Boycotts

I come from an old boycotting family. It makes it sound like I’ve got some kind of pedigree, like we’re old and important enough to have a tradition. Which is, if you know us, not the case. What I really mean is my mother, Ethel Fitzerman. Among many principled stands she took (kosher home, stand-up feminism, an aversion to Orthodoxy, especially the Jewish kind), she refused to buy German-made consumer goods. That included kitchen utensils, china, glassware, appliances, and pretty much everything down to pens and pencils. She believed that they were somehow contaminating, that the ashes of Jews clung to them like dust.

This lasted almost two generations. I was very much taken with my mother’s allergies (extending to anything that could be linked to the Spanish Inquisition), and I kept myself from a long list of purchases.

The breaking point came with a Krups coffee grinder, an enchanting building set for our toddler son, and a Volkswagon for our daughter when she first learned to drive. This last was an assertion of my wife, Alice Blue. She is the daughter of authentic survivors of Auschwitz and felt that the Volkswagon was the safest car available. When she dug in her heels, I had to defer. There’s a lot of mileage that comes of being the daughter of survivors.

But I’ve still got my mother embedded in my psyche. I’m no longer quite as doctrinaire as I was, but there are times when I also dig in my heels. When Jeff Bezos pulled the plug on an endorsement of Kamala, I immediately cancelled my subscription to the Post. I no longer participate in the Facebook metasphere, and it must be clear that I would never buy a Tesla. I still generally avoid German goods, although the statute of limitations has lapsed on Spain. But I’m still wrestling with the sins of Bezos the Oligarch. I draw the line shopping at Whole Foods, but I confess that the boxes from Amazon keep coming.

None of this holds up to rigorous scrutiny. Target has turned its back on Pride Week and seems to be inching away from DEI. The local manager of my Target says that’s not quite true, but it still feels very much wait-and-see. Meantime, I just bought a rug for the bathroom.

Mostly, I am proceeding by feel, the intuitive sense that an entity is contaminated and no amount of atonement is currently possible. To take the perfectly obvious example, I would not purchase merch associated with Trump Inc., but I might be tempted to buy an Hungarian import, as long as tariffs didn’t put it out of reach. There’s probably a good reason not to buy from anyone, but I have to live in a world that I did not make.

At the end of the day, that’s all I can recommend. If you feel a sense of visceral discomfort, that you would be deeply corrupted by a commercial relationship, it is time to grab hold and look for alternatives. If that’s not where you are, you might cut everyone some slack—including the innocent people who may have manufactured your purchase—and allow a place in your life for imprecision and generosity.