GetReligion
Tuesday, April 08, 2025

Anti-Semitism

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Swedish neo-Nazis plan march near synagogue on Yom Kippur: Is scant advance coverage a good thing?

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Swedish neo-Nazis plan march near synagogue on Yom Kippur: Is scant advance coverage a good thing?

How’s this for a spiteful poke in the eye?

The neo-Nazi Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) is planning a march, with the approval of the local police, that will pass near the main synagogue in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second largest city. And when will they be doing that, you might wonder?

Why on Yom Kippur, of course, the holiest day on the Jewish liturgical calendar, which this year begins on Friday evening, Sept. 29, with the haunting Kol Nidre recitation. (Yom Kippur is part of the Jewish High Holy Days, also referred to as the High Holidays, which begin with this week’s celebration of Rosh Hashanah.)

Poke, poke, poke – ouch!

Sweden is hardly the only Western European nation where anti-Semitism – defined as hatred of Jews as a group or Judaism as a religion, for whatever the reason – has become an increasing public issue of late.

The U.K.’s Mirror, for example, last month ran a piece saying one in three British Jews is considering leaving the nation because of anti-Semitism. Reporting survey results, the paper said only 59 percent of the nation’s 270,000 Jews still feel comfortable living in Britain.

In Germany, the head of the growing right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-European Union Alternative for Germany party said just the other day that rather than continuing to lament his nation's instigation of the Holocaust, Germans should instead be "proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars."

Additionally, the head of the European Jewish Congress earlier this year said anti-Semitism is becoming increasingly more openly expressed across Western Europe.

Dr [Moshe] Kantor said: “It is truly disturbing that in living memory of the Holocaust, today in Europe we have a situation where the far right in gaining popularity in every major country on the continent. It is once more becoming acceptable in polite circles to openly make anti-Semitic, xenophobic and bigoted remarks, all under the cloak of national patriotism. ...


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Connect dots: After Charlottesville, journalists should cover anti-Semitism as distinct from 'racism'

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The past week once again underscored for me the connectedness of earthly phenomena – including, most decidedly, what's happening in the news business.

Comments made in Washington – or Bedminster, N.J. – reverberated in Panmunjom. An ugly and disconcerting clash in Charlottesville produced global bulletins, with good cause.

So excuse me if this post strays from my assigned GetReligion role, which is to focus on analysis of international stories and trends, and instead zig-zags between the foreign and the domestic.

Call it connecting the dots – in a very personal way.

The week saw a plethora of screaming headlines (and shouting cable talking heads) going on about the threat of nuclear war with North Korea and – incredibly – the threat of U.S. military intervention in hapless Venezuela. And then, at week’s end, came Charlottesville, the consequences of which will surely keep the news media engaged for some time, or at least until the next all-engulfing story comes along.

President Donald Trump finally got specific Monday about the underlying cause of Saturday’s clash between an assortment of alt-right white supremacists and their fellow travelers, and a large number of counter demonstrators, one of whom was killed when a man identified as a white supremacist and new-Nazi sympathizer is alleged to have driven his car into the crowd of counter demonstrators.

North Korea surely has potential consequences that are far greater formore people in Asia and elsewhere than do Venezuela (a non-story born out of another thoughtless remark by our commander in chief) and Charlottesville.

But I'm going with Charlottesville here, because, as I was told in Journalism 101, all news is local and personal. And I happen to be an American and a Jew and what I learned a half-century ago in journalism school remains true.


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Concerning Trump and anti-Semitism: Scribes offer blitz of views on whether he is or is not

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The daily maelstrom that is the Donald Trump administration has left journalists across the religious and political spectrum gasping for air. There is so much real news – don't get me started on the "fake news" dystopia – that even a 24-7 news cycle is unable to keep pace.

So being only human, I've had to prioritize which issues I pay close attention to in an effort to keep my head from exploding. Not surprisingly, my priority issues are the ones I think impact me most directly.

These would include the future of the environment and climate change policy, White House attacks on the integrity of the press, health care, religious liberty for all, the economy and class divisions and the increase of anti-Semitic acts – including a continuing rash of bomb threats – and the president's reaction to them.

Meanwhile, the headlines just keep on coming.

Sure enough, just prior to this post going live, the president commented on the bomb threats and other anti-Semitism incidents that have manifested of late. Click here for the latest.

The debates will continue. To say the least, the elite media, the American Jewish press and Israeli media have been all over the anti-Semitism issue.

I've read and viewed numerous reports that I thought handled it quite adequately and fairly. As you might expect, it's an explosive topic for any Jew who publicly identifies as such, as I do, and has family history connected directly to anti-Semitism at its very worst – the Holocaust and Muslim terrorism against Israeli and non-Israeli Jews.

As a former wire service reporter (United Press International in New York and San Francisco during the 1960s), I retain a fondness for a well-crafted round-up on a complicated subject – such as the charges from some Jews (and others) that President Trump harbors anti-Semitic inclinations. Of course, others say he at least looks the other way when such inclinations appear to surface in his associates and supporters.


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Anti-Semitism, an unlikely aid to Jewish survival? Plus tales of tribalism in France, Poland

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Anti-Semitism, an unlikely aid to Jewish survival? Plus tales of tribalism in France, Poland

Beneath the surface of polite conversation in the Jewish world there exists a disturbing (for me) school of thought that postulates the following: Anti-Semitism has not been all bad for Jews.

Yes, you read that right. Anti-Semitism has not been all bad for Jews because it has helped them survive as a living religious culture, one that otherwise might have disappeared via assimilation had Christians and Muslims, among whom Jews lived as minorities, been nicer about all those complicating theological details and cultural differences.

Or to put it another way, anti-Semitism forced Jews to cooperate among themselves for their physical survival, solidifying their tribal identity and encouraging them to fight to preserve their culture and faith.

I'm reluctant to embrace that proposition – given the Holocaust, the Inquisition and the assorted pogroms and injustices Jews have endured across the centuries, and to this day. That's a heck of a price to pay for group cohesion.

Yet I can't utterly reject it; I'm too aware of the emphasis on anti-Semitism that Jewish organizations use to rally community solidarity. Yes, and to raise money.

So I wonder whether a similar dynamic is currently at play among French Christians, Roman Catholics in particular, who seem to be experiencing something of a public political revival? And not just French Christians, but also the entire backlash among more conservative religionists against globalization's massive and threatening demographic changes.

That backlash would include Indian Hindus, about whom I wrote last week, white British Christians (even if only culturally so) who backed Brexit and American evangelicals who voted overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump despite strong misgivings about his lifestyle and temperament.


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Parade of 2016 yearenders: The Forward tunes in dizzying set of Jewish opinions

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When you think of The Forward, you probably think of a progressive Jewish website with a flair for interesting story angles on politics and trends in Judaism – secular and religious – with the occasional pop-culture and/or social media spin.

In other words, at the moment, "50 Things To Fear From the Trump Administration" right next to "5 Easy Hangover-Relieving Recipes to Make Today."

That's the ticket.

Well, The Forward also has a new corner of the website called Scribe, in which readers and commentators from all over – 250 contributors from six continents – offer their take on the world. It launched in July and the editors marked the end of 2016 -- naturally -- with a Top 10 items list.

Now, I am not going to list all of them. Click here to head over and see this feature for yourself. However, I am going to show you a sample of the list, in part to demonstrate that this is not your normal liberal Jewish blitz of content.

Now, it starts with something quite newsy and also rather predictable, in light of news trends linked to You Know What in this election year:

1: Anti-Semitism in America is Nothing New. Don’t Deny Jewish History and Culture by Calling Us “White”

The next item is also from the edgy progressive, multi-cultural, even virtue signalling side of things. As in:

2: Jews Should Register as Muslims
But then we hit the third item in the list. Sit down before clicking on through to get to this one!
3: I’m a Jew, and I’m a Member of the Alt-Right


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Que sera, sera: It's Trump's turn to deal with Middle East. Let the guesswork begin in earnest

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Que sera, sera: It's Trump's turn to deal with Middle East. Let the guesswork begin in earnest

The presidential election is finally over and according to the rules of the American electoral system Donald Trump will be our next president (my bias is showing). That means it's that time in the journalistic election cycle to guess at what the president-elect may or may not actually do once sworn in.

Yes, guess work Is pretty much the state of affairs, at least as of my writing this post. We may soon have a better understanding, but for now candidate Trump's steady stream of contradictory, conniving, condescending and cockamamie pronouncements makes it hard for his opponents and supporters alike to know just what he plans with much certainty.

So sit back and watch as aspirational, personal projection and shot-in-the-dark journalism swarms the field.

Oh, wait.

It appears that aspirational, personal projection and shot-in-the-dark journalism have been on the field all along, given what the majority of political polls predicted, and what some of our best journalistic minds (seriously) said before being proved wrong.

Others at GetReligion have written extensively about the domestic side of Trump's victory. So as this column's title suggests, I'm going international, starting with the Middle East. I'll begin with Israel before getting on to the Arab and Muslim Middle East actors. (I'm skipping the Syria-Iraq situation in this post; it's a post itself.)


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Painful group memories and the news media's (potentially) curative powers

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Painful group memories and the news media's (potentially) curative powers

I've been semi-detached from the dread, anger, loss, and pain that have dominated American and international headlines the past two weeks while my wife and traveled across the Iberian Peninsula's north.

But only semi.

Full detachment is impossible for me (a) because of the electronic communication devices I take with me on vacation, and obviously (b) because of my obsessive newshound personality. The former allows me and the latter impels me to keep up – at least to some degree – with humanity's daily dose of self-inflicted trauma.

Spain and Portugal make it even easier for me to stay connected to this irrational state of affairs thanks to their particular histories. They abound with reminders of past injustices heaped upon the region's Jews, with which I fully identity. (Click here: I posted on this at the start of my trip.)

Human history seems a litany of communal hurts we never fully overcome. Not to mention that these hurts are continually updated.

In one Portuguese town – Viana do Castello, just south of the Spanish border – I parked next to a stone wall defaced by graffiti. The only parts of the scrawl I could decipher were the swastikas and the word "Sion," or Zion. I doubt the full message was complementary toward Jews or Israel.

Then there was this despicable anti-American, anti-Semitic and blatantly racist cartoon circulated by Spain's United Left political party, which holds eight seats in the nation's 360-member bicameral parliament (Click here for New York Times backgrounder). It was timed to coincide with President Barak Obama's brief visit to Spain last weekend. (Spain and Portugal now offer citizenship to foreign Jews of Sephardic ancestry, meaning those who can prove their families were forced out of Iberia during the Inquisition.)

I mention my experience as a prelude to commenting on a story published by The New York Times that reported international Muslim anger at perceived insufficient Western outrage and compassion toward terror attack victims in Bangladesh, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Turkey during the just completed Muslim holy month of Ramadan.


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Will Sanders' stance on Israel push Jewish voters toward Trump, despite all his negatives?

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Will Sanders' stance on Israel push Jewish voters toward Trump, despite all his negatives?

Some political dreams live on and on; Exhibit A being the late Harold Stassen.

Then there's the Republican Party's quadrennial hope of using hawkish support for Israel as a wedge issue to convince a majority of American Jews to back a GOP presidential candidate – something that hasn't happened in nearly a century.

Well, here we are again, in another presidential campaign, and the dream's back on the table. Only this time, Republican leaders, who argue they understand Israel's security needs far better than do Democrat politicians, think they have a better shot at picking up the Jewish votes they covet.

Ironically, they're pinning their hopes on the first Jew to get within sniffing distance of snagging a major party's presidential nomination. That would be Sen. Bernie Sanders, of course.

This is a steadily building domestic and international story that's getting its appropriate elite media attention. The implications are potentially game-changing; for Democrats, U.S. foreign policy, Israel, and for an American Jewish community already divided – generationally above all else – over the right-wing Netanyahu government's handling of Palestinian demands.

Click here for a New York Times piece on the issue. Click here to see how the Washington Post handled it.

I've no major quarrel with either of those stories. Frankly, though, I've found the American Jewish media's handling of the issue more interesting and varied.


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Fighting radicalism: Los Angeles Times offers glossy look at new Muslim efforts in Sweden

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It's one thing to light a candle rather than curse the darkness. It's another thing to ignore or gloss over what could very well be darkness. The Los Angeles Times comes close to the latter in its feature on Muslim efforts at peace in Malmo, Sweden.

The article begins with the three-year-old Islam Academy, which attempts to make young students not only better Muslims, but better Swedes.

In other words, this is a madrasa with a difference:

Like other madrasas, as Muslim religious schools are known, the academy teaches the Koran, traditional Sunni Islamic spirituality, sharia law and Arabic.
Unlike many, it also teaches secular topics. Among them: the Swedish language, nature and sports activities, and social responsibility. The last of these includes interreligious dialogue, especially with the Jewish community.
"All our education programs have the effect of immunizing our youth against radicalization," said Barakat, a 34-year-old imam, who was sitting in his office above the academy's prayer hall dressed in a pale, ankle-length robe and skullcap.

The story, which was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, continues with a briefing on Malmo, the point of entry for most immigrants to Sweden. "About 20% of Malmo's 300,000 people are Muslim, making it one of the most Muslim cities in Western Europe," the Times says.

But the Rosengard district, where many of the Muslims finally settle, is the focus of this story. Rosengard was the site of riots in 2008 and 2011. Many outsiders regarded the area as a "no-go zone," hazardous for non-Muslims.

Clearly, the goal of this Los Angeles Times piece is to change that image:


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