Mr. Putin goes to Tehran

Despite spending five months baiting Ukraine’s leaders as “neo-Nazis,” among them the country’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin didn’t bat an eyelid as he embraced a genuine Nazi sympathiser and Holocaust denier in the shape of Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Read more

Iran’s ‘death corridor’ is open for business

Iran thrust its way back into the news cycle last week as U.S. President Joe Biden embarked on a four-day tour of the Middle East beginning in Israel, but arguably, the most significant event to impact the Islamic Republic’s international reputation took place in faraway Stockholm. Read more

Banning anti-Zionism: Feasible? Desirable?

One of the main differences between the American and European systems of democratic government is the absence, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, of a First Amendment-style guarantee of free speech. Read more

Wishing Israel away

A disparate group of Islamist clerics has been busily predicting that the State of Israel will disappear in 2022, citing the Koran for support. Read more

The ‘Judensau,’ then and now

Two major news stories to hit the headlines in Germany this month focused rather strikingly on negative depictions of Jews in works of art, raising once more the question of whether these visual displays need to be contextualized and explained, or whether they should be removed from public view altogether. Read more

Goodbye to the oil weapon

As a kid in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember that the adults around me had a standard explanation for why so many countries around the world kept Israel at arms’ length. Read more

Qatar’s blood-stained World Cup

There was another significant announcement from an Arab capital last week about relations with Israel when Qatar—the wealthy Gulf nation that provides Hamas with financial and political support—confirmed that Israeli citizens would be permitted to attend the FIFA World Cup taking place there in November and December this year. Read more

Another Jew is murdered in France

The ugly truth about France is that Jewish people are not safe from anti-Semitic attacks even in their own homes. This has been proved time and again in the last few years, most recently in the city of Lyon. Read more

Iraq’s blood-curdling bill targets Israel (and its own people)

Nearly 20 years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in a U.S.-led invasion, Iraq remains at war with Israel, as has been the situation since the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. The question persists, however, as to whether Iraq will always be at war with Israel. Read more

‘Say yes to the world’ but no to the Jews: Lufthansa’s anti-Semitic scandal

It took several days, but eventually, the world’s media grasped why the scandal at Frankfurt Airport last week, when more than 100 Orthodox Jews were prevented by the German airline Lufthansa from boarding a connecting flight to Budapest, was so shocking. Read more

The apology that Russia won’t make

Did Russian President Vladimir Putin really apologize to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for the atrocious remarks on the Holocaust uttered by his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov? Read more

Can the United Nations survive the war in Ukraine?

A recent letter delivered to U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres by 200 former senior U.N. officials included a bleak warning regarding the consequences should diplomacy fail to end Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Read more

Say goodbye to Russian oligarchs

The International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear Catastrophe is the perfect example of an organization with an imposing name and an illustrious advisory board that you’ve still never heard of. Read more

Fabricating antisemitism: The case of Gil Ofarim

Back in October, I wrote about the strange case of Gil Ofarim, a popular German Jewish singer who levelled a charge of antisemitic discrimination against an employee of the Westin Hotel in Leipzig, Germany. Read more

America has to remain a leader in the fight against antisemitism

In a departing interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in October 2012, Hannah Rosenthal—on her final day as the U.S. State Department’s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating anti-Semitism—concluded by saying that “there will always be a need” for the post she held for three years. Read more

French politicians call time on anti-Zionist provocation

Palestine solidarity activists have found themselves a new hate figure in the person of Gérald Darmanin, the interior minister of France. Read more

The delegitimization campaigns targeting Israel and Ukraine

Attempting to refute the spreading claim that Russian soldiers wounded in Ukraine were receiving only $100 in compensation (the official line is that they receive $28,000), Russian President Vladimir Putin didn’t miss the opportunity to return to his latest favourite theme. Read more

On Putin, the Jews and the Future of the World

Jews and dictators normally don’t get along. History is replete with examples of strongmen who reviled the Jewish communities in their midst. Read more

The Israeli left’s antisemitism blind spot

A great scholar of antisemitism once told me that there was one country that frustrated him when it came to its understanding of the extent and depth of Jew-hatred: Israel. Read more

What the row over caricatures of Yasser Arafat tells us about Palestinian politics

A perennial discussion in the cauldron that is Middle Eastern politics concerns the degree to which a sovereign Palestinian state, should one ever be created, would be democratic. Read more

Has the time come to bribe the unvaccinated?

“How can we as a society stand by and watch people die when a simple shot could prevent a life-threatening illness?” That was the agonised question asked by a group of nine healthcare providers in Minnesota who took the unprecedented step of publishing an advertisement in local news outlets begging people to get vaccinated last weekend. Read more

2021: Past, present and future

Looking back at 2021 in the hope of having something sensible to say about the past year, I found myself musing on a perennial question. Read more

Éric Zemmour, presidential candidate

After months of speculation, the far-right columnist and TV pundit Éric Zemmour finally announced his candidacy in next year’s presidential election in France. Read more

Europe’s Jews have an uncertain future, but a future nonetheless

The continent of Europe ceased to be the centre of Jewish life more than a century ago, when it yielded that status to the increasingly affluent, influential Jewish community in the United States, joined, a bit later on, by the State of Israel. Read more

Heard again: Cries of ‘Death to the Jews!’ in a Polish city

In her recent co-authored book Philo-Semitic Violence: Poland’s Jewish Past in New Polish Narratives, the Warsaw-based literary scholar Elzbieta Janicka recounts an episode from Poland’s past that sheds a great deal of light on Poland’s present…writes Ben Cohen. Read more

German antisemitism, real and perceived

There were more than 2,000 reported antisemitic incidents in Germany in 2020 and just under 2,000 the previous year. That’s around or five or six incidents, some of them involving violence or verbal abuse, every day. Read more

Is Eric Zemmour the new Bruno Kreisky?

Could a politician who positively identifies as Jewish and expresses pro-Israel sympathies ever be elected as head of state in a European country? Read more

Can Jewish life in Europe start ‘thriving again’?

The European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, unveiled a nine-year strategy last week to counter antisemitism and foster Jewish life among its 27 member states. Read more

Iraq persecutes its heretics

It has the air of a witch-hunt. Many of the 300 leaders of Iraqi civil society, Sunni and Shi’a, who gathered in the Kurdish region last week for a conference advocating an Iraqi peace accord with the State of Israel, are now the subjects of arrest warrants from the authorities and death threats from Islamist militias. Read more

On visible and invisible Jews

During the middle days of the Sukkot festival, small groups of haredi kids can be seen wandering along the thoroughfares of New York City’s Upper West Side, asking passersby whether they are Jewish. Read more

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