To this day, Atlantic City, capital of the Southern New Jersey coastline, exudes the decadence of a glitzy seaside resort in permanent decline. It is justly famed for its broad and finely sable strand. Its storied transformations over the past half-century, it happens, correspond to the phase-shifts in my own trajectory. In my recollection, Atlantic City begins as middle-class vacation paradise, with demographics mirroring the ethnic map of nearby Philadelphia. It morphs into an East Coast gambling foothold and Babylon, and ends up as an oddly placed urban hub weathering the extremes of techno-capitalism.
When I was little, my family would crowd into one large room of a guesthouse on Little Rock Avenue in nearby Ventnor for a week or two every August. On weekends, my father joined us, travelling down from his Philadelphia carpentry shop. To this day, my nerves can replay the searing prickles of fresh sunburn, intensified by every recalcitrant grain of sand on my back as I bedded down on my portable cot.
My terminal degree, with a thesis on Kafka, was already in hand by the time demolitions began for the resort casinos that would presumably rescue Atlantic City from its endemic decay. Louis Malle, unpredictably sidestepping in his own cinematic trajectory, spared me a physical return to the place by directing Atlantic City (1980). Small-time operator, Lou, played by Burt Lancaster in his farewell role, rose to an unexpected ‘last hurrah’ by playing Prince Galahad to a recent arrival, Susan Sarandon, endeavouring to better her prospects as a croupier.
Las Vegas East
Atlantic City’s first glitter box of gambling and entertainment was Resorts International, opening its doors on 26 May 1978. During a frenetic gambling buildup in the area, Resorts International was quickly succeeded by Caesars Boardwalk Regency (6 June 1979), Bally’s Park Place (29 December 1978), the Brighton (11 August 1980), Harrah’s Casino Hotel (23 November 1980), and the Golden Nugget on Boston Avenue (12 December 1980).
On 14 May 1984, Trump Plaza and Hotel opened under the moniker, ‘Harrah’s at Trump Plaza’. In 1989, the Trump interests would go on to acquire the adjoining Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino; also, the Atlantis Casino Hotel.
Unprecedented rifts
Like any other world citizen and American Jew, I have been utterly shaken by the ferocity of the war initiated on 7 October 2023 by the brutal, murderous Hamas, attacking Israelis in multiple locations across Israel. My formation as a Conservative Jew, that is, observant but keyed to the tempo, dynamics, and economy of secular US society, is as hard-wired into my Philadelphia upbringing as our familial vacations.
The resolve of the current Israeli administration to utterly vanquish its foes, to drive the Palestinian population from ‘Judea and Samaria’ (the West Bank) as well as from Gaza, and to scorch the earth beneath any potential sovereign Palestinian entity, is indicative of a radical polarisation in the Jewish world. It is conveniently coupled with the stark binary logic, measures, and temperament defining Trump world.
Among my cherished keepsakes, I retain the vestiges of my early Hebrew education, at my synagogue and at a religious camp in the mountains. Exposure to a language with a non-Roman alphabet, trailing no small share of accompanying erudition. All transmitted selflessly. Perhaps most important of all, as deep-wired into the liturgy and ceremony of the High Holidays: being initiated into the collective human burden of culpability. And into the basic, homespun techniques of remediation and reconciliation.
A bewildering discrepancy has opened up between the principles of empathetic and mindful cohabitation with the ‘other’ with which I was ushered into Jewish culture and the belligerent policies of occupation, oppression, and dispossession Netanyahu has forged with Israel’s most unapologetic ethno-nationalist parties. The sense of irreparable rift is palpable. The closest parallel I can channel is how it must have felt on the verge of those great medieval schisms in the Church, whether the divide between Rome and Constantinople or, one millennium later, as Lutheranism and Calvinism first precipitated themselves out of Catholicism.
Rumblings from the Jewish diaspora
Perhaps the most eloquent lightning rod and interpreter of the stunning recent sea change in the Jewish universe is Shaul Magid. In The Necessity of Exile, he renders a status report on Judaism’s venerable, 2000-year tradition as a culture in absentia in the wake of the 1948 founding of the State of Israel, the culmination of the Zionist dream.
There is now a thriving Jewish diaspora in North America, South America, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere; one that is not dependent on Israel for its creative sustenance. This should be celebrated. But the Zionist party line has nothing to say about this. Quite the opposite.
In allowing for some demarcation to be drawn between the genesis, politics, and culture of the Israeli State and the diaspora, Magid allows for the celebration of the profound devotion, creativity, and improvisation amply demonstrated among the diverse Jewish communities of North and South Americas, Europe, and Australia. In so doing, he suspends the taboo against critiquing the State of Israel, its leaders, and its policies.
The New Jerusalem and the new Atlantic City
In my own frenetic efforts to chart the seismic forces that could have catapulted Trump to the presidency in 2016, I unearthed a concatenation of factors, not the least being uncanny dumb luck in the dimension of timing. Trump came on as a familiar daytime TV celebrity at a time when folks all over the ‘advanced technological’ world were retreating (or stampeding), with no forethought as to the consequences, into an absorptive, isolating universe of digital simulation. His claim to fame as a TV character was as a savvy corporate executive, whose genius, applied in a posture of ‘tough love’, could pull the most desperate corporation out of the steepest nosedives.
In the tradition of H Ross Perot, and other industrialists vying for the presidency, Trump espoused the conflation – no less than a perfect interface – between big business and government. (This coupling is the overarching mantra of the Trumpian administration, as boiled down to a unitary guiding principle – its Leitmotiv.) Forcing the upper hand in deals, making every good office rendered by the State transactional, approaching each potential commitment with confounding evasiveness – these tactics of the consummate business insider would purge the federal government of its deep-seeded inefficiency and corruption.
Trump’s instinct for the media, as configured, and in their breakneck transformations, has been nothing less than fatal. Out of the rock concert and the religious revival tent, he devised the prototype for a political rally that was as digitally captivating as it was cathartic ‘live’. It could not have been more fortuitous that Fox News self-fashioned itself as a Trumpian house organ. An unrestricted pool for lurid attack ads and a humongous presence in social media was accumulating on the US ultra-right. The US Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision shrouded vast right-wing contributions to think-tanks and institutes under the cloak of ‘dark money’.
It can come as no surprise that Trump approaches foreign policy with all the instinct of a real-estate wheeler and dealer. In conjunction with Elon Musk, his ‘star pupil’ in industrial innovation, capital accumulation, and authoritarian bearing, Trump gleefully goes about eviscerating the federal government and its institutions and with it, the budget. His approach to the Gaza war went public on 4 February of this year:
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too”, Trump said at a news conference. “We’ll own it and be responsible for disposing of unexploded munitions and rebuilding Gaza into a mecca for jobs and tourism.” Sounding like the real estate developer he once was, Trump vowed to turn it into ‘The Riviera of the Middle East’.
The President effectively reopened a Pandora’s box with far-reaching implications for the Middle East. Control over Gaza has been one of the flash points of the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades.
Responsible journalism immediately seized on the irony of establishing, in war-decimated Gaza, a ‘Mecca’ for the recreation industry, a choker of hotels, restaurants, and casinos glittering along the beach.
The journalistic transcript of Trump 1.0. is already rife with instances of the Trump Organisation’s capitalising on its political connections. On 11 October 2019, the New York Times asked: “Those Foreign Business Ties? The Trump Sons Have Plenty Too”. The article details the Trump progeny’s international barnstorming on behalf of major development projects in Scotland, India, Indonesia – even while they lambast former President, Joe Biden for some of his son,Hunter’s questionable dealings as a foreign business consultant.
Atlantic City on the Mediterranean: warning symptoms of Trump 2.0
One day after its initial disclosure of Trump’s thinking on Gaza, the Times takes us Inside the Hastily Written Proposal to Own Gaza, as its authors annotate the utterly slapdash manner in which this major shift in US foreign policy was ventilated:
“He [President Trump] shocked even senior members of his own White House and government … He read the plan from a sheet of paper – his administration had not done even the most basic planning to examine the feasibility of the idea …
Inside the US Government, there had been no meetings with the State Department or Pentagon, as would normally occur for any serious foreign policy proposal, let alone one of such magnitude. There had been no working groups. The Defense Department had produced no estimates …”
Brusque, kneejerk action whose implications have not been factored in, grounded both in long-nursed grudges and rivalries and in utter contempt for research and consultation: these are the fingerprints of governmental ‘address’ (what psychoanalysis would call ‘object relations’) under the second Trump regime. All the world is a real estate opportunity. Gaza – utterly lamentable battleground of radical politics, human shielding, and military retribution – also a cemetery for 50,000 Palestinian casualties, mostly bystanders. But my Atlantic City of those days, as much under the glowing aura of family values as the pellucid August sun – now bleeds into Gaza?
More in world.
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