Letter: Lowenstein Nails It Re: Councilmember Adams Missing from Statement

“Suppose someone attacked a BLM rally in Boulder in that manner and a Jewish council member refused to sign a statement on the grounds that the council member wasn’t anti-black, just anti-BLM.  What would TA (Taishya Adams, Ed.) think about that?”

— Mark Lowenstein, after reading Councilmember Adams’ Statement

Oh, Mark. The irony that your simple question might succeed where years of long, well sourced and cited writings to this body have failed (I know; I wrote them). The more I play with your question, the more entwined anti-black/anti-BLM and anti-Semitic/antiZionist become, respectively, and the absolute clarity of the second part being a subset of the first. Thank you for that.

We are in an environment where the Soviet post- World War II gambit of posing antisemitism as “antiZionism” –  not too cool at the time to look like Hitler – is back in style. Worked then, for a while; working now like a charm. But Adams, caught in a tight spot, comes out too clever for her own good. “Without the antiZionist part, the reader will fail to understand a key driver,” she says, and in a perverse sense, she is illogically correct. [Enough muck up, there, to weather inevitably being quoted out of context.] By conceding [“duress! duress!”] the antisemitic character, she also concedes that antiZionism is the subset; or wants to implausibly claim that they are separate classes in a laterally linked case. That lays bare the tortured reasoning from wherever that argument is made (and aplenty in Boulder City Hall from both sides of the bench) that is simply impossible to exist in in the observable, material world of our existence. Can someone write that in TikTok-ease? 

Mark, we’re trying to educate a political body and beyond that doesn’t really have the time, interest and care to do the learning. Or worse. I hope that your couplets will succeed, at least in the non-overtly antisemitic but still 75-charactered universe where we might still have a chance.

I conclude with a question that re-words my frequent plea to Mayor Brockett and City Council: NOW HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH? Get Adams out of BNSCP before more of my family, friends, colleagues and community are burned alive.

Bruce Shaffer
Boulder, CO/Jerusalem IL/Co-leader of Boulder’s Run For Their Lives chapter