https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/april-powers-condemned-jew-hate-then?token=e
I don’t remember when I first came across Kat Rosenfield’s byline, but I can tell you that for years now I’ve read everything she writes. Her bailiwick is our culture, particularly the strange corners of it that tend to go overlooked by everyone else.
Exhibit A is her ongoing, insightful coverage of the mad world of Young Adult fiction and the moral panics that regularly tend to convulse that industry.
Last week that beat converged with the urgent story of rising Jew-hate in America when a black, Jewish diversity chief named April Powers lost her job in children’s publishing for condemning antisemitism. (You read that right.)
When I came across the story, I immediately reached out to Kat to ask her what it said about the state of the publishing world and, more, what it revealed about how high-minded ideals like intersectionality actually operate in practice.
— BW
On first viewing, it looked like a Tik-Tok riff on The Purge: a caravan of cars rolls down La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles. The passengers — young men in keffiyehs, some draped to mask their faces — stand and shout through sunroofs and windows. The cars honk incessantly. In the back of a slow-moving Jeep, one man waves a billboard-sized Palestinian flag while another shouts through a megaphone: “Israel kills women and children every day!” His companions jeer: “Yeah! Fuck you!”
The next video shows the same men on the sidewalk, shouting and advancing on another man in a grey shirt who’s trying to fend them off with a metal pedestal. In the next: The man in grey is lying on the ground, curled in the fetal position. They punch him, kick him, claw at him.
The last video clip of the evening’s events shows the same sidewalk, now crowded with police. “They’re apparently going around the city, asking who’s Jewish, and beating them up,” says the unseen videographer. “This is America, guys.”
These clips were shot in late May, during the recent war between Israel and Hamas, a month in which there were dozens of similar attacks on Jews and Jewish spaces across America. It was also a moment when corporations and politicians — many of whom had eagerly released statements unequivocally condemning the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes the previous month, or supporting Black Lives Matter the previous year — suddenly lost their nerve when it came to denouncing violence against minorities.
Those that did speak out against Jew-hate, including high-profile progressives like Bernie Sanders and Ayanna Pressley, tended to speak out against “antisemitism and” — as in, antisemitism and Islamophobia, or antisemitism and all other forms of bigotry. (Tablet’s Noam Blum documented the trend here.)