Roberta Kaplan Takes White Supremacy to Court
“There’s no such thing as fake news in a courtroom. There are facts—and we’re going to prove the facts.”
“There’s no such thing as fake news in a courtroom. There are facts—and we’re going to prove the facts.”
“The understandable desire to find Mengele alive and try him, presumably on television, contributed to a reluctance on the part of some to accept the fact of his death.”
An attack that lasted less than a minute on Thursday night marked a new phase in America’s standing in the Middle East. What was until that moment a tense standoff between the Trump administration and the Ayatollahs in Tehran turned into a rapidly escalating conflict, which could lead to anything from a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks to an all-out war.
If you want to understand the nature of resurgent anti-Semitism in the United States, as well as to confront the obstacles to combating it, you could hardly find a more useful guide then by examining the events of the last month of 2019.
I’ve worn a yarmulke in public every day of my adult life. While I can recall a few times when someone yelled at me or hurled an insult my way, these have generally been rare occurrences—except when I’m also holding my husband’s hand.
Last week, only days after the deadly attack at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, Congress approved a massive increase to the Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), which will reach $90 million in 2020, compared to the $60 million allocated in 2019.
The title of “biggest threat” to American Jews is hard to define or measure. And more importantly, it’s political. Most liberals would agree that anti-Semitism has reached new records under Trump and that the president’s response to the phenomenon has been less than adequate.
As we approach the first yahrtzeit of the Pittsburgh attack, it may be worthwhile taking a moment to look at what has been done, and what still needs to be done, to make sure it is a commemoration of past evil, not a turning point in American Jewish life.
The United States is not the UK, and the Democratic Party is certainly not the British Labour party. But the echoes of British, left-wing anti-Semitism and a two-camp worldview can be heard on many American college campuses, within extreme-left political groups and even among some American progressives. It reminds us that anti-Semitism in America is not simply the property of the American right.
Deborah Lipstadt knows a lot about anti-Semitism, and she’s talked a lot about it lately, ever since her book Antisemitism: Here and Now came out right in the middle of the biggest public furor on the topic in years.
Robert Siegel Reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s new book, Antisemitism, and Mark Weitzmann’s Hate: The Rising Tide
of Anti-Semitism in France.