“Kahn told me once that the Jews were too neurasthenic to be vengeful,” relates a character in Shadows in Paradise, Erich Remarque’s penultimate novel. “Because they were neurasthenic, their hatred had no stamina; it soon gave way to resignation, and to preserve their self-respect, they turned their energies to understanding the enemy. Like all generalizations, this was only partly true. Still, there was somethingin it. Or maybe they were too cultivated to be vengeful…”

         Anne Bayefsky reports that the UN General Assembly in June nailed the coffin shut on reform of the UN Human Rights Council, which the Obama administration had proclaimed it would reform from within. (The Bush administration had rightly said the 2006 supposed “reform” of the Council was no reform at all and stayed away.)  Supposedly there would be a “review” of the Council after five years but the five years have now ended with the General Assembly adopting a resolution kicking any further consideration ten to fifteen years down the road.  

 In 2009 the West Dunbartonshire Council passed a resolution/motion during Operation Cast Lead, to boycott all goods from Israel.             This week the story was news again and has unleashed a Twitter tirade, emails and phone calls as well as blog articles and online newspaper articles.             We now discover that the person who tabled […]

(Editor’s Note: In this excerpt from A Guide for the Bedevilled, published while the Holocaust raged in Europe, Ben Hecht provides guidance for how not to respond to anti-Semites.)                   The Jewish apologists are avidly and pathetically intent on stating the case for the Jew by contradicting his enemies. They do not even pause […]

            What the misreading of the Arab Spring as a revolutionary wave of democracy, rather than an explosion of existing tensions and longstanding civil wars, points to most is how thoroughly the 21st century Middle East expert has unlearned everything that his 19th century predecessor knew about the Muslim world.             The 19th century expert […]

            Dov Gruner was born in Kisvarda, Hungary in December 1912. On April 19, 1947 the British Mandatory Authorities in Palestine hanged him. Who was he?             Bela (later Dov) Gruner was born to a religious family, attended a Jewish primary school in his native Hungary and obtained an engineering degree in Moravia in the […]