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Search Results for: American Jews

antisemitism Culture wars USA 

While hoaxes make headlines, real attacks on Jews keep happening

Melanie, ,

In the West, we’re not merely living at present through savage culture wars. We’re not merely experiencing a terrifying eruption of antisemitism in supposedly civilized countries. We are being subjected to a manipulation of reality that could have been scripted by Franz Kafka. The gay, black actor Jussie Smollett claimed that he was set upon in Chicago, after buying a sandwich in the middle of a pulverizingly cold night last month, by attackers who yelled racial and homophobic slurs, shouted “this is MAGA country,” poured an unknown chemical over him…

Israel 

Australia’s boomerang knocks diaspora Jews off balance too

Melanie, , ,

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison thought he was sending a bouquet to Israel. It turned into a boomerang. Two months ago, Morrison raised hopes of moving the Australian Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv when he said he was “open-minded” after President Donald Trump moved the US Embassy and recognized Israel’s capital. Last week, however, Morrison announced that Australia would merely establish a defense and trade office in Jerusalem and would move the embassy only after a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. More explosively, he said he recognized…

USA 

Will black be the answer to US Jews’ diaspora blues?

Melanie, , ,

In a recent speaking tour in the US, I kept coming across Jews who were consumed by anxiety that so many of their young people were turning against Israel. I had encountered such anxiety on previous trips, but this time it was worse than ever before. Their children, they said, were being hoodwinked by bigoted hostility to Israel — wildly ridiculous lies and libels that they were choosing to believe because these formed the default anti-Zionist narrative on campus. What was to be done to reverse this, the parents repeatedly…

antisemitism USA 

Driver tries to run down Los Angeles Jews

Melanie, ,

Another antisemitic attack in the US as a driver tries to run down Jews walking from synagogue in Los Angeles. Quick, let’s blame Trump! Oh wait… Video from a security camera shows the driver apparently trying to hit two men dressed in clothing typically worn by Orthodox Jews on Shabbat. The driver, who has been identified as 32-year-old Mohammed Mohammed, reversed and tried to hit them again. The man reportedly insulted a group of Jewish people leaving the synagogue before he got into his vehicle and attempted to run them…

conservatism Culture wars USA 

Jews and conservatism: an idea whose time has come

Melanie, , ,

Last Sunday, I took part in the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York on Jews and conservatism. There were some excellent presentations from a line-up including Ruth Wisse, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Jonathan Haidt, Yoram Hazony and others. The point of the conference was, in the JLC’s own words, to harness the power of conservative ideas to strengthen the Jewish people and revitalise American civic life. It is not over-dramatic to say this is a project that is urgently needed to save the west. For the past several decades, the bedrock…

hatred USA 

Hatred of the Jews unites far left and right

Melanie, ,

Hatred of the Jews unites far left and right Last Saturday a man called Robert Bowers allegedly walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue where the congregation was celebrating the sabbath and opened fire screaming “All Jews must die”. Eleven were killed and many others wounded. Both Bowers and Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man accused of posting more than a dozen bombs to left-wing figures, are far-right conspiracy theorists. At the same time there are conspiracy theorists on the left who, like the far right, think that the Jews run American foreign policy…

Culture wars Israel 

Time to leave? The question the Jews of Britain and Europe must ponder

Melanie, , ,

These are alarming times for Jews in Britain and Europe. The British Labour Party is convulsed over the realization that it is riddled with antisemitism. Jeremy Corbyn, its leader and a friend to Hamas, has been exposed as belonging to Facebook groups hosting claims that the Jews were behind ISIS and 9/11, that the Rothschilds controlled the world’s finances and other such paranoid theories. The backwash from the exposure of these groups revealed a tsunami of anti-Jewish insults, smears and libels by Labour supporters. Corbyn’s responses, often truculent and insulting…

de-radicalisation Britain USA 

Trump, Brexit and diaspora Jews

Melanie

The passionate Knesset speech by Vice President Mike Pence, endorsing the Jews’ miraculous return to Israel and Jerusalem, vividly illustrated how the tectonic plates in world politics have now moved. For Pence, of course, it was personal. As a biblically faithful Christian, he doesn’t just believe deeply in Jewish redemption in the land of Israel. He also understands that America itself rests upon the values of the Hebrew Bible. The significance of the speech, however, lay not with Pence but with President Donald Trump. For Trump may not have the…

USA 

The sea-change in American Jewry

Melanie

I have often written about the current dismaying trajectory of the American Jewish community. With some three quarters of them identifying with the universalist, left-wing mindset, both in religious and secular life, they are positioning themselves on the wrong side of the war of civilisation being waged against the west from within while their children are progressing from indifference towards Israel to outright hostility. So much is the common source of much anguished discussion amongst those who care about this decline. An astute and moving article in The American Spectator…

Israel USA 

Jews misread America’s cultural civil war

Melanie

The cultural civil war that has now exploded in America is an immensely dangerous moment for the west. It is also perilous for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Yet in both Israel and the diaspora, too many Jews just don’t get it. They are parroting instead the double-dealing and hypocritical pieties of their mortal enemies. After Charlottesville, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin wrote a letter expressing “support and solidarity” with the American Jewish community “at this difficult time”. Jewish students in America run a permanent gauntlet of left-wing…