Dana Goldstein | The Nation

Richard Kim is right: it has been farcical to watch President Obama—a politician who once wrote, “I favor legalizing same-sex marriage, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages”—shift to the right on marriage equality, and then tentatively swing back now that the public is more favorable to his original position. This tango between Obama and opinion polling has always been about crafting a narrative that can supposedly account for the president’s evolution, in which a struggling, family-values Christian eventually learns to love thy gay neighbor as thyself.

Male Democrats have been writing these gay-marriage “evolution” stories for a long time. During a series of presidential primary debates in 2007, both Obama and John Edwards were asked repeatedly about marriage equality. In July of that year, Edwards told Anderson Cooper he opposed gay marriage but his wife supported it; in September, Edwards added that his then-25-year-old daughter, Cate, also supported marriage equality, and that he expected his two younger children to someday support it, too. That same evening, Obama said his own daughters, then 6 and 9, were already aware of gay couples, and while he hadn’t spoken to them directly about gay marriage, “my wife has.”

These deflections were clever. They allowed the candidates to technically oppose gay marriage while signaling deep sympathy—even love—for those who supported it. For Obama, the purpose of crafting this years-long narrative has clearly been to pave the way for the kind of come-to-Jesus moment Richard so deftly imagines, in which the president delivers an emotional speech crediting his friends and loved ones with helping him see the light on full LGBT equality.

Katie Roiphe has written a link bait-y Newsweek cover story making an interesting claim: that the pop culture appearance of submissive female sexual fantasies, in shows like Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and pulp fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey, is somehow a backlash against women’s increasing economic power.

I think this is generally wrong. It’s true the advances of feminism mean women today are freer than ever to explore their sexuality in art and in their personal lives, without worrying too much about negating their power at work, in relationships or in the political sphere. In fact, it is a basic contention of sex-positive feminism that asking for what you want in bed is a feminist political act—whether you want to tie your partner up, be spanked by him/her or be tenderly made love to with lots of kissing.

Taboo-breaking sex is culturally prevalent right now not because of macroeconomic trends like the decimation of the male manufacturing sector but because we live in an age in which all sorts of sexual practices are incredibly visible and talked about. In particular, easy access to online pornography allows people, at a younger age than ever before and with more privacy, to explore non-vanilla sex, whether low-key spanking and restraints or much kinkier stuff. Female-authored erotica and sexualized fan-fiction are burgeoning genres online, as well, and e-readers have made it possible for consumers to purchase and read this material with perfect privacy. This is the world from which Fifty Shades of Grey emerged.

But these desires are as old as the human race; in every century and decade, sadomasochistic erotica has broken into the mainstream, from de Sade to Swinburne to Anais Nin to Anne Desclos to Anne Rice. Why assume, as Roiphe seems to, that some authoritative brand of feminism was ever supposed to lead to human beings losing their curiosity about power play during sex, which is, after all, a physical act? And while more women than men may tend toward submission—in part because Western culture fetishizes male strength and female fragility—one certainly can’t generalize. People of all genders harbor the fantasy of, as one sex researcher put it, “the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought”—thus surrendering power to a trusted partner. And there is anecdotal evidence that publicly powerful people of both sexes are especially prone to these fantasies, as a release from the stresses of their day-to-day work lives. Here’s how one professional dominatrix describes it:

I like to find out what a man does for a living. I see a lot of Wall Street types who go for bondage and humiliation. Lawyers, actors and entertainment executives never shut up. I have to gag them right away if I’m to have any peace. True masochists are rare—they’re usually police and ex-military. These men are such show-offs about how much pain they can take. I end up acting the role of a sadistic drill instructor, breaking canes and riding crops on their backs, which gives me a certain confidence in our armed forces.

I will admit that feminism’s forward march contributes to some people’s interest in S&M. Gender roles are more fluid than ever, and there are no longer strict rules about how men and women should act in the realms of dating and romance. There is certainly an appeal to retreating to a sexual space in which roles are much clearer.

Sadomasochism is problematic if one partner is doing it just to please the other and feels hurt by it. But I don’t think truly consensual S&M complicates women’s demands for full equality, or provides evidence of some anti-feminist backlash among the urban educated class that is consuming work like “Girls,” “Secretary” and Fifty Shades of Grey. Because many women now assume a certain level of egalitarianism at work and at home, they feel more comfortable experimenting sexually. Lena Dunham’s poignant feature-length film, “Tiny Furniture,” is articulate on this point. After a particularly degrading sexual encounter, Dunham’s character returns to her mother’s apartment and announces her ambition not to be a restaurant hostess or a masseuse or a makeup artist, but a successful filmmaker. Indeed.

REUTERS/Baz Ratner

I write about Israel-Palestine issues only occasionally, because the onslaught of emails and comments calling me a self-hating Jew can be emotionally overwhelming. It’s also difficult to weather the respectful but strident disagreement from some friends and members of my family, who consider me insufficiently pro-Israel because I support the international community moving with deliberate speed to pressure the Netanyahu administration to end the occupation and create a viable Palestinian state. (This position, I might add, is a relatively centrist one common among Jewish Israeli writers and activists; many well intentioned folks further to the left support a “single-state solution” that would soon make Jews a minority within Israel.)

This debate can get nasty. So I am somewhat in awe of my colleague* Peter Beinart, who seems to be made of stronger stuff than I am. I can only imagine what Beinart has experienced over the past few weeks, as the New York Times published his op-ed in favor of what he terms “Zionist BDS”—a boycott movement targeting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank; the Daily Beast launched Open Zion, Beinart’s new group blog featuring voices who oppose the occupation; and Times Books published his bracing new polemic, The Crisis of Zionism.

Beinart attends an Orthodox synagogue and sends his children to Jewish day school. Even the most cursory reading of his work reveals his critique of Israeli policy is motivated not by antipathy toward the Jewish state, but by an unwavering commitment to liberal Zionism: the belief that Israel should protect minority rights and conduct itself according to Jewish social justice values. Indeed, Beinart has been criticized from the left for opposing the occupation too much because it threatens Israel’s liberal, democratic character, and not being outraged enough about the displacement and subsequent statelessness of Palestinians. I disagree with this critique; Beinart writes unflinchingly about the massacres of Palestinian Arabs that accompanied Israel’s founding. His identification with Fadel Jaber, a Palestinian father unjustly arrested for “stealing water,” frames the entire book, and The Crisis of Zionism concludes with a call for liberal Jews to ally themselves with the Palestinian non-violence movement. But it’s worth noting Beinart is hearing pushback from all sides.

The Crisis of Zionism is a fundamentally moderate book, in which Beinart grapples seriously with Israel’s security situation. He notes that the majority of former heads of the Israeli army and Mossad, as well as a respected Israeli military historian, all believe an independent Palestine to Israel’s east would not pose an existential security threat to the Jewish state, and that continuing the occupation presents a grave risk to Israel’s safety, democracy and international reputation.

Nevertheless, Beinart has been called a “self-hating Jew” by public relations guru Ronn Torossian, an American Jewish philanthropist. In an interview with Tablet magazine, Beinart’s former New Republic boss, Martin Peretz, accused Beinart of being “narcissistic” and “a very vain man” for writing in a heartfelt way about the leftward drift of his views on Israel; in the same Tablet article, The New Republic’s longtime literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, accused Beinart of writing The Crisis of Zionism in a rush and for cynical reasons, only because his 2010 New York Review of Books essay on “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” (to grapple with the occupation) was “a hit.”

Most frustratingly, a host of hostile reviewers of Beinart’s book seemed unable to consider his argument on its merits. Their biases clearly left them ill disposed to absorb the array of historical facts, demographic statistics and contemporary, insider reporting Beinart musters up to support his observation that in 2012, the ever-expanding occupation is the cause of the continuing conflict, not the result of it—and that since the death of Yitzhak Rabin, a succession of Israeli administrations have failed to negotiate with the Palestinians in good faith.

These contentions are far less controversial in Israel than they are in the United States, which is why Beinart’s book is pitched toward us, American Jews. Though the majority of American Jews are progressive Democrats who support the creation of a Palestinian state, the most influential American Jewish philanthropists, activists and lobbyists hold more conservative politics aligned with Israel’s right-wing Likud party, and they actively work to prevent American presidents from acting as honest brokers to end the occupation.

While most American Jews identify with liberal, labor Zionism—kibbutzim, gender equality and the social safety net—the Netanyahu government and many of its American supporters subscribe to revisionist Zionism, an ideology that celebrates military expansion and the oppression of Palestinian Arabs as the paths toward rebuilding Jewish pride and even masculine virility in the wake of the Holocaust.

Beinart accurately diagnoses the central challenge for the twenty-first century international Jewish community: how to come to terms with “the shift from Jewish powerlessness to Jewish power.” In other words, if Jews do not learn to wield our newfound military, political and economic strength ethically—showing the same concern for Palestinian and Arab-Israeli minority rights that we hope gentiles will show for Jews—then we, as a people, have failed to learn the painful lessons of Jewish history.

What I found most revelatory about The Crisis of Zionism was the way in which Beinart appeals not just to Jewish political liberalism, but also to our faith. The holy books of Judaism are filled with portents about what happens when Jews abuse power, Beinart notes. After Persia’s Jews toppled Haman, the anti-Semitic royal advisor, they slaughtered 75,000 people in retribution; our texts recount that both the Babylonian and Roman destructions of Jewish empires came in the aftermath of Jewish moral decadence. “Our tradition insists that physical collapse was preceded by ethical collapse,” Beinart writes.

I don’t agree with everything in The Crisis of Zionism. As a writer who focuses mostly on how to improve public education, I cannot support Beinart’s argument that American Jewish liberals should revive their children’s attachment to Judaism and to Israel by enrolling them in private Jewish day school. Most American Jews are commited to the communitarian elements of secular, public education, and rightfully so: We know from a growing body of research on “peer effects” that all children learn more when college-educated parents (like the majority of American Jews) send their own children to diverse public schools, instead of opting out of a system that needs their support to thrive. Nor is it necessary for Jews to attend day school in order to absorb arguments in favor of marrying within the faith or raising children as Jews; I attended public school and certainly hope to raise any future children of mine in a Jewish home.

But I am grateful for this book. Younger American Jewish writers like myself, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Spencer Ackerman and Kiera Feldman have been writing for six years about our increasing alarm regarding the Israeli occupation, only to be derided as the “juice box mafia” by our elders. Beinart is a lot harder to belittle. He is the former editor of The New Republic—a magazine not exactly known for progressive foreign policy positions—and an observant Jew who once supported the Iraq war. He has demonstrated an admirable ability to rethink his opinions in the face of evidence, and as a member of Generation X, he serves as an ideal interlocutor between younger Jews and our Baby Boomer parents, many of whom continue to see Israel through the rose-colored glasses of their own youth, when the Jewish state was far less established and more threatened by its neighbors than it is today.

If the Jewish establishment will not be moved by the anguish of Palestinians, nor by the protests of Jewish young people, perhaps it will heed this warning from the Book of Jeremiah, which Beinart so aptly quotes: “If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow; and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your hurt: Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.”

* Beinart and I are both affiliated with the New America Foundation, a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C.

Educators and policy-makers from twenty-three nations gathered in New York this week for the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession, hosted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The purpose of the summit was to identify effective reforms for improving teacher quality. Notably, the research paper released in conjuntion with the event showed that compared to the United States, other nations put little faith in student test scores as a measure of teacher quality; the phrase "value-added," for example, never appears in the 103-page report. Instead, top-scoring nations like Finland and China have focused on improving training before teachers enter the classroom, and on making education a more attractive career choice by providing teachers with opportunities to participate in curriculum writing, group lesson planning and other professional activities alongside other adults.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten attended the summit. Here are her reflections on what the United States can learn from international education reform efforts, which she also had the opportunity to observe firsthand on a recent trip to Shanghai, Japan and Singapore. The interview has been consensed and edited for clarity.

“Cooperation” and “trust” were big buzzwords at the summit. Everyone talked about teachers working together, and with administrators, to actively improve instruction and curriculum. Do you think American reform efforts do enough to collaborate with teachers?

What is similar is the focus on how to ensure teachers are the best they can be, and how teacher evaluation has to be more than a snapshot, more than a principal coming in once a year. A lot of countries have focused on career ladders, student learning and teacher peer review, and those are elements of reform proposals that we and our managers have made [in some American schools]. Take Singapore. They have a teacher evaluation system that does include student learning measures. What is really different is that, except maybe for Chile, testing is not the centerpiece of these other nations’ accountability systems for teachers. Instead, testing is the centerpiece of an accountability system around children. In other nations, kids see tests as consequential. In the United States, teachers see student tests as consequential, but the kids don’t see it.

What do you hope Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his staff will take away from the summit, having heard that very few other nations are pursuing teacher reform strategies that are as test-driven as the kinds of reforms the Obama administration incentivized through Race to the Top?

I just hope they listen. I never doubt—and I know this will be controversial—but I never doubt their wish and hope and aspiration for transforming America’s educational system to ensure that there is both excellence and equity for all children. I don’t doubt them for a second. But it’s about the hows. The president is a very smart guy and he focuses on evidence. Here you have a lot of evidence about what works in other places.

America always pivots between collective responsibility and the idea that the individual can pull himself up by his bootstraps. What you see is that in education, you have to understand this notion of systems rather than individuals. Creating teacher capacity, teacher efficacy and climates of trust are what enable all kids, rather than just some kids, to learn. If you want equity, you have to have a system that focuses on it.

There was a real consensus at the summit. When nations were reporting their plans, you heard the buzzwords of collaboration and trust, of retain, recruit, support. You didn’t hear market solutions, competition, things like that.

One remarkable difference between teacher reform in the United States and teacher reform elsewhere is that American reformers like Joel Klein often speak about tearing down the barriers to becoming a teacher, while in other nations, it’s actually quite difficult to get into the classroom. In Shanghai and Finland, for example, all teachers must student-teach in the classroom of a mentor teacher for a full academic year. Why is the American debate on teacher preparation so different than the debate abroad?

I have great respect for [Teach for America founder] Wendy Kopp, but we unfortunately think about teaching sometimes as temporary work, or this is our public service work for a few years, as opposed to this being a serious profession. Nobody thinks about this for doctors or lawyers or architects. The disrespect comes in the idea that anybody can do it. At the same time, in Singapore and Japan there are a lot of entry points into teaching, but you still have to really be prepared. You can get your degree in almost anything, but then, if you haven’t gotten your degree in education, you have to be trained. It’s a much higher bar. They don’t just throw people the keys and say, “Okay, do it.”

What did you learn on your recent trip to Asia?

Teachers who work really hard there were much more focused on the art and craft of teaching than they were on all the things that, in the United States, teachers focus on. They’re not as much surrogate moms and dads and guidance counselors, but they are really more instructionally focused. There is a climate in these countries that education really matters, and kids and parents buy into that. That’s a real difference that one sees when you’re in Finland and when you’re in Asia. Teachers are to be respected.

In every previous American budget crisis, teachers have had to do more with less. Most of the time teachers are lionized for that. But this is the first time that during a budget crisis, with 300,000 fewer teachers, teachers were actually vilified for the mere fact that they were teaching during this period of time. And you never see that in any of these other countries. Even countries where you have some real debate about educational philosophies, there’s not the blaming and shaming of teachers that you have here.

In Singapore, very few people opt out of public education, very few people send their kids to private schools. There is a real sense of systemic responsibility, as opposed to asking individual teachers to take full responsibility.

You visited a high school in Shanghai that had undergone something akin to what we call a “turnaround” in American education reform.

Yes. They really focus on fixing schools, not closing them. We spent an afternoon in Shanghai at one of the toughest neighborhood schools that has turned around. The principal had his teachers speak far more than he himself spoke about the kinds of practices they do. Teacher engagement and adult relationships are really important. Teachers were very engaged in students’ lives and in the students’ success, and the school did provide a panoply of other services, like access to health care and counseling. It was the closest thing I saw to what we plan to do in our West Virginia project, or something like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. Those “wraparound services” we talk about all the time were as much a part of the strategy as instruction.

How were Asian instructional practices different?

In Singapore, the schools were fairly well funded, and what you saw was really a very interesting way to teach math. I’m such a stereotypical female learner in that I love social studies and love literature, and I always struggled with math and science. In Singapore they spent a lot of time with young kids teaching math spatially, so kids would see forms and would actually try to conclude which was larger or smaller by looking at diagrams.

And they were using technology in a very interactive way. They were using whiteboards, laptops, and some of the kids had tablet whiteboards with them. Teachers had technology in every classroom, but they were using it in a way where it wasn’t just a shiny object. The teacher was the center of the lesson; the technology wasn’t driving the lesson.

In Japan, we saw a school that appeared to be in a fairly middle-class prefecture, as well as a school that was in a poorer prefecture. In the high school that was in the poor prefecture, you didn’t see whiteboards, you saw blackboards. You saw more traditional ways of teachers teaching. But you still saw tremendous engagement and kids really focused on learning.

Many American education experts are fascinated by Japanese “lesson study,” in which teams of teachers work together to create lesson plans and test them in the classroom. Did you observe that?

Yes. [Japanese educators] were really honest about how they spend a lot of time with each other, trying to figure out how to teach. They’re proud of the time they spend collaborating. It's part of the work of getting better, and they build collaborative time into the schedule.

At the summit, did you get the chance to ask your international colleagues what they thought of New York City releasing teacher value-added scores to the media?

My colleagues are as horrified by it as Bill Gates was. People who want schooling to get better understand what a counterproductive mistake this is. I fought, as you may recall, using this value-add data as a basis for evaluation or for any kind of tenure decision. It was a big, big fight up in Albany. And I fought against it because we knew value-added was based on a series of assumptions and not ready for primetime. But back then, we didn’t realize the error rates could be as high as 50 percent!

None of the other countries use test scores to evaluate teachers. They use portfolios, demonstration lessons, peer processes. There are multiple ways of trying to assess, “Have I taught it and have kids learned it?” But very few countries are as fixated on student testing having a consequential effect on teachers’ lives. Student testing is very consequential for students.

So how do we shift the education reform conversation in the United States to better reflect the best international practices?

I think the first thing we have to do is move off the test fixaton. Top-down, test-driven accountability as a salvation has not proven to work. People will say, “Oh, she’s anti-accountability.” But I’m for making sure teachers can really teach and for multiple measures to assess teachers, like peer review, self-reflection, administrative review and assessment of student learning. But right now there are a disproportionate number of points [in many teacher evaluation systems] allocated to test scores.

The president gets a lot of credit for saying in his State of the Union, “Let’s not teach to the test.” NAEP [the National Assessment of Educational Progress] scores from the last decade had a better rate of growth than in this decade, and that says a lot about the effects of top-down, test-based accountability. We have to get away from that concept. I think if there’s a reset button where we get away from that, we can unleash creativity. We can unleash the Common Core, we can work on teacher quality through what we know works: cooperative environments. Then I think we’ll have a different conversation in America.