At London’s weekly anti-Israel protests each Saturday, one can often find a small group of strictly Orthodox Jewish men — always men or boys, never women. Generally no more than a dozen, they hold signs with wording such as “Judaism: …
The defiance of Israel’s border towns
Southern Israel is a region at war. Driving down from Tel Aviv to the border towns on the frontlines of the war with Hamas, I pass a truck with an open back carrying a load of heavily armed soldiers cradling …
The many delusions of Roger Waters
Roger Waters presents Corbynism the Musical, and, unlike its source material, it is still going. On the 81st night of his tour, This is Not a Drill, there are two demonstrations outside the O2 arena. The first is to Free …
The fall of the Jewish gangster
Antisemitism has always partly been driven by envy; Jews attract a unique resentment for their disproportionate intellectual achievements in literature, science, education and, particularly, finance. At the same time, however, this success can be inverted. Historian Fred Siegel calls this …
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 …
Who betrayed Anne Frank?
Embedded in the cobbled pavements of the Netherlands are thousands of brass memorial plaques dedicated to victims of the Nazi genocide: stumbling stones, or Stolplersteine. “As you stumble over them, you stumble over the past,” writes Rosemary Sullivan. “It is …
