Emily Tamkin

Modi Defiant as Trump Steps Up Pressure on India’s Russia Oil Purchases Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi struck a defiant tone in the face of US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, urging the nation to buy local goods as his administration signaled it would continue buying Russian oil.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi struck a defiant tone in the face of US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats, urging the nation to buy local goods as his administration signaled it would continue buying Russian oil

A good rule for Trump is that any promise of peace, a deal, a good/service is likely to be broken and any promise of racism or violence will probably be kept.

The more notable thing is that almost a decade into his political career people believed that he would

(This is social media so let me add: Before anyone says I am implying that Jewish unity should be used as reason to silence dissent or criticism, I invite you to read anything else I have written, ever.)

For Tisha B’Av

Judea Pearl has been a rare voice in academia cheering on the Trump administration’s crackdown on higher education, so this really is a leopards eating faces situation. And it’s telling that his response is not to stand in solidarity with other academics, but to say, “Investigate them, not me.”

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Sometimes I say this and people say well culture is power or the street is power and with apologies for borrowing from Game of Thrones: No, power is power.

How the George Floyd Protests Changed America, for Better and Worse

"the left’s illiberalism occupies a marginal position in mainstream Democratic politics and the right’s illiberalism possesses a stranglehold on the Republican Party"
Bracing review that gets at something much bigger: people love to leave power out of their analysis
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/b...

This is an incredibly twisted reboot of “Chicago”

The Budget Lab at Yale University, a nonpartisan research center, updated its tariff tracker on Friday. It calculated that American consumers will have to contend with an average effective tariff rate of 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. As a result, the center estimates that price increases will cost each household on average $2,400 this year. Shoe prices, for example, are expected to rise 40 percent in the short run. America’s total economic output — its gross domestic product — is estimated to shrink by about $120 billion annually in the years to come.

Nonpartisan budget lab at Yale has "calculated that American consumers will have to contend with an average effective tariff rate of 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934. As a result, the center estimates that price increases will cost each household on average $2,400 this year."

while I grudgingly accept that not everything can be a verse of Chad Gadya, "then came the bird that dropped the fish that ignited the wire that started the brushfire that the firefighters quenched in Ashcroft B.C. which is 67 km west of Kamloops" is a verse of Chad Gadya

Opinion | How Trump's ‘antisemitism’ deal with Brown University actually endangers Jewish students The agreement, the latest between the Trump White House and major universities, raises pertinent issues about who is protected and who is not.

Good piece by @emilyctamkin.bsky.social on the incoherence of the Trump administration's strategy of effectively requiring DEI for Jews and banning it for other minority groups. www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Opinion | How Trump's ‘antisemitism’ deal with Brown University actually endangers Jewish students The agreement, the latest between the Trump White House and major universities, raises pertinent issues about who is protected and who is not.

For MSNBC Opinion, I wrote about Brown’s agreement with the Trump admin and how promoting the idea that “DEI” is bad for Jews and also simultaneously that only Jews are entitled to it is totally counter to promoting understanding of Jewishness/fighting antisemitism

www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...

Critical Crossroads: In Conversation with Emily Tamkin, Part 1 — The Workers Circle The first of a two-part conversation with Emily Tamkin, contributing columnist at the Forward and regular contributor at Slate and the Washington Post, among other publications, and author of B...

I am so looking forward to having these conversations with @mordkhetzvi.bsky.social next month. Join us!

www.circle.org/events/criti...

A little like when Trump wanted to just stop testing for Covid because there was too much Covid and so he wanted to just suppress the numbers.

Moms on moms This is about my mom

Call me Pedro Almodóvar because this is all about my mother emilyctamkin.substack.com/p/moms-on-mo...

Only kind of related but last summer in response to a piece about how Democrats weren’t talking about men’s issues I wrote a newsletter asking why reproductive health wasn’t seen as a men’s issue, like a complete naif.

Doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying! But blaming women is like crypto or any number of other get rich quick schemes in these, our terrible times: seems so much easier that it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t ultimately work.

I think the narrative put forth here - there are lots of ways to be masculine, rejection isn’t the world against you it’s one person not being into you (also true for women but I digress), treat other people like human beings - is good, but “blame women” gets and will get more traction

"The one step the organization took pains to avoid, at least publicly, was examining how the Israeli government’s actions might be fueling a global movement against it. Not in the war’s opening days, when Netanyahu drove more than a million civilians out of northern Gaza. Not the next year, when videos appeared to show Israeli soldiers throwing corpses off a roof, or when Israeli drones attacked a convoy of World Central Kitchen aid workers, killing seven. Not when people such as Mahmoud Nafez al-’Aidy of Rafah awoke in hospitals and soon learned that their entire families had been wiped out. “I’m alone in the world now,” al-’Aidy told the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem. “Everything I cared about is gone.”"

as is this

"“New plan,” Greenblatt said in his address to national leadership last year, repeating a phrase that had recently been taken up by other Jewish organizations: “Put on your own oxygen mask first.”"

is a rich text unto itself

Inside the Crisis at the Anti-Defamation League The group used to believe the rights of Jews were inextricable from the rights of everyone else. Its war against anti-Zionism has changed everything.

Some victims of antisemitic hate say they didn't turn to the national ADL b/c it’s “so focused” on “calling balls and strikes on what is antisemitism… It’s less interested—in fact, maybe even not interested—in protecting the values that made America great for Jews.” (6/6)

nymag.com/intelligence...

ADL Musk

I spoke with 40+ sources for a look inside the Anti-Defamation League. Here’s some of what I found.

ADL’s gentle response to Elon Musk’s infamous salute was partially driven by his support of Israel. To ADL, that indicated he didn’t have “antisemitic tendencies.” (1/x)

nymag.com/intelligence...

“Although nationalist politicians promise to preserve the distinctive character of their country, the threat they are all fighting, namely, their political opposition and their critics, and the terms they use to describe this threat, is always the same”
www.theunpopulist.net/p/populist-n...

I spent decades at Columbia. I’m withdrawing my fall course due to its deal with Trump | Rashid Khalidi The university’s draconian policies and new definition of antisemitism make much teaching impossible

Historian Rashid Khalidi cancels his Fall class

‘“Making things here and exporting them isn’t really feasible as long as these tariffs are in place,” he added.’

Wait, the cops were trying to make sure Dershowitz didn’t misgender anyone 😭

Wall Street Journal headline and deck: "New York Shooting Puts Mamdani on the Spot Over Policing Views: The killing of four people in a Midtown office building rattled a city where mass attacks are rare and violent crime has declined."

It's really weird to demand accountability from a NYC mayoral candidate for a deadly NYC shooting rather than the current NYC mayor, an ex-cop who campaigned on a "tough on crime" platform and promptly got indicted for crimes

Finally delivering for the coal miners.