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Dear Richard
For the past five years, I have been honored to speak at Tikvah’s annual Jewish Leadership Conference. But this year feels very different, at least for me.
The theme—“Will our children defend America, Israel, and Jewish civilization?”—is a question I would once have answered confidently: “Of course.” I had been brought up to take such national responsibility for granted. And I began my career teaching Jewish literature at a public university with the same assurance that Jewish learning can flourish in the general community of inquiry and knowledge. But the climate of ideas changed very quickly—and very dangerously. This question—about the defining spirit of young Jews—has now emerged as the great Jewish and American challenge of the hour.
Before joining Tikvah, I spent many years teaching at Harvard, where the civilizational problem we face became painfully clear. An elite institution has the privilege of teaching some of the country’s most intellectually gifted and often curious students the sources and precepts of their precious civilization. Yet rather than fulfill its mission, this great school (and so many others like it) did the very opposite. Bad ideas were allowed to drive out the good. With little respect for nationhood, patriotism, or good citizenship, the dominant voices in the academy began to belittle and attack the best in America, Israel, and the Jewish way of life. Anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism were the adjuncts of their anti-Americanism.
Yet this corruption of our culture does not have to be the final word. Tikvah knows that American democracy is not biologically transmitted and that Jewish values have to be patiently passed on by devoted parents, teachers, schools, and communities. Working with Tikvah—and Tikvah’s students—has bolstered my own faith and fighting spirit as it has all those in its orbit. My early Tikvah students are now teaching these ideas in seminars and schools across the country. In fortifying ourselves, we strengthen the faltering educational environment.
I believe that many young Jews today are searching for their own purpose—and that our most urgent cause is to provide them an education in our Jewish past that prepares them to be guardians of the Jewish future. That is why this year’s Jewish Leadership Conference is so important, gathering together so many creative minds and courageous builders in the Jewish and American world.
Tikvah is a brilliant light in the Jewish world today. The Tikvah generation of students will indeed defend America, Israel, and Jewish civilization. They will act, speak, and live with moral confidence in their own inheritance. And Tikvah’s work only endures because of the community of supporters that come together every year to think about the challenges ahead. That is why the 2023 Jewish Leadership Conference matters so much.
I will be there. I hope you will join me and help sponsor this effort.
Very best,
Ruth Wisse
Distinguished Senior Fellow, Tikvah
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China Can’t Seem to Make Friends or Influence People
Even as Xi has doubled down on soft power efforts, global public opinion has become more hostile.
By Sadanand Dhume
Xi Jinping attends the opening of the 19th national congress of the Communist Youth League of China in Beijing
China has spent tens of billions of dollars to boost its global popularity over the past decade. It hasn’t worked. In soft power—the attractiveness of a country’s ideas, institutions and culture—the U.S. far outstrips China. That’s an opportunity for Washington.
Not long ago many scholars believed China’s economic progress would automatically translate into greater soft power, as it had for America, Japan and South Korea, among others. In these pages in 2005, Joseph Nye, the Harvard professor who coined the term “soft power,” quoted a 22-country BBC poll that found more people viewed China positively (nearly 50%) than the U.S. (38%). “China has always had an attractive traditional culture, but now it is entering the realm of global popular culture as well,” Mr. Nye wrote. He cited the Nobel literature laureate Gao Xingjian, Houston Rockets star Yao Ming and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” as examples of China’s growing appeal. The PR bonanza of the 2008 Beijing Olympics loomed.
Instead, global public opinion has soured on China, despite Xi Jinping’s doubling down on soft power. At a 2014 Communist Party meeting, Mr. Xi, who became president the year before, urged the party to “increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative, and better communicate China’s message to the world.”
In a recent 24-country poll by the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of respondents viewed China unfavorably. Only 28% held a positive opinion. Beijing has particularly lost esteem in high-income nations, where Pew said negative views “currently stand at or near historic highs.” Among middle-income countries, anti-China sentiment is at highs in Argentina, India and Brazil.
Sometimes it’s all right to be unpopular if you’re also respected, but only 9% of respondents said the Chinese military is the best in the world. Even fewer felt that way about China’s universities (6%), entertainment (3%) and standard of living (3%). Only in tech did a significant proportion (19%) consider China’s offerings to be the world’s best.
Contrast this with how people perceive the U.S. In 22 of 23 foreign countries surveyed, respondents view America more favorably than unfavorably. For China this is true of only six countries: Argentina, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa. In only Nigeria and Kenya did China’s favorability exceed that of the U.S. A plurality of respondents in 16 countries called America “the world’s leading economic power,” vs. only six for China. In two—France and the U.K.—the score was tied.
Unfortunately for Mr. Xi, China’s soft-power deficit stems from its system of governance and insular culture, deep-set problems that are difficult to overcome. In the 21st century, most people prefer democracies to foreign dictatorships. And China built both its Great Wall and its great firewall to keep foreigners out. According to a senior Asian diplomat who served in Beijing, Chinese elites often view foreigners steeped in Chinese language and culture not as equals but as curious barbarians who have acknowledged the superiority of Sinic culture. Compare this with the open attitude of Americans. Everyone is welcome to appreciate a Big Mac or Bruce Springsteen song.
The tight control China’s political system exerts on its cultural exports also makes them less compelling. Maria Repnikova, an expert on Chinese and Russian soft power at Georgia State University, points out in a phone interview that Chinese state-controlled media emphasize government priorities like the Belt and Road Initiative and promote Mr. Xi’s favorite slogans. Foreigners correctly view China’s main means of projecting soft power—Confucius Institutes, which teach Chinese language and culture, and English language media such as CGTN and Global Times—as government mouthpieces.
And though China’s economic rise has been impressive, China lacks an ideology that can be intuitively grasped by a Mexican laborer, a Cambridge don or a Malaysian doctor. In contrast, the erstwhile Soviet Union also exerted influence through propaganda, but it was far clearer in espousing communism, an ideology that found adherents in many countries. Why would any non-Chinese person be drawn to Han supremacism?
To make matters worse for China, Mr. Xi has centralized power to a degree not seen in decades. His government’s aggressive territorial claims have upset Indians, Japanese and Vietnamese, among others. Nor has Beijing gained friends with its economic bullying of countries such as Norway, Australia and South Korea. And China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplomats seem better at offending people than winning them over.
Despite China’s limitations, America shouldn’t be too sanguine. In geopolitics, raw military and economic power can still count for more than charm, and China has plenty of those. The U.S. is prone to soft-power blunders of its own, for instance by attempting to export fashionable woke ideas about sex. As the U.S.-China rivalry deepens, there’s no guarantee Beijing won’t find a way to improve its appeal or to benefit from American mistakes. Washington may have lapped China so far, but it can’t be certain of winning the soft-power race.
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Why San Francisco Is a Homeless Mecca
The city spends $646 million on shelter, but vagrancy grows.
The Editorial Board
California has spent more than $20 billion on housing for the homeless since 2020, yet public encampments continue to grow. As San Francisco progressives are learning, government can build more shelter, but that doesn’t mean the homeless will use them.
The city of San Francisco released data last week showing that 55% of homeless individuals rejected shelter when offered it. Days earlier a giant fire destroyed a housing complex under construction. The blaze is under investigation, but residents in the area say they repeatedly complained to the city about fires igniting around homeless encampments.
Mayor London Breed threw her hands up in response. “We can’t force people to accept or stay in shelters and we’re unable to prevent people from setting up an encampment in an area that was just cleaned. This is the situation we are in,” she tweeted Wednesday.
She’s right. San Francisco is under a federal injunction that bars officials from enforcing laws against camping or sleeping in public spaces as long as its homeless population exceeds available shelter beds. As we recently explained, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment creates a right to vagrancy.
Many homeless prefer to live on the streets where they can freely use drugs. “People are coming here for so many different reasons including the ease of access to getting these drugs,” Ms. Breed recently noted.
Since 2016 San Francisco’s homeless budget has ballooned to $672 million from $224 million, yet the number of homeless in shelters has increased by a mere 736. That equates to $609,000 in higher annual spending for each additional person in shelter. This is on top of the $20 billion that Democrats in Sacramento have thrown at the homeless problem.
A 2018 local ballot measure championed by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff increased San Francisco business taxes by some $300 million annually to build more homeless housing. Yet the tax increase has merely given businesses another incentive, on top of rampant crime and shoplifting, to move jobs out of the city.
San Francisco’s homeless epidemic is a result in large part of the familiar problems of drug addiction and mental illness. But a particular problem is the refusal to prosecute drug crimes. In 2014 California’s Prop. 47, which was backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom and other progressives, effectively decriminalized drug use and shoplifting. Localities can’t use the threat of jail to induce addicts to receive treatment.
Democrats in Sacramento plan to ask voters next year for approval to borrow $15 billion more to reduce homelessness. Only a progressive could imagine that will this work any better than the last tens of billions. How about instead repealing the misconceived law that is fueling the problem?
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Obama's third administration?
A Tablet article has struck a nerve and got the Beltway buzzing
By MELANIE PHILLIPS
US Beltway-watchers have been buzzing over a long conversation in Tablet between David Samuels and David Garrow, author of a biography of Barack Obama called Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.
Garrow, a prize-winning civil rights historian who specialises in excavating details overlooked by others, became a pariah on the left with his previous book about Martin Luther King in which he revealed from FBI wiretaps evidence of King’s drinking and womanising.
In Rising Star, Garrow effectively took apart Obama’s autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Garrow interviewed a number of people to whom Obama had referred or whom he had quoted. These interviewees gave Garrow a radically different account from the one that Obama had written, leading Garrow to conclude that Obama’s narrative couldn’t be true.
The most explosive claims in Rising Star were made by Obama’s former live-in girlfriend in the 1980s, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. In Obama’s own book, he described a major row with a girlfriend (who was a composite of various girlfriends) after they had seen a play. He depicted the row as pitting his own black consciousness against the girlfriend’s white liberal universalism — for him, the defining existential struggle.
But Garrow tracked down Jager, who told him that the row that ended their relationship — he twice asked her to marry him, but was turned down — was not about Obama’s black consciousness but his refusal to condemn black antisemitism.
In 1988, they had been to see an exhibition in Chicago about Adolf Eichmann. Around that time, a scandal had erupted in Chicago over a black mayoral assistant, Steve Cokely, who was sacked for antisemitism.
Jager’s Dutch grandfather had been prominent during the Second World War in an underground network sheltering Jewish children from the Nazis. He and his wife themselves sheltered a Jewish girl for three years, and are accordingly named on Yad Vashem’s Wall of Honour in its Garden of the Righteous.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager told Garrow that, after leaving the Eichmann exhibition, she had asked Obama why so many prominent black people in Chicago had sprung to Cokely’s defence. This led to a blazing row between them about which she told Garrow: “I challenged him on… the question of black racism… I blamed him for not having the courage to confront the racial divide between us”.
With hindsight, wrote Garrow, Jager concluded that the chasm between them wasn’t so much over race as her perception of Obama’s lack of courage. For Samuels however, the anecdote demonstrated that Obama has a problem with the Jewish people who present an obstacle to his view of the world.
This is because the Jews’ survival as a group and their continuing insistence on Jewish historical particularity gets in the way of his governing belief that the supreme crime of history is the oppression of back people by white people.
As Samuels writes:
Ghettos were invented for Jews. Concentration camps, too. How can Jews be “privileged white people” if they are clearly among history’s victims? And if Jews aren’t white people, then perhaps lots of other white people are also victims and therefore aren’t “white,” in the theological sense in which that term gains its significance in progressive ideology. Maybe “Black people” aren’t always or primarily Black. Maybe the whole progressive race-based theology is, historically and ideologically speaking, a load of crap. Which is why the Jews are and will remain a problem.
This problem with Jewish particularity is not only surely the case with Obama, but unfortunately characterises the mindset of many progressive people throughout the west.
However, Rising Star was published six years ago. So why has Garrow suddenly given this interview to Samuels (who manages to say rather more than Garrow himself, another curious feature of this “Q&A”)? Why are so many in Washington DC only now noticing from this account what was so obvious to some of us that we wrote about many of these things when Obama was president? Why didn’t they react like this to what Garrow had written when his book was published in 2017? And why are they so exercised about it now?
Various reasons suggest themselves. There’s the refusal of the left to entertain any challenge whatsoever to their dogmatic mindset, nor to accept any flaws in their cultural heroes and avatars. They construct instead a universe of fantasies and lies, and any writer who exposes these delusions will be disdained, denounced and dismissed. Those of us who wrote in these terms about Obama when he was president were mostly deprived of mainstream media platforms on which to do so, and scorned when we did.
Elsewhere today, there’s an acute awareness of the current parlous, indeed desperate state of America and the breakdown there of social cohesion. As Garrow observes, contrary to the hope that America’s first black president would cure the legacy of American racial prejudice, today’s vicious culture wars over intersectionality, Black Lives Matter and the rest of the left’s poisonous doctrines have made race relations worse than they were when Obama came to power.
Then there’s the baleful legacy of disastrous policies that Obama started and that continue under the Biden administration — most notably and infamously, the insane obsession with appeasing and empowering the Islamic regime in Iran which not only poses an unconscionable threat to America, Israel and the west but continues to be actively engaged in mounting terrorist attacks on American, Israeli and western interests.
And this is connected to what is perhaps the main reason this piece has struck such a nerve — the strong suspicion that the Biden administration is in effect the third Obama administration.
First, and incontrovertibly, the Biden administration is stuffed with Obama retreads.
Then there’s the fact that, when the Obamas left the White House, they moved just down the road into a mansion in the Washington DC neighbourhood of Kalorama. As Samuels observes, this violated
a norm governing the transfer of presidential power which has been breached only once in post-Civil War American history, by Woodrow Wilson, who couldn’t physically be moved after suffering a series of debilitating strokes.
As I and others have previously noted, various Democratic Party operatives and former Obama staffers have often been observed coming and going at the Obama mansion. The suspicion has grown that it has functioned as a kind of alternative White House.
Samuels links this with the Russian collusion hoax which was used to hound Donald Trump during most of his presidency and was orchestrated by the Obama-appointed CIA director John Brennan. Subsequently, as President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline became ever more apparent, it was hard not to wonder who was really making the decisions taken by an administration stuffed to the gunnels with Obama retreads and loyalists, and with Obama himself just down the road.
Samuels further recalls the remarkable clue left by Obama himself pointing to precisely this development. In 2015 he told talk show host Steven Colbert:
I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony. I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.
Yet the American media never questioned Obama’s continuing public advocacy, despite the evidence of this. Samuels writes:
Near the end of June, for example, Politico ran a long article noting Biden’s cognitive decline, with the coy headline “Is Obama Ready to Reassert Himself?”—as if the ex-president hadn’t been living in the middle of Washington and playing politics since the day he left office.
Indeed, in previous weeks Obama had continued his role as central advocate for government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership, claiming it is historically linked to racism. Surely, the spectacle of an ex-president simultaneously leading campaigns against both the First and Second Amendments might have led even a spectacularly incurious old-school D.C. reporter to file a story on the nuts and bolts of Obama’s political operation and on who was going in and out of his mansion.
But the DC press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful.
This is why America is in the state it is in today. This is why Garrow’s book never got the attention it deserved when it was published in 2017. And this is why the Tablet piece has caused such a sensation
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