1/ A literary Bible🧵 in honor of my friends @AriLamm & @zugzwanged

(Leaving for @bluesky so last one 😢)

Features surprising link btwn seemingly unrelated characters
& reminds us not to use Bible as “comfort food” & but appreciate how it pushes us beyond moral comfort zone 2/ Our focus is the tragic, fraught scene in Gen 21 that is sometimes described as the “Binding of Ishmael” due to the many parallels between this story & the binding of Isaac (Gen 22)

1/ @RetsefL: the only person who's been "abusing" & "attacking" you is me. & you know it. I've wasted countless hours trying to get you to correct the record
Thx for beginning to do so

Journalists (@MaltzJudy, @havivrettiggur) & biz leaders (@ackman, @mikeeisenberg) take note

https://twitter.com/RetsefL/status/1724065661746319710

2/ There are really horrific incidents of antisemitism on Am campuses these days. I know of many that are *not* being publicized

I feel terribly for students, faculty, & staff in those universities

I also don't know what I'd do if I had colleagues in my departments who signed+

I've learned more about moral panics in the last 36 hours than I ever learned reading about them

I'd like to propose that we're all living through a

*dual moral panic*

Quick/raw🧵 on what this means

(& see for classic cite on moral panics)jstor.org/stable/2083363 Start with analogies to financial market bubbles
(see & search "moral panic")

1 Like bubbles, moral panics are rooted in real facts & a compelling theory of what's behind those facts. The panickers usaually have very good reasons for their panic!!sociologicalscience.com/so-you-think-y…

🧵On the incredibly difficult moral dilemma we face viz the Israel-Hamas war

TLdr: The choices are bad bc moral clarity is everywhere demanded but “moral flexibility” (see linked paper) is pretty much all we see

osf.io/preprints/soca… Begin with five observations:

1. The global left has destroyed its moral standing as critic of 🇮🇱 over its response (deny, diminish, deflect, justify, celebrate) to mass-murder, torture, & kidnapping of civilians

At the heart of what’s making diaspora Jews viscerally afraid right now is simply the fact that we’re taking up so much space in people’s heads & emotional lives right now

That’s why Jews are often as uncomfortable with philo-semitism as with antisemitism

We know we’re+ just regular people, with the same array of faults & sins as everyone else. We constantly disappoint & outrage *one another* (as family members do!), & so we’re going to do that to you too if you follow us closely

Therein lies the danger

Which is familiar to us from cases of+

A lot of heated debate about whether the slogan

“🇵🇸 will be free from the river to the sea” is genocidal or not

Fair question

But as Jamal & Yarhi-Millo point out, it’s a distraction from key Q whether this sloganeering is *productive*

🧵 on why not

nytimes.com/2023/10/30/opi… Two main issues:

1. Downside of left “language of activism”

2. Dangerous ignorance

Interesting/sad I’ve lost about a dozen followers overnight — either over my Butler tweets or my @Columbia tweet

Also had a surge in private notes thanking me. So I guess I’ve been striking some nerves lately?

A 🧵on these sensitive comments: 1. Re Columbia, what’s pathetic about this letter?

iIt willfully ignores obvious counterfactuals & perpetuates an incredibly naive, childish narrative on the left that all deaths are the same

This is a war

& say what you want about the broad historical context (which Columbia+

https://twitter.com/ewzucker/status/1719151849477992808

While Butler’s post-10/7 reflection condemns Hamas, it too is morally bankrupt & politically juvenile in a way that’s highly revealing & representative of the moral rot on the global left

4 reasons:

🧵

lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/… 1. First off, why should anyone in the world care whether Butler or anyone else condemns Hamas’s massacre? No one should in the 1st instance give a rat’s ass what she or I or any academic thinks

Moreover, it should be obvious that mass murder & kidnapping is reprehensible. Duh.

🧵 on *organizational roots* of what we’re seeing—

moral rot & crisis of the far left

&

upsurge in pro 🇮🇱 sentiment & coordination among world Jewry

~ 0/23 Issermsan nails the organizational roots of the crisis in the left

More generally, the crisis can be traced in part to the left’s vilification of hierarchy, which makes it imposs to achieve reliability & accountability



1 /23thenation.com/article/activi…

7:05 am, Brookline MA

Sequence of special prayers for end of service

Nothing fancy. Nothing political. Just a moment to share w others in pain, & in fervent hope for those suffering in bondage while we are free & for those sacrificing their lives to protect us

Vital to+ have such shared moments in my opinion— certainly is for me

Among the many benefits, two come to mind based on the facts that the format & content are ancient & well known to millions of people (& easily learned if you know Hebrew):

One thing bschool profs talk too little about publicly is our teaching experience, esp exec ed

So let me say clearly & loudly about how *wonderful* it can be (at least at @MITSloanExecEd - a privilege & honor, & something I've come to really value during a crisis

Short 🧵on why First some context:

When I first began teaching exec ed, I was ~35 & could pass for 25. I also had zero industry experience. I'm also a social theorist at heart. I'm interested in very general mechanisms & processes. I was scared out of my mind

I was only brought in since R.H.

Petition by @IS_sociology is qualitatively better than the other one

In partic, it’s clearer about what role sociologists might play— enhancing public understanding

But it’s also embarrassingly immature & performative— & so also problematic

Why? 🧵

isa-sociology.org/en/about-isa/i… Two related reasons:

1. Sociologists believe that “war is never an acceptable solution.”
We do? If someone is intent on murdering your family, you’re not going to try to kill them first?

Sociologists aren’t idiots you’d think. We know that sometimes there are people so bent+

My pledge:

1. I will retain this list forever

2. Whenever I meet a fellow sociologist who signed (only know 1 or 2 people on it), I will ask them:

a. How did you protest Hamas’s butchery on 10/7?

b. Where was your evidence IDF “targeted the civilian Palestinian population”?

https://twitter.com/michaelrmuniz/status/1714409732281352585

P.S. 4 notes

1. Sociologists are welcome to check out my TL for my views. Warning though: they require thought & openness to possibly leftists are wrong sometimes (don’t get me started on the right)

A lot of criticism of universities' "moral failure" in responses to Oct 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists

Working hypothesis is: "wokeism"

But check this out!

Can't blame this on liberals

(nor antisemitism, tho cringingly tone-deaf in classic Xtian way)

So why?

Short 🧵 It's a matter of being trapped in a familiar frame of reference that's worked in superficially similar situations in the past but doesn't work now

Israel's military failure is one example of such a failure:

It was framework was+

Essay by @PeterBeinart in @nytimes (echoes great @YairWallach 🧵 last wk) gets a lot of things right but misses 2 things leftists ignore at their— & our— peril:

1. Why so hard for them to see Israel as Jews’ home

2. Wider regional context

🧵

nytimes.com/2023/10/14/opi… These 2 factors are crucial for explaining why the Palestine=Algeria equation is so alluring & why it’d be hard for Palestinian Muslims to shift to an apartheid frame:

1. Ok so why is it so hard to see Israel as Jews’ home?

A massacre on the scale of Oct 7 is just one shtetl (village) worth of murders by the German Army in 1941 ()

But whereas there was no reaction from the world then, today it’s headlines across the world, from horror to celebration

Why?

4 main reasons

🧵en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_P… 1. Communication tech
2. Frame of reference
3. Social networks
4. Sovereignty & nationalism

To elaborate:

A short 🧵 in my occasional series on the Heb Bible’s literary artistry— & how it’s key to read it in the original (cf @AriLamm )

The prompt is Deut 29:5

This verse generally escapes attention bc Moses seems merely to be repeating himself After all, back in Deut 8, he’d already noted the miraculous way Israel was sustained over its 40 year sojourn in the wilderness & how this had inculcated knowledge of God in them

Some advice is being shared by a superstar economist about how early career economists should cultivate high-status senior supporters

IDK whether this is a good strategy for economists in general

But I do have a story that may illuminate some unintended consequences

🧵 There are 2 parts to the story

The first was in ~2006, at MIT

I was just past the stage of my career when, if I saw there was an interesting seminar in a different field than my own, I’d try to check it out

Was increasingly overcommitted & struggling for time for my own work

Fascinating how powerful is the myth that the planetary week emerged independently & roughly contemporaneously with the Jewish week.

Earliest archaeological evidence for J week is 5th c BCE (Elephantine).when it v likely was well established

Earliest p week is late 1st c CE+ in Mediterranean communities with significant J presence.

Excerpt is from @jpinsk intro to interview with David Henkin (buy his great book!)

apple.news/AyCitF_-JSw2_B…

רעיון על ה #הפרשה לכבוד מוצ״ש:

שאלה מפורסמת היא למה יעקב ״החריש״ כשהא שמע מה עשה שכם לבתו. ולא רק שהתנהג כאילו לא שמע כלום עד שהגיעו בניו אלא שנתן לבניו לנהל את משא והמתן עם חמור ושכם ואז נתן לשמעון ללוי לעשות מה שהם עשו.

מה גרם לו להיות כל כך פאסיבי?

אולי יש רמז+ בפסוק א׳ של הפרק.

מה זאת אומרת שדינה יצאה ״לראות בבנות בארץ?״ מה היא ראתה בכלל? ולמה התורה מציגה את המפגש הזה בינה לבין בנות בארץ בצורה כל כך עמומה? יתכן שהמפגש הזה מאוד חשוב- זו מעין כותרת לסיפור!

I was yesterday years old when I realized...

that the key term "mimetic" is used in opposing ways by two highly influential & great sociological analyses of importance to me:

DiMaggio & Powell (1983) & Soloveitchik (1994)

& that it's productive to think about *why*

<THREAD> To be sure, the papers each use "mimetic" to describe when people (Soloveitchik) or organizations (D&P) model their behavior on others, even though (in each case) the person or organization has good reasons not to slavishly model their behavior on others.