every single person on Earth. This is how it always has been and always will be. We are a tribal species for better or for worse (mostly worse). Best to recognize this and find ways to mitigate the impact instead of trying to caricature it as some sort of evil that can be eliminated.
Agreed with all this but I would argue it also applies to the anti-Semitic wing of the left
Absolutely! The attitude and rhetoric of the pro-Palestine left in the US was incredibly damaging to both their movement and to liberalism more broadly, even when many of their individual criticisms of the actions of Israel in Gaza were directionally correct.
As with so many things, I actually think the important thing is to be able to move back and forth between different conceptual frames, to think about things on different levels of abstraction, to draw conclusions and heuristics from each frame, and then to synthesize all of it into a complicated picture that offers different advice for different contexts.
I think this is the only way to ever hope to be an adult person living in the real world who is, as much as humanly possible, usually both fair and kind AND wise.
For certain, if I’m sitting across from a Somali on the bus, I should treat them with respect and as an individual.
But also, I would be insane to support a political proposal to bring 100,000 Somali immigrants into my town.
Any political outlook that ignores the truth of that last observation is doomed to fail. But, worse, it is practically guaranteed to ultimately empower political movements that ignore the truth of the previous observation.
What about 100,000 Indians?
If you say that would be bad, I have to ask: Have you been to Fremont?
And if you say it's OK, I have to ask: Why are Somalis different? (Hint: selectivity)
100k Indians could *potentially* go well, dependent on proper selectivity. 100k Somalis are guaranteed to be terrible. This is because different types of people are different on a deep level, both in ways that manifest as individuals and which manifest in group behavior. I’m referring here to both hereditary biological differences as well as deeply situated cultural differences, of a kind which in practice mostly behave like genetic characteristics even though they are technically not and e.g. adopted children will inherit them from their adopted parents, not bio parents.
I don’t think I’ve ever been south of Castro Valley in the east bay. And even then I was really just driving on my way to Dublin.
The only mental association I have with the name fremont is that I think maybe that was the “cross of gold” speech guy, but I am gathering from context clues that there are a lot of Indians there and that it’s a nice place.
I would expect there to be a very different lists of pro’s/con’s with 100,000 highly selected Indians than with 100,000 Somalis. I agree with that.
Either way, I don’t think “don’t judge people by groups” is a totally complete picture of what reasonable people, even liberal people , actually do. Or even what they should do.
There are, I think, about 67k Indians in Fremont. I advise taking a trip there and seeing what it's like.
I think if you haven't been to some of these immigrant-heavy locations, it's easy to sort of mentally imagine a dirty, chaotic Little India or whatever. But then you go there and it's the nicest, cleanest suburb you've ever been to, with clean shiny malls and fancy restaurants and manicured parks and beautiful houses and so on. A real eye-opening experience.
Noah, I love you man. I am not saying this to be mean or snarky or anything else like that. But I truly don’t get how this response is being addressed to me based on anything I’ve said here. I don’t have any problem *at all* picturing an Indian-immigrant heavy suburb that’s extremely nice. That’s the easiest thing in the world to imagine. I don’t see why a trip there would be eye opening.
Oh sorry. Guess I didn't understand. My point is that whether 100k people from some country makes a place nicer depends a lot on WHICH 100k people come from that country.
The "'cross of gold' speech guy" was William Jennings Bryan. (John C.) Fremont was the first Republican to run for President, in 1856 (four years before Lincoln) -- and, ironically, he was already famous for killing (American) Indians. ;-)
Ahh, thank you. I did know that at one point a few decades ago, I promise!
I think it's quite clear that Indians assimilate very well into America. One of my former bosses was from India. Great guy.
The point you’re making is more about 100,000 people than the problem of Somali immigrants as a group- 1000 would seem less problematic. That, I believe, explains the relative resistance to more immigrants from Latin America compared to other regions; we already have a lot and others should be given a turn within a limit to the overall number of immigrants we should be willing to admit at a time.
I wouldn’t accept 1000 or even 100 Somalis in my neighborhood. If you want to know how much damage a even a small dysfunctional immigrant group can do, look up Denmark’s experience with 100 Palestinian refugees.
Congratulations on your Nobel Prize for bigotry. If the simple fact of knowing someone’s ethnicity is enough to reach that conclusion, well, we’ve seen what a group of 100 people like you can do and it’s far worse than 100 random Somalis.
No sorry Noah, we shouldnt have to deal with somali misbehavior and welfare use even in the off chance it turns out to be growing pains. Somali immigration is straightforwardly bad.
If you are unwilling to admit this you arent interested in having a functioning country
With respect, you miss the point. On the basis of your "reasoning" all Italian immigrants would have been deported because of their mafia members.
Some of them were my ancestors. But if the US government had decided that Italian immigration was just causing too much trouble and not a net benefit, I couldn't blame them. The USA owed them absolutely nothing just like we owe the Somalis nothing today. Hypotheticals about what future descendants would do are meaningless.
The government did shut down nearly all immigration after the huge wave from the 1800s to the Great Depression
What’s new is that one party has used decrees to render the law moot.
The prior administration used enforcement discretion to effectively render the law moot.
The average stats for somalis are worse, due in part to the fact that we have a large welfare state today
But yeah im willing to bite the bullet and say that natives at the time would have been justified in objecting to italian immigration
My Italian ancestors came over around 1900ish - there was a big wave 1890-1920.
Fast forward 50 years from the end of that wave to 1970. Would there be reason to object to Italian immigrants? Most had fully integrated and intermarried. That was true by the 1940s-50s even, less than 30 years after the end of the wave.
The big tranches of Somali refugees arrived around 30 years ago. How’s that going?
I’ve spent lots of time in Minny and interfaced with Somalis (mostly in lower tier jobs: restaurants, cab/uber drivers, etc). Most seem like decent people (and speak English quite well). I can like them as individuals and I hold no animus toward their country (only sympathy and shock) while at the same time believing that another wave of Somali refugees would not be in the interests of the USA.
That’s pragmatism, not hate and Seems to fly in the face of Noah’s argument. That’s because my view of treating every individual with respect and open-mindness (at least initially) has nothing to do with mass admission of refugees and whether that is good for the country. The success of educated Indian H1B holders also has nothing to do with masses of refugees. I’m all for companies being able to apply for H1Bs for educated and qualified Somalis (or anyone). Pakistan isn’t aligned with the kind of country we want the US to be, yet educated and qualified Pakistanis have done well in the US. Britain has taken a more mass/non-selective immigration approach there and suffered as a result. Looking pragmatically at results and altering policies to benefit the citizens of a country is not hate. Is some of the rhetoric by Trump hateful and designed to rile people up! Sure, and I don’t like it.
I also didn’t like it when Dems accused Repubs (Mitt Romney) of launching a “war on women”, when Biden accused Repubs of wanting to “put blacks back in chains”, when they targeted Catholics, embraced hateful and discriminatory DEI as a policy and implemented racialist/discriminatory policies and programs using taxpayer money.
Populism is about finding an enemy or “other” and blaming them for all of your troubles, and making hate of that “other” part of the ritual for in group inclusion.
This started under Obama, not Trump. And the Dems were able to institutionalize hate for the “other” (ie Republicans, evangelicals, Catholics, cisgender white men, now Jews) not only amongst their partisans and the media, but also into academia and governments
I don’t recall too many liberals decrying this hateful environment. Too often they embraced it.
I am not a populist and don’t want to hate anyone. I don’t like when Trump’s populism posits China or illegal immigrants as the “enemy”, but is that really worse than classifying white men, Christians, conservatives as enemies?
What's an immigrant group you think was good, and led to a functioning country, in our past?
The German immigration of 1750-1860 would be at the top of my list.
And cultures are sticky: St Louis is still distinctly German-ish in many ways.
So you think the massive panic about German immigration in the early 20th century was a mistake? A false alarm?
https://www.history.com/articles/anti-german-sentiment-wwi
That wasn't really about immigration, though - that was about "which side of this war between the Germans and the English are German-speaking, German-culture Americans on?" And it wasn't entirely unreasonable - I think Lindbergh's isolationism was probably enhanced by the fact that intervention would be on the English side.
(Just for reference, I grew up in a very Germanic community - I heard those stories a lot.)
I mean, I think it was about immigration. We had whole grassroots organizations to send people out to German families and homes during the day and "Americanize" them.
Yeah and the germans were otherwise productive. With somalis today, the average somali is not a net contributor, we have a large welfare state and a political culture that valorizes minorities (not one that demands assimilation akin to the americanization campaign circa ww1).
One relevant point I've read is that immigration in the mid 1800s was fairly selective, as it cost roughly a year's middle-class European income to get across the Atlantic. With the development of the steamship, the cost of immigrating dropped significantly, and with it, the class-selection of immigrants became much weaker. Hence the flood of poor and poor-ish Eastern and Southern European immigrants.
One factor that no one talks about in these immigration arguments is the effect of immigration on the immigrants themselves. Think of the huge increase in well-being that they and their descendants gain from immigrating, and thus the huge increase in total utility that humanity gains. Even if we discount this benefit by a large fraction due to feeling that their group is not a part of our group, or that immigration has negative side effects, I would argue that the benefits to the immigrants is large enough to outweigh this. If needed, we can mitigate the negative side effects by requiring assimilation to a greater extent than we do now.
Caring about the well-being of immigrants over the well being of the host country is how you end up with UK. They’re allowing immigrants (including violent sex criminal immigrants) to stay because they’d be treated badly (because they’re violent sex offenders) in their home country.
Completely agree. Refugee immigration has gone out of style since we let in Vietnamese/Salvadoran/Somali refugees in the 80s and 90s, and I suppose I understand why - if you have a fixed number of immigration spots the US benefits more if the immigrants are highly educated. But the base case for an Indian immigrant is they get a tech job in Hyderabad instead of San Francisco. The base case for the Somali refugee is they starve to death.
It's interesting how much of MAGA consists of importing to the right the victimology that leftists have practiced for decades.
I think the victory of gay marriage was such an overwhelming vindication of the politics of victimhood that much of the right concluded "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Ever since, right-wing politics has consisted mostly of white people, mostly the less educated, posturing as victims and lashing out against their imagined victimizers.
I mean they even went so far to invent a racial class - "White Christians" - for themselves.
Though the less-educated whites have had a bad few decades, if you compare their incomes to the country as a whole. Back around 1950, it is said that the average employed white male high-school graduate earned more than the median American worker overall. And there certainly were a lot of well-paying unionized manufacturing jobs for men with strong backs. But the economic value of such people has declined significantly. They've got good reason to think that the recent changes have been to their disadvantage; whether this makes them "victims" depends on your personal philosophy.
The responses to this article make me feel like we might be cooked.
If it makes you feel better the most hateful people tend to be the most online. I live in a liberal area but most people interact with people from different racial and religious backgrounds all the time and get along pretty well
> Somalis, on the other hand, are an extremely poor group, with very high poverty rates and much lower income than Haitians, or immigrants in general; this is due to the fact that most of them are refugees or descendants of refugees, which are the least selected type of immigrants. Somalis are Muslim, unlike Haitians, which makes them both visually distinct (because of the hijab) and mentally associated with civilizational conflict.
Sounds like a great reason to not let them in. Why should we treat all groups equally when it comes to immigration? All cultures are not equal and are not equally compatible with ours. Of course it would be better to treat everyone as an individual, but that's simply not possible with an immigration system. You have to rely on profiling and averages. The selective immigration system you mention is absolutely better than the non-selective one, but that also isn't treating people like individuals. It profiles on other things like having an advanced degree. This works very well because an immigrant with an advanced degree has a much higher probability of being employed and a much lower probability of causing trouble than one without it. So it's obvious that this type of profiling is useful. But then what if an immigrant from Mexico is much more likely to be employed and much less likely to be a trouble maker than an immigrant from Somalia? Why should we not favor immigrants from Mexico over immigrants from Somalia in the same way we favor educated and rich immigrants over uneducated and poor?
Education selection is far from the only method of selection -- in fact, it's not the most common one at all.
The most common types of selection are for EMPLOYABILITY and CRIMINALITY.
Our skills-based immigration system selects people based on who gets a JOB in America. That will select against people who can't find good jobs (since only higher-paying jobs can afford to sponsor immigrants).
And we deport people for crime. That selects for immigrants who don't commit crimes.
So yes, we have selection mechanisms to deal with all of this stuff you're talking about; we don't need to resort to racial profiling.
You got me curious Noah, and I googled “what criteria were used to allow Somalis into the USA.”
“Somalis have entered the U.S. primarily through Temporary Protected Status (TPS), granted due to Somalia's ongoing civil war, conflict, famine, and instability, allowing legal stay and work for those already present; and through traditional refugee/asylum processes, requiring proof of persecution for race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group, with eligibility criteria focused on safety and humanitarian need rather than just nationality, all while subject to background checks.“
I’m not sure how easy it is to do background checks in a place like Somalia.
I do think it’s a danger to condemn whole populations, but I also think we need to be careful. We want people that will assimilate and that are eager to be American.
Actually, the biggest selection is for being closely related to someone who is already here. And the selection for unauthorized immigration is likely to be completely different. Some reformers have advocated for making employability much more important as a criterion, but they've never gotten traction. Even the H-1b visa proram is markedly unpopular (other than among employers and highly-educated wanna-be immigrants).
"Somalis, on the other hand, are an extremely poor group, with very high poverty rates."
Huh, it's almost as if a group's typical characteristics and culture can be used to predict whether they will be a positive or negative if they immigrate.
The Somalis who came here in the 90s are, from what I understand, mostly US citizens, and they should be afforded every right that entails. And individuals should always be judged as individuals, not as members of groups. But to pretend that the culture or the group that someone comes from doesn't matter when determining who we should allow to immigrate into this country is absurd.
"it's almost as if a group's typical characteristics and culture can be used to predict whether they will be a positive or negative if they immigrate" <-- Then why are Indian and Pakistani and Filipino Americans so rich, and their neighborhoods are so nice, when their ancestral countries are so poor?
You need to think harder about this!!
Pakistani neighborhoods are absolutely not nice. They are hubs of Islamic extremism. Look up Epic City in Texas - thank God the governor stopped it. And Epic City was spearheaded by an “integrated” Pakistani American with an engineering degree and a college professorship!
The fact that there are differences, on average, between those groups and Somalians makes my point.
Can you answer the question of why Fremont isn't like India, and El Paso isn't like Juarez?
My best guess for Fremont would be that Indians that moved to Fremont are the brightest and most motivated in their cohort, so I would expect them to succeed in the US. My best guess for Juarez would be primarily that the drug cartels don't have significant power, which has all sorts of ramifications. I would guess the next biggest factor would be the average hispanic in El Paso was born and raised in the high trust society of the United States, while the average hispanic in Jaurez was born and raised in the relatively low trust society of that part of Mexico.
I don't think ethnicity or genes is determinative of a person's or group's outcome or whether they would assimilate into the United States. But the culture and upbringing (and religion!) that someone has absolutely is a factor.
> "What happened to judging people based on the content of their character? What happened to the colorblind society?"
Progressivism happened. Progressives showed their true colors. When they have cultural and political power they pursue explicitly anti-white goals and values.
Now they say, "It's racist and wrong to condemn a group of people based on the bad actions of a few individuals." ...Huh? This is all they did for over a decade! They turned every institution of media, education, and politics into a platform to endlessly denigrate (and when they could get away with it) legally marginalize white people *as a group*. They justified this based on of the actions of individuals. Anyone who disputes this is being dishonest. This is what happened in American public life from 2013-2024 and everyone knows it.
Progressivism has shown that anti-white racism is part of its ideological core. Either no one does identity politics, or everyone does.
I think there's a bit of a difference between an article calling to "stop" all white people, like the one you linked and a statement from Trump saying we won't allow refugee immigration from a specific country.
https://www.salon.com/2015/12/22/white_men_must_be_stopped_the_very_future_of_the_planet_depends_on_it_partner/
Trump might be racist in his heart, I'm not sure, but clearly here he is talking specifically about not wanting Somalian refugees in America, not eliminating Somalians as a group on principle or condemning "Somalianism" as a global plague, the way leftists do with white people.
The similarity is that they both judge individuals based on their membership in a racial group.
I...don't think so? Racial groups are not nationalities. AFAIK, Trump is not recommending we deport ethnic Somalians with American citizenship or nth-generation naturalized immigrants the way lefties believe white Americans should (hypothetically) be removed from "stolen land" (or made subjects of minority indigenous rule). Trump is saying that we should send Somali nationals here on refugee or worker status back to their country of origin.
If he were arguing for a policy to deport an entire ethnicity regardless of citizenship I'd agree with you.
Would love a knock-down drag-out between you and Andrew Sullivan on where to draw the policy line on immigration.
Sullivan being what I'd call an immigration minimalist--for it in principle (he is an immigrant after all), but only in numbers that don't threaten the culture and that the populace finds acceptable.
I don't agree with it--like you and many of your readers I think, I'm more expansionist, for practical and sentimental reasons--but Sullivan's view is much more legitimate and harder to argue against than, say O. Cass on tariffs.
And your tussle with Cass was fun, wasn't it?
I've had that debate with Andrew!
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/noah-smith-a-second-cold-war-with
Well shut my mouth ;-)
Different cultures have different values. I do not know anything abut Somali culture. But one should not waive away the possibility that it is antithetical to American culture--or at least, its aspirations. The language used by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller is intemperate and proves nothing. But I think that if we write about it as being irresponsible, we should delve into the facts of the case; not merely say that judging a group of immigrants by their origin is wrong.
(Yes, I believe the MLK quotation is the correct aspiration. but that does not mean that groups cannot be judged based on their collective actions.)
I'm sure there are things I wouldn't like about Somali culture -- maybe lots of things. But those cultures don't last in America.
Assimilation is a strange and mixed bag, though. If you read "Albion's Seed", there are four substantial regional cultures that were established by immigrants from very narrow parts of England and those cultures have persisted until this day. (I can make an argument that Trumpism and a number of other social movements are deeply embedded in the "borderer" or Scots-Irish culture established in Appalachia over two centuries ago.)
In general, Noah, I agree that we are and should be a melting pot, and though in some circles that no longer is a fashionable goal, it remains mine. And historically, most emigrant groups have assimilated. But some have not--at least not yet. The Hasidim come to mind as one such group. i do not know whether Somalis will be another.
Do we have a record of Muslim emigrants who come as a large group assimilating? I can't think of one yet. And France, for example, is having difficulties in that regard.
The Trump reaction and language are despicable. Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). His xenophobic rant is nothing new. Just fill in the target ethnicity he chooses to attack that day. Yesterday it was Afghans; another day it was Nigerians; and another Black South Africans.
It’s amazing to me how many people on the right have just now discovered bigotry in their ranks, particularly as it pertains to antisemitism. Who knew a movement dedicated to ethnonationalism would be full of antisemites? That’s never happened before except for literally every single time. It was beyond delusional to think bigotry against Haitians, Muslims and Mexicans would spare Jews. When you tolerate cranks and bigots of all sorts in the name of getting tax cuts you’re going to wind up getting stuck with antisemitism, racism and xenophobia.