Category: anti-semitism

Dara Horn on why smart people hate Jews

February 18, 2024 • 11:25 am

I first became acquainted with Dara Horn when I read her book  People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present.  Although it’s not a masterpiece, it’s very good and well worth reading. Her thesis— derived from editors who always asked her to write about dead Jews like Anne Frank, but never about living ones—is that people are willing to show respect for Jews, but only if they’re gone. (This of course resonates with the feeling of people about the Israelis killed on October 7 as contrasted with the feeling of many towards living Israelis.)

In a long article in the recent Atlantic, Horn writes broadly about the demonization of Jews on college campuses, and the title gives the topic. Her answer to the title question, though, is something I hadn’t thought about: Jews are simply accused of whatever is the most prominent moral failing in the Zeigeist, and right now that is “oppression”.”whiteness,” and “settler colonialism”.

Read by clicking on the headline, or you can find the article archived here:

Horn begins by discussing the fracas in the House hearing when three college presidents said the wrong thing. As I’ve emphasized, and Horn agrees, saying that calls for genocide of the Jews is indeed free speech so long as it doesn’t violate the provisions of the First Amendment limiting speech (e.g., if it’s liable to cause predictable and imminent violence, to produce a biased workplace, etc.). Where those colleges had erred wasn’t to enforce the First Amendment when it came to Jewocide, but their failure to enforce free speech in all other matters; e.g., they were hypocritical. Horn was also on the advisory committee convened by Harvard to recommend fixes for campus antisemitism (like many Jewish students, including ours, those at Harvard have been intimidated by vocal and aggressive pro-Palestinian students). And yes, genocidal calls like “Intifada revolution!” or “from the river to the sea yadda yadda” are also legal speech under the First Amendment, but violation of campus rules associated with such speech, like blocking buildings or vandalism, is not legal speech. This is a distinction that my own school has yet to make.

Horn on the nature of the problem:

Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought down two of those university presidents and spawned a thousand op-eds—except that all of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.

The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel. Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows. They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors. They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class. They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with fuck jews. They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish. At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more.

As I’ve said, what I found most interesting about the piece is Horn’s thesis, which sounds reasonable, that antisemitism is always around, but shapeshifts, glomming onto the Evil Trope du Jour:

The through line of anti-Semitism for thousands of years has been the denial of truth and the promotion of lies. These lies range in scope from conspiracy theories to Holocaust denial to the blood libel to the currently popular claims that Zionism is racism, that Jews are settler colonialists, and that Jewish civilization isn’t indigenous to the land of Israel. These lies are all part of the foundational big lie: that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist. Today, the big lie is winning.

In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism. Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider “Judaism.” This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider “Jewish,” this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable. If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. “Anti-Judaism” thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice.

Today the trope is Social Justice, and so we’re accused of being oppressors, and white colonial ones to boot (Jews who are of Middle Eastern origin are, in what is almost a a hilarious term, called “white adjacent”). The constant shifting of why they’re guilty forces Jews to constantly prove that they are not guilty. No other group, I think, has to do that. Here’s one particularly odious scene described by Horn after she wrote an op-ed for the NYT about the October 7 massacres:

Shortly after the op-ed was published, I was invited to watch video footage of the October 7 attacks that the Israeli army had compiled from security cameras, online videos, and Hamas terrorists’ GoPro cameras. This grim footage was assembled specifically for the purpose of fighting back against denial. But even this horrifying and humiliating evidence, documented largely by the perpetrators themselves, apparently isn’t enough to prove that Jewish experiences are real. At a screening of the footage in Los Angeles, someone in the audience shouted, “Show the rapes!”\

The attackers themselves provided footage of a woman’s naked, mutilated corpse and of a teenager with blood-soaked pants being dragged by her hair out of a truck. Since then, it has become clear that Hamas used rape and sexual torture systematically against Israeli women. Israeli first responders and forensic scientists have found corpses of women and girls with vaginal bleeding and broken pelvises. Teenage sisters were found murdered in their bedroom, one shot in the head with her pants pulled down, covered in semen; one woman was found with nails and other objects in her genitalia, while others were found to have been shot through their vaginas. Eyewitness testimony has included details about a woman who was passed among many men, murdered while one of them was still raping her; at one point, her severed breast was tossed in the air. It’s a detail familiar from the 1941 Baghdad pogrom, just as slicing a fetus out of a pregnant Jewish woman’s body is a tactic Hamas unknowingly replicated from the Khmelnytskyi pogroms of 1648 Ukraine. Et cetera, et cetera. But who would believe it? “Show the rapes!”

That’s pretty ghoulish, and can’t even be seen as purely salacious unless the shouter was a total pervert. No, it is at least a call to see evidence, although there was already plenty of evidence that yes, women were reaped on October 7—and in previous pogroms as well.

One note: Horn pins some of the blame for the antisemitism of intellectuals on DEI. (Remember, we’re trying to understand not just the particular form of modern antisemitism, but why academics are antisemitic in the first place. If it’s connected to DEI, then it can be seen as piggybacking on social justice, which Leftist academics regard as the paragon of virtue.)

One confounding fact in this onslaught of the world’s oldest hatred is that American society should have been ready to handle it. Many public and private institutions have invested enormously in recent years in attempts to defang bigotry; ours is an era in which even sneaker companies feel obliged to publicly denounce hate. But diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have proved to be no match for anti-Semitism, for a clear reason: the durable idea of anti-Semitism as justice.

DEI efforts are designed to combat the effects of social prejudice by insisting on equity: Some people in our society have too much power and too much privilege, and are overrepresented, so justice requires leveling the playing field. But anti-Semitism isn’t primarily a social prejudice. It is a conspiracy theory: the big lie that Jews are supervillains manipulating others. The righteous fight for justice therefore does not require protecting Jews as a vulnerable minority. Instead it requires taking Jews down.

This idea is tacitly endorsed by Jews’ bizarre exclusion from discussion in many DEI trainings and even policies, despite their high ranking in American hate-crime statistics. The premise, for instance, that Jews don’t experience bigotry because they are “white,” itself a fraught idea, would suggest that white LGBTQ people don’t experience bigotry either—a premise that no DEI policy would endorse (not to mention the fact that many Jews are not white). The contention that Jews are immune to bigotry because they are “rich,” an idea even more fraught and also often false (about 20 percent of Jews in New York City, for instance, live in poverty or near-poverty), is equally nonsensical. No one claims that gay men or Indian Americans never experience bigotry because of those groups’ statistically higher incomes. The idea that money erases bigotry apparently applies only to Jews. Again and again, the ostensible reasons for not addressing anti-Semitism in DEI initiatives quickly reveal themselves to be founded on ancient, rarely examined assumptions about Jews as invulnerable villains.

Yep, one more thing to blame on DEI.  And indeed, the Jewish students at my own university are beleaguered by the feeling that they’re surrounded by antisemitism, something I learned from a Zoom discussion las week with a dean and a campus rabbi.  If this antisemitism is indeed on campus, as it must be for these complaints to be true, then where does it come from? From all the demonstrations, poster, and sidewalk chalkings of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the consortium of students called “UChicago United for Palestine.” And especially from the abysmal failure of the University to punish these groups when they violate University regulations. Our Jewish students are fully aware of this failure of punishment, which of course simply heartens the pro-Palestinian activists to engage in further illegal activities, leading to more intimidation.  They have promised to continue demonstrating illegally.

If anybody from the administration is reading this, be aware of the situation and of the consequences, which include reduced contributions by Jewish donors and falling enrollment of Jewish students:

Amazingly, Jewish students, whose numbers have dramatically declined at Harvard in recent years for reasons no one seems able to explain, did not respond to all this with their own hate-speech campaigns. Instead, both before and after October 7, Harvard Hillel’s students have reached out to their peers among Harvard’s anti-Israel activists—asking not for a cease-and-desist, but for a dialogue, or even just a cup of coffee. Let’s get to know each other, they offered. The anti-Israel activists refused to engage. Jewish students tried again; they were rebuffed again. And again. This was hardly surprising. For some anti-Israel activists, even merely talking to “Zionists” (a label applied to the 80 percent of American Jews who regard Israel as an essential or important part of their Jewish identity) counts as “normalization”—that is, treating Jews as if they were normal humans, rather than embodiments of evil.

The decline in Jewish students is a general trend: read the Inside Higher Ed article “Jewish student enrollment is down at many Ivies.” And it’s gone down a lot at places like Harvard and Columbia in the last few years.

Besides the waning of students and donations, there’s always the possibility that students could bring a Title VI lawsuit against a university for allowing a climate of bigotry to exist. This has happened at Columbia University and now, notably, at Harvard, where I’m told the students have a pretty good case.  Here’s some evidence cited by Horn:

The mountain of proof at Harvard revealed a reality in which Jewish students’ access to their own university (classes, teachers, libraries, dining halls, public spaces, shared student experiences) was directly compromised. Compromised, that is, unless they agreed—or at least agreed to pretend, as many Jewish students who are neither religious nor Israeli now silently do—that there was nothing wrong with wallpapering America’s premier university with demonization of Jews. Coercing that silent agreement was the goal, and it was achieved not through arguments or evidence, but through the most laughably idiotic heckler’s veto: screaming at, chasing away, freezing out, or spitting on anyone who dared disagree with supporting the most successful Jew-killers since the Nazis. This left the great minds of Harvard debating the finer points of free speech for hecklers, instead of wondering why their campus was populated by hecklers. The question of why Harvard’s hecklers were heckling in favor of Hamas’s barbarism was too disturbing to consider, and so public discussions ignored it completely.

This heckling was not unrelated to the education that Harvard itself provided. Classes existed at Harvard, it turned out, that were premised on anti-Semitic lies. A course at the school of public health called “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health” looked at case studies from South Africa, the United States, and Israel; its premise—not a topic of discussion, but the premise on which the course was built—was that Israel is a settler-colonialist state. (A Jewish student who wrote to the professor questioning what they saw as the ideological slant of the readings was told that it was “insulting” to suggest that the course had an agenda.) The “Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights” proudly announced that it “utilizes a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement”—meaning, one might reasonably assume, the “decolonizing” of Israel through the removal of its 7 million Jews. (The program is a partnership between Harvard and Birzeit University, a Palestinian institution where an Israeli journalist was expelled from an event in 2014 just because she was Israeli and Jewish.)

An astonishing number of pop-up lectures, panels, and events at Harvard both before and after October 7 were centered on the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza—a worthy topic addressed with almost no mention of Hamas, even though Hamas has ruled Gaza for 17 years. Nor was there much mention of the fact that Hamas was founded in connection with the global Muslim Brotherhood, or of its comically wealthy sponsors in the Persian Gulf. Students had many opportunities to learn about Palestinian suffering from oppression by evil Jews, but far fewer opportunities to learn, for instance, about Hamas’s success in co-opting foreign aid and crushing dissent, or the intifada that students hoped to globalize. Outside of their engagements at Harvard, some guest speakers publicly endorsed extreme anti-Semitic lies, including the straight-up blood libel that Israelis are harvesting Palestinians’ organs or that the Israeli military uses Palestinian children for weapons testing. One could hardly blame students for repeating their educators’ claims.

If you want to see the Harvard lawsuit, click below:

And so we see a combination of factors that lead campuses to become antisemitic: a latent form of antisemitism activated by DEI, the wokeness that sees Jews as settler-colonialists, and an ignorance of history that allows people to buy into historical inaccuracies about the history of Jews and Palestinians in the Middle East. But of course the point of such an analysis is not to philosophize about antisemitism but to change it. And here’s Horn’s solution, at least for Harvard:

It is fairly obvious what Harvard and other universities would need to do to turn this tide. None of it involves banning slogans or curtailing free speech. Instead it involves things like enforcing existing codes of conduct regarding harassment; protecting classroom buildings, libraries, and dining halls as zones free from advocacy campaigns (similar to rules for polling places); tracking and rejecting funding from entities supporting federally designated terror groups (a topic raised in recent congressional testimony regarding numerous American universities); gut-renovating diversity bureaucracies to address their obvious failure to tackle anti-Semitism; investigating and exposing the academic limitations of courses and programs premised on anti-Semitic lies; and expanding opportunities for students to understand Israeli and Jewish history and to engage with ideas and with one another. There are many ways to advocate for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence that honor the dignity and legitimacy of both indigenous groups and the need to build a shared future. The restoration of such a model of civil discourse, which has been decimated by heckling and harassment, would be a boon to all of higher education.

Will this happen at Harvard? I’m hopeful. Will it happen at the University of Chicago? I’m not so hopeful since administrators are loath to even admit there’s a problem, much less take action to curb illegal conduct.  Perhaps things will calm down after Israel wins the war, but given the pervasiveness of antisemitism and hatred of Israel, I’m not so sure.

Columbia University rejects just one student group out of nine: the one opposing antisemitism

February 9, 2024 • 10:15 am

Andrew Sullivan’s statement, “We are all on campus now” has become pretty famous, and it’s proven true for wokeness, DEI, and other stuff that first shows up at universities and then spreads to other institutions and people.  The latest on-campus phenomenon, though it’s already appearing other places, is antisemitism. And antisemitism is how I interpret this latest bit of college news published by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe (and reprinted on his website.  Jacoby’s take on the latest happening (at Columbia University, of course) is mirrored in a piece by free-expression lawyer Popehat (Ken White).

Click below to read Jacoby’s piece:

Jacoby’s piece begins with Marie-Alice Legrand, a Columbia law student “of French Caribbean descent.”  I don’t think she’s Jewish, as the piece doesn’t mention that.  But she grew up with Jews and with  knowledge about pogroms and the Holocaust, and so when she got to Columbia she decided, in the face of campus antisemitism, to found a group to counter Jew hatred. The rest is is the story:

Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in “blatant antisemitism and hate,” as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words “By Any Means Necessary.” A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called “astounding,” “awesome,” and “victories of the resistance.” More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate “military action” against the Jewish state.

The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but “there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends.” She reached out on social media. “You are not alone,” she posted. “I unequivocally support and stand with you.”

She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.

Student groups are ubiquitous at Columbia — the university boasts that there are more than 500 clubs and organizations, at least 85 in the law school alone. Given the surge of venomous anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bigotry, especially among young Americans and in academia, the need for groups like Law Students Against Antisemitism is self-evident.

On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group’s other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.

But not Law Students Against Antisemitism.

Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand’s group be rejected on the grounds that it would “silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic.” It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA]. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia’s campus.

What is that definition? Here it is from the IHRA, which also gives some examples:

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”  

The Globe story continues:

Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

Read the definition again. Wouldn’t you write something similar if you were trying to define hatred of blacks?  And is using that definition of antisemitism likely to “silence pro-Palestinian activists”?  You’d have to be insane to think that; the activists are already out there, very loud and aggressive.  No, the vote of the Law School’s student senate reflects only one thing: an attempt to make Jews and their allies shut up, while approving of groups, like pro-Palestinian ones, giving them all the benefits that come with official approval.  The senate vote was also anonymous, as Popehat reports.

Popehat begins his article with a criticism of those who themselves go after students for generally being censorious and “politically correct”.  Popehat thinks that there is far more danger from government leaders who think “that dissent is illegitimate and un-American” (he uses the GOP and Florida in particular as examples).  And he’s probably right. But you fight fires where you can. So although Popehat’s not one of those who take a dim view of “woke” students, he nevertheless decries what the Columbia law-student senate did.  Click to read his site.

An excerpt:

Now, Columbia Law’s students are perfectly right to be vigilant about attempts to suppress criticism of Israel. Plenty of people of bad faith have been trying to disguise suppression of anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian thought as concern about antisemitism. Colleges have been complicit and sometimes students are the ones advocating suppression.

But Columbia Law’s Student Senate is being fuzzy-headed at best, and acting at bad faith at worst, to say that a student group shouldn’t be approved if its values and viewpoints could lead to censorship if widely accepted, or that its definition of racism is wrong. A newly formed Law Students Against Antisemitism would only be able to add one additional voice — a student voice — into the incendiary debate about Israel. Their definition of antisemitism is subject to critique, like everybody else’s. They would have no official power to enforce it, only the power to associate with each other and speak their views. Their power to argue that some criticism of Israel is antisemitic is no more powerful — and no less a legitimate part of the debate — than Students for Justice In Palestine saying that it isn’t.

I also question whether the supposed logic is sincere. Would the Columbia Law Student Senate deny recognition to, say, the Black Law Students Association, on the basis that students from that group have sometimes called for the punishment of speech they perceive as bigoted? Somehow I think not; nor should they.

So does the Columbia Law Student Senate think that it’s necessary to stop speech to save it? Possibly. It’s the sort of philosophical fatuity that students have always eructed. Realistically, though, it’s more likely that these particular students think that when they don’t agree with speech, it’s legitimate to suppress that speech by any means at their disposal, including official and quasi-official means. It’s more likely that they think they have some kind of right not to be exposed to speech they hate. They see no value in the utterance of things unless they agree with those things, and don’t share the value that they should respond to speech rather than preventing it. I feel no obligation whatsoever to respect that sentiment or the students who hold it, as I’ve made clear before. And I am perfectly capable of regarding them as censorial dipshits while recognizing that they are also mostly insignificant censorial dipshits, compared to our nation’s leaders.

The fact that Columbia Law is private, and not bound by the First Amendment, does not change this analysis. Columbia advertises itself as a haven for free expression. If Columbia law wants to be free for expression that its Student Senate agrees with, maybe it should say that on the package. The belief “there is only one correct way to view the conflict in Gaza and we will not recognize student organizations who disagree” is loathsome and un-American whether or not it violates the First Amendment.

I think the students could do better. In fact I expect it of them. I expect students at one of America’s best law schools to say “I think your definition of antisemitism is overbroad and wrong, but you get to advocate it just like other groups do.” I hope that age and experience will rub the censorial dipshittery off of them. But all of this may mark me as naive. Has the America of this century provided a good example of the value of liberty? Have these students’ local and national leaders modeled a mature and civically responsible approach to encountering speech they don’t like? Likely no.

It’s not only ridiculous to assume that Legrand’s group would silence students in pro-Palestinian groups, but even more ridiculous to reject her group because it espouses a definition of antisemitism that is accepted by the U.S. government and used as a standard to enforce Title VI violations (see page 13 of the Biden-Harris initiative to counter antisemitism). Read the definition again.  Do you think a group formed to fight antisemitism should be rejected because it uses the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism? And does the precise definition even matter so long as it captures the sense of Jew hatred?

Fortunately, Ms. Legrand has guts (from the Globe):

Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was “heartbroken” by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn’t forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.

We’re all on campus now, and the antisemitism spreading among colleges will simply infect the wider population—or hearten hidden antisemites to come into the open. For now there appears to be little penalty for hating Jews.

A new Free Press film: “American miseducation”

January 31, 2024 • 12:00 pm

The Free Press has a new 20-minute film called “American miseducation”, centered on pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses.  Given the pro-Israeli stand of that site, the tenor of this film is not surprising: its thesis is that aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrators are not just anti-Zionist, but largely antisemitic, and on some campuses are intimidating and even attacking Jewish students, who have no “safe space” of their own. (The attack on the Cooper Union library, shown in this film, is an example.)

The film is made by Olivia Reingold, a Free Press staff writer whose bona fides are these:

Olivia Reingold co-created and executive produced Matthew Yglesias’s podcast, “Bad Takes.” She got her start in public radio, regularly appearing on NPR for her reporting on indigenous communities in Montana. She previously produced podcasts at POLITICO, where she shaped conversations with world leaders like Jens Stoltenberg.

And this is her intro to the film:

That was one of 14 pro-Palestinian rallies I’ve attended since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Like the Rockefeller Christmas tree, the activists behind these events consider innocuous institutions to be their enemies: Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Cancer Center, the American Museum of Natural History, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

They insist that their aim is to liberate Palestinians, and that they are not antisemitic. But attend enough of these demonstrations and you’ll start to see the swastikas. Some people have looked me in the eyes and said that Israelis are the new Nazis, the prime minister of Israel is the new Hitler, and Palestinians are the new Jews. Out of the scores of people I’ve spoken to, only two demonstrators told me that Israel has a right to exist.

The word Jew is rarely uttered by these protesters. Instead, people hurl terms like Zionist, settler-colonialist, and occupier. They speak of academic theories like decolonization and intersectionality—concepts many told me they learned at elite institutions like Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.

I decided to go to the source of these ideas: The American campus, where I spoke to scores of anti-Israel activists and dozens of Jewish college students across the country.

I asked: How did an ideology once restricted to the ivory tower come to inspire masses of Americans chanting on behalf of Hamas and Yemeni Houthis? How did Gen Z, the most educated generation in U.S. history, become sympathetic to terrorism? And, most fundamentally, how did our colleges come to abandon the pursuit of truth in pursuit of something far darker?

The result is The Free Press’s first-ever documentary, American Miseducation.

The questions she asks in her last paragraph aren’t really answered, although Critical Theory seems to be a good solution: the oppressor-narrative combined with some undercover anti-Semitism. But the movie poses its own questions.  Is there really a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism?  Should antisemitic or anti-Palestinian speech be deemed hate speech?  Who is being most targeted by campus demonstrations: the pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian students? (I’ve seen both groups claim that they are being oppressed.)  My sympathies have been made clear on this site, but I’ll withhold them for now, for you should just watch this short movie.

After seeing this movie, Malgorzata told me glumly. “The good life for American Jews is coming to an end. . . . they are now more or less in the same situation that German Jews were in after Hitler came to power in 1933.  The antisemitism started slowly, but then grew over time until it became too late escape.”  As to what kind of anti-semitism will grow in America, she said, that cannot be predicted.

The National Secular Society (and the UN) literally erase the Jews from Holocaust Memorial Day

January 27, 2024 • 8:15 am

UPDATE: The NSS says that the hamhanded tweet-changing was done without the society’s usual vetting, with a tweeter panicking and taking out the Jewish part.  They have corrected the tweet now to what’s below, which is what they should have posted in the first place:

**************************

It’s not often that I devote a post to a single tweet, but this one deserves it. It was put up by the British National Secular Society to “commemorate” Holocaust Memorial Day—the day in 1945 when Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army.

Here’s what you see now:

But here’s the original, which I can’t find on the site. . . .

Clearly, the Holocaust, originally described as “the murder of 6 million Jewish children, women, and men” has been replaced simply by “the atrocities”, as noted by the reader below.

Now why on earth would they do that? I can think of only one explanation. Actually two, but the alternative explanation—it’s a “secular” society so it can’t name a religion—doesn’t make sense.

Working hypothesis: the word “Jewish” has become pejorative. Even to the National Secular Society!

 

 

h/t: Jez, Orli

Harvard sued for Title VI violations and antisemitism

January 13, 2024 • 10:50 am

Several Jewish students at Harvard, and an organization called “Students Against Antisemitism” (SAA), have brought suit against Harvard University for its antisemitic behavior.  While the plaintiffs aren’t going after Harvard on First Amendment Grounds (and wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if they tried to), the allegations in their suit involving genuine violations of federal law.

First, Harvard is accused of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says this:

No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

As the suit establishes (click below to read the long 77-page document), Harvard does indeed receive federal monies, most notably through grants to faculty.

Second, the suit asserts that the antisemitic activity at Harvard, involving students, faculty, and off-campus groups, did indeed deny Jewish students the full benefits of an education at the University, as they were intimidated to the point of finding it hard or impossible to study; some were denied access to study spaces by vocal pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel students; some classes included a huge dollop of antisemitic material, including canceling classes so students could go to pro-Palestinian demonstrations (these are invariably anti-Israeli and often antisemitic); and, finally, at least one Jewish student was attacked. This seems to add up to to “discrimination” under Title VI.

Further, and this is shocking, Harvard did little or nothing when Jewish students complained to the administration about the disruption of their education. In response, the administration invariably said, “We’ll look into it and get back to you,” eventually doing nothing. One sees this over and over again in the complaint.

Two more items are singled out. As I’ve discussed before, Harvard did not enforce its speech code uniformly: while mandating punishment for things like “fatphobia,” “ableism”, and “racism” (but not against Jewish students!), they ignored bigoted behaviors that, if directed against blacks instead of Jews, would have been punished. (Harvard does not have a First-Amendment-based speech code, and so it’s been irregular or even hypocritical in enforcing speech “violations.”)

Finally, Harvard allowed its own students (and outside organizations, who aren’t given the same license as registered student organizations), to engage in illegal violations of University rules of conduct, including sit-ins and prohibited demonstrations. In perhaps the most ridiculous demonstration of this kind of hypocrisy, Harvard not only allowed pro-Palestinian demonstrators to illegally occupy a University building, but even bought the demonstrators candy and burritos! (Jews, of course, never got burritos, as they don’t engage in sit-ins.)

As one of my friends wrote me after having read the complaint: “If even a fraction of this is true, the place has become a cesspool.”

I’m afraid he’s right.

I read the entire document, and it’s pretty shocking. You can access it by clicking below. Unlike most lawsuits, it makes pretty absorbing reading, as the degree of antisemitism that Harvard allowed, without punishing prohibited behaviors, is fascinating.  No doubt a lot of this is due to the DEI mentality that infests Harvard (ex-President Gay was infected with DEI-ism), so that Jewish students are perceived as oppressors who aren’t worthy of much protection. But perhaps I was just intrigued because this was where I got my Ph.D., and I was once proud of that (However, going to Harvard was, for me, a complete accident, and some day I’ll tell that story.)

The suit:

The plaintiffs include Students Against Antisemitism (described in the lawsuit as “a not-for-profit corporation organized under the laws of the State of Delaware, formed for the purpose of defending human and civil rights, including the right of individuals to equal protection and to be free from antisemitism in higher education, through litigation and other means”, as well as Alexander Kestenbaum, a Jewish student at Harvard, and five other Jewish students who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

Before I give excerpts from the lawsuit, here’s an article on it from Thursday’s Boston Globe. Click on the headline to see it, though it’s probably paywalled. I give an excerpt below it, but reading the complaint above tells you a lot more.

From the article:

Several graduate and law students at Harvard University filed a federal lawsuit against the Ivy League school this week, accusing the administration of failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment on campus during the Israel-Hamas war.

The 79-page civil complaint, filed Wednesday in US District Court in Boston, alleges that antisemitism at Harvard has become especially “severe and pervasive” after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks against Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, with militants reportedly raping and torturing civilians. Israel retaliated with a bombing campaign and ground invasion that has killed more than 23,000 people in Gaza.

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“Harvard, America’s leading university, has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” the complaint reads.

Only one of the six plaintiffs is named; Divinity School master’s degree candidate Alexander Kestenbaum.

The others are identified as members of Students Against Antisemitism, as is Kestenbaum. The other plaintiffs are enrolled at Harvard Law School and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, according to the complaint.

A Harvard spokesperson said Thursday that the university has no comment “on pending litigation.”

*******************’

Now for the lawsuit. itself.  I’ll give my own brief summaries (flush left) to bits of the suit (indented).

The gist of the complaint:

Harvard, America’s leading university, has become a bastion of rampant antiJewish hatred and harassment. Since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered, tortured, raped, burned, and mutilated 1,200 people—including infants, children, and the elderly—antisemitism at Harvard has been particularly severe and pervasive. Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel. Those mobs have occupied buildings, classrooms, libraries, student lounges, plazas, and study halls, often for days or weeks at a time, promoting violence against Jews and harassing and assaulting them on campus. Jewish students have been attacked on social media, and Harvard faculty members have promulgated antisemitism in their courses and dismissed and intimidated students who object. What is most striking about all of this is Harvard’s abject failure and refusal to lift a finger to Case 1:24-cv-10092 Document 1 Filed 01/10/24 Page 1 of 77 2 stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it.

The prohibited participation of unrecognized student groups in demonstrations:

44. The Student Organization Policies also provide that unrecognized student organizations are not permitted “to conduct any activity at Harvard even though their activities involve Harvard” students, except under “special circumstances,” that Harvard will not provide “access, support, or benefits” to unrecognized student organizations, and that students may not use the “Harvard” name or marks in organizations’ activities without permission from a dean or the provost.

45. Harvard nevertheless regularly permits unrecognized student groups such as Harvard Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (“Harvard BDS”) and Harvard Afro to conduct, while using Harvard’s name, disruptive antisemitic protests inside Harvard buildings and on Harvard grounds without consequence. These unrecognized groups have, in recent months, extensively engaged in discrimination against, and harassment of, Jewish and Israeli students and continue to violate numerous Harvard policies by holding unauthorized events in which they recruit hundreds of students to interrupt classes with calls for “globaliz[ing] the Intifada” and violence against Jews and Israelis, among other disruptive and harassing conduct. Harvard takes no action to prevent these organizations from regularly harassing Jewish and Israeli students in violation of Harvard’s policies.

This also happens at the University of Chicago, in which an unrecognized group called “UChicago United for Palestine” regularly participates in demonstrations and sit-ins, both legal and prohibited. The University doesn’t do anything about it.

Disruption and deplatforming of study groups and classes by pro-Palestinian demonstrators (again, this is prohibited under Harvard University regulations):

63. Harvard Out of Palestine (“HOOP”), another student group, led a relentless campaign against retired Israeli Major General Amos Yadlin, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government (“Harvard Kennedy”). For example, on February 1, 2022, HOOP organized a disruptive rally outside Yadlin’s first study group of the semester. As HOOP posted on its Instagram page, the harassment “continue[d] despite [the study group’s] efforts to change rooms every week.” HOOP also shared a video that showed its members standing in two parallel rows just outside the open door of Yadlin’s classroom, holding large banners and flags, so that anyone entering or exiting would be forced to walk through the gauntlet. The video also depicts protesters chanting and disrupting Yadlin’s discussion with students in the classroom.

64. On April 7, 2022, HOOP marched through campus, including in and out of buildings, banging on drums and using a megaphone to shout further accusations at Yadlin, charging him with personal responsibility for alleged “genocide.” Throughout the semester, Harvard did nothing to prevent HOOP from severely and pervasively harassing Yadlin and his students, notwithstanding, among other policies, Harvard’s Statement on Rights and Responsibilities proscribing such conduct as “unacceptable” violations of Harvard policy.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators storm Harvard Law school in violation of student regulations, terrorizing Jewish students. Cops stand by and do nothing, nor does the administration:

99. During this upheaval, SAA Member #1, SAA Member #2, SAA Member #3, and SAA Member #5 were in a study room on the first floor of Harvard Law’s main building, attending a small discussion session with a former assistant to the president during the Trump administration, Jason Greenblatt. At the session, the students heard drumming outside the study room and found a mob at the entrance to Harvard Law with a giant banner reading “Stop the Genocide in Gaza.” SAA Member #2 watched as HUPD officers observed, but took no action against, the hundreds of protesters, including non-HUID cardholders, who were bypassing card scanners and infiltrating the building. The group stormed Harvard Law’s main building, marched down the length of the building’s primary first-floor hallway, and blocked the hallway outside the study room where the SAA members and Greenblatt were hiding. Fearing a violent attack, students in the study room removed indicia of their Jewishness, such as kippot, or hid under desks.

101. SAA Member #2 emailed Assistant Director of Student Life Jeffrey Sierra after the mob stormed Harvard Law to describe what happened. In two previous meetings with Sierra, she had asked him what could be done to stop the rampant antisemitism on campus and explained its impact on her. In both of these meetings, and in response to her email regarding the October 19 incursion, Sierra directed SAA Member #2 to CAMHS for mental health services and, on several occasions, said he was “not in a position to do more.” When SAA Member #2 asked whom she could contact instead, Sierra said he would speak with more senior administrators, but SAA Member #2 never heard from anyone else about her concerns.

Burritogate!:  In this one, students sitting in and violating the campus code avoid discipline.  Instead of removing the students, the administration allowed them to stay overnight, and the deans brought the trespassing students candy and burritos! It seems that nobody was ever disciplined.

119. The utter inadequacy and clear unreasonableness of Harvard’s response to antisemitism on campus was further exemplified on November 16 and 17 when, for twenty-four hours, students took over University Hall, demanding that “Harvard administrators release a call for a ceasefire in Gaza,” announce that “antisemitism [is] not the same as anti-Zionism,” and “investigate Islamophobia and suppression of pro-Palestine speech on campus.” Rather than eject or otherwise penalize those students, nine hours into the takeover, Dean Khurana and Adams House Faculty Dean Salmaan Keshavjee brought the occupying students burritos and candy. After twelve hours, Dean Khurana gave them the chance to leave without disciplinary action; when the students refused, he allowed them to remain overnight. When questioned at the House Antisemitism Hearing why the deans provided food to unlawful protesters and promised them no consequences, President Gay evaded the question, stating, “where conduct violates our policies . . . we have processes underway.”

122. On November 29, Harvard PSC, Harvard BDS, and Harvard Afro again organized self-proclaimed “disruptive” mass walkouts from classes across campus, targeting major lecture halls to disrupt the largest number of students and took over the Science Center’s classrooms and lobby, among other locations. During their takeover of the Science Center lobby—conduct prohibited by Harvard’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities—protesters surrounded and intimidated Jewish students, using megaphones to shout genocidal antisemitic chants, including “globalize the Intifada,” “long live the Intifada,” “from the river to the sea,” and, in Arabic, “water to water, Palestine will be Arab.”

123. The disruption, like many before it, was led by a student recognized by Jewish students as among the primary instigators of antisemitic abuse on campus, whose presence causes considerable fear and alarm among the Jewish students who live in the same dormitory, Adams House, which he has turned into a base of operations for anti-Jewish activism. Adams House Faculty Dean Keshavjee—who supplied burritos and candy to the University Hall occupiers—has done nothing to ameliorate the situation.

Harvard cancels festival that partly celebrated Judaism, fails to stop students from disrupting a Divinity School event:

125. On December 6, rather than prevent protesters from disrupting Harvard Divinity’s Seasons of Light celebration that evening—a “beloved annual multireligious service” and Harvard Divinity’s only annual event that includes a celebration of the Jewish faith—Harvard canceled it. That same day, Harvard GS4P students took over Harvard Divinity’s “Holiday Tea,” interrupting the Harvard administrators, faculty, staff, and students who had gathered there by unfurling a large banner alleging “genocide in Gaza,” yelling about a “Zionist genocidal campaign,” shrieking “there can be no peace without justice,” “free, free Palestine,” and “shame!” The Harvard administrators did nothing to stop the students. Kestenbaum, who was present, emailed the Antisemitism Advisory Group to report this blatant violation of Harvard policy—which occurred after President Gay publicly declared that Harvard would discipline this type of violation—but has not received a response.

Harvard asks students to remove an outside menorah at night instead of the campus police protecting it. The University allows a banned protest at Widener Library. 

126. Rather than take steps to protect Jewish students, Harvard has thus required that they limit or conceal their activities. For example, as Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi revealed, Harvard requires that he remove the Chabad Hanukkah menorah from the campus at night so that it would not be vandalized. Rather than ensuring the safety and success of the Case 1:24-cv-10092 Document 1 Filed 01/10/24 Page 46 of 77 47 Seasons of Light celebration and making it unequivocally clear that vandalizing the menorah was unacceptable and would be met with harsh punishment, Harvard addresses antisemitism by canceling events that include celebrations of Jewish culture and warning celebrants to hide Jewish symbols.

127. At the same time Jewish students were being cautioned by Harvard to abandon or conceal their identity, students celebrating the October 7 massacre and advocating death to Israelis and Jews were free to do so on campus and over social media, not deterred or punished by Harvard in any way. On December 10, 2023, during final exam week, Harvard PSC, Harvard BDS, and Harvard Afro oversaw a disruptive, aggressive, flag- and banner-waving takeover of Harvard’s Widener Library, and then marched to Massachusetts Hall, where students chanted “from the river to the sea.” Kestenbaum had intended to study at Widener but abandoned his plan, as he was concerned that his religious clothing would make him a target for abuse or violence. Harvard took no action to stop the Widener protest or discipline the students or organizations that participated in it.

Professors allow students to leave class to attend a general anti-Israel strike “in solidarity”:

136. On October 20, Professor Clio Takas emailed her students stating, “[a]s many of you know, [Harvard PSC] and [Harvard GS4P] are organizing a class walk-out and general strike . . . . I have decided to cancel section today in solidarity.” Similarly, Harvard Public Health Professor Nancy Krieger accommodated students who wanted to participate in the October 20 global strike by permitting the vast majority of students to leave class to protest. Krieger then excused the remaining seven (which included several Jewish students) and asked them to return along with the protesting students at noon. As it turned out, Krieger and the protesting students returned to the classroom some forty minutes earlier than the professor had said class would resume and, in the absence of the Jewish students, Krieger resumed her lecture.

And a section on hypocrisy taken from the lawsuit:

Harvard Only Embraces Free Expression Principles When It Can Use Them to Protect and Permit Antisemitic Harassment

154. At the heart of Harvard’s double standard is its discriminatory application of free expression and other principles. Harvard’s campus is a safe space for students of all protected minority groups other than Jews.

155. Harvard’s invocation of free expression principles to justify permitting antisemitic harassment is both hypocritical and false, especially given that Harvard is ranked dead last on free speech, ranked “abysmal,” out of the 248 colleges assessed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard protects speech only when it espouses positions Harvard supports and prohibits speech adverse to the interests of other groups Harvard deems worthy of protection. Harvard’s double standard is apparent when one compares Harvard’s failure to discipline anti-Jewish harassment with its warning to freshmen—during the Title IX training— that “sizeism,” “fatphobia,” “cisheterosexism,” “racism,” “transphobia,” “ageism,” and “ableism” are prohibited because they “contribute to an environment that perpetrates violence.”

156. Harvard also has no problem censoring controversial speakers or discussions— unless they espouse antisemitic views, in which case Harvard insists it is obligated to permit them on free expression grounds. In 2021, for example, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences canceled a course on a policing strategy involving military tactics after student organizations expressed concerns about the subject matter. And in 2022, the Harvard English Department disinvited Dr. Devin Buckley from speaking on campus because she is on the board of an organization that opposes incarcerating biological males with biological females or permitting them to participate in women’s sports. But, as alleged above, Harvard readily permitted El-Kurd and Hill to appear on campus spewing anti-Jewish rhetoric, Holocaust denial, and calls for Israel’s extermination.

Below is the relief that the suit is asking for.  I have no idea whether the plaintiffs will win, but the document, if it allegations are true, makes a compelling case against Harvard.  What bothers me most as an alum is the University’s abject failure to do anything about the Jewish students’ complaints. Even Claudine Gay was guilty of that non-responsiveness. Right now, Harvard looks pretty bad.

If this suit goes through—and it could be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court—Harvard could no longer violate Title VI. In practice, that means that they’d have to enforce campus rules about demonstrations, and would have to be evenhanded in enforcing the University speech code. Fingers crossed.

The BBC and its Hollywood movie erase the words “Jew” and “Jewish” from the story of Nicholas Winton, a hero who saved Jewish children from the Nazis

January 10, 2024 • 9:40 am

The story of Nicholas Winton (1909-2015) is about as heartwarming as it gets, but also has, as I’ll claim, a double overtone of sadness. Born in London in 1909 to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Germany, Winton was a broker and stockbroker, but in 1938 moved to Prague to work with the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. (The country was at that time already occupied by the Nazis).  And he became a man on a mission: to save Jewish children from falling into the hands of the Nazis.  It was tough, and he had to get the kids through the Netherlands, where they could board a ship to England.

In the end Winton saved 669 children, nearly all of them Jewish, though, sadly, their parents remained in Europe because only children younger than 17 could be rescued. Nearly all their parents later died in the camps or ghettos.  Here’s the account from Wikipedia.

Alongside the Czechoslovak Refugee Committee, the British and Canadian volunteers such as Winton, Trevor Chadwick, and Beatrice Wellington worked in organising to aid children from Jewish families at risk from the Nazis.Many of them set up their office at a dining room table in a hotel in Wenceslas Square. Altogether, Winton spent one month in Prague and left in January 1939, six weeks before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Other foreign volunteers remained, such as Chadwick, Warriner and Wellington. In November 1938, following Kristallnacht in Nazi-ruled Germany, the House of Commons approved a measure to allow the entry into Britain of refugees younger than 17, provided they had a place to stay and a warranty of £50 (equivalent to £3,397 in 2021) was deposited per person for their eventual return to their own country.

Netherlands

An important obstacle was getting official permission to cross into the Netherlands, as the children were to embark on the ferry at Hook of Holland. Following Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Dutch government officially closed its borders to any Jewish refugees. The Royal Netherlands Marechaussee searched for them and returned any found to Germany, despite the horrors of Kristallnacht being well known

Winton succeeded, thanks to the guarantees he had obtained from Britain. Following the first train, the process of crossing the Netherlands went smoothly. Winton ultimately found homes in Britain for 669 children, many of whose parents perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother worked with him to place the children in homes and later hostels.Throughout the summer of 1939, he placed photographs of the children in Picture Post seeking families to accept them. By coincidence, the names of the London and North Eastern Railway steamers which operated the Harwich to Hook of Holland route included the Prague and the Vienna; the former can be seen in a 1938 Pathé Newsreel.

Back in Britain, Winton lived to the ripe old age of 106, and the children he saved had become middle-aged.  Many of them, unknown to him, were in the audience during a 1988 episode of the BBC show “That’s Life”. At that time Winton was 79.  He knew the show was celebrating his life, but had no idea that the audience consisted not only of the children he saved (now grown up) but of their own children and grandchildren. When they stood up to identify themselves, seen in the clip below, the magnitude of what he’d done became clear, and he wept.  I always do, too, when I see this video. I challenge you not to mist up when you watch this!:

Winton was modest and didn’t flaunt his achievements. In fact, they were unknown to his wife, who discovered them only when she found a scrapbook in their attic with the names of the children and of their parents.  She gave the scrapbook to a Holocaust researcher, who tracked down many of the children, finding 80 of them in Britain.  Many of them are in the video above. The rest is history.

Winton eventually accrued the honors he deserved, and got a knighthood in 2003 for “services to humanity, in saving Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia”.

As the old Jewish proverb goes, attributed to Hillel the Elder, “Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world.”  I interpret this to mean that “the entire world” refers to the world apprehended by the person who lives or dies. (I often think of this when saving ducklings.) Well, Winton saved 669 entire worlds, and that’s something to marvel at.

Recently the BBC made a movie about Winton, using the title “One Life” taken from the proverb above. It stars Anthony Hopkins as Winton—an excellent choice—and has been critically acclaimed,  garnering a 89% critics’ rating and a 96% public rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Well worth seeing, I’d think. (It also features Helena Bonham Carter and Lena Olin.)

But watch this 2-minute trailer, which includes a version of the scene above. But you may notice that one thing is missing: the trailer doesn’t use the words “Jew” or “Jewish.” They say “the children” and refer to them several times, but you’d have no idea from this trailer that they were Jewish children. The only sign of what’s happening is one scene in which there are a few Nazi flags.

Is this omission an accident?  I tried to convince myself that it was, but after seeing the video and reading the articles below, I decided that it was no accident. They left “Jewish” out because they thought it might turn off the prospective audience. (Of course, once the audience has their butts in the theater, the movie can use the word more often.) But I’m not sure how often they use it. Can you imagine “Schindler’s List” having a trailer that doesn’t use the word “Jew”? It is, after all, about another man who saved Jews. (Winton is often called “The British Schindler”). And sure enough, it does: it mentions the word several times and shows lots of people wearing yellow stars, a Jewish wedding, and other tropes.  What’s going on is very clear. Things sure have changed in the last thirty years (“Schindler’s List was released in 1993.)

Now, what about “One Life?” Here’s “Israeli filmmaker, director, and activist Yuval David [speaking] about the antisemitic environment in Hollywood and the purging of Jewish references in marketing of ‘One Life.’” David, who knows what he’s talking about, has absolutely no doubt that the omission was deliberate, engineered by the progressive ideology that pervades Hollywood (I’m starting to wonder if “Jew” or “Jewish” even appears in the film!). Have a look:

And below is an article from the popular entertainment magazine Variety that discusses how, in the movie’s promotion, they omitted mentioning the religion of the children who were saved, which of course is why they had to be saved.  Click the headline to read.  And here’s an excerpt from that piece about how they erased “Jewish” from the marketing materials, using instead the words “Central European.” That is shameful:

The marketing materials for Anthony Hopkins latest feature film, a Holocaust biopic titled “One Life,” are set to be amended after controversy ensued over the lack of reference to Jews.

“One Life” tells the story of Nicholas Winton (played by Hopkins), better known as the British Oscar Schindler. Winton helped save the lives of over 600 children – the majority of them Jewish – from the Nazis during World War II.

But there has been disquiet over marketing for the movie after it was claimed Jews had been erased from the synopsis.

The furore started after British media retailer HMV tweeted about the film and referred to the children saved by Winton as “Central European” rather than Jewish. A number of independent cinemas also used the term “Central European” instead of “Jewish” while describing the film on their websites. [JAC: This makes no sense: children who were “Central European” but not Jewish weren’t usually endangered.]

See-Saw Films, who produced “One Life,” and Warner Bros. Pictures., who are distributing it in the U.K., subsequently also came under fire for omitting the word “Jewish” from their marketing materials when describing the children saved by Winton, although they did not use “Central European.”

Warner Bros. in the U.K. declined to comment but Variety understands that following the criticism all Warner’s official marketing for the film will be amended to describe the children as “predominantly Jewish,” which reflects the fact that while most of the 600+ Czechoslovakian children were Jewish, a handful of them were non-Jewish political refugees.

Click:

At least they fixed the materials, but it’s clear that they left Judaism out of the materials on purpose. It’s the progressive Zeitgeist: Jews aren’t exactly the world’s most popular group.

The BBC itself, however, continues to omit any mention of Jews in its article below (click to read). There is not a single mention that the children were Jewish, which of course drives the whole movie. In case the BBC has a social-media promoted “change of heart,” you can find the original BBC article archived here.

Click to read:

I’ve put the entire text of this article below the fold, and you can do a search for “Jew” or “Jewish”. You won’t find it.  That has to be a deliberate omission, for the reason the kids were saved simply must be part of the story. 

Finally, there was a series of tweets about whether the BBC used the word “Jewish” in stores about the Holocaust. Their score: 50% (2 out of 4). Given the history of the BBC’s antisemitism, I call the omission deliberate, especially for the Winton movie. And, as you saw, I’m not alone,

Here are the tweets. Reader Jez says this about the first Tweeter:

Cath Leng, whose tweet alerted me to it, is a former BBC employee herself. She just posted a piece about how the BBC broadcast an unbalanced piece about the man who won a recent women’s pool competition – the woman he was going to face in the final politely declined to take part, forfeiting the prize. The BBC didn’t even interview her, and just focused on the man’s feelings.

As Vonnegut said, so it goes.

h/t: Jez, Malgorzata

Click “continue reading” to see the BBC story:

Continue reading “The BBC and its Hollywood movie erase the words “Jew” and “Jewish” from the story of Nicholas Winton, a hero who saved Jewish children from the Nazis” →

Pro-Palestinian protestors demonstrate illegally, cops do nothing; kids learn antisemitic slogans in Philadelphia

January 7, 2024 • 11:10 am

All over the Western world, aggressive pro-Palestinian protestors are breaking the law, blocking traffic and shouting slogans. Yes, this is a form of civil disobedience, but it differs from the classic civil disobedience of the civil rights movement of the Sixties—a movement that was actually effective—in three ways.  First, the pro-Palestinian protestors do not want to get arrested, and certainly don’t want to get hurt, but that was the explicit aim of Martin Luther King’s nonviolent protests. For it was the sight of peaceful protestors having police dogs attack them, getting bashed with billy clubs, and being drenched with fire hoses, that outraged the world and eventually bent the moral arc towards justice.

Second, the pro-Palestinian protestors break the law by deliberately inconveniencing people by blocking traffic—a tactic that won’t make anybody sympathetic towards them, either on the scene or watching their antics from afar. In contrast, the civil rights protestors marched peacefully alongside the road, sat in at lunch counters, or tried to get black people to vote—tactics that outraged racists but didn’t inconvenience anyone.  As far as I can see, these pro-Palestinian demonstrations are attempts to intimidate people by being loud, aggressive, and shouting threatening slogans (The well known “From the river to the sea. . . ” chant was always intended to call for the end of Israel and the expulsion and/or death of Jews. The “river to the sea” phrase is in fact in the original charter of Hamas.)

Third, in many of these pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the police stand by and allow the protestors to demonstrate illegally, often blocking traffic.  In one case, below, the cops even brought coffee to the protestors! (Granted, the movement paid for it, but, like employees of Uber Eats, the cops had to carry it from Tim Horton’s over a blocked bridge to the bawling keffiyeh-clad miscreants.)

Here’s one in Seattle (sound up). Cops do nothing.

Here they block the airport in Portland. (I don’t endorse the opening cartoon, which immediately segues into the video):

Below is the kicker: Toronto cops bring Tim Horton’s hot coffee (and it looks like donuts, too!) to the pro-Palestinian protestors.  The cops act are acting like Saint Bernard dogs and of course do nothing to break up an illegal demonstration.

Here’s an article from Canada’s conservative National Post about the reaction to the cops acting as waiters. Click to read:

An excerpt:

Facing mounting criticism for an alleged tolerance of a series of road-closing anti-Israel protests, Toronto police members have sparked renewed outrage thanks to a video showing them delivering coffee to said protestors.

Posted to social media platform ‘X’ at 2 p.m. on Saturday by Toronto lawyer and online commentator Caryma Sa’d, the video shows a Toronto police constable — his face concealed behind a black neck gaiter — delivering a cardboard urn of Tim Hortons coffee and a stack of cups — to anti-Israel protestors occupying the closed Avenue Road bridge over Highway 401.

The bridge, located within Toronto’s largest Jewish area, was the site of numerous demonstrations by anti-Israel activists.

That prompted Toronto police to close the bridge during the protests, prompting criticism of police kowtowing to protestors over enforcing the law.

Toronto police tweeted at 1:16 p.m. on Saturday that the bridge would against be closed, and that officers would be on scene to “keep demonstrators and passing traffic safe.”

When questioned by Sa’d’s videographer, the protestor who received the coffee said that somebody had bought the coffee for them, but were unable to bring it to the bridge protestors as police were restricting access.

“The police are becoming our little messengers,” said the grinning man wearing black jacket and keffiyeh.

. . .The National Post reached out to Toronto police for comment, but spokesperson Const. Laurie McCann told the Toronto Sun that officers at the scene of the protest were “managing a dynamic situation,” and insisted that the gesture wasn’t a sign of support.

“Their top priority is maintaining order in a tense environment on the Avenue Road bridge,” she said. “In performing a helpful act today, our officer’s motivation was to help keep tensions low and should not be interpreted as showing support for any cause or group.”

Sorry, but that doesn’t wash. The cops should be enforcing the law, and someone must have given them orders not to. Such is Justin Trudeau’s new Woke Canada. One more excerpt and a tweet:

Liberal MP Marco Mendicino — whose Eglinton-Lawrence riding is home to these ongoing anti-Israel protests — urged police to start enforcing the law.

“Good intentions aside, police serving coffee and food to protestors will just embolden more deliberate obstruction of traffic, undermine public safety, and add to local frustrations,” he posted on X.

“Laws exist to prevent this. They need to be enforced!”

Right on, Mendocino!

I asked a Canadian friend about this situation, and here’s the reply:

I tend to agree with the politicians that say the cops need to enforce the law. I compare this to protests in British Columbia by people stopping clear-cutting of old growth forest. There, the federal cops (the Mounties) violently arrested people, sprayed them right in the face with pepper spray when they were being peaceful, dumped out their water so they had nothing to drink. It goes on. I have seen some of this happen with indigenous protests but that is because there is a history where indigenous people have been killed unjustifiably and the cops are now extra careful. This, I think, is a bit much and I’m frankly tired of all the coddling of these protestors. My Jewish friends in Toronto are pretty sick of it and feel unsafe.

Oh, but it’s fine when those who feel unsafe are merely Jews! Note that the Mounties actually took drinks away from the protestors. 

Below is a recent protest in London in which the protestors are pro-Houthi, which is worse than being pro-Palestinian, as the Houthis are a purely terrorist group now trying to block all ship traffic (and not just Israeli or American ships) in the Red Sea.  Yes, they’re anti-Semitic, but who cares about a bunch of Jews?

I don’t know if this demonstration is illegal, or whether, if so, the cops tried to stop it. They’re not doing that here, at any rate. “Yemen, Yemen make us proud; how many ships have you turned around?” Oy gewalt!

And this is a clearly illegal demonstration in my own town, with pro-Palestinian protestors blocking Lake Shore Drive, close to where I live. The cops did nothing. What’s worse, this happened after some prominent Illinois Democrats for whom I voted, like Senator Dick Durbin, helped raise funds for CAIR (the Council on American-Islamic relations), an Islamist organization that was designated as a terrorist group by the UAE.

From Wikipedia:

The White House disavowed CAIR on December 7, 2023, after the director Nihad Awad said in a speech “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege, the walls of the concentration camp, on Oct. 7,” he said. “And yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege…” he continued “And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves, and yes, Israel as an occupying power does not have that right to self-defense,” referring to the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.

And this is the worst one, though not a protest. It is a video of Muslim children in Philadelphia being indoctrinated in martyrdom (Jew killing) and Jew hatred, just like their young counterparts in Palestine. (MEMRI is a very reliable source.) Sound up, though there are English subtitles.

What chance do these kids have? They’ve already been propagandized to hate and approve of killing.

h/t Orli