RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/13/jews-defending-other-jews-is-a-revolutionary-act/

David Christopher Kaufman was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here:

When does anti-Zionism become outright anti-Semitism? Since 7 October 2023, it has become disturbingly commonplace for ‘pro-Palestine’ demonstrations to demand the total destruction of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State. Claims that Israel deliberately targets children have echoes of the ancient, anti-Semitic blood libel. Sympathy for Hamas, a terror group committed to the murder of Jews, is also disturbingly widespread in a protest movement that claims to stand for ‘peace’.

David Christopher Kaufman – editor and columnist at the New York Post – joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss why Jews need to be more vocal in standing up for Israel. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What’s your response to the claim that, in the aftermath of 7 October, people were marching against Israel, rather than against Jewish people?

David Christopher Kaufman: The horror of that statement is that, when people turn on Jews, the endgame is usually an attempt at mass extermination.

Jews have often been alright in history. They were alright in Weimar Germany. In many ways, Jews were alright in the court of Isabella and Ferdinand in late-15th-century Spain. But, suddenly, they weren’t alright. Millions of Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, and millions of Jews were exterminated in concentration camps during the Second World War.

It pains me greatly to see so many Jewish people not speaking up. We had Adrien Brody winning an Oscar for playing a Holocaust victim for the second time in his career. Yet he said nothing about anti-Semitism, even while he was on the biggest stage in the world, benefiting from telling Jewish stories. In many ways, our own people are not doing their job. We’re allowing the bad guys to define the narrative.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/antisemitism-on-the-hill/

On March 5, the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill was the setting for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that was truly fascinating. The subject: antisemitism, in particular the displays of vicious Jew-hatred that have taken place on college campuses since the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023.

It’s a subject that the Democrats have tried to avoid for years because it sorely divides their ranks. After all, several congressional Democrats – notably members of the so-called “Squad” – are openly antagonistic toward Jews and deeply hostile to Israel. In 2019, a House resolution condemning antisemitism – introduced in the wake of remarks by the appalling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), one of the members of the Squad – was watered down by Democrats into a general condemnation of all hatred and intolerance.

Well, it’s a new day. Hence this two-and-a-half-hour hearing, which was made possible by the fact that the Republicans won a senatorial majority in the November elections. Of the five witnesses, three were selected by the Republicans: Adela Cojab of the National Jewish Advocacy Center; Alyza D. Lewin, president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law;  and Asra Q. Nomani of the Pearl Project. All had powerful, disturbing things to say about the rise in student antisemitism since October 7.

Cojab, for instance, recalled a college class in Middle Eastern Studies in which she’d asked the professor whether bin Laden should be considered a terrorist. “Everybody laughed,” she said – because, you see, her classmates had all been taught that the terrorist label is vulgar and simplistic. Indeed, Cojab explained, they’d been taught a lot of things – among them, that “the political is personal”; that the world is divided into the “global north and global south,” the former of which is always wrong and the latter always right; and that it’s permissible to commit acts of violence “if your ideology is correct.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/anti-semitic-influencers-conspiracy-theories-kanye-west-candace-owens-andrew-tate

In 1991, a motorcade carrying a Jewish rabbi cruised through Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood. After getting separated from the group, one of the cars ran a red light and collided with another vehicle, which swerved onto the curb and hit two black children, leaving one injured and another dead. Within hours, the neighborhood had broken out in riots, with mobs of black residents targeting Jewish institutions. Early the next morning, a group of young black men stabbed and beat a Jewish graduate student to death.

As the tensions escalated, the race hustler Al Sharpton organized protests at the scene, portraying Jews as nefarious “diamond dealers” responsible for the global exploitation of blacks. Another round of looting, vandalism, and violence followed.

Flash forward to the present. Hamas launched the October 7, 2023, terror campaign against Israel and created fertile ground for another propaganda war. In the United States, left-wing academics seized the moment to rally support for the “decolonization” of Israel, and in the digital realm, a new anti-Semitism has reared its head. Several influential online commentators—most notably, Kanye West, Candace Owens, and Andrew Tate—have used the attention around October 7 to push conspiracy theories and, especially in West’s case, outright anti-Semitism, on podcasts and social media platforms, ostensibly from a “right-wing” perspective.

The two episodes provide a fascinating point of comparison. Anti-Semitism is an ancient affliction, but it takes a different shape throughout history, depending on the culture, language, and technology of the moment. In today’s case, we see a resurgent anti-Semitism that has scrambled politics and perpetuated itself in cyberspace. In short, the Crown Heights riots have been digitized.

The first thing to understand is that Sharpton’s activism was a form of flesh-and-blood ethnic politics adapted to the televisual era. His narrative in Crown Heights was built on a particular grievance, against particular people, in a particular neighborhood. It generated its power on a left-wing trope: that Jews were oppressing poor blacks, and that the government was favoring “white interloper[s]” over native minorities. Sharpton’s desired outcome was tangible: he sought the imprisonment of the driver and, more broadly, cash for his organization, which operated like a mafia protection racket.

The new anti-Semitism has taken a different turn. The leaders of this movement are not political activists but social media “influencers” who have constructed a narrative based not on a left-wing, oppressor/oppressed framework, but on a diffused, right-coded conspiracy theory. Jews, in these influencers’ telling, have taken control of American media, flooded society with pornography, and organized sex-related blackmail rings to secure support for Israel.

https://www.jns.org/betrayal-lipstadts-silence-about-campus-jew-hatred-under-the-biden-administration/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm_medium=email&_

It turns out that what the country needed most was an antisemitism envoy to the United States and not to the rest of the world. And when the plague of Jew-hatred surged in the streets of American cities and on college campuses, what was also needed was for that envoy not to stand by in silence while the administration she served chose to be neutral about the issue for partisan reasons.

Sadly, that failure will constitute a major part of the legacy of Deborah Lipstadt.

Lipstadt is an eminent Jewish historian whose groundbreaking work on Holocaust denial earned her acclaim in her field. It also led to an important court case in Great Britain where Holocaust denier David Irving unsuccessfully sued her for libel, an ordeal that not only inspired her own book on the subject but also the 2015 movie “Denial” (she was portrayed by Jewish actress Rachel Weisz).

She deserves to be remembered for her scholarship and for writing some excellent books like her 1985 Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945 and the 1993 Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, as well as the 2005 History on Trial: My Day in Court With a Holocaust Denier.

Her recent acknowledgment of the failure of the Biden administration to adequately respond to the explosion of antisemitism under her watch, however, should not be overlooked.

Denouncing Columbia

It was just one sentence in an article she recently wrote in The Free Press that was devoted to explaining why she refused to consider an offer to teach at Columbia University. But in so doing, she buried what should have been the lead.