Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an opinion allowing the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority to reject religious advertising on its system. Civil libertarians should applaud the ruling. Over 40 years ago, public transportation systems opened subways and buses to commercial advertisements — painlessly, they thought, to hold down…
Ira Stickler was driving into the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel when he blinked in disbelief. There in front of him was a New Jersey license plate that read “Aryan10.” As a Jew, Stickler was outraged to be driving behind a Nazi. As a lawyer, he decided right then and there to see if he could get…
The bus from Warsaw to Rzeszów, Poland, breaks in Kielce. A small city in southwestern Poland, over 50 Jews were killed in Kielce by their Polish neighbors after returning from concentration camps in 1946. I found myself in Kielce en route to a Holocaust Commemoration week in the Podkarpackie Voidodeship, a mostly rural, deeply conservative…
Twitter accounts associated with the far-right Jewish Defense League were swept up in a larger purging of white nationalists accounts as the social media site implemented new rules targeted “violent extremist” groups. The Twitter accounts @JDLCanada, @jdldotorg, @JewishDefenceNY were all booted offline sometime on Monday, December 19. Twitter announced in mid-November that beginning Dec. 18,…
Jemele Hill, an ESPN reporter, has been feuding with Donald Trump on Twitter for the better part of a month. It began early in September when Hill tweeted, Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists. — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017 In response, the White House…
Recently, a friend wrote a piece that appeared in these pages. When I glanced at the comments that were posted, I was shocked by how vitriolic they were toward my friend and toward the other commenters. Almost none of them addressed the substance of the piece. Instead, they were ad hominem attacks on the writer…
A University of California, Berkeley student group has cancelled its “Free Speech Week,” a four-day event beginning on Sunday set to include appearances by right-wing media figures Stephen Bannon, Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos. However, Yiannopoulos showed up anyway on Sunday. According to Quartz, Berkeley was forced to pay $800,000 in security fees during Yiannopolos’…
The Jewish Bar Association of San Francisco has raised more than $85,000 as part of an unusual fundraising campaign to combat a right-wing rally proposed for next weekend in San Franciaco. A GoFundMe campaign titled, mockingly, “Adopt-a-Nazi (Not Really)” aims to protest a gathering known as the “Patriot Prayer’s Freedom Rally San Francisco” by raising…
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