Disqus - Latest Comments for maxsparber

Re: Letter | Jews have been in the land of Israel for thousands of years

maxsparber — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 07:20:16 -0000

Oh sure, if you redefine words they can mean whatever you want them to, but most of us know that this is a disingenuous approach to argument and won't engage.

Re: Letter | Jews have been in the land of Israel for thousands of years

maxsparber — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 22:42:39 -0000

What a galling act of clerical cowardice, and a horrific misrepresentation of both Rabbi Kahn’s tweets and the reasoning behind them. Indigeneity doesn't merely mean "where someone comes from," it's a post-colonialist political term that developed to describe ancient, settled populations experiences with colonial usurpers. By no contemporary definition are Jews indigenous to Israel -- even by our own legends, which has us as taking the region by force.

Rabbi Davidson seems to know that this discussion affects Israel, but is either unaware or unconcerned -- as Forward seems to be -- with the rise of ethnozionism, that uses junk genetic science to try and lay an exclusive claim to the region. This is the context for discussing Jewish indigeneity, which is, at best, a grotesque and failed mapping of the term to a people that predate it, at worst a cynical attempt to use indigenous people's struggles to bolster a claim of exclusive rights to the area, often using a sort of updated race science that historically has been very bad for Jews and does violence to the way Jews have identified themselves for thousands of years.

Nobody denies that Jews have a historic and cultural tie to the region. The case Rabbi Khan was making -- and it's a solid case -- is that discussions of Jewish indigeneity don't work in discussing this. Jews, as a precolonial, disaporic people, cannot simply claim a post-colonial term for themselves because it is politically convenient.

The fact that Rabbi Davidson didn't engage this discussion with any but the most shallow, dashed off three paragraphs suggests to me that he did not actually intend to engage this discussion, which is vital, but is probably responding to a Twitter campaign of harassment against Rabbi Khan that has included phone calls and emails to his synagogue, with the unsubtle goal of getting him removed for having the temerity to question a talking point that ethnozionists very badly do not want questioned.

But these talking points are absolute poison and must be questioned. They may superficially support Israeli efforts to justify exclusive claims to Israel, but they fly in the face of thousands of years of Jewish identity and do real damage to Jews in the diaspora, who are already subject to campaigns of delegitimization on the basis of not being genetically Jewish -- an understanding of Jewish identity that is entirely at odds with our self-definition.

The fact that Rabbi Davidson just brushed all this off feels like a face-saving effort, and is simply appalling in its lack of moral courage. I don't know how he wound up as the head of a synagogue, much less a progressive one that claims to support dialogue, From where I sit, he is a coward.

Re: Travellers who pitched illegally and forced cancellation of Fordham car boot sale could be gone by weekend - March and Chatteris News - Cambs Times

maxsparber — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 10:08:28 -0000

What an appalling article. Nice of you to give a megaphone to racists but not bother to speak to a single Traveller.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:41:42 -0000

The critics are biased. Every critic is biased by their experience.

It sure doesn't say racist, though.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:40:26 -0000

Good is so subjective as to be useless. I think white critics and male critics are limited in the critical responses they can offer plays that are not about their experiences. And I know this is true, because I am a white male critic and have bumped up against the edges of my ability to offer informed responses my entire career.

And nobody called you white. Jesus Christ.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:35:58 -0000

Please don't try to use Jews as a wedge against women and POC asking for parity in critical responses. I am a Jew and don't appreciate it.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:31:04 -0000

I gotta tell you, I don't give a shit what you think is lazy. I'm sick of dudes coming on, constructing straw man arguments in defense of the shallowest privilege, tokenizing specific women and inventing a support that they have not expressed (until Camille Paglia, Christina Sommers and Wendy McElroy actually comment, you can't and don't represent their viewpoint), and constructing worst-case scenarios of white or male voices being permanently excluded all because somebody had the temerity to say that maybe white men are not always the authority on everything.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:25:13 -0000

Um, no? If it does, surely you can provide a quote that says that, rather than a paraphrase.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:20:54 -0000

Not enough dudes coming in to tell women what they actually mean. I hope we get some more.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 16:28:00 -0000

You have invented a demand they do not make by stitching together a collection of comments and insisting it's what they actually mean.

Don't accuse me of being disingenuous.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 15:57:03 -0000

Asking for parity, a greater variety of critical voices, and a reflection of diversity does not equal demanding that critics be paired with projects based on race.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 15:51:46 -0000

Rejecting your alarmist framing is not a dodge.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 13:45:22 -0000

Huh, Philly. Well, that's only 55 percent POC, so touche. I do think criticism would be improved if the critics better represented the democgraphics of their city, yes.

Statistics is a branch of mathematics, by the way.

Re: A Collective Call Against Critical Bias

maxsparber — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 13:16:42 -0000

"As for only one out of eight nominators being a POC? That is 13.5%. Which is precisely the percentage of the general population that are African Americans."

The percent of the population that are POC is about 28% -- weird that you left out every other race.

Since we're talking about Tony nominations, which take place in New York: 56 percent of the population in New York City are POC. Weird that you didn't factor that in.

We're not going backwards. You're doing weird, exclusionary math.

Re: The Moving Company and the American Theatre’s Patriarchy

maxsparber — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 12:37:52 -0000

This is an extremely clear and well-argued critique. Thank you.

Re: 6 Murphy Village minors taken from families by South Carolina Department of Social Services

maxsparber — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 11:30:08 -0000

So Frank has turned into Vero? It's sort of hard to believe you when you have several different and anonymous Disquus identities.

Re: The Plea Deal

maxsparber — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 11:40:20 -0000

No, that's not how journalism is done. It's not "everyone knows this ethnic group is bad an I have one example to prove it."

By that standard, all Jews are stingy, all blacks are criminal, and all Chinese are inscrutable. Journalism demands that if you are going to claim a group is corporately criminal, you make your case. This article failed to do so.

Re: The Plea Deal

maxsparber — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 10:39:01 -0000

Is there a reason you repeatedly identify the ethnicity of the subjects of the story, and start with smearing their entire community? There are something like 1,400 people in Murphy Village, so 22 people represents .01 percent of the population, which is well within the usual percentage of every population that engages in criminal activity. The article itself says these sorts of crimes are relatively common nowadays in the general population.

Instead, the framing of this story, and the quotes selected, suggest there is something uniquely criminal about Irish Travellers. And I am going to go ahead an bet you're going to leave this comments section unmoderated, so it will become a typical cesspool of people making unsubtsantiated claims about Travellers.

This is not journalism. We don't typically identify the ethnicity of the subject of a story unless it is vital to the story, which is not demonstrated by this story. Instead, a small percentage of one neighborhood committed a crime and Metro Spirit using it to tar the entire community.

Which is consistent with the unethical way Travellers are treated by the press in general. So much for Metro Spirit's vaunted independence.

Re: NC investigators search for Irish Travelers connected to North Augusta

maxsparber — Fri, 23 Dec 2016 16:59:52 -0000

As the first comment shows, the framing of this story just encourages prejudice. There is no evidence that the men are Irish Travellers, but even if they were it is not relevant to the story and just furthers the idea that all Travellers are criminals.

Re: Strange man enters Irish Traveler Church shouting obscene things

maxsparber — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 12:00:13 -0000

Gosh, I wonder if two decades of the news media printing story after story identifying itinerant con artists, without proof, as being Irish Travellers, and printing the recent story about arrests in Murphy Village as being primarily around their ethnicity, endlessly suggesting, without proof, than an entire ethnic group is a criminal conspiracy, might have contributed to this?

Or that the media allows their comments section on their own websites and on social media to become a cesspool of epithets and slander against the Travellers? Tyhat certainly helps foment anger against the group.

Re: Strange man enters Irish Traveler Church shouting obscene things

maxsparber — Wed, 05 Oct 2016 11:57:30 -0000

Travellers are not gypsies, and, as a journalist, I would never allow someone who insists on using epithets and calling an entire ethnic group "trashy" on the air, nor someone who claims their expertise is "talking to witnesses," which is heresay both in court and on the news.

Re: Irish Travelers indicted of racketeering and fraud plead not guilty in Federal Court

maxsparber — Fri, 30 Sep 2016 21:47:24 -0000

All 2500 people in Murphy Village do this, huh?

Weird that the FBI could only make a case against less than 0.01 percent of the population.

Either they're terrible at their jobs or you're a bigot. I know what is more likely.

Re: Irish Travelers indicted of racketeering and fraud plead not guilty in Federal Court

maxsparber — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 20:03:42 -0000

Hardly. If you're a small-minded bigot you think you know it, though.

Re: Irish Travelers continue to fight to get girls back

maxsparber — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 16:16:34 -0000

I think I heard some muffled sounds a few seconds ago. DON'T COVER YOUR HEAD!

Re: Irish Travelers continue to fight to get girls back

maxsparber — Wed, 28 Sep 2016 11:51:09 -0000

Hope he's conformable in that hole.