Anti-Semitism
February 7, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The Hamas war on Israel is criminal and barbaric. It is genocidal in the the old-fashioned sense — the sense with which Final Solution familiarized us. The support for Hamas that has emerged in the Democratic Party, on campus, and elsewhere around the country is therefore appalling. The latest news on the fate of Israeli hostages provides a somewhat striking twist in this respect. Drawing on a New York Times
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January 31, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The Free Press has just posted the 20-minute documentary American Miseducation (video below). The documentary is reported by the Free Press’s Oliva Reingold, who provides background on it here. The video is posted on YouTube with this explanation: In October last year, when Hamas attacked Israel, a new form of violent antisemitism instantly exploded onto American streets. This newest strain of the oldest hatred comes not from far-right extremists, but
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January 28, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Yesterday TCM played Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah in observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day. I saw it when it was released in 1985 and took the opportunity to watch it again yesterday. It’s a powerful film. Over a period of 12 years Lanzmann compiled the testimony of Holocaust victim/survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and a few who don’t fit those categories. All in all, Lanzman filmed some 230 hours of footage and
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January 27, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Roger Kimball’s New Criterion editorial on “DEI’s dangerous lies” is titled “Gay science,” in honor of sacked Harvard president Claudine Gay. Roger’s editorial lacks only some accompanying reference to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which I actually read under the tutelage of my political philosophy teacher last year. It was in The Gay Science that Nietzsche announced “God is dead.” I thought Roger’s editorial might have announced that Harvard is dead.
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January 25, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Reading the eminent historian Niall Ferguson’s great Free Press column “The treason of the intellectuals” last month, I was struck by this passage: It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before. A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the
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January 24, 2024 — John Hinderaker
Private sector unions in the U.S. have been in decline for a long time. Currently, only around 6% of all private sector employees are union members. And most of those union members are not left-wing; on the contrary, they tend to vote for Republicans and especially for Donald Trump. Their leaders, nevertheless, are mostly throwbacks: socialists if not outright Communists. And in today’s world, being left-wing means being in favor
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January 17, 2024 — John Hinderaker
It is slowly dawning on liberals across America that DEI is, in most contexts, illegal. The whole point of DEI is to discriminate against disfavored groups, and in favor of preferred groups. Liberals have a hard time understanding that there is anything wrong with this, but the courts–most notably, recently, in the Harvard and UNC cases–are beginning to set them straight. In many states, legislators aren’t waiting for litigation to
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January 17, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Rep. Ritchie Torres is a Democrat whose district sits in the Bronx. He is an outspoken supporter of Israel and the Jewish people. This past Friday he gave the sermon at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue Shabbat service commemorating the life and legacy of MLK. Rep. Torres has posted the video below on his YouTube channel. The video seems to have gone viral among supporters of Israel on X. In his remarks
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January 12, 2024 — John Hinderaker
A group of Jewish graduate students at Harvard, including several from the law school, have sued that university alleging rampant anti-Semitism in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The complaint is embedded below, and I encourage you to at least skim it–it is 77 pages long. What is striking about the complaint is the breadth and depth of its factual allegations. If they are true,
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January 11, 2024 — Scott Johnson
San Francisco supervisors wrapped their resolution in a shroud of evenhandedness as they approved a resolution calling for a “sustained ceasefire” in Gaza that condemns Hamas as well as the Israeli government and urges the Biden administration to press for the release of all hostages and delivery of humanitarian aid. You, Mr. Hitler, you have a good point, and you, Mr. Churchill, you do too. Those in the audience did
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January 9, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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
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January 7, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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
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January 6, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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
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January 5, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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
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January 4, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
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
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January 2, 2024 — John Hinderaker
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,
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December 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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