Jews in Post-Communist Russia: A State with Philosemitic Pretensions, a Society with Antisemitic Sentiments
What is the government policy today vis-a-vis the still quite substantial Jewish communities in two major post soviet republics, the Russian Federation and Ukraine? Did state antisemitism, once abolished, cause antisemitism to disappear or is there something in the Russian public and political culture which threatens to make antisemitism surface once again? In Poland or […]
West is West, East is East: The Specific East European Incarnation of Antisemitism
Note: This op-ed is a partial summary of Dr. Katz’s talk at ISGAP in New York City on 5 April 2016. A PDF of his power point presentation on the evening (©Dovid Katz) is available online. Antisemitism in Western Europe is nowadays overwhelmingly a product of the (far) left. Its practitioners are socially, educationally and demographically […]
Israel and Europe After Brussels: What Insights Can We Share?
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel, which unfortunately has had a great deal of experience with terrorist violence, has much to offer Europe in its own confrontation with Islamist terror. Once Europe has internalized the reality that it is fighting a war, Israel can advise it regarding strategies like effective intelligence collection, disruption of enemy money supply, and […]
Hate Week: Why the “Israeli Apartheid” Canard is Antisemitic
It’s back. Every year at this time, some extreme anti-Israel activists invoke the worst terms of abuse they can think of to try to stigmatize the Jewish state. Jewish students on college campuses around the world call it “Hate Week”—for good reason. They feel the sting of potent antisemitic imagery on public display, aggressively deployed […]
Israeli Apartheid Week in Britain: Why Students’ Unions Are Acting Unlawfully
Israeli Apartheid Week sits within a global social movement, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions or BDS movement, which aims to exclude Israel from the economic, cultural and educational life of the rest of the world. It has been a feature of city and campus life since 2004 when it burst onto the scene with the […]
Memory, The Jewish Intellectual, and Cartesian Cogito in Amery’s “At the Mind’s Limits”
Jean Amery, in the first chapter of At the Mind’s Limits, tries to demonstrate that Auschwitz rids the intellect of his western ideals and reduces the intellect to a playful logical framework. And as a playful logical framework, Amery’s account of the intellect resembles the Cartesian Cogito. In order to argue this thesis, I will […]
Iranian Elections: The Radicals Strike Back
Tomorrow the Iranian people will simultaneously elect a new Parliament (Majlis) and Council of Experts—assigned to monitor the functioning of the Supreme Leader and to choose a new Supreme Leader when the position becomes vacant. The timing, following the nuclear deal, amidst domestic rifts and growing domestic and external challenges make the elections of unique […]
Mimesis, Antisemitism, Terror
How can we explain the virulence and brutality—the gratuitous barbarity—of Islamist mass-murder terrorism? More than ideology, more than neurosis, we should consider mimesis, rivalry and mimetic contagion. Some ten days before the attacks in Paris last November, the immortel René Girard died, bringing to an end a long and uniquely productive intellectual career. For decades, […]
Assessing the New Wave of Judeophobia in France
Today, few commentators deny the new wave of hatred against Jews in France. Indeed, many increasingly acknowledge that this is a global phenomenon. Assessing antisemitism in France is not only important for an evaluation of the threat for Jewish communities, but for French society in general. Moreover, the French case, in which this new wave […]
Europe, the Vatican and the Normalization of Antisemitism
On Sunday January 17th, 2016 Pope Francis made his first visit as Pontiff to the Great Synagogue in Rome. This was a significant event, the third such visit by a Pontiff to the Great Synagogue. Importantly, it followed on the heels of the October commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, where the Pontiff […]