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Anti-Semitism


Easter Easter
Thursday, April 1, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Around the world this weekend, Christians are preparing to celebrate Easter, the holiday marking the death and resurrection of Jesus and the culmination of the period of penitence that began with Ash Wednesday on February 17.     The first bishops in Jerusalem were Jews, and so the early Christian community commemorated the Feast of the Resurrection on the fourteenth day of the Hebrew month of Nisan, coinciding with the Jewish festival of Passover. In Temple times, the essential rite of Passover was the slaughter of a paschal lamb; the Christian Bible explicitly tied this ritual with Rome's crucifixion of Jesus:...
Libels and Politics Libels and Politics
Thursday, February 18, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Here we go again. Baroness Jenny Tonge of Britian's Liberal Democratic party called recently for a serious investigation of charges that Israeli rescue teams were in Haiti to harvest organs. In the ensuing firestorm, she has been removed from her role as "health spokesman" for her party in the House of Lords. What is going on here? It is one thing for Hamas to fling about heinous lies. Among Western elites, "Israel-bashing" seems too thin an explanation for the mounting eruptions of lunatic forms of anti-Semitism, unhinged from even the most severe criticisms reasonable people might make of Israeli policies. Are we...
Holocaust Days Holocaust Days
Thursday, January 28, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Yesterday, Shimon Peres delivered an address, in Hebrew, before the Bundestag as Germany and other nations marked International Holocaust Day, commemorating the date in 1945 when Soviet forces arrived at Auschwitz.  Israeli and American Jews conduct their own Holocaust remembrances in the spring, on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, uneasy with the Zionist emphasis on force and resistance, hold their memorials on the tenth of Tevet, one of the traditional fast days for the destruction of the Temple. In short, the Holocaust remains as open to interpretation, reinterpretation—and misunderstanding—as is the hole it blew through all the history...
Was Dostoevsky a Scoundrel? Was Dostoevsky a Scoundrel?
Tuesday, January 12, 2010 by | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), rightly known as a peerless master of psychological fiction, a fierce anti-socialist polemicist, an anti-romantic with a pulsingly romantic commitment to prophetic religion, and a dramatist of moral ideas without compare since the English poet John Milton, also happened to harbor an ugly fixation on the Jews.
It Isn’t Even Past It Isn’t Even Past
Thursday, January 7, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

The recent theft and recovery of the sign Arbeit Macht Frei from the gate of Auschwitz, and the emotional responses elicited by the incident, drive home just how deeply embedded the Holocaust and its imagery remain in contemporary consciousness. No doubt, this world-historical event will long continue to occupy a central place in human memory—along with, unfortunately, whatever permutations, distortions, and outright falsifications time will add to those that have already accumulated in the overheated political rhetoric of our own age. That is why, here and now, as we enter perhaps the final decade of the event's living memory, the issue...
Some Things Never Go Away Some Things Never Go Away
Monday, January 4, 2010 | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Nine years ago, according to recent reports in the Israeli media, the head of the country's leading forensic institute admitted to having transplanted tissues and organs—corneas, skin, heart valves, and bones—from deceased Jews, Palestinians, and foreign workers. It seems that the families of the decedents, while consenting to autopsies, had not consented to transplants. The practice was halted and the physician dismissed from his post. Old news, then. But the exact nature of the doctor's past actions, limited if clearly unethical, was lost in the furor aroused by the surfacing of this old news in late December. In Britain, the Guardian...
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Editors' Picks
Breaking the Fourth Wall Steven Hayward, Powerline. A young photojournalist exposes how his colleagues have become not merely part of the story of Palestinian unrest on the West Bank, but the instigators of it. (Video)
Re: Occupy Marc Tracy, Tablet. A response to Commentary's feature article on Occupy Wall Street and the Jews.
Where are the Red Lines? Eli Lake, Daily Beast. New diplomacy between the U.S. and Israel has prompted conversations over what triggers would justify a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
"Fight Judaization!" Jonathan S. Tobin, Contentions. The tour of Arab capitals being conducted by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh demonstrates that Hamas' goal is not only to destroy the State of Israel but to eradicate Jewish history.
Occupy Wall Street and the Jews Jonathan Neumann, Commentary. Predictably, the Occupy movement was plagued by conspiracy theories implicating Jews and Israel. Which makes the prominent Jewish involvement in the protests all the more curious and alarming.
Digging that Hole Efraim Karsh, Hudson New York. Attempting to defend his political science department against charges of bias, one professor betrayed the true depth of the problem by likening Israel to Nazi Germany in several key respects.
Diaspora Disneys Shelley Salamensky, New York Review of Books. From Poland to Spain, former Jewish quarters are being turned into theme-park-style tourist attractions—some respectful, some not. But is this fate still better than oblivion?
The Iranian Schindler Brian Wheeler, BBC News. Hitler declared Iran an Aryan nation. But Iran's head diplomat in World War II Paris used his connections and personal fortune to save thousands of Iranian Jews living in France.
Eco Chamber Paula Marantz Cohen, Smart Set. With The Prague Cemetery's virulently anti-Semitic protagonist, Umberto Eco may have joined those famous authors whose "editors grew afraid to edit them even as reviewers grew unwilling to pan them."
The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies Thomas Kühne, H-Net. There are over 16,000 books on the Holocaust. "If I had to limit my own library to ten out of those sixteen thousand," says a reviewer, "this would be one of them."