Bob Dylan: “Sometimes the ‘you’ in my songs is me. Other times I can be talking to somebody else. It’s up to you to figure out who’s who. The ‘I’ also changes. And also it could be another person who’s saying ‘I’. When I say ‘I’ right now, I don’t know who I’m talking about.” pic.twitter.com/NJ2qTTVFtt
— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) December 18, 2024
Robert Randolph & The Family Band. Robert on pedal steel and his cousins on bass and drums. Great message. A live act not to miss - I've seen 'em three times.
I was 5 1/2 when we moved from our apartment in Stamford to a house in Norwalk CT in the fall of 1956. One of the things I remember from my time in that apartment was watching two Westerns on TV (along with the Disney Davy Crockett series); Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger, the latter with its stirring opening and closing theme from the William Tell Overture. Although I remembered The Lone Ranger, there was only one show I specifically recalled in detail - the origin story of the character. I recently came across that show and it turns out it was the first episode of the first season. I must have seen it as a rerun because the show began in 1949 and ran through 1957.
Watching that first episode for the first time in more than 65 years I realized why it made such a big impression on me. We learn in that first episode that John Reid, about to become The Lone Ranger, vows never shoot to kill, only to wound, believing that justice belongs to the legal system. Yet that first show is very violent though, in keeping with the times, not graphically so.
Reid, along with five other Texas Rangers, including his brother, are in pursuit of a gang of outlaws. They ride into a box canyon and are ambushed. Reid is badly wounded and the other Rangers killed. This is the scene I remembered all these years and I think it was the unusual level of violence that made it stay in my mind. Reid's life is saved when the Indian Tonto rides into the canyon while hunting, finds the wounded Ranger and helps nurse him to recovery. We also find out that years earlier, Reid had saved Tonto after his family was killed by raiders from another tribe. The outlaws believe Reid dead, and Reid decides it is better for them to continue to believe it, and adopts his new identity as The Lone Ranger.
Clayton Moore plays The Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels is Tonto. Silverheels was a Mohawk and an outstanding athlete before making his film debut in 1938. Silverheels appeared in all 217 episodes of The Lone Ranger, while Moore missed one season because of a contract dispute.
The bulk of the post below was written several months ago and has been in draft form since. I had hesitated to publish it because the topic had been thoroughly explored in my lengthy 2023 post The Danger Within. However, I came across recent remarks by Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which prompted me to update and publish this post.
Greenblatt appeared on CNBC to talk about a recent study funded by the ADL. The study involved submitting resumes for white collar jobs from candidates with European names, Jewish names, and Israeli names, finding that those with Jewish and Israeli names needed to submit substantially more resumes before getting interviews. I've not read the studies so can't comment on the methodology which is critical to determining the legitmacy of the results, but I was interested in Greenblatt's comments on DEI. One of the interviewers makes several remarks about the problems with DEI. Greenblatt responds:
"DEI industrial complex which excludes, rather than includes, Jews, it magnifies the problem."
"It's hard for me to make sense of a program trying to create more diverse environments when we see it is diminishing that".
Is the ADL's embrace of DEI, described below, weakening? It's hard to tell, but I think Greenbaltt is still hoping to have DEI embrace, rather than reject Jews. Looking at the ADL website I can't find anything about DEI, but the organization is full on in support of social justice and of all the other causes now falling under the rubric of DEI. It looks like it can't face directly into the nature of the problem.
However, maybe there is something going on below the surface with the ADL and other American Jewish organizations. There certainly needs to be. As pointed out in my previous post on this, DEI is simply incompatible with Jews being included. To do so would undermine the very logic and rationale for DEI which is based on the oppressor versus oppressed framework. You cannot include the most disproportionately successful group in America within DEI. It would make a mockery of the ideology.
In the news right now is a story about the University of Michigan firing its Director of the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives for allegedly saying that the university is "controlled by wealthy Jews" and that Jewish students are "wealthy and privileged" and so do not need diversity services. She's actually correct, according to DEI doctrine. That's the reality that needs to be faced in to and why DEI is such a corrupt, divisive, and racist way of thinking. It is a repudiation of the tenets of the Civil Rights Movement, a denial of our common humanity, while embracing a reactionary view of tolerance.
In a piece earlier this year, The Real Rupture in American Jewish Life, Ben Koan best summarized the situation for American Jews,
As Franklin Foer writes in The Atlantic, the real rupture is between traditional Jewish-American liberalism and an antisemitism-ridden, illiberal left. According to Foer, “The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state.” Instead, the new left “considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy,” with Jews “treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness.”
While the old Jewish-American liberalism espoused cultural pluralism, for the left influenced by Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, there are only racists and antiracists, colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed. In this Manichean, literally black-and-white worldview, Israel is wholly in the wrong and the October 7 attacks are to be justified or even celebrated. Liberal Zionists are, at best, the equivalent of whites who refuse to see their privilege and thus contribute to structural racism. At worst, they are de facto oppressors and legitimate targets of ostracism or violence themselves.
Accordingly, the choice for most American Jews is not whether to adhere to liberal principles or to support the existence of Israel; it’s whether to fight for traditional liberal principles on the left or to abandon the left entirely.
Here's what I wrote a few months ago:
Those Jewish organizations who had been collaborating with the DEI crowd seem to have decided to maintain that course of action. In an interview with the Jewish Insider, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt once again tells us he sees nothing wrong with DEI, other than that Jews are not included:
We’re going to judge these institutions based on not what they say but what they do. And so whether it’s how they update and expand their DEI programming, whether it’s how they apply consequences to student organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine, that seriously violate their codes of conduct and target and intimidate and threaten Jewish students, whether it’s ensuring that those Jewish kids or Israeli kids don’t experience discrimination.
And so, DEI is here, and, you know, at ADL we believe that diversity education is really important. We live in the most heterodox, multicultural society in the world. Understanding your peers, your colleagues, your employees — understanding them, knowing their histories, ensuring that you can approach the issues from a more informed perspective, I think that makes you a better peer or a better manager or a better leader. You are able to demonstrate empathy. But if DEI perpetuates not diversity, equity, inclusion, but the exclusion of Jews and Israelis, we have a problem. So my hope would be that we will see the change that will ensure that Jewish people are going to be treated it with decency that are treated fairly and that are treated in the same manner as all others.
The problem with Greenblatt's position can be best seen in this tweet:
It's critical for any push for diversity in any industry to be inclusive of Jews. If your project of inclusion perpetuates the exclusion of Jews, you are failing. So, we applaud the many celebrities for their courage in standing up, speaking out and writing to @TheAcademy to… pic.twitter.com/lbOPuP9TrQ
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 10, 2024
The tweet links to this article,
in which well-off Jews demand inclusion in the Academy of Motion
Pictures Arts & Sciences Representation & Inclusion Standards
promulgated in 2020 in the midst of the George Floyd hysteria.
Here's another example that occurred in September 2023, predating the October 7 attack. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) joined a lawsuit against the Santa Ana Unified School District because it inserted antisemitic material into its mandated Ethnic Studies course. So far, so good. But the article goes on to quote the AJC Chief Legal Officer saying:
"Done right, ethnic studies prepare students to live in an increasingly diverse society. Done wrong, they can be divisive and discriminatory."
The
futility of this is evidenced by how Harvard defanged its
antisemitism advisory task force by naming Professor Derek Penslar as
co-chair, ensuring it would be a puppet of the administration. While much attention
has focused on Penslar's issues with Israel, the real problem is that he
is a hard-core DEI advocate. His role is to provide some
window-dressing designed to do the minimum possible to address
antisemitism and keep Jewish donors happy while failing to address the
core issue of DEI, from which all of the campus hostility to Jews
springs from. Also little noticed is that at the same time Harvard
announced formation of a task force on Islamophobia. The idea is to
create an equivalence between a virulent outbreak of antisemitism with a
non-outbreak of Islamophobia. These things are not alike but Harvard
will do its best to play Jews for fools.
This is the
reality of DEI and settler-colonialism link Israel and America. Settler-colonialism is not limited to
Israel. As the professor below states, "the goal is to dismantle the
settler project that is the United States" because "the U.S. is the
greatest predator empire that has ever existed". A few years ago, I
would have dismissed such talk as just crazy campus stuff, but since
2020 we've discovered the incredible power this set of beliefs holds,
not just in academia but across most of our elite institutions and the
Biden administration. (1)
The speaker quoted above is not some random person. It is Professor Melanie Yazzie of the University of Minnesota, whose biography states:
She writes and teaches about a range of topics, including Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism; Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies; biopolitics; water; media; Marxism; and theories of policing and the state. [NOTE - most of these are even real things]
Yazzie
has been helped along the way by the academic and foundation networks
backing the effort to instill race essentialism into our society. She
was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship;
Andrew W Mellon Dissertation Fellowship; and University of California
Postdoctoral Fellowship. This is not happening by accident, these
institutions are deliberately fomenting divisiveness. These people mean
what they say and must be taken seriously. Don't believe it? In April
2022, a communist "anti-colonial" black activist attempted to
assassinate a Jewish mayoral candidate in Louisville, Kentucky. Though
he fired four shots, he fortunately did not succeed. Didn't hear about
it? No surprise, as it was a one-day story in those media outlets that
reported it at all. No need to start a national conversation about that!
“Land back is going to happen," University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie said during a "teach-in" about the Israel-Palestine conflict. “The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States.” pic.twitter.com/glgwZpLmmD
— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) December 21, 2023
You can get a further flavor of Yazzie's thinking in her TED Talk.
Yazzie is not alone in academia. On October 7, 2023 Yale Professor Zareena Grewal tweeted, "Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard." She went on to tweet, "My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israeli is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity."
Grewal is still an Associate Professor of American Studies, Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, and Religious Studies(!). Yale seems fine, as do many other academic institutions, with having an advocate for murder and genocide on its faculty. Grewal also, like Yazzie, gets foundation support, in her case from Fullbright and Luce. Anytime you look at the most radical faculty at American universities you will find a network of progressive foundation support. There is a lot of philanthropic money to help those who want to destroy America.
For a different perspective read, "America Works, DEI Doesn't" by Corey Brook, a pastor on the South Side of Chicago.
The reality is that DEI is an ideology for the privileged. It helps people like Claudine Gay who exploit race for power and prestige and it hurts communities like mine by exploiting them for poverty-porn.
DEI ideology didn’t offer Jonathan a better life; it has no ability to help him. It doesn’t offer faith, and it doesn’t offer meaningful work. It doesn’t live with us on the South Side of Chicago. It’s manipulative rhetoric, a way of exploiting Jonathan’s tragedy, and the tragedy of thousands of young men like him, on behalf of professional-class ideologues who seek to use our pain to fuel their rise through American institutions. Their stock-in-trade is a soul-destroying poison whose moral and real-world effects are as negative for our communities as those of any other drug that is sold here.
An anonymous former academic, The Ivy Exile, wrote something similar from his perspective.
But by the mid-2010s their once-searing insights had become frozen in time like it was forever the 1980s—that even with the federal bureaucracy and Fortune 500 on board they remained scrappy underdogs against all odds. Even as America grew vastly more diverse, old black and white categories blurring and dissolving, the systematized version insisted that little had changed.
At least the campus wars of the ’80s and early ’90s around political correctness had offered critical race theorists spirited pushback in the public square, encouraging them to hone and diversify their ideas. With critique verboten in the age of Black Lives Matter, they’ve become increasingly insulated, cranking out the same faded dogma even as ill-conceived schemes like cashless bail and defunding police take disproportionate toll on minority communities.
Whatever the latest disaster, it’s always somebody else’s fault, and further proof that ever more DEI officials and administrators are needed to fix things. If not for white and adjacent privilege, plus the rest of the intersecting spectra of oppression, statistical parity of all indices across all groups would be the default state of global society.
You should read his entire piece with an example of the sloppy scholarship of the DEI academics.
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(1) The Democratic controlled Minnesota Legislature passed legislation enacting a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum based upon DEI principles, legislation signed by Governor Tim Walz, who then appointed a committee to develop the cirriculum, a committee chaired by an academic who advocates the destruction of the United States because it is a settler-colonial project.
Umberto Eco: "When we read a really great book, the book doesn't end on the last page. The book is only one stage in a lifelong dialogue between the reader and the author. The beauty of reading is that we never finish a book when we read it; we can always come back to it..." pic.twitter.com/D3dkCC5oPU
— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) December 4, 2024
How true. How many books have I read and re-read over the years. How many more will I in the future. And, as I get older, I take different things from your favorite books upon each reading.
You can read more about Umberto Eco here.
I like Edward Hopper paintings. This one, from 1930, is called Cobbs Barn and Distant Houses.
