Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, made a good point a couple of days ago when he said that the Jewish community in Germany should not be held responsible, “either in the street or on social media,” for Israel’s current armed conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. His comment was prompted by several developments. With […]
It would appear that the perpetrator of a racially-motivated hate crime in France can conveniently exonerate himself simply by claiming he is under the influence of a psychic disorder. On April 17, the Court of Cassation, the supreme court in France, ruled that a man who murdered a Jewish woman four years ago cannot stand […]
The complete archives of the seminal Nuremberg war crimes trial will be housed in a new center at Stanford University in California. Known as the Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg, it will manage the long-term digital preservation of documents, transcripts, photographs, films and audio recordings from this historic postwar trial in […]
It was recently announced that Jews in the Persian Gulf have formed the first communal organization, the Association of Gulf Jewish Communities. It will cater to the religious and educational needs of Jews in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all of which are officially pro-Western and aligned with the […]
By an overwhelming margin of eight to one, the Israeli Supreme Court has belatedly but boldly challenged the blatantly unfair monopoly the Orthodox rabbinate has held regarding officially recognized conversions in Israel. On March 1, Chief Justice Esther Hayut ruled that non-Jews who convert to Judaism in Israel through the Reform and Conservative streams of […]
The right-wing Polish government is trying to curtail free and independent scholarship with respect to the Holocaust, says Jan Grabowski, a Canadian scholar of Polish descent who was recently ordered to issue a public apology concerning a two-volume book he and Polish colleague Barbara Engelking co-edited. Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties […]
The pro-German Vichy government in France enacted antisemitic legislation with the full knowledge and support of the Catholic church, says a Canadian scholar who’s currently writing a book about that charged topic. Aliza Luft, an assistant professor at the University of California’s campus in Los Angeles, made this claim at a zoom lecture recently sponsored […]
The commonly accepted definition of antisemitism is crystal clear. Or is it? Until quite recently, antisemitism was universally understood to encompass a broad spectrum of hostility toward Jews. This animus could assume multiple forms, but at the end of the day it was an expression of unambiguous dislike of the Jewish people. This form of hatred, […]
If money talks, Sheldon Adelson was a remarkable example of the truth of that adage. A businessman, philanthropist and political activist, he deployed his fabulous wealth to promote conservative and Jewish causes in the United States and Israel, his respective birthplace and adopted homeland. Adelson died on January 11 at the age of 87 from […]
Although there have been a wide range of Jewish-Indigenous encounters in Canada, they have never been at the center of Jewish concerns, according to historian David Koffman. Indeed, aboriginal people have been “written out” of Canadian Jewish history, said Koffman, who holds the J. Richard Schiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry at York […]