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Antisemitism Tag

Posted by Miriam Elman on April 24, 2017 26 Comments
On February 15 two 17-year-old central NY high school students—Jordan April and Archer Shurtliff—raised objections to a homework assignment in which they were required to either oppose or defend the extermination of Jews. Their teacher, Oswego County High School teacher Michael DeNobile, asked them to
write an internal memorandum within the highest ranking offices of the Nazi party in regards to your support or opposition to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”
Presumably the goal was to teach the students critical thinking, thereby promoting one of the Common Core’s desired skills.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 24, 2017 27 Comments
You almost certainly have heard of Anne Frank. It's unlikely that until Trump's election you heard of an entity calling itself the "Anne Frank Center (US)." That's because for most of its history, AFCUS has quietly done work educating people about Anne Frank. Then in the spring of 2016 everything changed. AFCUS changed its focus, hired a political activist named Steven Goldstein, and began to reposition itself as a social justice organization. AFCUS has, since Trump's election, issued a series of inflammatory statements that get gobbled up by the media looking to bash Trump.

Posted by Miriam Elman on April 09, 2017 11 Comments
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is a non-Jewish organization that undermines the fight against, and enables, antisemitism by legitimizing and mainstreaming the anti-Israel movement’s assault on Jewish identity. JVP presents itself as a social justice organization committed to non-violence and peace. But as we’ve documented in dozens of posts, its tactics and affiliations tell a different story. JVP masquerades as merely devoted to ending Israel’s ‘occupation’ of Judea and Samaria/the West Bank when what it really wants is to end Israel. Its leadership and activists frequently promote and partner with extremist individuals and groups that demonize the Jewish state and delegitimize Zionism, while trafficking in negative stereotypes of Jews.

Posted by Miriam Elman on April 03, 2017 15 Comments
Several weeks ago a series of fliers appeared on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Most of the hateful fliers disparaged American Jews as privileged whites and connected this alleged ‘Jewish privilege’ to social injustice in the U.S. Others drew on classic antisemitic tropes of Holocaust denial and the new form of Jew-hatred in which Israel is compared to Nazi Germany. In a statement, university administrators condemned the antisemitic fliers that "defame, insult and negatively portray Jewish members of our campus community." They're reportedly conducting a full investigation, but as of this writing those responsible for creating and distributing the fliers are still unknown.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 01, 2017 8 Comments
Russian Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko has died at age 84. He was resident at the University of Tulsa, and died in a hospital in Oklahoma City. I think it's hard for Americans to understand the celebrated role that poets occupy in Russian history, including the dissident movement that began to develop in the 1950s and 1960s. I experienced some of that when studying Russian language and literature in the 1970s and early 1980s, and studying in Moscow in 1980. The vast sweep of Yevtushenko life work was somewhat overwhelmed by the power and stature of Yevtushenko’s 1961 poem about the Nazi massacre of over 33,000 Jews in just two days on September 29-30, 1941, at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev in the Ukraine. I provided extensive background and material about the Babi Yar massacre in my May 7, 2016, post, Israeli flag burned at Babi Yar on Holocaust Remembrance Day:

Posted by Mary Chastain on March 27, 2017 3 Comments
The Times of Israel reported that the Isreali-American teen arrested for the recent bomb threats against Jewish institutions in America made similar bomb threats at institutions across the world for two years. From Ynet:
According to Chief Superintendant Meir Ohayon of the Israel Police's cyber unit, New Zealand police requested assistance in tracing the source of the calls last September. After getting the relevant details and conducting a preliminary investigation, Israel Police informed their counterparts from New Zealand that they believed that source of the calls was Israel. "At that point, the hunt for the Israeli 'hacker' who drove the world crazy was on," said Ohayon.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 23, 2017 9 Comments
Israeli authorities, cooperating with the FBI, have arrested a Jewish Israeli-American teenager for the majority of bomb threats phoned into Jewish Community Centers in the U.S. and around the world. Those bomb threats led to widespread condemnation of Donald Trump from liberal groups for allegedly fomenting a wave of anti-Semitism. The JCC threats became a hammer used to beat Trump over the head for political purposes unrelated to fighting real anti-Semitism, which most frequently nowadays comes from the Leftist-Islamist coalition opposed to Israel's existence. When Trump allegedly suggested that the threats might come from people trying to make him look bad, he was accused of suggesting the JCC threats were "false flag" operations. While the exact words he allegedly used never have been clear, the suggestion was met with howls of condemnation from liberal Jewish groups.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 10, 2017 19 Comments
Over the past few months, Jewish Community Centers across the country have received bomb threats that, thankfully, have turned out to be nothing more than threats. Just yesterday the Jewish Children's Museum in Brooklyn was evacuated after a bomb threat was received via email. The New York Police now believe the calls are all coming from the same individual who's using a voice changer and number spoofer.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 24, 2017 21 Comments
On Saturday, February 25, 2017, Democrat National Committee delegates will vote in a new Chair. The two top contenders are Keith Ellison, congressman from Minnesota, and Tom Perez, former Obama Labor Secretary. Regardless of who is chosen, there is no centrist choice. Because the is no center of the Democratic Party. Perez is a fairly standard leftist. We haven't spend a lot of time covering his background because there's really nothing particularly interesting as regards the future of the Democratic Party. He's reportedly the Obama-Biden choice.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 22, 2017 22 Comments
A Jewish cemetery near St. Louis saw over 100 gravestones overturned. The criticism of this act is deserved, regardless of whether it was the result of non-anti-Semitic hooliganism or an act of intended anti-Semitism. Either way, it is an act of religious intimidation. What is not deserved is the attempt to blame it on Trump, which is the suggestion of much media and social media attention, and Democratic Party spin.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 12, 2017 2 Comments
You may recall the incident in the summer of 2015 involving Jewish American musician Matisyahu. His appearance at the Spanish Rototom Reggae festival was cancelled after threats from local Spanish activists from the Boycott, Divestment and Movement (BDS) movement. Spain has a particularly malicious BDS movement, which until recently, has had success convincing municipalities to boycott Israel, creating so-called Zionist-free zones. Those municipal boycotts have been declared to be illegal discrimination by Spanish courts. Matisyahu made a name for himself as a religious Jewish Reggae singer with hits advocating peace, such as One Day.

Posted by Miriam Elman on February 02, 2017 23 Comments
Anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda are common on America’s college and university campuses. But as we’ve highlighted in a number of recent posts, this discriminatory and biased messaging and materials appears to be filtering down into the public education system. In a post last April we noted how anti-Israel materials have been systematically introduced into the curriculum of a Newton, MA high school. Then at an Ithaca, NY third grade classroom we recently documented efforts to indoctrinate kids into becoming “freedom fighters for Palestine”:

Posted by Miriam Elman on January 01, 2017 8 Comments
Despite its name, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) isn’t Jewish or for peace. It’s a radical group that provides cover to the anti-Israel movement, particularly on campuses, by legitimizing and mainstreaming its assault on Jewish identity. As we’ve noted in prior posts, JVP usurps various Jewish celebrations, religious holidays, and commemorative life-cycle events by incorporating within them virulently anti-Israel themes and reinforcing that this Israel-bashing is consistent with Jewish values. Last year, as we highlighted in our posts, this identity theft of Jewish heritage was particularly visible during Passover and the High Holidays. Now, JVP is hijacking Chanukah (also spelled "Hanukkah") too.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 18, 2016 1 Comment
On December 4, 2016, I was a speaker at a national conference sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), held at Harvard Law School. The conference was co-hosted by HLS Alliance for Israel, and was titled "War By Other Means - BDS, Israel and the Campus." My presentation was on the history of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. While I have written hundreds of posts about the BDS movement, including its history, this presentation gave me an opportunity to pull it all together in one place, and to do more research to obtain documentation. BDS is a direct and provable continuation of the Arab anti-Jewish boycotts in the 1920s and 1930s and subsequent Arab League Boycott, restructured through non-governmental entities to evade U.S. anti-boycott legislation and repackaged in the language of "social justice" to appeal to Western liberals.

Posted by Miriam Elman on December 17, 2016 5 Comments
What’s happening to Jewish and pro-Israel students on many American universities and colleges from coast to coast is horribly ugly. On “hotspot campuses” the problem is only getting worse. “Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance on Campus”, a new 70 minute documentary recently released by the organization Americans for Peace and Tolerance, chronicles the rampant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish activism prevalent on many of America’s institutions of higher learning. We featured the film’s trailer in a recent post and the movie premiered in NYC on November 30. Last week, I had the opportunity to watch the film in its entirely. In this follow-up post, I review the documentary’s central themes and take-home messages.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 05, 2016 12 Comments
It has not been a good couple of weeks for Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison in his quest for Chair of the Democratic National Committee. Ellison was fast out of the gate, with major endorsements from Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi and many others. But then some inconvenient facts came out about Ellison: His past support for Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam during college and after; once proposing a separate country for blacks; his flirting with tutherism by claiming 9/11 was Bush's Reichstag Fire; his cozy relationship with some of the worst anti-Israel groups at the Democratic National Convention last summer and generally being the go-to congressman for that segment of the Democratic Party; and most recently, release of a partial audio clip of 2010 comments at a Muslim community fundraiser in which he questioned why the U.S. has such a special relationship with Israel considering it's only 7 million people and the Arab world is 350 million. All of this was documented by many people, including by us in the following posts:
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