“I thought I knew who John Fetterman was,” writes my colleague Peter Savodnik of the progressive senator in our first piece today. To be more precise, Peter thought Fetterman was “a rich kid pretending to be a working-class stiff.” But after October 7, Peter has decided he got Fetterman wrong. “I mean totally, indefensibly, unbelievably wrong.”
Not only has the lawmaker shown more moral clarity than fellow progressives since the Hamas attack, he has proven more steadfast in his support for Israel than almost everyone in the Democratic Party.
Fetterman’s stance shouldn’t be remarkable, argues Peter. But “we have become so overwhelmed by uncertainty, so incapacitated by our moral relativism, that we’ve become incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, or defending our values. Or forgetting what those values were in the first place.”
One of our core values at the Free Press is admitting when we’ve made mistakes, as Peter does powerfully here.
Click below to read his full piece.
In September 2022, I staked out John Fetterman’s home, just east of Pittsburgh.
I thought I knew exactly who Fetterman was: a lie—a rich kid pretending to be a working-class stiff. (This was hardly a secret. Everyone knew Fetterman, who made $150 a month when he was mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania, from 2006 to 2019, was getting help from his parents—into his late forties.)
Anyway, no one was home or showed up, and the campaign refused to make the candidate available.
I assumed he was hiding—didn’t want to let on how much damage his stroke had done to his mind or body, didn’t want anyone peering too closely at his carefully curated cartoon image of a down-to-earth Rust Belt Democrat. The hoodie, the tats, even the hunkering six-feet-eight-inches frame and the semipermanent scowl seemed too stilted and staged, like a caricature, a little too Eminem. It felt like a sham, and the best that could be said of Fetterman was he was someone else’s puppet.
I was wrong.
I mean totally, indefensibly, unbelievably wrong.
In the past two months, since Hamas attacked Israel, the Democratic now–junior senator from Pennsylvania has pulled off something that few, if any, of those at the highest echelons of the national power structure are capable of: he surprised everyone.
The seismic effects of last week’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism are still being felt, with University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill stepping down from her job over the weekend, and questions now circulating over the academic integrity of Harvard president Claudine Gay.
As Eli Steele writes in our second piece today, Gay is a symbol of mediocrity, the kind of person who has “checked the black box,” declaring her minority status on college and employment applications all her life. It’s something Steele says he has always refused to do.
Why?
Because, in his words, checking the “black” box “was to move off the merit track and onto the race track, where people like Claudine Gay excel.”
Read Eli’s essay below:
I have known people like Claudine Gay my entire life and they are the reason why I never checked the “black” box on college and employment applications. If I had, I would not be a free individual today.
As a child, I was fascinated by the story of my paternal grandparents’ interracial marriage in 1944 in segregated Chicago. The 1967 interracial marriage of my black father to the daughter of Holocaust survivors in the same city wasn’t much easier; at the time, America burned with race riots. My grandparents and parents had every reason not to marry across the color line. But they chose love over their racial order.
But, growing up, I was faced with another kind of racial order than my parents and grandparents. When I hit my teens, I encountered tremendous pressure to conform to a single race on school applications and in personal encounters. And with this pressure, it felt like my identity, which I thought was defined by the choices I made and the responsibilities I accepted, had become a currency in someone else’s political power game.
But it was not until I applied to college in the early 1990s that I encountered people like Claudine Gay and truly saw behind the curtain of identity politics. That was when, with grades and SATs that were borderline acceptable for top-tier colleges, my highschool counselor—along with most university officials—urged me to boost my chances of admission by checking the “black” box on applications. And when they saw my reluctance, they routinely dismissed my misgivings with the same line: “Oh, it’s nothing, just check the box and you’ll get the upper hand.”
For some time now, funny has been the exception, not the rule, on Saturday Night Live. Watch some classic sketches and you soon realize how far the show has fallen.
Or suffer through last Saturday’s cold open, which parodied the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn testifying before Congress last week.
Practically everyone agrees the hearing was a disaster for those being questioned. But somehow the writers’ room at SNL decided it was Elise Stefanik, the Republican lawmaker doing the questioning, who should be the butt of the joke. The sketch was not just painful television (watch it for yourself below), it was a sorry display of what happens when comedy becomes too ideological and punches in one direction only.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
For a reminder of what comedy can achieve—even in the darkest of times—look no further than Eretz Nehederet. Israel’s answer to SNL has become appointment viewing for a country at war. Whether it’s mocking the Hamas apologetics of American campus radicals or poking fun at Bibi Netanyahu, the show has fun at the expense of a wide cast of characters.
In the process, Eretz Nehederet (which translates to Wonderful Country), hasn’t just given Israelis some much-needed comic relief. It’s helped them make sense of an impossibly difficult time.
In her story below, Polina Fradkin meets the people behind the show making a grieving nation laugh.
Fun seemed to have come to an end on October 7 here in Israel. Amid the endless stream of tragedy flooding our phones and seizing our attention, it felt almost unconscionable to laugh. But for the cast and crew of Eretz Nehederet, which translates to Wonderful Country, Israel’s prime-time sketch satire show—our version of Saturday Night Live—generating humor is a duty.
“After October 7, our discussions and plans for the next season came to a halt,” Reshef Shay, a writer on Eretz Nehederet, which airs Tuesday or Wednesday each week on Keshet’s Channel 12, tells The Free Press. “Our program runs tightly to what’s going on day to day. So when reality changed, let’s just say, we write jokes and God laughs.”
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"hAMas cHARter sAYs kILL aLL tHE jEWs!"
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/hamas-2017-document-of-general-principles-and-policies
Reading the Free Press recently, an impartial reader would think that the only thing going on in the world is the war in Israel. Similarly, the paucity of articles written from the perspective of the average Palestinian's viewpoint, such as the horrors of bombing their schools and killing thousands of children, gets hardly a mention…if at all. When the Free Press offered such promise as a beacon of free speech, it is heartbreaking to see its mission disintegrate.