Postcard From Jerusalem

Plus: Lessons from the latest Republican defeat in Georgia, and weekend reading

I’m writing this edition to you from Jerusalem, following a whirlwind week of reporting in the region. It’s impossible to cover Jews today without writing about Israel, the place where approximately half of them now reside. With the country poised on a political precipice as Benjamin Netanyahu returns to power, I wanted to see for myself where things might be heading, and to talk with politicians, cultural figures, and changemakers on the ground. And because it’s impossible to talk about Israel without talking about the other nation that lives here, I spent time with Arab lawmakers here in Israel and with Palestinians in the West Bank, tracing the fault lines that riddle this land.

It’s going to take me some time to properly process and fashion what I’ve learned into words for you, so consider this a promise of coming attractions. In the interim, I thought I’d leave you with a few scattered thoughts and reading recommendations for the weekend, beginning with the outcome of this week’s Senate election in Georgia.

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On Tuesday, Senator Raphael Warnock defeated challenger Herschel Walker in Georgia. The victory put an exclamation point on a remarkable midterm showing for Democrats. But it was also the final nail in an electoral coffin that was fastidiously fashioned for Republicans by Donald Trump. That’s because Walker was just the latest of many incompetent candidates handpicked by the former president for their personal loyalty—often over far more experienced politicians—who went down to ignominious defeat. Georgia was a particularly pointed example of this phenomenon, where Trump-critical Republicans like Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handily won reelection, while Walker became the only Republican to lose a statewide race.

Some might be surprised that so many of Trump’s anointed Senate candidates imploded, but those people probably aren’t Deep Shtetl readers. As I wrote on September 8, Trump has become the Republican Party’s greatest obstacle to electoral success:

Just look at what’s happening in the 2022 midterm elections, when Trump isn’t even on the ballot but has somehow managed to make the entire affair about him.

The former president has interfered in Republican primaries across the country to handpick hundreds of candidates who support him and his claims of 2020 election fraud. This has often come at the cost of nominating weak and inexperienced options like Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, all of whom are polling poorly. Trump has rallied with his preferred candidates, once again putting himself and his relitigation of the last election—rather than Biden’s record—at the center of the story. And of course, Trump has continued to dominate the news cycle thanks to the scandal surrounding his collection of top-secret material at Mar-a-Lago, which reportedly included information on the defense strategy and nuclear program of a foreign country.

Some conservatives have taken to blaming the media for Trump’s omnipresence in our politics even after he left office. But the media didn’t personally pick an array of eccentric and questionably competent candidates in the Republican primary. The media didn’t rally with those candidates across the country. The media haven’t insisted on loudly denying the outcome of the 2020 election. And the media didn’t store classified documents at Trump’s estate. Trump did all those things. The media just covered it.

None of this is new. Since his days as a television entertainer, Trump has always been a black hole that sucks up all of the public’s attention. Republicans can fight his influence or this will keep happening, not just in 2022 but in 2024 too. It’s impossible to make an election a referendum on Biden when Trump keeps making it a referendum on himself.

As long as Republicans fail to quit Trump, the electorate will keep quitting them. Or to put it more simply: Go Trump, get dumped.

Recommended Reading

David Zvi Kalman on what religion can and should say about our impending AI revolution:

People really don’t know what they think about AI yet—and so we are in a brief moment where it is actually possible to shape the contours of the debate, to originate ideas about AI that will stick in the popular imagination. Religious leaders have a chance to make an impact, but they need to do it soon.

Olivia Potts on the history of the slow cooker, whose origins trace back to a Jewish inventor who sought to build an electric device that mimicked how his mother cooked food within the strictures of the Sabbath:

Irving Nachumsohn was born in New Jersey in 1902. His mother Tamara grew up in Vilna, a Jewish neighborhood in Vilnius, Lithuania. On Friday nights, her mother, Nachumsohn’s grandmother, would make cholent. She would fill a crock with pastrami shtickel, vegetables, and beans, and have Tamara take it to the local bakery to cook slowly overnight in the bakery oven’s cooling heat, nestled alongside dozens of other neighborhood families’ pots.

Nachumsohn was a born inventor. He invented an electric frying pan, the hula lamp (an early version of the lava lamp), and the TeleSign (an electronic news scroller). He was so prolific in fact, that he decided it was easier and cheaper to pass the patent bar himself so he could act as his own lawyer. During the long hot summer of 1936, he set out to solve the problem of cooking beans without having to stand over a hob or leave an oven pumping heat out into the house. He remembered the cholent his mother had told him about and, as with his previous inventions, applied electricity to the issue. He applied for a patent for the “Naxon Beanery”—he had shortened the family name to “Naxon” following World War II—an electric cooking pot with a fixed chamber and internal heating element. It was the world’s first electric slow cooker.

The story of how Siddhartha Khosla composed the delightful theme for Only Murders in the Building, whose first season I just finished on my flight to Israel.