Some 2022 antisemitic incidents you haven't heard about

The ADL keeps a database of extremist incidents, including antisemitic incidents. They list over 1700 so far for this year. I have been looking though their list for 2022, specifically incidents that mention Israel.

Here are only a few of them:

January, Brooklyn NY: Graffiti that read, "Kill Israel and the Jews" was found on the campus of a middle school.

January, Mountain View CO: In response to a Jewish middle school student's presentation on the Holocaust, the teacher harassed the student about the creation and policies of the State of Israel.

January, Seattle WA: The message "It's okay to be a Zionist genocider" was found spray-painted across the Jewish Family Service.

February, Buffalo NY: An antisemitic flier was posted on the campus of the University of Buffalo. The flier depicted Robert and John F. Kennedy with Stars of David etched over their faces, and the words, "Israel and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers."

February, University City MO: In a social media post, a campus Birthright program was the target of an anti-Zionist campaign comparing them to Patriot Front, a White Supremacist organization. The campaign strongly suggested that, like the Patriot Front, the Birthright program should not be allowed on campus and the post included the call "Death to all Settler Colonialism!"

March, Storrs CT: A Jewish college student was the target of antisemitic harassment and removal from a campus community group for their pro-Israel activism.

April, New Brunswick NJ: The Israel Fellow for the University of Rutgers Hillel received multiple antisemitic Instagram comments in response to a video they posted regarding the recent terror attack in Israel. One comment read, "die jews die."

May, Santa Barbara CA: "Zionist the evil Jews have got to go" was written in chalk by a bus stop.

May, Champaign IL: "Death to Israel" and "Israelis kill children" was written in chalk on a college campus.

July, Lakewood CO: A Jewish person was approached by an unknown individual on the street who said, "The Zionists will burn."

July, Boulder CO: "ZIONIST SEX PREDITAR (sic) AREA!" was found written in chalk on a sidewalk.

August, Miami FL: A Jewish institution received a threatening phone call in which the caller threatened violence against the Jewish community on behalf of his "Palestinian Wife" in relation to events in Israel. The caller threatened to cut off the heads of Jewish people.

August, Brooklyn NY: Graffiti said that said, "Antisemitism was invented by a Zionist," "Zionism is Anti Semitism (sic) and "Antisemitism is overrated" was found on a train platform.

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11/14 Links Pt2: Israel Deserves Better than the NYTs Prophet of Doom; Chappelle and normalizing black antisemitism; CNN Producer Tweeted ‘#TeamHitler,’ Hamas Terrorists ‘Freedom Fighters’

From Ian:

Braving bigotry and enemy fire, Jews served the Union valiantly during the Civil War

Sgt. Leopold Karpeles had a dangerous job. Serving in the 57th Massachusetts Infantry’s E Company during the American Civil War, he was a color bearer, which meant carrying a flag that identified his unit’s position — a necessary role, but one that invariably drew attention from the enemy. In May 1864, his actions won him the Medal of Honor — a decoration created during the conflict. His citation credited him with encouraging fleeing men to reform ranks and drive back the Confederates during the Battle of the Wilderness in northern Virginia.

Karpeles’s story was one of the more prominent accounts of Jews in the US Army during the Civil War. A new book, “Jewish Soldiers in the Civil War: The Union Army,” by Adam D. Mendelsohn, director of the Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Cape Town, explores the wider narrative around Jews serving in America’s bloodiest conflict. Its release is scheduled for November 15, just a few days after Veterans Day.

“Individual cases obviously gave life and color,” Mendelsohn told The Times of Israel, including when it came to “their decision to enlist, their experience in the army — which was not an easy one, particularly for Jews.”

On the battlefield, there was deadly combat and fear, including the terror Karpeles experienced in Virginia. Jews in uniform also faced ignorance, antisemitism or both from fellow servicemembers and higher-ups. Notoriously, in General Orders No. 11, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant expelled Jews as a class from the war department he commanded in the American South in December 1862.

“Clearly, in the senior ranks of the army, we see in [William T.] Sherman, Grant, [Benjamin] Butler, others, echoing views current in American society at the time of Jewish speculators and shirkers, profiting at the expense of the Union,” Mendelsohn said. “All these things ultimately came to a head in Grant’s order.”

Yet there were also interfaith friendships formed through mutual dependence during wartime.

“What I sensed in the data was the nature of comradeship,” Mendelsohn said. “Serving alongside each other, the experience of fighting together, does bring down the barriers.”

After the war, many Jews joined a nationwide veterans movement called the Grand Army of the Republic, with some even taking leadership roles. While the book states that Jewish veterans were largely unrecognized immediately after the war out of a national desire to move on, this changed several decades later. In the 1890s, the Hebrew Union Veterans Association was established amid a wave of antisemitism sweeping the nation.

The antisemitic history of the Union Army and the US civil war - opinion

The contractor, smuggler, speculator and shirker, however, were more than just figures of scorn. Jews and other “shoddy aristocrats” came to be seen as the creators and beneficiaries of the new economic and social order produced by the war. This “shoddy aristocracy” — whose morals and manners marked them as undesirable, whose profits were ill gained, and whose power derived from money alone — was imagined to lord it over a new and unjust social heap summoned into being by the chaos and disruption of war.

Even as the heated rhetoric of the war years receded after 1865, these ideas remained primed for action. They were returned to service in the Gilded Age.

It was no coincidence that the episode traditionally identified as initiating modern antisemitism in America — the exclusion of Joseph Seligman by Henry Hilton from the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs on May 31, 1877 — had at its center a man who had made a fortune as a contractor and banker during the Civil War. Seligman, a friend of President Grant, was viewed as an exemplar of the new capitalism that was remaking America.

Henry Hilton slandered Seligman as “shoddy—false—squeezing—unmanly,” a social climber who “has to push himself upon the polite.” Hilton drew upon themes familiar from wartime antisemitism: the Jew as speculator who trafficked in credit and debt; the Jew as obsequious ingratiator who attached himself to the powerful; the Jew as profiteer who advanced by improper means; the Jew as vulgarian who flaunted his (and her) obscene wealth and did not know his (or her) place; and the Jew as overlord whose money allowed him (or her) to displace others. In short, the “Seligman Jew” was the “shoddy aristocrat” by another name.

In an age of inequality and excess, the antisemite imagined the Jew as embodying all that was wrong with American capitalism. And during an age of mass immigration from Romania and the Russian Empire, they soon added another theme familiar from General Butler’s wartime diatribe: The Jew could not be trusted to become fully American.

Sadly, even as Louis Gratz, Max Glass and many other Jewish soldiers became American by serving in the Union army, the Civil War produced a range of pernicious ideas about Jews that have proven remarkably durable. We have escaped the everyday torments that afflicted Max Glass, but are still haunted in the present by the fantasies of Benjamin Butler and Henry Hilton.

A review of 'Woke Antisemitism', by David Bernstein

The American linguist and political commentator John McWhorter coined the term Woke Racism to refer to the latest wave of elite, radical, ‘anti-racist’ campaigners who posit that racism is so deeply embedded in the fabric of American life that it’s impervious to traditional civil rights and anti-racist legislation.

In order to level the playing field, liberal democratic systems of government – which aren’t up to the Utopian task of achieving perfect racial parity – must be radically re-constituted to allow for what Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How To Be An Anti-Racist”, refers to un-ironically as “anti-racist discrimination” against groups who are ‘disproportionately successful’.

The only thing that matters to such campaigners is the racial disparity in economic and social outcomes, which is viewed as sufficient evidence to demonstrate racism. Not only are all other possible factors for unequal results ignored, but it’s considered racist to even consider other explanations.

Thus, “privileged” whites and those labeled as “white adjacent” must accept a future where they will face ‘progressive bigotry’ until there’s complete racial parity in all areas of life.

Though the proponents of this Woke Racism typically focus only on the Black-White paradigm, the question of where Jews (and other successful, yet historically disadvantaged minorities) stand within this racial binary is rarely prominent within the public discourse.

Jason D. Greenblatt: Israel Deserves Better than the New York Times' Prophet of Doom

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote last week that in the new Israeli government coalition, Benjamin Netanyahu will soon preside over a parade of right-wing horribles whose very existence dooms Israel itself. Friedman then makes a giant leap of logic to suggest that if Jews in America share his distaste for two members of the new Israeli government, they will turn their backs on Israel once and for all. Apparently, these days, members of the Israeli government must pass muster not just with Israeli voters but also with newspaper columnists like Friedman - when in fact Israel, like the U.S., gets to choose its own leaders through free and fair elections.

Friedman claims that Arab countries entered the Abraham Accords only because "they wanted to trade with Israel." First, there's nothing wrong with that. And second, the Arab nations made peace with Israel because they're tired of pointless, expensive hostilities and because they recognize a common enemy in Iran. Friedman ought to have more respect for the courageous Arab governments that normalized their relations with Israel, and for those who may have quietly supported it from behind closed doors.

I abhor Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' anti-American comments, his payments to Palestinians to reward them for harming and murdering Israelis, and his comments about the Holocaust - yet I would still work with Palestinians and their leaders to try to improve their lives and seek peace between them and Israel. We don't burn everything down just because we disagree, however strongly, with the views of some of those in power.

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11/09 Links Pt2: The Jewish Studies Professors Who Traffic in Antisemitism‘; Thomas Friedman: Equal-opportunity Israel-basher; Chilling, newly discovered photos show Nazi Kristallnacht up close

From Ian:

The Jewish Studies Professors Who Traffic in Antisemitism

What is particularly disturbing is the fact that Jewish studies scholars have no compunction in deploying antisemitic tropes to further their agenda. Myers and Sokatch write: “The apparent return of Benjamin Netanyahu to power in Israel is a gut punch to people concerned about the state of democracy and the rule of law in the world. Netanyahu has been a key pillar in the global movement of illiberal leaders who have taken control and altered the rules of the democratic game—including in Turkey, Hungary and the United States in the Trump era.” While at first glance such a statement may seem little more than an anti-Netanyahu screed for his dictatorial propensities and underhanded machinations (which to be fair, is not unreasonable), a closer reading of this op-ed’s opening salvo reveals its perniciousness, the antisemitic trope embedded in their choice of words. Suggesting that Israel is a “key pillar” in a “global movement” to subvert democracy implies that the tiny Jewish state exerts disproportionate power in world affairs and it is exercising such power through collusion with actors who seek to enshrine white supremacy (or a local variation of fascism) in their own domains. Interestingly enough, they do not impugn Russia, China, Saudi Arabia or Iran, who are regional hegemons, in a manner that little Israel could never be, except in the minds of those who have read the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The wording is subtle yet clear, hiding in plain sight, echoing fantasies of Jewish power that have led to unimaginable violence against Jews in modern history.

Less subtle is the use by some Jewish studies scholars of the term “Jewish supremacy.” Professor Joshua Shanes of the College of Charleston has repeatedly used it in his op-eds and public Facebook posts. Although he is applying this phrase to the land “between the River and the Sea” and not to any global Jewish conspiracy, the very construction of this locution is antisemitic, insofar as it was a staple piece of Nazism and continues to be used by David Duke and others today (I invite readers to Google “Jewish Supremacy” and examine the results). “Jewish supremacy” is idiomatic and by definition it evokes images of the racial war between the Jews and Western civilization forewarned by Wilhelm Marr, Houston Steward Chamberlin and, of course, Adolf Hitler. However oppressive Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the stateless Palestinians may be, using this slogan to describe it is irresponsible and endangers the security of diaspora Jewry.

What’s even worse is that uttering “Jewish supremacy” today inexorably leads one to think of “white supremacy.” This is no accident, insofar as the Jewish people have been branded as white adjacent and even “hyper-white,” enjoying all the benefits of (and complicity in) whiteness while simultaneously claiming to be an oppressed minority. The centering of the Palestinians as the universal victim in the social justice movement has necessarily led to the branding of the Jews as a global oppressor. Paradoxically, “Jewish supremacy” marks the Jew as a racial scourge upon the world in addition to being an extension of the white European imperialists who not only enslaved Africans and decimated Native Americans but also committed history’s most systematic genocide against these very same Jewish people.

Myers and Shanes are professors of Jewish studies. They have written and taught extensively on the history of antisemitism. They cannot but know that their choice of words is pleasing to the ears of antisemites, all across the political spectrum. The people who hate the Jews, whether attendees at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville or eminent academics like Marc Lamont Hill who celebrate Palestinian terrorists, yearn for confirmation of their fantasies of Jewish power. For if the leading Jewish experts insist that the world’s only Jewish state is a key pillar in the global campaign to subvert democracy in order to institute Jewish supremacy at home, then their fantasies cease to be illusions, and their struggle against us becomes defensible. As such, liquidating “Jewish power” becomes a matter of ethical urgency.

‘Arab Jew’ is another manifestation of Arab denial

The Juifs d ‘Orient: une histoire plurimillenaire exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris earlier in 2022 broke with conventional taboos and commendably illustrated Jewish history and culture in their own right, although the Arab antisemitism that precipitated the Jewish exodus was glossed over – presumably so as not to upset the IMA’s Arab funders. At the time, an open letter from a group of Arab intellectuals and artists objected to Israel ‘usurping Arab-Jewish culture’ for the purposes of the exhibition. Elie Beressi and Noémie Issan-Benchimol writing in K. magazine take issue with the expression ‘Arab Jew’ beloved of the letter-writers, which reduces the Jews to a subset of Arab identity (with thanks: JIMENA and Edna):

Starting with the Nahḍa, the Arab renaissance of the nineteenth century, and under the influence of European nationalist ideas being imported the former Ottoman Empire, Arab identity was to be constructed as a national category, including Christians, but excluding Jews, despite the important contribution of the latter to the intelligentsia and state apparatus, particularly in Iraq, Egypt and Morocco[6].

This is why it is appropriate to question the use of the expression “Arab Jews” by Arab intellectuals and artists. How can we interpret this a posteriori recognition of the Arabness of these Jewish populations, after they have left the Arab territories, after having ceased to be an important element of Arab societies? The general rhetoric of the above mentioned open letter gives us the answer. In the expression Arab Jews, the function of the adjective is to abolish the nature of the noun Jew, to make it only a facet of the real subject, the Arab subject. Less than a Jewish-Arab culture, there would in fact be only a “Jewish component of the Arab culture“. The Jews are not a reality in their own right, but a part of the Arab heritage. Consequently, it is only possible to talk about them in terms approved by the Arab intelligentsia, and this is precisely what the IMA exhibition does not do, as it gives the floor to Jews from Arab countries, but not the “good” ones according to Elias Khoury, who puts forward an Israeli anti-Zionist academic, Ella Shohat. Born in Israel in 1959 to Iraqi Jewish parents, professor of Cultural Studies at New York University – author of “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims”. Social Text (1988) – Shohat sees the category “mizrahim” as a Zionist artifice to uproot Jews in Arab countries from their Arabness in favour of a uniquely Jewish identity, which she sees as being contrived, with a purpose to enlist them in the oppression of the Palestinian people. For her, the Mizrahim category is constructed in mirror image of the Ashkenazim category and is imbued with the negative archetypes linked to Orientalist representations.

These theses of Shohat are perhaps worth considering, but her claims to define Arab identity as the only authentic identity of the Mizraḥim and the irreducible opposition she portrays between this Arabness and Zionism as well as the claim of the Jews to self-define themselves as a people distinct from Europeans and Arabs, are nonetheless very objectionable.

How did Medieval Jewish Tombstones End Up in an Italian Monument?

In 1960, the Italian city of Ferrara undertook the renovation of the columns that flank the entrance to the ducal palace—which are among the city’s most important architectural landmarks. Workers soon discovered that one of the columns had been constructed using 36 fragments of local Jewish tombstones from the 16th and 17th centuries. Henry Abramson writes:
A noted patron of the arts, [the 15th-century duke Borso D’Este] and his immediate successors also made Ferrara a haven for Jews, especially those expelled from Spain and refugees from the Inquisition in Italian territories to the south. Under the House of Este, Jewish life flourished in Ferrara 1598, when the Papal States exerted control over the northern Italian city. The Jewish badge was instituted shortly thereafter, and Ferrarese Jews who once lived and worked throughout the city found themselves shut in the confines of yet another ghetto.

The column was first erected in the 1450s, and it had stood for over 200 years before it was heavily damaged by a fire on December 23, 1716. A chronicler of the period, Nicolò Baruffaldi, mentions that Marquis Francesco Sacrati secured the stones from the Jewish graveyards, “paying in full for their value to the masters of the ghetto.” It is highly unlikely that the Jewish community would have willingly surrendered the gravestones of their ancestors, especially since many of the graves belonged to people the contemporary Ferrarese Jews would have actually known—the grandparents and even parents of the generation alive at the time.

As Abramson explains, there is evidence of the confiscation of Jewish tombstones in contemporary Jewish records, although there is no extant mention of those used for the column. He adds:
Amazingly, [the fragments] were not returned to the Jewish community; they were rather put back into the column where they remain to this day. In fact, they were desecrated still further, with pieces removed and discarded to make room for a reinforced concrete core to protect the column from seismic activity (a devastating earthquake had hit Ferrara in 1570, which Pope Pius V blamed on the Este family for their historic protection of the Jews).

Matti Friedman: The Rich Past, and Promising Future, of the Middle East’s Date

If there’s one thing that unifies the people who live in the area stretching from Morocco to India, writes Matti Friedman, it is their appreciation for the fruit of the date palm:
Long before refrigeration, dried dates could keep for years, making them invaluable for travelers across seas and deserts. They can be turned into honey by boiling and straining the fruit; in fact, the biblical phrase “land of milk and honey” refers to honey from dates, not bees. They can also be fermented into liquor, like the date wine enjoyed by ancient Babylonians, according to the historian Herodotus. The tree itself was a source of fiber for ropes and baskets, fronds for shelter and shade and columns for construction. That led one rabbi to remark at least 1,500 years ago, long before environmentalism was cool, “This date palm—no part of it is wasted.”

“A righteous person will flower like a date palm,” goes the verse in Psalms, one explanation being that the date palm, like the righteous, grows straight and sustains others with its fruit. A scientifically minded rabbi in 12th-century Yemen, Netanel al-Fayyumi, explained that just as the pinnacle of the animal kingdom is people, and the pinnacle of the human species is prophets, the pinnacle of the plant kingdom, according to God’s design, is this tree. “And among the plants,” wrote the rabbi, “He created the most honorable species, which is the date.”

And perhaps even more than Iran, it might be the threat posed to the crop by the red palm weevil that will bring Israelis and Arabs together:
The enemy is at the gates, and this is what brought me to Abu Dhabi, the scene of the International Date Palm Conference. . . . Of particular interest at the conference was the presence of a few Israelis, which would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, before the American-engineered agreements known as the Abraham Accords inaugurated official ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. If we understand the date palm as a unifier in a divided part of the world, dates offer an obvious field of cooperation. A weevil sensor manufactured by an Israeli company, for example, has already been drilled into thousands of trees in the UAE and Morocco, as well as in Arab countries that won’t trade directly with Israel but purchase the sensors through a third party. The sensor picks up the vibrations of weevil larvae and sends a warning to an app installed on the farmer’s smartphone.

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11/06 Links: Melanie Phillips: How Jew-hatred has to fit the narrative; ADL creates 'more antisemitism,' divides Jews, black people -Candace Owens

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: How Jew-hatred has to fit the narrative

Last week, a Palestinian Arab terrorist murdered 50-year-old Israeli Ronen Hananya and injured 5 others. But Hananya was murdered in Kiryat Arba in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, and so was considered a “settler”. Since such Israelis are thus blamed for their own murder, Hananya’s killing went unreported by western media.

It was part of an escalating campaign of Palestinian Arab terror attacks in which 27 Israelis and others have been killed so far this year. Who can be surprised? For Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, has been calling on social media for “an escalation against the… settler herds”. That is, Israeli Jews.

Nazi-style antisemitic tropes demonising Jews constantly pour out of the PA. None of this is reported by the western media, which instead turns the Palestinian Arabs into martyred victims and the Israelis into their oppressors.

The watchdog Honest Reporting has revealed that a letter published last month on the Jew-baiting website Mondoweiss, signed by more than 300 Palestinian and Arab reporters, supported several journalists who had posted pro-Hitler messages on social media.

One signatory herself compared the Israel Defence Forces to Nazis. Another likened Jews to “dirt and rats” and, in response to a tweet about the death of a young Palestinian, replied: “Do you still ask why Hitler killed the Jews?”

Read anything about that in the mainstream media? Of course not. It doesn’t fit the narrative.

West’s views about Jews haven’t appeared in a vacuum. He’s channelling Jewish conspiracy theories and links between the Jews and Satan pushed by Nation of Islam’s leader Louis Farrakhan, as well as claims by the Black Hebrew Israelite group that black people are the real Jews and that “so-called” Jews have stolen their identity and birthright.

These views are commonplace in America’s black community. Yet Farrakhan is still indulged by the Democrats, and you won’t hear a peep about black antisemitism from the mainstream media.

Instead, everyone is “shocked” by a rapper’s Jew-hatred, while a murderous attack by an antisemite on a public figure is turned into a political football.

As if antisemitism weren’t bad enough, this makes it truly heartbreaking.

ADL creates 'more antisemitism,' divides Jews, black people -Candace Owens

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) creates more antisemitism, political commentator Candace Owens said on Saturday night in the wake of the Kanye West and Kyrie Irving antisemitism scandals, sharing a tweet by an anti-Israel activist claiming that the NGO created Jewish insecurity to justify Zionism.

"I think the ADL is like BLM [Black Lives Matter] and the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]. They create more antisemitism just like BLM created more racism." wrote Owens, explaining why she shared The Grayzone News editor Max Blumenthal's tweet. "They work only to further divide groups—in this circumstance, black and Jewish people."

In the tweet shared by Owens, Blumenthal had written that "White American Jews are living through a golden age of power, affluence and safety," and that "Acceptance of this welcome reality threatens the entire Zionist enterprise, from lobby fronts like the ADL to the State of Israel, because Zionism relies on Jewish insecurity to justify itself."

He added that Irving and West did not threaten American Jews in any concrete way, and the result of the ADL's attempt to justify its existence was "Jewish paranoia and Black humiliation is the result."

You are about to get into a lot of trouble for stating this.
Reminds me of when I said something similar about the NAACP and BLM way back when.
When you disrupt the trauma economy and call out the not-for-profits that benefit from it, you become their next target. https://t.co/gNbl9YsoZZ

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) November 5, 2022

Owens warned Blumenthal that he could "get into a lot of trouble" for his statements, and that she had experienced backlash over similar statements about BLM.

"When you disrupt the trauma economy and call out the not-for-profits that benefit from it, you become their next target," she said.

The US political commentator further called upon Americans to "fix fractured relations between Jewish and black Americans." She decried the cancel culture response to Irving and West.

I think the ADL is a partisan hack organization, too. But RTing Max Blumenthal, who spends his life covering for Jew-haters and stumping for Israel's destruction, makes the conversation significantly worse. It's garbage. pic.twitter.com/Y5hr6RwfjJ

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 6, 2022

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07/29 Links Pt2: Matti Friedman: Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion; Jonathan Tobin: On Tisha B'Av, it's time for Americans to step back from apocalyptic rhetoric

From Ian:

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Matti Friedman: Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion

Western ideologies generally include a parable about villainous Jews. Because this is a set of ideas that sees itself as a political critique, the parable doesn’t come, as past versions have, from Scripture (in the case of Christianity), or from economic theory (as it did in Marxism), or pseudo-scientific racial doctrines (National Socialism). It comes from the news—specifically, from the mythology that I saw being constructed as a reporter a decade ago. A strange antagonism to something called “Israel” came up if you went to a Women’s March against Donald Trump in New York, or protested violence against African Americans in Ferguson, Missouri, or joined the Dyke March in Chicago, or presented an academic paper at the American Studies Association. It appears in the platform of Black Lives Matter from 2016, in left-wing politics in Britain and France, and in gender studies courses at California colleges.

These diverse applications are unique, if not entirely unprecedented, for a news story. But they make sense if we understand the Israel story as a kind of sacred template that can be used to explain many different situations. A good example became visible this spring in the wake of the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis: the myth that Israel trains American police officers in the same methods of brutality that killed Floyd, and which are deployed more generally against people of color. This conspiracy theory has been promoted as factual by (among many others) senior journalists, members of the British Labour Party, and, in early July, by the biggest Lutheran denomination in America.

That last detail supports the idea that new religions are never completely removed from the old ones. Indeed, the unique power of the Israel story is the way it takes the central preoccupation of the new thought system—the inequality of white Western power versus nonwhite Third World innocence—and projects it onto a setting already loaded with religious resonance. If you’re looking for a parable about human inequality, places called Jerusalem or Bethlehem are potent in ways that can’t be rivaled by Xinjiang or Laayoune, or Minneapolis.

A good illustration of this merger came in the form of a speech given to a convention of the Episcopal church in 2018 by a Massachusetts bishop who described atrocities she claimed to have personally witnessed in Israel. She described the murder of an innocent 15-year-old Palestinian by Jewish soldiers—“they shot him in the back four times, he fell on the ground and they shot him another six”—and the aggressive handcuffing by soldiers of a 3-year-old Palestinian boy whose ball rolled off the Temple Mount.

It later turned out that the bishop hadn’t seen any such thing, and she apologized profusely. But in a religious mindset, the question isn’t whether a story happened. The question is whether a story can mobilize believers to achieve good. If the answer is yes, the story is “true.”

This kind of thinking has now bled into newsrooms and university departments, precisely the bodies that are supposed to be engaged in observation and reasoned debate. If important parts of the press and the academy are beginning to sound like ministries, it’s happening at a time when religion and quasi-religion are on the rise everywhere—not just on the progressive left but also on the right, and not only in the West. Some of these trends are evident in Israel, too. As we speak, as if to symbolize the moment, the Hagia Sophia is being changed from a public museum back into a mosque—though in Istanbul, at least, the conversion is being done in the open.

Jonathan Tobin: On Tisha B'Av, it's time for Americans to step back from apocalyptic rhetoric

Americans are experiencing a summer of discontent in a way that exceeds any in living memory. The nation is divided not just along political lines but seems increasingly immersed in something much more dangerous – a culture war in which both sides truly believe that not only will a triumph by their opponents bring ruin, but that the very existence of the republic and American democracy is at stake.

That's why both Jews and non-Jews need to pause this week and consider the lessons that the observance of Tisha B'Av: the day on the Hebrew calendar that marks the destruction of both ancient holy temples in Jerusalem, as well as many other catastrophes of Jewish history. The day of fasting and reflection, which begins this year on the evening of July 29, is not observed by most non-Orthodox Jews and generally considered too depressing to have become part of secular American Jewish culture, which prefers holidays that follow a model that runs along the lines of "they tried to kill us, we won, let's eat."

But if there was ever a year when its lessons were needed by Americans of all faiths, it is 2020.

Tradition teaches us that the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE occurred because of "sinat hinam" – senseless or baseless hatred—that undermined Jewish resistance during the siege of Jerusalem and great revolt against the forces of the Roman Empire.

A war that pitted the forces of a small nation against the world's only superpower wasn't going to have a happy ending, no matter how united the defenders of Jerusalem had been. But the rabbis who subsequently reconstituted Jewish faith emphasized the way that the Jewish rebels were divided into competing factions within Jerusalem's walls. In the civil war that raged inside the doomed city, a Zealot faction destroyed food supplies that could have prolonged resistance. Their self-destructive behavior made the task of Roman conquest that much easier and provided Jewish history with a lesson of what not to do to survive in a hostile world.

It's an important lesson, but not one that most Jews – or non-Jews for that matter – find easy to follow.

The political lines dividing Americans are starker than at any moment in living memory. It's not just that Republicans and Democrats disagree about the issues. Most of the supporters of President Donald Trump and most of those who support his opponents seem unprepared to credit each other with good intentions, period.

The deafening silence of liberal Jewish leadership in the face of BLM anitsemitism

For those of us that are children of Holocaust survivors, we know well the hell our parents went through to survive.
They hid, had no food, no clothes, no medical attention, and no help.
They were cramped in hiding places with no fresh air and couldn' t make a sound or Nazis would kill them.
It lasted a lot longer than this will last, some for up to 4 or 5 years.
They lost their education, their souls, their youth.
There were no supermarkets,no cell phones, no radios and no outside interference.

What we can compare with deadly accuracy is 1933 Nazi Germany and the inaction of our Jewish leadership and the Stockholm Syndrome response of many liberal Jews in the face of rising, hateful antisemitism.

Just as then when the voices of the leadership might have made a difference, but was barely heard, today most liberal leaders and clergy prefer to be politically correct and support our enemies.

Had Hitler conquered America or the area that is now Israel but was then the British Mandate, no Jews would have been left alive. That means many of those reading this article would never have been born.

What is it that left liberal and progressive Jews do not understand? When I hear the rabid antisemitic lies on videos and social media, I sense that another Hitler is coming - while you are sleeping, not 'woke,' dreaming about meeting the demands of the antisemitic Black Lives Matter.

Cogwar 8 Years on: BLM BDS & the Wokeocracy

In 2012 Prof Richard Landes said "Its not every generation that gets to defend a civilisation" and he advised that silence is not an option. In view of the extraordinary events since January 2020 when he was last in London, Campaign4Truth asked him how we have done in these 8 years: Have we been silent?

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