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Muslim American Support for Trump Is an Act of Self-Sabotage

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › muslim-american-support-trump › 680449

Over the weekend, a group of Arab American and Muslim American leaders in Michigan appeared onstage at a Donald Trump rally and urged their communities to vote for him. The outreach might be working: A recent poll showed Trump with a narrow lead among Arab American voters.

This is shocking, but hardly surprising. It’s shocking because Trump’s stated policies—on Palestine, on political freedom, and on the very presence of Muslims in America—are antithetical to so much of what most of these voters believe in. It’s unsurprising because we Arab and Muslim Americans have a long tradition of merciless political self-sabotage.

In 2000, angered by the sanctions against and bombing of Iraq, the use of “secret evidence” in deportation proceedings against Arab and Muslim immigrants, and especially the carnage of the Second Intifada, many liberal Arab Americans—myself included—decided not to vote for Al Gore and turned instead to Ralph Nader, himself a prominent Arab American. If the point was to advance Arab political interests, our protest was a pathetic failure. The election of George W. Bush led directly to the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, a strategic disaster that continues to resonate in the Middle East, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians.

This time around, the primary grievance is the Biden administration’s support of—or, at least, inability to end—Israel’s invasion of Gaza and, now, its widening wars in Lebanon and Iran. Once again, the impulse is to express our anger and “punish” the politicians responsible by withholding a vote for them. In an election with only two viable candidates, however, there is no difference between not supporting Kamala Harris and actively supporting Trump. And a quick review of the most important issues on which there’s a consensus among Arab and Muslim Americans demonstrates that a second Trump term would be dramatically worse than a Harris presidency.

[Read: What would a second Trump administration mean for the Middle East?]

Start with Trump’s signature issue, immigration. Nothing in Harris’s agenda would restrict immigration from Arab or Muslim countries. Trump offers the precise opposite. One of his first acts as president was to institute a “Muslim ban,” flatly prohibiting the entry of nationals from a list of seven majority-Muslim countries. President Joe Biden rescinded that executive order; Trump has vowed to reinstate and possibly expand it.

Moreover, Trump’s likely attack on Temporary Protected Status, especially for Haitian immigrants, is ominous for a number of Arab and Muslim communities whose members currently qualify, including Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Syrians, and Sudanese. With a stroke of Trump’s Sharpie, all of them could find themselves stripped of this protection—and included in his promised “bloody” mass deportations. Efforts to extend Temporary Protected Status to Lebanese nationals, entirely plausible under a Harris administration, would be dead in the water under Trump. Defending his decision to endorse Trump, an imam in Michigan declared that the former president “promises peace.” He plainly does not. The Washington Post has reported that, according to six sources, Trump recently told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do” militarily in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The notion that Trump would prioritize the interests of Arab civilians is simply absurd. This is a man who has repeatedly used the word Palestinian as an epithet against his (in many cases Jewish) Democratic political opponents.

Trump already has a long, instructive, and highly discouraging record on these issues. As president, he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and issued a statement recognizing Israel’s sovereignty in the contested holy city. He recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, in direct contravention of the United Nations charter’s rule against the acquisition of territory by war. And he slammed shut the Overton window on Palestinian independence and a two-state solution, which had been a matter of bipartisan consensus since the end of the Cold War. His “Peace to Prosperity” plan, released in January 2020, invited Israel to annex 30 percent more of the West Bank. Such a move would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded entirely by Israel, and therefore incapable of meaningful sovereignty. The primary effect of this crude document was to create a permission structure for Republicans to support wide-scale Israeli annexation of the West Bank and dispense with supporting Palestinian independence.

Harris, by contrast, has been categorical in her support of a real two-state solution that would mean the end of the occupation that began in 1967. The vice president has clearly stated that Palestinians and Israelis need to reach a peace agreement that affords them “equal measures of prosperity and freedom.” Trump has never spoken of Palestinians and Israelis enjoying equal measures of anything.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s new racist insult]

Trump’s anti-Palestinian bias extends to the home front. Arab and Muslim Americans have been emigrating to the United States in large numbers since the late 19th century in search of a better life characterized by liberty and democracy. And yet Trump’s whole campaign, and his entire agenda, amounts to an assault on those ideals. He has consistently singled out pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as part of a “radical revolution” that he has pledged to eliminate. According to The Washington Post, he told a group of Jewish donors in May that he is determined to deport pro-Palestinian students and “set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”

Our communities are overwhelmingly aghast at the U.S. government’s ongoing support for Israel’s military campaigns. I share the sentiment. But channeling that anger into support for Trump would be an exercise in the most rarefied gullibility and naivete. Far from promising peace, Trump threatens war on “the enemy from within.” Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, particularly those with pro-Palestinian sentiments, are likely to be high on the list of targets. We need to learn from the lessons of our own history. When we try to punish the politicians who have disappointed us without taking a serious inventory of the likely consequences, we usually just end up hurting ourselves.

Why Many Black Americans Feel Solidarity With Palestinians

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 10 › black-americans-solidarity-gaza › 680433

This story seems to be about:

In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him.

“I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion by the Polish Jews being held captive there. When Du Bois got there, in 1949, the city was still being rebuilt. Speaking at the behest of Jewish Life magazine—now Jewish Currents—Du Bois said the visit had helped him reconceive the “Negro problem” as part of a larger constellation of global struggles against oppression. He had been cured of a “certain social provincialism” and sought a way for “both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group.” For Du Bois, the path forward was simple: solidarity.

Du Bois’s vision has been deeply influential in the decades since he delivered his “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” speech. Similar sentiments moved Jewish students to take buses to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964, and brought both Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali to oppose the Vietnam War. Solidarity spurred students and people of color to call for American divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and has more recently brought Black activists to Standing Rock. The notion of global minorities and underclasses sharing common cause was provocative in 1952, but is now a constant in progressive circles, and has a special force among mainstream Black American institutions and politics, regardless of ideology.

But the past year has thrown Du Bois’s prescription into crisis. Most Americans expressed horror and sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s counterassault against Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians and caused a dire humanitarian crisis, all with the backing of the United States. As about 100 hostages still languish in captivity, the horror and sympathy remain. But the continued violence in Gaza has strengthened, among many, and especially among many Black observers, another feeling: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the resulting protests against Israel’s conduct, and statements of empathy for Palestinians, have been met with censorship by universities and state governments, and with derision and dismissal by the media. This has been particularly true for expressions of solidarity that are based on the Black experience in America, which have often been disparaged as unsophisticated and inauthentic. “The identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America’s race problem was hardly made in America,” the historian Gil Troy argued in Tablet magazine. “It is a recent foreign import,” air-dropped onto a gullible populace.

Of course, the American South is not the Middle East, and there are limits to every comparison. But it is not simplistic or facile to, while acknowledging differences, also see structural similarities over time and space, or to believe that, in a world connected by language, finance, and technology, our systems and ways of being are related. The Black experience has been usefully analogized to the Jewish struggle over the years, and we have clear documentary evidence of the ways that systems of anti-Black and anti-Semitic oppression have been borrowed and translated from one to the other. To claim kinship between Black and Palestinian peoples is merely to apply the same logic. Solidarity means recognizing the parallels and shared humanity among the three groups, and working to create a world that does so as well.

But efforts to create that world are now in danger of being snuffed out. The dehumanization and marginalization of Palestinians in American discourse and media, as well as denunciations of the use of concepts such as “intersectionality” and “decolonization” in relation to Israel, among even liberal commentators, have dovetailed neatly with the ongoing conservative backlash against “wokeness” and Black history. All the while, anti-Semitism is worsening in America and beyond. The fate of multiracial organizing and democracy in America is inextricably bound up with the fates of people halfway around the world.

Can solidarity survive the onslaught in Gaza?

Left: A draft of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” from April 1952. Right: Du Bois (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture).

First, some words about that onslaught. Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal incursion, in which assailants killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages, with an offensive that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, an estimate from the Gaza Health Ministry. (Hamas runs the ministry, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations consider its numbers generally reliable.) As of April, nearly 23,000 of those fatalities were identifiable by names and identification numbers issued by Israel. According to some experts, if people who die from disease or injury, as well as those found buried in rubble, are included, the true toll could be much higher. War is war, and the great, unavoidable tragedy of war is civilian death. But unavoidable is not synonymous with purposeful.

The Israeli campaign has, as a matter of strategy, regularly and knowingly subjected Palestinian civilians to violence. The Israel Defense Forces have targeted Gazan health-care facilities as civilians were being treated and sheltering there, claiming that militants use the facilities and that hostages were held in them (an explanation that the U.S. State Department has backed up as credible). Israeli air strikes have devastated Palestinian refugee camps, including a strike in Rafah in May that killed dozens of civilians along with two top Hamas commanders.

The UN and the U.S. Agency for International Development have both concluded that Israel blocked shipments of food aid to Gaza, a finding that under both U.S. and international law should make continued weapons shipments to Israel illegal. (The Biden administration rejected the finding, but has since written a letter demanding that Israeli officials improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.) The IDF has struck the same UN-backed school building five times, saying it was targeting militants. According to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 129 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed, making this the deadliest period for journalists since the group began keeping records in 1992. Last month, Israel shipped 88 unidentified Palestinian bodies back to Gaza in the back of a truck. And earlier this month, the United States launched an investigation of allegations of widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, months after video depicting an alleged sexual assault at the Sde Teiman detention camp leaked on social media.

Those who survive are facing the depths of deprivation. Almost 2 million people in Gaza are hungry or starving. For pregnant women, stress and terror are contributing to a spike in preterm births, and doctors describe seeing stillbirths, newborn deaths, and malnourished infants. Deteriorating public-health conditions have resulted in a wave of contagious skin diseases among children, and what the UN calls a “frightening increase” in Hepatitis A infections. The WHO is rushing to vaccinate Palestinians against polio after Gaza’s first confirmed case in a quarter century. This is a human catastrophe, documented and verified over the past year by the United States and other countries, the international diplomatic and legal community, nongovernmental organizations, reputable news outlets, and, not least, Palestinians themselves.

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov shows a steady drop in American sympathy toward Israel, and a corresponding rise in sympathy toward Palestinians; earlier polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and want America to send humanitarian aid to Gaza in lieu of more weapons to Israel. Yet one demographic group that broke early in this direction was Black Americans. In a New York Times/Siena College poll taken in December 2023, Black respondents already overwhelmingly supported an immediate cease-fire, and were much less likely than white respondents to endorse any action that endangered more civilians. Altogether, Black respondents were more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, and more likely than not to believe that Israel was not “seriously interested in a peaceful solution.” In a June CBS News poll, nearly half of Black respondents said they wanted the U.S. to encourage Israel to completely stop its military actions in Gaza, while only 34 percent of white respondents did.

These sentiments aren’t limited to young activists and leftists. Even moderate and legacy Black institutions have expressed them. In June, the NAACP called on the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel, arguing that the president “must be willing to pull the levers of power when appropriate to advance liberation for all.” In February, the Council of Bishops, the leadership branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for an end to American support for Israel and an immediate cease-fire. Noting both the connection of Black folks to Palestinians and the historical linkages between the Black and Jewish plights—and the deep theological affinity of Black-liberation thought with the story of the ancient Jews—the AME statement said that “the cycle of violence between historically wounded peoples will not be dissolved by the creation of more wounds or through weapons of war.” The statement also accused the United States of “supporting this mass genocide.”

In January, more than a thousand Black pastors—representing congregations totaling hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class Black people—urged President Joe Biden to push for a cease-fire. The leaders made a pragmatic case: They feared that Black voters, typically reliable backers of the Democratic Party (and Biden in particular), might not show up to the polls in November if the deaths in Gaza continued. But they also made a moral argument based in solidarity: “We see them as a part of us,” the Reverend Cynthia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

This sympathy toward Palestinians is shared widely across Black communities—by Black activists, commentators, clergy, and white- and blue-collar professionals of all age groups. Identification with the Palestinian cause stretches back well before the current conflict, showing up in polls as early as the 1970s. This solidarity is based on a number of factors, but the main one is obvious: Black people see what is happening to Palestinians, and many feel the tug of the familiar in their heart.

Attempts like Hale’s to analogize the experiences of Black people with those of Palestinians have often been met with a simple insistence that they are wrong; that they have confused things; that relations between Palestinians and Israelis are too complex to allow any comparison. In 1979, at the United Nations, the chief Israeli delegate, Yehuda Blum, chided leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, for calling for a Palestinian homeland. “Understandably, they are less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties,” Blum said.

In 2020, during the height of America’s purported “racial reckoning,” the Haaretz commentator Nave Dromi wrote that there were simply no commonalities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, claiming that Palestinians “don’t want genuine peace, in contrast to blacks in the United States, who do seek to live in peace with their American compatriots.” In 2021, in the pages of this magazine, the writer Susie Linfield said that the concept of “intersectionality” had been improperly applied to analogizing the Black and Palestinian struggles, in a way that can “occlude complex realities, negate history, prevent critical thinking, and foster juvenile simplifications.”

It is true that analogy has its limits for any political situation, and that, especially among journalists, nuance and context are crucial components of the arsenal of understanding. But often, regard for “complexity” in this particular conflict means treating its history as one hermetically sealed off from the rest of human experience, which in turn short-circuits any attempt to make common cause with Palestinians.

The short-circuiting has only accelerated since October 7. Shortly after Hamas’s attack, Rabbi Mark H. Levin wrote in The Kansas City Star that the argument that Black Americans and Palestinians have parallel experiences is “a popular but false analogy.” According to Alexis Grenell in The Nation, “When outsiders collapse the Palestinian cause into, say, the struggle for Black Lives or LGBTQ rights—while framing that position as virtuous because it’s ‘simple’—it’s not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Behind these objections is, perhaps, the very real fear of anti-Semitism—of Jews facing a unique scrutiny born not of compassion, but of hate. And it is indisputably the case that such singling-out does animate odious worldviews, that Hamas has justified its actions with anti-Semitism, and that the group has committed brutal and unspeakable acts. But instead of isolating Jews, solidarity actually situates the state of Israel within a much larger story, one in which brutality is all too common. And standing with oppressed people—including Palestinians, many of whom dream of a future without Hamas—does not require them to be universally righteous; this would in itself be a unique scrutiny.

Still, the fear of anti-Semitism has empowered those who would quell expressions of solidarity, and who were hostile to the idea long before October 7. In the past year, the insistence on Palestinian-Israeli relations as an inscrutable cipher, and the rejection of attempts to analogize the Black and Palestinian situations, have contributed to a broader aversion to multiracial organizing. In November 2023, the Free Press’s Bari Weiss made this argument explicit in an essay about college campuses: DEI efforts, she argued, were tantamount to “arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Since the 1960s, student protesters have often borrowed from the logic and language of Black protest, and many left-wing organizers on campuses have compared the Black and Palestinian experiences. During the invasion of Gaza, as universities became the locus of pro-Palestinian protest, many on both the left and the right saw the activism as proof that students’ minds had been warped by left-wing orthodoxy. Universities targeted their own protesting students with police crackdowns, canceled commencement addresses, and conspicuously revised speech and conduct codes, while politicians sought to pass laws that would ban forms of free expression, including an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires universities to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could reasonably see students expelled for criticizing Israel. Many ostensibly stalwart defenders of the First Amendment have found themselves tongue-tied.

This environment has invigorated people who were already calling for crackdowns on “wokeness.” The right-wing activist Chris Rufo used the backlash against student protests to try to oust administrators at elite universities who were too friendly toward diversity and other presumably leftist causes. Many other commentators have assailed DEI, decolonization, and critical race theory, often without taking care to define or assess how much currency in our discourse these terms actually have. The Black intellectuals who helped spin solidarity into real practice are often summoned, solely for the purpose of exorcism. All of these names and theories have been stripped of meaning and context and stewed down to a mush. The objective is not understanding or coherence, but convenience, turning solidarity into a Black bogeyman to destroy.

It should be noted that W. E. B. Du Bois was an early contributor to The Atlantic, and in 1901 risked his fledgling academic credibility to write a story for the magazine defending Reconstruction—when the magazine’s editorial leadership decried the era as a mistake. That essay became the cornerstone of Du Bois’s most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first elucidated the concept of the “color line,” which animated his 1952 address in the Hotel Diplomat. It should also be noted that, like many other Black scholars, he saw a mirror of the Black experience under that color line in the historical plight of Europe’s Jews, and explicit links between Nazi policies and Jim Crow. As Hitler began to build the machinery of industrialized genocide, and much of Europe and white America refused Jewish refugees from Germany, historically Black colleges and universities continued to sponsor visa applications. The Black press, early and without equivocation, saw the brewing catastrophe for what it was.

In the years leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto speech, Du Bois had been an ardent Zionist who believed that the creation of a Jewish state would lend legitimacy to Pan-African projects like Liberia, which had been founded as a colonial “promised land” for formerly enslaved Black Americans. But the Liberian project did not provide the promised liberation—indeed, it subjected local people to enslavement, subjugation, and war instead, all at the hands of a colonial elite and foreign companies—and Du Bois’s reluctance to acknowledge that failure was one of his great hypocrisies.

But in his later years, Du Bois followed his own logic to a more ecumenical approach, one that viewed all subjugated peoples as part of a connected global movement. This expansive view of solidarity, as embraced by many in the Black diaspora, did not require that groups have identical struggles or historical contexts in order to create common cause. Rather, it was based on the shared experiences of oppression, dehumanization, and lack of self-determination, especially at the hands of the American empire.

In this context, many Black observers witnessed years of Palestinian suffering, subsidized by American tax dollars and arms shipments—even as Black neighborhoods and schools were deprived of investment—and concluded that something familiar was going on. Many Black intellectuals criticized Israel for its role in conflicts with its Arab neighbors in the 1950s and ’60s, and for allying with apartheid South Africa. For those who were not scholars in foreign policy, there was a constant stream of news images showing meager conditions in Palestinian refugee camps, and forced or restricted movement. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of his own trip to the region in 2002: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Arguments that the conflict is too complex to compare with other global systems—to the Black experience in particular—have always rung hollow, especially given that both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were often characterized by their defenders as too singular for outsiders to comprehend. In the 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency devoted to maintaining white supremacy, sent speakers across the country to deliver a set of talking points called “The Message From Mississippi.” In those remarks, the speaker would complain that “the North seemed to know all the answers to our problems without having and knowing the problem,” before explaining patiently that Jim Crow was necessary and right. But this kind of time-wasting and complexification did not stop the northerners who heeded the call to participate in Freedom Summer. They did not need advanced degrees in segregation to know that what they saw on the news was wrong.

One effect of the prominence of the war in Gaza in American media over the past year has been a belated demystification. The deluge of images of flattened buildings, dismembered bodies, and grieving families does not present a conflict that is singular or arcane, but one that is frustratingly, appallingly familiar. After the May air strike on Rafah, the videos and photos that emerged were horrific—and not the least bit “complicated.” The victims were not “human beasts,” as the Israeli general responsible for overseeing Gazan aid described Hamas militants and the Palestinian civilians who celebrated on October 7, but mothers and children, dazed and broken. They deserve the same empathy and protection as any other people, and have been denied it by a constant stream of dehumanization, including decades of rhetoric painting Palestinians as backwards, uncivilized, and incompatible with “Western” values. This is a tactic Black folks know all too well.

In November 2023, Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, a member of the governing Likud party, shared on social media his belief that the campaign had been “too humane,” and demanded that Israel “burn Gaza now no less!” Last winter, two members of far-fight ultranationalist parties—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a vocal proponent of illegal settlement and annexation in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the Jewish-supremacist movement—called for the expulsion of all of the residents of Gaza. Shortly after the Rafah strike, Nikki Haley, the former Republican candidate for president, visited an artillery post in Israel and wrote Finish Them on an artillery shell. Instigated by extremist leaders and unfettered by the law, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have engaged in a campaign of ruthless violence and dispossession against Palestinian residents, even as the Israeli military has ramped up operations there that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Given all this, when Black folks who were raised on stories of lynchings and the threat of obliteration—stories of the Tulsa Massacre, of the quelling of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, of the Red Summer—look at Gaza, how could they not see something they recognize?

Rafah, May 5, 2024 (Hatem Khaled / Reuters)

When Du Bois gave his 1952 speech, Israel was a new state with an uncertain future. The Holocaust was not yet a matter of memory but a matter of present urgency, and across Europe, Jewish refugees still made temporary homes in displaced-persons camps. Du Bois had wept for victims of lynchings in the United States, and his grief was naturally extended to Jews who had lost family members, and who feared mightily about their ability to exist on this Earth as a people.

The Holocaust is more distant in time now, but not much more distant than Jim Crow, which is to say that it is living history, and that the staggering pain of genocide—and the attendant anxiety about future erasure—remains an essential part of how those of us seeking to build a global moral community should understand the world. That requires understanding the shock and profound loss of the global Jewish community on October 7. Solidarity demands that right-minded global citizens reckon with the stubborn persistence of anti-Semitism in the world, and its resurgence in the past few decades.

Solidarity does not demand, however, that they endorse another massacre, or the continued subjugation of another people. In fact, it demands the opposite. “A truly intersectional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Susie Linfield wrote, “would, of necessity, incorporate the Jewish people’s torturous history of expulsion, pariahdom, statelessness, and genocide.” This is undeniably true, and would then logically make an imperative of standing in solidarity with any group facing such circumstances.

The widespread backlash against that imperative is perhaps the chill in the air preceding the storm of the next four years, auguring a world of warring tribes, of us versus them. Trumpism, the ideology that backs the most authoritarian crackdowns on student protests and free speech, is hostile to Jews and Palestinians, and positions solidarity as the main enemy to a state built purely on the pursuit of self-interest. Already, this is a world where Palestinians are marginalized in the media and in policy, and one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and anti-Semitism continues to rise. Americans have always believed themselves to be at the moral center of the world, and here they have a case. The militarism and dehumanization endorsed by so many Americans are important exports, as are the American armaments that have killed thousands of Palestinian children before they could experience the wonder of learning to ride a bicycle.

This may all sound like an anti-war argument in general, and it is. Reeling from the horrors of the World Wars and the atomic age, Du Bois grew preoccupied with finding a solution to war itself. He came to understand that domestic systems of oppression and global wars shared a common root of systematized dehumanization, manufactured by the global color line. For Du Bois, true peace was the only way forward, and it required “extend[ing] the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples” across the world.

Several other Black leaders reached similar conclusions in their intellectual lives, ultimately linking global pacifism to the project of racial egalitarianism. In the years before his death, King, operating from his framework of the “three evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism, came out to oppose the Vietnam War. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in his best-known denunciation of the war. He spoke specifically of Black empathy with the Vietnamese. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met,” he said. “They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.”

What would Du Bois have said about the tragedy in Gaza? Over his long career, he worked to build a coherent philosophy on the basic principle of seeing all humanity as worth saving. He contradicted himself, made grievous errors, and often fell short of his own ethics in this quest. By the time he found himself speaking in the Hotel Diplomat, he’d amassed enough conflicting views to be his own best interlocutor. But he always professed, as found in his “Credo,” a belief “in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Du Bois’s guiding principle was not so different from the founding ethos of the abolitionist magazine that had helped catapult him to fame. In 1892, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of The Atlantic, gave an unambiguous definition of the American idea that his magazine contemplated: “emancipation.”

Emerson’s view was forged at a time when abolitionist arguments were censored in some institutions, abolitionists could be lynched if they journeyed to the wrong corner of America, and the supposed savagery and bloodthirst of the American Negro was the predominant moral argument for keeping him in chains. Emerson made a choice that was then bold and unusual among the white literati: to view Black people as humans, and to rebuild his philosophy around that conclusion. Emerson chose solidarity, and wrote against the scourge of slavery. He did so because emancipation, that American idea, demanded it.

Today, emancipation still demands much of us. It requires that we create a world in which the Holocaust could never happen again, which by definition means a world in which a holocaust could never happen again. It would also necessarily be one in which there would be no mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no famine in Sudan, no children held in cages at the American border, no steady procession of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, no killing of thousands of children in Gaza.

America is clearly failing miserably in that work. The ascendant political ideology gripping both parties views solidarity with suspicion, a suspicion that colors our global realpolitik. The United States remains committed to providing the bombs that kill children, even while—somehow—calling for a cease-fire.

“Where are we going—whither are we drifting?” asked Du Bois in 1952. On the one hand, we have solidarity. On the other, ruin.

The Comically Terrible Rollout of Latter-day Saints for Trump

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2024 › 10 › latter-day-saints-trump › 680428

One of the more puzzling, albeit obscure, subplots in the final weeks of this campaign season has been Donald Trump’s thunderingly incompetent effort to court Mormon voters.

Earlier this month, the former president’s campaign launched Latter-day Saints for Trump, one of several “coalition” groups designed to coordinate outreach to specific subsections of the electorate. (See also: Catholics for Trump, Jewish Voices for Trump, and Latino Americans for Trump.) The campaign’s special attention to the LDS vote makes sense. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once the most reliably Republican religious group in the country, have been considerably less loyal to the party in the Trump era. And enough of them live in the closely divided battleground states of Arizona and Nevada to make a difference.

But almost immediately, Latter-day Saints for Trump devolved into a Veep-like comedy of errors. The official website went live on October 7 with a photo of Russell M. Nelson, the president of the Church and a man considered by its members to be a prophet of God. When a reporter for the Church-owned Deseret News asked if the campaign had gotten permission to feature the image, given the Church’s neutrality in partisan politics, the campaign quickly scrubbed the photo from its homepage.

A few days later, users on X discovered a page on the Trump-campaign website selling Mormon-branded merch—including Latter-day Saints for Trump coffee mugs ($25) and koozies (two for $15). When people pointed out that Mormons somewhat famously don’t drink coffee or alcohol, the campaign hastily rebranded the merch, and a social-media pile-on ensued. (“Next: Jews for Trump pork chops.”)

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

Meanwhile, Mormon-targeted campaign events have been scheduled with an odd indifference to Latter-day Saint religious practice. A canvassing event in Nevada, for example, was held the same weekend as General Conference, a semiannual series of Church broadcasts in which senior leaders deliver sermons and spiritual counsel. (The timing was a “challenge,” admitted the Utah GOP chair, who helped organize the event.) And when Trump held a rally in Prescott, Arizona, with an array of MAGA-Mormon luminaries—including Senator Mike Lee of Utah and the right-wing media personality Glenn Beck—it took place on a Sunday, which Latter-day Saints traditionally set apart for worship, service, and rest, not political events. (Perhaps to address this dissonance, the post-rally Latter-day Saints for Trump Zoom call was advertised as a “virtual fireside,” a reference to evening religious meetings held by Mormons.)

The latest hitch in Trump’s Mormon outreach came yesterday, when the Deseret News reported that Doug Quezada, a founding co-chair of Latter-day Saints for Trump, is being sued for fraud over an alleged scheme involving a cannabis company. (Quezada told the paper the lawsuit was a “shakedown” and denied wrongdoing; in July, a judge denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.) Such allegations may be somewhat commonplace in the Republican nominee’s orbit, but the words cannabis company and fraud will not reassure Trump-skeptical Mormons.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to my request for an interview about the rollout of Latter-day Saints for Trump. But Rob Taber, the national director of Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz, a grassroots group that works closely with the Democratic campaign, was happy to talk. Taber told me he’s been surprised by the “sheer incompetence” of Trump’s efforts, and chalked up the missteps to a lack of practice. “They’re used to being able to count on the LDS vote to be the door-knockers and the foot soldiers of the Republican Party,” Taber told me. “Actually having to engage in persuasion is a little bit new to them.”  

For most Mormon voters, these political faux pas won’t be deal-breakers on their own. But the Trump campaign’s clumsiness is revealing. Taber has a point: There’s a reason professional Republicans are so bad at pandering to Latter-day Saints—before Trump came along, they never had to. In the modern political era, a typical GOP presidential nominee would receive the support of 70 to 80 percent of LDS voters in the United States. In 2016, Trump—with his “locker-room talk” and fondness for adultery, his rank xenophobia and religious illiteracy—barely managed to pull half of the national Mormon vote, and won deep-red Utah with a meager plurality. (Evan McMullin, a Mormon independent candidate, drew more than 20 percent of the vote.)

For most of 2016, Trump’s campaign seemed to take the Mormon vote for granted—even as Democrats saw an opening. That August, Hillary Clinton wrote an op-ed for the Deseret News touting her record of support for religious minorities around the world as secretary of state, and contrasting it with Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, which the Church had condemned. Intent on showing that she’d done her homework, Clinton even cited several historical LDS leaders by name. When Trump responded with his own Deseret News op-ed a few days later, it comprised a hodgepodge of generic GOP talking points, plus a tin-eared pledge to protect pastors who endorse political candidates from the pulpit (a practice that, though common in evangelicalism, is forbidden in LDS services).

Four years later, Trump and his allies seemed more attuned to their Mormon problem. The campaign repeatedly dispatched Donald Trump Jr. to Utah, and enlisted the help of Mormon surrogates. But they still struggled to connect. The most famous blunder came late in the 2020 campaign, when Lee gave a speech in Arizona ham-fistedly comparing Trump to a character from the Book of Mormon.

[Read: Why mormons don’t like Trump]

“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee said, pointing to Trump. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”

Many Mormons, including some Trump supporters, found the comparison blasphemous. Captain Moroni is a beloved scriptural figure, the personification of bravery and selflessness, and seeing him invoked at a MAGA rally was jarring. Lee quickly walked back the comments, but the incident illustrated just how uncomfortable many Mormons are with their newfound status as a voter bloc to be fought over. To court them effectively in a presidential campaign requires both a strong grasp of LDS culture and a certain amount of delicacy.

Rob Taber told me that this is where Mormon Democrats like him have an edge. People with left-of-center views in the Church spend their lives learning how to lay out their view gently and persuasively, he said: “You just get used to explaining things.”

There’s little doubt that most LDS voters will support Trump this year. Conservative attitudes on abortion and other cultural issues guarantee a certain degree of partisan loyalty. But younger Latter-day Saints, who came of age in the Trump era, are significantly less conservative than previous generations. And in the past eight years, some anti-Trump Mormons have gotten more comfortable voting for Democrats instead of third-party protest candidates.

The margins could matter. In a survey conducted shortly before the 2020 election, Quin Monson, a pollster and political-science professor at Brigham Young University, found that Joe Biden doubled Clinton’s share of the Mormon vote in Arizona—a state with a large Mormon population that Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes. For the Harris campaign, holding on to those voters this year could be the difference between losing Arizona and cracking open a celebratory beverage on Election Night. I know a website where they might be able to get some koozies on sale.

The Jewish Quarterback at a Mormon College

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 10 › jewish-quarterback-mormon-college-byu › 680292

There may be, quite simply, no place in America less Jewish than Brigham Young University’s football stadium on Yom Kippur. In a typical year, few of the roughly 63,000 fans who streamed into LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo, Utah, for the annual homecoming game would even be aware that Saturday was the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. But this is no typical year: The star quarterback for BYU, Jake Retzlaff, is Jewish. And he has led the team for the flagship Mormon university to an undefeated start that’s confounded prognosticators and propelled the Cougars to a top-15 national ranking.

It is one of those wonderfully strange college-sports stories that serves as a magnet for camera crews. In recent weeks, ESPN and CBS have both turned up on campus to profile Retzlaff, and Fox Sports dispatched a team of 140 to broadcast its game-day studio show from Provo. The stakes for Saturday’s game were high—a win against the University of Arizona Wildcats would not only make the Cougars bowl-eligible, but keep the team’s chances at a Big 12 championship and national-playoff berth alive.

The stakes were also high for me personally. As a dad gradually surrendering to stereotype in my approach to middle age, I had recently embarked on a mission to indoctrinate my young kids in the college-sports fandom of my alma mater. I bought them overpriced royal-blue hats and sweatshirts, and showed them viral videos of the beloved Cougar mascot, Cosmo, doing TikTok dances and jumping through hoops of fire. After deciding I would bring them to Provo last week for their first BYU football game, I spent days teaching them the fight song. By the time we took our seats on Saturday afternoon, the propaganda had done its work—they couldn’t wait to belt out “Rise and shout, the Cougars are out after each BYU touchdown.

I assured them they’d have many opportunities to sing, but I secretly had my doubts. Arizona’s defense was good; BYU’s first five wins of the season had been weird and a bit fluky. Most important, like any BYU fan, I harbored a vaguely superstitious notion that this was the point of the season—with national hype peaking and people finally taking notice—that our team usually melts down. Chatting with fans before the game, I discovered I wasn’t alone in this anxiety. One fan even wondered aloud if Retzlaff’s decision to play on Yom Kippur, which many religious Jews spend in prayer and fasting, would curse his performance. He was joking, I thought. But then the Cougars’ opening drive ended with Retzlaff missing an open receiver in the end zone on fourth down, and the Wildcats marched down the field to score, and suddenly the specter of divine punishment didn’t seem quite so far-fetched. I found myself wondering if any other nervous BYU fans were Googling How bad is it to play football on the day of atonement?

When I met Retzlaff on campus a couple of days later, I told him about the earnest Mormon’s concern over his compliance with Jewish law, and he laughed. “That’s fandom,” he told me. Retzlaff, who wore sweats and a Star of David necklace, said he never seriously considered skipping the game. He knew some Jews would disagree—Sandy Koufax famously sat out the first game of the World Series in 1965 to observe Yom Kippur. But to Retzlaff, playing on Saturday was a chance to represent his faith on a stage that is not exactly teeming with people like him. Utah has one of the smallest Jewish populations in America, and at BYU, there are only two other Jewish students. That puts Retzlaff in a strange position: He represents one of the university’s smallest minorities and is also one of its most famous students.

Retzlaff, a California native who spent two years as a top junior-college quarterback, told me that his first thought when BYU recruiters showed up was about football, not faith. The school has a comparatively high-profile program with a powerhouse pedigree—the Cougars won the national championship in 1984 and have churned out a string of famous quarterbacks over the years, including Steve Young and Jim McMahon. But he admits that contemplating what his non-football life would look like on a 99 percent Mormon campus gave him pause.

BYU, which strictly prohibits drinking, premarital sex, and a host of other traditional college pastimes, is not an obvious draw for most non-Mormon students. But every year, the school attracts a combination of college athletes who want to play their sport without distraction and students from other orthodox-religious backgrounds who don’t mind spending time on America’s most “stone-cold sober” campus. (Last year, a Muslim basketball player for BYU named Aly Khalifa made headlines for fasting during a March Madness game that fell during Ramadan.)

Retzlaff told me his arrival in Provo was a culture shock. Sundays were brutal: Local businesses closed, the campus shut down, and, with most of his teammates at church, Retzlaff found himself sitting alone in his room, struggling to ward off boredom. The mandatory religious classes, which frequently began with all the students singing a Mormon hymn, could also be disorienting. “Every single person around me has got this thing memorized,” he recalled, “and I have no idea what’s going on.”

Another player in his position might have chosen to downplay his religious differences; Retzlaff decided to lean in. On Instagram, he started referring to himself as the “BYJew,” and encouraged skittish friends and teammates to use the term as well. (Eventually, the Utah County Chabad began selling “BYJew” T-shirts.) To celebrate Sukkot last year, he arranged for a kosher food truck from Salt Lake City to visit campus so he could treat his teammates to shawarma and falafel. He relished the opportunity to educate. “Members of the LDS faith do have a funny fascination with Judaism,” he told me. Some of the questions he got—“Do you guys believe in Jesus?” for example—were rudimentary. (“To me, that’s like, you’ve never met a Jew in your life,” he told me.) But others were more sophisticated, prompting conversations about the overlapping theologies and shared cultural experiences of two religious minorities, one very old, the other relatively new.

The Latter-day Saint rituals weren’t his own, but Retzlaff learned to find comfort and even a kind of divine beauty in them. During the pregame team prayers, when all the other players bow their heads, he looks up and around the locker room at his friends and teammates—trying “to be present in the moment” as he reflects on his own gratitude.

Retzlaff’s experience took on a new dimension after the October 7 attacks on Israel last year. As campuses across America erupted in protests over the war in Gaza, and as many of those protests curdled into virulent anti-Semitism, Retzlaff was struck by how different his classmates seemed from the people in viral video clips hurling epithets at Jewish students. He suspected that the secularism that dominated those other campuses played a part. “I’d love to ask them about their faith,” Retzlaff told me of the protesters. “What are the odds that they’re faithful at all? I’d bet you they’re not.” For all the inconvenience and occasional awkwardness that BYU’s deep religious culture might cause him, Retzlaff believes it’s allowed his fellow students to see his Judaism not as a marker of political identity but as a faith that warrants respect, even reverence.

In fact, Retzlaff told me, as BYU’s quarterback he’s encountered more anti-Mormonism than anti-Semitism. The year before he joined the team, some fans at the University of Oregon greeted the Cougars with chants of “Fuck the Mormons.” The school eventually apologized, but Retzlaff told me he and his teammates have continued to face religious taunts in opposing stadiums. He’s less scandalized by the heckling than by the lack of outrage it seems to engender. “The blatant disrespect for their faith—it’s something to think about. What if there was a Jewish university that had a Jewish football team, and they were saying that in the stands?” Retzlaff asked me. “Like, imagine if that hit the papers. That would be a big deal.” The casual bigotry, and muted response to it, unnerves him. “There’s a lot of people who just don’t like Mormon people, for no reason,” he told me. “That’s what happened to the Jews all throughout history.”

In the arena on Saturday, Retzlaff and his team found their rhythm in the second quarter. After a perfect 20-yard touchdown pass tied the game, the Cougars never looked back. They scored 24 unanswered points, and forced four turnovers. We sang the fight song until our voices went hoarse, and by the time the game ended in a 41–19 blowout, my kids were converted. I had a Jewish quarterback to thank for helping me pass my fandom down to the next generation.

But BYU’s win wasn’t meaningful only to the Latter-day Saints who were watching that day. After the game ended, Retzlaff made his way to the locker room to shower and change, and then took questions at a press conference. Playing like that on Yom Kippur was, he would later tell me, a “spiritual experience.” He was exhausted and emotional. But before he could leave, he got word that someone was waiting for him in the stadium, now mostly empty. A Jewish fan had waited more than an hour to take a picture with the quarterback. After shaking Retzlaff’s hand and thanking him, the man said he was going home to break his fast.

Why Humility Is the Key to Well-Being

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2024 › 10 › sukkot-holiday-happiness › 680262

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Last night at sundown, the annual Jewish holiday of Sukkot began. This seven-day celebration, known as both the Feast of Tabernacles and the Holiday of the Harvest, commemorates the exodus from Egypt and the end of the harvest season. Those observing the festival do so by erecting tent-like structures outdoors, in which they eat, pray, and even sleep, to recall the temporary dwellings made by the Israelites during their 40 years in the desert, as well as the shelters that farmers used in earlier times when they were bringing in the crops.

Sukkot is a joyful celebration—in the Talmud, it is written that any Jew who has not celebrated Sukkot “never saw rejoicing in his lifetime.” That’s a claim I’ve never heard about any other holiday. I don’t recall anyone saying, for example, that Christmas is guaranteed to make you happy, let alone that you can’t be truly happy if you don’t celebrate Christmas.

The spirit of Sukkot is in sharp contrast to the holiday that immediately precedes it: Yom Kippur, which calls upon Jews to make somber atonement for their sins. That change of mood will be especially poignant and difficult this year, coming so soon after the anniversary of the October 7 massacre in Israel. For some, Sukkot’s joyful celebration may understandably feel out of reach.

But Sukkot has an ingenious method for bringing joy even in the midst of suffering, if people choose to accept it—what’s known as “reverse emotional causation.” Sukkot instructs its observants as follows: to, as they recall being saved, be humble, even if they feel proud; to be grateful for the abundance they enjoy, in spite of their resentments; to celebrate as befits the holiday, even if their hearts are hard. By this means, Sukkot engineers the joy it seeks to instill.

You don’t need to be Jewish to benefit from Sukkot’s technique of reverse emotional causation. Learning this method can help you find more to rejoice in.

[Yair Rosenberg: When you’re not in control of your life]

We live in an age in which emotional authenticity is considered paramount. Many people talk about their feelings constantly and feel warranted in acting according to them. A common justification for saying something unkind might easily be “Because I felt angry.” As I have written a number of times, this rationale cedes a lot of behavioral autonomy to the brain’s limbic system, which largely functions below the level of conscious control. Negative basic emotions, for example—fear, anger, disgust, sadness—are at root a physiological response to perceived threats. To act because you feel these emotions is to allow yourself to be managed by what amounts to an entity of low intelligence.

For greater happiness, a better way to live employs what behavioral scientists call metacognition. This simply refers to an impartial awareness of your emotions, a capacity to see them as important information but not as a mandate for any particular behavior. Good ways to practice metacognition include Vipassana meditation, journaling, and prayers, which shift the experience of involuntary emotion into the realm of conscious attention.

Once you have this cognitive awareness of your feelings, you can consider what they mean, and how to act most appropriately in response.

Social scientists have also found that emotions can be reeducated through conscious decisions and actions. Put simply, if you want to feel differently, act as if you do. Many experiments demonstrate this so-called as-if effect.

Take humility, for example, which is a sentiment with both attitudinal and emotional components. Being humble is virtuous but devilishly elusive, especially for some people. As Benjamin Franklin—known by contemporaries for his lack of humility—joked in his autobiography, “Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome [my pride], I should probably be proud of my humility.”

In 2014, a team of psychologists set out to test whether humility training could work. Participants were assigned a 7.5-hour set of exercises intended to help them recognize and acknowledge their limitations: Although they were not specifically seeking to become humbler, completion of the course did result in their becoming more open to ideas, acquiring a broader perspective with less focus on themselves and an enhanced ability to see value in other things. The researchers concluded that the intervention they’d designed increased humility by about 8 percent among participants (compared with no significant change among a control group that was not exposed to the exercises). The improved humility also came with a greater capacity for forgiveness and patience, and reduced negative feelings.

Gratitude works the same way. You might think that being grateful requires feeling grateful. Researchers have successfully run the process in reverse. A 2011 study in Applied Psychology documented an experiment by three Canadian psychologists, in which one group of participants was asked to adopt a practice of thinking about what they were grateful for in life and to try to maintain this gratitude; a control group simply recalled a memorable event from their lives, with no prompt about feeling thankful. After four weeks of this exercise, the scholars found that those in the gratitude group reported almost 8 percent more life satisfaction, while the simply memorable controls were slightly less happy than when they’d begun.

Finally, consider celebration itself. A holiday per se doesn’t necessarily stimulate positive emotion; that depends on how you decide to celebrate the occasion. In 2011, a team of Spanish and Chilean psychologists studying Christmas and New Year celebrations found that when the holidays were purposely ritualized through traditional practices, families on average experienced greater satisfaction with their life after the holiday than beforehand. In other words, people don’t celebrate because they feel joy; they feel joy because they have made a specific commitment to celebrate.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Eight ways to banish misery]

Sukkot devised an ancient formula for joy: No matter how you feel, for seven days, practice humility, count your blessings, and gather with family and friends to share in food and drink—and joy will find you.

It might find others as well. The holiday in fact has a third name—the Festival of Lights, because the people of old Jerusalem would light great lamps that would illuminate the entire city. “And it shall be one day that shall be known to the Lord, neither day nor night,” wrote the prophet Zechariah, “and it shall come to pass that at eventide it shall be light.” From miles around, Jerusalem would be a brilliant, gleaming beacon, and all across the countryside, people would rejoice at the sight.

Even if you are (like me) not Jewish, you can adopt your own personal Sukkot whenever your well-being isn’t where you want it to be. As an act of humility, set aside a week during which you will resolve to focus less on yourself and your professional or personal life; instead, try taking on a project that has no immediate benefit for you but gives a lot to others. Strive not to talk about yourself the entire week but concentrate on the things outside yourself for which you are grateful. One effective way of doing this is to make a gratitude list that you keep studying and updating over the week. And then make sure to celebrate with others whom you love: A ritual you could adopt would be to have dinner with a different friend or family member each night, and to use it as an occasion to bring joy to them as much as you can.

By doing these things, you yourself will light up, creating the joy you seek. And like a little Jerusalem, you will shine on others and bring them the inspiration they need.

Gut yom tov. Happy Sukkot.

This essay is based on a Sukkot reflection delivered on October 16, 2024, at Temple Beth Elohim in Wellesley, Massachusetts.