The Uncarried Sufferer

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Luke Ford

Japanese soldiers entered Nanking in December 1937 and killed as many as three hundred thousand people over the following six weeks. Western reporters watched it happen. Missionaries and doctors kept records and smuggled film out of the city. The world’s press covered it while it was still going on. Sixty years later Iris Chang (1968-2004) subtitled her book about it “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” and the subtitle held. Nanking never became a story Japan tells about Japan. For decades it barely became a story China tells about China. It stayed local to the city where the bodies fell.

Jeffrey C. Alexander (b. 1947) puts this case near the center of his theory of cultural trauma, and he uses it to argue something that unsettles most of what we assume about public memory. The failure at Nanking had nothing to do with the scale of the suffering, the availability of evidence, or the presence of witnesses. All three were overwhelming. The failure came from the collapse of what Alexander calls the trauma process. No group emerged with the resources, the authority, and the interpretive competence to carry the claim. The narrative was never made persuasive to audiences beyond the victims. The perpetrators were never compelled to accept responsibility. The lessons were never memorialized or ritualized. Nothing about the circle of moral obligation changed.

Whose suffering in America today can be converted into a compelling public claim about who “we” are? And whose can’t?

Alexander’s core move is to reject what he calls the naturalistic fallacy. Events do not traumatize collectivities. Representations of events traumatize collectivities. A society can absorb institutional failure, mass death, economic collapse, and systematic cruelty without any of it entering the group’s sense of who it is. Social crises become cultural crises only when someone succeeds in representing the pain as a threat to the identity of the collectivity.

Alexander asks how and under what conditions claims get made, and with what results. Real suffering still requires representation before strangers will experience it as their business. The Nanking dead were not less dead for going uncarried. They were less useful.

The work is done by what Alexander, borrowing from Max Weber (1864-1920), calls carrier groups. Carrier groups have ideal and material interests. They sit somewhere in the social structure. They possess particular talents for meaning making in public. They can be elites, and they can also be despised minorities or spiritual pariahs. What they must do is answer four questions convincingly. What happened? Who is the victim? Why should a wider public identify with that victim? Who is responsible?

Those answers then have to survive passage through institutions. Alexander lists the arenas: religious, aesthetic, legal, scientific, mass media, and state bureaucracy. Each imposes its own discipline. The legal arena demands binding judgments and distributable remedies. The scientific arena demands evidence that survives methodological attack. The aesthetic arena demands identification and catharsis, which is why The Diary of Anne Frank did work that no monograph could do. The bureaucratic arena can convene a commission that either dramatizes a crime or launders it, depending on who controls the commission. Alexander adds a set of blunt questions about stratification. Who owns the newspapers. Whether courts are independent. Who exercises control over the government. A claim can be true, urgent, and dead on arrival because the people who might carry it cannot reach a printing press, a courtroom, or a camera.

Alexander offers this as a general theory, and he insists it applies outside the West. I want to run it in the other direction and use it on the country I live in. If Nanking is the type case of enormous suffering that failed to convert, where are the American equivalents?

One preliminary finding shapes everything that follows. The United States in 2026 does not have a single trauma apparatus. It has several, and they are at war with each other.

We can see what a dense carrier system looks like when we have one. Veteran suicide has a national bureaucracy inside the Department of Veterans Affairs, an annual report, a dedicated crisis line, and a grant program that offered another $112 million to community suicide-prevention efforts this year. Domestic violence and sexual assault have specialized federal statutes, a Justice Department office whose FY2025 grant awards ran to roughly $463 million, plus shelters, hotlines, prosecutors, academic fields, and a professional vocabulary that ordinary people now speak. Antisemitic victimization currently has direct access to the federal civil-rights apparatus, with the Education Department and the Justice Department opening investigations at a steady clip through 2025 and 2026.

Race shows what happens when carrier strength varies by arena. The civil-rights narrative remains embedded in universities, journalism, law, philanthropy, and popular culture, where it still supplies the master vocabulary for talking about injustice. Meanwhile the current administration terminated federal DEI programs in 2025, and in July 2026 the Education Department removed disparate-impact provisions from its Title VI regulations. The same trauma claim now commands one set of American institutions and gets actively resisted in another. Alexander’s framework predicts this. He treats the arenas as semi-autonomous, and a claim can win the aesthetic and academic arenas while losing the bureaucratic one.

Against that background, here are the largest severity-to-carrier mismatches I can find.

Start with people in prisons and jails who are raped, assaulted, isolated, or psychologically broken in custody. This may be the clearest case in American life.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 4.1 percent of adult prison inmates reported sexual victimization in 2023-24, with a nearly identical figure of 4.0 percent in local jails. In both systems the reported abuse came from staff as well as from other inmates. The federal system was holding roughly twelve thousand people in restrictive housing in late 2023, typically for at least twenty-two hours a day. Mental illness concentrates heavily behind bars: the most recent nationally representative survey of prisoners found a history of mental-health problems among 43 percent of state inmates.

Prisoners make poor trauma protagonists for reasons that map onto Alexander’s four questions one by one.

The nature of the pain is contested by the people who control the record. Custodians produce most of the information about what happens inside, and the victim’s account arrives pre-discounted.

The nature of the victim fails the innocence test before the story starts. The public has already classified this man as a perpetrator. That classification is not incidental to his invisibility. It is a condition of other people’s trauma claims. Crime victims need perpetrators, and the perpetrator role is filled by men who are themselves among the most victimized people in the country. The same body carries both roles, and only one of them is legible at a time.

The relation of the victim to the audience is the hardest problem of all. Alexander says the audience must see valued qualities of the larger collective identity in the victim. “He committed a terrible crime and then something terrible was done to him” resists universalization in a way that “this could have been your daughter” does not.

Attribution of responsibility points back at the audience. The antagonist is a state employee acting in the name of the public, and the public authorized the sentence. Recognizing this trauma requires Americans to write themselves into the causal story.

Carrier groups exist. The Prison Rape Elimination Act, prisoners’ rights lawyers, the Vera Institute, Solitary Watch, the Liman Center at Yale, and a durable tradition of investigative reporting all work this territory. Measured against the severity of the suffering, their power to make Americans say “their pain implicates us” remains close to nil.

Prison also gives us a strange inversion of Alexander’s sequence, and it deserves its own name. Alexander describes routinization as what happens after a trauma process succeeds: the effervescence fades, the charisma cools, and the lessons get objectified in monuments, statutes, and offices. Prison rape got the statute without ever getting the drama. PREA passed Congress in 2003, generated a data collection program, standards, audits, and an annual report, and produced no shared national moral experience whatsoever. The apparatus arrived without the audience. And the apparatus then works as evidence that the matter is handled. A federal reporting requirement can function as a substitute for public feeling, which is a use of bureaucracy that Alexander’s model does not anticipate and that American government performs constantly.

Next, people with severe psychosis cycling among the street, the emergency room, the jail, the shelter, and involuntary treatment.

SAMHSA reports that about 30 percent of people experiencing chronic homelessness have a serious mental illness. There is no agreed narrative for what is being done to them.

Is this man abandoned by an inadequate mental-health system? Deprived of housing? Overmedicated? Denied medication? Criminalized by police? Preyed on by drug markets? Denied the involuntary treatment that could save him? Damaged by involuntary treatment? Cast out by deinstitutionalization? Warehoused by institutions?

Disability-rights organizations, families, psychiatrists, civil libertarians, housing advocates, addiction treatment providers, police unions, public defenders, hospitals, and mayors all represent the same man’s suffering in mutually exclusive terms. In Alexander’s framework this is fatal, because attribution of responsibility cannot stabilize, and without a stable antagonist the drama has no third act.

Modern trauma culture runs on the polished autobiographical witness, the survivor who can narrate what happened in the register the audience expects. A floridly psychotic man cannot supply that testimony. He frightens the people he needs to persuade. He may have committed crimes. He may refuse the treatment that one of his advocates insists he desperately needs, which turns his own voice into evidence against one carrier group and for another.

There is enormous institutional activity around homelessness and mental illness. What is missing is any group able to turn the experience of severe psychosis into a shared national story.

Third, frail elderly people and severely cognitively or developmentally disabled adults who are abused, neglected, restrained, exploited, or warehoused.

The CDC estimates that about one in ten older adults living at home experiences abuse, neglect, or exploitation, and cautions that the true figure runs higher because many victims are frightened or unable to report. Adult Protective Services received its first federal regulations in 2024, three decades after domestic violence built out a comparable apparatus.

The Alexander problem here is peculiar. These people would make excellent innocent victims. Nobody thinks a woman with advanced dementia had it coming. What they cannot do is narrate their own victimization, and the abuse takes place inside homes, nursing homes, group homes, and caregiving relationships that no journalist can enter.

The antagonist keeps dissolving. Sometimes he is a son stealing money. Sometimes an underpaid aide working a double. Sometimes a nursing-home chain. Sometimes a state agency that lost the file. Often nobody is deliberately cruel, and the suffering comes out of a system held together with too few people and too little money. American public morality handles villains well and handles depletion badly.

Disabled children fare better, because “child” is among the strongest victim identities this country has. Even there, routine horror can persist for years. In February 2026 the Justice Department reported that a single Missouri special-school district had secluded more than three hundred disabled students almost four thousand times in two years and restrained nearly one hundred fifty students seven hundred seventy-seven times. The Government Accountability Office has continued to document allegations of youth in residential facilities being maltreated and sometimes killed by staff. This is a suffering story whose carrier apparatus is getting stronger while leaving large territory uncovered.

Fourth, people living with severe chronic pain, particularly patients caught between pain treatment and the opioid regime. This may be the most instructive case of all, because it approaches a controlled experiment.

In 2023, 24.3 percent of American adults reported chronic pain, and 8.5 percent had high-impact chronic pain that frequently limited their lives or their work. That is an enormous population by any measure.

Chronic pain resists dramatization at the level of the image. There is no explosion, no assailant, no body, no battlefield, no moment. A man can be in unbearable pain and look healthy in a photograph. The aesthetic arena, which Alexander identifies as the site of identification and catharsis, has almost nothing to work with.

Then comes the larger problem. The chronic-pain claim collided with a far more successful claim, and lost.

The opioid epidemic narrative acquired dead children, grieving parents, corporate villains with names, lawsuits, documentaries, prosecutors, congressional hearings, settlement money running into the tens of billions, and a causal story that a stranger can absorb in one sentence. Every element Alexander says a trauma claim requires, that narrative had. And the chronic-pain patient taking opioids was standing in its path. He could be recoded from victim into suspected addict, drug seeker, or overdose statistic waiting to happen.

The CDC eventually acknowledged harms from misapplication of its 2016 prescribing guideline, including rapid tapering, abrupt discontinuation, access problems, and patient abandonment. Its 2022 guideline warns against those practices in plain language. The correction came through the scientific arena, where the pain patients had their only real carriers, and it arrived years after clinical behavior had already changed.

Alexander’s model treats claims as competing for public attention. This case shows something stronger. A dominant trauma narrative can reassign the moral status of the people inside a weaker one. The victims of the second story become the suspects in the first.

Fifth, family members providing extreme long-term care for dementia, profound disability, neurological disease, or severe mental illness. Here I want to separate weak carrier organization from weak traumatic coding, because the two come apart.

AARP is not a weak organization. It has money, lobbyists, a magazine, and a membership that votes. Its 2025 report with the National Alliance for Caregiving counted 63 million Americans providing continuing family care, with nearly a quarter giving forty or more hours a week, nearly half reporting a major financial consequence, one in five describing his own health as fair or poor, and nearly one in four reporting social isolation.

Why has suffering at that scale never become a central American story?

The narrative structure runs the wrong way at every point. There is usually no perpetrator. The person creating the burden is the person the caregiver loves. The work is coded as devotion, family duty, adulthood, and decency, so complaint reads as failure of character. The caregiver feels ashamed to name his mother as the source of his misery, and shame suppresses testimony more reliably than any gag order. The one caregiving narrative that circulates freely is heroic self-sacrifice, which honors the caregiver while privatizing his suffering. Praise, in this case, does the work that denial does elsewhere.

So caregivers do not have the weakest carriers in America. They suffer one of the largest failures of traumatic coding. Their organizations can move tax credits and respite care onto a legislative agenda more easily than they can persuade the country that years of exhaustion, financial depletion, broken sleep, bodily care, and anticipatory grief add up to a social injury.

Sixth, civilian male suicide and social disconnection, especially among men outside prestigious institutions.

There were 48,824 suicides in the United States in 2024. The male rate ran nearly four times the female rate. American Indian and Alaska Native people had the highest rate of any racial or ethnic group at 22.5 per 100,000.

Set this beside veteran suicide, which possesses one of the densest carrier systems in the country. The comparison teaches something about Alexander’s four questions that the framework does not make obvious.

Veteran suicide has no villain. Nobody can name the perpetrator. Attribution of responsibility, which Alexander treats as essential, is diffuse to the point of absence. The claim carries anyway, because the third question is answered so completely. “Veteran” connects the sufferer to sacrifice, patriotism, war, and national obligation, and it connects him to a federal department built around that population. Identification does the work that accusation cannot.

A powerful answer to the identification question can carry a claim with no antagonist at all. A weak answer to it sinks a claim even when the antagonist is obvious. Prisoners have a nameable perpetrator and no identification. Veterans have identification and no perpetrator. Only one of these becomes a national concern.

Civilian male suicide gets universalized into “mental health,” which has humane advantages and one sociological cost. It forecloses reading the male differential as a collective injury requiring explanation. The unemployed man of fifty, the divorced father, the isolated laborer, the failed contractor, the man recently out of prison, the man on a reservation: none of them arrives with an institution capable of turning his biography into a national story. Writers and organizations concerned with boys and men have grown more visible in the last few years, so I would call this an emerging carrier field that has not yet established a stable master narrative rather than a bottom-tier case.

The suffering stories that travel best through American institutions have an innocent victim, a discrete violation, a nameable perpetrator, a dramatic event, an articulate witness, reproducible imagery, an available remedy, and some link to sacred national values.

The stories that travel worst have morally compromised victims, incapacitated victims, chronic rather than episodic harm, private settings, ambiguous causation, diffuse responsibility, embarrassing bodily realities, or institutions the public authorizes and funds.

Underneath several of these cases sits a physical condition that Alexander’s stratification questions imply. He asks who owns the newspapers and whether courts are independent. The prior question is whether a carrier can reach the victim at all. Prison, jail, nursing home, group home, psychiatric ward, and the family house are enclosed spaces. Someone controls the door. The suffering that goes uncarried in America happens disproportionately in rooms that journalists cannot enter, where the party controlling access is also the party who might be blamed. Enclosure precedes narrative failure and helps produce it.

This explains why prison rape stays peripheral despite federal statistics documenting it. It explains why a psychotic man decomposing on a sidewalk is visible to everyone and represented adequately by nobody. It explains how chronic pain became culturally subordinate to opioid addiction. It explains how a woman with dementia and her exhausted daughter can vanish together inside a house for five years while the neighbors wave.

Alexander also forces a distinction that most political writing collapses. Carrier poverty differs from political defeat. Immigrant suffering, transgender suffering, racial discrimination, gun violence, abortion, police violence, and opioid addiction are all fiercely contested in this country. None of them is carrier-poor. Each has lawyers, nonprofits, journalists, donors, scholars, politicians, filmmakers, social-media networks, and an established vocabulary. Their claims may lose, and losing hurts. Losing on the national symbolic battlefield differs from never reaching it.

The people at the bottom are the people whose suffering has the least narrative use.

Prisoners. The severely psychotic. Addicts who cannot be converted into innocent fentanyl victims. Cognitively impaired adults. Frail old people behind closed doors. Pain patients whose treatment needs violate a stronger public story. Caregivers who cannot name the beloved as the source of their misery. Men whose collapse gets read as personal failure before it can become a social claim.

The uncarried sufferer is the category. Alexander’s most unsettling implication is that the opposite of cultural trauma is suffering that never becomes ours.

Alexander writes that constructing cultural trauma expands the circle of the we and allows collectivities to take on moral responsibility, which is true and which is the humane core of his theory. The opioid case shows the other side. That claim succeeded, and its success reassigned pain patients from the victim column to the suspect column. Public attention is finite, the stage is small, and the arenas can process only so many dramas at once. A carrier group that wins does not merely add its victims to the national roll. It reorders the roll.

Americans are weakest at recognizing extreme suffering when the victim is captive, dependent, discredited, cognitively impaired, socially isolated, or implicated in his own misfortune, and when acknowledging the suffering would put ordinary Americans and ordinary institutions into the causal story.

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The Two Gates: Palestinian Memoir and the Apparatus That Cannot Use It

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Holocaust produced a memoir generation because the survivors were resettled inside publishing centers, in New York and Paris and Tel Aviv, at high rates of literacy, with the perpetrator regime destroyed and the event closed. Memoir requires an ending and a chair to sit in. The Nakba generation had neither. The mass victim was a fellah from the coastal plain, often unlettered, resettled into a camp administered by an agency, inside a condition that did not end. The prestige form in Arabic was poetry, and the literary energy went there: Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003), Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), and into fiction with Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972). And the primary audience for the first three decades was Arab rather than Western, which meant the four representations were being performed for a public that already granted the first two and did not need to be recruited into the third.

The consequence shows in the English-language canon. It was written by the professional and landowning diaspora. Edward Said (1935-2003) from a wealthy Jerusalem and Cairo family. Ghada Karmi (b. 1939), physician. Raja Shehadeh (b. 1951), lawyer. Sari Nusseibeh (b. 1949), aristocrat and philosopher. Mourid Barghouti (1944-2021), poet. Fawaz Turki (b. 1940) is the exception who came out of the Beirut camps, and I will come back to him because he is the case.

This is the Muselmann problem. In the camps, the figure the system had finished with could not speak, so the canon was written by those the system had not finished with. In the Palestinian case the filter is class and language, which are more polite and just as total. The man whose village was emptied in 1948 and who spent forty years in Ein el-Hilweh has almost no first-person book in English, and the absence is at the foundation of everything built on top of it.

Now the slots.

The Frankl slot went to Izzeldin Abuelaish (b. 1955), whose three daughters and niece were killed by an Israeli tank shell in January 2009 while an Israeli television anchor had him on the line. I Shall Not Hate appeared in 2010 and did what Frankl’s book did, for a different set of buyers with different problems. Western liberal institutions needed a way to grieve Gaza without confronting policy. The coexistence sector, which had money and no proof text, needed one. Universities needed a speaker who could address a mixed audience without splitting it. Abuelaish solved all three with a single formulation: the suffering is total, the refusal of hatred is a choice, and the choice is available to anyone. Suffering becomes data. The survivor becomes a teacher. Moral access is diffuse and portable. He received honorary degrees, a professorship in Toronto, Nobel nominations, and a permanent lecture circuit.

He is also resented inside his own carrier group for exactly this, and the resentment tracks the same logic that eventually turned the organized Jewish community against Frankl’s universalism. A trauma that anyone can claim and anyone can interpret cannot ground a specific political demand.

The sacred witness slot took a different route, because the Palestinian apparatus did not have twenty years and an institutional patron to construct one. It went to poetry, which is already liturgical and does not need to be converted. Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness is the high text. Then, in December 2023, Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) was killed in an airstrike, and the poem he had pinned became the most circulated Palestinian text of the war, read at rallies on six continents, printed on cardboard, translated into dozens of languages within weeks. The apparatus needed a liturgy and reached for the one form that is liturgy by default.

And then there is Mosab Abu Toha (b. 1992), who is being installed in real time. The Pulitzer board gave him the 2025 Commentary prize for essays on the carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience. Read the citation as a genre statement and it names the requirement: intimacy, which is Alexander’s third representation, the relation of the victim to the audience. He came through Harvard’s Scholars at Risk program and a Syracuse MFA and returned there as a visiting scholar. He was detained by Israeli forces in 2023 before leaving for Egypt and then the United States. At least thirty-one members of his family have been killed.

Wiesel needed roughly a decade, a French retranslation, and a Catholic patron to reach the position. Abu Toha reached an equivalent position in about eighteen months, and the reason is that the apparatus already existed. It was built for a different trauma, and it has a template, and a template accepts a new occupant faster than it can be constructed for a first one.

The Levi slot belongs to Shehadeh. Palestinian Walks took the Orwell Prize in 2008. The register is lawyerly and restrained, organized around landscape and legal instruments rather than atrocity, and it makes moral ambiguity thinkable without making it inescapable. Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah occupies the same position, translated by Ahdaf Soueif with a Said foreword and awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal. Prestige canonization, sustained scholarly attention, no mass circulation. Levi’s position exactly.

The comic outlier is Suad Amiry (b. 1951), whose Sharon and My Mother-in-Law made the 2002 siege of Ramallah funny, and which sold well and cannot go anywhere commemorative. You cannot put a joke about a curfew and a dog’s Jerusalem passport into a memorial. Krystyna Żywulska (1914-1992) wrote cabaret songs in Auschwitz and occupies the same category: admired, translated, and structurally unavailable to the institutions that need the material for ritual.

Which brings me to Turki, who is the Borowski of this corpus and whose exclusion runs on the same rule.

The Disinherited appeared in 1972, the first Palestinian exile memoir in English, and it was praised on publication. Then it kept going. The trajectory runs from a revolutionary Bildungsroman in the first book to a transgenerational tragedy in Soul in Exile to a diasporic counter-Odyssey in Exile’s Return, the last written against the PLO’s pursuit of a settlement in the Oslo years and against the tension between the diaspora and the homeland as the concessions accumulated. He wrote camp childhood without ennobling it. He wrote what exile does to a man’s character, which is that it degrades it. He wrote his own contempt, for the Arab states that housed and despised the refugees, for the leadership, for Westerners he met.

The apparatus needs the victim intact. A victim whose character has been deformed by what was done to him cannot anchor identification, because identification requires the audience to enter the position, and no audience will enter a position that makes it worse. Turki is on syllabi and in the Journal of Palestine Studies archive and nowhere else. Admired and contained, powerful and marginal.

The Vrba slot, the account that assigns responsibility inward, exists and is thin, and the thinness is enforced. Karmi’s Return, her 2015 account of going back to work for the Palestinian Authority and finding it hollow, has a fraction of the reach of In Search of Fatima. Nusseibeh’s Once Upon a Country drew nationalist attack for its self-criticism about leadership.

The deeper vacancy is the collaborator’s memoir. Every occupation produces informers, and the Palestinian occupation produced them at scale. There is no Perechodnik here. There is no Palestinian equivalent of Calel Perechodnik (1916-1944), the ghetto policeman who wrote down that he put his wife and daughter on the train and gave the reasoning he had at the time. There is no Lengyel, no man who records a decision of his own that killed his family. Suspected collaborators were executed in the street during both intifadas. The topic is policed by the community whose testimony it would be, and the vacancy in the canon is the shape of that policing.

Then the case that proves the rule from the other direction. Son of Hamas, by Mosab Hassan Yousef (b. 1978), is a memoir of Palestinian suffering, torture in Israeli detention included, canonized by the Israeli carrier group, published by an evangelical press, made into an award-winning documentary, and cited in American political argument for fifteen years. Vrba inverted. The text is usable to whichever apparatus its attribution serves, and what the author suffered is not the variable.

The Holocaust memoirist faced one gate. Clear the trauma apparatus and you were in. The Palestinian memoirist faces two, and they want different things.

The Western solidarity apparatus requires innocence, nonviolence, an identification-inviting narrator, and an attribution landing on Israel and on the audience’s own government. It cannot use an account in which Palestinian armed action appears as chosen and intelligible. It cannot use an account of life under Hamas administration. It cannot use an account of what the streets of Gaza City looked like on the afternoon of October 7.

The Palestinian national apparatus requires sumud, agency, and the refusal of the pure victim posture, because the national movement has spent sixty years rejecting that posture, and it cannot use an account that criticizes the leadership while the struggle continues.

A book that satisfies the first fails the second. Abuelaish clears the Western gate and is resented at home. Turki cleared neither. That double gate is the reason the Palestinian canon is thinner and more uniform than the Holocaust canon at a comparable distance from the event, and thinness of this kind is a property of the filter rather than of the writers.

There is one word that gets a book through both gates. Plestia Alaqad (b. 2002) published The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience with Little, Brown on September 30, 2025, drawn from forty-five days of diary entries, written in English rather than her first language in a deliberate effort to reach the widest possible international audience. Pan Macmillan won it at auction against five other publishers.

Resilience. Suffering with agency inside it. Victimhood that does not read as passivity. It satisfies the Western requirement for a sufferer and the national requirement for steadfastness in a single noun, and it sits in the subtitle where Frankl put meaning. Both corpora found the word that lets the book through, and in both cases the word is on the cover.

The compression is the other new thing. Holocaust testimony had fifteen to twenty years between event and canon, and the interval did filtering work of its own, since the accounts that survived it had to be selected a second time by a generation that had not been there. Gaza’s canon formed inside eighteen months, during the fighting, using an apparatus built for a prior trauma. The filter ran faster and met less friction. And it selected along the lines it was built to select along: a young journalist with an Instagram following and English gets an auction; a fifty-year-old man in Khan Younis writing in Arabic about the price of flour, who was selling it, and to whom, does not get translated.

The books that will not travel are already identifiable, and they exist on both sides in mirror image. On one side: the account of Hamas governance written by someone who lived under it and is not writing for an Israeli publisher; the account of the days after October 7 from inside Gaza City; the account by a man who informed and explains his reasoning; the account of the family that got one son out and did not get the others. On the other side: the soldier’s procedural memoir of a workday in Gaza, hour by hour, with the food and the fatigue and the calculation about the building; the hostage family that made a bargain it will not describe; the kibbutz account of what people said about their Gazan workers before, and what they said after.

Those books are being written now. Both apparatuses will admire the honest ones and neither will use them, and the reason is the reason it has always been. The filter runs through the incentive structures of publishers, prize juries, universities, museums, and advocacy organizations, each selecting for what it can use, and usability is set by carrier groups whose interests are orthogonal to descriptive honesty.

The recovery of the discarded Palestinian books, when it comes, will not come from the carrier groups. It will come the way Borowski’s recovery came, from literary academics with no coalition stake, working thirty or forty years after the fighting stops, when the material has stopped being ordnance and can be read. Turki is sitting there now, in print, on Monthly Review’s list, waiting for that. So is the man in Khan Younis, except that nobody wrote his down.

Notes

Abu Toha’s Pulitzer and the citation language about the intimacy of memoir: https://www.pulitzer.org/node/mosab-abu-toha-contributor-new-yorker, plus https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/5/mosab-abu-toha-wins-pulitzer-for-gaza-essays and https://www.democracynow.org/2025/5/6/headlines/palestinian_poet_mosab_abu_toha_wins_pulitzer_for_essays_on_physical_and_emotional_carnage_in_gaza

His institutional path through Harvard and Syracuse: https://complit.fas.harvard.edu/news/mosab-abu-toha-2025-pulitzer-prize-for-commentary/ and https://news.syr.edu/2025/05/14/alumnus-visiting-scholar-mosab-abu-toha-g23-wins-pulitzer-prize-for-new-yorker-essays/

Detention in 2023, the thirty-one family members, biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosab_Abu_Toha and https://www.newarab.com/news/palestinian-poet-mosab-abu-toha-wins-pulitzer-gaza-essays

Alareer’s line and its circulation, including Abu Toha quoting it on winning: https://themarkaz.org/poet-mosab-abu-toha-wins-pulitzer-prize-for-gaza-essays/

Alaqad, publication data, the English-language decision, the forty-five days: The Eyes of Gaza and https://niemanreports.org/eyes-of-gaza-plestia-alaqad-palestinian-journalists/ and https://www.democracynow.org/2025/10/7/plestia_alaqad

The six-publisher auction: https://www.thenationalnews.com/arts-culture/books/2024/09/25/plestia-alaqad-book-gaza/

NPR coverage, useful for the reception argument: https://www.npr.org/2025/10/23/nx-s1-5582834/nprs-book-of-the-day-plestia-alaqad-the-eyes-of-gaza

Turki’s three-memoir arc and the Oslo-era positioning of Exile’s Return: the scholarly article is Katharina Galor or, more precisely, “Ways of Being Palestinian: Autobiography as Critical Emplotment in the Work of Fawaz Turki,” Middle Eastern Literatures 26.3 (2023), 328 to 348, posted at https://www.academia.edu/122487080/Ways_of_Being_Palestinian_Autobiography_as_Critical_Emplotment_in_the_Work_of_Fawaz_Turki_Middle_Eastern_Literatures_26_3_2023_328_348_. I did not confirm the author’s name from the search result, so check the byline. This is the best single source for the argument and worth reading in full.

Also on Turki: the 1973 Journal of Palestine Studies review at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2307/2535753, Asaad Al-Saleh’s comparison of Said and Turki in Arab Studies Quarterly 33.2 (2011), 79 to 95 at https://www.jstor.org/stable/41858652, the Institute for Palestine Studies listing at https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/38250, the Monthly Review Press page at https://monthlyreview.org/product/disinherited/, and the Publishers Weekly author page at https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/authorpage/fawaz-turki.html, where the review of the sequel says it fails to convey what the first book conveyed.

Posted in Gaza, Holocaust, Palestinians | Comments Off on The Two Gates: Palestinian Memoir and the Apparatus That Cannot Use It

The Arena in Real Time: Gaza and the Limits of Cultural Trauma Theory

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Luke Ford

Jeffrey Alexander built his model from cases with settled outcomes. The Holocaust succeeded. American slavery succeeded, late and partially. Nanking failed. Rwanda, Cambodia, and Guatemala failed or half-succeeded under governments with an interest in the result. In each, the analyst arrives after the process has run and reconstructs why the claim traveled or died.

Gaza offers a condition his framework has no slot for. Two carrier groups are running the full trauma process at the same time, in the same institutional arenas, before the same fragmented audience, and each has a prior successful trauma claim already banked. Neither is an insurgent claim against an indifferent public. Both are established claims being extended into contested ground. And the two are not independent: each is built partly out of the other, so that the injury one names includes the other’s naming.

Start with what Alexander licenses. He is explicit that his concern is how and under what conditions claims are made and with what results, and that the claim’s moral justification lies outside his question. This is a permission and a fence. The permission is to analyze a live claim without waiting for history to close. The fence is that nothing in the analysis bears on whether the underlying representation is accurate. A sociology of claim-making cannot determine whether the Genocide Convention’s mental element is satisfied. That question belongs to a different arena, on a different evidentiary standard, and anyone who runs the sociology and then produces a verdict at the end has smuggled the verdict in.

The two carrier groups.

The first assembles Palestinian diaspora organizations, the international human rights sector, the United Nations human rights apparatus, a large university and professional-association layer, and a state sponsor. Its institutional strength lies in the legal and scientific arenas. South Africa filed at the ICJ in December 2023, obtained provisional measures in January 2024 on a finding of plausible risk, and the case has since ground into the written phase. Israel filed its counter-memorial in March 2026, and on May 21, 2026 the Court set a deadline of November 22, 2027 for South Africa’s Reply and May 22, 2029 for Israel’s Rejoinder. Israel has objected to jurisdiction, and a wave of third states have intervened on the interpretive question of whether genocidal intent can be inferred from patterns of conduct, with the Netherlands and Iceland urging a lower threshold and the United States a constricted one. The comparison cases are instructive on timing. Bosnia filed in 1993 and received judgment in 2007; Gambia filed against Myanmar in 2019 and the merits hearing has still not been scheduled.

Outside the Court, the same carrier group has accumulated determinations from bodies with authority but no enforcement. The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 that Israeli authorities had committed and were continuing to commit acts of genocide, and named Netanyahu, Herzog, and Gallant for incitement. Amnesty International reached a genocide finding in December 2024 and the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in August 2025. B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, Human Rights Watch, and the Lemkin Institute have issued parallel conclusions.

The second carrier group assembles the Israeli state, the organized American Jewish institutional sector, the hostage families movement, and a domestic legal advocacy layer. Its strength lies in domestic American law and in state bureaucracy. It carries a claim about October 7 as the deadliest day for Jews since the Shoah, about fifteen months of captivity, and about a diaspora condition that it represents as continuous with the historic pattern rather than as a reaction to a war. The ADL recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025, a third-highest year and a 33 percent decrease from 2024, with physical assaults at a record high and weapon-involved assaults up 39 percent. Three people were killed in antisemitic attacks in 2025, the first year since 2019 with Jewish murder victims in the United States. Its arena work is visible: Title VI complaints and settlements, campus grading instruments, federal security funding, executive task forces.

Now run Alexander’s four representations across both and watch them answer the same questions with incompatible content.

On the nature of the pain, the case has produced the cleanest empirical demonstration of Alexander’s central claim that I have encountered anywhere. In January 2026 the IDF accepted the Gaza Health Ministry’s estimate of roughly 71,000 dead, after refusing to do so for two years. The Ministry’s figure stood at 71,667, and Israel has maintained a ratio of roughly two to three civilians per militant. A household mortality survey published in The Lancet Global Health put violent deaths at 75,200 through January 5, 2025, about 35 percent above the Ministry’s administrative count for the same window, suggesting the Ministry figure is a floor. The numerical dispute, which absorbed two years of argument, collapsed. The classification dispute did not move an inch. Facts do not settle representation. Alexander says this in the abstract; here it happened on a calendar.

On the nature of the victim, both claims run into a boundary problem, and both boundary problems are internal. The first must decide whether Hamas sits inside or outside the protected group, which is the question the Convention’s language forces and which the carrier group cannot resolve without cost either way. The second must decide whether American Jews are victims of this war or of a separate and older thing, and it faces a rival Jewish carrier group contesting the right to speak for the group at all, which is the most corrosive position a claim can be attacked from.

On the relation of the victim to the wider audience, both sides are making the same move in opposite directions. Each tells the American audience that it is not a spectator. The first says the audience pays for it. The second says the audience’s own synagogue got the graffiti. Alexander is right that this third representation is where claims live or die, and it is where both sides are pouring resources, which is why the fight over the young is more ferocious than the fight over the old.

On attribution, the first names the Israeli state and extends toward American complicity. The second names Hamas and extends toward the university, the NGO sector, and the UN. Note the symmetry of the extension: each side widens the defendant beyond the immediate actor to include the institutions that shelter the rival claim.

Then there is the Holocaust, which is the common currency and the reason the contest cannot be conducted in cash. Alexander’s own argument is that the Holocaust became the master trauma of the West and the standard against which later suffering makes its claim. That standing means neither side can decline it. The first invokes Lemkin, the 1948 Convention written in the shadow of the camps, and the signatures of Israeli and Jewish scholars in Holocaust studies, which it treats as the highest available warrant. The second treats the application of the word to Israel as the most efficient desecration available and reads the first side’s Jewish signatories as the instrument of that desecration. Symbolic capital of this kind cannot be spent twice. Each side experiences the other’s usage as theft, and both are correct about what the other is doing, which is why the misunderstanding framing is useless here.

Sort the arenas and the picture stops looking like a single contest.

International law belongs to the first claim and will deliver nothing on the merits until the 2030s. The Court’s discipline in this case takes the form of delay, and delay interacts with Alexander’s routinization stage in a way he does not discuss. A judgment that arrives after the affect has flattened, after the monuments are built and the curriculum is set, enters a settled field rather than a live one. Bosnia’s 2007 judgment did not construct Srebrenica’s meaning; it ratified a construction completed a decade earlier in the media and aesthetic arenas.

Domestic American law belongs to the second claim, and this is the fact most often missed by people watching only The Hague. In the same country, in the same months, one carrier group is accumulating consent decrees and the other is accumulating declarations. Different arena, opposite result.

The scientific arena belongs to the first claim, with the qualification that professional associations voting resolutions are behaving as carrier groups rather than as evidentiary bodies, and that the peer-reviewed mortality work is a different kind of object than an association resolution and should not be bundled with it by either side.

State bureaucracy is split and produces a configuration Alexander’s model does not anticipate. Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 17, 2025 endorsed the American-brokered plan, established the current ceasefire, secured the release of all hostages, and created a Board of Peace as transitional governance with an International Stabilization Force. Implementation stalled through 2026 with Hamas armed and Israel holding more than half the Strip, and a roadmap was announced on July 30, 2026. The same government that is the strongest state opponent of the genocide classification is also the guarantor of the framework under which the killing largely stopped. A carrier group that needs to attack the guarantor and preserve the framework has a coordination problem with no clean solution.

Three features of this case sit outside Alexander’s model, and naming them is the part I think adds something.

The first is reciprocal constitution. Alexander models a carrier group projecting toward an audience, with deniers resisting. He does not model two claims whose contents are partly composed of each other, such that the audience is not only fragmented but is the prize in a status contest where success for one raises the price of the other. His speech-act analogy assumes a speaker and a hearer. Here there are two speakers and the hearer is the ground being fought over.

The second is that the accused party is a carrier group with a canonical trauma of its own, organized around the very event that supplies the accusation’s vocabulary. Alexander has perpetrators who deny, as in Japan, and perpetrators who accept, as in Germany. He has no case where the accused’s collective identity is built on the master trauma from which the charge is drawn. That condition explains the intensity of the fight better than any account of the underlying conduct, and it predicts that no verdict from any arena will be received as a verdict by the losing side.

The third is speed. Alexander’s model assumes lag, and every one of his cases has one. Here both claims were made within weeks, before the evidentiary base existed on either side. Trauma construction now runs ahead of trauma documentation, and the documentation arrives into a field where the classifications are already load-tested and defended. The Lancet paper landed in a world that had made up its mind in October 2023.

So: why decline to say which claim is correct.

Three reasons and a cost. The frame has no verdict function, and running a sociology of claim-making and then producing a determination at the end is a category error that flatters whoever performs it. The legal arena has not spoken and will not for years, and I am not equipped to substitute for it. And I have a coalition, every reader knows what it is, and a verdict from me would be a coalition move wearing the costume of method. That is the thing Alexander’s framework is best at exposing, and using his framework to do it would be a poor joke.

The cost is that a refusal to affirm is a move in the arena, and both sides will read it as one, and both will be partly right. I do not have a way out of that and I am not going to pretend the position is neutral ground. It is a refusal to launder a position through a method, which is a smaller and more defensible thing than neutrality.

The classification fight will outlast the war by decades and will migrate from courts to curricula, museums, and commemorative calendars, because that is where routinization happens and routinization is what winning looks like. Whichever claim first gets a date, a building, and a lesson plan in general American education has won, and the ICJ’s timetable makes it unlikely that a judgment will arrive before that race is decided.

Each carrier group will produce accounts that fail the genre requirements and each will admire and shelve them. The soldier’s procedural memoir of what the work was actually like, hour by hour, the account from inside Gaza that describes the calculations neighbors made about each other, the honest reckoning with what a hostage family did and did not say to get their child back. Those books are being written now. They will get respectful reviews and no distribution, because they implicate the audience, and audiences do not fund their own implication. Both sides will have a Borowski. Neither will canonize him.

And the best test available for anyone who wants to check whether his own position is a description or a flag: find the strongest fact the other side has, state it in a sentence, and see whether you can leave it standing without adding a clause. The IDF’s acceptance of the death toll is that fact for one side. The 2025 murders are that fact for the other. Alexander’s framework does not tell you who is right. It tells you exactly where to look to find out whether you are thinking.

Notes

ICJ procedural status, including the November 22, 2027 Reply deadline and the May 22, 2029 Rejoinder deadline: the South African Presidency statement at https://www.thepresidency.gov.za/presidency-notes-icj-order-21-may-2026-matter-between-government-republic-south-africa-and-state and the government news version at https://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/presidency-notes-latest-icj-order-south-africas-genocide-case-against-israel. The order at UNISPAL: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/icj-court-order-on-fixing-of-time-limits-reply-and-rejoinder-south-africa-v-israel/. Note these are a party to the case, so use them for dates rather than characterization.

Third-state interventions and the split over inferring genocidal intent: https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/status-south-africa-icj-case-alleging-genocide-against-israel-46b586. This is an aggregator and I would not cite it in print. The underlying declarations are on the ICJ docket and that is where I would source it.

Bosnia v. Serbia (1993 to 2007) and Gambia v. Myanmar timelines: https://theconversation.com/is-israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza-international-court-will-take-years-to-decide-but-states-have-a-duty-to-act-now-263076

The IDF accepting roughly 71,000 dead in January 2026: JTA at https://www.jta.org/2026/01/29/israel/idf-official-says-71000-killed-in-gaza-war-matching-gaza-health-ministry-estimate and Haaretz at https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.premium/idf-accepts-gaza-health-ministry-estimate-of-over-70-000-palestinians-killed-in-the-war/0000019c-0918-dec4-adfd-fd5dde830000. This is the load-bearing fact in the essay and it rests on an anonymous briefing to Israeli outlets, so say so.

The Lancet Global Health household mortality survey at 75,200 violent deaths through January 5, 2025: reported at https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/18/gaza-death-toll-exceeds-75000-as-independent-data-verify-loss. Get the primary paper before citing the number.

UN Commission of Inquiry, September 16, 2025: https://time.com/7317574/israel-gaza-genocide-united-nations-commission-inquiry-report/, https://www.cbc.ca/1.7634867, https://globalnews.ca/news/11430683/israel-committing-genocide-in-gaza-un-commission

IAGS resolution, August 31, 2025, primary text: https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf

Amnesty (December 2024), B’Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, HRW, Lemkin Institute: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/8/legal-scholars-genocide-label-crucial-in-addressing-atrocities-in-gaza and https://opiniojuris.org/2025/12/16/gaza-genocide-and-the-un-general-assembly-part-1/

Security Council Resolution 2803 of November 17, 2025, the Board of Peace, and the International Stabilization Force: https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2026-07/the-middle-east-including-the-palestinian-question-25.php

Stalled implementation and the July 30, 2026 roadmap: https://israeled.org/roadmap-for-gaza-july-2026/ and https://jstreet.org/nine-months-in-assessing-the-status-of-the-gaza-ceasefire/ and https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2026-07-30/israeli-strikes-kill-three-in-gaza-including-two-children-amid-new-ceasefire-push. Both israeled.org and J Street are advocacy organizations on opposite sides, which is why I used them together.

ADL 2025 audit, 6,274 incidents, record assaults, three killed: https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-records-historic-high-antisemitic-assaults-and-attacks-deadly-weapons and the full report at https://www.adl.org/resources/report/audit-antisemitic-incidents-2025

The methodological critique of ADL counting, which you should have if you use the numbers: https://jewishcurrents.org/examining-the-adls-antisemitism-audit

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Bret Stephens: I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Luke Ford

Stephens writes in The New York Times:

Don’t use artificial intelligence to help you write. Never let A.I. do your writing for you.

Don’t use it for school papers, work briefs, letters to your in-laws, speeches at your company gathering or emails (however perfunctory) to your colleagues or friends. Don’t let it organize your notes. Don’t let it suggest an opening sentence, a segue or a closing paragraph. Don’t ask it to write a first draft and pretend that editing that draft somehow makes it your own. It doesn’t.

Do none of these things not because they are unethical. Writing with A.I. is unethical when it’s a deception: when you pass off words, ideas and information as your own when they aren’t. An acknowledgment can largely address the problem. Do none of these things, either, because you might be able to learn to write better than an A.I. can. Pretty soon, if not already, you won’t, just as you can’t outrun a car or outplay a chess app.

The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care. We’re already reckoning with the well-documented decline of reading; A.I. is accelerating the decline of writing, ushering us further into what The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch calls our “postliterate age.”

What, uniquely, does writing do? It compels thought. It compels thinking in ways that silent contemplation or spoken language rarely can. It compels us to subject our thinking to the effort of articulation, the rigor of grammar, the tests of intelligibility and coherence, the inspection of others. In doing so, it also enjoins us to be clear, logical, accurate — and accountable. People may easily forgive a word said in anger but not so easily one written in anger, precisely because the fact that it was written tells us that it was considered.

This column might have been better if he had used AI as an editor.

The column has one checkable number in it.

The study is Dan Sarofian-Butin’s exploratory analysis, and what he examined was 100 EdD dissertations published in 2025 in Educational Leadership and Administration. The column renders this as “100 doctoral dissertations,” which invites the reader to picture doctoral education. The EdD is a practitioner degree. Sarofian-Butin’s own suggestive finding runs against the generalization: lower AI use correlated with R1 or R2 institutions, higher AI use with private non-profits. The column takes the corner of the doctoral world where the effect is largest, drops the qualifier, and presents the result as a fact about doctoral study. A researcher would call that sampling on the dependent variable. An AI asked to verify the citation returns the abstract in seconds and the writer sees the gap himself.

The reliability question sits underneath. Detection tools disagree with each other. One controlled comparison found intraclass correlations ranging from 0.57 to 0.95 across three open-access detectors, which raised concerns about the reliability of the tools. The column’s entire empirical foundation is a single exploratory paper using contested instruments. It bears the weight of the paragraph about the death of academic integrity and the paragraph about democratic self-governance after that.

Second, the strongest objection to the argument goes unmentioned. Socrates makes this case against writing in the Phaedrus. The new technology will supply the result and the faculty will wither, memory in his version, thought in this one. The structure is identical. Anyone who has read Plato hears the echo in the first paragraph, and the column has to explain why the parallel fails. Maybe it does fail. Writing externalized memory and produced philosophy, so the trade was good, and perhaps this trade is not. That argument is available and the column does not make it. An AI prompted with “what is the best case against this piece” produces the Phaedrus, the calculator, GPS and spatial memory, and the transactive memory research of Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner on how people offload to search engines. The writer then has four objections to answer and a stronger column.

Third, there is an empirical claim that the column asserts and never defends: “We become better writers by the constant effort that mundane writing demands.” Anders Ericsson (1947-2020) spent a career arguing the opposite. Repetition without feedback produces a plateau. Most office memo writing is repetition without feedback. Nobody grades your calendar-invite prose. If the mundane writing were building the muscle, the average corporate email would be better than it is. The column needs the claim to be true because the wedding toast and the routine memo have to be the same activity for the argument to hold.

Fourth, the piece bans note organization and segue suggestion and never draws a line. Spellcheck, outlining software, a thesaurus, a research assistant, and an editor all supply what the writer did not generate. Newspaper columnists work with editors who rewrite ledes and cut closing paragraphs, and nobody says the desk enfeebled them. So the rule cannot be that assistance corrupts. It has to be something narrower about generation, and the column never says what. Asked “state your rule as a test a reader could apply,” an AI exposes that there is no rule yet, only a mood.

Fifth, the ethics paragraph tangles. The first sentence says do none of these things and not because they are unethical. The second says AI writing is unethical when it deceives. The third says acknowledgment mostly fixes that. So the ethical objection is raised, conceded, and resolved in three sentences, and the reader is left unsure why the paragraph exists. It exists to clear the ground for the enfeeblement argument, which is the real one. Cut it to a clause and start the piece a paragraph earlier.

Sixth, the ending. If the thesis is that everyone’s capacity to reason is eroding, the last line should not sort the audience by party. “Or a vote against Trump” converts a claim about cognition into a coalition signal and tells half the readership that the argument was never addressed to them. The writer may want that. But he should want it knowing the cost, and a reader who asks “who does this sentence lose” makes the cost visible.

There is also the question the column never asks itself. What evidence would change its mind? If a study found that students who drafted with AI and then revised produced better arguments than students who drafted alone, would the thesis survive? The piece has no answer, which makes it a conviction rather than a claim. Conviction is allowed in a column. The reader deserves to know which one he is reading.

None of this touches the sentences, which are good. The escalator and the stairs works. “I want that in writing” as evidence that written words carry weight is a fine observation. The father-of-the-bride example has a hole in it, since hired speechwriters and best-man speech books predate the machine and presidents have not written their own speeches in a century, but the emotional logic lands.

So the improvements are all upstream of the prose: check the number, find the counterargument, defend the causal claim, state the rule, cut the tangled paragraph, count the cost of the ending. Which is the irony worth sitting with. The most useful thing AI does for a writer is adversarial rather than generative. It is a fast, tireless, unembarrassed reader who says your best evidence is thinner than you think and here is the objection you skipped. The writer still has to decide whether the objection lands. That decision is the thinking the column wants to protect, and nothing in the process removes it.

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America’s Most Powerful Victimhood Groups

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Luke Ford

Here is how I would rank current American carrier groups by capacity to make a trauma claim stick, which means access to symbolic production, presence in more than one institutional arena, and staying power.

The populist right now holds the strongest position, because it combines a grievance narrative about deindustrialization, opioid deaths, demographic displacement, and prosecution of its own, with podcasts and cable, a think tank layer, and control of the executive branch. State capacity is the arena most carrier groups never reach.

Organized American Jewish institutions retain deep infrastructure, with the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the federations, the Holocaust museums, and Hillel, and after October 7 they have been carrying two claims at once, the historical one and a live one about campus antisemitism. Their constraint is a rival Jewish carrier group, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow and the associated academic layer, contesting the same symbolic inheritance for opposite ends, which weakens the claim to speak for the group.

The conservative Christian legal apparatus, meaning Alliance Defending Freedom, Becket, First Liberty, and the associated academic pipeline, has been the most effective carrier group of the past fifteen years measured by results in the arena that produces binding outcomes. It carries a claim about the marginalization of religious Americans and it wins.

The civil rights establishment and the racial-reckoning intellectual layer built around it reached its institutional peak between 2020 and 2022 and has since faced retrenchment through litigation, state law, and corporate withdrawal. The infrastructure is permanent and the claim is canonical; the current phase is defensive.

The pro-life movement carries an ongoing atrocity claim, uses genocide language and Holocaust analogy openly, and has state-level power plus a fifty-year proof of persistence, which almost no other carrier group can match.

The veterans and military-family constituency is the most legislatively effective bipartisan carrier group in the country, and the PACT Act in 2022 is the demonstration. It carries burn pits, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, and suicide.

The bereaved-families constituency around opioid deaths converted grief into the largest set of American mass-tort settlements, which is the legal arena working as designed, and it also generated the deaths-of-despair narrative that the populist right now uses.

The immigrant advocacy sector carries family separation and enforcement raids, has strong media access and church partnerships, and is currently in its most active and most adversarial period.

The gun violence survivor organizations and the gun rights constituency are a matched pair carrying incompatible traumas, mass shootings on one side and confiscation and state overreach on the other, and neither can dislodge the other.

The trans rights carrier group and the parents-and-detransitioner counter-carrier group are the sharpest live example of two groups making trauma claims about the same treatments and the same children, in the same arenas, at the same moment. Whatever else you think, the structure is a gift to anyone teaching Alexander.

The vaccine-injury and broader health-skeptic constituency deserves a place, because it moved from margin to federal appointment inside a decade, which is the fastest carrier group ascent in recent American life and the one most researchers failed to predict.

The Palestinian American and campus solidarity network is the fastest-growing new entrant, with genuine symbolic production capacity in universities and the arts and severe constraint in legislative and philanthropic arenas.

Indian Country, which had a state-sponsored boarding school initiative build the record for it between 2021 and 2024. And the climate constituency, which is an odd case for Alexander because it carries an anticipatory trauma, an injury located in the future, and the model was built for injuries in the past.

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The Syllabus

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Rothblatt Memorial Education Fund paid for eight Wednesday nights in the social hall at Beth Israel of Pico, coffee and rugelach included, and printed a flyer with a photograph of a barbed wire fence at dusk.

Sy Rothblatt (b. 1948) had made his money in commercial carpet and had given the shul its memorial wall, which runs eleven feet along the lobby and holds four hundred and six names in brass. His mother came out of Bergen-Belsen at nineteen weighing seventy-one pounds. The donor plaque under the names is in a larger typeface than the names.

Rabbi Dov Kalman (b. 1966) suggested Grossbard because Grossbard was the most learned man in the neighborhood and because the last series, on the parsha and leadership, had drawn nineteen people.

Sixty-two came the first night. Grossbard had a lectern, a stack of eight paperbacks, and a single sheet of paper he did not read from.

He began by saying that they were going to study a market.

He gave them Jeffrey Alexander (b. 1947) in twenty minutes. A catastrophe becomes a catastrophe when a group of people make a claim, and the claim has four parts. You must represent the nature of the pain. You must represent the nature of the victim. You must establish the relation of the victim to the wider audience, which means you must make the audience say, that could have been me. And you must assign responsibility, and therefore meaning, and redemption.

“Four representations,” he said. “Every memoir you have ever been given performs all four. Tonight I want you to notice that this is a performance requirement and that requirements have costs. Somebody pays them.”

A man named Feldstein asked whether he was saying the Holocaust was a construction.

“The killing was not a construction. Nothing about the killing was a construction. What we do with the killing is a construction, and it has been constructed by people with names, working for institutions with budgets, and I intend to introduce you to some of them.”

The room liked this. There is a pleasure in being told you are about to be shown the back of the set. Sixty-two people went home feeling they had signed up for something.

He handed out the reading list at the door. Eight weeks, thirteen books. Nobody looked at it closely under the fluorescent lights of the lobby, and the ones who did assumed the famous ones were coming later.

Week two he gave them what he called the control group, and he was generous.

Halina Birenbaum (b. 1929), who went in at ten and came out at fifteen, whose book has been read by more Polish and Israeli schoolchildren than any other testimony, who has spent fifty years on the March of the Living and answers every letter a teenager sends her. Rena Kornreich Gelissen (1920-2006), who went to Auschwitz on the first women’s transport and organized her whole account around a promise she made her mother about her sister, so that three years of atrocity resolve into one obligation a fourteen-year-old in Encino can understand. Edith Hahn Beer (1914-2009), who survived by marrying a Nazi Party member in Munich and being a good German wife. Heda Kovály (1919-2010), who came out of Auschwitz into Prague, whose husband was hanged in the Slánský trial in 1952, and whose book therefore says that the machine has more than one operator.

“These are true books,” he said. “Being true is not what got them onto your daughter’s tenth grade reading list. Look at what they share.”

He listed it. A victim who can be identified with. A pain that can be represented without disgust. A relation to the audience that widens rather than narrows. An assignment of responsibility that lands on someone outside the room.

“Hold those four. For the next six weeks I am going to show you books that fail.”

Mrs. Ruchie Zelikow (b. 1954), whose mother came from Mukachevo and had the number, said from the third row, “Fail them according to who?”

“According to the buyer.”

“And who’s the buyer?”

“You are,” Grossbard said. “That’s the course.”

Week three was the procedural, and the room went down to fifty-one.

Miklós Nyiszli (1901-1956) was a Hungarian pathologist who survived by performing autopsies for Josef Mengele on bodies delivered from the gas chambers, including the bodies of the twins he had examined alive the week before. He describes the dissection room. He describes the equipment, which was good equipment. He describes the working relationship, which was in a certain register cordial. He describes the day the Sonderkommando found a sixteen-year-old girl alive under the bodies and revived her and could not save her.

Filip Müller (1922-2013) spent almost three years in the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau and wrote the operations down. The airtight doors. The time from the pellets to the silence. The way the bodies were found, the strongest at the top, the children and the old at the bottom, because of what happens in a room when people climb. The hair. The teeth. The rotation of the shifts. What the Sonderkommando ate, which was better than what everyone else ate.

Grossbard read four paragraphs of Müller aloud in the social hall and then closed the book.

“Notice what did not happen in you just now,” he said. “You did not identify. You cannot identify with a man who has just told you the operating procedure for the door. The third representation failed. Alexander’s third leg. There is no relation established between that victim and this audience, because you will not permit yourself to occupy his position for even a sentence.”

Feldstein said, “So we’re supposed to say we would have done it.”

“You are supposed to notice that the book will not let you say you wouldn’t.”

A woman near the coffee said she had come to a class about survivors and this felt like something else.

He gave them Borowski, and read the paragraph where the narrator eats while the transport unloads, and a man in a Dodgers cap got up and went to the parking lot and did not come back.

Week four was Olga Lengyel (1908-2001) and Gisella Perl (1907-1988), and week four was where it broke.

Lengyel was a surgical assistant in Cluj who went to Auschwitz with her husband, her parents, and her two sons. On the ramp she was asked how old her older boy was and she made him younger, because she believed younger meant lighter work. She sent her mother with him to keep him company. She writes it down. She writes that she killed her son and her mother by her own hand and gives the reasoning she had at the time, which was decent reasoning made out of the information she had, which was none.

Perl was a gynecologist from Sighet who performed abortions on the dirt floor of the barracks at night, without instruments, because a pregnant woman went to the gas. She estimates the number in the hundreds. She wrote that she saved their lives by taking their children’s, and then she went to New York and delivered three thousand babies at Mount Sinai and said a prayer before each one.

Grossbard put the two books next to each other on the lectern.

“Perl can be canonized and has been, a little, because her act is legible as sacrifice and the responsibility for it lands on the Germans. Lengyel cannot, because Lengyel made a decision on a ramp with her own mouth and the sentence in the book is in the first person and she does not ask for absolution. The apparatus can carry a woman who did a terrible thing for others. It cannot carry a woman who made a mistake.”

Mrs. Zelikow stood up. She did not shout.

“My mother chose,” she said. “On the ramp. She was nineteen and they asked her about her sister and she answered and she was wrong, and she told me once, in 1979, in the kitchen, and never again, and she died in 2011, and I have never said it out loud in a room with other Jews in it in my life. And now I have.”

Nobody moved.

She sat down. She came every week after that, including the weeks when there were eleven people.

Week five, a woman named Dara Weisbrod asked the question during the break, standing by the urn with a styrofoam cup.

“Rabbi, forgive me. When do we do Night?”

“We don’t.”

She waited for the rest of it.

“We don’t do Night,” he said. “We don’t do Anne Frank (1929-1945). We don’t do Frankl (1905-1997). We don’t do Levi (1919-1987). Not one word for eight weeks.”

“That’s a joke.”

“No.”

“You’re teaching a Holocaust class and you’re not teaching Elie Wiesel (1928-2016).”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

And he gave her the answer he had prepared, which was a good answer and was not the true one. He said that they had all had those four since the sixth grade, that there was nothing he could add to a book that had sold ten million copies and been read aloud in this building, that a syllabus is a statement about scarcity and those four are not scarce. He said he wanted to run a controlled experiment on a Wednesday night in Los Angeles: take away the material that does the work automatically and find out what happens in a room when the books refuse to do it.

Dara Weisbrod said that sounded like a stunt.

“It might be,” he said.

She put the cup in the trash and went home at the break and the second half had forty-one people in it.

Week six he gave them Rudolf Vrba (1924-2006).

Vrba escaped from Birkenau in April 1944 with Alfréd Wetzler and produced a thirty-two page report on the killing operation, with maps, with the layout of the crematoria, with the arrival figures, and got it into the hands of the Jewish leadership in Slovakia and Hungary before the Hungarian deportations began. Four hundred and thirty-seven thousand Hungarian Jews were deported anyway, in eight weeks, on schedule, without resistance, believing they were going to work.

Vrba spent the rest of his life saying that the leadership had the report and did not warn the communities, and that the reason involved a negotiation between Rezső Kasztner and the Germans over a train of sixteen hundred and eighty-four people, and that the people on that train included Kasztner’s family and the Jewish notables of Kolozsvár.

“He was right about the report,” Grossbard said. “The document existed and reached them. What he was right about after that is contested. Vrba performed all four of Alexander’s representations at a level nobody has matched. His pain is documented. His victimhood is total. His relation to the audience is heroic, an escape, a warning, a man running through the woods with the numbers in his head. And on the fourth representation, responsibility, he pointed at us. And the apparatus that ought to have made him the most famous Jew of the twentieth century made him a difficult figure, a bitter man, a professor of pharmacology in Vancouver.”

Feldstein said, “You’re saying the Judenrat killed the Hungarians.”

“I am saying that a memoir that assigns any portion of responsibility inward gets no distribution, regardless of its accuracy, and that this is a rule you can observe operating in every memory regime on earth, including the Rwandan one, where I have watched it operate at close range.”

Sy Rothblatt was in the back that night. He had not come to the first five.

In the parking lot he said, “Shlomo, whose class is this?”

“Mine.”

“It’s my mother’s. I gave that money so people would remember. You’re teaching them to audit.”

“Remembering is auditing.”

Rothblatt looked at the lit windows of the social hall. “My mother watched her father give a watch to a kapo for nothing. Nothing. The man took the watch and walked away. She talked about the watch more than she talked about her father.” He put his keys in his hand. “You think I don’t know what you know?”

“I think you know it and have decided it should not be said in a room with a coffee urn.”

“That’s right,” Rothblatt said.

Fourteen people came to week seven.

He gave them Ruth Klüger (1931-2020), who went in at eleven and came out and became a professor and then wrote a book that attacks the memorial industry from inside the survivor position, that says the camps taught nothing, that says the sentimental German penitent is a species she can smell across a room, that refuses to be anyone’s occasion for feeling.

He gave them Jean Améry (1912-1978), who wrote that the man who has been tortured stays tortured, that the trust in the world is not restored, that he retains his resentment and considers his resentment a moral achievement, and who took his life in Salzburg in 1978.

He gave them Charlotte Delbo (1913-1985), who came back with what she called useless knowledge and put it in fragments because the sentences would not connect, and Imre Kertész (1929-2016), who wrote that the worst part was that it was survivable and that survival is banal.

Fourteen people. Mrs. Zelikow in the third row. A young man named Ari Fromowitz in the back who had come every week and never spoken.

“Notice,” Grossbard said, “that these four are respected. Klüger has a chair. Kertész has the Nobel. Delbo is taught at Yale. The apparatus admires them and does not use them. Nobody puts Améry on a wall. Nobody prints a Delbo fragment on a program at a commemoration. There is a category we should have a name for, which is the honored and inoperable.”

He heard himself say it and thought about his book with four hundred and eleven copies sold.

Week eight was the counterfeits and there were eleven people, and Rothblatt was one of them.

Binjamin Wilkomirski (b. 1941), who was Bruno Grosjean, a Swiss Protestant boy who was never in a camp and who wrote a childhood in Majdanek that won prizes in three countries and was taught in schools. Misha Defonseca (b. 1937), who walked across Europe with wolves. Herman Rosenblat (1929-2015), who met his wife through the fence at Schlieben, apples every day for seven months, and told it on daytime television twice and sold it to a film company.

“Every one of these was believed by professionals,” Grossbard said. “Editors. Prize juries. Historians. Survivors. The frauds were not caught by the apparatus. They were caught by outsiders, late, and in each case the apparatus resisted the correction. Ask why.”

He waited.

“Because a counterfeit is manufactured to specification. Wilkomirski’s book performs the four representations more efficiently than any true memoir can, because a true memoir is encumbered by what happened and a fabrication is free to supply demand. Rosenblat’s fence is impossible. There is no place along that fence where a boy could stand and a girl could stand. Every specialist who looked at the map knew inside a minute. It ran for fourteen years anyway, because a Jewish boy and a Jewish girl and an apple through the wire is what the market was ordering, and here is a man willing to fill the order.”

He put his hand on the stack of paperbacks.

“For eight weeks I have shown you the supply the market would not clear. Nyiszli. Müller. Lengyel. Vrba. Klüger. Améry. And I have shown you that the market cleared a Swiss Protestant with a fabricated childhood at a hundred thousand copies. That is the finding. The filter does not run on truth. It never has, in any nation, about any atrocity. It runs on what a community needs to keep being the thing it is, and the community is not lying when it does this, and neither are you, and neither am I.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Mrs. Zelikow said, “Can I say something to you.”

“Please.”

“You didn’t leave out those four for us.”

He waited.

“You keep saying experiment. Controlled experiment, you said, in week five, I wrote it down. It’s not an experiment. You left them out because you wanted them punished. Because they got everything and your people got nothing, and you had a room and a lectern for eight weeks and you took it out on the dead.”

Rothblatt, in the back, laughed once, at the ceiling.

Grossbard stood at the lectern in the social hall with the coffee urn cooling behind him and the barbed wire flyer still taped to the door and understood that she was correct in every particular, that she had seen it from the third row in week two and had sat through six more weeks to be sure, that he had built the syllabus out of a grudge against a man with a Tony and an Oscar and a medal, and that the syllabus was also true. Both. The way it had been in the church with the second take.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, that’s what I did. And every book on that list still belongs on it.”

Mrs. Zelikow gathered her coat. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I came back.”

Rabbi Kalman did not renew the series. He was decent about it and said the room had not been right, which was true. Rothblatt’s fund sponsored a scholar in residence from Yeshiva University the following winter on the theme of resilience and drew two hundred and ten people, and the shul put out a nicer flyer.

In March, Ari Fromowitz emailed. He was twenty-four, he worked at a hedge fund in Century City, he had gone to a Modern Orthodox day school where they read Night in ninth grade and again in eleventh.

He wrote that he had bought all thirteen books. He wrote that he had finished Müller on a Sunday and gone for a four hour walk. He wrote that he had one question and would understand if there was no answer.

He wrote: if the filter is real, and if my community will only carry the versions that flatter it, then what was I supposed to do with the eight weeks. I can’t unread it. I can’t teach it. Nobody I know wants it. What is it for.

Grossbard read the email four times and typed a long answer about interpretive communities and deleted it, and typed a shorter one about Alexander and deleted that too.

What he sent said: It is for you. That is the only market it has. You will find two or three others in your life and you will know them within ten minutes of meeting them and you will not be able to explain to your wife why those two or three matter to you so much. That is the community. It has no building and no fund and no flyer. Come learn Wednesday nights if you want, eight o’clock, my table, no coffee.

Fromowitz came the first Wednesday. He came the second Wednesday.

He did not come the third.

Posted in Holocaust, R. Shlomo Grossbard | Comments Off on The Syllabus

The Work of That Day

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Luke Ford

The Reznick Family Foundation bought premium economy for eleven rabbis and coach for the videographer. Rabbi Chaim Portnoy (b. 1944) paid the difference for business out of the shul discretionary fund and did not mention it at the gate, though he mentioned the leg, which had been operated on twice.

They flew LAX to Brussels to Kigali in April 2014, the twentieth year. Marla Teitelbaum from the foundation had a binder with tabs. The tabs said Nyamata, Ntarama, Murambi, Gisozi, Reconciliation Village, Free Afternoon. There was a page of talking points and a page listing which memorials permitted photography.

Rabbi Shlomo Grossbard (b. 1951) sat in 22C with a paperback of Borowski he had read four times. Tadeusz Borowski (1922-1951) had been dead longer than Grossbard had been alive. Across the aisle Rabbi Aryeh Kestenbaum (b. 1963) slept sitting up with his hands folded, and even asleep his chin was at an angle that would have read well from the back of a room. Kestenbaum had been a chazzan in Forest Hills for nine years before semicha. He had the instrument. Everyone knew he had the instrument.

At Brussels, waiting on the connection, Rabbi Yoni Setton (b. 1975) asked Grossbard what he was reading.

“A Polish writer. He worked the ramp at Auschwitz.”

“Worked it how?”

“Unloading. Carrying. Sorting.”

Setton thought about that. “A Jew?”

“No. A Catholic. Political prisoner.”

“So he had it better.”

“He had it better,” Grossbard said. “That’s the book.”

Nyamata is a brick church with a corrugated roof and holes in the roof where the grenades went through. Ten thousand people died there over two days in April 1994. The pews hold the clothes. The colors have gone to the same color, which is the color of dust that has been rained on and dried many times. Down the steps behind the altar there is a crypt with shelves of skulls and shelves of femurs, arranged by size.

The guide was named Emmanuel. He was thirty-five and he had been fifteen. He gave the tour in English with a vocabulary that had been sanded by repetition into something almost pleasant to listen to. He said the number. He said the two days. He said the priest and the mayor. He pointed at the altar cloth, which is stained, and at a metal rod in a case, and he said what the rod had been used for.

The rabbis stood in the aisle in their black shoes.

Kestenbaum went forward alone. He put his hand on the back of the last pew and stood there for maybe forty seconds and then he sang El Malei Rachamim.

Grossbard had heard the prayer six hundred times. He had said it himself at more funerals than he could count. Kestenbaum sang it in that church and the sound went up into the brick and came back down, and Emmanuel, who had heard everything, stopped moving. One of the Kigali drivers took off his cap. Rabbi Duvid Lasker, who was thirty-one and had eleven thousand followers, put his phone down at his side without switching it off, so that the video that later circulated has ninety seconds of Kestenbaum’s voice over a shot of Lasker’s shoes.

When it was over nobody said anything for a while. Then Terry Ochoa, the videographer, said, “Rabbi, I’m so sorry, I had you backlit. Is there any way.”

Kestenbaum’s face was wet. He said, “Of course.”

He walked back to the last pew and put his hand on it again and stood for about forty seconds and sang it again, and it was better the second time.

That is the sentence Grossbard would spend eleven years trying to write.

And Grossbard, standing there, understood something about himself that he had no use for. He wanted the forty seconds. He was fifty-two years old, he had published four books with academic presses and a hundred and forty essays, he had spent thirty years telling graduate students that no interpretation stands outside the community that authorizes it, and what he wanted in that church was to be the man at the front of it with the instrument.

At Murambi the school buildings sit on a hill above Gikongoro with a view that costs money anywhere else in the world. Fifty thousand people were told to gather there for safety. There was no water. There were no latrines. On April 21 the soldiers and the militia came up the hill.

They keep some of the bodies. They were buried in lime and the lime preserved them, and now they lie on tables in the classrooms, white and small, in the positions they were in. Children with their arms up. A woman with her legs drawn.

Rabbi Ephraim Katz went out and sat on the step and did not come back in.

The French built a camp on the hill afterward, during Turquoise, and they put in a volleyball court on top of a grave.

Portnoy said, “The French.”

Setton said, “Everybody.”

Grossbard asked the guide what the memorial paid the survivors who came to give testimony to visiting groups. The guide said it depended. Grossbard asked what it depended on. Teitelbaum touched his sleeve and said that they were behind schedule.

That night at the hotel in Kigali, which had a pool nobody used and a buffet with a carving station, they sat at a long table and drank Fanta and Primus.

Kestenbaum said, “We have an obligation to bring this home.”

“Bring what home,” Grossbard said.

“Shlomo.”

“What is the object of the verb.”

Setton laughed.

“The witness,” Kestenbaum said. “We came here. Almost nobody in our world has come here. We stand in the church, we say the words, and then we go back and we say to our people, it happened again, it happened while we were watching television, and we said never again and it meant nothing.”

“That last part is correct,” Grossbard said. “It meant nothing. It’s a phrase that has never described anything. It’s a noise a community makes to signal that it chosen.”

“You want to say that from the bimah?”

“I want to say what’s true from the bimah.”

Portnoy put down his glass. “Yoni, tell him what they’ll fund.”

Setton shrugged. “A trip. They’ll fund another trip. Bring the eleventh graders. Everybody cries at Nyamata, the parents get a slideshow, the foundation gets a report with photographs.”

“And that’s contemptible?” Kestenbaum said. He had the patience of a man who has never in his life needed to raise his voice to be listened to. “Shlomo, a boy from Valley Village stands in that crypt at seventeen. Something happens in him. You think that’s nothing?”

“I think something happens in him,” Grossbard said. “I think what happens in him is that he learns his own people’s suffering is the model for all suffering, and that he is on the right side of it, and that he has now discharged an obligation by feeling something on a Tuesday. And I think he will go home and be a slightly better person for about five months.”

“Five months is five months.”

“It is,” Grossbard said.

Later, walking back to the rooms, Kestenbaum caught up to him in the corridor. He said, “I’m not the fool you think I am.”

“You are a performer,” Grossbard said. “So am I. Mine plays to forty people.”

On the fifth day they went to the prison at Mpanga and then to a reconciliation village where men who had confessed in gacaca lived on the same road as families of the people they killed. This was Teitelbaum’s tab that said Reconciliation Village, and there was a session with tea, and a woman spoke about forgiveness, and a man spoke about repentance, and the rabbis asked questions about teshuvah and whether the Rwandan model had an analogue in halacha, and Lasker got a photograph of two hands, one of each.

Afterward Grossbard walked out past the tea and found a man sitting on a plastic chair by the wall, out of the sun, not part of the program. He was maybe sixty. His name was Théoneste. He had done eight years.

Grossbard sat down on the ground next to the chair, and asked him about the days.

Théoneste talked about the days.

There was a whistle in the morning, around seven. You went to the roadblock or you went with the group to the marshes. If you went to the marshes you took a machete and you took a bottle of water because it was hot in there and the papyrus was over your head. You worked until eleven or twelve and then it got too hot and you came out and you ate. Some men brought food from home. Some men ate what was in the houses. In the afternoon you went back in for a few hours and then you stopped around five because the light was going and you could not see in there after five. In the evening there was beer. The cows were the good part. If you were early you got a cow, and the cows were finished in the first two weeks, and after that there were only the goats and the sheet metal off the roofs.

He said the marshes were the hardest because of the mud and because people hid under the water and you had to look for the reeds moving. He said a man from his cell in prison had a bad shoulder from that month and still had it.

Grossbard asked him if he had known the people.

Théoneste said he had known all of them. He named four families. He said one of the men had lent him a bicycle pump.

Grossbard asked him what he had thought about while he was doing it.

Théoneste looked at him for the first time, the way you look at a foreigner who has asked something that has no answer, and said, in French, that it was the work of that day.

Le travail de ce jour-là.

Grossbard wrote it on the inside cover of the Borowski.

Kestenbaum’s essay ran nine days after they landed. Eleven hundred words. It ended with the roof of Nyamata and the light coming through the holes. His shul put it on the wall by the office. A network booked him. He was good on television, better than good, because he sat still and let his face do it, and afterward people wrote to him and said they had never seen a rabbi like that.

Grossbard wrote four thousand words. An editor he had published with twice asked for three changes. Cut the section about the payment schedule for survivor testimony, because it read as an accusation against the memorial and would be used by deniers. Cut the paragraph about the delegation’s own budget, because it read as an attack on a foundation that was doing good work. And soften the ending, which said that everyone in the church that morning, including the eleven men in black shoes, was made of the same material as the men in the marshes, and that the difference was position and not character.

Grossbard said he would cut nothing. The piece ran on his own website on a Thursday and got two hundred and forty readers.

He went back four times on his own money. He learned enough Kinyarwanda to know when the translator was smoothing. He interviewed a hundred and ninety-three people over seven years, sixty-one of them confessed killers, and he kept tape logs because he had been trained by an argument and he knew what an argument requires.

The book took eleven years. It is called The Work of That Day. It runs three hundred and forty pages and there are no photographs.

It has the flat register. It describes the marshes the way Théoneste described them, hour by hour, with the water bottles and the heat break and the light at five. It has the economics. It has the price of a machete in Kigali in 1993 and where they came from and how the import numbers rose. It has the cows. It has forty pages on gacaca that annoyed everyone who worked on gacaca, because he wrote about the incentive to confess and the discount for confession and the men who confessed to a good story. It has an appendix on the memorial economy, the per diems, the honoraria, the delegations, the number of foreign groups Nyamata received in a year and what the guides were paid.

And it has the delegation. Chapter nine. He put the eleven of them in the church, in their shoes, and he put Ochoa asking for the second take, and he put Kestenbaum’s throat, and he wrote the sentence about the second take being better and the man meaning it both times.

Then he wrote about his own community’s use of its own catastrophe. He wrote that the practices are identical in structure, that a canon of witness had been assembled out of the accounts that could travel and that the accounts that could not travel had been admired and shelved, and he named which ones. He wrote that the phrase never again had always functioned as a membership card. He wrote that he had carried the card his entire life and had gotten a career out of it.

The agent he had used for the fourth book returned it in six weeks. She said the writing was extraordinary. She said she could not think of the reader.

A university press in the Midwest took it and printed a first run of eight hundred.

The launch was at a bookstore on Pico on a Sunday evening in November. Eleven people came. Six were from his shul and four of those left before the questions. A woman asked whether he thought there was anything redemptive in the story he had told, and he said no, and there was a pause, and the moderator asked about his research methods.

The book sold four hundred and eleven copies in the first year.

There was one review, in a Belgian journal of African studies, by a scholar who called it the most accurate account in English of the operational texture of the hundred days and noted with regret the author’s insistence on inserting himself.

His shul held a kiddush that month for a boy’s aufruf and nobody mentioned the book. The conversation went to the parking situation on Beverwil, and then to a hospital case, and Grossbard stood by the herring and understood that he was watching a functioning organism route around an object that had no use.

His oldest friend on the board took him aside in the parking lot and said, “Shlomo. I read it.”

“And?”

“It’s the best thing you’ve written.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t teach it here.”

Kestenbaum spent three months writing One Hundred Days. He opened at a nonprofit theater downtown and moved to a two-hundred-seat house and then, in 2019, to Broadway.

It runs ninety minutes with no intermission. He plays six people. He plays Emmanuel. He plays a woman who survived under bodies for two days. He plays a French officer. He plays a killer. He plays a rabbi from Los Angeles who arrives with a binder. And at the end he stands at a wooden rail in a light the color of the light through a brick roof and sings the prayer.

The reviews used the word necessary. He won the Tony in 2020. HBO filmed it in 2021 and it played on a Sunday in April and the network put up a resource page. The film version won the Academy Award for documentary feature in 2023, and Kestenbaum, in a tuxedo, said thirty seconds of the survivors’ names and then sat down, which everyone agreed was the right call. In 2025 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the citation said he had taught a generation the meaning of never again.

Grossbard watched the HBO broadcast at home with a cup of tea going cold.

The killer Kestenbaum plays crouches. He breathes through his mouth. His eyes move to the side and he says the word cockroach three times and something happens to the muscles of his face on the third one.

Kestenbaum had gone back twice himself, which nobody knew, and he had a folder of interviews he never used. And out of all of it he had built the version that a country could receive.

Grossbard turned off the television and sat in the dark and thought about interpretive communities, which he had lectured on since 1983.

He had told students for thirty years that there is no standing outside a practice, that the criteria by which anything is judged good are internal to the community doing the judging, that nobody reads from nowhere. He had believed he was a realist. He had assumed that his own standing was a report on the quality of his mind.

It had been a match. His supply had happened to fit a demand. In 1988 the demand had been for a young Orthodox scholar who could talk about hermeneutics to people who were nervous about hermeneutics, and he had supplied it, and he had been paid.

Now he had written the truest thing he would ever write and there was no demand and there was no argument he could make against no demand, because you cannot argue with a market from inside a book the market has not bought.

Portnoy died in March 2026 in Chicago. Grossbard flew out.

At the cemetery the wind came off the lake and the men held their hats. Kestenbaum was there in a black coat, and there were two people with him who were not family and who stood at the edge of the crowd looking at their phones.

Afterward, in the parking lot, Kestenbaum came over.

“Shlomo.”

“Aryeh.”

They talked about Portnoy for a while.

Then Kestenbaum said, “I read your book three times.”

“That’s more than the Belgian.”

“I have it in my bag right now. I’ve had it in my bag for four years.”

“Why?”

Kestenbaum looked out at the stones. “Because I can’t use any of it.”

“I know.”

“I’ve tried. There are nine pages in there I would give a year of my life to have written, and I have stood in a rehearsal room with them and there is nothing to do with them. You put them onstage and the audience goes quiet, and you have lost them.”

Grossbard put his hands in his coat pockets. “Do you believe what you say on that stage?”

“Every word.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Kestenbaum laughed, one syllable, and then stopped. He said, “Nobody ever asked me for yours. In thirty-one years, not one person, not one board, not one foundation, not one donor, not one television producer, has ever asked me for yours. They asked me for mine before I knew I had one.”

The two people at the edge of the lot were looking over.

Kestenbaum took his hand and held it a second longer than the handshake needed. “Your book is the better book.”

“I know,” Grossbard said.

He meant it and it was worth nothing and he drove to O’Hare.

In the fall a student named Zevi came to his office, which is a corner of the beit midrash with a desk and two chairs and a window onto a wall. Zevi wanted to write. He had a subject. He asked what he should do so that people would read it.

Grossbard sat with that for a while.

“Find out what your readers need,” he said. “To keep being what they are and feel righteous about it.”

“And then supply it?”

“Then decide. If you can supply it and tell the truth, you’ll have a career and you’ll deserve it. That happens. It happened to me for twenty-five years and I thought it was virtue.”

“And if I can’t?”

“Then write it anyway and don’t be surprised.” He turned the pencil over on the desk.

Zevi wrote something down.

“One more thing,” Grossbard said. “When you’re standing in the place where it happened, and a better man than you sings, and you notice that you want it to be you, put that in. That’s the only sentence in my book anybody will still use in fifty years.”

He looked at the window and the wall.

“Go learn,” he said.

Posted in R. Shlomo Grossbard | Comments Off on The Work of That Day

JD Vance Often Sounds Like A Podcast Bro

Posted on August 3, 2026 by Luke Ford

In “Politics as a Vocation,” Max Weber (1864-1920) lists three qualities a politician needs: passion, a sense of responsibility, and proportion, which he glosses as distance from things and from men. The last one is the rare one. It means letting reality work on you at some remove instead of inhabiting every idea you encounter at the moment you encounter it.

The podcast form punishes distance. The product is the process of thinking, performed live, and the audience pays in attention for the sensation of discovery. A host who says “I looked into that and it turned out to be nothing” has wasted three hours of tape. A host who says “I went down a rabbit hole on this and what I found will surprise you” has made his week. The reward gradient runs toward novelty, and novelty correlates weakly with truth. Run a man on that gradient for a few years and he acquires a taste for the unexpected claim.

Office runs on the opposite gradient. You decide with bad information, you own the decision, and the record follows you. Closure is the job. Springfield is the case study: Vance (b. 1984) defended circulating a story he had not verified on the grounds that it drew attention to a real problem. That is podcast logic applied to power. The claim is a vehicle. Its truth is a secondary property of the vehicle.

Two things cut against this reading, though.

One, the alternative failed too. The credentialed men with no taste for rabbit holes gave us Iraq, the 2008 regulatory posture, and a public health consensus that spent 2020 revising itself in public while insisting it had not. Openness to the heterodox source is a real asset when the institutional source has been wrong at scale. The question is whether a man can sample outside consensus and still discipline what he brings back, and Vance is hard to read on that because he has never had to show his work.

Two, the style may be coalition signaling rather than cognition. Vance is a Yale Law graduate who worked in venture capital and served in the Senate. He can do the disciplined thing. Speaking in the idiom of a media ecology whose audience elected him is a choice about where to stand, and it tells you less about how he processes information in a room with no microphone. His Munich speech was many things, but it was not a journey. It was a prepared position delivered to hostile listeners who knew exactly where it landed.

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The Cost of the Claim

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

A man in an office notices that his colleague leaves at three on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reports come in a week late. Nobody says anything. He asks his supervisor what the arrangement is, and the supervisor tells him she cannot discuss it. The law forbids her. So the man builds his own account out of what he can see, and his anger builds.

Adrienne Colella described this in the Academy of Management Review in 2001, in a paper on how coworkers judge the distributive fairness of workplace accommodations. She returned to it with Ramona Paetzold and Maura Belliveau in Personnel Psychology in 2004. The legal constraints that prevent an employer from explaining why an employee received an accommodation push the surrounding workers toward negative inferences about the process. Confidentiality protects one person and starves everyone else of the information that would justify what they are watching. Colella also found that invisible conditions draw the most suspicion. When nobody can see the impairment, coworkers wonder whether the person is faking to get the benefit. Paetzold and colleagues followed in 2008 on the resentment that results.

This small literature shows that resentment tracks an information deficit that the rules create. A worker who suspects the arrangement is unearned has been placed in a position where he cannot check, and the rule that forbids him from checking is the same rule that forbids his supervisor from reassuring him. The system generates the suspicion and then treats the suspicion as a defect of character in the man who has it.

What does the accommodation regime cost, and who pays?

Jason Fletcher published “Spillover Effects of Inclusion of Classmates with Emotional Problems on Test Scores in Early Elementary School” in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2010. His cross-sectional estimates showed a single classmate with an emotional problem cutting reading and math scores by more than a tenth of a standard deviation, between a third and a half of the Black-White test score gap. With student fixed effects the estimate fell to about five percent of a standard deviation, and the reading result held up less well than the math. David Figlio found similar effects using disruptive boys, identified through an instrument built on boys given girls’ names. Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra found them using children exposed to domestic violence. Neidell and Waldfogel found them using teacher ratings of externalizing behavior. Kristoffersen and colleagues found them in Danish administrative data.

Then Nienke Ruijs, writing in the Economics of Education Review, ran three separate identification strategies on Dutch data and found nothing. Students with diagnosed special educational needs had no effect on the achievement of the regular students around them.

The two sets of results fit together if you separate disruption from diagnosis. Disruptive children impose costs on the children beside them. Diagnosed children arrive with money, aides, and structure, and the resources offset the disruption. A policy that identifies a child and funds him may leave his classmates no worse off. A policy that mainstreams a child without funding him will not.

Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Angrist published “Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act” in the Journal of Political Economy in 2001. They found the ADA reduced employment among disabled men of all working ages and disabled women under forty. The effects ran larger in medium-sized firms, which fell under the statute while small firms did not, and larger in states that generated more discrimination charges. Thomas DeLeire found the same direction in 2000 using different data. Employers priced the accommodation and the litigation risk and stopped hiring. And Acemoglu and Angrist looked for damage to the unprotected and found little evidence of any.

The regime hurt the people it was written to help and left everyone else where they were.

The cost concentrates where the condition stays invisible, the benefit stays discretionary, and the process stays hidden. Colella found the concentration twenty-five years ago. Nobody has followed it into the places where it now does the most work.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2019 that 4.2 percent of students at affluent public schools held 504 designations, against 1.6 percent at schools where three quarters of students qualify for subsidized lunch. The national count more than tripled between 2000 and 2016. Nick Ainsworth at the University of California, Irvine published a decade-spanning analysis of state and federal data in January of this year finding wealthy families twice as likely as poor ones to secure a 504 accommodation. The pattern reverses for Individualized Education Programs, which skew poor. The socioeconomic gap in 504 rates widens as students move into middle and high school, when the payoff from extra time on college entrance exams rises. A private neuropsychological evaluation runs from a few hundred dollars to fifteen thousand.

Two systems, then, wearing one name. The affluent purchase a diagnosis that converts into extra time, a private room, a later deadline. The poor receive a designation that marks a deficit and comes with a bus. The child in the middle, whose parents have jobs and no lawyer and no fifteen thousand dollars, competes against both and receives neither.

The regime rewards documentation. Documentation costs money and requires a parent who knows the option exists. Peter Conrad, in The Medicalization of Society, tracked the moment when diagnosis stopped functioning as a label people feared and started functioning as a resource people sought. Nick Haslam’s work on concept creep, published in Psychological Inquiry in 2016, describes the downward extension of harm concepts to cover milder cases, and Cass Sunstein supplied the term for the actors who drive that extension, opprobrium entrepreneurs. Frank Furedi wrote the cultural version in Therapy Culture in 2004. Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning supplied the strategic version in The Rise of Victimhood Culture in 2018, where the payoff comes from advertising grievance to a third party with power. Put these together and the picture is of an incentive structure where the people who respond best have the most practice with institutions.

The speech question follows from the confidentiality question. A dispute about who carries which load is a distributive dispute, and distributive disputes get settled by bargaining. Move the same dispute under the antidiscrimination frame and it becomes a moral dispute, settled by whoever controls the vocabulary. The worker who says the arrangement burdens him has, in the new frame, confessed to something. He learns this and stops saying it. Then the training arrives to explain to him why he was wrong to think it. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2016, found that mandatory diversity training produces backlash and leaves organizations worse off than doing nothing. The training reads to its audience as an accusation, because that is what it is.

Thomas Sowell named the posture in The Vision of the Anointed in 1995. Richard Epstein made the general economic case against the statutory apparatus in Forbidden Grounds in 1992. Neither man wrote the study I am describing. Samuel Bagenstos, who supports disability rights, laid out the internal contradictions of the movement with more candor than its critics manage, in Law and the Contradictions of the Disability Rights Movement in 2009. Amy Lutz attacked the neurodiversity movement from a direction its opponents rarely take, arguing in Chasing the Intact Mind in 2023 that the profoundly autistic got written out of the debates conducted in their name.

None of these literatures cite each other. The coworker-fairness researchers do not read the economics of accommodation. The reporters covering 504 capture do not cite Haslam. The medicalization sociologists treat resentment as a stigma problem awaiting better management. And the question of what the arrangement costs the people who absorb it has no literature at all.

The absence has an explanation that belongs to the sociology of knowledge. No federal agency funds a study of the burden inclusion places on the included. No institutional review board welcomes an interview protocol that asks teachers which children in their rooms make the other children learn less. No graduate student builds a career on that finding, and the one who tried would discover that his committee, his job market, and his eventual tenure file all sit inside the same coalition. The result is a field that can measure the benefits of a policy and cannot measure its price.

An accounting would need three things. It would need the Colella finding carried forward into a period when invisible conditions dominate the accommodation caseload, with attention to what the confidentiality rule does to trust inside a unit. It would need the 504 capture data joined to outcomes, so that we learn what happens to the undiagnosed student in the middle of the distribution who competes against classmates with extra time. And it would need someone willing to publish the answer.

The first two are empirical work. The third is the hard one.

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Who owns the residual?

Posted on August 2, 2026 by Luke Ford

A law partnership has no outside shareholders. Whatever remains after rent, salaries, and staff goes to the partners, and the industry publishes the quotient under the name profits per partner. That number is a governance fact. It tells you who owns the surplus, and ownership of the surplus is the franchise.

The franchise is weighted by revenue. It has to be. A partnership that gave equal weight to every equity partner regardless of what he brought in would lose the rainmakers to a firm that did not, and the rainmakers know this, and so does everyone else. The weighting rarely appears in the partnership agreement in those terms. It appears in compensation, in committee seats, in who gets a return call from the chairman on a Sunday. And because revenue composition can change faster than culture, a firm can hold an election it never announced and hand power to a bloc that did not campaign.

That is the story the Times told about Paul Weiss.

In 2008 the litigators owned the surplus. The firm’s identity was theirs to buy because it was their money. The Scottsboro appeal, the assistance to Thurgood Marshall in Brown, the Windsor case, the airport deployments in 2017, the two hundred and fifty family reunifications: these were purchases made by the residual claimants out of their own residual. They bought recruiting advantages and got them. They bought prestige at conferences and in the Financial Times and got that too. They bought the pleasure of the thing, which is a real good even if no accountant books it, and a partner making two and a half million dollars a year can afford to consume some.

The consumption and the returns pointed the same way. A firm can hold values for a long time when holding them costs nothing at the margin and pays in three currencies.

Karp saw that banking work would slow. He was right. He went after private equity and mergers because the money was there, and he brought in a man from Cravath and paid him more than the veterans to accelerate it. The litigators agreed to this. They had to; the pivot funded their raises. By the early 2020s corporate work threw off 65 percent of revenue.

The electorate had changed. The new owners had different tastes in what to buy with their money.

Nothing in the account requires anyone to lie or convert. Karp did not sell out. He financed a pivot with the litigators’ consent and the pivot carried a franchise transfer. Barshay said on arrival he had no interest in leadership, and he probably meant it, because he did not need leadership. He needed votes on the Deciding Group, and revenue delivered them without his asking. When he told a table of young litigators at Marea that he was running the firm already with Karp more as a puppet, and that he liked the arrangement because he could hold the power without the daily tedium, he was describing the setup accurately. The elevation of Barshay to chairman after the Epstein documents surfaced is a formality that recorded a transfer already complete.

Korberg surveys employees and pushes for three days a week in office. Barshay pushes for five, mirroring the banks and funds his group serves. Korberg wins. Read the outcome and you might think the litigators still held the room. Read the call itself, on Mother’s Day, a head of corporate law telephoning a partner to press a point about attendance, and you see a man testing whether the franchise had moved yet. It had not, quite. He tested again the next year with questions about billable hours and pro bono ratios, and partners who could have told him it was not his business instead arranged a briefing.

Idaho, 2023. The state makes gender transition care for minors a felony. The ACLU and Paul Weiss sue. Barshay learns the firm will be named in the release and demands the name come out. He gets it, and gets prospective approval rights over all such releases. This is a lawyer whose clients bear the reputational cost claiming a veto over the publicity, and the veto is granted because he is paying. Karp’s fix was to have the firm’s name added to the ACLU’s website after the fact and his own name added as counsel of record, which is what a chairman does when he can no longer deliver the substance and still wants to deliver something.

The 2023 address to partners says it aloud. Pro bono made the country more fair and burnished the firm’s reputation over generations, and many of you came here for it, and the firm has since recruited lawyers with divergent political sensibilities, and we are a commercial law firm and not a public interest advocacy organization, and there is a war, and being in that war is not good for business. Karp proposed keeping the core work and being sensitive about which matters the firm promoted. Read that as a chairman describing the new electorate to the old one and negotiating the terms of the reduction.

Korberg’s exit. Three million in compensation over a final year of pro bono and mentoring, then another year’s salary at roughly three and a half million, in exchange for a promise not to sue, not to disparage, and not to reveal that a deal existed. The firm was buying back a claim on its own story. It bought it out of the same surplus that had funded the story in the first place, which tells you the values and the settlement were always denominated in one currency. Whatever else the firm believed about Korberg, it priced the risk that Korberg would speak, and it paid, and it did not investigate what four people said Barshay had been saying behind Korberg’s back.

The website fight in March 2025. The Center to Combat Hate page comes down around the time of the White House deal, and partners argue over what can go back up. Dunn wants it restored unchanged and says the comparison between versions will be the problem. Bonvino wants it back with major changes and asks whether they are going to hand it to Boris or Miller for review. Then the solvency statement: last week was miserable, the firm was saved from the brink, the firm should take no risks, there likely won’t be a next time if we get hit again. These are partners arguing over how much of a purchase they can still afford after a margin call. The page went back up without the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers work.

Dunn’s proposed abortion rights case in the same weeks is the same argument at a larger denomination. She wanted to buy back independence with a lawsuit. Karp was lukewarm. Barshay was opposed. The purchase was declined, and Dunn left in May with Rhee and two others, and the Deciding Group tilted further corporate by their leaving, which is how these transfers compound.

Then the DJI withdrawal, which came before any executive order. In October 2024 the firm sued the Pentagon for a Chinese drone maker. After the election Barshay argued on a call that the firm should not stand adversarial to the government. In December the firm withdrew. The spokeswoman says the decision would have been made regardless of party. Perhaps. The timing tells you the new owners had already begun repricing the portfolio.

The Oval Office meeting in March 2025 follows from all of it. Four firms fought similar orders and won injunctions from angry judges. Paul Weiss’s leaders believed they could win too. Winning was not the constraint. Karp’s own reasoning, as reported, was that a favorable ruling would not stop an administration stocked with loyalists from refusing to deal with his lawyers, and more than three quarters of the firm’s clients held government contracts. Meanwhile partners on the corporate side were taking calls from rivals and saying so. A firm whose surplus depends on M&A cannot spend a year as the government’s named adversary, and the men who generate that surplus were the ones voting. Forty million in free legal work was the number that cleared the market.

Karp landed Apollo in 2011 as the opening move of the corporate pivot, and Apollo became the firm’s highest paying client. Through Apollo he knew Leon Black. Through Black he knew Epstein, and gave the sex offender free advice. In March 2019 he wrote to Epstein that a draft motion was overwhelmingly persuasive and that he particularly liked the argument that the victims had lain in wait and sat on their rights for strategic advantage. He put the word victims in quotation marks.

This was the pivot arriving at its terminus. Karp chased corporate revenue to fund an identity, the revenue came with relationships, the relationships came with obligations, and one of the obligations was flattering a man’s lawyers about a filing that mocked girls he had abused. The chairman who kept a photograph of a reunited father and daughter on his desk wrote that email seven weeks before he sat for interviews about the firm’s conscience.

When the Justice Department released the files in January, the Deciding Group met without him over several days. Partners reported irate clients. They decided he had to go, and Barshay told him.

Two implications follow.

First, the betrayal narrative gets the causation backward. If the story is that a firm lost its nerve, the remedy is nerve. If the story is that a firm’s electorate changed and the new electorate had different preferences, then nerve was never available to be lost, and the decisive moment was 2016, when a compensation package purchased something nobody at the table priced. Ask what Paul Weiss thought it was buying when it paid Barshay more than its veterans. It was buying M&A market share. It was also buying a vote, and then a bloc, and then the firm.

Second, a reputation is capital that a partnership can spend for decades without noticing it has stopped funding the reserve. Every year the firm consumed some of what Rifkind and Liman built, and every year it converted the consumption into recruits and rankings, and the conversion was profitable, so nobody asked what would happen when the reserve was tested. Rifkind’s granddaughters, both lawyers, wrote that taking action to stay off an enemies list does not advance the rule of law. They were writing about an inheritance their grandfather funded and the firm drew down.

The Times reports that after the deal, Paul Weiss provided no examples of work opposing the administration.

That is the residual, allocated.

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