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Popular Leftist Website: Only Date BDS Supporters

Ah, to be young and in love!

by
Liel Leibovitz
December 13, 2017
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First dates can be so awkward! What if you’re really into jazz and your date digs Phish? Or if you’re a vegan and your date dreams of Big Macs? Or if your date believes the Jewish state alone, out of all the world’s nations, ought to be singled out for sanctions, and you aren’t an anti-Semite?

According to a newly published column in Everyday Feminism, a super-popular progressive blog that enjoys more than 4.5 million visitors a month from 150 countries, support for BDS is essential if you’re hoping to impress the woke person sitting across from you at the gluten-free coffee shop into a second date.

Just as one must now cheer for sex work (it’s not a horrible, degrading, and exploitative line of work we should strive to curb, thunders the column’s author, Lara Witt, but a way of somehow sticking it to the patriarchy) and oppose Capitalism in all its filthy forms, having an irrational hatred of Israel is necessary to pass off as sexy with the smart set.

“Eventually,” Witt writes, explaining her support for BDS, “I learned about Apartheid from a theoretical perspective, and I began to understand the terror, trauma, and stress of having everyone you love and care about get killed.” Witt’s inquiry into theoretical perspectives arguably left her with very little time for reading the news, which would have revealed the terror, trauma, and stress of Israelis having so many whom they love and care about get killed by Palestinian stabbing, bombing, shooting, and ramming attacks.

Witt—who identifies herself elsewhere online as a “professional misandrist”—displays the same fiery ignorance elsewhere in her list of dating advice, like arguing that there’s nothing misogynistic about Islam, which, of course, is why women only recently earned the right to drive in Saudi Arabia and still need a man’s permission to travel abroad, why Jordan just this year abolished a law that allowed rapists to escape punishment if they married their victim, why Iranian women are forced to don a hijab, and why 37 percent of married women in the Middle East, according to the UN, have experienced sexual or physical abuse from their partners. But yeah, by all means, let’s obsess about the Jews, just as morally corrupt and intellectually feeble individuals and societies have done throughout history.

Or maybe I’m being too harsh on Everyday Feminism. Maybe I should be grateful. Maybe the blog’s readers will actually follow Witt’s dating advice, and, if they do, they’d likely find a very bored person nodding their head at the other end of the table. Because if there’s one thing that’s even less attractive than bigotry it’s stupidly parroting meaningless slogans in the hope that people will think you’re smart. Most of us learned that in junior high.

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.