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A Letter Gets Printed
My letter to the Palm Beach Post, mentioned in the preceding Jackspotpourri, was printed in their April 24 issue. That reached about 24,000 of their ‘print’ edition subscribers and many more who read it online. (Jackspotpourri is sent to about 80 email addresses, half of whom ignore it.) That’s why YOU should write letters to newspapers!
JL
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New York Times Roundtable Musings
On April 24, the New York Times ran an opinion ‘roundtable’ trying to figure how Democrats managed to come back to life in 1992 with Bill Clinton, after being hammered by Ronald Reagan and figuring out a way to do it again today.
Check it out at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/opinion/democratic-party-future.html or JUST CLICK HERE. Here is my take on their discussion which I found disappointing.
The pundits agreed with the obvious, that Democrats have lost the knack of hearing, listening, going to working-class people, and speaking the language that they understand. Beyond that, they came up with little new ideas other than to look at Democrats who have been successful in otherwise Republican States like Pennsylvania, Kentucky, or North Carolina, to see if their keys to victories there might be applicable nationally.
Taking centrist positions might temporarily peel await a few G.O.P. votes but would not break us out of a periodic ping-pong style exchange of presidencies every few years between two parties that are about equal in size nationally, as well as in each of the so-called ‘battleground’ States. Other steps are necessary, the ‘roundtable’ agreed.
This is a different age, more malignant that what Ronald Reagan represented. My take is not to look back to how Bill Clinton managed to break the mold, but rather to be looking on how to emulate how FDR accomplished it.
Roosevelt inherited an economy destroyed by a lack of regulation that Donald Trump hasn’t yet reached but is trying hard to attain. Ultimately, Trump will be proven to be no better than Herbert Hoover. I hear that some want his visage added to Mount Rushmore. He would be fortunate if the restrooms there are named after him. Of course, there would be 'pay toilets' there from which he would profit.
The pain Americans are, or will be feeling, must be turned into reasons to turn Republican voters into Democratic voters. That’s what FDR did. But clearly, a new approach is necessary. It won’t ‘just happen’ automatically.
JL
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The Hate That Came to the Governor's Mansion
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Damage to Pennsylvania Governor's Mansion |
By Michael A. Cohen, MSNBC Columnist - April 20, 2025
(One of the States mentioned above, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, provides a residence for its governor on the second floor of their ‘Governor’s Mansion’ in Harrisburg. It contains gathering rooms and a museum on its first floor. It was that building that was attacked a little over a week ago by an arsonist. MSNBC Columnist Michael A. Cohen ties that attack to antisemitism. Read on!)
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“On Saturday night, on the first night of Passover, an armed intruder hopped a gate at the residence of Pennsylvania’s Gov. Josh Shapiro and set fire to the building. It appears he did so because Shapiro is Jewish.
According to call logs provided by Dauphin County authorities, Cody Balmer told a 911 dispatcher less than two hours after he allegedly set the fire that “Shapiro needs to know that he ‘will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people,’ and he needs to stop ‘having my friends killed’ and ‘our people have been put through too much by that monster.’”
Shapiro, of course, has no control over Israel’s war in Gaza, and accusing him of culpability for crimes committed by other Jews, halfway around the world, is the definition of antisemitism.
Few would consider this even a controversial statement.
But here’s one that might ruffle a few feathers.
Balmer’s particular pro-Palestinian rhetoric didn’t simply appear out of thin air.
Targeting Shapiro because he’s Jewish is disturbingly similar to certain pro-Palestinian activists calling Shapiro “Genocide Josh” last summer and advocating against him as Kamala Harris’ running mate. It’s little different from anti-Zionist activists targeting Jewish-run businesses in the U.S., Jewish American leaders and Jewish institutions because of their views on Israel.
They are two sides of the same coin — manifestations of modern antisemitism.
It is essential to note that there are caveats to this argument. Anti-Zionist activists didn’t burn Shapiro’s house and try to kill him. Degree matters — as do actions. Moreover, Balmer, according to his mother, suffers from profound mental illness and has a lengthy criminal record.
Still, Balmer’s particular pro-Palestinian rhetoric didn’t simply appear out of thin air. His specific criticisms of Shapiro bear striking similarity to accusations made by anti-Zionist activists that the governor is aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza.
Last summer, critics of Shapiro’s bid to be Harris’ running mate argued that he “stands out among the current field of potential running mates as being egregiously bad on Palestine.” A group of progressive activists calling themselves “No Genocide Josh” urged Democrats to pass over Shapiro for the No. 2 nod. A now-defunct website of the group argued that it was in the Democratic Party’s “best interests” that the VP nominee “support the majority of Democrats and Americans who want social and economic justice for workers and an immediate ceasefire in Palestine.”
But Shapiro’s views are practically interchangeable with those of other prominent Democrats, including his rivals to become Harris’ 2024 running mate.
Like the eventual VP pick, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, or Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Shapiro supports a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state. He has also been far more personally critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he called “one of the worst leaders of all time” and said of him he “has steered Israel in a wrong direction, and made Israel less safe and made their future less bright because of his leadership.” (For Kelly’s part, he attended and applauded Netanyahu’s speech to Congress last year when many other Democrats in attendance wouldn’t, while Walz barely mentioned the prime minister’s name during his time as the Democrats’ VP candidate.) Yet, no one called Walz “Genocide Tim” or Kelly “War Crimes Mark.”
Shapiro has even offered rhetorical support to those protesting Israel’s policies in Gaza, noting “it’s right for young people to righteously protest and question those issues.”
Underlying the criticisms of Shapiro is the unstated idea that Jews cannot be objective when it comes to Israel — a charge once explicitly lobbied against Catholic politicians, including John F. Kennedy — or that American Jews are as loyal to Israel as they are to the United States.
The suggestion of dual loyalty has haunted Jews for generations, but such scurrilous accusations from self-proclaimed progressives are all the more concerning. The left has long partnered with Diaspora Jews in fighting racial, ethnic and religious discrimination. At a time when the president of the United States regularly traffics in antisemitic tropes — and his first term in office was marked by a significant rise in antisemitic incidents — the support of the left is more essential than ever. (Even with Trump out of office, the number of antisemitic incidents in America continued to rise, even before the war in Gaza began in late 2023.)
Criticism of Israel is fair game, but lumping in American Jews with the actions of their co-religionists in Israel is not.
To those rightly rushing to condemn Balmer’s alleged crime, the same unequivocal force needs to be directed at those who traffic in the seemingly more benign but just as dangerous antisemitism — even when it comes from their own political camp.
Conservatives like to ascribe blame for antisemitism to the anti-Zionist left. Liberals often place blame squarely at the feet of Trump and other far-right groups. The reality is that antisemitism is prevalent in both camps, even if both right and left-wing leaders are loath to point fingers at their political allies.
Antisemitism is arguably the oldest and most enduring form of ethnic and religious discrimination. It is civilization’s first major conspiracy theory. Since antisemitism is so prevalent and often misunderstood, there is an even greater danger in singling out Jewish politicians for their views on Israel or Jewish administrators at public universities, or protesting Jewish restaurants, hospitals with Jewish names, or Jewish places of worship, and calling for bans on Jewish religious organizations, like Hillel. Doing so risks turning Jews at large into targets of those aggrieved by the situation in Gaza.
Pro-Palestinian activists will argue that such public demonstrations represent a small fringe, but that’s all the more reason to ostracize and exclude those who would turn their attacks on Israel against Jews in America. Jews need and deserve not nitpicking over what is and isn’t antisemitism, but rather full-throated condemnation, even if the hate is emerging from one’s own political camp.
Criticism of Israel is fair game, but lumping in American Jews with the actions of their co-religionists in Israel is not.
As we saw this week in Pennsylvania, when such ideas enter the public discourse, the impact can be deadly.”
Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for MSNBC and a senior fellow and co-director of the Afghanistan Assumptions Project at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He writes the political newsletter Truth and Consequences. He has been a columnist at The Boston Globe, The Guardian and Foreign Policy, and he is the author of three books, the most recent being “Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans.”
JL
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Government Poking its Head into Areas They Should Stay Away From
More easily to grasp than Michael Cohen's sometimes complicated reasoning reproduced above, is something that appeared on CNN’s online ‘Five Things AM’ of April 25.
‘Employees at Columbia University and Barnard College were stunned this week after receiving text messages from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requesting that they complete a survey that asked if they were Jewish, Israeli, had Jewish/Israeli ancestry or practiced Judaism. The text messages, which were sent to the staffers’ personal devices, were part of a federal investigation into workplace practices at the schools. Since returning to office, President Trump has taken aim at higher education institutions under the auspices of fighting antisemitism. Some staffers said they were rattled by the questions and the method of communication. Others were upset that the schools had given their personal contact information to the government.’
Their standard reply to the EEOC should be ‘So long as this is still the United States of America, this is none of your frigging business!’
Regardless of the stated purpose of such a request, it smacks of the kind of information antisemites gather to ultimately use to attack Jews. While the President is not overtly an antisemite, they are not absent from his Administration. Don’t ignore that back in November of 2022, Trump hosted white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, for lunch at his Mar-a-Lago home.
Trump’s willingness to associate with figures who have repeatedly spread antisemitic and white supremacist tropes remains deeply concerning, particularly since he is back in the White House.
If such a survey is indeed necessary, which I feel it is not, it should be run by organizations within the Jewish community and not the government. The task of fighting antisemitism by the government can be pursued without officially gathering such information. It smacks of what the Nazis did with such informaion in Germany once they came into power, and we all know where that led.
Once again, ‘EEOC: Listen Up! So long as this is still the United States of America, this is none of your frigging business!’
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Your comments on this ‘blog’ would be appreciated. My Email address is jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Sources of Information on Jackspotpourri: The sources of information used by Jackspotpourri include a delivered daily ‘paper’ newspaper (currently the Palm Beach Post, a Gannett publication) and what appears in my daily email. Be aware that when I open that email, I take these steps. 1. I quickly scan the sources of the dozen or two emails I still get each day at my old email address to see from where they are being sent. Without reading 99% of them, I usually immediately delete them. 2. I then go to the email arriving at jacklippman18@gmail.com. Gmail enables ‘Promotion’ emails to be so designated and separated out. I believe their criteria are whether or not they end up asking for donations or if they are no more than advertisements. I ignore most of these emails without reading them, deleting them. A very few, perhaps one or two a day, get moved over to the two or three dozen other emails which I will actually open.
Besides email, my other source of information is the Google search engine where I can look up any subject I want. Lately, these search results have been headed by a very generalized summary clearly labeled as being developed by AI (Artificial Intelligence). I do not use such summaries in preparing Jackspotpourri because I am in the dark about the techniques used and possible sources AI has mined to develop them. Sources with their origin clearly identified to me still follow, and these are what I use in composing Jackspotpourri postings. (In doing searches on Google, I have found that these AI summaries can sometimes … but not always … be avoided by saying so in your search. For example, instead of searching for ‘FDR’s New Deal,’ I might search for ‘FDR’s New Deal – No AI.’ This is a work in progress.)
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JL
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