Reaction to Prop. 8 ruling (UPDATED)
A number of Jewish groups are expressing disappointment with the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Proposition 8 in California, which bars marriage between same sex couples, while Orthodox organizations are praising the ruling. Some excerpts from their press releases:
The Anti-Defamation League, which joined an amicus brief arguing that Proposition 8 represents a revision to the State Constitution, rather than an amendment, and as such requires approval by the state legislature: "The Court's ruling sets a dangerous precedent. As we argued in our amicus brief, 'If the fundamental rights of gays and lesbians can be stripped away by a mere 52% majority, then future amendments will enable Californians to strip away fundamental rights from other disfavored groups.'"
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism: "The Union for Reform Judaism joined an amicus brief, coordinated by the California Council of Churches, to make the Court aware of our unshakable commitment to the rights of all people, regardless of sexual orientation. The Court's affirmation of the legal legitimacy of the 18,000 marriages before the passage of Proposition 8 embodies the hope that full marriage equality will soon by the norm across our nation. While today's news dampens our spirits, it does not diminish our resolve."
National Council of Jewish Women: "The California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Proposition 8 is a disappointing step backward. Denying same-sex couples the right to marry is an affront to civil rights. While disheartened by this ruling, we are buoyed by the Court's decision to recognize the legal marriages of the 18,000 same-sex couples who wed in 2008."
Orthodox Union: "We supported Proposition 8 because in addition to our religious values, which we do not seek to impose on others, we fear that same-sex marriage poses a grave threat to the fundamental civil right of religious freedom. Scholars and advocates on both sides of this emotionally charged debate agree that codifying same-sex marriage without providing robust religious accommodations and exemptions will create widespread and unnecessary legal conflict that will "reverberate across the legal and religious landscape." Already, in states with same-sex civil unions and similar laws, religious institutions, including churches, social service providers and youth groups have been penalized by authorities for their beliefs. Forcing a choice between faith and the law benefits no one."
Agudath Israel of America: "Agudath Israel of America and Agudath Israel of California are gratified that the will of the people of California to preserve the traditional meaning of marriage has been legally affirmed by the State Supreme Court. Agudath Israel of California was an early and vocal supporter of the state constitutional amendment that expressed this will, and thus takes a particular interest in the outcome of this case.There is one troubling aspect of today’s decision, the failure of the court to apply the people’s will retroactively to nontraditional 'marriages' entered into before the effective date of the state constitutional amendment. The result will be inherently incoherent, to say nothing of offensive to tradition-minded Californians. A wiser, not to mention more proper, decision here would have more accurately reflected the California electorate’s wishes."
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Sotomayor, pork and the meaning of Latino
This 2001 speech by Supremes candidate Sonia Sotomayor is raising hackles because of her remarks to the effect of: Old man: wise; old Latina woman: even wiser.
Ben Smith at Politico uncovers something even more unsettling -- her taste for pig flesh:
For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir -- rice, beans and pork -- that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events. My Latina identity also includes, because of my particularly adventurous taste buds, morcilla, -- pig intestines, patitas de cerdo con garbanzo -- pigs' feet with beans, and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito, pigs' tongue and ears.
I've just written about Sotomayor's close ties to the Jewish community and how much she loved Israel on her two visits there. That said, dinner at her home might be, um, a problem.
I mean, feet, ears, tongue and intestines -- is there a part not on the menu?
On another matter, covered by Ami, no: Cardozo was not the first Latino judge. I'm Sephardic, my parents spoke Ladino as a first language, and I would never consider myself "Hispanic." It would be hugely presumptuous to do so.
First of all, language is the critical signifier in such a designation (something Sotomayor addresses in her speech). I'm pretty sure Benjamin Cardozo was born generations after his ancestors stopped speaking the language. Bill Richardson and Sotomayor do speak the language. (And eat the pig feet!)
It's more complex than that, even for those of my parents' generation who spoke the language. The story of Spanish speaking Jewry is the story of a slow, inevitable death, of culture, of language. My ancestors left Spain and Portugal with two identities: Jewish and Spanish. Spanish identity passed long ago. Jewish attachment, at least comparatively, thrived.
Why is anyone's guess: Why remain attached to a culture that reviled you? And then, Turks and Greeks were likelier to identify my ancestors as Jews than as Spanish speakers - and how you're defined in your surroundings is critical, no matter how autonomous we imagine identity to be.
And yet, and yet: My parents both traveled to Spain as soon as it opened up, in Franco's final years. They loved being able to deplane and converse freely with the locals as easily as if they had landed in New Zealand. They loved the questions they got about their accents. They toured the synagogues-turned-churches and brought back colorful picture books. They loved that Eydie Gorme, a New York-born Sephardia, recorded an album in Spanish that was a massive hit in Latin America.
And yet, and yet: When I was 13 and bought my mother a record of romanceros, traditional Ladino ballads, for her birthday, she couldn't listen to more than a track without weeping. She was fiercely proud as a Jew, and eventually immensely proud that I moved to Israel, but she made it clear she didn't want any further reminders of this past. This was a culture that was slowly but surely crushed, by the Spanish queen, then by Hitler, then by the ultranationalistic homogeneity that swept through the Balkans in the last century, and then by the exhaustion of its preservation. What did it mean, what was it worth, to speak Spanish? Judaism had meaning that reached into notions of God, of our place among our families, among ourselves, in the world. Spanish was a ... language. Had my parents returned to Turkey (they briefly considered it, after a few bone-chilling Canadian winters) I would have belonged to the generation that would speak Turkish, that would reject Ladino as poltically incorrect.
My parents spoke Ladino, my older sisters understood it, I could piece together a little here and there, and I'm emblematic of this generation's Sephardic Jew.
I researched a little, and uncovered a few things about the past my parents weaned me away from: Durme, Durme, for instance, a traditional lullaby that featured on the album that drove my mother to tears. I asked my sisters if they remembered the song; they, born in Turkey, did; I, born in Montreal, did not. My mother sang me songs from the 1930s and 1940s movies that had made North America her ambition: "Shine on Harvest Moon" and "When I'm Calling You" (with its ridiculous notion of how Mounties pursued snowbound maidens). Not "Durme Durme".
Ten or so years ago, I visited Salonika for the first time in my life. (My mother''s family, descended from vintners, took its name from a vine laden valley to its north; two of my grandparents were born there; another ancestor earned the honorific "Pasha" functioning as a kind of treasurer to the provincial leader in the late 19th century.) I stayed with Greek friends, and when they asked about my (Greek-sounding) last name, I would try to explain but it was like enthusing about vespas at a bikers rally: It was all about Greeks vs. Turks. What was this about the Jews? No one even knew that the city once had a Jewish plurality; they were vaguely aware of a Jewish quarter.
My Greek friends were otherwise immensely hospitable, and wondered how a grandson of Greeks could not handle the language and insisted on calling me Ronnus and plying me with retsina. At one point, I couldn't take much more and retired to a bedroom over the balcony.
I closed my eyes and drifted into the suspended region between sleep and wakefulness. I heard one of my hosts asking my girlfriend where I was. She explained, and he laughed and started singing "Durme Durme."
I snapped out of my hangover and ran downstairs: How did you know that song? Did you know it was a Jewish song?
He shrugged: It was "around." He had heard the song "around."
As if I had lost it. Except I didn't. It never really belonged to me.
Cardozo doesn't need the "first Hispanic" honorific. We don't need to claim it for him.
It's enough that he was a proud Jew.
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Dissing Benjamin Cardozo?
Who says that Sonia Sotomayor will be the first Hispanic member of the U.S. Supreme Court?
From the initial New Yok Times report on President Obama's choice:
Indeed, in nominating the first Hispanic justice, Mr. Obama may appeal to a large and growing constituency whose party loyalty is still very much in play. Hispanic groups have expressed excitement about the idea of one of their own serving on the high court. (Some scholars argue whether Benjamin Cardozo was really the first Hispanic justice, but with his Portuguese-Jewish background, he never identified himself as a Hispanic.)
UPDATE: The Times has a full sidebar on the issue in Wednesday's paper:
Prof. Andrew Kaufman of the Harvard Law School, who is the author of a 1998 biography of Cardozo, said the debate was esoteric, complicated and, perhaps above all, amusing. ... “Well, I think he regarded himself as a Sephardic Jew whose ancestors came from the Iberian Peninsula.”
He said the term “Hispanic” was not commonly used during Cardozo’s lifetime and would probably have been unfamiliar to him in 1932 when President Herbert Hoover named him to the court, where he served for six years until his death. ...
The executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, Arturo Vargas, said the contemporary political definition of Hispanic in the United States would definitely not include Cardozo. The practical definition he uses, Mr. Vargas said, includes people who are “descended from countries in the Americas” with a Spanish-language heritage. It does not even include those from Spain itself, he said.
The Volokh Conspiracy has more:
It's possible that the answer to this question is "no." Justice Benjamin Cardozo was a descendant of Spanish or Portuguese Jews who immigrated to America, and took great pride in his Sephardic Jewish identity. For details, see Andrew Kaufman's excellent biography of Cardozo.
That said, ethnic identity is largely a social construct. So I can understand if Hispanics today take special pride in Sotomayor's appointment because she would be the first justice whose parents were recent arrivals from Latin America. Like many racial or ethnic classifications, "Hispanic" is a somewhat arbitrary label. It includes widely divergent groups such as Brazilians and Mexicans, while sometimes being used in a way that excludes Spanish and Portuguese immigrants and their descendants (including Cardozo)....
The issue is also being debated over at Half Sigma:
Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, is being billed as the first Hispanic Justice, but clearly under the definition of Hispanic, “persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central or South American, or others Spanish or Portuguese culture or origin, regardless of race,” Benjamin Cardozo, whose surname is Portuguese, was the first Hispanic Justice.
Everyone says that Bill Richardson is an Hispanic governor, and I don’t see how Bill Richardson is any more Hispanic than Benjamin Cardozo....
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Avoiding two states, getting one state
Over at her personal blog, War and Piece, Foreign Policy's Laura Rozen calls the latest New York Review of Books piece by Robert Malley and Hussein Agha on the prospects of Israeli and Palestinian peace "dangerous."
She doesn't explain why but -- without having spoken with her -- I'll venture agreement with her, and not in a way that diminishes Malley or Agha*.
It is dangerous not because of its central proposition -- that Obama should radically recast how the West talks about the conflict -- but because it almost explicitly makes a point that should be obvious: If Bibi Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman want to avoid talking two states, they better get ready to start talking one state.
I have yet to see this stated publicly by anyone in the U.S. or Israeli governments, or by any of the mainstream think tanks that consider Middle East policy in this town.
Agha and Malley don't come right out and say it, but it is clear by their qualifiers that they see it as an option. Here's an example -- note the "might well."
There may be another way. Its starting point would be less of an immediate effort to achieve a two-state agreement or propose US ideas to that effect. Rather, it would be an attempt to transform the political atmosphere and reformulate the diplomatic process. This would entail, first, identifying and recognizing fundamental Israeli and Palestinian concerns and aspirations and then placing them at the core of the process. In turn, this would involve altering how a US-supported solution is conceived and presented to both sides so that Palestinians see it as the outcome of their national struggle and Israelis as the culmination of their historic quest rather than as the byproduct of others' strategic pursuits. The end result might well be the same—two states, living side by side. But the journey would be more authentic and its destination more acceptable.
Or, might not.
And here's where they note the echo of the prospect of "one state" on the Israeli side:
When Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, calls for dropping timeworn slogans—land for peace, two-state solution—he has a political purpose. He also has a point. Endless repetition has not brought realization of these goals closer, and it has chipped away at their credibility. America's discourse can reconnect with both sides' hopes and needs if it addresses them and reverts to basics—namely, acknowledging and redressing injustices suffered by Palestinians and providing Israelis with the recognition and normalcy historically denied them.
The point made by Agha and Malley is two-fold:
1) Israel and its allies apply to the Palestinians the notion that statehood is an endgame, as it was for the pre-state Zionists. The authors suggest that for the Palestinians statehood is, instead, one of several means that have been considered to redress historical wounds -- and that those wounds (displacement, marginalization) are far more important than trappings that satisfy western notions of national fulfillment.
2) Nothing gets done unless you demarginalize the marginalized. Much of the article addresses the need to bring in the Palestinian refugees; but -- and this is what is dangerous -- the writers make the same point about the settlers:
The US should reach out to skeptical constituencies that would make a difference but are left indifferent by current talk of a two-state agreement. One example is the settlers, an active and dynamic Israeli group yet one that the outside world typically treats as modern-day lepers. A more inclusive political process could recognize their views and concerns, consider their interests, and invite them to take part in discussions.
How does one consider the needs of the settlers and those of the refugees in the same vision? A small core of Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals have, for a number of years, proposed this solution: a single state.
It's an elegant proposition, which might explain its growing appeal. If you can't come to an agreement on separating the West Bank from Israel, on making Jerusalem the capital of two states, then don't. Live together.
It's also nuts: Belgium, with two secularized Catholic constituencies separated only by language, still has togetherness issues. Yugoslavia split up, in part, because Serbo-Croatian-speaking Christians couldn't get along with ... Serbo-Croatian-speaking Christians. And on and on. We live in a world atomizing further and further into nation states, partly because it is the least worst means of keeping the peace. Talk of a Jewish-Arab federation is delusional.
Make no mistake, one state is not what Malley and Agha are proposing: Instead, they are saying that a peaceful solution must accommodate two polities that don't necessarily embrace two states.
They have a point, which is why I think that Israel and the pro-Israel community need to make it abundantly clear, and now, why two states is preferable.
In doing so, no substantial sector should be marginalized, on either side. Too often I've heard settlers -- and I mean the individuals, the families -- vilified as deliberately obstructionist by dovish sectors in Israel and in the U.S. pro-Israel community. Framing a two-state solution solution for this sector might involve prepating them for the pain of a phsyical move -- but it should be done without making them feel like villains and fools.
I can't count the number of times I've heard Israeli leftists say of settlers in the Hebron area, "why are they risking their children's lives?" Instead, the question should be: "How do we recognize your dedication to keeping Hebron meaningful to Jews in a way that makes sense for the overwhelming Palestinian majority?" I realize that Baruch Marzel is not about to collapse in gratitude at this rhetoric; but it would go someway to defusing how his extremism can at times sway settlers and other Israelis.
On the Palestinian side, this means recognizing the pain of displacement while at the same time making it clear that renationalization is not an option within the Green Line.
Clearly, I don't agree with all of the conclusions in the Malley and Agha article: not only is now not the time to discount two states; the very fact that it is not resonating means it needs a better and more insistent pitch. Furthermore, it baffles me why they would see President Bush's support of Palestinian institution building as "pernicious" because it made the prospect of statehood "humdrum." Palestinians aren't bored teenagers, and, if anything, Bush deserves credit for treating them as adults. Finally, I don't believe that Hamas will be appeased by any national unity formula that does not remove from office Mahmoud Abbas.
Nonetheless, it is an important and sensitive piece. And it should finally put to rest ideas that Malley -- vilfied repeatedly as an enemy of Jews, especially when his name is coupled with Obama's -- somehow is hostile to Israeli interests. Name for me any other think-tanker in Washington calling for recognition of the legitimate interests of settlers.
*This is the team that, in another NYRB piece, attempted to dismantle the conventional wisdom that Yaser Arafat was responsible for scuttling the 2000 Camp David talks when he turned down an unprecedented offer from Israel. I say "attempted" because, from covering those talks, I still believe that Arafat's cowardice and the Palestinian failure to internalize the permanence of Jewish nationhood were the principle villains; on the other hand, Malley and Agha raised important points about how Ehud Barak's obtuseness and Bill Clinton's accelerated approach did not help. But that's another blog post.
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OU: Sotomayor ‘very encouraging’ on religious liberty; NJDC likes nominee (CORRECTED)
The Orthodox Union has taken an early look at Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sonia Sotomayor opinions on religous liberty issues and finds them "very encouraging." Here's one example:
-Flamer v. City of White Plains (1993). This case involved a suit by a rabbi who had sought permission to display a menorah in a city park, but was denied permission in light of a city council resolution barring fixed outdoor displays of religious or political symbols in parks. The rabbi’s suit challenged the resolution as unconstitutional. Judge Sotomayor (then on the district court) agreed and struck down the resolution as a content-based regulation of speech that discriminated against religious speech.
Sotomayor, said the O.U., has "also recognized the importance, under the Establishment Clause, of protecting religion from state interference." For example:
-Hankins v. Lyght (2006). In this case, a 70 year-old Methodist minister brought an age discrimination claim against the Methodist Church after he was fired pursuant to the church’s mandatory retirement rules. Judge Sotomayor dissented from the panel majority’s decision to send the case back to the district court for further analysis under two different statutes. Instead, she took the position that the federal age discrimination in employment statute simply did not apply in this context, because applying it would entail undue intrusion into religious matters. She wrote: “Federal court entanglement in matters as fundamental as a religious institution’s selection or dismissal of its spiritual leaders risks an unconstitutional ‘trespass on the most spiritually intimate grounds of a religious community’s existence.” Given those concerns, she concluded that the federal statute was best read “not [to] apply to employment suits brought against religious institutions by their spiritual leaders.”
To read the full O.U. survey, go here. Also weighing in on the pick is the National Jewish Democratic Council, which praises Obama's decision to "have the Supreme Court reflect
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