Why is Nancy showing us video?
I don’t know…
Me neither! Let’s blame Josh Szeps, whose “Ask Me Anything” video I watched this morning while making coffee…
… and also because there are a lot-a lot of video possibilities around these parts, you hear talk of it nearly as often as I was killing mice two weeks ago, until I sealed up their terror tunnel!
Last night’s Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em First Sunday Zoom hang offered so much interesting information about Israel, from people who studied and served there, and offers to eat with one’s Moroccan Jewish in-laws, and a pitch to interview Iraqi Jews in Ramat Gan - I plan to report from Israel in January - and several podcast recommendations people are finding indispensable, including “Israel Story” and “Call Me Back.” Let me know in the comments what you are finding useful.
After the Zoom, the first video I saw on the Twitter machine - and goodness I misspoke at the end of the audio: It’s not Substack that’s put a blockade between itself and Twitter, it’s the other way around - was the one of the single counter-protester dancing while being shouted at; Twitter video link here.
I had 400 people comment that they want to buy the guy a drink, and that’s great, but I worry. The energy inside the protests is a live wire and people love it, they love the feeling they get from being near it, to figuratively sense it sparking around their feet. But I have seen it - and so have you - snake off and have a life of its own and set things on fire. How long before window rattling becomes window breaking? Before shouting in an old man’s face becomes punching in that face? I don’t think it matters that the Columbia Social Workers for Palestine are not, one on one, a very tough bunch; they are throwing in and providing a very nourishing medium for terrible violence to grow.
This is what I mean in the video, how demonstrations and movements provide haven, cover, justification for people whose aims the front-facing masses might not condone. Or maybe they would. Maybe they admire the people who break the windows, who punch in the faces, who pull the guns and shot people they have never met.
I have written about that “fucking fascist”…
