Getting Hitler

Some cataclysmic events occur with the speed of a train wreck; others unfold over months or even years. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2007 bestseller The Black Swan argues that the more earth-shattering the event, the less likely that the press will provide an early warning.

The Overseas Correspondent  Peter Osnos,  Foreign Affairs.  The craft of reporting from abroad, says the editor and former Washington Post journalist, is going the way of the blacksmith.  SAVE

Foreign Reporting  Megan Garber,  Neiman Journalism Lab.  Harvard's Neiman Foundation tries to figure out how foreign correspondents can operate in the changed environment of the 21st century.  SAVE

Interview with Andrew Nagorski  Jennie Rothenberg Gritz,  Atlantic.  Nagorski tried to put himself in the shoes of reporters in Hitler's Berlin, without benefit of hindsight: "What would I have understood?"  SAVE

What Americans Knew  Jim Willis,  Greenwood.  With many reporters deluded about Hitler's intentions, it was not until 1938 that most U.S. newspaper readers understood the menace of Nazi anti-Semitism.  SAVE

"Anti-Semitism Sweeping Germany Like Plague"  JTA.  . . . and other reportage from the archives of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.  SAVE

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Poison Pen

A Nobel Prize-winning German novelist—a former SS soldier, no less—accuses the state of Israel of seeking to exterminate an entire people, and the literary republic yawns. But when Israel bars its accuser from entering the country, because ex-Nazis have no place in the Jewish state, the cries of "bullying" and "censorship" nearly drown out the original accusation.

An Open Letter to Günter Grass  Daniel Johnson,  New York Sun.  After 60 years, was it Grass's conscience that prompted him to admit that he belonged to the Waffen SS? "The absence of contrition . . . excludes that possibility. I am afraid that the most cynical motive is also the most plausible: You had an autobiography to sell." (2006; Part II is here.)  SAVE

The New Prejudice  Howard Jacobson,  Independent.  By brute consensus, now, Israel is the proof that Jews did not adequately learn the lesson of the Holocaust.  SAVE

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism  Robert Wistrich,  Jewish Political Studies Review.  Anti-Zionism uses stereotypes concerning the "Jewish/Zionist lobby," Israeli/Jewish "criminality," and Sharonist "warmongering" that are fundamentally manipulative and anti-Semitic.  SAVE

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Peter Beinart, I Quit.

Peter Beinart's new blog on the Daily Beast titled Open Zion (formerly Zion Square) is dedicated to an "open and unafraid conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the Jewish future."  But after several weeks of Open Zion, one writer has concluded that its conversation is not, in fact, open—and is not one in which he can continue to take part. Here, he resigns his position. 

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French Lessons

The saga that captured headlines around the world last week came to an end when Mohamed Merah—who had murdered four people, including three children, at the Ozer Hatorah Jewish school in Toulouse, France—was shot dead by French police. Before his death, Merah told police negotiators that he was a member of al-Qaeda.

Red Flag  Gerald Warner,  Scotsman.com.  While the left steadfastly clings to the doctrine that high immigration can never lead to social problems, it has lost its stranglehold over public debate.  SAVE

Vive la Jihad!  Michel Gurfinkiel,  PJMedia.  Increasingly frequent anti-Semitic violence, a growing wave of anti-Zionism, and the legal threat to ritual slaughter have left the French Jewish community vulnerable on several fronts.  SAVE

French Muslims Training with the Taliban  Associated Press.  Pakistani intelligence officials are trying to determine whether the Toulouse shooter was among the dozens of French Muslims who have trained with the Taliban.  SAVE

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Scholarship and Anti-Semitism at Yale

Almost a year has passed since Yale University shuttered the five-year-old Yale Interdisciplinary Initiative for the Study of Anti-Semitism, known by the unwieldy acronym "YIISA," and replaced it with the Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism, or "YPSA."

Yale's New Jewish Quota  Ron Rosenbaum,  Slate.  It was a "cowardly, clumsily-executed maneuver," said the columnist, by which Yale abolished the YIISA program.  SAVE

Can Academia Ignore Politics?  Ben Cohen,  Forward.  After YIISA's 2010 conference, the PLO protested to Yale's president that since Arabs are Semites, they can't be anti-Semitic.  SAVE

YPSA Begins Awarding Grants  Jane Darby Menton,  Yale Daily News.  Yale's Jewish chaplain explains that we study anti-Semitism to gain a "better scholarly understanding of other prejudices."  SAVE

Follow the Money  Alex Joffe,  Jewish Ideas Daily.  Between 1995 and 2008, Arab Gulf states gave $234 million in contracts and about $88 million in gifts to American universities. What has their money purchased?  SAVE

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