The huge post i lost yesterday was, among other things, an extended meditation on the construction of the family and the historical and ideological formation of the categorization "American Jews," prompted both by me turning 23 and feeling like i should be more of an adult than i presently feel like i am, living here as a non-paying tenant in my old room in my parents' apartment, and by comments by an israewli minister which i overheard on national public radio regarding the Hague's ruling on the wall, which greatly disturbed me. I won't try to rehash the entry here, because it was very long and went in to an in-depth exploration of the tensions between socialist/anarchist internationalism and white privilege in my family's history as a way of describing some tof the tensions underlying the formation of this category and my tenuous relationship to it, but i'm a little excited to have found the words to talk about feelings of exclusion and contingency that have been haunting me since 7th grade and possibly before in ways which aren't vitiative or accusatory.



I don't think this statement:

"Time will tell how effective this is. However, it does reinforce the reality that the traditional benefits of the union movement are no longer appealing to workers."

by Randel Johnson, VP for labor, immigration, and employee benefits at the US Chamber of Commerce, is at all uselful. If some of the traditional methods and languages of union organizing have been rendered obsolete by the influx of new workers from the global south, and i'm not entirely sure this is the case - it seems more that many unions have forgotten how to organize immigrant workers, tactics which built the labor movement between the 8 hour movement of the 1880s and the first world war, and then again during the 1930s. Moreover, Johnson strategically elides the systematic destruction of workers' right to organize by corporations and their political allies, which has been responsible for sweeping changes to the workplace, and, specifically to workers' ability to excercise a voice in the means and conditions of the work that they do.



On a more personal note, i miss my friends. With the exception of Alyssa, Vic, and Austin, i haven't seen any of them in months and i'm feeling very isolated and frustrated and lonely.



EDIT: Thanks to Erin for recommending this fantastic piece in the nation by Esther Kaplan, which asks and answers a lot of the questions i was trying to grapple with.