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What Happened: July 19, 2021

Tablet’s afternoon news digest: Ben & Jerry’s do BDS; White House vs. Facebook; Malamud’s secrets

by
The Scroll
July 19, 2021

The Big Story

Ben & Jerry’s, the name of the ice cream company that operates as the fully owned subsidiary of multinational conglomerate Unilever, announced a new policy Monday on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in response to social media pressure. For the previous two months the company has maintained its silence on Twitter after it faced a barrage of criticism in May for failing to take an official political stance on the conflict. The silence ended Monday when the company published a statement on Twitter saying that it would stop selling ice cream in “occupied Palestinian territory,” an area that it did not define in political or geographic terms. The new trade policy was influenced by “concerns shared with us by our fans and trusted partners,” the statement said. The company added that it would “stay in Israel through a different arrangement,” which it would announce in the future. This appeared to divide opinion among supporters of the movement to target Israel with boycotts, with some celebrating the company’s move and others pushing the ice cream company to cut all business ties with Israel. In related news, there have been no statements released by Ben & Jerry’s or tweeted from the ice cream company’s account related to reports of human rights abuses by its corporate owner, Unilever, in the wake of the publication of a comprehensive investigation in the Associated Press last November exposing “brutal treatment of women in the production of palm oil, including the hidden scourge of sexual abuse, ranging from verbal harassment and threats to rape … human trafficking, child labor, and outright slavery.” Unilever is a major player in the $800 billion dollar palm oil industry.


Today’s Back Pages
: Exclusive New Revelations about Bernard Malamud!


The Rest

• On Monday, President Biden softened claims he made last week that Facebook is “killing people”—while also chiding the company for being overly sensitive, and reiterating his underlying charge that the social media platform has failed to effectively block deadly vaccine “misinformation.” Biden’s claim last Friday, that “the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that’s—they’re killing people,” was part of a full court press from the White House aimed at asserting greater control over Facebook’s policies. The effort also included White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s announcement that the Biden administration was directing the social media company to posts it had flagged for disinformation and wanted taken down, and it included comments from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy calling misinformation “an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.”

• In a New York Times profile of Israel’s national baseball team, the team’s trainer, Barry Weinberg, who previously worked for the New York Yankees and Oakland A’s, among other teams, describes his current team as “a combination of the Bad News Bears and the Jamaican Bobsledding Team.” Of the team’s 24 players, only four are Israeli, while the rest are mostly itinerant Jewish ballplayers from the States “whose Jewish roots allow them under Olympic rules to play for the team.”
Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/nyregion/israel-olympic-baseball-team.html

• The Western United States and Canada are still dealing with the fourth major heat wave since June, one that is fueling wildfires across the region. Temperatures were expected to get as high as 107 degrees Fahrenheit in Montana and 104 in Utah Monday. One wildfire burning in south-central Oregon near the California border has engulfed an area roughly the size of Los Angeles.

• The videoconferencing company Zoom announced its first major acquisition Monday, a $14.7 billion deal to buy Five9, a company that provides cloud software for call centers. It’s a nearly $15 billion dollar testament to how the coronavirus pandemic reordered the economy to the benefit of the tech industry. Zoom went public in 2019 with a $9 billion valuation and started 2020 without much of a public profile, but it was catapulted by the pandemic into becoming a market leader, widely used for both personal and business communications—with a current market cap over $100 billion.

• Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has refused to endorse a new county policy requiring people to wear masks indoors on the ground that it “is not backed by science and contradicts the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines.” Effective Saturday at midnight, L.A. became the first major county in the United States to reinstate an indoor mask mandate for all people regardless of vaccination status. State and federal policy do not require vaccinated people to wear masks. In his public statement, Villanueva said that the sheriff’s department would “not expend our limited resources” enforcing the mandate.

• Hip-hop’s “funny friend” and beatboxing pioneer Biz Markie died Friday at 57. The Harlem and Long Island native made his reputation as a member of the influential Juice Crew. In his late forties he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, and he was hospitalized in April of this year from complications caused by the disease.

• The Biden administration Monday blamed a group affiliated with China’s Ministry of State Security, the country’s main intelligence service, for a cyberattack earlier this year on Microsoft’s Exchange Server software. A number of U.S. allies, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, jointly condemned China for its cyberattacks.
Read it here: https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-exchange-hack-biden-china-d533f5361cbc3374fdea58d3fb059f35

• Florida resident Paul Allard Hodgkins, 38, was sentenced to eight months in prison on Monday—in the first verdict against a Capitol rioter who took a felony plea. Hodgkins pleaded guilty last month to one count of obstructing an official proceeding. Hodgkins told the court that he “would never have ventured farther than the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue” if he had known the pro-Trump protests at the Capitol would escalate into riots.


The Back Pages

Out of the Fog

Introducing a new history feature “Out of the Fog” by writer and historian Brian Berger. This week: the forgotten tale of “Malamud the Red.”

Can a single newspaper clipping encompass the history of Brooklyn Jews, American literature, the Second World War, and the geopolitical triangulations of the Soviet-led Popular Front? This one sure tries. The item you find here is a 1938 newspaper column in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle—unearthed and republished for the first time here—that shows a young Bernard Malamud, years from achieving literary fame, acting as a spokesman for a Popular Front group.

Though widely celebrated as one of the United States’ greatest 20th-century writers (Flannery O’Connor, no slouch herself, called him “better than any of them”), Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) remains, in part, an elusive and enigmatic figure. Not least among these mysteries are the politics of the young Malamud. As a Depression-era graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Malamud’s politics are of particular interest.

While not all Brooklyn Jews were Socialists or Communists in the 1930s, a great many of them—post-World War I Red Scare oppression be damned—were active Leftists. That an artist as empathetic as Malamud had somehow sat this activist period out seemed unlikely but … what evidence was there to the contrary? Many prominent Brooklynites such as writers Albert Maltz and Irwin Shaw, composer Aaron Copland, and musician Woody Guthrie were all cast under suspicion, in one way or another, during the second Red Scare. Even the Dodgers all-star second baseman and U.S. Army veteran Jackie Robinson testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in July 1949—not because he was a Red, but because he was being set up, his strong Black voice used to counter that of Paul Robeson, who was suspected of anti-American sentiments.

When Malamud’s first book, the acclaimed baseball novel The Natural, was published in August 1952, he seemed a writer quite removed from his time: one somehow nonpolitical, as if the social-political foment of the 1930s was an event he’d sat out.

And yet, as this artifact shows, that was not the whole story. In late November 1938, Bernard Malamud, then 24 years old, spoke at an American League for Peace and Democracy (ALPD) event at the Hotel Grenada in Brooklyn. One of the era’s leading Popular Front groups, the ALPD attracted a wide range of anti-fascists and Leftists. At the time, most were ignorant of the true nature of Stalin’s Russia—such excuses would not be accepted a decade later.

Young Malamud got lucky. Though his hometown’s leading newspaper, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle—a Democratic paper whose staff was generally further left than its publisher—reported on his speech there, Malamud was otherwise unknown, and the event was forgotten. (Tanganyika, then a British territory, was formerly part of colonial German East Africa, neither of which are close to East Flatbush.) He was just another Jewish loudmouth and, in this instance, easily overlooked. Had it been otherwise, even were his writing unchanged, it is unlikely he’d have been as acclaimed were he also known as Malamud the Red.

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This column is named after the excellent Warner Bros gangster movie, “Out of the Fog” that premiered in June 1941, co-starring John Garfield and Ida Lupino, directed by the Jewish-Russian émigré, Anatole Litvak, and shot by the great cinematographer, James Wong Howe. Set in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, the picture is based on the Coney Island-set Irwin Shaw play, The Gentle People. The play was itself a work of notable accomplishment—and one notably more Jewish than the movie. When it opened on Broadway in January 1939, its cast included Bronxite movie star Sylvia Sidney and future directors of renown, Elia Kazan and Martin Ritt.

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Brian Berger is the co-editor, with Marhsall Berman, of New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (2007). He is presently writing a history of underworld Brooklyn from the 1840s through the 1950s. His twitter is @BrooklynConf

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