Jews From The United States

"When the business community and our leaders cease to speak out on matters of public concern, they turn their backs on the foundations of our country's success."

"For our country to succeed economically, our market-based system must function alongside strong, effective government. Strong, effective government, in turn, requires a functioning democratic process."

"Unconventional monetary policy and stimulus can be part of a successful economic programme for a period of time. But they are no substitute for fiscal discipline, public investment and structural reform."

"Internalizing the core tenet of Professor Demos’s teaching — weighing risk and analyzing odds and trade-offs — was central to everything I did professionally in the decades ahead in finance and government."

"Some people I’ve encountered in various phases of my career seem more certain about everything than I am about anything."

"The only place people find fulfillment is within themselves. And too often, that's the last place they look."

"Moments after being sworn in as Treasury Secretary in 1995, I stood in the Oval Office to advise the president on how to address the threat posed to us by the unfolding economic crisis in Mexico, an experience repeated two years later during the Asian financial crisis. I know what it's like to recommend complex responses with no certainty of success."

"What's so sad to me… is we [the United States] have such tremendous strengths and so many advantages. And I think the damage we're doing is very substantial. Attacking our research, attacking science and basic research, attacking our universities, immigration policy that makes no sense whatsoever."

"What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had to paint. Whether he painted well or badly didn’t matter; painting was the stuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, lies in the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knew to be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had been worthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than if he had put down his desire and become the richest merchant in Amsterdam."

"There's no such thing as being too respectful of other people's traditions."

"It is important for non-Jews to understand that the Israeli prime minister is not the pope of the Jews. He is not a religious leader to whom global Jewry looks for guidance. He is a secular politician..."

"Adam Serwer is the most incisive political writer of our time.""

"The essays in The Cruelty Is the Point combine an unsparing accounting of our history with an astute examination of our present.""

"Serwer's powerful truth-telling grabs us, shakes us, and warns us that as long as we wishfully forget the history of American cruelty, we will fail to see it coming for all that we hold dear."

"No journalist has done more to advance our understanding of American power abuse in the age of Donald Trump than Adam Serwer."

"For those of us trying to find our way through the fog of the Trump era, Adam Serwer's essays served as a constant source of illumination and inspiration."

"History is not a thing that operates on its own. It’s written by human hands and interpreted by human beings, and that interpretation is substantially mediated by power. For example, after Reconstruction, Democrats in the South saw Reconstruction as a mistake and saw Jim Crow as restoring the proper order of things. That interpretation was challenged by W.E.B. Du Bois and others but it did not begin to be overturned in American public memory until the around Civil Rights era. My book is an attempt to put down a historical record of the Trump administration to show it as I believe it really was; to prevent this kind of manipulation of history from taking place (although, I’m just one person). But the public memory of the Trump administration will be determined substantially by who holds power in the future."

"most people think of cruelty as an individual problem. And it is that, but what I'm focused on in the book is cruelty as a part of American politics, specifically the way that it is used to demonize certain groups so you can justify denying people their basic rights under the Constitution and exclude them from the political process, which is substantially what the Trump project was about, both as a means to power and also as a policy agenda."

"We're always going to have disagreements in a democracy. That's what democracy is for. It's for reconciling disagreements. But what is not necessary is a politics where one side is trying to disenfranchise or exclude the other party's voters in order to maintain a grip on power. And that's what I mean when I talk about cruelty on a political level."

"The critical race theory scare is a reaction to the re-evaluation of history sparked during the Obama presidency and the Ferguson protests. They sparked an inquiry into how we have a Black president but still have glaring racial inequalities that have not been resolved. That process was accelerated by the election of Donald Trump because he was so overtly running on the politics of white identity, and then it culminated in the George Floyd protests. That recognition frightened conservatives because the knowledge that racial disparities were caused through public policy, that implies the state should step in and fix it. If you are conservative and you believe that these inequalities are actually the result of in-born natural ability then you don’t want the state to do that. So I think there’s a recognition on their part that this re-evaluation of history would cause people to understand the lingering effects of racism in American life, and to prevent that, they want to make it difficult to teach history that includes the extent that discriminatory policies shaped racial disparities in America."

"Trump is not essential to Trumpism. The politics of cruelty that Trump's employed are a product of a system that encourages a minority of the country to engineer the government so that they are no longer accountable to the public. And what - Trump's real innovation was showing how much of that the Republican Party can get away with. The only solution to this is for the Republican Party to have to reach out beyond the base that it currently has to serve a more diverse constituency so that it can no longer rely on fomenting the kind of intolerance represented by Trump's politics of cruelty."

"Even as an opinion journalist, I try to give the facts as best as I see them, but I think in political journalism, you often get some version of "one side says the sky is green and the other side says it’s blue." I think that is in part a product of longstanding journalistic traditions regarding objectivity but also a lack of diversity in the newsroom that has led to certain ideas of what is considered objective is unchallenged."

"there are more axes of difference beyond the Left-Right worth exploring, and in some ways, political journalism does not always acknowledge those."

"I think the phrase merely described a phenomenon we had all observed, but the proximate inspiration for it was when the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford. What struck me about the hearing was that she had said the thing she remembered the most was the laughter of Kavanaugh and his friend, and Trump seemed to zero in on that and he was intent on mocking her for coming forward and making the audience laugh at her. He viewed her words as an emotional weakness he could exploit. For that, that’s what crystalized in my mind. But even before then, the phenomenon was clear, I just didn’t have a sure way to describe it."

"It is not American Jews who have betrayed their Israeli cousins. It is the Netanyahu-led Israeli government that has betrayed Jews outside Israel, by aligning itself with nationalist parties in countries like Poland and Hungary, who are hostile to the ideals that make it possible for Jews in the diaspora to live free of persecution. (p 205)"

"Donald Trump, whose uncritical support for Israel and belief that America is fundamentally a nation for white Christians exacerbates a divide between the two largest Jewish populations in the world. (p 205)"

"In the aftermath of the Ferguson protests, it was fashionable to speak of a "new civil-rights movement." But it is perhaps more illuminating to see Black Lives Matter as a new banner raised on the same field of battle, stained by the blood of generations who came before. The fighters are new, but the conflict is the same one that Frederick Douglass and George Ruby fought, one that goes far beyond policing. (p 302 "The New Reconstruction")"

"Since the Civil War, American Jews have built a place for themselves here much the way other minorities have-by holding the United States accountable to its own principles (p 210)"

"While I was writing this book, I was inspired tremendously by the people who throughout American history have fought to expand the blessings of American democracy to everyone. And I think that what people need to understand is that America is the Declaration of Independence, and it's the three-fifths clause. These are both organic, authentic parts of the American tradition, and they're always going to both be a part of who we are as a country. And all we can do is try to hew as best we can to our best traditions rather than the ones that make us feel shame."

"American religious pluralism, however imperfectly practiced, is centuries older than the European commitment to purging anti-Semitism, which is younger than Israel itself. (p 222)"

"The Civil-Rights movement was a rebellion against the law. It had to be. And the police were called upon to crush it. From marches to sit-ins to protests, many of the most iconic images of the era were representations of police brutality: the Birmingham police siccing dogs on protesters, Alabama state troopers beating marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Atlanta cops manhandling Martin Luther King Jr. after an arrest at a sit-in. These images showed white Americans who had averted their eyes from the realities of segregation-from their restaurants to their schools to their neighborhoods that it was enforced at the point of a gun in their name. (p 259 "Abolish Police Unions")"

"The invention of the police is like the invention of race; memory and history have conspired to make the recent seem eternal. And yet both are recent innovations. (p 254 "Abolish Police Unions")"

"The artifacts that persist in my memory are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. (p 100)"

"Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another…Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump. (p 101)"

"What made Trump unusual was his administration's commitment to barbarism as an end rather than a means, with few of the redeeming features that tempered other presidents' approaches to immigration. (p 135-6)"

"Multiracial democracy is hard and messy and sometimes rude, but it is preferable to the alternatives (p 77)"

"Win or lose, the dust Trump was kicking up would linger in the lungs. I started poring over old texts about racism, immigration, and nativism, like John Higham's Strangers in the Land. I found disturbing echoes of Trump's rhetorical style in Hannah Arendt's description of Stalinist and Nazi apparatchiks in The Origins of Totalitarianism and had epiphanies about the fragility of American democracy reading W.E.B. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America. (p xiv "Introduction")"

"Memorial Day has the tendency to conjure up old arguments about the Civil War. That’s understandable; it was created to mourn the dead of a war in which the Union was nearly destroyed, when half the country rose up in rebellion in defense of slavery. (p20 "The Myth of Kindly General Lee")"

"There are former Confederates who sought to redeem themselves—one thinks of James Longstreet, wrongly blamed by Lost Causers for Lee’s disastrous defeat at Gettysburg, who went from fighting the Union army to leading New Orleans’s integrated police force in battle against white-supremacist paramilitaries. But there are no statues of Longstreet in New Orleans.* Lee was devoted to defending the principle of white supremacy; Longstreet was not. This, perhaps, is why Lee was placed atop the largest Confederate monument at Gettysburg in 1917, but the 6-foot-2-inch Longstreet had to wait until 1998 to receive a smaller-scale statue hidden in the woods that makes him look like a hobbit riding a donkey. It’s why Lee is remembered as a hero, and Longstreet is remembered as a disgrace. (p28 "The Myth of Kindly General Lee")"

"white supremacy in America is a history of conspiracies. The Middle Passage was a conspiracy to use black people as forced labor; the Confederacy was a conspiracy to keep black people as chattel; the end of Reconstruction was a conspiracy to overturn black citizenship; Jim Crow was a conspiracy to maintain black people as a subservient labor caste; the Tuskegee medical experiment on black men was a conspiracy; redlining was a conspiracy; the exclusion of most black people from many of the benefits of the New Deal was the result of a conspiracy; the theft of Henrietta Lacks's cells was a conspiracy; lending discrimination is a conspiracy; and so on and so forth. And for the most part, black Americans must go about their lives every day with knowledge of such conspiracies as most white Americans deny they exist, or that they have been of any significance in shaping modern life whatsoever. (p 163)"

"Trump and Barr let the biggest drug dealers in America off with a slap on the wrist. Law and Order indeed."

"On the one hand it's a lovely symbolism that the Dem slate in Georgia represents the old school civil rights coalition between black people and Jews. On the other, it's telling that the exact same tropes from then are being used by the gop in 2020"

"You see, when only white men are hired, it's just a question of competence and merit. But when white men are not hired, it's prejudice. Don't ever let anyone tell you conservatives don't understand systemic racism! They just think it only exists for them."

"I hope people who should have known better then, understand now that Giuliani succeeding Dinkins was an outcome of similar forces that led to Trump succeeding Obama."

"I will never write anything as concise and explanatory about race in America as this."

"while critics like Adam Serwer have rightly argued that when it comes to the bond between Trump and his supporters, "the cruelty is the point," my claim is that such cruelty is not only an experience of community and delight; it's fundamentally a return to a particular civic experience."

"A constant of the Trump years was that counting on Trump supporters to reach the limit of their commitment to him was a losing bet. (229)"

"They would rather not have democracy than have to share it with people who are different from them"

""Woke capital" doesn't exist, only capital, and those obsesses with the former are not at all opposed to the power of the latter"

"No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history."