Editor-in-chief: David Suissa
February 10, 2022
The Supreme Court okayed a controversially gerrymandered electoral map from the Alabama state legislature in a 5-4 vote. The case has given rise to a debate about the Court’s so-called “Shadow Docket,” which refers to cases decided by emergency orders without oral arguments.
You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.
Monday’s ruling effectively (even if not formally) gutted the Voting Rights Act’s ban on racial gerrymandering, allowing states yet another tool to dilute the voting power of racial minorities. But Monday’s ruling isn’t a disaster only for voting rights; it’s also a harbinger of even more problematic shadow docket rulings to come.
This was an emergency ruling, so they didn’t do much to explain why. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote that it was simply too late, nine months before an election, to change up the maps. The justices said they’ll decide the merits of this case later…
Florida may soon pass a controversial new law limiting teachers’ freedom to discuss sexuality and sexual identity in the classroom with children in grade school. This law, and others like it pertaining to how race and sexuality are taught in schools, are stirring up a fierce culture war.
Here’s the rub: It’s the combination of this vagueness and punitive mechanisms such as rights of action and tip lines that is the problem. And proposals for tip lines are proliferating.
As a gay conservative myself, I decided to read the actual bill to see what all the outrage was about. As is so often the case, the left-wing shrieking moral outrage and charges of bigotry are wildly overblown and not based in reality.
By suggesting there is something so shameful about LGBTQ people that they can’t be mentioned or must be discussed in negative terms, these laws stigmatize and isolate LGBTQ youth, contributing to a climate of hostility and harassment in public schools…
Israelis have recently discovered that the police have been using spyware to surveil civilians without court orders. Many are worried that their home is transforming into a surveillance state.
Israel has long been considered the only democracy in the Middle East. Yet personal privacy, along with limits on police overreach, no longer seems to be part of the Jewish state’s democratic principles.
The enormous impact of this exposure on the Israeli intelligence world and the damage it does to our security must not be underestimated.
The NSO spyware scandal is a good reminder that sometimes, humanity creates incredible tools whose use it later has to limit, so as not to let the matter get out of control.
The window for a diplomatic breakthrough on a new Iran Deal is drawing to a close, with the Islamic Republic reportedly just “weeks” away from having enough nuclear material for a bomb. Has Israeli PM Naftali Bennett resigned himself to this fact?
There is a sense of resignation in Jerusalem that while the Americans – as well as the other countries in the talks with Iran – are listening to Israel’s input, there is little the Bennett government can do to influence the outcome.
Those who are charitable might say this is a calculated policy decision. Those who are charitable might say that those now in power in Jerusalem saw the harm Netanyahu’s battle with the Obama administration over Iran did to US-Israel ties…
US President Joe Biden explicitly supports Israel’s freedom to act against Iran, whether there is a return to a nuclear deal or not, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Monday. According to Bennett, Biden made a statement to that effect in their phone conversation Sunday night.
Here are three takes on broad trends in the Jewish world:
Jews in history have known moments of great tragedy and fear, and times of relative stability and welfare. Today, objectively, the situation leans to fair, with most Jews in the world away from neediness, a strong Jewish sovereign state, and civil rights ensured to Jews in democratic countries where most of them live.
…whereas in the past the religious might have relied on family convention, now they sought the correct way of doing things in Jewish books. On many issues of Jewish law and practice, they would find “a wide variety of different positions”. So, if “one seeks to do things properly (and these ‘things’ are, after all, God’s will) the only course is to attempt to comply simultaneously with as many positions as possible”, Soloveitchik explains. And hence the move to greater ritual strictness.
Who am I and what is my relationship to the past? For the modern Jew, there are perhaps few questions greater than this. American Jews have never stopped struggling with their relationship to the past. Consider the 76% of American Jews (per the 2020 Pew survey) who view “Remembering the Holocaust” as essential to being Jewish.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Nancy Pelosi of operating a “Gazpacho Police,” presumably intending to refer to the Gestapo, the police force of Nazi Germany. Here are some of Twitter’s best responses:
With the Gazpacho Police, every crime is a cold case
I do believe we can all agree to defund the Gazpacho police. Let’s heal.
All you people claiming that there’s no such thing as the Gazpacho Police clearly are unfamiliar with the Soup Nazi.