Jay P. Greene's Blog

The 2016 presidential election is a reminder of just how horrible the world can be.  Like Ben Shapiro, who was a star reporter at Breitbart before their pro-Trump-putsch, I used to think that tales of right-wing anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and other backwoods fascists were largely ghost stories the Democratic party told Jews to keep them from venturing out of the party’s tent.  I imagined that maybe 10% of the population adhered to these fringe beliefs on the right and perhaps another 10% believed in the left-wing version of Jew-hating conspiracy craziness.

Like Shapiro I now have to admit that I was wrong.  This election has brought the crazies out of the woodwork and it is clear they are not a tiny fringe.  America is not as moderate and sensible as I always believed.  We can see evidence of this not only from the huge spike in “alt-right” activity in social media, but also from the large number of voters supporting hateful nonsense in the primaries and in general election polls.

America has a real fascism problem. So, what are we supposed to do about this?  One essential weapon in the anti-fascist arsenal is humor.  Charlie Chaplin mocked Hitler in The Great Dictator. Stanley Kubrick ridiculed Soviet despots as weepy drunks in Dr. Strangelove.  Latin American dictators in the mold of Che Guevera and Fidel Castro were portrayed as silly madmen in Woody Allen’s Bananas and in Alan Arkin’s The In-Laws.

Part of the attraction of these dangerous despots to their crazed followers is the appearance of strength and stature.  And part of the attraction of fascist movements to the stupid and weak is the illusion that they may be part of something great and powerful.  Mocking fascists undermines this appeal by revealing how ridiculous they actually are.

This is why my nominee for the 2016 Al Copeland Humanitarian Award is Yair Rosenberg.  Rosenberg is a journalist who writes mostly for Tablet Magazine, but his work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Magazine and elsewhere.  But the forum in which Rosenberg excels in mocking anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and other backwoods fascists is Twitter.  You might say that he is the Picasso of trolling the “alt-right” and Twitter is his canvass.

One of Rosenberg’s most common methods for mocking the alt-right is to take internet memes they have adopted to spread their views and modify those memes so that they advocate for the opposite.  For example, the alt-right has adopted “Pepe the Frog” as one of their symbols.  Rosenberg turns the meme on its head by putting a Mossad t-shirt on Pepe that declares “It’s Never an Accident.”

Another strategy Rosenberg has for mocking anti-Semites on Twitter is to treat their conspiracy theories seriously and suggest what the consequences might be if they were true.  For example:

(((Yair Rosenberg))) ‏@Yair_Rosenberg Aug 7

I know there’s lots of disinformation out there about Jews, so I try to do my best to dispel people’s misconceptions

(((Yair Rosenberg))) ‏@Yair_Rosenberg Aug 28

Oh no, I’ve said too much

 Rosenberg is also fond of mocking anti-Semitic conspiracy-theorists by acting as if those conspiracies actually exist and producing images of Jews alarmed that the goyim (Yiddish for Gentiles) have discovered the plot.  For example, when world leaders are photographed  whispering in each others’ ears, some internet folks insert captions like “Hail Hydra.”  Rosenberg inserts “The goyim know.”

(((Yair Rosenberg)))Verified account‏@Yair_Rosenberg

“The goyim know!”

 Or Rosenberg places “The goyim know” meme on stereotypical images of Jews.

Rosenberg follows in the tradition of Fasi Zaka, the Pakastani DJ and TV celebrity who I previously nominated for “The Al” for mocking the Taliban for things like smelling bad and needing deodorant.  If fascists like the Taliban or the alt-right are doing a lot to worsen the human condition, people like Yair Rosenberg and Fasi Zaka are making important strides to reverse that damage by mocking these monsters.

 Rosenberg’s efforts remind me of the old joke about two Jews sitting in the park reading newspapers.  One of them is reading an anti-Semitic rag and the other says to him: “How can you read that garbage?”  The one reading the anti-Semitic paper replies: “In your paper Jews are being persecuted and murdered.  In mine we are controlling the banks and media and running the world.  I like reading good news.”  Yair Rosenberg is giving us good news.

Several months ago Robert Pondiscio started a little storm within the education reform movement by raising alarms regarding the movement’s heavy leftward tilt over the last several years.  I joined the fray emphasizing that the social justice takeover of ed reform organizations was politically foolish since state-based Republicans are the ones who do almost all of the work in actually adopting meaningful ed reform.  I tried to address the political foolishness of alienating your key backers while making futile attempts to woo one’s opponents by providing some basic lessons from political science.  And Matt Ladner warned ed reformers against marching into a political dead-end alley.  Many others added their two cents, including Max Eden, Rick Hess, and Derrell Bradford.

But Robert Pondiscio — the man who sparked this debate — has topped all of us with the post to end all posts on the social justice wars in ed reform.  It is part of an excellent forum that Education Next has organized on the topic.  Pondiscio accurately describes the angry reaction of white ed reform leaders to his original piece and their call to remedy the fact that “The leaders of reform organizations are mostly white, and mostly from backgrounds of relative privilege, creating a stark contrast with the communities, and leaders, of color that demand rapid improvements in their schools.”

In his new piece Pondiscio calls their bluff.  If creating greater diversity among ed reform leaders is a priority for these white social justice leaders, why don’t they step aside and let more people of color take their jobs?  They say actions speak louder than words, unless, as it appears, these leaders care more about words than actions.  The failure of these national organizations to cause much action in changing state policies seems to reinforce the point.

Here’s the heart of Pondiscio’s piece:

The founder and leader of Education Post is Peter Cunningham, who was an assistant secretary for communication at the U.S. Department of Education under Arne Duncan, with whom he also served when Duncan ran Chicago Public Schools a decade ago. Cunningham has worked in PR, politics, and for small weekly newspapers but never, to my knowledge, as a teacher. He’s also a middle-aged white man. He is, in the argot of social justice thought, deeply privileged….  But if Education Post is serious about “elevating the voices” of the communities it serves, at some point it should be run—should it not?—by someone representative of those communities.

What about now? What about right now? What about Marilyn Anderson Rhames?

I ask this not to be mischievous, but to call the question and settle one of ed reform’s most sensitive debates. When I published my now-infamous piece earlier this year, it prompted, in addition to Rhames’ piece and others, an “open letter” signed by 170 “white education leaders” (including, not incidentally, much of the staff of Education Post) who took serious exception to my critique and lamented reform’s failure to put people of color in leadership positions.

“The education reform coalition has a problem,” the letter started. “Unlike other historical movements dedicated to the urgent betterment of social conditions, the most prominent leadership and voices of the school improvement coalition have not been representative of the communities that the effort hopes to serve. The leaders of reform organizations are mostly white, and mostly from backgrounds of relative privilege, creating a stark contrast with the communities, and leaders, of color that demand rapid improvements in their schools.”

All true, but this elides an awkward truth. Closing the achievement gap will take decades. Closing the leadership gap can be done this afternoon. All it takes is for the “white, privileged leaders” who signed the letter to recruit a person of color and step aside. The right person, like Rhames, might already be on staff, already contributing to the movement as a foot soldier or subordinate but not occupying a position of leadership or authority.

My paramount concern, almost completely unaddressed in the outsized reaction to my piece, remains that a militant leftward tilt in education reform endangers the longstanding bipartisan political support that has long fueled the movement. Neither do I believe that the only children poorly served by their schools are from families of color. But it makes little sense to bemoan “the extraordinary flaws and shortsightedness in our own leadership for letting the field become so lopsidedly white.” This is, as Teach For America likes to tell its corps members, within your locus of control. Those who signed the “open letter” may believe they are standing on principle. But if their theory of change rests on diversifying leadership, they are mostly standing in the way.

I invite those leaders to step aside for the greater good. No more open letters. No more manifestos. No more virtue signaling on Twitter. Either you are serious about the need to diversify the leadership of the reform movement, or you are not. It simply will not do to congratulate yourselves for being “brave leaders” and cluck earnestly at conferences about the need for education reform to “look like the communities it serves” year after year, while blocking exactly those people from the positions you insist they deserve.

To be clear, I continue to question whether the ed reform movement at large is properly viewed as a race-focused “social justice” movement or a broad school improvement initiative benefitting all children, thereby serving social justice ends. But let’s not quibble. If diversity of leadership is integral to your theory of change, why not practice within your organizations? And why not do it now?

Our infant nation survived George Washington relinquishing power and returning to his fields at Mount Vernon. Ed reform will survive without its current cadre of self-flagellating white leaders.

What – what exactly – is stopping you?