The Palestinian organization that had organized Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar’s planned delegation to Jerusalem and the West Bank once claimed that Jews put Christian blood in matzah, echoing a centuries-old anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Miftah, a not-for-profit run by longtime Palestinian peace negotiator Hanan Ashrawi, was forced to apologize in 2013 after publishing an…
Author and journalist Ari Shavit called new sexual assault accusations against him “blood libel” on Israeli army radio station Galatz on Monday. “This is a blood libel,” he told host Yael Dan in Hebrew. “Murder in cold blood, [the accuser] shed my blood and my daughter’s blood.” Shavit was responding to an account by an…
(JTA) — Lots of people have been comparing the government’s policy of separating families to the Holocaust. But Paul Krugman, the liberal’s liberal economics columnist at the New York Times, has a different Jewish historical analogy: He says the policy is like the age-old blood libel against the Jewish people. The blood libel is an…
Supposedly there was a blood libel last week at University of California, Berkeley. After Alan Dershowitz spoke at the law school, the student newspaper ran a cartoon that provoked numerous complaints about anti-Semitism, including letters by University of California Chancellor Carol Christ and Dershowitz himself, who wrote that there was “little doubt that this abhorrent…
JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of spreading a blood libel in his address Thursday to the European Parliament in Brussels. In the speech, which earned a standing ovation from parliament representatives, Abbas alleged that Israeli rabbis called this week for the poisoning of Palestinian water, a medieval anti-Semitic libel…
PRAGUE — Two far-right Czech politicians have been charged with incitement to hatred and defamation over a note they wrote supporting a 19th century blood libel. The police launched criminal proceedings against the men on December 20, and the charges were confirmed to JTA on Tuesday. Adam Bartos, chairman of National Democracy, a far-right Czech…
In “The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe,” Emily Rose, a historian who has taught at Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Baruch, among other universities, explores long-standing false accusations that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in ritual ceremonies. From the Middle Ages to the present,…
Some years ago, an obsession with Polish poetry led me to two ideas: First, that I should visit Poland, and second, that someone else should pay for it. So I wrangled a Fulbright fellowship and spent a year traveling in Poland. (I mention the Fulbright not to brag, but because it bugs me when travel…
