Wednesday Potpourri

First, as scandals go, it was only mini, Columbia University sanctioned three administrators for sharing anti-Semitic text messages during a meeting about anti-Semitism.

The New York Times reports:

Columbia University placed three administrators on leave this week, a university spokesman said on Saturday. The moves came a little more than a week after images emerged showing the school officials sharing disparaging text messages during a panel discussion about antisemitism on campus.

The panel, which focused on Jewish life on campus amid tensions over Israel’s war in Gaza, occurred during a Columbia College reunion on May 31.

The spokesman did not identify which officials were placed on leave, but The Washington Free Beacon, the website that first published the images, reported that they were Susan Chang-Kim, the vice dean and chief administrative officer; Cristen Kromm, the dean of undergraduate student life; and Matthew Patashnick, the associate dean for student and family support.

Ms. Chang-Kim also exchanged texts during the event with Josef Sorett, the dean of Columbia College, according to The Free Beacon. In one exchange, Mr. Sorett texted “LMAO,” for “laughing my ass off,” in response to a sarcastic message Ms. Chang-Kim had written about Brian Cohen, the executive director of Columbia/Barnard Hillel, according to The Free Beacon.

Second, on the fun side, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo appeared on the Bill Maher Show. An interesting exchange took place.

“The trial in New York, the one he [Trump] got convicted for, was the greatest fundraising bonanza ever. He was lagging behind Biden, and now he's pulled quite a bit ahead," Maher said to Cuomo during the show. 

To which Cuomo, who was elected as New York State Attorney General in 2006, replied: “That case, the attorney general's case in New York, frankly, should have never been brought."

Cuomo continued: "If his name was not Donald Trump and if he wasn't running for president. I'm the former AG in New York. I'm telling you, that case would have never been brought. And that's what is offensive to people. And it should be!”

"Because if there's anything left...it's belief in the Justice system!"

Third, Israel is increasingly under attack by Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. The Biden administration, preparing to sell out the Jewish state, has told Israel that it is essentially on its own.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized:

The latest misfire is Sunday’s comments by Gen. C.Q. Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to reporters on his way to Botswana. According to the Associated Press, America’s top military officer “said the U.S. won’t likely be able to help Israel defend itself against a broader Hezbollah war as well as it helped Israel fight off an Iranian barrage of missiles and drones in April.”

He warned Israel “to think about the second order of effect of any type of operation into Lebanon,” including danger to U.S. forces, and said the Iranians could join the fray directly and give greater support to their proxy “particularly if they felt that Hezbollah was being significantly threatened.”

That’s a calculated red light to Israel—don’t count on U.S. help, do count on Iran’s wrath—but what message is the general sending to Hezbollah? In the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah’s bunker, it probably sounds like: “Go ahead. You can get away with more.”

And also, from the Journal:

It emboldens Hezbollah to keep shooting and extend its range. This increases the domestic pressure in Israel to do something about it. Unprovoked, Hezbollah has already fired nearly 5,000 rockets, missiles and mortars at northern Israel since Oct. 7, depopulating the region. Not that Iran cares, but a major war between Hezbollah and Israel could wreck Lebanon. Central Israel could take damage like it never has before.

The stakes are high, which makes the U.S. policy of publicly trying to deter Israel even harder to figure. Israel is less likely to be compelled to fight Hezbollah if 70,000 Israelis can return to their homes safely in northern Israel.

This means quieting Hezbollah’s rocket fire and convincing it to remove its fighters from the buffer zone in Southern Lebanon. But Hezbollah has no reason to do that if it thinks it can keep firing away and President Biden will protect it from the consequences.

With friends like Joe Biden, you do not need enemies.

And, remind me of why American Jews are rushing out to support Joe Biden’s candidacy.

Fourth, we have occasionally pointed out that the Ivy League has been suffering reputational damage of late. In part, this has happened because these schools have countenanced anti-Semitic demonstrations. You will have noted that the woke leaders of these schools have been weak and ineffectual.

It’s one poll, so, take it with a few grains of salt, but still:

Just The News reports that in the survey from Rasmussen Reports, a mere 10% of respondents say that they consider Ivy League graduates to be hard workers. By contrast, 75% do not consider Ivy League alumni to be better workers, while 74% consider Ivy Leagues to be out-of-touch with the values and beliefs of everyday Americans.

In the same poll, 67% said that they think students are better off attending a state school than attending an Ivy League university. Only 15% said they believe Ivy Leagues to be superior to state schools.

The discontent with the Ivy League universities was noted across partisan lines: 81% of Republican respondents said that the Ivy Leagues are out-of-touch with the rest of America, while 76% of Democrats said the same.

Ever since the unprecedented terrorist attack on Israel by the Islamist group Hamas on October 7th of last year, anti-Israel protests and riots have taken place across the country and around the world, particularly at college campuses. The most violent and extreme demonstrations were at Columbia University, but spread quickly to other campuses such as UCLA.

These incidents have ranged from mass vandalism to assaults against Jewish students.

In addition to the decline in public opinion, the protests have led to a massive decline in Jewish enrollment at such universities. 

Data from Ivy Coach shows that, while roughly 20% of incoming Yale University students in the 2000’s were Jewish, that number plunged to just 12% in 2023.

Fifth, is there a deeper meaning to the wave of restaurant closings? I am hardly qualified to offer an opinion, so I will limit myself to stating the facts.

It’s not as bad as Red Lobster, which has gone bankrupt, but now Hooters is closing 40 locations. It’s not a good sign for the economy. It seems to have something to do with inflation. It may be the canary in the coal mine. But it is not a good thing.

I know you find it hard to believe, America seems to bes losing its appetite for hooters.

Sixth, yesterday I had my say about the appointment of one Tyler Cherry to a position in the communications office of the Biden administration.

And I noted, dutifully, that Cherry had renounced his prior Tweets, which tended to be anti-Semitic and anti-police.

Now, according to Fox News, an anti-anti-Semitism group finds that insufficient. It wants Cherry fired, right away.

An antisemitism watchdog group is calling for the Biden administration to fire a recently promoted White House official whose anti-Israel social media posts resurfaced this week.

StopAntisemitism said Tyler Cherry, who was promoted earlier this month as an associate communications director at the White House, called for the elimination of Israel and promoted anti-Israel viewpoints on social media going back years, as well as anti-police commentary.

"We're hoping this is the quickest hire and fire scenario in President Biden's administration to date," Stop Antisemitism founder Liora Rez told Fox News Digital. "For the Biden administration to either A, not vet properly, or B, to vet and then approve an inner circle appointee like this… is just horrifying."

In fairness, if he had said as much about any other minority group, he would not have gotten the job, regardless of how much he changed his mind.

Seventh, and now a few words on the great smartphone debate. You will recall that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote a best-selling book blaming the mental health problems of American youth on smartphones.

About which Derek Thompson wrote this in The Atlantic. 

You can find a summary of it on page 5 of this year’s World Happiness Report, a survey of thousands of people across more than 140 countries. “Between 2006 and 2023, happiness among Americans under 30 in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand declined significantly [and] also declined in Western Europe,” the report says. But here’s the catch: In the rest of the world, under-30 happiness mostly increased in this period. “Happiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and Eastern Europe,” the report says. “In the former Soviet Union and East Asia too there have been large increases in happiness at every age.”

This is pretty weird. Smartphones are a global phenomenon. But apparently the rise in youth anxiety is not. In some of the largest and most trusted surveys, it appears to be largely occurring in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”

The story is even more striking when you look at the most objective measures of teen distress: suicide and self-harm. Suicides have clearly increased in the U.S. and the U.K. Emergency-room visits for suicide attempts and self-harm have been skyrocketing for Gen Z girls across the Anglosphere in the past decade, including in Australia and New Zealand. But there is no rise in suicide or self-harm attempts in similar high-income countries with other national languages, such as France, Germany, and Italy. As Vox’s Eric Levitz wrote, the suicide rate among people ages 15 to 19 actually fell significantly across continental Europe from 2012 to 2019.

So if you were tempted to embrace the smartphones heuristic, think again.

Eighth, as for the notion that America, thanks to its therapy culture, has been exporting mental illness, you can find it articulated well in a book by one Ethan Watters. It is called Crazy Like Us.

Finally, I now have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. Email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com to set up an appointment.

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