I am not an historian, decent author or a journalist, and the chances are that unless there is a link or reference to somewhere else, the perpetrator is yours truly – Renaud Sarda. I created this blog as a focal point, to arm people with arguments and facts that they can perhaps use to counter biased media reporting and anti-Israel propaganda, and to help counter (BDS) campaign. I am a Zionist/Sephardi/Jew who will fly the Israeli flag, and defend whatever Israel does.
A collection of pictures of Jerusalem and other places in Israel from the 19th century has been sold for $1.4 million the British newspaper The Daily Mail reports.
The collection consists of over 1,000 black and white photos, the earliest of which are from 1840.
The photo set includes pictures of Mt. Zion, al-Aqsa Mosqe, and the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. The photos are amongst the oldest photos of Jerusalem ever captured.
Jews and Arabs appear in the pictures, and shows people praying in mosques, at the Western Wall, and at other holy sites.
The collector, who’s name hasn’t been released, collected the photos over a quarter century in order to create a special historical record of the city.
The collection was sold at auction at Sothebey’s. The starting price was under $500,000, but the winner of the auction bought the collection for $1.4 million.
Richard Patorini, an expert at Sotheby’s described the sale as “one of the most unforgettable sales” that he was involved in.
“It arrived at its high price because those who were involved in the bidding understood that there were great treasures amongst these pictures. More pictures are taken every two minutes than were taken in the 19th century,” he said.
“Pictures from this period are rare, and this is the largest collection of pictures from this period which have ever been sold at auction.”
JEWISH students at Glasgow and Edinburgh University made the shock discovery of fliers referring to the Holocaust on the eve of Pesach.
The fliers, headed 'The Greatest Swindle of All Time', were posted on notice boards at the two universities.
They include quotes from Professor Norman Finkelstein: "The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the greatest robbery in the history of mankind"; "Much of the literature on Hitler's Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense if not sheer fraud"; "Given the nonsense that is turned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few sceptics."
Student chaplain Rabbi Yossi Bodenheim said: "We've been in touch with the universities and the police have been contacted.
"This is clearly an act of antisemitism. As I have told the students, the posters were put out right before Pesach which celebrates freedom. We, as a student community, will keep going, stronger than ever."
It is understood that East Renfrewshire MP Kirsten Oswald consulted with Glasgow North MP Patrick Grady as well as the Glasgow University's administration.
Both the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities and Chaplaincy Scotland are looking into the matter.
As a young boy, I used to think my grandma very strange. In her bedroom she kept a suitcase, packed and ready for use at a moment’s notice. “Just in case,” she’d tell me when I asked where it was that she was always waiting to go to. “You never know when they’ll turn on the Jews.”
Her house in Northwood was epitome of suburban comfort, and I couldn’t understand what on earth she meant. Until, that is, I learned some history – including the history of the Jews. Which is, in short, that pretty much everywhere, they have turned on the Jews.
From my teens through my twenties and thirties, the fact that I am Jewish meant little to me beyond the Jonathan Miller sense of being Jew-ish. I adored beigels, matzoh balls, Seinfeld and Woody Allen more than your average gentile would think they deserved. And that was about it. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you that after the Holocaust, real, serious anti-Semitism – the sort where Jews were killed for being Jews, rather than the odd nasty comment – was a thing of the past, in civilised Europe, at least.
Then something happened. 9/11, to be specific. I realised something was up that I didn’t really understand. So I read and read and read. And then read some more – especially the words of the terrorists and their fellow Islamists. They were explicit and open. Jews were the enemy. All their “issues” with the West pivoted, in the end, on their Jew hate. So I immersed myself even more in the issues around terrorism and Islamism. Because, you see, it mattered.
It matters, of course, to all of us, because – as we have seen both on 9/11 and ever since, Islamist terrorism is not specific in its targeting. But it matters to me more, I would say, than anything else I can think of. Because although these maniacs will happily kill anyone, they say, andtheir subsequent murders show, that – quite specifically – they want to kill me. A Jew. So on level I am not in the least bit shocked, or even surprised, by the reemergence of Jew hatred as a thing in recent years. By what arrogance would we think that our generation, alone in history, would be free of the oldest hatred?
But on another, more visceral level, it chills me to the bone. And it’s not the terrorists. They threaten me, of course, as they threaten us all. Yet to me, the real chill comes from their fellow travelers – the useful idiots of the terrorists and Jew-murderers who say they do not have a racist bone in their body, but when it comes to Jews, a blind spot emerges. The likes, to be blunt, of the now suspended Ken Livingstone, who claims never to have come across a single example of Anti-semitism in the Labour Party. He clearly has never looked in the mirror. Much has been written – especially by the brilliant Nick Cohen – on the “Red/Green Alliance”; the phenomenon by which a swathe of the Left has linked up with radical Islam, leading to the bizarre spectacle of Leftist feminists supporting Islamists who would cut off the hands of women who read books.
With “anti-Western-imperialism” as part of the glue binding the alliance, everything else falls into place. So Hamas and Hezbollah might have as their defining goal the elimination of an entire people from the face of the earth, but that unfortunate consequence for Jews is by the by, because Hamas and Hezbollah are freedom fighters.
And because Israel is part of the Western imperium, as well as a key target for Islamists, it is also enemy number one for progressives. So an obsessive preoccupation with the Jewish state becomes the default position of the Left. China, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia – pah! The focus must be on Israel and Israel alone. From that springs an entire worldview that encompasses “Zionist” control of the media, of business, of everything. And we can’t be accused of targeting Jews because we don’t use the word. We say Zionist, not Jew.
So deep does this warping of what it means to be Left and progressive now run that it is almost prosaic to assert Zionist control. But now, to cap it, we have a Labour leader whose entire political career has been in this milieu – feeding it, growing it and pushing it.
For months now, week by week, examples have been emerging of cut and dried anti-Semitism – most dressed up, oh so cleverly, as anti-Zionism, but much not even bothering to hide it. And the Labour leader’s response to the criticism that he is soft on anti-Semitism and that it’s his political mindset that has fuelled its rise is not to get hard on anti-Semitism. It’s to get irritated.
Miliband: Peer’s comments ‘disgraceful’Play!00:24
This is not some academic exercise or interesting political theory. This is reality – the reality that the Labour Party is now run by a cadre for whom anti-Semitism really is ok, so long as it is dressed up as anti-Zionism. Because Zionism is the enemy of all good people.
Should I admit that I am afraid? Because I am. I don’t go about my life in fear. I wouldn’t be writing this or doing my job if I did. But how, quite rationally, can I not be afraid when Jews are being murdered on the streets of Europe simply for being Jews; when anti-Semitic tropes and discourse is becoming part of the mainstream of political debate; and when one of our main political parties is led by a man who does not merely let this fester, but actually describes representatives of terrorist groups as “friends”?
If this is the level we have reached today, I fear not just for myself but far more for my children. History shows that when anti-Semitism takes hold it does not wither; it grows. Yes, Britain is a wonderful home to Jews, as it is to all minorities. Yes, we have the full backing of the law and the authorities. But yes, I do look over my shoulder. Wouldn’t you?
Stephen Pollard is the editor of The Jewish Chronicle.
I’d largely forgotten about the anti-Semitism I experienced at school until a few weeks ago. I’d been tagged in a Facebook photo by one of my oldest friends who moved to Australia and I miss dearly. It was a picture of a small yellow bird and the caption read: “A rare sighting of the tiny little jew bird”.
“If it was any other form of racism, I wonder whether everyone would have encouraged and accepted it”
I’d been used to this sort of casual anti-Semitism on a daily basis when I was growing up. One of my friends quickly coined the nickname “Jewsie” and soon that’s what how most people referred to me. Other variations included “pocket Jew”, as I am a modest five foot, or people would make regular insightful observations such as “you’re such a tiny little Jew aren’t you.”
If I ever asked them to stop and pointed to the fact that what they were doing was actually a form of racism they’d say: “chill out! It’s just a joke!”
I also remember one girl saying: “I still don’t see how Jews are a race.”
The last day of school
On the last day of school, I came bounding home and proudly showed my mum my jumper. We had just finished school, and even though we would all be staying on for sixth form together, everyone had scrawled proclamations of their undying friendship in marker pen all over each other’s uniform.
She was shocked when alongside the different versions of “omg I’m gonna miss u so much”, one boy had written:
“Just
rEmember
Will”
I tried to reassure my mum that it wasn’t a big deal and that it wasn’t meant in a nasty way. These were my friends, my best friends, after all, but she was still upset.
Even though it didn’t actually upset me, this treatment sadly taught me to always play down my heritage. I’d tell people: “I mean yeah I’m Jewish but I’m not Jewish. It’s only because my mum’s mum was a Jew, I mean I’m not religious or anything and I love bacon. I’m not a real Jew.”
I think the reason it then struck me when I saw that Facebook post is that I’ve become so used to life without this casual anti-Semitism.
Embracing Jewish identity
At university “Jewsie and “pocket Jew” were swapped for “tiny Susie” and “little Suse”. I even made friends with some Jewish girls who were really proud of their heritage. It was completely alien to me to meet people my age embracing and openly talking about their Jewish identity.
I’m still not as vocal as they were about being Jewish, but now if someone asks I say “yes I am” without reeling off a list of justifications.
To this day I don’t doubt that my school friends made those comments without malice. But if it was any other form of racism, I wonder whether everyone would have encouraged and accepted it like they did.
I also wonder why none of my teachers mentioned anything when I’d been wearing that jumper all day, but perhaps they just didn’t see it.
Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party this week for alleged anti-Semitism
After Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party this week for alleged anti-Semitism, the Director of the Council of Christian and Jews has warned that racism towards Jewish people is highly prevalent within politics.
Speaking to The Tablet Dr Jane Clements said that not only is anti-Semitism on the rise in the UK, but “it has never really gone away”. Calling it ‘the longest hatred’, she said contemporaneous forms included all the usual elements of fear, stereotyping and criticism.
Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended from his party along with Labour MP Naz Shah over comments made about Israel. The crisis has led to claims of a deep anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn denied that there was a crisis in his party but said Mr Livingstone would face an investigation over the "grave concerns” regarding his use of language.
“While legitimate criticism of Israel is not anti-semitic, it can act as a cover for such thoughts,” she said.
A Labour MP who didn’t want to be named told The Tablet they found the recent news about Mr Livingstone “appalling and abhorrent”.
“It is quite right to challenge governments whose actions we find abhorrent,” said Dr Clements. “When these challenges also echo recognised racial slurs, they cross the line.”
She said that racism can be thwarted by “checking for the residue of the old anti-Judaism, by reading and taking to heart the Papal declarations on the anniversary of Nostra Aetate last year and by challenging even the smallest slur against others.”
She also raised the point that alongside anti-Semitism, people must also be aware of Islamophobia.
“Catholic teaching emphasises the fact that God cares for all humanity, regardless of status or background or identity,” she said
Controversy has reignited over plans for a memorial in the Warsaw Ghetto honoring non-Jewish Poles who saved Jews during the Holocaust following an Israeli sculptor’s apparent acceptance of a commission to design the project.
The plans, now taking place amid efforts by Poland’s right-wing government to portray the role of Poles as heroic during the Nazi occupation, has provoked fervent opposition—but also some support—from survivors of the Holocaust, their families and scholars of Jewish history in Poland.
“This is not a place to commemorate Polish heroism,” one of the opponents, Professor Jacek Leociak, told the Forward in a phone interview from Warsaw. The Warsaw Ghetto, said Leociak, who is the director of Holocaust studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences, “is a place to commemorate a Jewish disaster, where Jewish bones lie in the biggest Jewish cemetery in Europe.”
Plans call for the memorial to be built on the grounds of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a prime modern site in the historic district where Jews penned in by Nazi orders launched a doomed revolt against their oppressors, after hundreds of thousands were deported to Nazi death camps. Opponents of the project view the site as sacred ground, where Jews died and resisted, largely on their own.
The memorial’s main proponent is Sigmund Rolat, who is himself a Polish Holocaust survivor. Rolat, a wealthy philanthropist, is chairman of the Remembrance and Future Foundation, which is sponsoring the project. Last year the foundation conducted a design contest for the monument, but Rolat rejected the proposal of the top finalist, which was for a memorial consisting of a cluster of trees.
Now, at Rolat’s urging, Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan has agreed to design a monument, although no drawing yet exists. Rolat stresses that no contract has yet been signed and no money has been exchanged.
Opponents had been trying to persuade Karavan to turn down this commission. But on April 12 Karavan wrote critics of the project, who have organized a Facebook page, and informed them of his intention to create a monument on the museum grounds.
“I am convinced that the ‘holy’ earth of the Warsaw Ghetto is the right place to commemorate the courageous Righteous Poles, who risked their lives and the lives of their family, friends and neighbors to save the life of one Jew,” he wrote.
News of Karavan’s decision unleashed a torrent of angry responses on the Facebook page from Polish and Diaspora Jews.
“We, the actual descendants, the moral descendants, of Polish Jews have an obligation to defend the integrity of this ground, and hence, oppose any revisionist initiatives such as this monument,” wrote one critic.
The dispute over the planned memorial to Poland’s “Righteous Gentiles,” as they are called, has been exacerbated with the ascendance of a far-right Polish government that came into office late last October. Opponents of the memorial see it as reinforcing the government’s nationalist narrative
In his interview with the Forward, Leociak said that the government has made it a project to propagate that Righteous Gentiles during the Holocaust had rescued millions. “This is absolutely insane,” he said.
Poland, which had a Jewish population of some 3.3 million before World War II, had an estimated 369,000 at its end. Yad Vashem, the Israeli museum devoted to the Holocaust, has recognized roughly 6,454 Poles as Righteous Gentiles, the highest number of any country in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Asked if the monument would bolster the current government’s depiction of Poland as a nation of heroes, Konstanty Gebert, a member of the board of trustees of the Remembrance and Future Foundation, said, “We will not tailor our monument to the vicissitudes of Polish politics.” Gebert noted that the monument initiative began during the previous government.
Rolat said he saw the monument as an expression of “our Jewish debt to those who were trying to save us. In many cases they did save us,” he said, “Risking their lives and that of their families.”
As for his insistence on the Warsaw Ghetto site at the POLIN museum, “It’s the only place where it will be seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors… especially young people,” Rolat said.
Henryk Grynberg, a prominent Polish-Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor who now lives in the United States, disagreed. “If the Poles want to celebrate these people, as they should, they should do it on their territory, not in the ghetto,” he said. “They should do it not with an Israeli artist, but a Polish artist. Why do the Jews have to do it for them?”
The National Union of Students is Britain’s largest membership organization , representing 7 million students . So when it recently elected Malia Bouattia as its new president, and rumors swirled around that she was an anti-Semite, Jewish students on British campuses reportedly felt isolated and uncomfortable .
But is Bouattia really an anti-Semite? Isn’t she merely, as she claims, an anti-racist activist who happens to be an anti-Zionist?
It’s far too easy to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Doing so shuts down debate and cheapens the accusation of Jew hatred. If you’re a religious Jew who believes that a Jewish state shouldn’t be formed before the coming of the Messiah, your theological conviction is anti-Zionist but it certainly isn’t anti-Semitic. And if you believe in cosmopolitanism — the philosophical position that there should be no international borders, and therefore that the Jewish people shouldn’t have a nation state of their own, because no people should — that’s anti-Zionist, but again, it’s not anti-Semitic.
But to answer the question about Bouattia in particular, you have to know something about the internal politics of NUS as an organization.
NUS runs a number of autonomous liberation campaigns for underrepresented or oppressed student groups. There’s a campaign for women students, for LGBTQ students, for black students (defined as students of African, Asian or Arabic heritage) and for disabled students. These campaigns hold their own conferences, decide their own policies and elect officers to sit on the executive committee of NUS in order to represent their campaigns to the wider movement.
In the wake of the racially motivated 1993 murder of a black British man named Stephen Lawrence and the public inquiry that followed, progressive politics in Britain became wedded to a result of the inquiry — the MacPherson doctrine — which said that racism should be defined by the victims thereof. It’s not for white people, say, to decide what is and isn’t offensive toward black people.
The NUS liberation campaigns embody that principle. It would be almost unthinkable for the NUS conference to debate what it means for something to be racist against black students. That would be a discussion for the black students’ conference, not for anyone else.
To the best of my knowledge, there is only one minority group that has ever had to discuss, in front of the entire NUS conference, what they consider to be an attack on their identity.
We Jews don’t have a liberation campaign.
Around 10 years ago, I was elected to the national executive committee of NUS. Back then we already felt that certain forms of anti-Zionism were merely anti-Semitism in sheep’s clothing. To compare the plight of Palestinians to the plight of Jews at the hands of the Nazis was to use the memory of the Holocaust as a stick to beat its victims and their descendants. We therefore believed that criticism of Israel, though it should be free, robust and heartfelt, should steer clear of those comparisons, not merely because they were grossly inaccurate, but because they constituted a form of anti-Semitism.
We believed that it was fine to deny Jews a right to self-determination if you were a religious Jewish anti-Zionist or a cosmopolitan. But it was anti-Semitic if you thought that other peoples who claimed such a right — such as the Palestinians, Kurds or Tibetans — deserved to have it. You couldn’t allow everyone except Jews to have national aspirations.
Accordingly, we proposed to the NUS conference that it adopt the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s working definition of anti-Semitism , which enshrines all these convictions. I had to stand at the podium in front of 1,000 student delegates, who represented millions of students, and argue our position. I felt like a court Jew of the Middle Ages, pleading to the gentile powers to heed our concerns. Black students or disabled students at NUS would never have had to suffer the humiliation of appealing to their own detractors to heed their understanding of their own identity and struggle. They have autonomous liberation campaigns within the body of NUS. We don’t.
I had to leave the room when my non-Jewish colleagues got up to attack our motion. I didn’t want the audience to see me cry. We won that debate, but I had never in all my life felt so judged for being Jewish as I did standing in front of that room of delegates, pleading our case.
Bouattia is an anti-Zionist. Not merely a critic of Israeli policy or of the occupation, she describes her position in terms of anti-Zionism — opposition to the existence of a Jewish state — and yet she’s all for the national rights of other peoples. She’s in favor of Palestinian national rights and she stands in solidarity with the Kurds . Other people can have self-determination, just not Jews. I’m not defending the MacPherson doctrine here (I can understand why some people might think that racism is an objective evil and that nobody should have a monopoly over the right to define it), but it seems that for Bouattia, this doctrine should protect only non-Jewish minorities.
Putting to one side the fact that Bouattia criticizes the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel for sidelining violent “resistance” against innocent citizens (which makes her a sympathizer with Hamas and the worst forms of violent extremists), I think I’ve done enough to establish that according to the EUMC, whose definition was ultimately adopted by NUS, she is an anti-Semite. To be clear, I’m not personally accusing her of anti-Semitism, but it does seem that this label would apply to her based on the EUMC’s working definition.
Of course, she’ll come back to her claim that we’re confusing anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism. But this is coming from a person who refused, at first blush, to support a motion condemning the Islamic State group because she feared it would be perceived as an attack on Muslims. She pressed for a differently worded motion, but I struggle to see what in the original wording was Islamophobic. Clearly, Bouattia is a person who thinks that we should be very sensitive when it comes to the feelings of non-Jewish minorities, but that Jews are just too sensitive.
Under her leadership, I fear that the British student movement will become a place in which Jews will really feel welcome only if they’re willing to adopt an understanding of their identity that doesn’t ruffle any feathers. They will have to be good court Jews. And I know from painful experience how alienating that can be. It’s time for the student movement in Britain and the political left in general to eradicate the pernicious forms of anti-Semitism that are flourishing in their midst.
I have nothing but admiration for the Jewish student leaders who have been left to fight this fight. But some of the most inspiring people I’ve ever known were the non-Jewish student leaders who, in my time in the movement, stood shoulder to shoulder with us, and with all victims of racism, whatever their background or religion. We need people like them if we’re going to win this fight.
Samuel Lebens is an Orthodox rabbi and a research fellow at Rutgers University, where he works on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics.
