Random stuff I find interesting and you may not.
Before the conservative panic about political bias in Big Tech, there was the conservative panic about political bias in Hollywood. It would, after all, be hard to find a place more solidly blue than Tinseltown, where those to the right of center have long felt the need to keep their views under wraps and where … Read more
A poll released Monday found that half of “openly Jewish” college students have at times attempted to conceal their religious identity on campus, and that they are more likely to do so the longer they’re enrolled. The study — conducted by the Cohen Research Group with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under … Read more
Freedom flows not from remaking each other, but from loving one another. My father-in-law, Alexander Guttmann, was an erudite Talmudic scholar. He was trained in academic critical scholarship (what that once meant before CRT and its friends came along), as well as in the more ancient Jewish version of disciplined study. From those perspectives, he … Read more
“The U.S. Can Neither Ignore nor Solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” was the headline of Martin Indyk’s May 14 article in Foreign Affairs. Washington may not be able to end that conflict, he wrote, but must actively manage it. Indyk, a former U.S. Special Envoy for Middle East Peace under President Barack Obama, and who served … Read more
Why do so many students hate Jews? Especially now. You’d think with so much spare time on their hands — all those sob stories about being denied the full Uni Experience of staying drunk on cheap students’-union booze 24/7 and becoming more intimately acquainted with each other and the cast of Neighbours than with their … Read more
In [David] Baddiel’s case, one of these contradictions is between his earlier reputation as a laddish, football-loving comedian and his recent incarnation as a serious intellectual figure with a deep-rooted interest in the social aspects of history and literature. The latter has not only led him to work as a dramatist and novelist, but has … Read more
If there is one thing that unites the political extremes — from the halls of Congress and the steps of the Capitol, from Main Street to academia — it’s disdain for Jews. Embraced and excused by both the far Right and far Left in America, anti-Semitism has gone mainstream. Bigotry has a strange way of … Read more
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — AEI Annual Dinner 2017 We’ve seen the emergence of what I call a politics of anger. We have seen the culture of competitive victimhood. We have seen the emergence of identity politics based on smaller and smaller identities of ethnicity and gender. We’ve seen the new politics of … Read more
This past weekend, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group uniting 125 local Jewish communities and 17 national Jewish organizations, sent an email to its followers proudly announcing that it has signed on as a partner in the Virtual March on Washington this week, an event organized by Al Sharpton. Because last week … Read more
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Chanukah message 2019 British Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivered a forceful videotaped message to mark the start of Hanukkah on Sunday, insisting, “Britain would not be Britain without its Jewish community. “It is a time to celebrate not just the miracle of the oil but also your unique identity … Read more