Saturday, April 16, 2022

The Neo-Liberal World Order May Be Over

APRIL 15, 2022

Anne Applebaum, a Russian expert, recently wrote a piece in The Atlantic entitled, “There Is No Liberal World Order.” She laments: “There is no natural liberal world order, and there are no rules without someone to enforce them.”

But who? Who is going to not only make the rules, “the liberal world order,” and who is going to “enforce” them? Sadly, Applebaum doesn’t answer these questions.

However, Applebaum hints at answers to the questions. She argues:

Because of Europe’s metamorphosis—and especially because of the extraordinary transformation of Germany from a Nazi dictatorship into the engine of the continent’s integration and prosperity—Europeans and Americans alike believed that they had created a set of rules that would preserve peace not only on their own continents, but eventually in the whole world.

Then she notes:

This liberal world order relied on the mantra of “Never again.” Never again would there be genocide. Never again would large nations erase smaller nations from the map. Never again would we be taken in by dictators who used the language of mass murder.

She concludes, warning: “Precisely because there is no liberal world order, no norms and no rules, we must fight ferociously for the values and the hopes of liberalism if we want our open societies to continue to exist.”

Reading Applebaum’s article one must shout: Open your eyes!

For all Applebaum’s well-intentioned discussion, she ignores how “ferociously” the U.S. has fought since WW-II to maintain the global hegemony she identifies as liberalism. Yes, the U.S. is a very dynamic nation with, for many, unprecedented freedom to do almost anything they want – and with the largest military (and military-industrial complex) in the world. Her celebrated “Never again” mantra is the social lubricant of decades of foreign intervention – from Vietnam to Afghanistan and everywhere in between.

Applebaum claims that at the core of the belief in “Never again” is a very simple, if profound, belief: “Wealth would bring liberalism. Capitalism would bring democracy—and democracy would bring peace.”

This belief, if not reality, defined U.S. and Europe social life for decades. People once believed in the “American Dream.” And for decades, it worked. The lives of most people in the advanced capitalist countries got materially better – be it measured in life span, medical care, income, home ownership and even sexual life. Greater political and social attention was focused on issues relating to social equality, be they involve race, gender or wealth.

However, that era of “relative” equality has been eclipsed by a new order of “inequality,” of Robber Barron capitalism reliving the Gilded Age. A century ago, the Gilded Age was an era of the celebrated grand bourgeoisie but also marked by widespread poverty, racist violence and women launching first-wave feminism. We appear to be a swimming in an unstable era marked by not only a global pandemic, but the ever-growing rise environmental concerns, increased forced migration, widespread malnutrition (especially among the very young) and neo-colonial warfare fought with postmodern techno-madness.

Applebaum, The Atlantic’s long-time writer about Russia, offers an informed overview of how the former Soviet Union was transformed into the newly constituted Russia of old, with Vladimir Putin becoming the new tzar. She informs readers:

The leaders of Russia, owners of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, were reconstructing an army and a propaganda machine designed to facilitate mass murder, as well as a mafia state controlled by a tiny number of men and bearing no resemblance to Western capitalism.

And she reminds her readers that the “for 30 years, Western oil and gas companies piled into Russia, partnering with Russian oligarchs who had openly stolen the assets they controlled. Western financial institutions did lucrative business in Russia too …”

She tells her readers that “neither Bill Clinton nor George W. Bush made much attempt to arm or reinforce the new NATO members. Only in 2014 did the Obama administration finally place a small number of American troops in the region, largely in an effort to reassure allies after the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

Applebaum fails to acknowledge the role the U.S. played through NATO as its cat’s paw in seeding the current geo-political showdown. The historian Mary Sarotte, author of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, reported on NPR:

Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, NATO expanded three times: first to add the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland; then seven more countries even farther east, including the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; and finally with Albania and Croatia in 2009.

Does expansion equal encroachment? And does encroachment mean conquest? These are the historical questions being played out in the Ukraine war.

Applebaum’s analysis doesn’t place Russia’s current war in a long-term historical context, nor does she consider Putin in terms of what might best be called the Russian “character” or “spirit.” She presents Putin on face value, with little or no reference to the history his personality and title embody. A reading of Vasily Grossman’s insightful novel, Everything Flows, is in order.

Applebaum makes a strong, convincing case that “Russia is not the only nation in the world that covets its neighbors’ territory, that seeks to destroy entire populations, that has no qualms about the use of mass violence.” She warns about the treats posed by North Korea, China, Belarus, Venezuela, Iran, Nicaragua, Hungary and “potentially others.” She warns, “they understand that the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice is dangerous to their form of autocratic power—and they know that that language originates in the democratic world, our world.”

Applebaum divides the world between “democracies” and “tyrannies,” thus ignoring the great economic restructuring that’s reordered the global order over the last quarter-century. U.S. hegemony – economic, military and diplomatic — is in crisis, it’s might faltering. And with a destabilized world order, almost anything is possible.

Most troublesome, the same vehicle that Russia is employing in its attempt to take over Ukraine is the same entity Applebaum believes the West/U.S. should use to “enforce” what she calls “the liberal world order” – an all-powerful State.

To her credit, Applebaum knows how fragile the “democratic” State is, especially in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency and the January 6^th failed attempted coup. But are “the language of democracy, anti-corruption, and justice” sufficient? Perhaps it’s time to think outside the formal, established “box” of social order and restructure the structure of ever-centralizing power of both the State and the oligarchs to safeguard the future of democracy in the U.S., Europe and the rest of the world.

David Rosen is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion: The Transformation of 1950s New York’s Forbidden into America’s New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015). He can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com.

A Decaying USA, From Canada’s Coign of Vantage

BY ELLIOTT MILLER

APRIL 15, 2022
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A Review of the Next Civil War: Dispatches From The American Future

To distill a subject, like the possibility of another American civil war, requires integral literary tools, some of which are: Time, Perception, Honesty and a sufficient amount of Valor—assets that unfortunately, all writers do not possess. When I saw that novelist/journalist Stephen Marche had strapped on a parachute and went feet first into the subject, I felt somewhat at ease. I say that as someone who has not read a lot of Mr. Marche’s work—but the little I have read (an unflinching Esquire piece on the 2016 film, A Birth of a Nation, and a 2021 Literary Hub piece that confronts, “contemporary fiction’s slow abandonment of literary voice”) rendered me thoroughly impressed. Those essays are what nudged me into his latest nonfiction effort, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, but it wasn’t until I ran into the following assertion, on page 8 in the book, that I truly, reclined my chair and embraced the ride: “American liberals in the major cities retain a kind of desperate faith in their country’s institutions that amounts nearly to delusion…”

Mr. Marche, hailing from the neighboring Republic of Canada, opines that statement while watching our American production unfold from a convenient premium seat. Still, with liberal and conservative flags planted firmly around the globe, and cancel culture surging, it takes an audacious critical observer to make, and document, an impartial forthright assessment of that polemical caliber. To put it more bluntly, one can assume that in a book like this, the hard right’s antebellum pipe dreams would receive an intense examination. However, that fact does not guarantee a similar exploration of neoliberal politics, and the romanticism and chicanery it imposes on American citizens in blue and purple states.

On the same candid page, Marche even x-rayed neoliberal’s 21^st century darling, the 44^thPresident of the United States—with the kind of statement that I’m almost certain, after besotted feelings subside, historians will perpetually drum, when they excavate and deliver their unabating analysis on his eight year tenure:

“Barack Obama’s presidency was based on what we will, out of politeness, call an illusion of national purpose. He articulated the idea most passionately, most purely, during his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention”:
“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.”

“It was a beautiful vision.” Marche continued. “It was also fantasy.”

After setting a great nonpartisan tone in the book’s opening chapters, Marche blurred literary lines and intermittently summoned his fiction voice to craft five hypothetical plots, (chapters he labeled, “Dispatches” that suggest the type of natural, and unnatural disasters that could (in his opinion) ignite another civil war:

Dispatch One: THE BATTLE OF THE BRIDGE – A calculating General and a troop of US forces, confront an armed anti-government militia, cosseted by a Machiavellian sheriff and his loyal deputies, on a run-down, insignificant bridge.

Dispatch Two: PORTRAIT OF AN ASSASSINATION – An angry despairing loner, seizes an unlikely opportunity, assassinates a sitting female President, and is anointed “a hero to one half of the country—and a cold-blooded murderer to the other.”

Dispatch Three: THE FALL OF NEW YORK – A category 5 super storm devastates New York. Three droughts in five years leave America starving; and climate change triggers flooding, heat waves, climate refugees and economic turmoil.

Dispatch Four: THE OUTBREAK OF WIDESPREAD VIOLENCE – The author ruminates on multiple civil disorder scenarios—all of which lead to insurgency, and the “reshaping of the American political landscape.”

Dispatch Five: THE END OF THE REPUBLIC – Tribalism reigns. The Constitution becomes toilet paper. America cracks and secedes into three separate nations. And the self-professed, Last Citadel of Democracy, belongs to the ages.

The fiction in this artistic device highlights Marche’s gorgeous prose and prompts my newfound interest in his two novels (2005 Raymond and Hannah and 2015 The Hunger and the Wolf), but I’m not sure if the author’s hybrid approach buttressed his assiduously researched perspective the way, I assume, he hoped it would. What I mean by that is, nonfiction is usually an intense perusal; the writer turned lawyer, presenting his or her case to a jury of literary peers. To pause the presentation, repeatedly, in order to show the jury a cluster of short films, (so to speak) in the hope that said narratives will help elucidate one’s perspective, is taking a huge risk at convoluting the reader’s literary perception.

Nevertheless, I for one appreciate an artist (and art) that dares to take risks. Whether achieved or not, being adventurous will always represent the road to possibility, and artists are the world’s foremost pilots, chauffeurs and wheelmen, even if we do get into the occasional fender bender every now and then—and as bold and intriguing as The Next Civil War is, it did not, like all literature, roll off the publishing showroom floor unblemished.

In a chapter he titled, HOW TO THINK THROUGH THE AMERICAN HARD RIGHT, Marche contends, “During the decades in which America obsessed over the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, it failed to notice the rise of a homegrown equivalent, radical Americanism, a pocket heartland ISIS.”

This is the kind of perspective and assessment that coddles “disavowal, repudiation and elusiveness”—language that, Gloria Wekker, writer and Dutch emeritus professor at Utrecht University, appropriately employed, in her shrewd 2016 nonfiction book, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. A disingenuous deportment, white innocence, one that affords the US, other governments (and individuals) that don’t want to grapple with the kind of racial quandaries found in Marche’s book, an escape hatch. No, the American government has always been fully aware of its in-house racial ferment, and it is more than capable of quick marching towards domestic hate groups, while blowing bubble gum orbs at foreign Islamic terrorism.

The distraction that Marche suggests is really a furtive indifference from the Department of Justice, one that has been exercised since the end of the Civil War. An intentional blind eye, cast and designed to, Klandestentally nurture American antebellum fervor and principles—the same blind eye that conservative politicians are turning from last year’s United States Capitol attack.

I don’t know how one can be aware of the complicit actions, and responses, from Trump’s political sycophants, with respect to January 6, 2021—while acknowledging the boiling confederate animus this country has been steeping in for over a hundred fifty years—and not see that they are nothing more than kissing gerontophilic cousins.

There are a couple of other aspirated theories, proclaimed by one of the author’s maven military Generals, that I could not digest as well, but I’ll refrain and succinctly conclude this review by saying this… I, unfortunately believe, like Stephen Marche, there will be another civil tragedy in this country, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be the blue/gray coat affair of the mid-19^th century, or one of diplomatic seceding states that Marche outlines in the denouement of his prophetic book (as wonderful as that scenario would be). But the antebellum similarity I do see is a bifurcated, compromised military and police force, and polarized US citizens, spilling a river full of brotherly/sisterly blood, in fitful hostilities, all so the conservative demographic in this country can try and preserve antiquated ideals, instead of seeking a new, advanced, apexed way of life.

Advancement and the facility thereof, is the only bonafide gift an intelligent generation can truly offer posterity. We are here, today, because of that gift. And unless the majority of us are willing to concede that man, woman and society have reached their full potential, (a proposition too ludicrous to entertain) we, or everyone occupying this planet, are obliged to pay “advancement” forward—a notion that fundamentally, could very well be, the final amendment to that insincere, anachronistic document called, the United States Constitution.

Peace in the Valley: a Glyph

BY ED SANDERS

APRIL 15, 2022

Ed Sanders is a poet, musician and writer. He founded Fuck You: a Magazine of the Arts, as well as the Fugs. He edits the Woodstock Journal. His books include: The Family, Sharon Tate: a Life and the novel Tales of Beatnik Glory.

Jesus Christ Was a Medicine Man

BY ELLIOT SPERBERFacebook

Jesus Christ, he was a medicine man
Jesus Christ, he had the best medical plan

There was vision
There was dental

Free education
Clean transportation

He put an end to war
And deforestation

Everybody got
Debt cancellation

And free housing and free food
It’s true
As food and housing’s medicine, too

Elliot Sperber is a writer, attorney, and adjunct professor. He lives in New York City and can be reached at elliot.sperber@gmail.com and on twitter @elliot_sperber

Eleanor Marx: The Last Word

BY DEAN WAREHAM

MARCH 31, 2022
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Eleanor Marx at the age of 18, in 1873.

Last year the New Yorker published Paul McCartney’s essay on how he came to write “Eleanor Rigby.” It turns out the main character was based on an old woman he knew in his childhood and her name was not Eleanor at all; it may have been Daisy Hawkins but that didn’t work in the scheme with Father MacKenzie (verse two), so he created “Eleanor” from Eleanor Bron, who worked on the Beatles’ Help movie, and “Rigby” after a shop sign he saw in Bristol.

During the first pandemic year, I wrote my own song about an Eleanor: Eleanor “Tussy” Marx, who died on this day, March 31, 1898. I found myself reading Mary Gabriel’s Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution which tells the epic story of Karl, his wife Jenny von Westphalen, and their daughters, Laura, Jenny (Jennychen), and Eleanor. There were others too — Karl and Jenny in fact had seven children but only three survived into adulthood. All three daughters — and their spouses — played a role in the socialist movement, but it was Tussy who was closest to Marx and Engels and the most active politically.

From Rachel Holmes’ biography, I learned that Eleanor Marx had done the first English translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and figured it was high time I read that too. The novel was scandalous for its depiction of adultery and the newspaper that serialized it was tried for obscenity in 1857. It created a stir in England too, where it was secretly blacklisted even into the 1950s, with government files showing that police constables were under orders to purchase and destroy copies they found.

The first half of Madame Bovary is slow going — maybe Flaubert wanted to illustrate how tedious bourgeois life was in the provinces — but the novel shifts into another gear when Emma embarks on her affairs with Rodolphe and Léon, and it’s hard put it down. Here is the necessary spoiler: the fictional Emma Bovary, destitute and heartbroken, kills herself by taking a dose of arsenic.

Eleanor Marx was born on January 16, 1855, and Julian Barnes suggests that Emma Bovary also was “born” around 1855, as the serialized novel first appeared in the Revue de Paris in 1856.

The baby Tussy was vaccinated against smallpox, in compliance with the English Parliament’s Vaccination act of 1853, which mandated compulsory vaccination for infants. The Marxes, who had already lost two sons and a daughter to illness in their infancy, were happy to follow the mandate, and it may have saved her life — her mother contracted smallpox in 1860 and never fully recovered.

Formal education was not an option for girls in 1860s England, but Eleanor attended the South Hampstead College for Ladies and her teachers at home were top-notch: Marx, Engels (when he visited), and Engels’ partner Lizzy Burns, who could neither read nor write but interested Eleanor in the cause of Irish independence. From an early age she accompanied her father to the reading room at the British Museum and at the age of nine wrote letters to Abraham Lincoln, letters which her father pretended to mail but instead shared with Engels. By fourteen she was assisting both Marx and Engels in their research. She learned German and French and later studied Norwegian for the sole purpose of translating Ibsen.

Rachel Holmes argues that the feminist movement properly dates to the 1870s, not the 1970s, and considers Eleanor Marx the foremother of socialist feminism. The right to vote in England was predicated on property ownership; working class men could not vote, and women could not vote no matter what their social status. Eleanor supported the call for women’s suffrage, but always framed the question of women’s rights, as “the sex question and its economic base,” that is, she dealt with it from the perspective of working class. “Women are the creatures of an organized tyranny of men,” she wrote, “as workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers.”

Eleanor was her father’s first biographer, writing an important article for Progress magazine on his life and on the theory of surplus value. She organized the first women’s trade union sections and was a leader of the Gasworkers and General Labourers union (today’s GMB, who present an honor in her name each year).

Both Eleanor and Emma, writes Julian Barnes, led lives of sexual irregularity in the eyes of right-thinking people. For Emma Bovary, that irregularity was a series of adulterous affairs. For Eleanor Marx, it meant living for fifteen years in an open relationship, a free union, with Edward Aveling, whom she met in 1884, in the reading room of the British Museum. Aveling was a member of the Secular Society, a Darwinist, zoologist, actor-playwright, literary critic, socialist, and by all accounts a cad and a compulsive borrower and bouncer of checks.

“He has the eyes and face of a lizard,” wrote her friend George Bernard Shaw, and many of her friends refused dinner invitations if they thought Aveling might be there. So maybe the “free’ in their free union was mostly for Edward, who spent her money and carried on affairs while she worked tirelessly for the socialist and labor movements and took teaching and translating work to pay their bills.

In 1886 she completed her translation of Madame Bovary, as well as Lissagaray’s History of the Paris Commune, and staged the first reading of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in England, while also co-writing (with Aveling) The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View, on the oppression of women and how it affects both men and women. Holmes describes it as a synthesis of Marx, Engels, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley.

That year the Marx-Avelings toured the United States, at the invitation of the Socialist Labor Party. She abhorred anarchists and their tactics, but still made speeches in defense of those Chicago anarchists who were framed and sentenced to death after the Haymarket Square Incident that May. She and Aveling wrote a treatise on the socialist movement in the States. She was in Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday, November 13, 1887, marching at the front of the rally when the police started beating people.

In 1895 Eleanor bought a small house at 7 Jews Walk in the London suburb of Sydenham, where she lived with Edward, and continued to edit the essays of Marx and Engels for publication. Aveling spent a lot of time in London and carried on a secret life, borrowing money compulsively. He was in considerable debt to G.B. Shaw, who nonetheless continued to loan him money only because Shaw was developing a play, The Doctor’s Dilemma, with a degenerate lead character based on Aveling, and said he wanted to observe his behavior.

On the 8th of June 1897, Aveling secretly married a young actress, Eva Frye, using a fake name on the marriage certificate. He left Eleanor without any explanation, but by the end of the year, he became seriously ill (kidney disease and a recurring abscess) and moved back into the Sydenham house without saying where he had been.

Aveling had been married before and always told people that his first wife — Isabel Campbell Frank — would not give him a divorce, and hence he could not marry Eleanor. In fact, Isabel died in 1892; Aveling had taken her inheritance and bought property that he kept hidden.

At the start of 1898, things were closing in, she was under financial pressure with Aveling’s considerable medical bills, and friends urged her to leave him. But she remained forgiving, to a fault.

“Dear Freddy,” she wrote to the family friend Frederick Demuth, “I see more and more that wrongdoing is just a moral disease, and the morally healthy . . are not fit to judge the condition of the morally diseased, just as the physically healthy person can hardly realize the condition of the physically diseased.” Most historians believe Demuth was in fact her half-brother, Karl Marx’s illegitimate son with Helene Demuth.

In the last week of March, an anonymous letter finally alerted her to Aveling’s marriage to Eva Frye. On the morning of March 31st, they quarreled loudly, and Edward took a train to London. Eleanor sent her maid Gertrude Gentry to the pharmacist with a note, signed “E.A.” and Aveling’s business card attached, asking for chloroform and “prussic acid (cyanide) for dog.” Upon receiving the package, she took her life in the same manner as Emma Bovary.

Gertrude found Eleanor dead in her bed, in her white muslin summer dress, her face and hands turning blue. A doctor was called — Dr Henry Shackleton, whose son Ernest later explored the Antarctic. The coroner’s report concluded, “suicide by swallowing prussic acid at the time labouring under mental derangement.” Her death was registered in Sydenham: “Eleanor Marx, age 40, a single woman.” In fact, she was forty-three.

She left a short note for Aveling:

Dear, it will soon be all over now. My last word to you is the same I’ve said during these long, sad years — love.

I decided to take that heartbreaking line and write a song around it. The line fit best in the four-chord bridge, but sill I had to lop off that last word — love — to make it fit the melody. I’m okay with that, I kinda like that I sing about the word without naming it. Maybe I should have used Paul’s trick, where the bridge — “Ah, look at all the lonely people” — starts the song.

I feel a bit morbid focusing on her death when her life is so inspiring, but telling that life story would have meant writing an opera and that really is best left to McCartney.

p.s. Jennifer Julia Eleanor Marx was cremated at the Woking Crematorium, and her ashes had their own history — brought first to the SDF offices, later in possession of the British Socialist Party and then the British Communist Party, then moved to the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green, where they were displayed on a bookshelf in the Lenin room. In 1956, when Karl & Jenny’s tomb was built in Highgate Cemetery, her remains were buried alongside them.

p.p.s. Edward Aveling lasted only four months longer, succumbing to kidney disease on August 2, 1898.

The Last Word

I fell in love with a communist cad

A free union, he drove me mad

Isn’t it wonderful, isn’t it nice

Labor and capital, value and price

I will tell you one last word

I told you lies but I never deceived you

You only heard what you wanted to hear

Send for the chemist, send for the maid

My time has come, I’m not afraid

I will tell you one last word

My last word to you is the same that I’ve said

During all of these long sad years

My last word to you is the same I’ve said

During all these long sad years

These are the ashes of Eleanor Marx

Jennifer Julia Eleanor Marx

Who took her life, on the last day of March

Jennifer Julia Eleanor Marx

Dean Wareham founded the bands Galaxie 500 and Luna. His most recent album, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A., was released in 2021.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM

MK Tibi arrives at Temple Mount, confronts police officers

ZIONIST MEMBER OF KNESSET FREAKS OUT
MK Ben Gvir calls for MK Ahmed Tibi to be prosecuted for confronting security forces who were stationed at the Temple Mount.

Israel National News
15.04.22

Eastern JerusalemShalev Shalom/TPS

The chairman of the Otzma Yehudit Party, MK Itamar Ben Gvir, on Friday asked the Attorney General to look into prosecuting MK Ahmed Tibi (Joint List) after Tibi confronted security forces who were stationed at the Temple Mount.

Footage posted to social media showed Tibi arriving at the Temple Mount following the violent riots that erupted there on Friday morning. He confronted police and told them, "Today is the second Friday of Ramadan, I always come with the people to pray. I am Muslim, I am not Itamar Ben Gvir. He came to do provocations, I come to pray with my people."

The video clearly shows Tibi in the midst of a shouting match with one of the policemen and yelling at him, "Get out of here!" as one of the officers keeps the other Border Police officers away from Tibi.

Ben Gvir also appealed to the Border Police to remove the officer who defended Tibi instead of the fighters.

"It is clearly seen that Ahmed Tibi is attacking policemen and the officer is protecting Tibi instead of the fighters," he wrote.

"Tibi's place is in jail for assaulting police officers. I call on the Border Police commander to immediately suspend the officer who defended Tibi, instead of the fighters under his responsibility, who interrupted their determination to deal with the terrorist Tibi who attacked them. It is forbidden to leave an officer who abandons his fighters in the Israel Police for even one minute, and we must end the loss of control and governance."

Harris, Emhoff to hold first known Passover seder at VP’s residence

Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will be the first known second family to host a Passover seder at the vice president’s residence Friday after holding a virtual celebration last year.

Harris confirmed her holiday plans on Twitter, posting a traditional Passover greeting.

“Chag Sameach to all those celebrating Passover. Tonight, like families in the United States, Israel, and around the world, the @SecondGentleman and I will also host a Passover Seder at our residence,” the post read.

The news was first reported by CNN, citing a White House official who revealed that Jewish members of Harris and Emhoff’s staff will attend the gathering at the Naval Observatory in Washington along with their loved ones.

The vice president also reportedly informed Israeli President Isaac Herzog of her plans to host the seder during their Thursday call.

Emhoff became the first Jewish spouse of a US president or vice president when Harris was sworn in last year. The couple were married in 2014.

Just two months after the inauguration, the second gentleman led the first-ever virtual Passover seder at the Naval Observatory, saying at the time he hoped it would be the last virtual celebration.

The couple will hold the seder at the Naval Observatory in Washington along with their loved ones.

In November of last year, the vice president’s family hung the first mezuzah on the front door of an executive residence in US history.

The celebration comes as Washington, DC, is hit with a wave of positive COVID-19 cases — with both Harris and President Biden potentially being exposed several times.

Multiple administration officials, including Harris’ communications director Jamal Simmons and Attorney General Merrick Garland, contracted the virus after attending the superspreader Gridiron dinner April 2.

As of Monday, both the president and vice president had tested negative for the virus.

Harris’ office did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Saturday, April 16, 2022

Eleanor Marx: The Last Word

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