Eye on Eire: A Cold Bloomsday For Dublin Jews
June 16 is Bloomsday — the date Leopold Bloom spends “wandering Dublin” in that “portrait of modern alienation,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” notes Phelim McAleer at The Wall Street Journal.
Bloom “is an Irish Jew” who “endures not only the private pain of his wife’s unfaithfulness but the casual, corrosive antisemitism of his fellow citizens.”
Yet “Ireland hasn’t progressed since Joyce wrote ‘Ulysses’ — it has regressed,” as antisemitism “has intensified.”
The country’s become “a cold house for Jews” in the wake of the “Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.”
A century ago, “Leopold Bloom was insulted and threatened, but Jews could at least still freely wander the streets of Dublin.”
Today, “he would be advised not to try.”
Schools beat: A Crazy Way To ‘Ensure Safety’
A House bill mandates 70% of some $243.6 million in federal “school safety” funding get spent on mental-health programs, laments City Journal’s Carolyn D. Gorman, yet “no evidence” suggests schools “can treat mental-health conditions” well or bolster safety.
“Most school-based mental-health programs flag kids with even slight distress for potential intervention and push them” toward diagnoses.
Yet one review found “mental-health screening produces up to 90 percent false positives.” Other research shows these “programs have not made students any safer.” Plus, “much of the school-based mental-health enterprise” is mere “ideology.”
“Youth mental health matters,” but having “school counselors and psychologists” respond to “genuine safety challenges” is as foolish as having “social workers respond to 911 calls for homeless adults with untreated serious mental illness.”
Mideast beat: Trump Abandons Iranian People
This Iran deal leaves much undecided, but “one key aspect is now crystal clear: The American agreement with Iran completely abandons the Iranian people,” fumes Elliot Abrams at National Review.
In just months, President Trump went from posting “HELP IS ON ITS WAY” to saying “I never cared about regime change.”
Warns Abrams, it’s another slap in the face of Iranians that Trump now labels “the people who murdered thousands of their fellow citizens in cold blood a few months ago,” as “rational.”
Washington has “limited ability to help Iranians achieve democracy,” but that didn’t’ oblige Trump to “dismiss their aspirations disdainfully”: Let them “know we understand and support their struggle for basic human rights.”
Art critic: David Hockney RIP
“Love of freedom” was the motive force that “clearly animated” the “life and art” of British painter David Hockney, who died last Thursday aged 88, mourns Spiked’s Jacob Reynolds, recalling how his teen self was enamored of Hockney’s “enormous, vivacious installations.”
The “young Hockney” was a “rebel,” “very clearly a man of the 1960s counterculture,” yet while much of the “artworld very quickly embraced kitsch, parody and irony, Hockney didn’t.”
He “never sought to disdain or deconstruct” the real world”; his “art was modern but not postmodern.”
A lifelong smoker, Hockney loathed “Britain’s nanny state,” and “mastered” the “iPad as an artistic device” in his 70s, while managing to “remain almost unremarkably, avuncularly British.”
From the right: Becerra’s Disqualifying Legacy
“A staggering 450,000 migrant children disappeared under President Biden’s tenure,” thunders The Washington Times Editorial Board; the feds are now “investigating reports where some of these kids claim that they were raped 6[00] to 700 times.”
As Health and Human Services secretary, Xavier Becerra “oversaw the migrant sponsor program that let hundreds of thousands of children disappear” — some into “the custody of sexual predators and human traffickers,” or “are probably being trafficked in the sanctuary state of California,” where Becerra is now running for governor.
“The New York Times reported in 2023 that Mr. Biden’s White House and HHS were repeatedly alerted to signs that children were being placed with exploitative sponsors,” and worse “detailed at least five HHS staff members who filed complaints at the time and were pushed out of their jobs after raising concerns about child safety,” yet Becerra calls it all a “MAGA hoax.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
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