Gaza: Violence since Israel's 2005 'disengagement'

From a 7,000-word article, "Israel’s Descent," by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024

"When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.

The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has launched five offensives in the Strip. The first four were brutal and cruel, as colonial counterinsurgencies invariably are, killing thousands of civilians in retribution for Hamas rocket fire and hostage-taking. But the latest, Operation Iron Swords, launched on 7 October in response to Hamas’s murderous raid in southern Israel, is different in kind, not merely in degree."

If a nation begins with "other forms of persecution...including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanisation," then "a war defined as an existential battle for survival" may catalyze yet more intense violence.

What word best describes the violence?

"The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.

But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide – or at least acts of genocide – in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of circumspection – indeed, of extreme caution – where Israel is involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch."

Israel hasn't been disengaged

Afeef Nessouli introduces "The Limits of the Law," an interview with Noura Erakat in the Fall 2024 issue of Acacia (Issue 2), by saying:

"Despite Israel’s argument that it completely withdrew from Gaza nearly two decades ago, the court ruling [by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on July 19] reaffirms that Gaza remains occupied. Israel still controls entry points and exits, water space, airspace, access to resources, the freedom of movement, enacts surveillance, and, of course, strikes the area whenever it chooses.

* * *

The problem with international law is that it can’t be enforced. Enforcement falls to the Security Council, of which any of the permanent members (including the U.S.) can veto any resolution. Hence, in practice, there has been no meaningful accountability for Israel. The world’s inability to hold Israel to account has led us to this genocidal moment. The law will not be able to turn back time or bring those who have been senselessly murdered back to life, but sanctions and pressure are more likely when legal justice is clearly defined. The argument that two equal parties are simply unable to come to an agreement has always been a farce and a product of the peace process framework. The limitations of international law have allowed for a precedent in which an occupier can negotiate human rights away from those they occupy."

In this interview, Noura Erakat says that, "as a scholar of third world approaches to international law (TWAIL)," she "understands international law as the site of domination and as constitutive of its colonial form in order to protect colonial interests and powers. That’s certainly evident in the Genocide Convention as well." Europe didn't care about the Nazi genocide of the Jews. "They didn’t. Jews were also dehumanized, and there was a racial regime that excluded them from citizenship, that ghettoized them, that subjected them to premature death and ultimately to a logic of annihilation." Yes, the Genocide Convention arose as a response to that genocide, but that does not mean they cared about Jews nor about people who aren't white. Under the Genocide Convention, "brown and black people were not historically conceived as civilians or even as combatants—people who have the right to fight under the laws of war. They have been explicitly rendered 'The Savage.' They don’t become incorporated and recognized as civilians or as fighters that deserve protection until 1949, when they are recognized as civilians. And then in 1977 they are seen as fighters in the Additional Protocols to the 1949 Geneva Conventions."

False binaries

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Sep 2, 2024:

"I want to name the false binary of "hostages vs. Palestinians" when the real binary has always been, "soaking the earth with more and more blood" or "find a political solution." We’ve been talking about this for months. Eg here, here.

May the memories of everyone killed over the last 11 months be a revolution towards collective liberation, safety, wholeness, and a true future for everyone in the region."

Arguments over the anthem

Israel’s national anthem, "Hatikva," is written from a Jewish point of view and refers to Jews living freely in their land of Zion. This often causes distress for the one-quarter of Israelis who are not Jewish. In the February 2013 swearing-in ceremony for new parliament members, several Arab politicians left the room to protest the lyrics. Suggestions to make the language more inclusive, even when those suggestions are vague and put forth by Jewish politicians, have been controversial.

2025 in the West Bank

Israel sends tanks to the West Bank for the first time in 20 years. Here’s why that’s significant, Mick Krever, CNN, February 24, 2025

2025 in Gaza

"Addressing the people of Israel in an article written in Hebrew and published by Haaretz on Thursday, Olmert, who served from 2006 to 2009, condemned current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for 'waging a pointless war, without a clear goal or plan, and with no chance of success,' according to Google’s translation of the piece."

— 'Indiscriminate, Unrestrained, Brutal': Former Israeli PM Calls Gaza Assault 'War Crimes': "What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination," former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote in an op-ed aimed at Israeli citizens. Kelby Vera, HuffPost, May 25, 2025

This is extremely significant. Former 🇮🇱 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (2006-9) wrote in a May 22 Haaretz op-ed that Israel is: 🔴 intentionally waging a war of annihilation 🔴 premeditatedly adopting a policy of starvation 🔴 massacring civilians 🔴 making declarations of genocide A thread:

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— Monica Marks (@monicamarks.bsky.social) May 24, 2025 at 7:23 PM

Reporter's Notebook: Testing the Fabric of Humanity in the West Bank: What Does Freedom, Dignity and Liberty Look Like? Danielle Moodie-Mills, NBC News, Nov. 12, 2015

Nasser Abu Srour, a Palestinian man jailed in 1993, was released in October 2025. He wrote The Tale of the Wall "about my coming to terms with life in prison" and In Writing as Therapy in which he "revisited early stations of my life, staged confrontations with my younger self, which was a rather painful experience." His third book is in progress. It's "a psychological study of my fellow prisoners. Or at least that is what was about, when 7 October happened. The second half – which I plan to start writing next week – will be about the war. I want to offer a full account of what happened in Israel’s prisons during the genocide." (‘Why Don’t You Just Die?’: Surviving torture and brutality inside Israel’s prisons, Nasser Abu Srour, translated from Arabic by Luke Leafgren, May 20, 2026)

Over the years, the US has given Israel billions of dollars for military use, and evidently there are no enforceable conditions on it. Read: ‘The Humiliation Just Compounds’: Trump Tells Netanyahu Not to Bomb Iran, Then Israel Strikes Anyway: US President Donald Trump “appears unwilling to spend the political capital necessary to rein in Netanyahu—beyond angry phone calls and tough public statements,” said one analyst. Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, Jun 08, 2026

Over 100 House Democrats vote to block billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, reflecting growing schism in party, Annie Grayer, CNN, July 15, 2026

"When you use a phrase like ethnic cleansing.. you must have known that in some ways that would have been inflamatory" Maybe Nina Warhurst should spell out who thinks saying that is inflamatory. Is it the people murdering Palestinians & stealing their land, by any chance?

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— Saul Staniforth (@saulstaniforth.bsky.social) September 9, 2026 at 2:11 AM

Ed Miliband has overturned decades of Foreign Office inertia on illegal Israeli settlements: Foreign secretary ends UK’s feigned helplessness with sanctions and condemnation of ‘ethnic cleansing’, Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, Sept 8, 2026

Boorstin: The 'pseudo-event'

“Great unforeseen changes—the great forward strides of American civilization—have blurred the edges of reality. The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses. The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images—however planned, contrived, or distorted—more vivid, more attractive, and more persuasive than reality itself.

We cannot say that we are being fooled. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that we are being ‘informed.’ This world of ambiguity is created by those who believe they are instructing us, by our best public servants, and with our own collaboration. Our problem is the harder to solve because it is created by people working honestly and industriously at respectable jobs. It is not created by demagogues or crooks, by conspiracy or evil purpose. The efficient mass production of pseudo-events—in all kinds of packages, in black-and-white, in technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms—is the work of the whole machinery of our society. It is the daily product of men of good will. The media must be fed! The public must be informed! . . .“

— Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1961. Quoted by Susan Bordo in BordoLines, 2024.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.

Trans man in Sydney, Australia (1937)

A clip of Peter Alexander, a trans man from New Zealand, interviewed in Sydney in 1937.

Also listed on the Digital Transgender Archive.

You may be interested in: As Berlin Held the 1936 Olympics, These Athletes Changed Their Sex: Assigned female at birth, some went on to live as men. Published on May 13, 2024 in Prism & Pen. 12-min read.

What makes a story queer?

Spotted on Bluesky:

I need the straights out there to understand that the presence of queer characters isn't what makes a story queer, and that you will never be the authority on whether a story is or isn't queer. It's fine and healthy to acknowledge that not every conversation includes you.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 11:50 AM

In a lot of media there's an assimilationist attitude toward the inclusion of queer characters, because it prioritizes cishet comfort: "they're not that different from you, their existence won't threaten heteronormativity!" But that's a lie, we are different and we still deserve the same empathy.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:05 PM

A near-universal component of being queer in a society like ours is being required, from birth, to identify with a pov that is not our own. With that in mind, part of being queer usually means reading between every line to find ourselves and others like us. It's a psychic survival mechanism.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:22 PM

So it's not just us queers having fun when we say Gonzo is a nonbinary icon, or that the only straight Star Trek character is somehow Miles O'Brien. By necessity we're tapped into the Astral Plane, and we're also objectively correct.

— Sen 💀🔥 (@dresdencodak.bsky.social) Jul 4, 2024 at 12:31 PM

We'll always have vanilla? No, of course not. We could lose it.

Climate change and deforestation destroy our planet piece by piece. We can lose vanilla.

"Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a band of the earth between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation."
— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "This Is How the World’s Favorite Scent Disappears," New York Times, Aug. 4, 2024, part of the What to Eat on a Burning Planet series

Vanilla by gate74 from Pixabay

See what's happening:

Evacuations Ordered As 'Exceptionally Dangerous' Wildfire Rages Near Athens, Greece: Hundreds of firefighters backed by more than 30 water-dropping planes are battling a major wildfire raging out of control on the northern fringes of the Greek capital. Elena Becatoros, HuffPost, Aug 12, 2024

20th-century Zionism took many forms

Photo by Gidon Pico from Pixabay

One news article

Do Donald Trump and Kamala Harris identify as ‘Zionist’? Here’s what their campaigns told us, Ron Kampeas, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 12, 2024:

"Zionism, born as a modern ideology in the 19th century, sought to establish a Jewish polity in the Land of Israel. Since that was achieved with Israel’s establishment in 1948, its meaning has been contested, but is generally taken to signify support for Israel as a Jewish state, and for its citizens. Many Jews self-identify as Zionist, and antisemitism watchdogs caution that bigots will often use the word “Zionist” in their attacks on Jews."

One essay

From a 7,000-word article, "Israel’s Descent," by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024

"...as Shlomo Sand reminds us in Deux peuples pour un état?, there was another, dissident Zionism, a ‘cultural Zionism’ that advocated the creation of a binational state based on Arab-Jewish co-operation, one that counted among its members Ahad Ha’am, Judah Magnes, Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt. In 1907, the cultural Zionist Yitzhak Epstein accused the Zionist movement of having forgotten ‘one small detail: that there is in our beloved land an entire people that has been attached to it for hundreds of years and has never considered leaving it’. Epstein and his allies, who founded Brit Shalom, the Alliance for Peace, in 1925, imagined Zion as a place of cultural and spiritual rebirth. Any attempt to create an exclusively Jewish state, they warned, would turn Zionism into a classical colonial movement and result in permanent warfare with the Palestinian Arabs. After the Arab riots of 1929, Brit Shalom’s secretary, Hans Kohn, denounced the official Zionist movement for ‘adopting the posture of wounded innocents’ and for dodging ‘the least debate with the people who live in this country. We have depended entirely on the force of British power. We have set ourselves goals that were inevitably going to degenerate into conflict.’

But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the Zionist mainstream. For the advocates of ‘muscular Zionism’, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has argued, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine would allow Jews not only to achieve the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on sacred Jewish land."

After Israel was recognized as a state in 1948,

"Jewish critics of Israel who traced their roots to the cultural Zionism of Magnes and Buber – or to the anti-Zionist Jewish Labor Bund – would find themselves vilified as heretics and traitors. In Our Palestine Question, Geoffrey Levin shows how American Jewish critics of Israel were dislodged from Jewish institutions in the decades following the state’s formation."

There was

"Fayez Sayegh, the leading Palestinian spokesman in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s...joined forces with an anti-Zionist rabbi, Elmer Berger of the American Council for Judaism, who had already established himself as a critic of Zionism in his 1951 book, A Partisan History of Judaism, in which he assailed the movement for embracing ‘Hitler’s decree of separatism’ and betraying Judaism’s universalist message."

Today, "the most consequential wave of resistance may be the one we are seeing now from a generation of young Jews for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach."

Books referenced

Note: Deux peuples pour un État? is a translation from Sand's Hebrew into French by Michel Bilis.

A Partisan History of Judaism by Elmer Berger (Amazon)

Wikipedia

United States support for Israel in the Israel–Hamas war

Another essay

Jody Alyn reflects on kibbutz life in Israel in the year following the Yom Kippur War (which was in 1973). Some people at the kibbutz "made fierce argument for a shared future with Palestinian Israelis." Alyn points out:

"History depends on who tells it. The histories of Israel/Palestine are convoluted, conflicting and confused by colonialism and capitalism. They go back to World War II and the partition of Palestine in 1948. Or to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Or to Russian pogroms, the Ottoman Empire or to Judea and Samaria in the Iron and Bronze ages."

Here, "people who lived through the same events came out with different stories depending on where they sat in the system." Unfortunately, "Israel was favored—and used—by the British colonizers in power."

She says: "My idealism died in 1995 when Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Laureate Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli settler. The oh-so-fragile peace process was also dealt a fatal blow." She found herself "ashamed, angry and afraid of what Israel had become."

"What we do to the 'other,' we do to ourselves," and therefore: "We must all call for a permanent cease-fire; for regime changes, for truth and reconciliation and for collaborative, cooperative rebuilding. Now and forevermore."

Read: Can I Take My Identity Back From Israel?: Reflections of one Jew on her life and times. Jody Alyn. Age of Empathy, Nov 29, 2023.

What do politicians use it to mean?

Returning to the JTA article, mentioned earlier:

"Asked by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency if Vice President Kamala Harris considers herself a Zionist, a campaign aide replied:

“The Vice President and Governor [Tim] Walz have been strong and longstanding supporters of Israel as a secure, democratic homeland for the Jewish people. They will always ensure Israel can defend itself from threats, including from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Told that the first sentence of that response would meet perhaps the most common definition of “Zionist,” the aide replied that beyond the statement she relayed, she had “nothing for you.”"

Virginia Heffernan, Nov 2025:

"Catholics and Protestants are fighting again, and the subject is Israel.

In other terms, this grudge match is being widely reported on. But we misunderstand the whole thing when we portray it as entirely between isolationist nativists and Christian Zionists. True, the first group, exemplified by Nick Fuentes, hates Jews. The second, exemplified by Charlie Kirk, has made an uneasy alliance with them in anticipation of the Rapture.

But what’s more salient is that the first group are Catholics, and the second are Protestants (or Evangelicals, as the mainline Protestant denominations have essentially collapsed)."

Here's a religious point of view

Some time after October 7, 2023, Netanyahu cited a victim's mother who said she wanted Hamas destroyed. He said: "One thousand prosecutors at The Hague cannot stand even for a second" against what the woman had said, nor "against the justness of our moral path."

Of this, Peter Beinart commented:

"Such statements can best be understood as a kind of theology. Israel is righteous by definition. Its war in Gaza remains moral even when its crimes are documented for all to see. More than sixty years ago, Hannah Arendt warned that Jewish nationalism contained this danger. 'The greatness of this people was once that it believed in God,' she wrote in 1963. 'And now this people believes only in itself?' That's the real meaning of Netanyahu's words. When he proudly declares that a Jewish state cannot be judged by any external standard, he is making that state — and the Jewish people for whom it speaks — an object of worship."

He refers to the Biblical story of Korach:

He adds: "I wish leftist activists more often acknowledged that there's a tradition of cultural Zionism, championed in the mid-twentieth century by figures like Martin Buber and Judah Magnes, which wanted a thriving Jewish culture in Palestine–Israel but opposed a Jewish state."

Consider against the 19th-century seeds of fascism

A biography of the Antoine-Amédée-Marie-Vincent Manca Amat de Vallombrosa

“Deporting Jewish activists who visit the West Bank to engage in protective presence used to be unthinkable. But since October, five Jews have been deported for participating in Israeli- and Jewish-led solidarity initiatives. Are left-wing Jewish young adults really enemies of the state?” (Why Does the Jewish State Keep Deporting Diaspora Jews?, Sam Stein, Haaretz, June 11, 2026)

In 1998, Netanyahu gave a speech in Washington in which he differed from Clinton's policy about the peace process. By contrast, the speech was not in Congress, but at a private gathering of evangelical Christians.

But Evangelicals have also played a role in disrupting the peace process. 'I was ambassador for four years of the peace process, and the Christian fundamentalists were vehemently opposed to the peace process,' says Itamar Rabinovich, who served as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. between 1993 and 1996, under the Labor governments of Rabin and Shimon Peres. 'They believed that the land belonged to Israel as a matter of divine right. So they immediately became part of a campaign by the Israeli right to undermine the peace process.'

No one played that card more forcefully than Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu, who as prime minister used the Christian right to fend off pressure from the Clinton administration to proceed with the peace process.

On a visit to Washington, D.C., in 1998, Netanyahu hooked up with Jerry Falwell at the Mayflower Hotel the night before his scheduled meeting with Clinton.

'I put together 1,000 people or so to meet with Bibi and he spoke to us that night,' recalls Falwell. 'It was all planned by Netanyahu as an affront to Mr. Clinton.'

That evening, Falwell promised Netanyahu that he would mobilize pastors all over the country to resist the return of parts of the occupied West Bank territory to the Palestinians. Televangelist John Hagee, who gave $1 million to the United Jewish Appeal the following month, told the crowd that the Jewish return to the Holy Land signaled the 'rapidly approaching...final moments of history,' then brought them to a frenzy chanting, 'Not one inch!' -- a reference to how much of the West Bank should be transferred to Palestinian control.

The next day, Netanyahu met with Clinton at the White House. 'Bibi told me later,' Falwell recalls, 'that the next morning Bill Clinton said, 'I know where you were last night.' The pressure was really on Netanyahu to give away the farm in Israel. It was during the Monica Lewinsky scandal...Clinton had to save himself, so he terminated the demands [to relinquish West Bank territory] that would have been forthcoming during that meeting, and would have been very bad for Israel.'

"American Rapture," by Craig Unger, Vanity Fair, Dec. 2005. page 220.

Enslaved scribes of early Christian texts

Sarah E. Bond, author of Trade and Taboo...

...has a new article in Hyperallergic, "The Enslaved People Who Wrote Down the New Testament": Art history has long concealed the scribes who put swaths of the Bible and early Christian writings on paper. July 28, 2024.

"In ancient Egypt and early Imperial China, scribes were of high status," she says, but this contrasts with "many Greek and Roman cities, villas, libraries, churches, and even monasteries," where scribes were often enslaved.

These books are mentioned in the article:

The Slaves of the Churches: A History by Mary E. Sommar

She also directs us to "Female Scribes in Roman Antiquity and Early Christianity," an article by Kim Haines-Eitzen.

And another article: "In one study, ancient historian Adam Serfass reconstructs how Gregory gave enslaved people to his friends and ordered them bought at auction and even tortured."

Why this interests me

I've written about eunuchs in history.

When we read about eunuchs serving as scribes, we should look at the context of whether they were enslaved. Also, if sole authorship is credited to someone (eunuch or not), we should ask who was helping them (maybe enslaved people, some of whom may have been eunuchs.

You may also be interested:

On gendered argumentation in 20th-century New York

Just learned of this book:

It's about "the New York Intellectuals—a heavily Jewish scene, formed around Cold War liberalism and high modernist literary tastes, that profoundly shaped everything from art criticism to foreign policy," as David Klion, contributing editor to Jewish Currents, explains today.

Klion says:

"A rare work of academic history with crossover appeal to more mainstream readers, Write Like a Man is also the first book to give full attention to the fraught gender dynamics that shaped the New York Intellectuals. Most of the group was male, defined by names like Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Howe. Grinberg not only gives fair due to the most prominent women in the group—chiefly Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter—she also ingeniously demonstrates how gender shaped the actual writing produced by both male and female New York Intellectuals.

The title comes from a killer 1963 quote from NYRB co-founder Jason Epstein: 'With women in that crowd, the first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough.' To Grinberg, 'writing like a man' refers to a mode of rigorous, swaggering, aggressive argumentation rooted in the legendary cafeteria alcoves of then all-male City College, where many of the future New York Intellectuals spent the 1930s engaged in verbal duels with Stalinists. It's a style still recognizable today, and Grinberg portrays it as a means of assimilation for the sons of poor Yiddish-speaking immigrants trying to assert their masculinity in an America that stereotyped Jews as meek and effeminate. Grinberg’s female subjects, as the Epstein line suggests, held their own in the group because they were able to master this style—though as Grinberg also shows, the women in the scene who came from different backgrounds (either as gentiles or, in Arendt’s case, as a German Jewish emigre with formidable Old World academic credentials) received more deference from their male peers than the shtetl-descended women who were often treated simply as wives."

More on Jason Epstein

Michael Castleman explains how Jason Epstein invented trade paperbacks:

"In 1953, Jason Epstein was a recent Columbia University graduate working in publishing — temporarily, he thought — as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. He lived in Greenwich Village, a short walk from the funky but glorious (and now defunct) Eighth Street Bookshop, which counted among its patrons Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, E.E. Cummings, Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.

To Epstein’s wide young eyes, the place was paradise. He visited after work, sometimes lingering for hours. But his editorial assistant’s salary paid so little (forty-five dollars a week) that he couldn’t afford hardcovers, and that was all Eighth Street Bookshop stocked.

One day Epstein asked the store’s owners if they might be interested in selling less expensive paperback editions of their hardcovers to appeal to working folks and young people like him.

Not Pocket Books. Heaven forbid!

No, Epstein explained, he envisioned a larger format and better paper..."

Excerpted from Michael Castleman, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (2024), excerpt reprinted in LitHub

Related

The Birth of Doubt: Confronting Uncertainty in Early Rabbinic Literature (2020)
Moshe Halbertal, trans. from Hebrew by Elli Fischer.
Series: Brown Judaic Studies.

Argument Isn’t Everything: On Creativity in Philosophy, Justin Weinberg. Daily Nous, December 10, 2025

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Project 2025 says 'porn' to mean 'imagined enemies of the family'

What does Roberts mean by "children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries." What is this "pornography" that Project 2025 says should be "outlawed"?

Melissa Gira Grant reminds us today in "The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn" (The New Republic):

"The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define 'pornography,' their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the 'normalization' of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls 'gender ideology.' Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. 'Pornography,' Roberts continues, is 'manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.' And how should it be outlawed? 'The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.' Project 2025 is not targeting 'pornography' as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography."

Pay attention:

"Behind all this is what philosopher Judith Butler calls anti-gender ideology and movements, which is how we should understand Project 2025’s anti-pornography rhetoric. It’s a transnational movement, fueling and also fueled by the reassertion of patriarchal order, of a return to normative sex and gender roles, and of ordering the world by sex and gender hierarchies. Gender in this movement has come to be regarded as a code, as Butler has described it—for pedophilia, for the destruction of the family, 'a plot by urban elites to impose their beliefs on ‘real’ people,' a threat to civilization, a threat to masculinity. When the fight is defined that way, a fight to save not just children and families but society and civilization, nearly any crackdown can be justified."

Read also: Exclusive: Justice Amy Coney Barrett defends overturning Roe v. Wade and reveals Supreme Court dynamics in new book Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst, September 2, 2025

Aziz Rana on Republicans' constitutional control

Constitutional scholar Aziz Rana talked to The Ink. Rana is author of The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them (2024). You can subscribe to the Ink if you like this stuff — in fact, now's the time.

Rana says there were

"specific dynamics in the mid-20th century. From the New Deal to World War II, through the Cold War and decolonization, that created the conditions for political agreement rather than anything that's there in the text of the Constitution. And now all of that has gone away. I worry that liberals oftentimes invoke that broken set of agreements whenever you see even more brazen acts of misbehavior by either the Court or political actors like Trump. And I just don't know that that's going to work going forward."

That agreement "defined politics in the mid-20th century." It was a time when "there was some degree of center-right, center-left consensus around the terms of the institutions, how folks operated with respect to each other, which types of discretionary misbehavior were out of bounds, and which kinds of discretionary misbehavior would be papered over." But now, it has broken down. We have "nostalgia" for it, but that doesn't help. The breakdown explains why "we're in this moment."

Some liberals appeal to what the Constitution supposedly really says or should mean, at least on a symbolic level if not with any real-world political force that they could leverage to promote their ideas. Although "Constitutional veneration...can provide some constraints," in the long term it may be unhelpful, as it legitimizes the whole system that lets certain people get away with bad behavior.

More specifically:

"The problem, in my view, is that the long-term trajectory of American power and the centrality of the presidential office to the national security state and the national security apparatus have over the long term overwhelmed these proceduralist constraints such that the War Powers Resolution is deeply ineffective.

The courts overwhelmingly ended up deferring to presidential authority. And I'd say that the collapse of the Soviet Union was seen as a validation of not just the American Cold War project but specifically the belligerent, aggressive Reaganite approach to the Cold War. That was very closely tied to market fundamentalism, to a kind of belligerent posture towards the world, to unilateralism globally.

And all of this got built into the cultural politics of the country, and made it very, very difficult, in Congress and certainly in the courts, to constrain the presidency. And we saw this dynamic play out again in the War on Terror."

Sure, "use whatever constitutional devices that are available to try to hold Trump accountable," but recognize "why those devices fail time and time again."

With Republicans in control of the Supreme Court,

"the internal disagreements of the right — how much immunity is too much immunity, how much of the administrative state to gut, whether or not to completely get rid of the right to abortion or just to functionally get rid of it by systematically undermining the checks on laws that would constrain reproductive rights — that is the sum total of the legal universe. And that means that the rest of us are effectively now just subject to their internal disagreements."

Democrats and journalists still imagine an "ideological spectrum" that used to exist in the Supreme Court but no longer does. The justices will only agree to hear cases on things they care about ("affirmative action, abortion, Trump's immunity, the nature of the administrative state"), and they'll debate the answers from their own perspectives. Issues that matter to many Americans today — "the carceral state," "a fundamental right to education" — are never going to be taken up by the court.

We need "systematic changes to constitutional structure, including some very fundamental reforms to the structure of the Supreme Court itself." More justices on the court, term limits for them, and better procedures to amend the Constitution.

Rana's book:

2026 addendum

"It does not matter, in practical terms, whether ICE’s actions are legal. In mafia states, legal is a malleable notion. What matters is that they are wrong. What matters is how they can be stopped." Sarah Kendzior, January 15, 2026