I’ve recommended it before, but Amy Kaplan tells exactly this story in Our American Israel. www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

We issued a report on prisoner abuse last year from @lisahajjar.bsky.social and Basil Farraj. It goes back a long way. www.merip.org/2024/10/isra...

Primary Fetterman.

There is a material basis for the DEI freakout. Krugman did a great job explaining it. But compare it to the material basis of, say, hyper masculinity in the fascist movements of the 1930s, it’s still pretty weak tea.

This really is a winnable fight.

paulkrugman.substack.com/p/women-jobs...

Regular people are, in the main, not going to be moved by an Islamophobic freak out over Mamdani when there are so many other important things to worry about. The Islamophobia therefore is a clearly weak hand to play.

I think about this in terms of the freakout over DEI/women/race too…

How is the material basis different? With 9/11, although the response was a disastrous overreaction, it was a response to a very real threat manifested by the 2001 attacks and subsequent, smaller scale stochastic events. In the case of Mamdani, it’s one Muslim guy winning an election.

In case you are ready to invest right now, this second:

www.merip.org/donate/

He has to win re-election in PA first!

And read “Abu Farid’s House”! It’s lost none of its relevance.

www.merip.org/1989/03/abu-...

I really found this conversation so rich, and am eager to do more like it. Give it a listen, like and subscribe on your podcast service of choice.

www.merip.org/2025/11/the-...

I was honored to speak with Beshara, who is conducting research in and around that same village 40 years later, about “Abu Farid’s House” and how life in the West Bank has changed for ordinary, working class Palestinians since the First Intifada and in this horrible time of genocide.

It was much more recently that I read his 1989 essay, “Abu Farid’s House” which he wrote while conducting research for that book and which chronicles the life of a working class Palestinian family in the village of Salfit just before and through the First Intifada.

So many scholars that I came to first as historians concerned with the deeper past cut their teeth writing for MERIP about the present.

One of those scholars is Beshara Doumani, whose book on peasants and merchants in 18th and 19th century Ottoman Palestine I first read in grad school.

Gotta add to this — you need publicly financed campaigns and ranked choice voting, too. Really hard to imagine Mamdani accomplishing this without either of those things. Cuomo could outspend him, and RCV made consolidating the anti-Cuomo vote more straightforward.