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falsely claims that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election.”
The Jewish Democratic Council immediately agreed (but that’s easy, since they only support Democrats), as did the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), which also only provides funding for Democratic candidates. But DMFI responded to J Street with a challenge of its own: “We are still waiting for @jstreetdotorg to join us in refusing to back candidates who voted against replenishing the life-saving #IronDome missile defense system.”
As for AIPAC, it is not at all clear that the lobby can commit to not backing candidates who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. That list of 147 Republicans includes staunch supporters of Israel such as Senators Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, as well as Representatives Lee Zeldin and Brian Mast. Clearly, AIPAC has no plans of shunning these lawmakers or others on the very long list of Republicans who backed Trump’s attempt to overturn the election results. And none of the lobby’s supporters really expects them to.
AIPAC’s fundamental approach to partisan politics is issue-based. If a politician is on its side regarding Israel, they will receive the lobby’s blessing, regardless of their stance on other issues.
An excerpt from Moment’s bi-weekly column, Jewish Politics and Power, with reporting from politics reporter, Nathan Guttman.Read more Moment’s Jewish Politics & Power newsletter is published every other week. Sign up at at momentmag.com and sign up for the news-momentmag.com/jpp
How can we teach history—or learn from it—if we can’t agree on facts? “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” revisits the harrowing photo of that name and asks what “other perspectives” could bear upon its content. To consider such evidence, to look at it squarely and refuse to turn away, is a first step toward knowledge— whether the event it documents occurred far off or close to home. —Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor
Said to be on the back of a photo found in a German soldier’s album, these words have attached themselves to the image itself.
The man who kneels at the edge of a pit heaped with bodies, the man who kneels at the edge of a pit heaped with bodies—the man who kneels at the edge of a pit heaped with bodies—is looking up at the crowd of German soldiers watching him. They stand like lynch-mob casuals around their day’s achievement. Bespectacled, a German soldier, behind the man, leans slightly to extend a gun, trigger ready. In the kneeling man’s lap bunches his coat, a pile of ordinary warmth he maybe thought he’d need. I can imagine him, the fact of him, before this day. I don’t have to imagine this photo—
I’ll give them their own opinions, not their own facts, the Senator said. And yet, a pliant official, telling Texan teachers about new law, advises, If you assign a book about the Holocaust, also assign “one that has opposing…other perspectives.” But what “perspective” beside this view across the pit where a second soldier stood to click his shutter a moment before the killing shot? Did that soldier bring his exposed film to a shop and later spread his snaps across a tabletop to scrawl his slanted notes on their backs? Perhaps. No one now can say, but the photo of that name still frames the fact: a thin man, hair rumpled, collar buttoned, hands clenched, who, kneeling on the edge, briefly watched the German soldiers standing around his almost slaughtered town.
Sandy Solomon is writer in residence in creative writing at Vanderbilt University. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines, most recently The New Yorker. Her book, Pears, Lake, Sun, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.
