Just before Christmas, the Pope met with a Jewish comedian. This may sound like the set-up of a Woody Allen joke, but it is not. On December 23, Pope Francis received Gad Elmaleh — nicknamed the “Seinfeld of France” — …
Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma
There was a great three-panel comic that the artist Art Spiegelman did for The Virginia Quarterly Review a while back that neatly encapsulates the dubious if nearly universal centrality of the Holocaust in American Jewish life. In the strip, the …
The Dreyfus Affair is not finished
On January 13, 1898, Parisians awoke to the chorus of hundreds of news criers who, striding along the grand boulevards and brandishing copies of the newspaper L’Aurore, were shouting passages from the article that sprawled across the front page. It …
The erasure of black Jews
What does a Jew look like? If you ask this slightly suspicious question, most people’s minds will conjure a stereotype. The Woody Allen type: scrawny, cerebral, wears horn-rimmed glasses and probably has a prominent nose. Few people would immediately think …
The return of Satanic Panic
Of the 1,000 people who gave up their Saturdays to protest in London’s Square Mile, it was a middle-aged couple who stood out the most. They wore matching grey sweaters emblazoned with the words “STOP CHILD TRAFFICKING”.
Held on 17 …
What Giorgia Meloni is hiding
“I am Giorgia. I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Italian, I am Christian.” A 2019 speech by the new Italian Prime Minister is doing the rounds on social media, and has Right-wingers throwing flowers at her …
Germany’s cynical response to Munich
Palestinians deserve a better leader than Mahmoud Abbas. Last month, the president of the Palestinian Authority visited Germany, a country on whose donations his quasi-government depends. At a press conference two weeks ago with Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a German journalist …