The Vatican opens its wartime archive

One of the most persistent and controversial debates about the history of World War II concerns the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, and specifically, the actions of Pope Pius XII. Read more

J’Accuse! Our Dreyfus and theirs

Two months after its shellacking in the United Kingdom’s general elections, the Labour Party continues to remind British voters of why they chose the “anyone-but-Jeremy-Corbyn” option. Read more

What should be done with the ‘Judensau’?

“Here in Wittenberg, in our parish church, there is a sow carved into the stone under which lie young pigs and Jews who are sucking,” wrote Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant faith in Germany, in one of his anti-Jewish tracts. Read more

Blaming antisemitism on capitalism

It is progress of sorts. This week, one of the leading magazines of the American left published an article that took the phenomenon of antisemitism seriously. Read more

The multiple faces of antisemitism

Several years ago, in an article for Commentary magazine, I offered a distinction between two kinds of antisemitic mindsets. I named the first one “bierkeller” antisemitism and the second one “bistro” antisemitism, as a way of illustrating the cultural gulf between these two forms. Read more

‘Dark days are coming back’: Justice is denied for Sarah Halimi

The appeal court in Paris duly confirmed on Thursday the dreaded expectation of French Jews who have anxiously followed the legal proceedings in the case of Sarah Halimi, the 65-year-old widow who, on April 4, 2017, was viciously beaten and then thrown to her death from the third-floor window of her apartment by one of her own neighbours. Read more

Can Labour overcome antisemitism after Corbyn?

History will not be kind to Jeremy Corbyn, the vanquished and soon-to-be-former leader of the opposition British Labour Party. Read more

Macron’s unsettling words: ‘Until our dead can sleep in peace’

One of the criticisms levelled at the numerous Holocaust memorials dotted around Europe is their alleged tendency to, as an American Jewish leader memorably put it to me, “encourage Europeans to commemorate dead Jews, and ignore what’s happening to the living Jews.” Read more

Truth is not selective: Poland vs. Netflix

Poland’s government won an important victory on the battleground of history last week. Read more

Belgium’s carnival of hatred is still going strong

A few years ago, I was paying for some items at a large department store in the Netherlands when I was startled by the sight of a doll behind the cashier’s desk that appeared, at first glance, to be a grotesque racial caricature of a small black child wearing an elfin costume. Read more

Germany’s rising far-right threat

On the night of June 2, a German politician by the name of Walter Lübcke was found lying dead in the garden of his home in Wolfhagen — a village on the outskirts of the city of Kassel in the centre of the country — with a gunshot wound to the head. Read more

The Americans, the Kurds, the war

Two days after announcing the betrayal of America’s Kurdish allies in Syria, U.S. President Donald Trump decided to belittle them for good measure. Read more

In Britain, Boris is opening the door for Jeremy

Jeremy Corbyn’s prospects of becoming Britain’s next leader received an important boost last Friday, when the head of the Scottish National Party, Nicola Sturgeon, intimated that her party would back him as prime minister if that was the only way to prevent the United Kingdom from leaving the European Union on Oct. 31 without a divorce agreement in place. Read more

Why Jews should care about the Hong Kong democracy protests

It’s more than 30 years since pro-democracy student demonstrators were brutally crushed by Chinese security forces in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—a graphic sign that while communism was in the process of collapsing elsewhere in the world, China was to be a bloody exception. Read more

AMIA 25 years on: Insult, injury and Argentina’s upcoming election

In 2006, Argentine government lawyers led by the federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman formally named the eight leading Iranian officials who planned the bombing attack 12 years earlier, at 9:53 a.m. on July 18, 1994, on the AMIA Jewish centre in downtown Buenos Aires. Read more

‘Who, me? A racist?’

The exposé on antisemitism in the British Labour Party, broadcast in the United Kingdom last week by the BBC’s flagship Panorama program, gave viewers an opportunity to see the extraordinary confrontation in April 2016 between John Mann, a Labour parliamentarian and leading fighter against anti-Jewish bigotry, and Ken Livingstone, the former Labour Mayor of London and leading promoter of conspiracy theories about Zionist “collaboration” with Nazi Germany. Read more

Nabih Berri’s grotesque antisemitism

In a puff piece on Nabih Berri, the speaker of the Lebanese parliament, published on the occasion of his 80th birthday last year, the broadcaster France 24 headlined its profile, “The Great Survivor of Lebanese Politics.” Read more

Polish antisemitism is serious, but Yair Lapid is overreaching

Over the last year, Yair Lapid, the co-chair of Israel’s opposition Blue and White Party, has made several outspoken statements about Poland, Polish antisemitism and the Holocaust. Read more

The Pharaoh who spoke too soon

In his important book “Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History,” the historian David Biale noted that the very first ancient Egyptian reference to the nation of Israel was a brutal announcement of its destruction. Read more

Assange’s antisemitism revisited

When the fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange first holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London seven years ago, “Brexit” was an unknown word, Donald Trump was still hosting “The Apprentice,” and the Iran nuclear deal was just a twinkle in the eye of U.S. President Barack Obama. Read more

In South Africa, one step forward, two steps back

“Not as much as we had hoped, but we have advanced nonetheless!” With these words, the “Palestine Solidarity Forum” of South Africa last week greeted the news that the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) top decision-making body had voted, for the moment at least, against an academic boycott of Israel. Read more

‘Institutionally antisemitic’: The British Labour Party’s cautionary tale

There is, in Britain, a long tradition of holding public inquiries to establish the facts and learn the appropriate lessons from a host of social and political challenges. Read more

‘Institutionally antisemitic’: The British Labour Party’s cautionary tale

There is, in Britain, a long tradition of holding public inquiries to establish the facts and learn the appropriate lessons from a host of social and political challenges. Read more

The Christchurch mosque massacre and the changing face of extremism

By the time the world woke up on Friday, Mar. 15, Google’s search engine was jammed with news of a mass shooting at another place of worship in the world. Counts of 49 dead and dozens wounded were being reported at the Al Noor Mosque in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand. Read more

Leave the graves of Jedwabne alone

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” These words, from George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 were often called upon during the Cold War as a pithy explanation of the principles on which Communist propaganda operations were based. Read more

25 Years after the AMIA bombing, justice is again denied

This July, Argentina’s Jewish community will mark the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were murdered and hundreds more were seriously wounded. Read more

‘Anti-Zionism’ without the hyphen

To hyphenate or not to hyphenate? Read more

Anti-Semitism and the ‘visible’ Jews

One evening about 30 years ago, my girlfriend, who is now my wife, came home to our small flat in London, her eyes swollen with tears, and the backs of her knees and thighs covered in painful bruises. Read more

Behind Europe’s antisemitism ‘perception gap’

A comprehensive survey of European attitudes to antisemitism released last week by the European Union displays what its authors call a “perception gap.” In this context, the term means that Jews in Europe regard the problem of antisemitism as far more immediate, pressing and urgent than do their non-Jewish fellow citizens. Read more

How to teach the Holocaust going forward

Imagine that you are a Jewish doctor in a Nazi concentration camp…writes Ben Cohen/JNS. Read more

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