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An Iraq War veteran (of mixed Ashkenazi and Iraqi Jewish ancestry) and two-time failed Republican candidate for public office, Elan Carr, was appointed in Feb. 2019 as State Dept. “Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combatting anti-Semitism.”  Carr’s been in the news for advocating an aggressive strategy of “philo-Semitism,” going on the offensive against antisemitism by projecting […]

Not surprisingly, publications and writers with different political leanings have handled this issue differently.  Conservative journalist John Podhoretz, writing in the NY Post, has gone ballistic against New York Mayor Bill de Blasio for his Twitter chastisement of “the Jewish community” in charedi neighborhoods of Brooklyn for ignoring public health social distancing rules. The New […]

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) opened its first full day on Feb. 9 with a session called “Leveraging Community Relations to Fight Antisemitism” — a panel consisting of Deborah Lipstadt (author most recently of Antisemitism Here and Now and a professor of Holocaust Studies at Emory University), Dove Kent (Senior Strategy officer at Bend the […]

REQUEST TO THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION CHILLS ACADEMIC FREEDOM Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar last week wrote Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to request an investigation into whether University of Arizona programs comply with federal funding requirements. He expressed concern specifically about whether the campus’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) engages in anti-Semitic activities or […]

Over 25 years ago, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin complained about the anemic support of AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) for his government’s efforts at peace, prompting the launch of a more dovish organization within the pro-Israel American-Jewish community, the Israel Policy Forum.  But AIPAC’s rightward trajectory has continued.  One of our colleagues, David […]

A number of African Americans have attacked Jews, and some observers on the left can only see white supremacy.  For example, Alex Myers twists himself into knots to assert that “White Supremacy Is the Root of  Violence Against Jews“; while clearly true in Pittsburgh and in other instances, it’s hard to see this in the […]

Initially, a factually flawed article in the NY Times alarmed our Third Narrative discussion group by reporting that the Trump administration’s new executive order was redefining Jewishness in “national” or even “racial” terms.  The actual text of the “Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism” does not do that however.   Two of our Third Narrative colleagues are in […]