Anti-Semitism
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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December 28, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 22, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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December 22, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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
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December 21, 2023 — Scott Johnson
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).
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December 15, 2023 — John Hinderaker
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
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