Culture wars Jewish people 

Support for Black Lives Matter repeats a lethal error of history

In the 20th century, thousands of progressively minded people supported Soviet communism. Believing this ideology was the key to a better world, they refused to acknowledge the horrific abuses under Stalin when millions were brainwashed, murdered or starved to death. Today’s progressives are behaving in similar fashion in response to another onslaught on civilized values, perpetrated in the name of an ideology with the same roots as Soviet communism. And just as in the last century, a dismaying number of its cheerleaders are Jews. In both America and Britain, Jewish…

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Culture wars Jewish people 

The progressive world: an antechamber to evil

After days of antisemitic rants on social media, the “Grime” rapper Wiley has finally been barred from Twitter and Facebook following outrage by Jews and others that he was allowed to use these platforms for his vicious incitement. This episode was particularly chilling. It involved a sustained onslaught of anti-Jewish invective by a prominent public figure who described Jews as “cowards and snakes,” likened them to the Ku Klux Klan and suggested they should be shot. He could do this with impunity because no one saw fit to stop him…

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Holocaust Britain Jewish people 

Betraying Jewish history by watering down the Holocaust

In my JNS column below, I refer to a talk given by Baroness Deech. Her text is reproduced below my own article. The British baroness Ruth Deech, whose family were Jewish refugees from Nazism, recently delivered an impassioned address to the Oxford Jewish community about the way the Holocaust is being evacuated of meaning by memorials and museums in its name. Her concern was prompted by the controversial plan to build a Holocaust memorial and learning center in London’s Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park near the Houses of Parliament.…

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Culture wars Jewish people USA 

The Jewish surrender to the west’s eclipse of reason

Rarely has a journalist’s resignation from their newspaper created such an impact as the coruscating letter with which Bari Weiss resigned from The New York Times. The moral bankruptcy of that paper has been plain for years to the many who have been shocked by its substitution of propaganda for objective journalism on many issues, including Israel. What really horrified people was Weiss’s description of the way she was victimized by her colleagues for challenging the paper’s group-think. They singled her out for her support for Israel as a Jew,…

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Culture wars Jewish people 

What have the Jews ever done for us?

I gave a talk to the sixth form and staff at London’s JFS school, under the title “What have the Jews ever done for us? The contribution of Judaism to western civilisation and modernity”. You can watch the talk here, and you can read an edited version below. What have the Jews ever done for us? The contribution of Judaism to western civilisation It’s an article of faith that religion and modernity are mutually exclusive. In one box, labelled modernity, are all the good things that we value: reason and…

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Culture wars Israel Jewish people 

Jews’ lives matter

The Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has sacked the party’s shadow education secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, for tweeting a link to an interview in which actress Maxine Peake gave vent to an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Peake repeated the baseless claim that has been bouncing round the internet that the tactics used by American police on George Floyd, who died under the knee of a police officer pinning him down, were “learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services”. This is a malevolent falsehood. As the Israeli police have said: “There is…

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Britain Culture wars Jewish people USA 

Why even black and brown-skinned Jews are “white imperialists”

The experience of being an immigrant group and living as a minority in an often hostile culture is, of course, one that diaspora Jews know only too well. There are obviously huge differences, though, between the Jewish and black experience. Yet one of the most important is overlooked. In Britain and America, as we have seen over the past few weeks, a movement is under way to rewrite American and British history with the aim of changing the culture. The charge is that white society is endemically racist. This is…

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Europeans lose minds and moral compass Culture wars Jewish people 

How racist “victim culture” tears up Jewish moral norms

The appalling rioting that followed the shocking death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer has left a trail of devastation across America. Once again, however, Jews have found themselves singled out for particular attack. In Los Angeles, Jewish-owned stores and synagogues in Beverly Hills and the heavily orthodox Fairfax district were looted and defaced with anti-Jewish graffiti. How could this Jew-hatred have occurred in what was repeatedly described as “protests” against racism? And why were so few Jewish voices raised against either this or the general…

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leftward Jewish people 

UK Jews too eager to embrace Starmer’s still dubious Labour party

In both Britain and America, the Jewish community is increasingly badly served by leaders who seem less and less able to distinguish between the friends and the enemies of the Jewish people. In America, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has been convulsed by controversy over appointing Dianne Lob as its new chairman. Lob is the former president of HIAS, an organization originally established to assist Jewish refugees but which has morphed into a body closely associated with anti-Israel and Islamist groups. In Britain, this week a…

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Passover Jewish people 

The story Jews repeat on Passover is the secret of their survival

As Jews around the world celebrate the festival of Passover this week, the ironies are painful. The festival celebrates the pivotal biblical event that followed Pharaoh’s refusal to free his Hebrew slaves. The last and most terrible of the 10 plagues inflicted as punishment upon the Egyptians, the death of the firstborn in every family, passed over the houses of the Hebrews who then left Egypt for freedom and their destiny as a Jewish nation. Today, of course, the plague of the coronavirus has not passed over the Jewish people—a…

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