Why Do Families Put Up With It?

Some years ago, I got to know a guy who had two daughters that were approaching high school age. His lifestyle was a little too bourgeois-rat-race for me to think of him as an actual friend, but it was fun to catch up with him now and then at hobby-related events. Everything changed as his daughters grew old enough for him and his wife to chart their college admissions strategies. As far as I can tell, they went to an Ivy admissions consultant who recommended that their best chance was to aim for a Title IX recruited athlete basket via women's basketball.

So this became the program, except that women's basketball, unlike men's basketball and nearly every other sport, doesdn't have a season, it goes all year, which meant that other than this guy's regular job, he was going to have to spend almost every waking hour taking his daughters to their games, coaching them, monitoring their workouts, and so forth -- and it wasn't going to be just a burst of activity for a few months, but something that would soak up his non-work time and attention for maybe six or seven years straight.

Once he told me about this, I no longer ran into him in connection with our hobby. He wasn't allowed to have a hobby. In fact, I never ran into him again, so I never learned how things turned out for his daughters. I was lucky enough that I was part of the first Ivy admissions rat race that began in the late 1950s when I was still in junior high, and things weren't quite so intense, although at least once a year my mother would make an appointment with the guidance counselors and ask specifically what needed to change on my transcript to get me into Dartmouth.

One of my strangest experiences from junior high, in fact, was soon after my parents had gone in to consult with the principal, Dr Callahan, over some troubling aspect of my 14-year-old behavior. The next day, Dr Callahan called me in to meet with him one-on-one. "I need to explain something to you," he said. "Your parents are in a panic. They have this fixation on getting you into the right college. I've never seen anything like it." He went on to reassure me that this was going to be a tough part of my life, there wasn't going to be much I could do about it, but I should have some perspective.

I was one of Dr Callahan's problem children, but I remember him fondly.

Yesterday I asked why students and their families aren't up in arms that, whatever the sacrifices they may be making to try to get their kids into an Ivy school, the game is rigged, and in fact,it's generally understood to be rigged. The middle-class kids from the suburbs are competing for a particular subset of openings in each elite-school class, while people with the right names or the right DNA or big enough wallets are able to bypass the whole process, but I concluded they never would.

This keeps taking me back to the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. As I pointed out in this post,

This arose early in the last century when Dartmouth College, facing a financial crisis, asked its alumni to bail the school out, in return for which several seats on the board of directors would be nominated and elected by the alumni. This went unnoticed for decades until, in the 1980s and 1990s, conservative students began criticizing liberal faculty and administration policies. The result was that sympathetic alumni organized campaigns to elect avowed conservatives to the board as opportunities arose.

The movement eventually failed, in part because it never had a specific agenda beyond putting conservatives on the board, and perhaps as a result of that, the trustees it elected before the administration regained control were mostly narcissistic self-promoters. But the main reason it failed was that students, alumni, applicants, and parents complained that any controversy about the College would diminish the perceived value of a Dartmouth degree. Argument over.

In other words, there's a deep compulsion in the US middle class for families to sacrifice healthy adolescence and balanced parenthood in a vain and incredibly expensive effort to play a rigged game. On one hand, a few figures like Mike Rowe are seriously questioning the usefulness of a four-year degree vis-a-vis learning a trade or pursuing some small business opportunity, but nobody seems to be questioning the value of an Ivy degree vis-a-vis one from a less selective and much less expensive state school. I suspect the state school will do a better job teaching the basics of each discipline.

This problem won't be solved by putting conservatives, or even pro-Israel Jews, on Ivy boards of trustees. I had a long and productive chat with the first insurgent Dartmouth trustee, who pointed out that he and those like him would always be flying coach to board meetings, while the other trustees would be flying in on private jets, and they would always outnumber the insurgents no matter what. Even if there are alumni with an insurgent agenda, even a most commendable insurgent agenda, they'll get nowhere, and the strongest resistance will come from the parents, applicants, alumni, and students who are most intent on playing the same old rigged game.

There will need to be a bigger cultural change. Homeschoolers, for instance, are no less focused on getting their kids into an Ivy. Even homeschool won't solve a whole lot.

The Basket Theory Of Ivy Anti-Israel Protests Confirmed

This came up in the news after I made yesterday's post (click on the image for a larger copy):

Pro-Hamas protestors on the campus of MIT were warned that if they didn’t disperse -- they were violating campus policies that prohibited interfering with academic activities and the free movement of students and staff --they would be suspended. The protestors were warned several times and failed to disperse.

Jewish students were prevented from entering the campus through the main entrance and were rerouted.

Once the protestors finally dispersed the administration decided to not follow through on their threats to punish the students for violating the policies of the school.

It was a bit of a surprise because MIT President Kornbluth seemed ready to follow through on her threat.

So why didn’t she?

The piece cites a subsequent letter from President Kornbluth:

After exhausting all other avenues for de-escalating the situation, we informed all protesters that they must leave the lobby area within a set time, or they would be subject to suspension. Many chose to leave, and I appreciate their cooperation. Some did not. . . . Because we later heard serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues, we have decided, as an interim action, that the students who remained after the deadline will be suspended from non-academic campus activities. The students will remain enrolled at MIT and will be able to attend academic classes and labs.

John Hinderaker, who raised the original questions that led to my post here yesterday, posted at the Power Line blog in response to Kornbluth's letter:

There you have it: the pro-genocide students (or many of them, anyway) are non-Americans, most likely from the Middle East. They have brought their unAmerican attitudes with them to this country. MIT doesn’t want them to be deported, likely in part, at least, because they are rich kids who pay full freight. Foreign students are a cash cow for universities, often being nearly the only ones who pay the university’s sticker price.

Foreign students are just another admissions basket for a good many elite universities, for the specific reason Mr Hinderaker gives: they pay full freight. The university likes them even more than, say, the children of big-donor billionaires, because various departments can target them for special programs like English courses at extra cost, which flows to the coffers of the English Department and justifies faculty positions.

Degrees from prestigious US universities like MIT are status symbols for the wealthy third-world families that send their offspring there. In that, they function in exactly the same way that Sam Bankman-Fried's MIT degree functioned: it was a status symbol that gave Sam the cachet of merit that, as a hyperactive adolescent unable to concentrate on routine scientific or mathematical tasks, wouldn't have gained him competitive admission to MIT and thus the credibility he needed to run a financial Ponzi scheme. In this, MIT was complicit.

Like the foreign students who are able to buy their way into an MIT degree, Sam's parents got him in via a special basket, presumably using a network of faculty and administrative insider favors and obligations, that allowed him to hitchhike on the prestige of the very different students who came in via the meritocratic basket.The question continues to be, what are the relative sizes of the different baskets? MIT and other elite schools are selling their prestige and giving the purchasers preferential treatment based on the reputation of an entirely separate applicant group that's admitted on merit.

The first link above continues,

Let’s be clear: nobody at MIT could be considered a member of an oppressed class. They are in the 1% of the 1% of the 1%. An MIT degree is a ticket to the top of the economic ladder, and chances are you are close to being there already.

This applies even more to wealthy families from African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries who send their offspring to MIT for status symbol degrees.

But this raises, or at least ought to raise, another set of questions. There's a significant population of US middle-class families whose lives are preoccupied with the elite-school admissions rat race. Will those students or their parents ever be up in arms that their efforts are exploited by the elite schools that can merchandise their reputations to domestic billionaires or wealthy foreign families to let them buy admission for their offspring because it will give the impression that the wealthy kids have competed for it with the domestic kids working their tails off for an Ivy admission?

They ought to, but they won't. I'll get into this.

"How Did They Get Into MIT, Penn, Etc.?"

John Hinderaker asks good questions in a brief post at the Power Line blog:

Where do these people come from? How did thy get into MIT, Penn, etc.? . . . I don’t think these educational institutions have any idea how terrible they look to the general public. And I don’t think we can begin to calculate the long-range consequences of the utter moral failure of higher education that we are now witnessing.

But let's keep in mind that before the Hamas issue put the Ivies in the forefront, they'd already drawn public attention in recent months for bringing us a series of con artists, crooks, and incompetents like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Stockton Rush, and Alissa Heinerscheid. Jeffrey Epstein, who never graduatrd from any four-year institution, nevertheless hitchhiked on Harvard's and MIT's prestige by involving them in his philanthropic hustle. And I've talked about the Ivy admissions problem, for instance here. where I noted that the most recent crop of Ivy sociopaths not only attended elite schools but came from privileged backgrounds as well.

In fact, the Ivy admissions system itself has the resources to answer Mr Hinderaker's questions, although I can't imagine it ever undertaking such an effort. Keep in mind that in the elite-school admissions process, every applicant falls into a "basket", categories including students coming from favored "feeder schools", recruited athletes, legacies, children of major donors and public figures, and favored minorities, all of whom take implicit priority over the "basket" of white and Asian public school kids, who must compete entirely on the basis of grades, test scores, and extracurriculars (Jews not in other baskets are effectively in this basket as well, unless they're subject to an additional Jewish quota).

Although the existence of the admissions baskets is generally acknowledged, the relative sizes of each basket at each university are closely guarded secrets, so this is the first obstacle to getting a serious answer to Mr Hinderaker's questions. But we can at least start with the recognition that every student at every elite school came in with a basket ID that can be interrogated in some way.

The second question is whether we can identify the students who are demonstrating against Israel or otherwise harassing Jews on campus, or at least a significant subset of them. It might be possible simply to attach names to faces in photographs, although this wouldn't differentiate students based on their individual motives or relative commitment. A better indicator might be to identify students who were arrested or otherwise disciplined for conduct at the demonstrations, but there are several obstacles here, too: the universities have so far been generally lenient, and few students have been singled out this way; in other cases, disciplinary measures may be confidential.

But we can at least conduct a thought experiment and ask which members of which baskets might be likeliest to participate in anti-Israel demonstrations or anti-Jew harassment. I suspect that among the least likely would be members of the meritocratic basket, the ones, some of whom are Jews themselves, who competed for admission based entirely on grades, test scores, and extracurriculars. Among other things, those students could well be too busy hitting the books to go to anti-Israel protests, since many of those will still be competing for admission to law and medical school when they graduate from college.

Based on my own experience as an Ivy undergraduate, when I look back on which of my acquaintances occupied the administration building to protest the Viet Nam war and were subsequently arrested, I would say they were predominantly legacies, preppies, and budding minority activists. They'd be less affected by an arrest record, since their family connections would fast-track them into careers irrespective of that record, or in other cases, they could build on the arrest to further an activist career.

The problem for the elite schools hasn't really changed since the days of Viet Nam protests, and it's similar to the emerging problem of the students from privileged backgrounds whom the Ivies are enabling to become crooks, con artists, and famous incompetents: the Ivies started as, and continue to be, institutions of wealth and privilege. The meritocratic basket was forced on them during the post-World War II period, but they continue to maintain baskets of significant but highly confidential size for the privileged, now augmented by new baskets for favored minorities.

Anti-Semitism has always been a component of social elitism, so that's one explanation for why it's found at the Ivies. Another has been the newer tendency to fetishize minorites as victims, what Anti Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt characterized as the "oppression Olympics":

These college administrators — and you know, it’s the oppression Olympics, . . . where you either play oppressor or oppressed. And in this victimology madness, Jews are somehow put at the bottom.

The real answer to Mr Hinderaker's question is that the Ivies have lulled the world into believing they're meritocratic. This works in their favor, because they serve a significant market, those already wealthy and privileged, who can, as figures like Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Stockton Rush, and Alissa Heinerscheid recently have, use the meritocratic aura of their elite-school degrees to convince their marks that they got into Stanford, MIT, Princeton, and Harvard on their intelligence and hard work, when the real Ivy system ensured this was not in fact the case.

There are very few competitive universities, such as Caltech, that do not use a "basket" admissions system that effectively favors wealthy and privileged applicants -- but even in a system that also favors designated victim groups, as Mr Greenblatt points out, in that oppression Olympics, the Jews wind up at the bottom. Alan Dershowitz sensed this in Chutzpah as well. Without some sort of basic reform, there's always going to be an effective Jewish quota and all the other baggage that goes with it.

I'm Trying To Figure This One Out

I found this today:

During the third debate, Vivek Ramaswamy called for RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to resign, citing the party's "culture of losing." Now, Ron DeSantis is throwing more gasoline on the fire, announcing that he is going to defy a threat from McDaniel to disqualify any candidate who attends an upcoming forum in Iowa.

According to an October 28th letter, the RNC has deemed the Family Leader Thanksgiving Forum, hosted by Bob Vander Plaats, to be a "debate." That would supposedly violate the pledge the candidates signed in order to participate in the RNC debates, though there's a good case to be made they are stretching the definition of term to absurd lengths.

But I went to Real Clear Politics for the latest Republican polling average and found this:

Trump 58.5
DeSantis 14.4
Haley 9.0
Ramaswamy 4.7

Then I found this at The Hill:

Fewer than 7 million people watched Wednesday night’s third Republican presidential primary debate on television, the lowest of the debates so far this cycle.

NBC News’s broadcast of the third GOP debate, which aired in prime time from 8-10 p.m., delivered 6.8 million viewers on linear television, including 1.3 million in the advertiser-coveted 25-54 age demographic, according to Nielsen Media Research.

So the RNC is threatening to kick candidates out of future debates if any attends an event the RNC deems a competing debate, except that fewer and fewer people are watching the official RNC debates, and the one Republican who's doing by far the best in the polls is skipping those same RNC sanctioned debates.

And then I found this:

During an appearance on Fox News with host Laura Ingraham, McDaniel defended her record and addressed criticism about her leadership. Ingraham brought up the calls for McDaniel’s resignation and asked her to respond.

McDaniel started by deflecting, putting the attention on President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

. . . Ingraham then brought up the controversy over the GOP’s performance in Virginia, which was disappointing, to say the least. McDaniel was again criticized for not providing financial assistance for Republican candidates running in the state. She claimed the state Republican Party told her they did not need help, an argument that was later debunked.

“I know at one point you said that you were not asked for money in Virginia, but a Republican source familiar with the Youngkin team in Virginia told the angle late tonight that that is false. And there, meaning your story keeps changing,” Ingraham said.

As best I can parse this out, Ms McDaniel is claiming that criticism of her role at the RNC is misguided, because the RNC is irrelevant. We'll have to see how this pans out, but right now, the leasding Republican candidate has bypassed the RNC debates because in his estimation, they're irrelevant. Fewer and fewer people are watching the RNC debates because in their estimation, they're irrelevant. And the RNC chair is saying she shoud keep her job, because she's irrelavant.

Yeah, The Judge Is Losing Control

Dialogue that's beginning to emerge from recent days in Trump's New York trial is giving me the impression that Judge Engoron has already backed himself into reversible territory, and he knows it. Via Forbes from last week:

Engoron’s law clerk has been a source of contention throughout the trial, after Trump made a disparaging post in the trial’s first week sharing a false rumor about the clerk and suggesting she was politically biased against him, prompting the judge to impose a gag order barring parties in the case from speaking about court staff.

The "false rumor" was news that a complaint had been filed with the New York State Bar Association against Judge Engoron's chief clerk, Allison Greenfield, for violating judicial rules preventing officers of the court from making excessive political donations.

[I]n 2022 alone, Greenfield gave $3,335 in political donations to Democrat candidates and causes in New York—more than six times the maximum allowed annually for court officials like herself to give.

Forbes continues,

The back-and-forth over the clerk resumed Friday, with Engoron saying he hoped he was clear when he instructed Trump’s lawyers to stop making improper claims about the clerk and is “worried about this.”

Kise refused to drop the issue, saying, “The entire country, if not the world, is watching this proceeding” and pointing to a Breitbart piece published Thursday, which claimed a Twitter user submitted a complaint to the New York State Bar Association that takes issue with the clerk’s purported “partisan political and Democratic activities.”

The attorney claimed he could file for a mistrial due to the alleged bias.

On Monday, Trump's attorneys continued to telegraph their intent to move for a mistrial on the basis of bias. Via CNN,

Donald Trump’s lawyers said they want to make a motion for a mistrial, getting into an extended debate with Judge Arthur Engoron about how they can raise the conduct of his clerk that’s subject to a gag order.

"We would at least need to reference the subject matter," Trump's attorney Chris Kise said.

Initially, Engoron told Trump’s lawyers they should not file such a motion that referenced his staff, saying he put the gag order in place to protect them.

"I am 1000% convinced that you don't have any right or reason to complain about my confidential communications,” Engoron said.

Other observers have reported that during this exchange, Judge Engoron admonished Kise, "Don't file that motion, Chris", addressing Trump's attorney by his first name in the courtroom, which is highly irregular and suggests the pressures building up on the judge. The CNN account continues,

Trump’s attorneys, who have complained about Engoron’s note-passing with his clerk, claim it’s a sign of the trial’s bias and have urged Engoron to reconsider.

"You can't respectfully reject it before you've seen it," Kise said. Trump attorney Alina Habba told the judge, "Obviously are going to be moving for a mistrial, that is part of the plan."

"We need to have an opportunity to be heard on those things that have not been yet heard,” Habba said.

After conferring with his clerk, Engoron changed course and said that Trump’s attorneys could file a motion, but he asked them to do it in writing.

The trial isn't being televised, so it's hard to determine how frequently Judge Engoron interacts with his clerk, but remarks from observers in the courtroom suggest it's almost constant.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday Laura Loomer alleged that Judge Engoron's wife, Dawn Marie Engoron, had been making anti-Trump tweets from an account called Dawn Marie:

EXCLUSIVE:

This is one of the most damning screenshots I have archived from the Twitter account of Dawn Marie Engoron, the wife of Judge Arthur Engoron, the Leftist judge who is overseeing President Trump’s Civil Fraud trial in NYC.

On October 30, 2023, while the trial was… https://t.co/fBMt1lxMAZ pic.twitter.com/G1TRMiMR6K

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) November 8, 2023

Mrs Engoron has denied that the account is hers:

Newsweek was unable to verify that the account belonged to Dawn, and on Wednesday, she issued a firm denial. Dawn told Newsweek on Wednesday afternoon that the account does not belong to her.

"I do not have a Twitter account. This is not me. I have not posted any anti Trump messages," she said.

Well, after yesterday's post, we at least know that the judge is married to an individual who identifies as female with she/her pronouns, if nothing else. Beyond that,

[I]n a September 27, 2023 article published by Bollywood Safar, over a month before the recent turn of events, Dawn Marie is mentioned as an expert in the field of mental health. Not only that but her current employer’s name was cited as Brain Mind Harmony, where she has been reportedly working as a professional psychotherapist since December 2021.

As per the Bollywood Safar article, her other roles included serving as a psychodynamic psychotherapy supervisor for 3rd and 4th-year residents at the Zucker School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry, The Zucker Hillside Hospital, and Northwell Health from July 2021.

I'm sure if Judge Engoron is married to a psychotherapist, his mind and body are indeed in perfect harmony, and he's posted the selfies to prove it.

About Judge Engoron. . .

I don't know which way Judge Engoron swings, and it isn't my business, but it seems like he's setting himself up as a bizarre foil for Trump's Chicago Seven strategy.

BREAKING: The judge presiding over Trump's NYC trial appears to have a peculiar hobby of posting half-naked photos of himself on a high school alumni newsletter he controls as reported on by @MarcoPolo501c3.

The 74-year-old judge Arthur Engoron appeared to even post a… pic.twitter.com/JW2ArmxzzN

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 7, 2023

Alan Dershowitz, before the latest revelation of the judge's bathroom selfies, came to the same conclusion in this YouTube post:

At 3:42, he begins,

. . . back at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s before most of you were born, there was a famous trial in America, it was called the trial of the Chicago Seven. It tas during the 1968 presidential conventions in Chicago that a group of radicals headed by people like Abby Hoffman, left-wing progressive radicals, demonstrated and engaged, sometimes, in some violent conduct, and they were all arrested and charged with conspiracy. I was a consultant on the case, because there were free speech issues, and the trial turned into a farce, because they had picked a judge named Julius Hoffman, who was a very right-wing jurist to preside over the trial, and he hated these radical defendants, and the radical defendants hated him, and Abby Hoffman came up with a tactic, he said basically to his lawyers and everybody else, "Look, we can't win this case in front of Judge Julius Hoffman. Let's see if we can go about getting it reversed on appeal, and the best way to do it is to provoke this judge, he has a short fuse, and provoke him into making error after error."

And that's exactly what [Abby] Hoffman did, he stood up, he made speeches, he wore costumes, he did everything possible to provoke the judge, and the judge fell into the trap, and I was one of the lawyers on the appeal, and we won the appeal, and he held the lawyers in contempt, and we won the appeal on contempt. So we had a total victory, and [Julius] Hoffman really was laughed at by his fellow judges, and he was condemned by jurists and appellate judges. So I call this the Chicago Seven tactic, and I think this is what Donald Trump is using now.

In my view, it doesn't hurt that one of Trump's chief attorneys, Alina Habba, is something of a bombshell, and she stands up to Judge Engoron in court, which he must find especially galling, a highly attractive and assertive woman going against a nebbishy, vain, androgynous, bad-tempered 74 year old. Via Newsweek,

Habba then defended Trump, telling Engoron that the judge is here to "hear what he has to say." Engoron gave an angry response to Habba's interjection, telling the attorney: "I'm not here to hear what he has to say. He's here to answer questions," while demanding she sits down.

In a statement outside the court, Habba said she is not going to "tolerate" being yelled at by a judge and that she was only doing her job as an attorney when defending the former president's responses in court.

Following the revelation of Engoron's bathroom selfies, several commentators have noted that this is not appropriate judicial conduct, and it appears that much like Judge Hoffman, Judge Engoron's reputation will suffer in the wake of this trial. Again, apparently written before the bathroom selfies hit the news, Don Surber posted,

Trump is the issue. Democrats blundered by indicting and suing him so much. Tying him up in court ties the media to keeping him on Page One, where he flourished in 2016. NYT is still holding out hope that Democrats will not suffer a Pyrrhic Victory in court that costs them the presidency.

The official paper of birdcages everywhere reported, “Trump Indictments Haven’t Sunk His Campaign, but a Conviction Might.”

The legacy media can't resist Trump, because Trump brings clicks -- but Trump's ability to deflect the narrative in his favor is uncanny. You can see Dershowitz's grudging respect for Trump growing by the day, and Dershowitz is no amateur at self-promotion himself.

Alan Dershowitz Takes The Red Pill

I've followed Alan Dershowitz for much of my life, and I would have to say I've frequently agreed with him, even at times where he's been, in his own characterization, a traditional 1960s-style liberal. More recently, I find myself agreeing with him even more. Over the weekend, he published an op-ed in the UK Daily Mail, ALAN DERSHOWITZ says vile Leftist anti-Israeli hate will turn millions of American Jews from Blue to Red - and he's one.

The Democratic Party now faces a choice.

The Hamas atrocities of October 7th have forever fractured any political alliance between centrist and liberal Jews and woke, anti-Israel progressives.

It's either them or us.

The coalition is at civil war.

This is a point similar to the one I've been making, that the highly successful New Deal alliance of the 1930s and 1940s, which included labor; Catholics, Jews, and other ethnics; northern philanthropic wealth; and southern segregationists, contained contradictions that began to manifest themselves once Kennedy and Johnson co-opted Republicans on the civil rights issue, which had been Republican since Reconstruction. Bringing urban African-Americans into the coalition was inevitably going to cause internal stress, since rightly or wrongly, residents of urban ghettos resented Jews and other ethnics who ran the businesses that served them like pawnbrokers, bail bondsmen, convenience stores, and retailers.

Other contradictions included the original Christian evangelizatioon of African slaves, which stressed the parallel between the Africans and the Jews enslaved in Egypt, while the NAACP was founded with early Jewish support from figures like Henry Moskowitz, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsh, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. The Spingarn brothers served as officers, and Jacob Schiff, Julius Rosenwald, and Herbert Lehman contributed funds.

A second set of tensions arose with the inclusion of the New Left in the coalition later in the 1960s. While many New Left figures were Jews, there was a second faction, probably just as large, of trust-fund WASPs with consciences troubled about their family wealth that in many ways had dominated the earlier New Deal northern philanthropic alliance with southern segregationists. Many of these figures, like Episcopal Bishop Paul Moore Jr, came from post-Civil War high society that was never completely comfortable with admittng Jews.

My own view is that Nancy Pelosi's main task as a latter-day Democrat leader was to maintain the traditional New Deal alliance with the civil rights and New Left additions despite those contradictions, but she was able to do this alomost singlehandedly via her personal charisma. Once she retired as speaker, nobody else could take over that role, least of all Joe Biden. I think this is at the root of Dershowitz's disaffection:

Nine hard-Left Democratic members of Congress voted against a House resolution that condemned Hamas and expressed support of Israel. Another six voted 'present' for the bill that passed overwhelmingly.

Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz suggested these members who couldn't bring themselves to denounce the slaughter of civilians 'don't have a soul.'

Thank you, Congresswoman. But where, I ask, is the presidential address demanding introspection of the 'soul' of the party?

. . . And just last week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pointedly declined to say if the President had any plans to speak to the explosion of antisemitism among university students.

It's correct that the universities have been loci of this anti-Semitic outbreak, but I don't think Prof Dershowitz should be surprised. In his own book Chutzpah, he discusses the post-SAT strategy of the Ivies to maintain de facto Jewish quotas by limiting applicants from Northeastern suburbs and favoring white applicants from the South, Midwest, and intermountain West in the name of "diversity", a principle that was established as early as the 1940s. Ivy anti-Semitism is baked into the system, something Dershowitz has recognized all along -- I sensed it, and I'm sorry to say I was influenced by it myself as an Ivy undergraduate in the 1960s.

But he sums up the dilemma quite well in the piece:

I have supported the Democratic Party since I first voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960, for much like my parents and grandparents, and since the days of Frankin Delano Roosevelt, a vast majority of Jewish-American voters could be reliably counted upon to cast their ballots for Democrats and contribute disproportionately to their campaigns.

This is unlikely to continue.

. . . Of course, some Jews will continue to vote blue, but their allegiance will be weakened to the point of disappearing.

. . . The antisemitic and anti-Israeli attitudes uncovered by these game changing events will not be forgotten.

But we should note that this is part of a wider realignment from the New Deal coalition that's been taking place since the 1960s. Trump got the majority of the Catholic vote in 2016; the Southern states went Republican beginning in the 1970s. Prominent Jews formed the neoconservative movement and allied themselves with Reagan in the 1980s. Prof Dershowitz is a smart guy, it's hard to think he's all that surprised now.