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 […]
Antisemitism in Response to the 2015 Refugee Wave – Case of the Czech Republic
Despite its strategic location in Central Europe, the Czech Republic remains nearly untouched by the Refugee Wave. In Autumn 2015, when the wave started to culminate in Germany, the Czech Republic had more asylum seekers from Cuba than from Syria. Despite this fact, the Czechs read the news on the Refugee Crisis and the Paris […]
ANTISEMITIC INCITEMENT IS STILL ALIVE IN IRAN
On April 10, the Iranian hardliner website Mashregh News affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards published an article entitled “Who Are Human History’s Most Bloodthirsty People?” The article was later republished by other websites, including Alef, which is associated with Ahmad Tavakoli, a conservative member of Iranian Parliament (Majlis), former head of its research center, and […]
Angry Germans, Inept Leaders
German topics rarely make it into American cable news. Recently, however, a leading TV show put Chancellor Angela Merkel into the category of “villain of the week.” The reason given: she allowed an invasion of mostly young men from Arab and North African lands into Germany. Assaults during the Cologne New Year’s Eve celebrations seem […]