After years of dwindling activity, the Ku Klux Klan is staging a comeback, according to a newly released report from the Anti-Defamation League. The report, “Extremism in America: Ku Klux Klan,” found that the notorious white-supremacist group has re-emerged in the past year as a potent force. The ADL, which monitors hate groups, found that…
Germany’s push for all European Union member states to adopt legislation criminalizing Holocaust denials is gaining traction as several key countries that expressed concerns over potential free-speech infringement have indicated a new willingness to join the effort. Berlin announced early this year that during its six-month presidency of the E.U., it would press to make…
The Israeli government has shut down the office of the Minister of Diaspora Affairs, raising concerns that the government may be giving less attention to the already weakening bonds between Israel and the rest of the Jewish world. Last week, according to a spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the contracts of the last two…
Washington – As Palestinian leaders left this week for Saudi-brokered talks aimed at reconciling the Fatah and Hamas factions, the Bush administration was sending a tough message, making clear that a Palestinian national unity government will not necessarily pave the way to international recognition. Stepping up its own involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the administration…
Washington – The fierce debate over a report calling for greater autonomy for Israel’s Arab population and questioning the Jewish character of the state is spilling over to the American Jewish community. The report, titled “Future Vision,” was issued by Israel’s National Committee of the Heads of Arab Local Authorities. Funding came from the New…
In the wake of an increasing flurry of attacks leveled against left-wing Jewish groups by their right-wing counterparts, one dovish group is fighting back. Jewish Voice for Peace, a San Francisco-based organization, recently launched a blog to track what it describes as a growing epidemic of intimidation and harassment from fellow Jews seeking to stifle…
In the late 1980s, Barbara Benioff Friedman sat in a meeting of the UJA-Federation of New York’s distribution committee and was appalled by what she heard: During a heated debate over which summer camps the charity should fund, a Reform Jewish woman stood up and argued that it was Orthodox camps that merited the dollars,…
A study that posits itself as the new authority on Jewish demographic data says that the American Jewish population is between 6 million and 6.4 million, and potentially as high as 7.5 million. The new figures are the latest and most powerful refutation of the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey, which found a Jewish population…
Is Harvard’s first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust. You know what they say – as goes Harvard, so goes America. Anyone calling Hillary for a statement?
I have an article up today about how member groups of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs are debating the exact language of a proposed resolution in support of reducing America’s dependence on oil: Some would like to see more of a focus on the environment and global warming, while others are more focused on…
Isaac Hirshbein of La Mesa, Calif., wants to know why, in all English translations of the Bible, four of the Five Books of Moses, or Pentateuch, have Greek names — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy — while a fifth bears the English name of Numbers. “Why the break in continuity?” he asks. “And what is…
