I’m sharing a post a friend of mine, Victoria Cook, wrote on Facebook about the New York City mayor’s election and Jews and Israel. That whole thing. It’s not a TPM Reader email but I’m posting it in the same vein. This is her piece not mine. So in the nature of things I wouldn’t write everything in the same way or agree with every individual point. But for me she wrote with great subtlety about how some Jews experience this bundle of issues. She also captured something that is quite salient to me which is that this conversation often gets clogged up on the very binary question of whether some thing or some person is anti-Semitic. Obviously some people really want it to land there or insist that it not land there for their own reasons. But on these issues, for me and I guess for Victoria too, that’s often kind of beside the point.
In any case, some of this is very internal the Jewish experience and a specific variant of Jewish experience. And TPM isn’t a site about Judaism. So if you’ve already heard enough on this topic, I get it. But as always I share what is interesting to me in the hope and expectation some readers may find it interesting as well. For me this helped illuminate some of my own thoughts and feelings about this that I hadn’t been able to tease apart on my own.