Behind the Aegis
Behind the Aegis's Journal(Jewish Group) Why The New York Times Got the Fight Against anti-Semitism in America Wrong
(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)Jonathan Weisman compares the reluctance of U.S. Jews to speak out against the hate crime to the European failure to prevent the Final Solution, which is wrong on many levels
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Weisman’s article echoes the theme of his book that hits stores this week – “(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump” – which is billed as “taking to task the Jewish community in the United States for a single-minded obsession with Israel that blinded it to the threat inside its borders.”
I don’t know precisely what American-Jewish community Weisman is describing, but his generalizations bear little resemblance to the one I’ve been reporting on. It is certainly true that anti-Semitism has surged during the rise of Donald Trump. But the American Jews I’ve watched have been anything but sheeplike in their response.
The ADL’s press releases that flood reporters’ inboxes and their hyperactive Twitter feeds don’t reflect a group that has trouble asserting itself, or one that lacks support from mainstream Jewish organizations and many individual American Jews.
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It would be more helpful for American Jews to remove partisan blinders and improve their ability to see and denounce anti-Semites regardless of ideological or political orientation – recognizing that disturbing hatred of Jews exists in both mild and extreme forms on both sides of the partisan divide.
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BOOM goes the dynamite! Awesome! This was a response to the piece I posted yesterday, Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Why Aren't American Jews Speaking Up?. She NAILS it, including taking on the idea that anti-Semitism is not just right or left!
(Jewish Group) Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Why Arent American Jews Speaking Up?
(THIS IS THE JWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)Anti-Semitic hate crimes are on the rise, up 57 percent in 2017 from 2016, the largest single-year jump on record, according to the Anti-Defamation League. That increase came on top of the rise in incidents in 2016 that coincided with a brutal presidential campaign.
I have personally seen the anti-Semitism, in online insults, threatening voice mail messages and the occasional email that makes it through my spam filter.
If not quite a crisis, it feels like a proto-crisis, something to head off, especially when the rise of anti-Semitism is combined with hate crimes against Muslims, blacks, Hispanics and immigrants. Yet American Jewish leaders — the heads of influential, established organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Federations of North America — have been remarkably quiet, focused instead, as they have been for decades, on Israel, not the brewing storm in our own country.
But American Jews need to assert a voice in the public arena, to reshape our quiescent institutions and mold them in our image. And Jewish leadership must reflect its congregants, who are not sheep.
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I have mixed feelings about this article/opinion piece. While it seems to mainly be finger-wagging at Jews on the right, combatting and speaking out against anti-Semitism is not the sole, or even the main, responsibility of Jews. ALL people should be speaking out!
Holocaust museum stands tall as tide of anti-Semitism laps again around its walls
The striking glass facade of Warsaw's Polin Museum rises from a tree-lined square in what was once a key district for the city's Jewish community.
Infamously turned into a ghetto by the Nazis, who later snuffed out an uprising there, the location could not be more fitting for a museum dedicated to tracing the history of Poland's Jews who, on the cusp of World War II, comprised the largest Jewish population in Europe.
Inside, the curved walls of Polin's cavernous main hall divide dramatically, symbolising the rupture in the 1,000-year history of Polish Jews that the Holocaust represented.
Visiting the museum last weekend, the bitter controversies over a new law in Poland related to responsibility for Holocaust crimes were never far from the mind.
Read more: https://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/holocaust-museum-stands-tall-as-tide-of-antisemitism-laps-again-around-its-walls-36714134.html
104-year-old Holocaust survivor recalls the Anschluss
"Even before the Anschluss, Austrians had the Nazi symbol hidden under their lapels," says Marko Feingold, the oldest living Austrian survivor of the Holocaust.
Almost 105 years old, he shared with AFP his sometimes startling memories of Hitler's takeover of Austria in March 1938 and how anti-Semitism lingered on well after the war.
"Anti-Semitism was already very much in evidence in the 1920s," he says.
"But [Austro-fascist chancellors of the 1930s] Dollfuss and Schuschnigg created such poverty that 80 percent of Austrians welcomed the Anschluss", the centenarian Jewish community leader in the city of Salzburg recalls.
Feingold had moved to Italy in the 1930s to escape that poverty. But he happened to find himself back in Vienna when, on March 13 1938, German troops made their triumphant entry into the Austrian capital.
He was 24 years old and admits to having "no idea" of the true nature of what was afoot, as Vienna celebrated the Nazis' arrival in a carnival atmosphere.
Read more: https://nation.com.pk/17-Mar-2018/104-year-old-holocaust-survivor-recalls-the-anschluss
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104 years old and still speaking out against anti-Semites!
Macedonia prepares to unveil new Holocaust memorial museum
Ninety-eight per cent of the Jews of Macedonia were murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust. Yet, 75 years after their deportation, an extraordinary museum has opened in the country’s capital Skopje, a joint project of the government and the now-tiny Jewish community.
The Holocaust Memorial Centre, designed by renowned museum specialists Berenbaum Jacobs Associates (BJA), is due open to the public next month.
But a series of ceremonies last weekend saw the project blessed by the Bulgarian Prime Minister, members of the Macedonian government, scholars from Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and the US special envoy for Holocaust issues, Thomas Yazdgerdi.
Dr Michael Berenbaum, principal of BJA and himself a renowned Holocaust scholar, said that the Macedonian community is one of the most ancient in the diaspora.
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Never Again: Fighting Hate in a Changing Germany With Tours of Nazi Camps
It was not the execution wall or the electric fence or even the description of the smell of human flesh burning day and night that made the teenagers stop cold.
It was the bunk beds.
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Teaching history is a pillar of national identity in postwar Germany. That is why Sawsan Chebli, a Berlin state legislator with Palestinian heritage, recently came up with an idea that is radical even by the standards of a country that has dissected the horrors of its past like no other: make visits to Nazi concentration camps mandatory — for everyone.
“This is about who we are as a country,” she said in a recent conversation in Berlin. “We need to make our history relevant for everyone: Germans who no longer feel a connection to the past and immigrants who feel excluded from the present.”
Ms. Chebli’s proposal comes at a time when Germany is grappling with the creeping rise of two kinds of anti-Semitism and as the Jewish community, now numbering about 200,000, is once again nervous.
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Grossman: Candidates must stand up to rising anti-Semitism
The numbers are startling.
According to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual “Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents,” the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose by 57 percent in the past year. That’s “the largest single-year increase on record,” the ADL notes.
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For years, anti-Semitic incidents declined in this country. Starting in 2016, though, they began to rise again — and rise precipitously.
“It had been trending in the right direction for a long time,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, chief executive of the ADL, said in an interview with The New York Times. “And then something changed.”
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The dates are telling: 2016 and 2017 are the years of Donald Trump’s ascendancy.
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(Jewish Group) Holocaust Deniers and Other Anti-Semites Making Inroads into Mainstream U.S. Politics
(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)Holocaust deniers and other anti-Semites are making their presence felt in mainstream American politics. Whether they are running for high-profile offices themselves, or aligning themselves with candidates in races around the country, members of the extremist right – and their racist, anti-Semitic views – are experiencing more exposure today than at any time in recent history.
While extremists’ involvement in politics is not new, the country’s major political parties have historically kept fringe candidates and their ideologies at arm’s length.
In one case, the Holocaust denier himself is running for office. In Illinois, former American Nazi Party head Arthur Jones will be the Republican nominee for US Representative for the state’s 3rd Congressional District. The vocal white supremacist and Holocaust denier is running unopposed for the Republican nomination, and will face incumbent Representative Dan Lipinski or challenger Marie Newman in the general election.
Jones and his wife are founding (and possibly sole) members of the neo-Nazi America First Committee, which operates under the Nationalist Front umbrella. He often attends events organized by the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM), including the April 2017 rally in Pikeville, Kentucky.
Jones has repeatedly run for office, always unsuccessfully, since the 1970s.
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This was written a MONTH ago and already needs to have several updates!!!!
Anti-Semitism is on the march across Europe
The Front National is about to depart the French political scene. When members of the far-right party gather in Lille for their annual congress today, they are expected to pass a motion to change the party’s name. It will be a personal victory for party leader Marine Le Pen, who has long argued that a facelift is vital if the party is to shed its toxic reputation and open itself up to political alliances.
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In this one aspect at least, the Front National is bucking a wider trend. Across Europe, the rise of populist right-wing parties has been accompanied by an alarming rise in anti-Semitism. When a new government is formed in Germany this month, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland will become leader of the opposition. It carries a legacy of anti-Semitism; last autumn one of its candidates said Germany should take pride in what its soldiers achieved in the second World War. Official figures show reported anti-Semitic crimes are rising, and almost 93 per cent of those are linked to far-right extremism.
In Poland, where the nationalist Law and Justice party recently enacted a law making it illegal to speak of Polish complicity in the Holocaust, prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki last month found himself having to deny being a Holocaust denier after apparently suggesting that Jews were partly responsible for it. Jewish organisations in Poland have recently reported being flooded with hate mail.
As xenophobic parties have seen their support surge from Austria to the Czech Republic and Italy, so too has anti-Semitic demagoguery.
In Hungary, authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has proclaimed zero tolerance for anti-Semitism, but many see anti-Jewish messaging in the government’s campaign against George Soros – the elderly Hungarian Jew who emigrated to the US after the second World War, made a fortune and has long been involved in promoting liberal democratic values in eastern Europe.
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And today, what do I wake up and read in LBN here at DU? Putin says Jews with Russian citizenship could be behind U.S. election meddling (there is also now a thread in General Discussion.)
Poland marks 50 years since 1968 anti-Semitic purge
In 1968, the Polish Communist party declared thousands of Jews enemies of the state and forced them to leave Poland. Fifty years later, historians and witnesses warn of a revival of Polish anti-Semitism.
Jozef Lebenbaum was a reporter with the Workers' Voice newspaper in Lodz, Poland's second-largest city, when he was forced to leave the country in August 1968. The reason: He was Jewish. Anti-Semitism was ablaze back then in Poland, and the regime sought various, often absurd, excuses to get rid of the Jews.
He was 38 at the time, in the middle of his career, Lebenbaum tells DW. "Suddenly, my work was gone, my colleagues, my apartment, and the Polish culture I had grown up with," he remembers.
An anti-Semitic wave forced about 20,000 Jews from Poland to leave the country between 1968 through to the end of 1972. It peaked for the first time on March 8, 1968, when Warsaw police beat up students protesting state censorship and repression of critical fellow students. The student leaders were branded as Zionist and anti-Polish as state-controlled anti-Semitic agitation began to spread across the country.
The authorities organized mass demonstrations in which Jews who held prominent official positions were accused of everything that was wrong with the ailing Communist system. "Zionists to Zion," people yelled at party conventions, the aim being to send the country's Jews — regarded as anti-Polish — to Israel.
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