New Hampshire Governor Teases Taxachusetts on Flag
Plus, a former Obama speechwriter takes on the anti-Zionists
The Republican governor of zero-state-income-tax, “Live Free or Die,” New Hampshire, Kelley Ayotte, is teasing her southern neighbor, Democrat Maura Healey, as Healey’s Massachusetts tries to choose a new flag to replace an existing one with an image of an Indian.
The Massachusetts Seal, Flag, and Motto Advisory Commission recently released three finalists for the new design—a Mayflower, a circle of Turkey feathers, a star atop a blue hill.
Ayotte took to social media to post an alternative suggestion—one closer to the existing one, which has served the Bay State since 1908. Her suggestion, a not-so-subtle reference to the “millionaires” tax that Massachusetts voters narrowly approved in November 2022, features a flag with the words “higher taxes.”
Conservatives in the Bay State are attempting a 2026 ballot initiative to gradually lower the base personal income tax rate in Massachusetts to 4 percent from 5 percent. That’d be progress, but it’d still be higher than New Hampshire, to which jobs and people have fled Massachusetts. Give Ayotte credit for some creativity and a sense of humor in reminding people of the Granite State’s tax advantages over Massachusetts.
If Healey is smart she’ll copy the good idea from Ayotte and turn the idea around by teasing Rhode Island over its Taylor Swift Tax, an extra property tax targeting people (like Taylor Swift) who aren’t Rhode Island residents for income-tax purposes but who do have second homes in the state. That levy, effective staring July 1, 2026, is a classic example of taxation without representation, which Massachusetts, and the American Revolution itself, was all about opposing.
Former Obama speechwriter takes on the anti-Zionists: The high-profile, high-expectations American Jewish book launch of the fall publishing season is “As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us,” by Sarah Hurwitz.
Hurwitz was a White House speechwriter for President Obama and for Michelle Obama and has also written for Hillary Clinton. I reviewed her first book, “Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life — in Judaism (After Finally Choosing To Look There)” positively in the Algemeiner when that book was published back in 2019.
“As a Jew” won a Natan Notable Book Prize, which comes with “a $5,000 cash prize, as well as customized support for promoting the book and its ideas.” There was a New York launch event on September 10 at the The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center featuring Hurwitz with the A-list group of Dara Horn, Dan Senor, and Abigail Pogrebin. A series of other events are planned online and in person.
I was excited to dive into “As a Jew.” And there is plenty there to appreciate and like. There are strong discussions of both Christian antisemitism and “enlightenment” antisemitism. There’s a sensible discussion of the shortcomings of what Hurwitz describes as being “a cultural/ethnic/social justice/good person/remember the Holocaust Jew” and an argument in favor of being what she calls a “knowing Jew.” Some of the book is a rebuttal to the antizionism that has become trendy in some circles. Some of it is an encouragement for less involved and less knowledgeable Jews (or even people who are not Jewish but are in relationships with Jews) to become more deeply involved with and knowledgeable about the Jewish tradition, as Hurwitz herself has.
Yet given all the high anticipation and notwithstanding the fact that I’m largely aligned with Hurwitz’s goals, I found some passages of this book maddening and disappointing. Here’s what I mean:
Hurwitz describes herself as “appalled by Israel’s current right-wing government, sickened by the racism and extremism of some of its most senior government officials.” She writes that “the current ruling faction includes several notorious racists, annexationists, and religious extremists.” She writes that Prime Minister Netanyahu “continues to wage a war in Gaza with no realistic goal or day-after plan, continuing casualties, devastating suffering, and a number of people, including American citizens, still being held hostage in horrifying conditions.”
Well, how’s that for an awfully fine distinction? Zionism-is-racism is a Soviet-era lie, but Israel’s elected government is rife with sickening and notorious racists?
Contrary to Hurwitz’s claim, Netanyahu, his government, and the Israel Defense Forces have been crisply and consistently clear about the war goals—to get all the hostages back and to remove Hamas as a governing and military force in Gaza with the ability to threaten Israel. They have made remarkable progress toward achieving those goals. Of the 251 hostages taken on October 7, 48 remain captive, of whom about 20 are thought by Israel to be alive. Many Hamas leaders, terrorists, and their Iranian sponsors have been killed or captured. Hamas allies in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iran have also been dealt significant military setbacks. The responsibility for the war’s continuation and the attendant suffering and casualties rests largely with the Hamas terrorist organization, which has been unwilling to surrender its arms, the hostages, and control of Gaza.
Hurwitz also complains about Israel building settlements in the West Bank, “which are widely considered illegal under international law.” She writes that “in recent decades, in a kind of slow-motion annexation, Israelis have built a growing number of settlements deep in the West Bank, disrupting the adjacency of Palestinian communities and undermining their ability to establish a state of their own.”
On the settlements, that something is “widely considered illegal” does not mean it is, any more than any other widely believed but false beliefs about Israel or the Jews. For an accessible and careful exposition of this point I recommend “The Illegal Settlements Myth” by David M. Phillips in the December 2009 issue of Commentary.
After October 7, it seems less prudent than ever to allow a Palestinian state in the West Bank with control of its border with Jordan. Without Israeli security control over the Jordan Valley, arms could easily be smuggled into the West Bank and used to attack Jerusalem and Tel Aviv the way Hamas attacked from Gaza on October 7. The future of Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, is a complicated issue, and I don’t have time to do it full justice here other than to point out that Hurwitz’s treatment of it badly misses the key legal and security issues.
I’m not saying Netanyahu or his cabinet members or the IDF, much less all the West Bank settlers, are perfect or beyond criticism. But under the circumstances, for a book whose jacket copy bills itself as debunking “hateful myths” about Jewish “depravity” and telling the story of how the author learned to live “proudly” as a Jew, Hurwitz concedes too much ground to Israel’s critics, in a way that undercuts her own arguments.
A brief section of the book that touches on U.S. domestic politics is also clunky. “I began to feel like I’d felt during the 2016 presidential election and ensuing presidency,” Hurwitz writes. “Donald Trump broke norm after norm—threatening to lock up his opponent, firing oversight officials and interfering in Justice Department investigations, condemning federal judges whose decisions he disliked, praising notorious dictators while insulting American allies, denying the results of the 2020 election, inciting an insurrection at the Capitol.”
The 2024 election also featured Democrats chanting “lock him up” about Trump, along with a lot of efforts by prosecutors to do precisely that. President Clinton fired his own FBI director, William Sessions, in 1993, and Bill Clinton had an unscheduled meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch at an airport in 2016 as Lynch’s Justice Department was investigating Hillary Clinton. President Obama unloaded on the Supreme Court Justices in his 2010 State of the Union for the Citizens United decision on the freedom of political speech. As for cozying up to dictators while insulting allies, Obama’s pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal over Israeli objections fits that description. And Georgia governor candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, refused to accept her own defeat in the 2018 Georgia Senate race.
The point of that passage was that Hurwitz found post-October 7 campus antisemitism as unbelievably norm-shattering as she found Trump’s presidency. That may be so, but it erodes her argument’s credibility with those who do not share her political views. Part of her point of the book, by her own reckoning, is to tell of how she improved from her past—someone for whom “the closest I came to meaning and spirituality was a collection of social justice slogans and self-help cliches, a convenient mash-up of Democratic politics and ‘being a good person’ filtered through the ‘you do you’ creed of modern life.”
Hurwitz describes this book as progress beyond the last one, which almost entirely avoided the topic of Israel. Perhaps her next effort will go even further beyond this one. As she describes it, she had a late start, with minimal Jewish education, experience, or learning, until age 35. Moses did not really get going seriously until he was 80, and he went pretty far, which I always find inspiring, especially as I age myself. So there’s plenty of hope for Hurwitz in the years ahead. Perhaps after Israel achieves its war goals its American Jewish friends will finally be moved to stop describing those goals as unrealistic. Certainly Hurwitz has shown herself promisingly capable of learning and open to new ideas and old ones.
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Surprised you support politics by meme. Instead of taking pot shots at MA as a campaign strategy the NH Governor ought to study why her state is so restrictive on housing development, recreational marijuana retailing and gambling when their motto is "Live Free or Die".