Attention to the Unseen

Bryan Mealer reports from the migrant caravan: María Cáceres’s son Javier, who is 15, has Down’s syndrome. He’s a tall, chunky kid, with short dark hair, a missing front tooth, and eyes that are permanently crossed. María tells me how they fled San Pedro Sula after gang members constantly harassed her family for bribes and “taxes”. When they couldn’t pay, some men burned down their house, then murdered her two brothers. María had just finished burying them when – on…

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The Washington Post reports: A little girl from Honduras stares into the camera, her young features contorted in anguish. She’s barefoot, dusty, and clad only in a diaper and T-shirt. And she’s just had to run from clouds of choking tear gas fired across the border by U.S. agents. A second photograph, which also circulated widely and rapidly on social media, shows an equally anguished woman frantically trying to drag the same child and a second toddler away from the…

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60 Minutes reports: This past week, a federal judge struck down the president’s latest immigration order. It’s been a chaotic two years on the border as the administration imposed barriers with little consideration of their legality or consequences. The 2017 ban on travelers from Muslim countries was so abrupt it surprised the officers who had to enforce it. Before the midterm elections, President Trump ordered thousands of troops to Texas to stop what he called “an assault” by a caravan…

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Sabrina Tavernise reports: As the country catches its breath after one of the most acrimonious midterm elections in years, it would be easy to conclude that all of America is hopelessly divided — a land where two angry tribes are at each other’s throats and everybody thinks about politics all the time. But the reality is far less extreme. A deep new study of the American electorate, “Hidden Tribes,” concludes that two out of three Americans are far more practical…

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The Atlantic reports: Cecil and David Rosenthal were buried in matching caskets made of wood, each adorned with a single Jewish star. The brothers, 59 and 54, were two of the 11 Jews killed in Pittsburgh on Saturday, remembered by all as irrepressibly friendly synagogue regulars. But they were also vulnerable in a different way than the other victims of the shooting at Tree of Life synagogue: The brothers lived with profound intellectual impairment; Cecil, for example, could neither read…

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The New York Times reports: Until recent years, many Jews in America believed that the worst of anti-Semitism was over there, in Europe, a vestige of the old country. American Jews were welcome in universities, country clubs and corporate boards that once excluded their grandparents. They married non-Jews, moved into mixed neighborhoods and by 2000, the first Jew ran for vice president on a major party ticket. So the massacre on Saturday of 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, by…

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Chemi Shalev writes: When Trump said Saturday that the attack in Pittsburgh might not have been as bloody if the synagogue had hired armed guards, he was essentially blaming the Jewish victims for their own death; proving, in the process, how detached he is from the sentiments of the liberal Jewish majority, which abhors the unflinching Republican support for guns and their owners. Trump’s insensitive assertion proved to anyone who still harbored doubt that he is eminently unqualified to reassure…

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