In May, there’s been a terrifying surge in antisemitic hate crimes across the country. This is not just anecdotal, nor is it just a few isolated but well-publicized incidents in places like Los Angeles and New York. Rather, we have seen a torrent of incidents across the country in both small towns and major urban…
On Sunday night a new front opened up in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict: John Oliver’s mouth. The comedian, whose commentary segments on his “Last Week Tonight” HBO series often out-report reporters, this time slammed Israel in its week-long battle against Hamas, the Islamic militant group that controls Gaza. “Multiple children have been killed this week…
Antisemitism is on the rise, with powerful instigators behind it, but the struggle against it is at risk of being derailed by acrimonious divisions among Jews and others over its very meaning. The drive for adoption of a single, fixed definition of antisemitism has devolved into a polemical political debate on Israel and Palestine with…
The undergraduate student-government organization at University of California, Los Angeles has unanimously passed a resolution calling on the UC system to divest from companies that allegedly profit off the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, prompting UCLA pro-Israel groups to issue a statement saying they were left in the dark about the resolution’s true, anti-Israel…
As one of the oldest civil-rights organizations in the Jewish community, we’re not unaccustomed to criticism, even in the pages of one of America’s oldest Jewish news outlets. But the OpEd by Salam Al-Marayati, president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which the Forward published on Tuesday morning, was illuminating about how certain quarters in…
Everyone has heard Viscount Northcliffe’s famous aphorism explaining what makes news: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news… But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” While it’s an understandable editorial principle, if two or three men start biting dogs, each generating its own splashy set of news stories, one…
As someone who regularly wears a kippah you might think my encounters with anti-Semitism would be all about a racial epithet I unfortunately was confronted with on the street. But subtle racism can be even more detrimental than an overt attack, and this experience of racism beneath the surface cuts even deeper than a stranger…
Updated Aug. 14 at 10:00 a.m. Last fall, Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union made history by inaugurating its first non-Christian president — an Orthodox-trained rabbi — to lead the esteemed consortium for the advanced study of religion. The ceremony took place on Oct. 24 at UC Berkeley’s International House, where Rabbi Daniel Lehmann delivered his inaugural…
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