Anti-Semitism

Gaza Comes to Minneapolis

Featured image The City of Minneapolis is going to ruin under the feckless leadership of its far-left City Council and boy mayor Jacob Frey. Yet, what was the first order of business yesterday, when the City Council held its first meeting following last year’s election? An anti-Semitic resolution: In their first meeting after being sworn in for two-year terms, council members voted to discuss a symbolic resolution on the conflict — amid »

Harvard Is Still Anti-Semitic

Featured image Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard freshman Charlie Covit explains why it is still hard to be a Jew at Harvard, notwithstanding Claudine Gay’s demise: [T]he crisis facing Harvard’s Jewish community hasn’t gone away. A zealous hatred of Israel has swept our campus, thinly veiling an epidemic of antisemitism. Ms. Gay’s testimony in Congress, in which she said calls for the genocide of Jews were context-dependent, was representative of »

Has Harvard Always Been Anti-Semitic?

Featured image Hamas’s October 7 massacre has focused attention on anti-Semitism in American universities. The Claudine Gay episode brought such attention to Harvard, specifically. The Times of Israel notes that anti-Semitism has a long history at that institution: In a 1934 editorial, Harvard Crimson student journalists spoke out in favor of hosting top Nazi and former Harvard man, Ernst F.S. Hanfstaengl. Nicknamed “Putzi,” Hanfstaengl was Hitler’s foreign press chief and graduated from »

Don’t F*** With Bill Ackman’s Wife

Featured image Bill Ackman is a lifelong liberal whose political donations have been to Democrats. But, as a Harvard alumnus and a Jew, he was appalled by Claudine Gay’s incompetent and borderline anti-Semitic Congressional testimony, as well as her lack of any body of original scholarship. So for the first time, he stepped into the cultural and political fray. The Left responded predictably, by attacking his wife, Neri Osman, who is brilliant »

Hamas New Year in California [With Comment by John]

Featured image Yesterday, pro-Hamas protesters showed up in force in the California Assembly, the California Globe reports, forcing members to call a recess, but “then upgraded to adjournment.” Isaac Bryan, a Los Angeles Democrat, called the protest a “powerful showing of civil disobedience,” but Yuba City Republican James Gallagher said in a statement: We cannot allow pro-Hamas radicals to continue shouting down government proceedings and bullying people into silence. We must stand »

“Anti-Racism” Is Racist

Featured image That is obvious from the “anti-racists'” explicit precepts, which call for race discrimination extending indefinitely into the future. If most people had any idea what the anti-racists say, they would be horrified. But here is a more specific instance of anti-racist bigotry: A US anti-racism campaigner has triggered outrage after she claimed “Zionist” doctors were giving worse care to black and Muslim patients. Saira Rao, a former Democrat congressional candidate, »

Some call it realism

Featured image John Mearsheimer is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He fancies himself an international relations scholar who belongs to the realist school of thought. With Harvard’s Stephen Walt, he is the author of The Israel-Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book to which I devoted a lot of attention on Power Line when it was published in 2007. Mearsheimer has regained a »

Ye is sorry: A footnote

Featured image Commenting on the “apology” tendered by the rapper formerly known as Kanye West for causing “unintended outbursts,” I quoted the text verbatim. I also drew on Christopher Kuo’s New York Times story reporting on the denial of anti-Semitism reflected in the title track of his forthcoming compact disc Vultures. On the album’s title track, the Times reports, “Ye raps that he cannot be antisemitic because he had sex with a »

Ye is sorry

Featured image I first tuned in to the anti-Semitic ravings of Kanye West or Ye in his October 2022 interview with Tucker Carlson. In the part of the interview Tucker chose to air, Jared Kushner’s promotion of peace between Israel and Arabs in the Abraham Accords was disparaged as self-interested in an evocative fashion. “I just think it was to make money,” Ye said. “Is that too heavy-handed to put on this »

The Face of Evil

Featured image On December 3, a radical group hosted a “teach-in” titled “From Minnesota to Palestine.” The panelists linked America and Israel as “settler colonialist” nations–the only ones, apparently, in world history–and thus the source of all evil. This is the whole thing. It goes on for more than two hours, and I don’t recommend that you watch it. Among other things, the panelists celebrate the Hamas massacre of October 7 as »

Claudine Gay in context, take 2

Featured image As we learned yesterday, Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried stands by Harvard President Claudine Gay in context, and in context it’s almost funny. It’s amazing how much embarrassment Harvard is willing to suffer “to say that which is not” (as the Houyhnhnms put it in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels) in support of Gay. That’s not quite how Harvard Law Professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz puts it. However, The Harvard Crimson »

Robert Wistrich revisited

Featured image Robert S. Wistrich was the Neuburger Professor of European and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the director of the university’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism. He may also have been the leading academic authority on anti-Semitism. Witness his histories A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism From Antiquity to the Global Jihad (2010) and From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, The Jews and Israel (2012). »

Anti-Semitism Or Snobbery?

Featured image What accounts for the outburst of hostility to Israel that we have seen in recent weeks in the U.S. and much of Europe? Quite a bit of it comes from Middle Easterners who probably shouldn’t be here (or there), but there is more going on than that. Michael Deacon in the Telegraph writes on “The real reason liberals attack Israel.” Many people on the Right suspect that liberals who criticise »

Are Democrats Really This Dumb?

Featured image Taking a sabbatical from daily blogging is a lot like dieting: It’s hard to keep it up and resist temptation. Especially when a fresh glazed donut or delicious, creamy chocolate cake rolls by your nose. In this case the irresistible treat of a news story concerns the social media blitz that “first gentleman” (the provisional label for Doug Emhoff, aka, Mr. Kamala Harris) spooled out on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram »

Marching For Genocide

Featured image Joe Biden was in Los Angeles on Friday, and a mob showed up in the streets chanting for judenrein from the river to the sea: L.A. – as Jews were lighting candles last night for Shabbat and the second night of Hanukkah, mobs of antisemites took to the streets to chant antisemitic slogans and graffiti buildings, including Synagogues. This particular location is the epicenter of Persian Jewish life on… pic.twitter.com/8oxrf6NjvF »

Campus Anti-Semitism, Unabated

Featured image This highly impressive MIT graduate student details the atmosphere of anti-Semitism that characterizes that campus. You might think that after all the unwelcome attention MIT has gotten, its authorities would at least try to address the problem. But no: Extraordinary video in which a Jewish student highlights the extent of antisemitism on campus at @MIT. Elite universities and their DEI bureaucracies have failed us. pic.twitter.com/X2lX9sMw8l — Ed Leon Klinger (@edleonklinger) »

One Down?

Featured image Reportedly, the University of Pennsylvania is firing President Liz Magill, following her House committee testimony: The University of Pennsylvania is expected to ask its president, Liz Magill, to resign Friday over growing outrage at her failure to condemn calls for the genocide of the Jewish people — a move celebrated by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who said she would be “one down.” The Ivy League school’s board of »