There is, as I mentioned on the most recent Bonjour Chai podcast, a meme I think about a lot:

If this all looks like gibberish to you, allow me to explain: If your reference point is limited, everything you encounter looks like the one thing you know about. It’s a bit like the adage about, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the bestselling author of, most famously, 2015’s Between the World and Me, as well as his 2014 opus published by The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” After a break from non-fiction, he’s back with The Message.

I bring up the Boss Baby meme not because I’m under the impression that Coates has seen only one movie (he is a screenwriter, in addition to being an A-list American public intellectual), but because of my frustrations with two things happening at once in Coates’s latest project. One is the American tendency to transpose U.S. racial history onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The other is the more global tendency to place Jews and, now, the Jewish state at the centre of events, such that when Jews err, it isn’t human fallibility but rather some sort of cosmic timeless oppressor manifesting itself.

What I’m responding to in this column isn’t the book, which I haven’t read but would like to. Rather, it’s journalist Ryu Spaeth’s interview with Coates, itself an interesting document to say the least. That interview is the current cover story of New York:

But appearing in this high-profile glossy venue is also somewhat at odds with the pretense that Coates has been effectively exiled from mainstream media for daring to mention the plight of the Palestinians.

“In interviewing journalists about Coates and his work,” writes Spaeth, “I got the sense that taking the Palestinian side, or even talking about the issue at all, invited significant risk to one’s credibility and career, part of a constant policing of the parameters of acceptable discourse on the subject.”

Given that what I know about Palestinian suffering comes mainly from media coverage, both in the form of reported articles and from journalists posting about it, I’m having trouble seeing where silencing is entering into it. There is a longstanding question of how politically outspoken news reporters are permitted to be, in any direction. But on the opinion side of things, opinions are getting voiced! There are individuals keeping mum about political views at work, in all directions, in media and beyond, which is probably an unavoidable fact of human nature.

Legacy media outlets shift in their leanings, as personnel (and funding sources) evolve, such that The New Republic of 2024 is not the one of 2015 which is not the one of 1995. So, too, The Atlantic, where Coates had made his name. The most that seems to have happened here is that Coates is not ideologically aligned with that magazine’s current iteration. But he has not personally been deplatformed, nor is he breaking the news that, for example, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank isn’t looking good.

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Coates’s expertise comes from a 10-day trip (a kind of anti-Birthright Israel) to East Jerusalem and the West Bank in the summer of 2023. He then did reading and research, and concluded that the topic on which he is a justly respected authority—the Black experience in America—is what he sees before him in the Middle East. Palestinians aren’t merely oppressed but oppressed under the same terms, for interchangeable, let’s not bother ourselves with details reasons.

“For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate.”

“In Coates’s eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the territories. In the soldiers who ‘stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs.'”

“‘On that street so far from home,” he writes, ‘I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space. For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.'”

Oppressor-oppressed is a dynamic (she types, fancying herself Foucault), but different situations are different and require different contexts to understand. How is this controversial? I guess it is, or maybe I am lacking in moral purity, or over-versed in modern Jewish history, or something.

To speak of the Boss Baby meme may seem to diminish the seriousness, but I think it’s the opposite. Flattening different things, even different things that are all bad, doesn’t help anyone understand anything. It just invites anyone who’s spent more than five minutes thinking about these topics to point out why no, actually, the conflict between two groups of people who look alike, one with we were here first more on their (immediate) side, the other countering with everyone in the world got together and decided either to murder us or allow us to be murdered, is not quite the history of U.S. slavery and segregation.

***

If contemporary Americans make everything about race in the U.S. conceptions thereof, people across rather greater swaths of time and geography make everything about Jews. This is, I will be the gazillionth to point out, not unrelated to Jews’ role in Christianity. Not Jews as in, 41-year-old women in Toronto whose sensibilities align with Larry David. Jews as in, Biblical Hebrews. We’re not the same group of people, except that we are. It’s confusing. It is, dare I say, complicated.

Coates begins “The Case for Reparations” with a quote from Deuteronomy: “And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.” The Hebrews were on his radar when thinking about the legacy of slavery in the United States. And goodness knows us Hebrews are on his radar now.

“By the time Coates returned to New York, Palestine was his obsession.”

Coates’s and everyone else’s, is the thing. I’m not sure being the “obsession” of the wider world has served Palestinians any better than it’s served Jews, but here we are.

Coates, per Spaeth, “had also been told that the conflict was ‘complicated,’ its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.'” Coates, in his moral purity, sees things plainly as they are, and will present them as such to the world.

“When I asked Coates what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific—for example, to have journalists not be ‘shot by army snipers.’ He said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the problem for years. Pragmatism, at any rate, has never been his concern.”

The problem is that this “greater question” is the complicated part. Speaking out against “specific” wrongs is easy. The “body of knowledge” enters into it when it comes to such things as figuring out what the after ought to—or plausibly could—look like. Let’s say you believe (for what it’s worth, I don’t) that the simple answer is for Israel to put down its arms entirely in all cases. For the IDF to disband. What follows? Where do Israelis go?

Or does he just want Israel out of the West Bank, in which case this is so much less dramatic and who exactly is cancelling him for this?

If you don’t have the answer to how to bring about Mideast Peace, you can simply join the club of people who think war is terrible, who think however many times a day, in different contexts, imagine if those were my kids, and who has no practical step-by-step diplomat’s guide out of the mess.

***

It’s hard to say how much of the Boss Baby vibe I’m getting comes from Coates, and how much is from Spaeth’s coverage. The Message takes Coates not just to the Middle East but to South Carolina and Senegal. But no one’s hanging the flags of these locales on their Montreal electioneering materials, now, are they? Not to be all, no Jews, no news, but, this.

Spaeth admits that “Coates did parachute in”—to the topic, that is, not anywhere literally, but insists that “one could argue that this provides the book’s greatest asset—its sense of revelation, its portrait of the new in all its shameful splendor. The point he is trying to make is that anybody can see the moral injustice of the occupation.”

Yes, definitely, the thing needed to clarify what’s going on in a high-conflict region is for people with no stakes and shallow knowledge to hold forth about it.

And a part of Spaeth’s commentary got to me more than anything from Coates himself:

“The most famous of Israel’s foundational claims—that it was a necessary sanctuary for one of the world’s most oppressed peoples, who may not have survived without a state of their own—is at the root of this complication and undergirds the prevailing viewpoint of the political-media-entertainment nexus.”

Consider this phrasing. The idea that the moral necessity of Israel is not a fact, or at least a belief many people of all sorts share, but “the prevailing viewpoint of the political-media-entertainment nexus.” As though Jews are all in politics, media, or entertainment. As if all the media is The Atlantic, as if all Jews work for The Atlantic.

Full disclosure, I freelanced for their website a few times over a decade ago, earning for each article enough to buy a small bag of groceries at Loblaws today. Anyway, these are my notes from the nexus for this week. Happy New Year.

For more original Jewish culture commentary from Phoebe Maltz Bovy subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.

The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.