"That’s what it is to be a Jew, in some ways. Being really comfortable with tension, and being comfortable with paradoxes..."

"... and understanding that we’re a people, we’re a nation, we’re an ethnicity, we are a religion, too. We don’t fit naturally. And that’s why we’re such a pain. It’ll give a lot of grist for people to argue at over kitchen tables, as we have been doing for over 3,000 years."

Said California State Senator Henry Stern, a Democrat, quoted in "Are Jews an Ethnic Group? California Considers the Question. A bill would allow Jews to identify themselves as an ethnic group on state forms. Supporters argue it’s a step toward acknowledging the complex nature of Jewish identity" (NYT gift link).

Stern is the son of the actor Daniel Stern:

I have to use the tag "Judaism" for this post. I don't mean to be coming down on the side of those who say Jews are a religious group. I'm against tag proliferation and  "Judaism" and "anti-Semitism" are longstanding tags. And I don't have separate tags for each ethnic group. I just use "ethnicity." There's also "race consciousness" and "racial politics."

A.I. powered "sombrero" memes are overflowing on X, and no one seems at all sensitive to the charge that they are racist.

I saw James Woods pushing this one:

Best yet… pic.twitter.com/Hrhr0MsZJh

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 5, 2025

Very extreme, perhaps maxxing out the trend. But no. There is much much more. Go to the replies to Woods's post and scroll. The sombrero-themed A.I. concoctions are endless.

"The Germans are open-hearted, good-natured, witty, and irresistible in war but inclined to fritter away their time and money on drink."

"The Englishman, by contrast, is affectionate, effeminate and graceful in thought, albeit prone to lechery and 'changeable as the moon' in his religious observances. He gets off comparatively lightly: the Swede is cruel and superstitious, the Hungarian is disloyal and bloodthirsty, and the 'wild, peasant-like' Pole is most likely to meet his end in a cowstall. These are the bald assertions of a 'Table of Peoples' artwork executed by an anonymous Austrian painter in about 1720, during the early throes of the Enlightenment mania for taxonomy."

From "The Enlightenment exhibition that poses troubling questions in Trump era/The German Historical Museum’s landmark exhibition on the 18th-century era has become surprisingly relevant in light of cultural and geopolitical trends" (London Times).

"Fat Beach Day... is being held to coincide with Pride month at Jacob Riis Beach in New York, a location deeply ensconced in the city’s activism space..."

I'm reading "New York’s Fat Beach Day gives plus-size people a space to be themselves/Jacob Riis Beach hosts the day of body positivity and fun, in the city at the heart of the fat acceptance movement" (The Guardian).

I didn't know that fat acceptance was part of what Pride month is about or that New York had something it wanted to call its "activism space." 

... New York has, for decades, been at the heart of the fat acceptance movement. In the 1960s, about 500 protesters held a “fat-in” in Central Park, burning diet books and photographs of the supermodel Twiggy, to publicly encourage body positivity and liberation.... 

Jacob Riis Beach is named after Jacob Riis, the "Danish-American social reformer, 'muckraking' journalist, and social documentary photographer" (Wikipedia). There is some criticism of Riis, you know. This doesn't have to do with fatness. The people in Riis's photographs were skinny — poor people living in tenements.

"The days when Democrats could get away with thinking of Hispanics as one of 'their' minority groups are, or should be, over."

Writes Ruy Teixeira, in "Postcard from the Hispanic Working Class/Education polarization comes to America’s Latinos"  (The Liberal Patriot).

In terms of voting intentions, Biden leads by just one point among working-class Hispanics but by 39 points among their college-educated counterparts. Interestingly, this 38-point reverse class gap is actually larger than the class gap in this poll among whites (30 points).... And here’s something that should concentrate their mind when considering the working-class Hispanics problem and how seriously to take it. The simple fact of the matter is that there are far, far more working-class than college-educated Hispanics. According to States of Change data, Hispanic eligible voters nationwide are 78 percent working class. And working-class levels among Latinos are even higher in critical states like Arizona (82 percent) and Nevada (85 percent).

I'm giving this post my "Biden's racial nightmare" tag, though I can't remember what made me invent that tag and will need to publish this post and click on it to find out. 

UPDATE, right after posting: I now see why I created the tag. It's a pretty different topic, but I want to go back into it. It was August 13, 2020:

Looming and dooming.

I'm reading "How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Doom Joe Biden/The independent candidate looms as a serious drag on Biden’s Latino support in Arizona and Nevada" by Adrian Carrasquillo in Politico.

Kennedy’s popularity appears to be a function of name recognition and a general lack of enthusiasm for President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, not to mention voters brushing their views onto the somewhat empty canvas of his candidacy.

As if RFK Jr. is mainly an empty space and Biden and Trump are just guys people are blasé about. Sorry. That's just a random/filler sentence. The article is full of specific material Latinos in Arizona and Nevada. Those are important swing states and in both the Latino population is about 30%.

So... another excerpt:

"This is why we cheer for Rocky. Rocky is not supposed to win, but he wins. And that’s to me America. And Hunter is not supposed to win."

"He should be dead. And he faced a crossroad in his life, which we all do when we’re all struggling with things in our lives. And he could have chosen the easy path, which is to keep going and die, or do the hard thing, which is to change."

Said Georges Bergès, the owner of the gallery that sold Hunter Biden's artwork, testifying before House Judiciary and Oversight committee, quoted in newly released transcripts and reported in "Hunter Biden’s paintings have sold for a total of $1.5 million/Gallery owner, a Trump donor, has sold the work to 10 buyers; some bought multiple paintings" (WaPo).

The biggest buyer of the art — who bought 11 paintings for $875,000 — was Kevin Morris. Morris, we're told, "has become one of Biden’s closest friends while also acting as an attorney and financial benefactor."

"Groups of young people cruise the streets of Porirua, New Zealand, in the dead of night, their cars and bicycles stacked with high-powered speakers..."

"... designed to emit the loudest, clearest sounds. The groups, known as siren clubs, use late-night musical battles to express their identities and create community... A popular sound... is the voice of Celine Dion.... Siren clubs are made up mostly of young men, many of them in Porirua’s Pacific Islander community, known as Pasifika....They get together to modify cars and bicycles with public-address system speakers, which they call sirens. They spend hours wiring and soldering multiple sirens and amplifiers to car frames or onto bicycles.... Dion’s 'My Heart Will Go On' and 'The Power of Love' are siren club classics.... Residents calling in to report noise complaints often cannot home in on the source. And even when they can, the competitors have often taken off by the time police arrive...."

From "New Zealanders are blasting Celine Dion until 3 a.m., leaving some miserable/‘Siren battles’ in the streets are driving some residents crazy" (WaPo).

Porirua Mayor Anita Baker is quoted praising the Pasifika in the manner one expects from mayors:  “They’re an awesome community. They love music, they love dance, they love church. They’re a really close-knit community … and that’s what we love about Porirua. We have such diversity here.” 

"The welfare society is fundamentally a community, which is based on a mutual trust that we all contribute. All that is being seriously challenged by parallel societies."

Said Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, quoted in "Denmark Aims a Wrecking Ball at ‘Non-Western’ Neighborhoods/A government program is using demolition and relocation to remake neighborhoods with immigrants, poverty or crime" (NYT). 

The term "parallel societies" refers to "segregated enclaves where immigrants do not participate in the wider society or learn Danish, even as they benefit from the country’s generous welfare system."  

The government is getting rid of more than 4,000 public housing units.

"No one in our company openly mocks pronouns, but a cis, straight Hispanic female colleague offers that her pronouns are 'She/Her/Ella.'"

"... She is using pronouns to further her own personal branding.... This is an appropriation of a space that queer and trans people won so their most basic identity could be appropriately recognized at work. There are other venues in which to be proud of one’s cultural heritage. This colleague leverages identifying pronouns for her own benefit, diluting the concept for everyone else. Ethically speaking, is it OK for her to use pronouns this way?"

This is a question sent to the NYT work advice editor Roxane Gay by a man who calls himself "a queer person of relative privilege (white, gay, male, senior in the organization)."

The column is titled "It’s Not OK to Police Co-Workers’ Pronouns/Even if you think they’re using their identities for personal branding."

"For a long time, the dominant thinking about Latinos was that they complicated the Black-white binary that has defined race in the United States."

"Recently, though, some Afro-Latinos have argued that Latinos have reinforced it. There are Black Latinos and white Latinos, who each experience the world differently. [Nancy López, an Afro-Dominican sociologist at the University of New Mexico] has argued that Latinos’ different experiences stem from their 'street race,' meaning how they are perceived when they walk down the street.... 'Now we’re just gonna mix race, ethnicity, and origin, everything,' she told me. 'It’s all the same. We’re all the same color. No, that’s not the reality. And to say otherwise is to eradicate our ability to document inequities based on what you look like.'... [I]t is hard to imagine what the shared racial characteristics of Latinos are. Proponents of the combined question say that the experience of anti-Latino discrimination defines Latinos as a race. This seems to grant too much power to non-Latinos to define who Latinos are, and doesn’t acknowledge how Latinos, even if they are racialized, are racialized differently depending on factors such as skin color and class background...."

From "Should Latinos Be Considered a Race? A proposed change to the census faces opposition from Afro-Latino groups, and exposes conflicts among Latino communities" (The New Yorker).

"Yes, the French are... lazy. It’s just not in the way we lazily think."

I'm reading "Are French People Just Lazy?" by the historian Robert Zaretsky (NYT).

"Generally, the cruellest are perhaps those who are of Russia but are not of the Russian tradition, such as the Chechens, the Buryats and so on."

Said Pope Francis, quoted in "‘Racist’ interview with Pope Francis causes fury in Russia/Francis says Chechen and Buryat minorities in Russia’s army more cruel in Ukraine than other soldiers" (The Guardian). 

"Some Latino voters say the Republican Party supports their hopes for economic advancement."

"That is the case for Luiz Oliveira, 63, an immigrant from Brazil who owns three coffee shops in the Las Vegas area. 'I came here with a dream to live the American dream, and many other immigrants have the same dream,' he said. He said he is wary of Democratic policies that seem too much like socialism. 'Socialism will kill my dream, kill my business,' he said. The Journal poll, which included a large sample of Latino voters, found that views within that group differed by education level. Latino voters with a four-year college degree substantially favored a Democratic candidate over a Republican—61% to 32%—whereas Republicans led or were at parity among those with lower levels of formal education.... 'Black working-class and Hispanic working-class people have a lot more in common with white working-class people than many people have been willing to believe,' said Ruy Teixeira, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute who writes often on the subject." 

From "GOP Gaining Support Among Black and Latino Voters, WSJ Poll Finds/Republicans appear to be in a better position with both groups heading into the midterms than they were in 2020 or 2018" (Wall Street Journal).

For more from Ruy Teixeira, here's "Hispanic Voters on the Eve of the 2022 Election/Hispanic Voters Are Normie Voters and Normie Voters Aren’t Happy." I was going to blog that a few days ago, but I got so sidetracked into the use of the term "normie"! He writes:

In short, they are normie voters. And like other normie voters, if they feel Democrats are falling short on the things normie voters care about, they are more than willing to punish the party they hold responsible.

"Beyond Mr. Netanyahu, the election is also a referendum on the kind of society Israelis seek to build."

"His coalition partners include ultra-Orthodox lawmakers who oppose teaching math and English to their children, and far-right settlers who frequently antagonize Israel’s Arab minority and seek to remove checks and balances on the parliamentary process. To Mr. Netanyahu’s backers, his victory would shore up Israel’s Jewish character. It would reassure certain right-wing Jewish Israelis who fear that the unprecedented involvement of an Arab party in the departing government has threatened the country’s Jewish identity and endangered their personal safety. To his opponents, a win for Mr. Netanyahu would endanger the integrity of Israeli democracy — particularly after Mr. Netanyahu’s allies announced plans for sweeping judicial reform — and make it even harder for the country’s Jewish and Arab communities to get along."

From "Here’s what’s at stake as Israelis cast their ballots" (NYT)(Netanyahu, the current opposition leader, faces "the governing alliance of right-wing, left-wing and centrist parties that share little beyond their opposition to the former prime minister").

"In its early days, the pleasure of 'The Great British Baking Show' was in the reassuring fantasy it built under a high-pitched country tent..."

"... an endless source of cheeky innuendo, serious amateur baking and absolutely nothing else. The worst thing imaginable was that someone’s Battenberg cake would come out a bit asymmetrical, or that one baker might accidentally use another baker’s custard.... But over its 12 years on the air, the worst thing imaginable on Bake Off has gotten worse, again and again. Last week, the hosts, Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas, strolled up a grassy slope dressed in fringed serapes and straw sombreros to introduce 'Mexican Week' with tired puns, saying they shouldn’t make 'Mexican jokes' but proceeding to do just that. The show had hit rock bottom, revealing what it had managed to obscure in the past with a bit of charm.... The 'Bake Off' clips were shared incredulously and angrily on Twitter, days before the episode even aired. The phrase 'Mexican Week' quickly became shorthand for profound culinary blunder, presented with a sense of naïve triumph. An image of a cursed avocado, lopped away with a knife, became the episode’s unofficial mascot, as if a home cook unfamiliar with peeling an avocado should feel humiliated."

From "‘Mexican Week’ Was Not an Accident for ‘The Great British Baking Show’/After 12 years, the show’s long, inexorable journey from comfort to cringe is complete" (NYT).

From the top comments over there:

Like so many articles in the New York Times that cover accusations of racism or cultural appropriation, readers are left pondering what actually happened. Other than straw sombreros, an abused avocado and a reference to a reference about “tired puns”, there’s no real reporting in here that actually informs readers about what was done that was so bad.

And:

"I don’t know that there should be a common Latinx identity. This identity is rooted in land and geography when it should..."

"... be rooted in understanding settler colonialism in the Americas. I would be invested in a political Latinidad that first and foremost fought for indigenous sovereignty and black liberation. If it doesn’t do that, I don’t see the purpose...."

Said Alan Pelaez Lopez, a Zapotec cultural critic, artist, and academic, one of the 6 participants in a conversation at "The Problem With Latinidad/A growing community of young, black, and indigenous people are questioning the very identity underpinning Hispanic Heritage Month" (The Nation).

"An epidemic of Spanish-language right-wing disinformation that spiked around the 2020 election on social media platforms, and in some big-city AM radio stations, is revving up again..."

"... ahead of the fall midterms. Two years ago, before the 2020 presidential election, Spanish-language videos and news stories smeared Joe Biden as a communist. After the election, disinformation campaigns accused Black Lives Matter of spurring the Jan. 6 insurrection and bolstered the lie that Biden stole the election.... Conspiracy theories, easily debunked false narratives and outrageous lies spread quickly and take hold among Spanish-language users... [because] social media sites, including Facebook, do little fact-checking on foreign-language pages... [F]ake news videos often spread via large group chats among families and friends on WhatsApp, which is hugely popular among Latinos and is encrypted.... 'If your father sends you a video, you will trust your father. This is what makes us extraordinarily susceptible. We have very strong family ties.'... [W]e Latinos need to do our part. Don’t be shy about asking Abuela where she got that information she mentioned on WhatsApp...."

 
Writes Lizette Alvarez, in "Fake news speaks many languages, but it’s particularly fond of Spanish" (WaPo).

Who wrote these stupid lines for Jill Biden — "as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx... and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio"?

That's a description of human beings!

It's like something you'd make a politician character say in a movie comedy — and I don't mean a sophisticated comedy. Just a mainstream comedy that would make a general audience laugh.

I'm reading "Jill Biden rebuked after saying Latinos as unique as ‘breakfast tacos.'"

Jill Biden was praising civil rights icon Raul Yzaguirre during the annual conference of UnidosUS.... 

“Raul helped build this organization with the understanding that the diversity of this community — as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio — is your strength,” Biden said. 

When addressing the Bronx bodegas though, she mispronounced the convenience stores and said “bogedas.”... 

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists panned the remarks, stating, “We are not tacos.”

Isn't it obvious that you don't liken an ethnic group to its conventional food? Notice that the words seem to be intended to say that the individuals within the community are different from each other. There's diversity within the set of people who are Hispanic. But then she cited a stereotypical food — breakfast tacos — and presented them as diverse. That's the level of individualism — the way a breakfast format accommodates different food items.

I can't think of any other examples of public speech comparing an ethnic or a racial group to the food people associate with them. Maybe you can suggest a comparable statement about white people — as unique as the....

Ha ha. The man tries to defend himself. In public. I'm amused because I have the same foible...

... but I wouldn't excuse it.

I'm reading "You be the judge: should my boyfriend close the kitchen cupboards after himself?" in The Guardian. I'll skip "the prosecution" section, where the girlfriend complains that it not only looks disorderly, she knocks her head on the open doors. (She's only 5' tall.) 

Here's the guy:

I see no issue with leaving kitchen cupboards open.

If this were Reddit, they wouldn't be saying he's wrong. They'd be saying this means so much and she should leave him now. But this is The Guardian, so let's read on: