A county in Sweden is planning to ban non-medical circumcision of boys, its commissioner said. Per-Ola Mattsson, commissioner of Blekinge County, said he would move ahead with plans to ban ritual circumcision by bringing the subject up in February with the county’s health board, according to an article published Thursday by the Sydöstran Daily. According…
With an asylum application to her own homeland, Annika Hernroth-Rothstein was hoping to draw attention to the problem of anti-Semitism in Sweden. Hernroth-Rothstein acknowledges the bid is “absurd” – but it’s working, having garnered international media coverage and stirring debate. “EU statutes provide that asylum be granted to persons with ‘well-founded reasons to fear persecution…
A bill introduced in the Swedish parliament would ban the non-medical circumcision of underage boys. Two lawmakers from the rightist Sweden Democrats party, noting that female genital mutilation is illegal in Sweden, submitted the bill to the Riksdag on Tuesday. Bjorn Soder and Per Ramhorn wrote in the measure that “boys should have the same…
President Obama examined artifacts from the life of Raoul Wallenberg and wished Jews worldwide a “shanah tovah” during a tour of Stockholm’s Great Synagogue. Wallenberg’s half sister, Nina Lagergren, 92, escorted Obama on Wednesday as he examined the belongings of the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust and later disappeared…
President Barack Obama is slated to visit the Great Synagogue of Stockholm during his visit to Sweden. Obama, who will arrive in the Swedish capital Wednesday on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, is en route to the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, Svenska Dagbladet reported Thursday. The U.S. embassy in Stockholm confirmed that the…
Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmo, has seen a near tripling of reports of anti-Semitic attacks, according to official figures. According to the Sydsvenskan local daily, Swedish police recorded 60 hate crimes against Jews in 2012, up from an average of 22 in 2010 and 2011, and during the first six months of 2013, police reported 35…
The Great Synagogue of Stockholm hosted Sweden’s first Jewish gay wedding. The couple, two men who had been living together for the past 28 years, was wed at the synagogue on Sunday at a ceremony conducted by Rabbi David Lazar and attended by some 50 people. “They only invited close friends because it was their…
The invaluable Thomas Edsall reports in his New York Times blog on a paper by an MIT economist, co-written with a Harvard political scientist and a French economist, that claims America can’t adopt more egalitarian social policies because it’s our “cut-throat capitalism” that allows countries like Sweden to have their “cuddly capitalism.” The idea is…
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