Brandon Johnson & Batya Ungar-Sargon on the Jews

Hi all,

Jews have been in the news lately. Usually, that’s not a good thing. Growing up, I believe the first time I heard of Jews in the news was when Jesse Jackson called New York City “hymie town.” Thankfully, Eddie Murphy saved the day:

The next major flareup was in my teens when Crown Heights exploded over Al Sharpton’s antisemitic rhetoric.

There have been other flareups here and there, but it was not until October 7 that Jews have been front and center in the news, and nonstop.

In the past 24 hours, I came upon two news items that I thought were revealing.

Some of you may know, a visibly Jewish man was shot in Chicago recently by an assailant that reportedly yelled, “Allahu Akbar.” Brandon Johnson, the Chicago mayor, extended his condolences to the victim without mentioning that he was a Jew.

The hypocrisy here is that Johnson is tribalist in his core and uses identity for power. He touts the blackness of his administration and accuses his distractors of white supremacy. Yet, when it comes to the shooting victim, he invisibilizes his Jewishness.

Think about this for a second. Someone had to have brought the mayor the news that there was a shooting victim and it is likely that he reacted with initial concern. It is also likely that he then wanted to know the identity of the victim because it would be identity not character that determined how he reacted. When he learned the victim was Jewish and that the assailant screamed an Arabic religious phrase, he erased the Jewishness.

What else could we have expected from a mayor captured by and driven by liberation ideology? Every single action of his maximizes POCs as victims and whites, including Jews, as oppressors. There’s no empathy in ideologues — just pure calculation.

When a Palestinian boy was murdered a year ago, Johnson did the moral thing, including calling it a hate crime:

Then there is Batya Ungar-Sargon. The one thing I have noticed about quite a few recently un-woke liberals, especially influencers, is that they lecture us daily about the issues, taking strong stances. Then they flip around and tell us they must vote their moral conscience in the presidential race, an act which often leads them to support the very issues they say they oppose. Since when is a vote for the president not about issues? It certainly isn’t about one’s own narcissistic moral vanity. The issue here is not who one votes for but the inconsistency between talk and action.

There’s none of this with Batya. I met her when she interviewed me for The Forward about “What Killed Michael Brown?” We were weary of each other at first because we came from different political perspectives — we had a good laugh about that initial skittishness a year later over dinner in Malibu. What impressed me was her integrity and her determination to get to the root of things. Since then she has followed a path similar to my father’s in moving away from the Left to the free-thinking territory — and in the public eye, which is not easy to do.

That is why I wanted to share with you what she calls, “My message to my fellow American Jews on the eve of the election. With love.” Without further ado:

The debate over Jews and, by extension, Israel will only intensify as time passes. The Jew has always been “in the news” at every major shift in civilization and we are in the middle of another one.

My best,

Eli