Which of These Four Videos Should I Watch About Tucker and Shapiro?

6:09 PM Friday.

I am getting ready to switch over to Native American studies after spending much of the day deep in thought about Jewish studies. I made it out for an hour-long walk around mid-morning, during which time I finished up listening to What Will Be Israel's Next Big Story? Donniel Hartman & Yossi Klein Halevi (PART 1) and The Jewish-Mamdani Vote with Donniel Hartman & Yossi Klein Halevi (PART 2). After lunch, I organized every pertinent book in my Kindle library into a Jewish studies collection (about 78 titles) and scanned through all of the Jewish studies titles on the hardcopy bookshelf in my sleeping area. Then I added almost one hundred Jewish studies videos to my YouTube watch later list. It's not just the videos I selected that made this exercise important. It's also the search terms I entered, and the content YouTube retrieved for me in response, and the thoughts I had as I scrolled through the results. The total effect was quite a conversation. At this point, it looks like I need to consider watching one or all of the following videos tomorrow:

Then I wish I could afford to become a member of the Call Me Back community so I could hear Dan Senor and Jonah Goldberg finish up this conversation: Between Mamdani and Tucker, Are Jews Getting Squeezed? with Jonah Goldberg (SNEAK PEEK). 

I spent a healthy portion of my Jewish studies analytical time over the last two weeks thinking about Zohran Mamdani, and none of that time thinking about Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. But what do I mean by Jewish studies, exactly, and how do I distinguish my thinking on this project from my thinking about Two-State Zionism under my Political Theology area of responsibility? I don't know yet.

Let me say in closing tonight that I listened to Tucker Carlson speak for about 20 minutes on Israel a month or two ago. He is brilliant, he is patriotic, and it seems to me that he is wrong on this issue at the end of the day, although the International Court of Justice may well agree with him on some points. Like me ten misinformed years ago, Tucker is likely caught up in a riptide current of American anti-Semitism without even realizing it. But he has Jeff Sachs and John Mearsheimer on his side, and these are not intellectual lightweights. So maybe he is not technically anti-Semitic. I don't want to weaponize the term. Maybe he is just wrong about Israel, along with Sachs and Mearsheimer. Maybe all three are anti-Semites. Maybe all three are patriots. Maybe they are brilliant patriots and unwitting anti-Semites, if that is a plausible constellation of character strengths and flaws in contemporary American political culture. We have to remember that we are dealing with an incredibly wicked problem. Jerusalem is both a massively attractive unifier and a massive source of geopolitical polarization. Solving this problem may be harder than solving the problem of fusion energy. The problems of Jerusalem and fusion energy could be one and the same, on a mystical level. Tucker, Mearsheimer and Sachs could simply be dialectical steppingstones toward an Israeli fusion reactor. Or an Israel-Palestine fusion reactor, if such a thing is possible and desirable and God's will.

Send insight, Hashem. Should I take a deep dive into these videos on Saturday, or focus my Jewish studies attention elsewhere? 

End 7:31 PM.