Martin Luther King Jr.: A Legacy Lost?
Each year, on the third Monday of January, Americans celebrate the life and the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a day of remembrance and observance, of zakhor and shamor, as it is written in the Hebrew Scriptures that he so frequently invoked. These are very powerful words. Zakhor is far more […]
The Jew and the Other in Brussels’ French-speaking Schools
Summary of a 70-page study on the representations of young people in Brussels, and the Other, including the Jew.[1] In France, it is only fairly recently that the media, and the political and academic world, have come to accept the idea that the anti-Semitism of French people of Arab-Muslim immigrant origin is a real issue, […]
Antisemitism: The Revival of an Ancient Hatred
Numerous watchdog groups, both in the U.S. and abroad, have followed the dramatic rise in antisemitism. Among them are the Louis Brandeis Center, the Anti-Defamation League, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the Amcha Initiative, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), Great Britain’s Community […]
Columbia’s BDS Motion Misses the Point About Dialogue
Last week, students at Columbia University passed a resolution calling for boycotting and divesting from Israel. Their motion, sponsored by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, asserts that any commercial or intellectual connections to Israel “fall under the UN International Convention’ for both the suppression and punishment of the ‘Crime of Apartheid.’” For me, this news […]
Anti-Israel Claims of Ethnic Cleansing Have No Place in a Student Paper – or Anywhere
Last week Columbia University’s students passed a referendum that recommends that the university divests from all financial activities with Israel. According to the student group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), this student led directive falls under the United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Jennifer Roskies, in this […]
The Tirana Conference on Antisemitism: Bringing Governments Together to Review their Commitments
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) undertook to combat antisemitism following a Ministerial level conference hosted by the German Government in 2004. Since then almost every succeeding chairmanship has held a conference on the subject to revise and update commitments, on an annual basis. These have included agreements to monitor antisemitism, train […]
Officially Sanctioned Hate at the University of Michigan
The 2020 Youth for Palestine Conference is taking place from January 25-26 at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. The conference will be hosted by Midwest Students for Justice in Palestine (Midwest SJP), Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE). The conference is also being sponsored by the American Muslims […]
Political Leadership in The Age of Scoundrels – Reflections in advance of the UK’s December Election
If the second quarter of the twentieth century was “The age of the dictators” then the current period is bidding to be “The age of the scoundrels”. Certainly, few would claim that many of today’s national leaders display high levels of personal integrity. Perhaps it was ‘ever so’ but surely, not, in democracies, displayed in […]
Poisonous Pedagogy: Israel Hatred and the Collapse of Liberal Education
Professor William Kolbrener reflects on the corrupting and ideologised pedagogy in higher education that is creating ‘a moral cosmos as rigid as any to be found in conventional theologies’ and which not only demonises Israel but erodes the very basis of the liberal university. He calls for those committed to democracy to make clear that […]
The Small Matter of Malice: Meditations on “the Pattern” of Antisemitism
I have just spent the week at Oxford (St. John’s College) at the annual ISGAP conference on antisemitism, which brings together a wide range of people, from scholars to graduate students, to learn about antisemitism and build curricula for teaching it. We were 86 scholars-in-residence: a really impressive group of people at all levels, the scholars, […]