The toxic blood libel accusation, rooted in medieval Europe, emerged with a vengeance several times during the interwar period in the Soviet Union. This may come as a surprise to those who assume that such primitive manifestations of antisemitism would have been inconceivable in a supposedly progressive country like the Soviet Union. But a […]
Category: Jewish Affairs
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Golden Dawn: A Criminal Gang
To its credit, the Greek government has arrrested the leader of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, and a number of his senior associates on charges of having formed a criminal organization. Greece took this drastic decision, the first of its kind in decades, after police raided Golden Dawn’s offices in Athens and Greek […]
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Hassan Rouhani and the Holocaust
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has launched a public relations blitz. Two weeks ago, he sent Jews a Rosh Hashanah greeting from his Twitter account. In the past few days, while in the United States, he has tried to convince the international community that he is a moderate and a breath of fresh air compared to his clownish yet […]
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Quebec’s Charter Of Values
In unveiling the Charter of Values recently, Quebec Premier Pauline Marois optimistically predicted that it would unite Quebeckers. Much to her distress, it has become a political football, a source of deep division in the province. Judging by a Leger Marketing poll, the charter is supported by only a plurality of Quebeckers, 43% to 42%. […]
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An Important Milestone
A German official who prosecutes Nazi war crimes has recommended that prosecutors in Germany lay charges against 30 men and women who worked as guards in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where 1.5 million people, mainly Jews, were ruthlessly killed. “This is really an important milestone in the effort to bring Nazis to justice,” observed Efraim […]
Marcel Reich-Ranicki was an anomaly of the first order, a Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor who launched a stellar career as one of the foremost literary critics in Germany. Reich-Ranicki, who died in Frankfurt on Sept. 18 at the age of 93, was a man for all seasons. He wrote for Germany’s most influential newspapers, Die […]
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Jews Under Islam
The 1,400-year history of Jews living under the banner of Islam has been extremely checkered, marked as it has been by periods of acceptance and discrimination. Reflecting on the status of Jews in Muslim domains, the historian Bernard Lewis adopted a balanced approach, saying it had never been as “bad as in Christendom at its […]
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The Cruellest Conflict
World War II was not just another destructive conflict between warring nations, but a nationalist crusade on the part of Germany to acquire territory, attain hegemony, disseminate Nazi ideology and murder Jews on a massive industrial scale. When Germany attacked Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, touching off an international conflagration that dragged on for six […]
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Footprints in time
They died in the last little while, leaving a lasting legacy … Robert Fogel, 86, a University of Chicago economist, shared the Nobel Prize in economic science in 1993 for his work in explaining the role of railways and slavery in the development of the American economy. His books on these topics, Railroads and American […]
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Hate Rhetoric in the Middle East
The vile rhetoric of antisemitism pervades the Muslim world. Malicious myths and unfounded assumptions about Jews have become all too commonplace. No where else in the world today are Jews so openly maligned and excoriated. Two examples will suffice. On the eve of leaving office, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in a brazen admission that […]