From Brian Leiter:

Texas is the second largest buyer of school textbooks in the US and, unfortunately for the nation, the power to approve and reject textbooks is vested in the hands of a small State Board of Education, which is dominated by the Texas Taliban, that frightening brand of Texas politicos who are committed to making the law of (their) God the law of the land. The publishers frequently cave in to pressure from the Texas Taliban, and edit and revise their textbooks to appease them, since they can't afford to have their books rejected from the Texas market. The result is that the Texas Taliban affect the content of textbooks in dozens of other states.

[...]

A nice thing about the Texas Taliban is that they actually publish their "criteria" for evaluating school textbooks. You can read them (and weep) at the web site of Mel and Norma Gabler, a kindly looking couple who have done more than anyone to try to undermine public education in Texas. They do catch the occasional error in school textbooks, but the errors they want to add (about law, about history, about science, about economics) are just breathtaking.

Remember, this isn't just a Texas issue, since the textbooks selected by the Texas State Board of Education are likely to end up in the classrooms of children from Michigan to Florida to Oregon.

11:31:20 PM    

As folks might know my Dad is here visiting from Israel, and TBG is in the midst of a serious demolition/reconstruction job on our front porch. So my time on-line has been a bit curtailed. But an NPR report on California’s proposition 54 earlier this week, and Prometheus_6’s August 4th post, “But what do you do in the meantime?” have been simmering in the rear of my mind for a few days and so I thought it was time to be blogging it.

This will be a very long post; continue reading it here, ...

1:44:49 PM    

Winds of Change reminds me that is a good day to feel a little sad and contemplative.  And I am particularly grateful for the link to this post on a Jewish response to "senseless hatred."

Tisha B'Av is a holy day on the Jewish calendar that the vast majority of non-Jews have never and will never hear of.   Frankly, I would imagine that the vast majority of reform, loosely affiliated, or culturally identified Jews haven't heard of it.  It's a day of mourning -- for the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and for the many many tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people since then.  It is a fast day.  I spent one summer as a camper and nearly 5 summers as a staffer at the Jewish camp for teens, Tel Yehudah.  The camp is not affiliated with any particular denomination of Judaism; but rather was committed to pluralism.  The intention was that whether one was an Orthodox Jew or an unaffiliated one, you should be able to fairly comfortably attend.  Accordingly the camp was Kosher and Shomer Shabbat and had a short prayer service every morning.  And of course, observed the holidays that fell in the months of July and August -- including Tisha B'Av. [Literally the "ninth" day of the month "Av"].  No one was required to fast; small, cold, dairy meals were available buffet-style all day long at camp. [Egg salad, tuna fish, and peanut butter sandwiches, veggie sticks, apples, and bananas.]  But there were no regular activities offered -- no swimming, or sports.  There was free time to spend quietly, and small discussion groups.  And in the evening....

One of the most indelibly etched memories from my camping experience.  In the evening as dusk approached, the 200-some teenage campers and staff would congregate at the doors of the "Beit Ha'Am" [literally "House of People"] the cavernous, wooden hall used for all assemblies, plays, dances and indoor basketball games.  Inside, the staff would have already set up the hall with dozens and dozens of white candles, lit and melted to the floor.  Passing through the doors to the Beit Ha'Am, you would receive a much used photocopied set of papers -- the book of Lamentations -- and you would slowly file in and form small groups around the candles. And for the next, almost 2 hours, the entire camp assemblage would sit on the dusty wood floor of the Beit Ha'Am, lit only by candlelight, and read and chant and sing the mournful poetry of prayers traditional on this day.  

I, like just about every other person in that dark hall, had never observed Tisha B'Av before my summers at camp.  And I have not marked a Tisha B'Av since my last summer as a staffer at Tel Yehudah more than 10 years ago.  Yet the sense of that night, sitting quietly with a hall-full of typical hormone- and fad-obsessed American teens and reciting words and singing melodies almost 2000 years old ... well, it still gives me goosepimples.   Sure we dribbled the candle wax onto the floor and rolled the hot soft goo between our fingers.  We yawned.  We flipped through the photocopied packets to see how many pages there were left.  And by the time we wandered back to our cabins under the crisp stars of the Delaware valley the spell had dissipated and we were back to being the ironic smart-asses we were supposed to be.  But something took.  And now, I realize the miracle and magic that for those few short hours our hall resonated as an electric bead on a wire of living history that delineated at least pieces of who we are and connected us millenia back to who we were.

Thanks to those bloggers who marked this day and provoked my memories and reflection.

4:05:12 PM    

Okay, right off the bat I apologize because I was merrily bloghopping along and right-clicking links for later viewing when I found something I want to share and now have no idea who to credit for steering me this way.

Anyway,  I ended up here, an article in IMPRINTS: A JOURNAL OF ANALYTICAL SOCIALISM which is an interview with Michael Walzer, UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Yeah, I hadn't heard of him before either.  Anyway, he is asked:

In Just and Unjust Wars you take a strong stand on the issues of war crimes, guerrilla war, reprisals, and terrorism in general. How do you view the current crisis in Israel in the light of what you wrote in that book? How do your insights regarding the history of anti-semitism contribute to an analysis of how radical politics is understood within both sets of national identities?

Walzer responds:

This is a hard question for me to answer with any sort of brevity, given my long involvement in Zionist politics in the Jewish diaspora and in Israeli politics too, as a frequent visitor. I recently published an article in Dissent, 'The Four Wars of Israel/Palestine,' explaining my position, which I will try to summarise here. These are the four wars: there is a Palestinian war to destroy and replace the state of Israel, which is unjust, and a Palestinian war to establish a state alongside Israel, which is just. And there is an Israeli war to defend the state, which is just, and an Israeli war for Greater Israel, which is unjust. When making particular judgements, you always have to ask who is fighting which war, and what means they have adopted, and whether those means are legitimate for these ends, or for any ends. Most of the people attacking Israel or defending it, and most of the people attacking the Palestinians or defending them, don't even begin to do the necessary work. I can't do that work here, but I will suggest some of the judgements that I think it leads to – most crucially these two: Palestinian terrorism, that is, the deliberate targeting of civilians, should always and everywhere be condemned. And Israeli settlement policy in the occupied territories has been wrong from the very beginning of the occupation. But this second wrongness doesn't mitigate the first: Palestinian attacks on the occupying army or on paramilitary settler groups are justified – at least they are justified whenever there is an Israeli government unwilling to negotiate; but attacks on settler families or schools are terrorist acts, murder exactly. (I want to insist that this is not special pleading: I am old enough to have made similar arguments at the time of the Algerian war: FLN attacks on French soldiers or on OAS militants were justified; putting a bomb in a café or a supermarket in the French section of Algiers was murder.) And similarly, Israeli attacks on Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters are justified; dropping a bomb on an apartment house in Gaza was a criminal act.

The distinctions Walzer makes here are useful to keep in mind when attempting to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  The four different "wars" he describes each work toward different agendas and are fought by different "armies."  I think this offers a useful analytical framework with which to break down assumptions and rhetoric when one is attempting to discuss this issue.

Walzer continues:

Since I have often been a critic of Israeli governments, I am reluctant to call such criticism anti-Semitic. But it does seem to me that there is an oddly disproportionate hostility toward Israel on the European left, which requires some explanation. I know, for example, people my own age who indignantly refuse even to consider a visit to Israel, but who had no trouble visiting France at the height of the Algerian war and have no trouble visiting China today despite its brutal policy in Tibet (which includes a far more massive settlement program than Israel has attempted in the West Bank). Indeed, much of the criticism directed at Israel has more to do with the existence of the state than with the policies of any of its governments – which was, again, never the case with France or with Germany after World War Two or with China today. Something is seriously wrong here.

Folks who've read my blog for awhile might know that I myself am suspicious of the particular vehemence and passion of anti-Israeli rhetoric in Europe.  Whether or not such criticism is justified, it always smells just a little off to me.

Anyway, the interview touches on many, many other issues that have nothing to do with Israel.  I am intrigued by Walzer and will keep my eye open for more.

10:54:57 PM