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What Happened: June 18, 2021

Tablet’s afternoon news digest: A new federal holiday; the Hong Kong crackdown continues; weekend reads

by
The Scroll
June 17, 2021
Editor’s note: Guest edited today by Armin Rosen. 

The Big Story

In the legislative equivalent of a buzzer-beating 26-footer, large majorities in Congress and President Joe Biden heroically liberated an additional day for much of the U.S. workforce on Thursday afternoon, with the president signing a bill establishing June 19, the day the Union Army freed the slaves of Galveston, Texas, and abolished slavery throughout the state in 1865, as a federal holiday. Since the actual day falls over the weekend, today marks the first formal observation of Juneteenth, the first new federal holiday since the creation of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. It’s hard to think of something worthier of nationwide commemoration than the freedom of some of the last enslaved people in the country—and the beginning of a national reckoning over slavery and its legacy that’s only gotten more heated and more urgent in recent years. Already there’s concern among activists that Juneteenth will join Memorial Day and Columbus Day as a holiday whose primary meaning, for most Americans, is little more than a skipped day of work. Others allege that the holiday is being recognized as a substitute for any real progress on police reform or racial equity. They’re right to be concerned about the occasion eventually being stripped of any solemnity—headlines like “Juneteenth: How big tech companies are celebrating the new holiday” are already cropping up. But Juneteenth’s other name is Emancipation Day, and it’s often a festive occasion in the Black communities that have long been the only place where the holiday’s really been celebrated. Now, for the first time, it’s every American’s holiday, with all the possibilities for awareness-raising and the risks for future crassness that any new American tradition entails. Read about it here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/us/politics/juneteenth-holiday-biden.html and https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/biden-signs-juneteenth-bill/index.html

The Rest

Orthodox Jewish groups, including the Orthodox Union and Agudath Israel of America, welcomed a 9-0 Supreme Court decision yesterday prohibiting the City of Philadelphia from ending a contract with a Catholic social agency on the grounds that the organization wouldn’t consider same-sex couples as adoption candidates. But legal experts noted that only justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas signed on to an opinion that called for overturning Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 case that permitted the government’s prohibition of a religious practice as long as the rule in question was applied universally and wasn’t specifically intended to ban that practice. Interestingly, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, often touted as religious conservatives by both their supporters and opponents, did not endorse this view. Read more: https://jewishinsider.com/2021/06/supreme-court-orthodox-adoption/ 

Reuters managed to get two of its journalists to Xinjiang, China, where a million Uighur Muslims are in reeducation camps and the Beijing regime has opened sinister theme-park-like re-creations of the culture it’s trying to erase from existence, fueling a local tourism boom. The journalists were constantly tailed, and barbed wire was erected around the exits of their hotel after they left through a back door earlier that same day. Read more: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/wider-image-chinas-new-xinjiang-patriotic-tourism-riot-police-minders-2021-06-17/ 

The five leading editors and executives at the pro-democracy Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily were arrested this week in the latest sign of Beijing’s increasingly strict rule over the once-autonomous island city. Hong Kongers responded by purchasing a half-million issues of the paper, five times its usual print run. Read more: https://apnews.com/article/hong-kong-newspapers-business-arrests-6399f4757e29f5598d4d4d4133f80f10 

States and cities have ignored federal marijuana and immigration laws for years without any real consequences from Washington, D.C. So it’s perhaps inevitable that more right-leaning states are now lashing out against federal gun laws, with Missouri passing a law that fines police departments for enforcing various federal regulations that allegedly infringe on Second Amendment rights. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/us/missouri-federal-gun-laws.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage 

The House of Representatives has voted to repeal the 2002 authorization for the use of military force in Iraq, a law that seems like a leftover from several epochs ago but that still continues to give the president broad legal authority to order military action in and around the Middle Eastern country without having to consult Congress. Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-to-vote-on-repealing-2002-iraq-war-law-11623931201

The proposed canal between the Red Sea and the Dead Sea has been touted as a magic bullet for saving the quickly depleting lake while bringing desalinated water deep into the desert, and also as a crucial point of cooperation between Israel and Jordan, countries whose relationship is never on entirely sure footing. Jordan has now pulled out of efforts to revive the project, which dates from 2002 and has stalled amid environmental concerns and the exploration of cheaper alternatives. Read more: https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/jordan-pulls-plug-on-red-dead-water-project-with-israel-report-671372 

Gunmen kidnapped 80 students and five teachers from a school in northwestern Nigeria, with early reports indicating that the attackers were from an entrepreneurial criminal gang rather than a jihadist movement. It’s the latest high-profile incident in a country where both the security situation and the social fabric have deteriorated since the start of the year. Read more: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/17/policeman-killed-students-abducted-in-attack-on-nigerian-school 

“I am coming to you live from a Brandon, Mississippi Waffle House. I, a total loser, came in last place in my fantasy football league. As punishment, I spend 24 hours in a Waffle House. Every waffle I eat shaves an hour off the clock. It’s 4:07 Central,” tweeted Mississippi journalist Lee Sanderlin yesterday, kicking off a saga that captivated a weary nation. A man of his word, he left after 15 hours, having consumed nine waffles. Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/us/waffle-house-fantasy-football.html 

Some less delightful news on the sporting front: Naomi Osaka, a generational tennis talent and perhaps the world’s leading female athlete, withdrew from Wimbledon, which begins June 28. The 23-year-old Osaka pulled out of last month’s French Open amid controversy over her refusal to participate in mandatory press conferences, citing mental health concerns. The French Open withdrawal sparked a debate over the pressures faced by big-time athletes—as well as the media’s role in exacerbating them. Read more: https://www.espn.com/tennis/story/_/id/31653392/world-no-2-naomi-osaka-withdraws-wimbledon-take-personal-friends-family

The Back Pages

Few contemporary writers have the moral authority, popularity, and literary credibility of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an author of works that are at home in both book clubs and graduate seminars, and whose pamphlet-length “We Should All Be Feminists” can be seen sitting near the checkout counter at seemingly half the bookstores in existence. She is exactly the sort of figure who’s respected enough to execute a contrarian turn and still be taken seriously—to be able to hoard good will over the course of many years and then spend some large chunk of it airing an opinion that she must have known would piss off many of her usual fans. Rescuing literary culture from censorious and small-minded young people is just that important to her.

The key word in her self-published essay from this week, which recounts a former writing student’s attempt to lead a public crusade against her for alleged transphobia, is “American,” appearing in the last paragraph of section one: “You will tell yourself that being able to parrot the latest American Feminist orthodoxy justifies your hacking at the spirit of a person who had shown you only kindness.” Adichie lives and works in Lagos, which is where she met her would-be persecutor. From her perspective, cancellation rests on a foreign ideology—it is a specifically American form of intolerance.

The end section of the essay holds absolutely nothing back:

In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

Will Adichie’s broadside will marginalize her as a fusty anti-woke crank, or lead to a bit more circumspection about how the younger generation’s addiction to mob behavior threatens to corrupt art and literature? The answer will be a crucial test case for where the broader culture might be heading. Read more: https://www.chimamanda.com/

Is America bad for the Jews now? I tend to think it isn’t and that this country is still freer and safer and more prosperous and more comfortable for us than any nation that’s ever existed at any time in history. But I’ll concede that we’re at the point where the alternative view is worth entertaining, at least, and you won’t find a better version of it than Tel Aviv-based writer and occasional Tablet contributor Benjamin Kerstein’s latest. The pessimistic case deserves an airing, even if you don’t really believe it, and especially if you don’t want to believe it. Perhaps specifically American dynamics really have allowed the antisemites to gain a permanent upper hand. Perhaps the United States as a national and ideological project will inevitably hollow out any Jewish will to survive on our own terms:

[T]he barbarians’ arrival has exposed, once and for all, something that, for decades, has been obvious to those willing to see it: American Jews are dying of civilization. Middle class plenty and the headlong pursuit of an assimilationist fantasy have made them perfect victims. They are domesticated, castrated. And even worse, their own success at pursuing the American middle-class dream has made the hollowness of that success inconceivable.

Read more: https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/06/15/american-jews-need-wait-no-longer-the-barbarians-have-arrived/

The writer Janet Malcolm died yesterday at 86. My first exposure to her was a seemingly novel-length account of a murder trial that had torn apart the Bukharan Jewish community in Queens, a case in which an Orthodox woman allegedly had her husband murdered. It’s been over a decade since I’ve read it—astonishingly, the piece was written and published in 2010, when Malcolm was 74—but I remember the details with unusual vividness: the conspiracy-theory-obsessed expert witness, the heartbreaking post-murder custody battle, and of course the subject herself, who is almost a total cipher and whom Malcolm has the presence of mind not to try to ever really explain. I don’t know if Malcolm picked the title, but it’s one of the all-time greats: “Iphigenia In Forest Hills.” Read it here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/05/03/iphigenia-in-forest-hills

Tablet’s afternoon newsletter edited by Jacob Siegel and Park MacDougald.