Israel and Poland are at war again, figuratively speaking at least. For the second time since 2018, they are embroiled in a nasty war of words, which have had an unsettling effect on their bilateral relations. This increasingly bitter diplomatic row revolves around a Polish parliamentary bill which drastically limits the ability of Holocaust survivors […]
Regrettably, the lower chamber of Poland’s Parliament, the Sejm, is considering a bill to limit the ability of Jewish and non-Jewish claimants to seek restitution for property confiscated by the Nazis during the Holocaust and nationalized by the Communist regime during the postwar period. This mean-spirited bill sailed through the first of three readings last week and […]
Israel’s enemies claim they harbor no ill feelings toward Jews despite their hatred of Israel. And while this may be true in some cases, the recent cross-border war in Gaza demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is very thin and porous. As the war unfolded, Palestinian Arabs and their […]
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 […]