UnHerd: What did the Habsburgs do for us?

 For Rady the unquestionable key to the dynasty’s might was its mystique. It was imbued with an aura of sacral legitimacy which not only held the loyalty of subjects but imbued the family’s members with a driving sense of vocation: “they conceived of their power as both something they had been predestined for and part of the divine order in which the world was arranged.” The self-concept was manifested through intense Eucharistic and Marian piety — well beyond that of other royal households. [...]

For contemporaries, their own lived experience was different. Presentations of the royal house in popular literature had a sense of “sacred drama” about them. The personal sorrows of Franz Joseph, who lost both wife and son before their time, together with the burdens of ruling “were likened to Christ’s Crown of Thorns, confirming the emperor as not only the ruler of peoples but also their redeemer.”

Ethnic fragmentation was contained because the emperor “became the almost exclusive focus of loyalty and symbol of an idea that transcended nation.” Unlike in today’s culture war and Brexit battles, national-separatist ambitions were more pronounced among the intelligentsia than urban-worker and rural-labourer population bases. [...]

Maybe Franz Joseph was influenced by the late medieval chroniclers who constructed elaborate lineages linking the Habsburgs back to the Kings of the Old Testament and even to Noah. Certainly, the very real affection the Empire’s Jews felt towards him is attested to in surviving silver Torah scroll holders, capped with the Habsburg double-eagle, produced in significant numbers during his reign.

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UnHerd: Is Corbyn really an anti-Semite?

 After 26 years of activity in the labour movement, there are some things about which I am sure. One is that there is a strain of the Left — mainly embedded within the far-Left — that is anti-Semitic, virulently so, in some cases. It is small, but it exists. It will often cloak its anti-Semitism in criticism of Israel. Indeed, its obsession with the transgressions of that small country, when the misdeeds of certain other nations are more numerous and at least as bad, leads one to conclude that there is something else going on. Occasionally, it will lay bare its true beliefs with swivel-eyed rantings about “Zionist” control over the media or financial system. It is, quite frankly, comprised of irreconcilable extremists who are beyond reason. [....]

I know, too, that while most who raised concerns about anti-Semitism inside the party were well-meaning and justified, a small number chose to weaponise the issue because they loathed Corbynism and wanted rid of it. To say so is regarded as heresy in some quarters, but you don’t have to be a Corbynite to recognise that there has been some degree of naked politicking in this debate. It is idle to pretend otherwise. This politicking by a minority has served to create something of an accusatory — and deeply unpleasant — atmosphere across the Left which, on occasion, saw legitimate vigilance and a desire to clean the stables develop into hyper-sensitivity and recrimination. [...]

We know that Corbyn has consorted with undesirables, some of whom are unquestionably foul anti-Semites and from whom most decent people would run a mile. We have seen the stories about murals and wreath-laying near the graves of those linked to the Munich massacre. But we also know the Corbyn who stood against apartheid and has been a lifelong and vocal campaigner against racism. So to the question of whether Corbyn dislikes Jews for no other reason than that they are Jews, I can only respond that I am unable to make a window into the man’s soul and provide the answer for you. And I am sceptical of anyone who asserts certain knowledge on the point.

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The Atlantic: Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

 The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. “My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith,” he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. It’s a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barrett—a devout, conservative Catholic—to the Supreme Court. [...]

It helped that Trump seemed to feel a kinship with prosperity preachers—often evincing a game-recognizes-game appreciation for their hustle. The former campaign adviser recalled showing his boss a YouTube video of the Israeli televangelist Benny Hinn performing “faith healings,” while Trump laughed at the spectacle and muttered, “Man, that’s some racket.” On another occasion, the adviser told me, Trump expressed awe at Joel Osteen’s media empire—particularly the viewership of his televised sermons. [...]

The Faustian nature of the religious right’s bargain with Trump has not always been quite so apparent to rank-and-file believers. According to the Pew Research Center, white evangelicals are more than twice as likely as the average American to say that the president is a religious man. Some conservative pastors have described him as a “baby Christian,” and insist that he’s accepted Jesus Christ as his savior. [...]

In fact, according to two senior Utah Republicans with knowledge of the situation, Don Jr. has been so savvy in courting Latter-day Saints—expressing interest in the Church’s history, reading from the Book of Mormon—that he’s left some influential Republicans in the state with the impression that he may want to convert. (A spokesman for Don Jr. did not respond to a request for comment.)

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The Guardian: The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and then took on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced by Gisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front). [...]

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. The moral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly. [...]

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

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Curve Magazine: The Qur’an, The Bible And Homosexuality In Islam

Neither the Bible nor the Qur’an (Koran) has a lot to say about homosexuality, and what they do say relates only indirectly to contemporary discussions about gay rights and same-sex marriage. Like pre-modern scholars of law and ethics, these books assume heteronormativity. [...]

Actually, he had already determined to punish all these towns and their inhabitants, male and female, young and old, before the angels’ visit and the attempted homosexual rape (Genesis 18:16–33). When the wickedness of Sodom is recalled in other parts of the Bible, homosexuality is not mentioned. Yet, despite this broader context, the story was often interpreted primarily as a condemnation of homosexual activity in any form. [...]

In the Hadith (thousands of stories reporting the words and deeds of Muhammad and his companions that are comparable in authority to the Qurʾan itself), there is some support for the notion that the principal offences of Sodom were idolatry and avarice. These led in turn to inhospitality and the rape of male visitors.

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The Memory Palace: Stories about the St. Louis

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UnHerd: No, my marriage is not a “second holocaust”

So too was my reaction to the latest comments of the newly appointed Israeli education minister, Rafi Peretz that intermarriage – Jews ‘marrying out’ – “is like a second holocaust”. His comment, made last week, during a government cabinet meeting is indicative of a growing rift between hard line Israeli nationalists and the increasingly liberal Jewish diaspora, especially in places like the United States. Peretz was commenting on a briefing given to the Netanyahu government by Dennis Ross, formerly a senior official in the Obama administration, on recent trends in Jewish communities around the world. Peretz pointedly commented that over the last 70 years, the Jewish community has “lost six million people” – a figure that is commonly understood to be the number of Jews that were murdered in the Shoah. [...]

My wife and I decided that our boys – both Jews on account of their mother – ought probably to get their Israeli passports. But the conversation with the Israeli embassy didn’t go well. It seems that our boys will not be allowed to have Fraser on their Israeli passports – though that is their name. The embassy official needed proof that ours was not a sham marriage – or indeed any sort of marriage at all. They demanded Facebook photographs of us together throughout the year before our marriage. Bizarrely, being properly married in a Register Office – with documentary evidence – and living together for three years and having two children didn’t count as sufficient evidence that ours isn’t a sham marriage. But Facebook photos would do. In the face of all this ridiculous officialdom, Mrs Fraser – who is really not to be messed with – is no longer minded to continue with the process of application. [...]

But seeing past my anger, the minister’s statement is indicative of the changing nature of Jewish identity. In 2017, the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Institute published a study that found that – excluding the Heredi community – close to 60% of US Jews are married to non-Jews and only 15% are married to other Jews and raising their children as Jewish. It is probably these statistics – far more than the sort of shabby, low grade prejudice that currently lurks within the Labour Party – that really bothers those who are looking long-term at the future existence of the Jewish people. For the more conservatively-minded, assimilation constitutes a deeper existential threat.

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Haaretz: Intermarriage Among Diaspora Jews Is 'Like a Second Holocaust,' Israel's Education Minister Says

Israel's education minister has likened intermarriage among diaspora Jews, and particularly North American Jews, to the Holocaust in a recent cabinet meeting. A spokesman for Education Minister Rafi Peretz confirmed Tuesday that Peretz said that "assimilation is like a second Holocaust."[...]

Last year, Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, member of the National Union – one of the member parties to the Union of Right-Wing Parties, sent a letter to employees at his ministry discussing the "assimilation Holocaust." According to Ariel, "During the Holocaust, we've lost about six million Jews. Without at all comparing the two, we're losing a part of our people to assimilation."

Fellow National Union member Eli Ben Dahan said in 2014, while he was deputy minister for religious affairs, that intermarriage are "a silent Holocaust. We must remember that the Jewish people, unfortunately, has gone through a Holocaust. It has been diminishing over the past century … In Europe we have as much as 80 percent intermarriages; in the United States it's 66 percent. It's horrible."

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EURACTIV: Right- and left-wing violence cannot be equated, says expert

The Federal Office’s report shows that the community of Reich citizens and so-called ‘self-administrators’ is growing. How come, what kind of people are they?

This is by no means a new phenomenon, these people have long been known among researchers. Yet, the size of the group is growing and Reichsbürger is a collective term for everything. It is also easy to enter the right-wing extremist scene.[...]

Moreover, in recent years we have observed an increase in physical attacks on Jews where perpetrators are of Arab descent. The attacks are not, therefore, carried out with a classical right-wing extremist motivation, but because of hostility towards Israel.[...]

No. The extremist groups from the left are very divided in terms of ideologies and programmes. These are not rooted in tradition as is the case with right-wing extremism, which leans towards nationalist thinking. [...]

On the right, the vast majority of offences are racially motivated, often directed against migrants. On the left, we see mostly confrontational violence directed towards the right-wing scene and police officers. It is often about eliminating the basic democratic order of the state. For example, by attacking right-wing politicians or attacking the police at demonstrations.

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The Guardian view on German responses to antisemitism: frankness and honesty

The Jews of Germany are alarmed. It is not just the success of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in recent elections that contributes to their feeling of unease. A short-lived campaign to ban circumcision in 2012 was the first alarm bell; large demonstrations against the Gaza war in 2014, in which hostility to Israel often seemed indistinguishable from antisemitism, was another. And they are aware of the rising currents of antisemitism around Europe, even if it takes different forms in different countries. [...]

The chancellor and the newspaper, in their different ways, exhibited a moral seriousness that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of German public life. The determination of official Germany to look the past squarely in the eye and, where possible, to atone for it, has provided a moral example to the rest of Europe. That does not undo the signs that sympathy for the Nazi past remains in some parts of the country. But no senior German politician would say, after far-right protests that had led to a person’s death, that there were “very fine people on both sides”, as Donald Trump did after the Charlottesville white supremacist rally of 2017.

The first big challenge to modern Germany’s liberal order came from the far left, with the urban guerillas of the 1970s. One noted legal thinker then observed that the democratic, liberal state depends on conditions that it cannot itself guarantee. In other words, the written rules are not in themselves enough to hold society together. They must be supplemented by unwritten moral understandings. Finding and strengthening those was the task facing Germany in the 1970s, successfully accomplished then; it must be resumed now. It is also the task that faces a horribly divided Britain today.

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Phys.org: Ashkenazic Jews' mysterious origins unravelled by scientists thanks to ancient DNA

For a more scientific take on the Jewish origin debate, recent DNA analysis of Ashkenazic Jews – a Jewish ethnic group – revealed that their maternal line is European. It has also been found that their DNA only has 3% ancient ancestry which links them with the Eastern Mediterranean (also known as the Middle East) – namely Israel, Lebanon, parts of Syria, and western Jordan. This is the part of the world Jewish people are said to have originally come from – according to the Old Testament. But 3% is a minuscule amount, and similar to what modern Europeans as a whole share with Neanderthals. So given that the genetic ancestry link is so low, Ashkenazic Jews most recent ancestors must be from elsewhere. [...]

The tolerance of the Persians encouraged the Jews to adopt Persian names, words, traditions, and religious practices, and climb up the social ladder gaining a monopoly on trade. They also converted other people who were living along the Black Sea, to their Jewish faith. This helped to expand their global network. [...]

What happened next was that the Jewish empire began to collapse. By the tenth century, the Jews on the Black Sea migrated to Ukraine and Italy. Yiddish became the lingua franca of these Ashkenazic Jews and absorbed German words while maintaining the Slavic grammar. And as global trade moved to the hands of the Italians, Dutch and English, the Jews were pushed aside.

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The Guardian: Jews in Germany warned of risks of wearing kippah cap in public

Germany’s government commissioner on antisemitism has warned Jews about the potential dangers of wearing the traditional kippah cap in the face of rising anti-Jewish attacks.

“I cannot advise Jews to wear the kippah everywhere all the time in Germany,” Felix Klein said in an interview published Saturday by the Funke regional press group.[...]

Klein, whose post was created last year, cited “the lifting of inhibitions and the uncouthness which is on the rise in society” as factors behind a rising incidence of antisemitism. [...]

“Antisemitism has always been here. But I think that recently, it has again become louder, more aggressive and flagrant,” Claudia Vanoni said in an interview, adding the problem was “deeply rooted” in German society.

Antisemitic crimes rose by 20% in Germany last year, according to interior ministry data which blamed nine out of ten cases on the extreme right.

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CityLab: Why France’s Former Prime Minister Wants to Be a Mayor in Spain

His candidacy is a grand gesture—one that represents the ideal of the European Union, of late so beleaguered, as a space where national borders and identities can dissolve into a glorious, larger transnational project. In practice, Valls’s campaign is a living example, even a cautionary tale, of how all politics is local, and of how that European ideal can be a vague and elusive abstraction in the rough-and-tumble of an election. [...]

By then, Valls was one of the most disliked politicians in France. Socialist voters felt betrayed not only by his joining En Marche, but also by the policies he had championed while in power: market-friendly labor reforms that didn’t go over well with the party’s left-wing base, and his stance in what could loosely be called identity debates, such as his efforts to strip French jihadists of their citizenship, a proposal the Socialists ultimately withdrew for lack of support. Valls was essentially seen as a neo-conservative. [...]

At the height of the independence push, when Valls was still an elected official in France, he made impassioned speeches in favor of Spanish unity, saying that “unmaking Spain is unmaking Europe,” and in this moment, the germ of his candidacy first sprouted. Valls has repeatedly said, including to me, that he’s a republican in France, which replaced its monarch in the French Revolution, and a royalist in Spain, where he sees the royal family as defenders of Spanish democracy. Opposition to the Catalan independence movement is a pillar of his mayoral campaign. One of Valls’s opponents in the race is an independista running his campaign from jail, adding an element of romantic martyrdom to the political drama. [...]

Barcelonians don’t seem to resent Valls for being an opportunist or a carpetbagger. The city has a pretty open heart for welcoming newcomers from all over the world, to say nothing of Catalans such as Valls. But it isn’t so keen on the fact that he lived here for only a matter of months before announcing his intention to run in September. That he keeps making gaffes doesn’t help. Valls got some flak after a television interview in which he admitted that he didn’t know how much a metro ticket cost here.

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The Atlantic: Europe’s Ubiquitous Anti-Semitism

Growing up, I used to think anti-Semitism was like the black death: tragic, nightmarish, and historic. It had wiped out millions of people. It was theoretically terrifying. But only occasional outbreaks in poor and faraway countries remained. It had ruined the life of my grandmother, but it would not be part of mine.

But now I realize that anti-Semitism is actually like the flu: uncomfortable, sickly, occasionally deadly, but constantly with us. Every few decades, it mutates into an epidemic. The rest of the time it lingers, producing headaches, sweats, and dizzy spells. Not killing us, just wearing us down.[...]

I felt it again, stronger, like a cold sweat, when I saw the footage of the Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut being mobbed by gilets jaunes—the yellow-vested protesters—who had crossed his path. They yelled, “Palestine,” “France belongs to us,” “Dirty Zionist,” and “The people will punish you.” [...]

Don’t let your Jewish identity be defined by those who hate you. Instead make it a source of strength, something they can never touch, what our ancestors wanted Jewish life to be. They saw the rituals, the togetherness, the songs of the Sabbath as a palace in time, not a cage, a way of life whose purpose was to bring the deepest calm.

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openDemocracy: Was Symon Petliura “an antisemite who massacred Jews during a time of war”?

The army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was perhaps the worst perpetrator. The UPR had declared independence from Russia in January 1918, becoming the focus of many nationally conscious Ukrainians’ desire for liberation. It spent the next three years trying to defend itself from various enemies before the Bolsheviks finally defeated it at the end of 1920. However, according to the most reliable statistical investigation, its troops were responsible for about two fifths of all pogroms and half of the total deaths.[...]

On 14 October 2017, the recently created Day of the Defender of Ukraine, the municipal government of the city of Vinnytsia erected a statue to Symon Petliura. This created consternation among many Jews in Ukraine and abroad, not least because the statue was in Ierusalymka, Vinnytsia’s historical Jewish quarter. Yet it also provided the Kremlin with further ammunition to discredit Ukraine as a bulwark of fascism and antisemitism. “Petliura was man who had Nazi views,” reacted Vladimir Putin at the time, “an antisemite who massacred Jews during a time of war.” [...]

The pogroms were not UPR policy. They were outbursts of military indiscipline during which UPR troops and commanders, proceeding from the prejudice that Jews supported the UPR’s enemies, punished entire Jewish communities, brutally and without discrimination. Some perpetrators had only a very loose affiliation with the UPR.

However, the view of Jews as hostile was not simply held by a few rogue units or irregular peasant partisans. Representatives of the UPR in powerful positions singled out Jews for special punishment. For example, the commandants of the cities of Dubno and Kremenets’ exacted a extraordinary tax from the local Jewish community as a punishments for its perceived disloyalty to the UPR.

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The New York Review of Books: The Fake Threat of Jewish Communism

Trying to discredit powerful political myths with mere facts, as we know all too well today, is a frustrating endeavor. Thus Hanebrink seeks instead to understand the historical background and the “cultural logic” of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism—how it functioned and morphed through different phases. Ultimately Judeo-Bolshevism embodied, in the form of “Asiatic barbarism,” an imagined threat to national sovereignty, ethnic homogeneity, and Western civilization conceived as traditional European Christian hegemony. It fused, in short, political, racial, and cultural threats into a single “specter haunting Europe.”

Hanebrink notes that amid the exhaustion, defeat, and political dissolution of many European countries at the end of World War I, the threat of the spread of Bolshevik revolution from Russia into Europe caused not only widespread fear and loathing but fear and loathing that identified Jews as the real cause of Bolshevism. He is correct, I think, to point out that this pervasive identification required more than the prominence of Jewish revolutionary leaders, and that Judeo-Bolshevism was constructed from the “raw materials” of earlier anti-Semitism. For Hanebrink the “three venerable pillars” of anti-Jewish thought were the attributions to the Jews of social disharmony, conspiracy, and fanaticism, which made Judeo-Bolshevism both a coherent idea and a ubiquitous, self-evident assumption. [...]

Atrocities against Jews led to Jewish appeals to the Allies and the subsequent imposition of minority rights treaties on Eastern European nations. In a vicious circle, these regimes in turn resented Jews as the cause of this infringement on their sovereignty, which they saw as further evidence of Jewish disloyalty. They insisted even more vehemently on the Judeo-Bolshevik connection to justify their past mistreatment of Jews and successfully exploited the Allies’ desire for a cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe to prevent the further spread of Bolshevism. For instance, the Polish army received crucial military aid to help it resist the Soviet invasion of 1920 even as it interned many of its own Jewish soldiers. All of this, it must be emphasized, took place before history’s most notorious purveyor and champion of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism had emerged from obscurity on the streets of Munich. [...]

The Allied occupation, the war crimes trials and denazification, but above all the division of Germany and the onset of the cold war led to the emergence in Western Europe of an anti-communism that was pro-democratic, pro-American, and not anti-Semitic. Underlying this transformation were two concepts. The first was that of totalitarianism, by which discredited and defeated fascism was equated with communism. The German churches in particular—previously highly nationalistic, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic, and thus all too often fellow travelers of the Nazi regime’s campaigns against liberalism, Marxism, and Jews—now portrayed themselves as resisters to and victims of that regime, which like the Soviet Union had manifested the evils of the secular, materialistic, ungodly state run amok. West Germany’s new self-image of Christian Democracy pitted against totalitarianism dovetailed with the second concept—the American notion of Judeo-Christian values as the basis of both democracy and Western civilization in its cold war opposition to godless communism. By embracing the cold war, assimilationist American Jews finally severed the old identification between Jews and Bolsheviks, but at the cost of giving priority to anti-communism over Holocaust memory. It was not until the late 1970s that the Holocaust began to obtain the position it currently holds in American consciousness.

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Haaretz: Istanbul's 'Fake Auschwitz': What Happened When a Turkish Movie Gala Recreated a Nazi Death Camp on the Red Carpet

What made this faux-Auschwitz all the more strange, gratuitous and incongruous was that the movie itself is not at all focused on the Holocaust or on death camps, even if it does bring in the tragedy of German children who were victims of the T-4 Nazi euthanasia project. That at least would explain the toys and small shoes piled on top of the red carpet – but not the death camps, to which they were not sent.

Indeed, in an interview that took place following the screening, the producer, Mustafa Uslu, explained that the genocide of the Jews had already been presented on film so many times he decided to focus on a different aspect of the Nazis’ murderous policies. This of course begs the question why he opted for the sensationalized Holocaust setting for his gala, if he originally did not think it was "new" enough ground to be a central part of his film.

The gala evening’s strange WWII recreation was only briefly covered by the giant media outlet Haber Turk, which ran the story under the headline, "The Nazi Concentration Camp Gala." The bare "which-celebrities-were-spotted" report used a normal tone, and didn’t question the visuals or propriety of partying alongside the props of genocide. With most Turkish media outlets subject to government pressures not to stir controversy, it is no wonder that no other major outlet tackled the topic head on. [...]

It’s more likely than not that this incident was triggered by inexplicable ignorance, rather than explicit anti-Semitism. But the support the Jewish community received in protesting the event serves as yet another example where Turkish Jews have enjoyed growing solidarity in response to cases of anti-Semitism on social media and within the public sphere.

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Vox: New York’s Orthodox Jewish community is battling measles outbreaks. Vaccine deniers are to blame.

What’s notable here is that the cases are mostly occurring among unvaccinated or under-vaccinated Orthodox Jews, particularly children. When asked why people are opting out of vaccines, the city health department said anti-vaccine propagandists are distributing misinformation in the community.

The fearmongerers include the Brooklyn group called PEACH — or Parents Teaching and Advocating for Children’s Health — which spreads misinformation about vaccine safety, citing rabbis as authorities, through a hotline and magazines. Brooklyn Orthodox Rabbi William Handler has also been proclaiming the well-debunked link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism. Parents who “placate the gods of vaccination” are engaging in “child sacrifice,” he told Vox. [...]

He also explained that some Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn go to school together, worship together, and live and travel together. This means a few unvaccinated people living in close proximity can be dangerous. But it also means making inroads with public health messages requires extra effort. “We see government invest in public health awareness a lot,” Rapaport said. “But it never trickles down to Yiddish speakers or people who don’t own TV sets.”

The story in New York is familiar: Other tight-knit communities — like the Somali-American community in Minnesota and the Amish in Ohio — have recently fallen victim to measles outbreaks as a result of vaccine refusal. This latest outbreak is a reminder of how vulnerable more insular groups can be to anti-vaxxers, and the unique challenges for public health advocates in countering their messages in these communities. [...]

“From a religious point of view, people have to vaccinate,” Rabbi David Niederman, executive director and president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg, told me. Instead, people have a duty to protect their families and the most vulnerable in their communities. “Anything that causes harm — you have to do whatever you can to [avoid] that.”

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The Guardian: How the murders of two elderly Jewish women shook France

But one reason the case became so notorious is that it fit into what has become a common narrative. France is the only country in Europe where Jews are periodically murdered for being Jewish. No fewer than 12 Jews have been killed in France in six separate incidents since 2003: Sébastien Selam, Ilan Halimi, Jonathan Sandler, Gabriel Sandler, Aryeh Sandler, Myriam Monsonégo, Yohan Cohen, Philippe Braham, François-Michel Saada, Yoav Hattab, Lucie Attal and Mireille Knoll. [...]

For Rachid Benzine, a scholar of Islam and a well-known French public commentator, these killings are best understood in the context of what he calls postcolonial antisemitism. “For me, this is a holdover from the colonisation of Algeria, linked to the treatment of Algerian Jews compared with Muslim natives,” he said. In 1870, for instance, the so-called Crémieux decree secured full French citizenship for all Jewish subjects residing in Algeria, whereas Arab Muslims remained under the infamous code de l’indigénat, which stipulated an inferior legal status, essentially until 1962. The legal disparity continued even after Algeria won independence, when hundreds of thousands of former colonial subjects from North Africa continued to arrive in metropolitan France. Jews like the Attal family, originally from the Algerian city of Constantine, arrived in France as citizens. Muslims, however, had to apply to the government for the privilege of citizenship.

Benzine also noted “the unfortunate reality that the Palestinian tragedy fuels the perception among many Muslims that we somehow have the Jews of France to blame”. Another factor, he said, is the so-called concurrence des mémoires. “We have this competition of who’s suffering most,” Benzine said. Many French citizens of west African origin, for instance, argue that while the French state has invested fully in preserving the memory of the Holocaust, it has made little effort to preserve the memory of slavery. “The disparity is a fact, and it’s true that many black people say, ‘look what they do for Jewish people, and there’s nothing for us,’” Louis-Georges Tin, an activist and the former director of the Representative Council of France’s Black Associations (CRAN), told me recently. Paris is home to one of the world’s premier Holocaust museums and research centres, and a black plaque adorns the façade of nearly every building in the city from which a Jewish child was deported during the second world war. All that commemorates slavery in Paris, the capital of a former slave-trading nation, are two small nondescript statues. The only museum that documents this history is in the overseas department of Guadeloupe, nearly 7,000km from mainland France. [...]

Even the phrase “the new antisemitism” is contested. If the old antisemitism was associated with France’s Catholic far right, which has hardly disappeared, the “new antisemitism” is today used almost exclusively to describe Muslim hatred of Jews. In that sense, many on the left believe that “naming the problem” actually makes it worse, enshrining difference in a society that officially recognises none, and repeating the kind of racial stereotypes that only exacerbate social divisions. But others, both on the right and in the Jewish community, ask whether Attal and the other French Jews who have been killed since 2003 are collateral damage in an egalitarian social project that was always doomed to fail. They often decry what they call “ostrich politics”, what they see as the wilful blindness of the left with regard to Islam.

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Vox: There will be more non-Christians in the new Congress than ever before

The new House and Senate will have the highest number of non-Christian members of any modern Congress, according to data compiled by the Pew Research Center, edging out the 111th when Democrats had full control of Capitol Hill.

A full 63 members — almost all Democrats — adhere to a faith other than Christianity or don’t adhere to any faith at all. [...]

According to Pew, 61 Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate are not Christian, while only two Republicans are not — both of whom are Jewish. Most of the Democratic non-Christians are Jewish as well (32), and there are a handful of Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. Nearly 20 Democratic members declined to name their religion — a new high, per Pew’s data — and newly elected Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) said she is unaffiliated.

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