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April 18, 2025
Key Developments and What We're Discussing Today:
1) Programming note: Since Sunday is the last day of Pesach, you're getting the newsletter today. I'll be back to the usual Sunday morning bright and early schedule on April 27. Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!
2) Today, April 18, is 560 days since October 7, 2023. The Hamas-led attack on Simchat Torah resulted in 1,182 fatalities (including 44 Americans) and over 4,000 wounded. 251 hostages (210 alive, 41 dead bodies) were taken during a day of brutal savagery and sexual violence. It was the largest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with more than one in every 10,000 Israelis killed, and the third overall deadliest terrorist attack in the world to date.
3) The 59 remaining hostages include five Americans. Edan Alexander is the only remaining American believed to be alive. Hamas holds the bodies of Omer Neutra, Itay Chen, Judi Weinstein Haggai, and Gad Haggai. We cannot rest until all the hostages are released.
4) Trump has still not called Josh Shapiro after the antisemitic arson attack early Sunday morning. Trump doesn't care about antisemitism except as a pretext for deportations without due process and attacks on higher education.
5) Trump vetoed an Israeli plan to attack Iran next month. Crickets from our Republican friends.
6) Partisanship can be good or bad, depending on how we define it. We need more of the good kind.
7) We should not fall into the false equivalency trap of describing our political climate as "polarized."
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Hi Steve,
Did you hear about the imminent release of all 59 remaining hostages? Neither did I. Trump has not secured the release of any hostages since the last hostages under the agreement Biden negotiated were returned on February 27, despite warning Hamas several times that there would be "all Hell to pay" unless they released the hostages. Promises made, promises broken.
Andrew Miller writes that the Trump administration wasted the best opportunity to achieve a permanent end to the war in Gaza and that "unless the Trump administration changes its approach, more Israeli hostages could die, more Palestinians will be killed, and the United States will look increasingly feckless."
Keith Siegel, who spent 484 days as a hostage, described the physical and psychological distress he endured in an interview with The New York Times.
Time Magazine chose former hostage Noa Argamani as one of its 2025 most influential people and chose Doug Emhoff to write about her.
Did you hear about Trump's warm phone call with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro? Neither did I. It's been nearly a week since the antisemitic arson attack early Sunday morning, when Shapiro and his family were home and asleep after the first seder.
Yet Trump has not yet called Shapiro. He has not condemned the attack as antisemitic. His administration has not called this a hate crime or an act of domestic terrorism (fortunately, no Teslas were harmed).
JDCA CEO Halie Soifer said on April 16, "Last year, Trump didn’t hesitate to call Josh Shapiro a ‘highly overrated Jewish governor.’ Now, nearly four days after Gov. Shapiro was targeted in an act of political violence — reportedly due to his position on Israel — Trump hasn’t clearly condemned it.
"Trump feigns support for Jewish Americans and Israel, but his actions suggest otherwise. He’s a hypocrite who condones political violence when it suits his political agenda, and his silence amid this targeted arsonist attack on Gov. Shapiro speaks volumes. Shame on the President.”
Read JDCA's April 14 statement for more background.
Let's not talk about "partisanship" and "polarization" anymore. As they are used today, those terms cloud rather than clarify.
Democracies are partisan. Elections are partisan. Democrats and Republicans differ on nearly every major issue. A proposal is not bad because only one party supports it, nor is it good because both parties support it (as rare as that is these days).
Some members of Congress brag about working across the aisle. I don't care who they work with. I want them to pass good legislation.
Saying that legislation is good because it appeals to members of a party that, according to Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, is "ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition" is not a ringing endorsement. When we are talking about MAGA, it's more of an indictment.
Partisanship is bad when it means agreeing with one party or another based on "my party right or wrong." For example, Republicans who saw Russia as our number one enemy now siding with Russia because Trump sides with Russia is bad partisanship.
Want a more recent example? We learned last week that Trump vetoed military action by Israel against Iran. Republicans were outraged when Biden discouraged Israel from attacking Iran and told Israel to "take the win."
Yet Republicans had nothing to say following this week's report that Trump refused to support Israel's plan to attack Iran in May. That's "my party right or wrong" partisanship. Not only did Netanyahu fail to persuade Trump to lift tariffs on Israel when they met, he failed to persuade Trump to back his plan for military action against Iran. But Trump is still Israel's best friend ever, right?
(Israel hoped to set Iran's program back a year or more with military action, which is what the Iran Deal that Trump tore up in 2018 accomplished through diplomacy. We don't know if this administration is capable of reaching a satisfactory diplomatic solution or the details of Israel's planned operation, which makes it impossible to know if Trump was right to scuttle Israel's plan.)
When someone describes Trump as ''a bigot, a misogynist, a fraud, and a bully," calls him a "con artist," and says in March 2016, "under no circumstances will we support Donald Trump for president" and then supports Trump once Trump is nominated by the GOP for president, that's the kind of partisanship no one should respect.
But supporting a political party because you agree with the positions it takes is common sense and should not be described pejoratively as "partisanship." Those who like to pat themselves on the back for disregarding party affiliation and call themselves "independents" are often low-information voters who think that deciding who to vote for is like flipping a coin.
The differences between the parties today are starker than ever before. If you think deciding who to support is a hard call, you're not paying attention. Voting "the person, not the party" is like voting "the person, not the issues." Party affiliation is the single best predictor of how a candidate will vote on any issue. No vote is more important than the first vote a winning candidate will make: for Speaker of the House, which decides the legislative agenda, and which depends entirely on party affiliation.
Partisanship is not polarization. Jennifer Rubin argues that using "polarization" to describe our political situation promotes false equivalence and "suits the corporate media’s obsession with moral equivalence and contrived balance."
She writes that "it would, for example, be absurd to say we are 'polarized' on the issue of immunization. Gosh, if only each side were not so stuck in its position. Those Democrats are so fixated on medicine and science. One side has, frankly, lost its mind on the subject; the other has not. Extreme authoritarians have overtaken one political party, putting at risk functional government and democracy itself, while another party remains a traditional center-left party."
She is correct. There are not two sides to every story. Sometimes, one side is right and the other side is wrong.
We should not dismiss our differences as "polarization." The stakes are too high.
We should, as Rubin writes, "welcome back those who can still be persuaded to return to the reality-based, pro-democracy silent majority. Fortunately, Trump’s grotesque incompetence, dizzying reversals, and overreach is making that task easier."
Corrections. I'm entitled to my own opinions but not to my own facts, so I appreciate it when readers bring errors to my attention. No one pointed out any errors in last week's newsletter. The streak of perfection continues.
In Case You Missed It:
1) Ami Fields-Meyer and Julia Angwin: A practical guide to courage in Trump's age of fear.
2) Harvard's response to Donald Trump. Nora Berman writes that Jewish university presidents are saying Trump is exploiting campus antisemitism, not fighting it. Maybe we should listen to them and to Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), co-chair of the Congressional Jewish Caucus.
3) Nadav Tamir: Even Trump understood: Netanyahu is not Israel.
4) Rob Eshman sat through the movies October 8 and The Encampments so we don't have to.
5) On April 15, a coalition of ten organizations representing a broad swath of mainstream American Jewry – including three of the four denominations – issued a joint statement rejecting the false choice between confronting antisemitism and upholding democracy.
6) Matt Johnson breaks down how Bari Weiss's "Free Press" has lost its way and is radicalizing the more sophisticated right.
7) On Wednesday, the United States joined Russia, Belarus, North Korea, Eritrea, Mali, Nicaragua, Niger and Sudan in voting against a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russian aggression against Ukraine. This is the company we keep under Trump.
8) Franklin Foer writes that Trump's actions can be best explained as a Marxist theory of power—but against knowledge workers, not billionaires.
Social Post of the Week. Rep. Jack Kimble.
Thread of the Week. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ).
Video Clip of the Week. The White Potus--SNL.
Vintage Music Clip of the Week. Mockingbird - Carly Simon & James Taylor.
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I periodically update my posts on the IHRA definition of antisemitism and on why Democrats are better than Republicans on Israel and antisemitism. My definition of "pro-Israel" is here (it's a work in progress, as am I).
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