I’ve conservativized somewhat as I’ve aged, the way a lot of people do, but hear me out.

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I was a heedless, footloose cosmopolitan, living in Paris.

Having discovered (who knew?) that a flight to Israel took only four hours, I decided, suddenly and randomly, to fly there. Randomly because I’d never been much of a Jew, nor anything like a Zionist, so my motive was curiosity, not conviction or emotion. Being a Jew meant something non-trivial to me; the identity had virtually no religious component (I was and remain pretty ignorant of Jewish texts and rituals); but, steeped in Holocaust history and art from childhood, I was enough of a member of the tribe to recognize and feel myself as part of a supremely suffering contingent.

My own story was the safer, more conventional one of grandparents who fled pogroms at the turn of the century to settle in large American cities and spawn doctors and lawyers. I had no relatives who died in concentration camps. I mean, probably I did, but I didn’t know about them. [The dead in the gas chambers] flow out in smoke from the extermination chimneys, writes Moses Herzog; and leave you in the clear light of historical success of the West. A heedless, footloose cosmopolitan with the money to live in Paris, I was that historical success.

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Only a few days after touching down in Israel (the security – this was 1982 – was insane: a phone call the day before telling me to show up at DeGaulle at 3 AM rather than noon; an extensive interview when I got to Ben Gurion), I had my coming-out moment when two things happened at once. I was sitting at an outside table on a university campus (Hebrew U? Don’t remember.), reading a book I’d picked up at the airport when I arrived: Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic. UD recognized immediately that the author was a terrific prose stylist who put across a difficult argument eloquently, craftily, seductively, and she read each page with great interest.

As she read, she became aware of a nearby table where three women were giggling and talking loudly among themselves. Looking more closely, she took in their absolute ease in their very specific being as out-loud Jewish — deeply, rootedly, unself-consciously, un-nervously Jewish in their Jewish country. And just as the powerful polemic in favor of Zionism she was reading prompted … resistance in UD, so those women, with their enviable being-there-ness, disconcerted her, alienated her.

The promise of countries like Israel, it seemed to UD, was this tribal warmth and clarity. Belonging. But it was much more than that. Hillel Halkin, the author of the polemic, insisted that in living here, in Israel, you as a Jew were doing no less than saving the Jewish people; he spent many pages reviewing the assimilation/disappearance of Jews all over the world. Like koalas, he argued, Jews are a peculiar, specific, breed who will die out if you deprive them of the specific and quite restricted conditions they need to survive. Indeed his entire argument rested on his prediction that Diaspora Judaism will soon die out. In a 1977 review of the book, Robert Alter notes: “Halkin projects that the current American Jewish population of five million plus will be reduced by the end of the century to at most three million.”

Yet the current population of American Jews is well over six million. Some sources put it at seven million plus.

One hopes that anyone who moved to Israel on the basis of Halkin’s predictive abilities has, by 2021, evolved lots of other reasons for having done so. For there’s this, too, as Alter writes: “For [Halkin,] Orthodoxy alone has authenticity, but it is the authenticity of an anachronism, preserving itself only by averting its vision from the most imperative aspects of modernity, and so its historical fate will be gradually to fade away in the slow dawning of the Jewish secular future.” In the event, what Alter rightly calls secular Israel’s “anemic” birthrate has meant the shrinking of that population and the demographic explosion of the orthodox and ultraorthodox.

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Most tellingly, perhaps, Halkin at one point chides American Jews because they “lack the passion to live without contradiction,” which is to say that they seem not to want to be koalas, Jewish creatures who just like being Jewish and want to live in the one place they can chew eucalyptus leaves and be fully Jewish and nothing else. It wasn’t exactly an inspiring image to UD then, and it still fails to rock her world. She’s Blakeian; she’s Whitmanian; she’s a contradiction-maven. Cuz she was raised in a liberal democracy! She’s a … [we’re back in Israel here, at UD‘s moment of truth] liberal! Alter: “In liberal democracies … Jews are naturally drawn from their Jewish parishes to the freedom [and manifold contradictions] of the larger environment…”

In a recent interview, Adam Gopnik, who wrote a book defending liberalism from left and right attacks on it, observes that

[O]ur hunger for [collective] identity, our need for connection, is overwhelming and … liberalism [some argue] impedes it. Liberalism acts as a stopper on it. [This is Charles] Taylor’s point: We [have a] need to ask, “Where am I?” and liberalism [which is much better at giving us time and space to ask “Who am I?’] doesn’t seem to give a good answer to that.

But, Gopnik continues:

What liberals, I think, would say in response, what my liberalism would say in response, is first of all, liberalism has actually been very good at the project of making community. It’s why we live in New York. You know, I never get over the miracle of New York… A tolerant community is another kind of community. A pluralistic community is another kind of community. I delight exactly in the variety of kinds that I can find every time in New York. That’s not an absence of community. It’s a particular kind of community that we relish.

Is it, though, a community without roots, without stable collective identity, without inherited meanings, symbols, rituals?

Damn right it is.

“Is a lack of meaning really worse than a lack of freedom? … What liberalism’s critics appear unable, or unwilling, to address is whether a lack of meaning is a worse problem to have than a lack of freedom.”

Maybe liberalism – “the political order that privileges non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy” – issues in some degree of conceptual confusion, and maybe even in a difficulty or refusal to commit oneself to clear philosophical/theological convictions and collectivities – but is this really so unbearable a position to be in that one’s only option is, for instance, rule by monks who think burning heretics at the stake is key to good governance?

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So this is the first in a series of posts attempting to clarify liberalism, the nature of my affiliation with it, the nature of the manifold attacks on it, etc. All of this has been catalyzed by the latest radical dumping on liberalism: critical race theory. Having spent years in theory-oriented English departments, UD is familiar with Foucauldian anti-liberalism, and as a strong Rortyian she has always been appalled by it. Yet she is at the same time guilty of a certain passive unreflective enjoyment/acceptance of her liberal-culture advantages, as in of course she’s not a desperate Afghan woman brandishing a gun in Ghor province hey that’s nuts it’s not even worth thinking about let’s just relax and enjoy our freedom… But always-imperiled liberal virtues must always be thought about, defended…

[T]he complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism… increasingly play a similar role to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side.

That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition. It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over [the new anti-racism] as just a “moral panic” experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.

… like Andrew Sullivan, attempts to get at the fatal disconnect between liberal culture and critical race theory.

Critical race theory is not the same thing as Marxism, but some of its more facile popularizers share with Marxists the deep conviction that their way of seeing the world is the only way worth seeing the world. Moreover, some have encouraged people to behave as if this were the only way of seeing the world. The structural racism that they have identified is real, just as the class divisions once identified by the Marxists were real. But racism is not everywhere, in every institution, or in every person’s heart at all times. More to the point, any analysis of American history or American society that sees only structural racism will misunderstand the country, and badly. It will not be able to explain why the U.S. did in fact have an Emancipation Proclamation, a Civil Rights Act, a Black president. This is a major stumbling block, not so much for the legal scholars (some of whom actually merit the title “critical race theorist”) but rather for the popularizers and the scholars-turned-activists who want to force everybody to recite the same mantras.

UD has watched with pleasure as Andrew Yang’s mayoral bid tanks. In a just political universe, you don’t brag that you’ll let cultists keep their children in ignorance, placing the burden of their support as lifetime unemployables on the New York taxpayer, without paying a heavy price. Good on you, NYC.

Couple this with events in Israel, and hey.

But hold onto your hat. Expect, in both cities, ultraorthodox riots. They’ll be really, really bad in Israel.

… as we ate breakfast while staring out the window at the hummingbirds who have found our crop of bee balm.

“Horrid terrorists. No.”

“Not Chechnya. Czechia.”

“Is that… the latest name for Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, etc.?”

“Yes.”

“Should I … ha-ha … czech it out?”

“Check out their Pirate Party. They might actually win the next election.”

“With a name like Pirate Party? Wow.”

So UD checked them out.

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All members of the Pirate Party look like extras on the set of Easy Rider. (There is a tradition of this.) Except for their leader, who looks like Bo Derek. They are very cool, very anti-corruption, very personal liberty. When the current government refused to thank Taiwan for donating anti-covid medical supplies (wouldn’t want to offend China), the Pirate Party put up an enormous THANK YOU TAIWAN image during an anti-corruption rally.

A reminder, from Jonathan Chait, that those of us fond of liberty need to rev our eternal vigilance engines.

A sweet little propaganda morsel in the Bennington Banner instructs us that women covered head to toe in black is beautiful. We are to find this beautiful.

Nowhere in her celebration of invisible women does the propagandist remember to add that we are also to find children – just little girls, of course – covered head to toe beautiful; or that we are to find compulsory female covering in Iran and other countries beautiful. Varied, beautiful, and you’re going to jail for a long time if you and your children don’t veil.

“Many modern nuns have abandoned” their black coverings, the author notes, and I wonder why. And I wonder why it doesn’t occur to her that there’s a difference between modern nuns free to abandon old ways and millions of Afghan and Saudi women (ordinary women, not people who have joined religious orders) who face imprisonment and even death if they throw off their robes. Who at the very least face physical attacks on the street from men who see them uncovered.

The author tsk-tsks all the weird unwoke anti-burqa legislation coming out of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, but never inquires about whether that legislation means anything other than (as she believes) visceral hatred and fear.

“Within our own country and around the world, religious garments say, ‘I believe this.”

Sometimes they say that. Sometimes they say I revile what I’m wearing but I can’t do anything about it. Sometimes they say There are places in the world where men can legally fully cover women, or intimidate them into being fully covered, but this secular republic shouldn’t be one of them.

And it matters what this is, doesn’t it? Are we really not allowed to judge people who say “I believe apostates should be killed”? What about people who say “I believe we should bring back burning at the stake”?

One way to avoid writing propaganda is to read a little bit about your subject. The question of veiling is not solved by agreeing to judge something that a lot of people find appalling beautiful. The matter is complex. One might start here.

An update from the New York Times on deliberations about repatriating ISIS women and their children. Are they still ISIS adherents? Impossible to know. Are they – as their advocates insist – poor fools who got trafficked and deserve sympathy? Well, but then they’re poor fools who got trafficked and can get trafficked again. (Those who’ve talked for the record, like Shamima Begum, tend to deny the trafficking bit and admit the ideology turned them on.)

[Belgium’s justice minister] said that any of the women wanting to return to Belgium would have to prove that they mean no harm to the country. “If they have not distanced themselves from ISIS ideology, they will remain on site,” he said.

Sounds a little naive, doesn’t it? Will Belgium ask them to recite the Scout’s Pledge?

So my thing is that France already has plenty of ordinary anonymous hardworking people/ISIS fanatics preparing the next attack on Paris, and one assumes the French state spends large sums of money tracking them and their circle. At the very least, returning demonstrated, way-hardcore ISIS adherents to the country who are really sorry now means far more, and far more extensive, surveillance work.

For the first time since 1860, a major American political party doesn’t believe America is a democracy. No Republican will win a contested primary in 2022 or 2024 who will assert that Biden is a legal president.

Far out.

Burqa bans, like marijuana, can be gateway drugs; they can lead to more dangerous bans. And while UD agrees that little girls are obviously unable to give consent to the hijab, the more important principle here is one of restraint and religious liberty. For UD, the burqa/hijab difference has to do with a fundamentally uncivil refusal to be visible in the public realm, vs. a visible face, a willingness to be identified as part of a free and equal society. Female-identity-crushing burqas are eccentric to any authentically egalitarian setting, whereas hijabs allow wearers to remain within the democratic orbit.

Yet again we get the infantilized woman, the woman incapable of ideological clarity and conviction. We can never know why Suhayra Aden left Australia for the ISIS caliphate! A moral idiot, like all women, Aden must have been victimized by some clever man who talked her into boiling away in the stinking desert so as to be treated as sexual chattel by one ISIS fighter after another.

Now the men… ah, the men grasp the content of fanatic Islamism, and they like it, see? So we can hold them accountable. “It’s unclear what role, if any, Aden may have had in ISIS.” Not only was she just really confused as to where she was and why, she probably didn’t … do anything. But what can this mean? Lived in the caliphate for years doing… nothing. Nothing to promote a terrorist state. Nothing besides hanging around being an idiot.

If you want to know why no state – even places like New Zealand, which pride themselves on being humane and progressive – wants this woman, you have to understand that while some observers seem to believe she’s harmless solely because she’s a woman, actual politicians tasked with protecting actual people have eyes in their head. The same group of fanatics she hung out with in Australia are still there in the home country, ready to take her back into the fold. You think she’s an idiot, but Australian security services will need to spend years, money, and plenty of personnel tracking her once she returns.

Put her on trial in Australia, you say? She could have murdered ten people; the chaos that was ISIS and the burqa as fashion choice makes it almost impossible to find documentation and witnesses.

No, UD does not think this woman and her children should stay in the desert. Authorities should first try to convince Aden that the children’s best interests are served by sending them to family in Australia, if family willing to take them exists.

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Australia and New Zealand are locked in a nasty battle over which country has to take this woman in; both have dug in their heels. As Jacinda Arden notes, Australia has the greater claim:

“It is wrong that New Zealand should shoulder the responsibility for a situation involving a woman who has not lived in New Zealand since she was 6, has resided in Australia since that time, has her family in Australia and left for Syria from Australia on her Australian passport.”

But Australia has revoked her citizenship.

Constant readers know UD‘s suggestion. With money from sympathizers, Aden can try buying citizenship in any number of countries. Some will reject her; but if they agree with those who believe that because she’s a woman she’s harmless, others will take her. Her children can visit her there. Not the worst outcome for her.

And for that reason devastating.

Israel is one of the few countries whose fundamental character is imperiled… Modern Israel cannot survive [Haredi cultural regression]—there will be no one to fund it—unless the Haredim fundamentally change their behavior and worldview, of which there are no signs. It is more reasonable to foresee that, if anything, the process will be accelerated by secular flight…. [Even small changes will draw from the Haredim] charges of “anti-Semitism” and probably rioting in the streets.

Dan Perry lays it out in eighteen stark paragraphs: Israel is a democracy rapidly transitioning to a rather violent theocracy. One of its most powerful political parties simply rejects the authority of the state; suicidally and homicidally ignores covid laws; and bars women from running for office because public life of any form “isn’t their natural place.” If women must go outside, gender segregation and heavy physical covering is a must.

Established as a secular democracy, Israel is well on its way to making Saudi Arabia look enlightened. Yet because its current cultural grotesquerie has been a gradual process, people don’t really see it. They don’t see the secular brain drain, the out-of-it authoritarian rabbis, the masses of illiterate children. Maybe they take in the endless court judgments against appalling haredi behavior; but then they miss the fact that the haredim ignore all such judgments.

The Jew with literary history’s most fantastical, malignant imagination – Kafka – could never have imagined contemporary Israel. It exceeds even his mental grasp.

She’s stuck in a rancid ISIS prisoner camp, and England won’t take her back. Intelligence services believe that this fanatic (she says that’s all over) continues to represent a threat to the country.

Here’s her attorney on the subject:

What happened to Christian forgiveness? Does it not apply to a woman — and a dark-skinned one at that? It seems that different rules apply… Is it perhaps that some of us are more British than others of us? Shamima is of Bangladeshi descent, does that change her right to British nationality? I am tempted to think it does…

SOS says: Manifold are the ways one can speak up on behalf of one’s client. Admittedly, this attorney has a superjumbo problem on her hands, since her client not only renounced her British citizenship when she embraced Islamic State citizenship, she also committed vile acts (suicide vest sewing; slave-ownership; public support of mass murder in Europe and beheadings in the caliphate, etc.) and has expressed little remorse for her extensive blood-thirstiness. But SOS wonders whether lazily pushing certain buttons is the best one might do for Begum.

The lawyer’s weakest button is the Christian thing. Not sure she’s looked around at England lately, but it’s the land of empty churches. It rivals France for empty churches. If you’re going to go the Christian route, try getting her American citizenship. We’re the land of full churches…

But, you know, 135,000 slaughtered Assyrians later, I’m not sure you’re going to have much success in that direction either. Better drop the whole Christian thing.

That leaves sexism and racism. UD readers already know my take on the there there little woman you can come back cuz you’re a stupid harmless li’l thing approach to this problem. The sexism in the Begum story locates itself firmly in defenders who believe – claim to believe – that women are just too nice to be mean, and too dense to form serious, protracted, ideological commitments.

There are of course many light-skinned people among those that various countries have refused to repatriate. ISIS enjoyed a broad appeal.

Finally, yes: Begum is of Bangladeshi descent. And it is to Bangladesh that her lawyer should direct citizenship claims.

‘MAKE EYE CONTACT AND SMALL TALK. [This is part of] being a citizen and a responsible member of society.‘

Burqa enthusiasts simply don’t care about this; for them, the total blacking out of women on the streets of their cities represents a higher value than responsible citizenship, than the open mutuality of open faces. An outfit designed to repel interaction – an outfit which, most shockingly and insultingly, features mesh over the mouth of a woman (small talk? no talk), fits perfectly, as Snyder’s argument suggests, in a tyrannical setting like Saudi Arabia. It has no place in a democracy, and, as Kunwar Khuldune Shahid’s very long list of democratic – and would-be democratic – countries where burqas are outlawed suggests, more countries and municipalities realize that every day. Switzerland is only the latest; it will not be the last.

…national ban on the wearing of burqas/niqabs.