Definitions of Antisemitism, Rescinded Awards, and Football Under Fire - Dinner Table Digest № 70

The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!

Dec 26, 2023

I hope you that you and your family are having a wonderful holiday season! None of today’s links are holiday related, but they are, I think, really interesting. I hope you enjoy them, as I have.

Sections: In The Shadow of the Holocaust / Hannah Arendt Award Rescinded / Doomsday Party at the Old Town Hall / The Changing Face of Football

In the Shadow of the Holocaust - Masha Gessen - The New Yorker

While I will briefly table the rescinding of the Hannah Arendt Award from Jewish journalist and scholar of authoritarianism, Masha Gessen, I wanted to first highlight Gessen’s examination of the politics of antisemitism. Focusing particularly on how German law and social policy have sought to limit criticism of the State of Israel under particular definitions of antisemitism, Gessen questions the fallacious view that the Jewish Holocaust was somehow the most terrible of holocausts the world has ever or will ever experience. That is not to say that the Jewish Holocaust wasn't horrific - it very obviously was - but that its weight and seriousness does not, by definition, outweigh every single mass atrocity committed by humanity. Gessen writes,

The insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust and the centrality of Germany’s commitment to reckoning with it are two sides of the same coin: they position the Holocaust as an event that Germans must always remember and mention but don’t have to fear repeating, because it is unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen. The German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Centre for Research on Antisemitism, in Berlin, has argued that unified Germany turned the reckoning with the Holocaust into its national idea, and as a result “any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or other genocides, can [be] and is being perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state.” Perhaps that’s the meaning of “Never again is now.”
Some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust spent the rest of their lives trying to tell the world that the horror, while uniquely deadly, should not be seen as an aberration. That the Holocaust happened meant that it was possible—and remains possible. The sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of the Holocaust was a function of modernity—that, although it was by no means predetermined, it fell in line with other inventions of the twentieth century. Theodor Adorno studied what makes people inclined to follow authoritarian leaders and sought a moral principle that would prevent another Auschwitz.

He continues, appealing to the great German Jewish thinker, Hannah Arendt:

In 1948, Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter that began, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” Just three years after the Holocaust, Arendt was comparing a Jewish Israeli party to the Nazi Party, an act that today would be a clear violation of the I.H.R.A.’s definition of antisemitism. Arendt based her comparison on an attack carried out in part by the Irgun, a paramilitary predecessor of the Freedom Party, on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, which had not been involved in the war and was not a military objective. The attackers “killed most of its inhabitants—240 men, women, and children—and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.”

This appeal to Arendt is significant, especially because Gessen was about to receive the Hannah Arendt Award from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a non-profit organization affiliated with the German Green Party. As we find out in the next piece, however, The Böll Foundation felt that Gessen, in this piece in the New Yorker, had strayed too far into the realm of antisemitism.

Arendt and Jerusalem - John Ganz - Unpopular Front

For his piece exploring the politics of antisemitism, Masha Gessen, himself a Jewish scholar and journalist who specializes in authoritarianism, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, affiliated with the German Green Party, has rescinded the Hannah Arendt Award. Translated from the German by Google Translate, Zeit Online writes,

The DIG [German-Israeli Society] accuses Gessen, with such statements "in clear contrast to think Hannah Arendt's. [thinking,] it is incomprehensible to us how a scientist, how Masha Gessen, who is so great merits to the critical analysis of Russian imperialism seriously Gaza with the Nazi extermination ghettos can equate," says the open letter. From the perspective of the DIG there is only one explanation for this: "A deep-seated and basic negative prejudice against the Jewish state."
[While Gessen] is free to express such views, it continues. "But Masha Gessen should not be honoured with a prize with their views, with whom the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt is to be thought."

John Ganz, in Arendt and Jerusalem, identifies the irony of the situation:

This entire brouhaha was occasioned by an essay by Gessen on The New Yorker’s website entitled “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” about the use and misuse of Holocaust memory. The offending passage compares Israeli actions in Gaza to the Nazi liquidation of ghettos. This crosses a bright red line in Germany: any type of parallel between the Jewish state and the Nazis is streng verboten. In one of the situation’s many ironies, a good deal of Gessen’s piece is dedicated to criticizing the very speech codes that lead to this kind of interdict; rules, which, in Germany, are not just informal taboos but actual state policy.

Furthermore, argues Ganz, Gessen’s essay was very much in the tradition of Arendt:

Still, there are many absurd parts of this situation, not the least of which is that a German organization in charge of awarding a prize named for a Jewish woman that country sent into exile and has retracted (or not) the prize when it was awarded to another exiled Jew. This comes just days after the Russian state issued an arrest warrant for Gessen. Arendt might say that Gessen was in good company: she believed that pariah-dom was an essential part of the Jewish experience that lead to the unique contribution of Jewish intellectuals.
… Whether or not Arendt would have agreed with every word of Gessen’s essay is impossible to know and besides the point: the fact is that they are much more in the tradition of Arendt, if such a thing can be meaningfully invoked, than their critics.

The entire Masha Gessen situation points to the importance of coming up with a shared definition of antisemitism that includes the right things (in my view, hatred towards the Jewish people), and excludes the extraneous things (in my view, criticism of the State of Israel).

Just Because…

The Changing Face of America’s Favourite Sport - Dave Sheinin & Emily Giambalvo - The Washington Post

A lot of people don’t know that the sport of football is personal for me. Starting in grade 8, I was part of the sticks crew for my high school football team, working all home games. In grade 10 and 11 I was the ball/water boy, and traveled with the team to all their games. In grade 12, I decided that I’d had enough of watching from the sidelines and joined the team, only to find myself watching from the sidelines again after being injured on my second official play. Growing up in British Columbia, we played four down American football; to this day, football season is my favourite time of year, whether it’s college ball where I cheer for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, or the NFL, where I cheer for the Seattle Seahawks and the Buffalo Bills.

Which brings me to this fascinating deep-dive into the existential threats faced by the sport of American football. The piece pays special attention to the shifts in participation rates between liberal and conservative communities, wealthy and poor neighbourhoods, and white, Black and Hispanic groups. Of particular interest is our increasing knowledge of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain condition that cannot be officially diagnosed until after death, but whose effects are felt not only by former football players, but also by their families.

So instead of asking how many kids are playing, the bigger question for the sport in 2023, and in the future, is who is playing.
“Kids who are disadvantaged will say, ‘I’ll deal with that [CTE] issue if and when it ever comes,’ ” said Harry Carson, a Hall of Fame linebacker for the New York Giants who later became one of the most vocal critics of the NFL’s response to brain injuries. “Kids are thinking, ‘If I can get that big contract, my family will be set for generations, so I’m willing to assume the risk.’ … They see the bling, the cars, the contracts being handed out. There’s no way you can compete against that. These kids are coming from next to nothing.”

While wealthier, whiter, more educated communities are increasingly refusing to let their children participate in football because of the dangers of CTE, poorer, more racially disparate communities, with an increasing number of Hispanics, are continuing to participate in the sport because of what the future financial payoff might mean for them and their families.

In separate polls conducted in 2012 and this year, The Post asked respondents whether they would recommend children play youth or high school football (without specifying tackle or flag). Overall, the numbers barely budged, with those encouraging it falling from 67 percent in 2012 to 64 percent this year.
But the divide between specific demographic groups changed far more dramatically. This year, for example, 75 percent of Americans who identified as conservatives said they would recommend football to kids, but a much smaller 44 percent of liberals did. That gap represented a striking change from the 2012 poll, when the margin was only 70 percent to 63 percent. The gap between White conservatives (72 percent) and White liberals (36 percent) in 2023 was even wider, much larger than a 67 percent-57 percent gap in 2012.

For kids who grow up in America’s poorest states, the risks are worth it:

“We go hard because, I mean, a lot of us come from nothing,” said Jermar McCarter, middle linebacker for Starkville (Miss.) High. “We don’t like to see our parents struggling.”
Asked about the injury factor, McCarter’s teammate, quarterback Trey Petty said, “At a young age, we don’t really care about injuries. If injuries come about, it come about. We worry about it when it come. But in the moment, we don’t worry about playing football. We’re having fun.”

What do you think? Is the continued existence of the sport of football worth it, despite the fact that we know that it causes CTE in many, if not most of its players?

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