Preview

It’s only in the past year that I’ve become a big fan of Jeopardy!, and I’m angry at myself for having missed it for pretty much my entire life. Mickey Rourke’s love for it in Diner should have been a tip-off. Anyway, I was under the misimpression that the sorts of knowledge it rewarded were, ahem, beneath me. But it turns out it rewards all sorts of knowledge. (I got a call when I was reporting in Israel in 2008 that my name had been part of a question. That may have been the height of my fame for my entire life.) The show is a near perfect melding of democracy and meritocracy and rewards both hard work and precise speech. It’s like a little island of truth in a world where the entire idea has gone out of fashion. (Plus, it’s one of the only places in the media where “real people” are featured for reasons other than being Trump supporters in Rust Belt diners or anti-vax lunatics wearing MLK T-shirts while storming fast-food restaurants that ask them to wear masks during a pandemic.)

One thing that was not fun for the show this year was its attempt to replace its longtime host Alex Trebek following his death in November 2020. In what journalists call a “roller-coaster year” for the show, it embarked on a high-profile search for a replacement, only to give everyone the idea that the entire exercise was a fix—Dick Cheney style—when they went with the show’s then–executive producer, Mike Richards. Fans cried foul—another journalistic cliché, sorry—and eventually, the powers that be settled on a combination of Ken Jennings, its likable, nerdy winningest-ever contestant, and Mayim Bialik, the controversial actress, liberal, and Zionist (but not “liberal Zionist”). Fortunately, the psychodrama behind the curtain was overshadowed among devotees by the winning streak of the handsome, charming Yale computer science Ph.D. student Matt Amodio, who won 38 games in a row. And then came Amy Schneider’s 40 wins, the second-most ever after Ken’s (measured in games, not money, won). Schneider became a hero to people for her poise, grace, and ability to handle the attention she received, not only for being the first woman to break a million bucks but also for being among the world’s now most high-profile trans women. On the show, Amy was open about having a female partner. In many media interviews, she spoke about her history and experience as a trans person, and never was less than articulate and good-humored.

But this being Altercation, what interests us today are the comments made in media interviews with the Jewish press by recent winner Emma Saltzberg, who won $58,799 and works with the organization IfNotNow. (The group is named in honor of the famous saying by Hillel the Elder.) Because it refuses to condemn the BDS movement—though unlike Jewish Voice for Peace, with which it is often paired, it does not embrace it either—mainstream Jewish organizations hate IfNotNow far more than they hate apartheid in the West Bank (which, to be honest, most are pretty comfortable with). Their problem with IfNotNow is that it gives a voice to the significant percentage of young American Jews who continue to care about Israel and the future of American Jewry but refuse to take orders about what it is permissible to think and say about either one from the self-appointed arbiters of American Jewish officialdom.

Saltzberg reminds me a little bit of AOC during her bartender days. She was knowledgeable, articulate, full of common sense, but not at all full of herself. I hope she considers a career in politics. A Hebrew school survivor as well as the former vice president of Amherst College Hillel, Saltzberg, while speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, beautifully articulated the way her experience on Jeopardy! helped to illustrate her understanding of what it means to be Jewish. “What makes the ‘Jeopardy!’ world so great is this sense of curiosity and wanting to learn and be there for each other,” she said. “And so much of the conversation that I’m seeing in the Jewish world right now is so deeply anti-intellectual in a way that I find really heartbreaking.” Saltzberg said she sees
Jewish organizations—big and small, secular and religious—rejecting the painstakingly crafted research of a whole swath of human rights organizations just out of hand, without even bothering to make arguments about what it’s saying on the merits. They just reject it out of hand, and in a way that really sows confusion, for non-Jews and Jews alike, about what antisemitism is. So they’re calling things like this Amnesty International report antisemitic or saying that it will increase antisemitism just to look squarely at what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians. …

That sense of, we have to put ourselves in competition is the total opposite of the spirit that I’ve encountered in my brief time in the ‘Jeopardy!’ world, which is that people are incredibly supportive. People want to learn and people are just decent to each other.

It’s a competition—but it’s also a place where people respect the rules of the game, and if you get the answer wrong, you don’t tell the hosts that they’re making it more dangerous for Jews to live in the world. In some ways, that sort of clear competition creates a clearer way to support one another.

In another interview, this one with Jewish Currents, she explained how she came to take a more critical view of Israel, which led her to join IfNotNow: Alienated by mainstream Jewish organizations and horrified by the 2014 story of the three kidnapped Israeli boys, the hunt for them, and the burning of Mohammed Abu Khdeir in retaliation, she heard via social media of an “event in New York about this, which turned out to be the first ever IfNotNow action. I remember looking at myself in the reflection of a store window on the way home from work and realizing I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night if I didn’t go to this action the next day. So I showed up at my lunch break outside the Midtown office of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, wearing all black.” Saltzberg said she “joined in the Mourner’s Kaddish for everyone who was being killed in Israel/Palestine” and came away from the experience having found a place for “young Jews calling on our community to live out its moral values and to oppose this violence.”

Due to her presence on the Jewish McCarthyite Canary Mission list (dark money–funded), Saltzberg gets hassled a lot by right-wing Jews, but because of her Jeopardy! fame, she received a whole bunch of antisemitic hate mail as well. I was so pleased to learn from the JTA interview, therefore, that Lawrence Long, the nursing student and self-described “stay-at-home uncle” from North Carolina who defeated her told her that he would be donating to IfNotNow in her honor. “I noticed the particularly hateful comments directed at Emma online,” he said, adding, “I would have had her back regardless of whether our personal beliefs align … I wish her nothing but the best and I gotta figure out the cool multiple of $18 to donate.”

As I said, I love Jeopardy!. Its importance as an institution should, by now, have earned it multiple dissertations and at least one thorough history. Like baseball, jazz, bacon cheeseburgers, and Bruce Springsteen—and not those dipshit Trump-supporting diners in Pennsylvania—it’s what actually makes America great. And hey, Emma, I think you are going to really like—and also really dislike parts of—We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, whose third (and dammit) final draft I turned into Basic Books this week at just under 163,000 words, to be published this fall. Write me back and I’ll see you get a copy.

Here’s a sentence that ought to be in every single New York Times story that has the words “Trump” and/or “Republican” in it. In fact, it should be the first sentence: “But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news—the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump and his allies.” Unfortunately, it’s only in this one.

But wait, here’s another one: “Its underpinnings—as a hodgepodge of people suffused in counterfactual belief systems, conspiracy theories and barely bridled rage at anything seen as contrary to their mission—frequently erupt through the official veneer.” That one is about Tucker Carlson’s heroes in the Ottawa truckers lunatic movement, but it should actually precede virtually every speech and piece of legislation put forth by any Republican in the United States, whether at the national, state, or local level.

With regard to last week’s Altercation on the topic of the Times’ ostrich-like behavior regarding the Amnesty International report on “apartheid” in Israel, and the enormous reaction it inspired, I received this emailed response after it posted from Danielle Rhoades Ha, a Times spokesperson: “We have covered the debate over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, both the accusations by rights groups that Israel practices apartheid as well as with on-the-ground reporting of the underlying conditions that give rise to these arguments. While it is not our practice to cover every report published by NGOs, these issues have been and will continue to be an essential part of our Mideast coverage.”

Finally, I spoke on CUNY-TV with Bob Herbert about the media’s role in ensuring democracy and their failure to do so when needed most, here.