During a recent too-hectic 24-hour foray into New York, I had the fortune to venture deep into Brooklyn, on a tip that I should try the lamb at Tanoreen.

In our confusion and hunger, my dining companions and I failed to order any straight-up kebabs, which probably would have showcases the famous lamb at its best, but the lamb stuffed into squashes and dumplings were truly delicious, and the mess of mezze that came first were also great. Brussel sprouts! Who knew?

The Supreme Court has issued a decision in Central Virginia Community College v. Katz, holding for the first time since Seminole Tribe that Congress may use an Article I power (this time bankruptcy) to trump state sovereign immunity.

I would like to brag that I did predict that one justice might join with Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer to form an anti-sovereign-immunity majority, but I told the Supreme Court reading group that it would be Justice Roberts if it were anyone. I was wrong.

The opinion has plenty of intriguing stuff, including a war of originalisms between Justice Stevens and Justice Thomas.

I realize this is something of an old blogtopia chestnut, but I was struck by something in one of Steve Bainbridge's recent posts on the plight of conservatives who want to enter academia. I'm not interested so much in the legal analogy that Professor Bainbridge makes as in his conclusion about hiring practices.

The core of Professor Bainbridge's argument is that the wide disparity between Democrats and Republicans (or liberals and conservatives) necessarily demonstrates that "university hiring practices are having a disparate impact." But that isn't actually true. His argument hinges on the assumption that liberals and conservative PhD holders apply for faculty positions in roughly equal (or even not-quite-so-disproportionate) numbers, but the faculty hiring process winnows out the vast majority of the conservatives. Why is this assumption necessarily correct?

One could also easily make the argument that fewer conservatives make it through the grueling graduate process and obtain a PhD (for any number of possible reasons), or even that fewer conservatives enter graduate school to begin with. The disparity that Professor Bainbridge identifies would thus have little to do with hiring practices that largely come into play at the post-PhD stage.

I don't know whether one of these propositions is even close to being correct. And even if one is, that does not necessarily mean there is no problem or that liberal bias in graduate admissions, graduate mentoring/evaluations, or post-graduate hiring does not exist. But at a minimum, I think it's clear that knowing when conservative students or faculty candidates leave academia is crucial to knowing why they do so, and I think Professor Bainbridge's argument would be a good deal stronger if he took this into account.

Jonathan Adler, writing at NRO's Bench Memos, disagrees with the idea that there would be considerable litigation, confusion, etc, in a post-Roe environment. With all due respect to Professor Adler, his post consists mostly of conclusory statements that Will's argument is wrong, without much in the way of analysis. The one supporting example he cites (state regulation of alcohol) doesn't quite seem to have the same valence as state regulation of abortion, never mind the existence and effect of the 21st Amendment. Professor Adler may well be right and Will wrong; I'm definitely not an expert in this area. Yet it seems to me that arguments against the prediction in "States of Confusion" would be considerably stronger and more convincing if they were arguments, rather than merely conclusions.

Edited to Add: This article in Time has some interesting examples of ways that governments (state or federal) can drastically limit access to abortion without ever banning the procedure explicitly or entirely. I'm particularly struck by the Missouri law granting a civil cause of action against people who aid minors in evading Missouri parental-notification requirements. If that law were used to sue people in a different state (such as an abortion clinic just over the state line), it seems to me, though I'm again not an expert, to raise interesting questions about potential conflicts of laws, interstate comity, and diversity jurisdiction.

Phoebe Maltz and Matthew Yglesias wrestle with the issue of Israel defining Jewish identity. Nominally, both agree that Israel has become more than an elective identity, and stands as a conferred one. We are a people more than renamed after our struggle with the angel of history. Where Maltz and Yglesias (and I think, this correspondent) differ, is whether we are ascending or descending Jacob's ladder.

It is not quite fair for Yglesias to assign his embitterment over the conflation of Israeli and Jewish identity to Israel itself. On May 14, 1948 in Tel Aviv the founders of Israel did forge the latest link between the state of Israel and its unhomed children:

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.[emphasis mine]

But for each link between our national and ethnic identity which we choose, another is affirmed by our enemies, and those links bind us much more tightly.

(To self plagiarize:) In 2003, opening the tenth session of The Islamic Summit Conference, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed of Malaysia called for a war of extermination against the Jews. The response of the fifty-seven heads of state to whom more than one-fifth of the planet's residents owe fealty: a standing ovation. Not condemnation, or censure, or silence, or murmurs: from Hamid Karzai to Megawati Soekarnoputri, sustained long applause. This is the reality of world opinion of us today: it makes the action of any Jew (by Mahathir's extension and intension, Israel) the action of all Jews; it makes any action of the Jews an act worthy of destruction. This is what it is to be a Jew in America, now, regardless of belief. Israel becomes the crux of our humiliation and unavoidably determines our identity—locally, because we are blamed for its excesses, abroad, because of our disbelief at the moral distortion of enforced moral equivalence: the consistent dismissal of the continuous murder perpetuated by the morally bereft Palestinian Authority and its Islamist counterparts, whose internal rivalry is played out in Jewish blood.

I am often asked why I support Israel, given "how well off Jews are now," given how, as the last legacy of the colonial West in the Arab world, Israel is a perpetual reminder of the Islamic humiliation of this century, of their abiding failure to live within the modern world. "Arabs didn't hate Jews before Israel." True and untrue, but more true than not. The connection of the Arab cause against the Israeli state, which was national, to the Islamic cause against the Jews (Mahathir Mohammed's words are chilling: "1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews") is one of the great tragedies of the last thirty years, and it is almost surely because of Israel's continued existence. Pragmatically, of course, we, the people between the river and the sea, should have taken the higher Masadan ground, and died. Our negation would have almost certainly solved the conflict.

And so some of us in America are dissolving. But it is a self-negation only made safe in the post-Israeli Diaspora, a vanishing into hedge funds rather than hedge rows, heads in the clouds rather than graves in the air. Our American cultural abbreviation (our schtick, our schmear, our schmaltz) is made possible by a national identity that we can stand before and stand without, but that resolutely stands for us. In a few generations Elaine and Jerry and George’s gentility might be more than a cheap in-joke. But all the Jews are not so well-off that they might shrug away their Otherness; Israel remains a necessity in a world that has not made its peace with its favorite villains. Our victimhood is only performative on the Upper West Side; it is shockingly literal in Haifa.

But if I might disagree with Maltz as well (foolish contrarian and inauthentic Jew that I am), I am far too nostalgic to see this disappearance as a wholly good thing. While the kitsch of identity, a klezmer Judaism that desires for itself a seat at the table of parochial ethnic banality (like the ginger-haired young Manhattanite who explains his St. Patrick’s day revelry by way of his surname), is pure poshlust, and rightfully derided, Diasporic American Judaism is not just “neurosis and cured meat.” Part of the genius of Allen and Bellow and Roth, their incessant self-revision through fictionalization, the deep firmament of their local and yet alien New York and Chicago and Newark has to do with a particular Jewish urban exceptionalism which should be, if not celebrated, at least mourned. Jews, like blacks, for many years were unique among American out-groups in that they remained out-groups over multiple generations. While we like to think of ourselves as an assimilationist people, Jews did not suburbanize until after the Civil Rights movement. Our ‘Other’ schtick was other-enforced; in higher education, in country clubs, in the housing covenants of genteel gentile communities across America, Jews were written out.

There was a reason that blacks and Jews had such strong ties, and a reason that so many Jews were prominent in the Civil Rights movement – and it had little to do with religion or residual Jewish socialism. Both communities were united in their perceived visions of themselves as internal exiles, and their commitment to urban life – to ghettos that existed either de jure (as Bronzeville and Harlem) or de facto (as Flatbush and Rogers Park). Bellow and Roth and Allen exist as transitional figures, giant artists because of their ability to chronicle the ironic journey from internal exile to performative inutile. This work depends in some sense on a tragic elision or revision of the African-American experience (sometimes overt, as in Mr. Sammler’s Planet, sometimes more tellingly silent, the ever-present jazz score in Allen’s near totally white films), since the stereotypes which modern Jewish culture relies on are holomorphic to the urban experience in which both ethnic groups had lived. The idea of the neurasthenic, non-athletic, non-criminal Jew, the intellectual Jew, the Jew allergic to drugs, the de-sexualized Jew: this is a Jew stripped of his masculinity and his urbanity. It denies both Meyer Lansky and the SPHAS. And it is a fascinating denial because of its tragic narrative. The Jew of Bellow and Roth and Allen is one decaying even as he is being accepted, one shrinking into modern neurosis and analysis even as he is freed from the rhetorical violence and physicality of the early post-immigrant ethnic enclaves. Bellow’s use of a menacing black phallus in Mr. Sammler’s Planet is not merely racist, it is an exposition of (as Lee Siegel has it) the “American middle class daydream of feral potency.” As with Mailer’s “White Negro,” Bellow was announcing that the Jew had finally arrived in American society: he too could fetishize the black phallus as both a destructive force and one of unparalleled freedom. Like the early minstrel song “Long Blue Tail,” or the inevitable castration that accompanied lynchings of black men, or even the cocky swagger of every white Rock and Roll star strutting plagiarized race music, the American Jew’s descent into Americaness (or ascension? there are two Jacob’s Ladders at play), his tragicomic disintegration of the racial and urban roots of his identity, was dependent on the increasingly and ruthlessly parodic blackface of his id.

This is a somewhat dangerous cultural accumulation to naively admire (although this blackface id is part and parcel of American culture, not just American Jewish transition), but its documenters produced some of the greatest art of the American Century, the Twentieth. The Jewish narrative of assimilation was for WASP America a way to whitewash guilt over black non-assimilation and for WASC America a way to covertly participate in the gag. And in its critique of modernity, its stripping of our dignity and physical humanity, a critique ironically turned inwards towards modernity’s most historically enthusiastic participants, Jewish comedy reached near universal heights. Jewish culture was a safe medium through which much of the tension and bile of the incredibly rapid dislocations caused by modernity could be strained. We had become for a brief time psychic lenders.

But nature is motion and growth, and this transitional narrative of the disappearing Jew had a limited reel of flicker frames anyway. Israel and the Shoah repositioned Jewish identity, but suburbia’s acceptance of more than one Jewish member (the treasurer) had laid the groundwork for American Jews to finally melt.

Two notes: a sensible criticism of the above essay is that its diagnosis/apologia of/for the place of American Jewish culture is intensely gendered. Ms. Maltz alluded to as much in an earlier conversation. I think that this analysis could benefit, as could much similar work on minstrelsy, from an examination of how women were excluded from some of the freeing formal tropes of Jewish and African-American expression (one might witness the strong misogynistic element in each group’s popular culture), and yet included with the negative stereotypes. The second: it is far far too late, so any typos, wild overstatements, grace notes, must wait.