Elissa Olinsky

So happy for you Joe!! 💙💚

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

…it didn’t sit right with me. I really feel for my colleagues who are still there and trying to do good work.

Among the reasons why I left including the fear among leadership that any decision made by staff that angered Dear Leader would lead him to can the board and director and replace them with Holocaust deniers. Having spent 9 years of my career there teaching about the dangers of obeying in advance…

I left the museum during Trump 1, and am not sure how they’re doing things today, but I’m absolutely certain this was not the social media manager’s decision. Comms director, museum director, and the board for sure had a hand in this.

Every Holocaust scholar I know emphasizes that the reason to study its singularities, but to connect it to other past and present forms of violence, to try and learn from the former and stop the latter. Whereas bad actors try to use its singularities to avoid both learning and stopping.

(That was me for a few years)

My parents made that switch this year! After shoveling out their neighbors’ driveways for 30+ years, this week they got a call saying “we’ve watched you do for everyone else, this time it’s our turn to do for you” 😍😭

A snowy backyard with about four inches of snow on furniture and grass

@capitalweather.bsky.social

Sleet line just arrived in North Bethesda.

but is it a fast-tattoo or a loose-tattoo?

One vote for alligator over here

I wish you, and me, and all of us, strength & solidarity & joy in the new year as we find our way together: which we have done this year already, and will arise tomorrow to do again. /thread

snakes leave behind whole skins. all manner of flying creatures, not just butterflies, do them one better, whole new selves from wriggling worms. rocks into gems. mystics die to the flesh to be reborn in the spirit. rebirth is the rule, not the stray exception, if we can grasp it

When you get the reputation of being the guy with the encouraging words on New Year's Eve, it can start to come through as a little pressure -- what if the situation on the ground is worse than usual? what if people are more scared than they usually are, and with cause? what use are good vibes then?

Gibbous Earth hovering over the lunar surface against a pitch-black sky. A remarkable view photographed by Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968.

This day 57 years ago.

Earthrise.

A remarkable view of Earth hoving into view as the Apollo 8 command module flew over the lunar surface.

That's us. That's home.

straight-up dog vuvuzela tbh

Just a friendly reminder as we go into the holidays:

Folks don't have to explain to you why they don't drink.

If you offer them a drink and they decline, don't ask them why. It's not your business.

Just offer them something without alcohol to drink instead. And move on.

What the heck just flew over my house in Bethesda???

Join us today at 2:00 PM!

Hit the link below to RSVP.

graphic in the mamdani font/colors saying: CALL YOUR SENATORS and TELL THEM NO SHUTDOWN DEAL WITHOUT ACA FUNDING 202-224-3121

Find your senators at reps.fyi or call 202-224-3121

Hopescrolling >>> doomscrolling.

leave me alone, I am Sad About Baseball

Baseball is the worst because my team was eliminated 2.5 months ago and the next pitch might kill me. It is Nov. 1

Has this World Series consistently featured the highest quality of baseball? No. Has it featured the widest array possible of beautiful, weird, specific baseball delights? Yes.

I like him so much more when he’s pitching for the team I’m rooting against

7 Policy Recommendations for Combating Antisemitism in the United States The surge in antisemitism seen in America today threatens the Jewish community and the nation’s democracy as a whole, and it necessitates a nonpartisan, whole-of-society effort to eradicate hate.

NEW: My CAP colleague Ben Olinsky has written a sobering examination of the surge in antisemitism in America and delivers seven solid nonpartisan policy recommendations for fighting it.

@americanprogress.bsky.social

Sexy Museums in Chestertown reporting for duty 🫡