The New York Times reports on the Andrew Sullivan vs. Leon Wieseltier controversy. The report is not quite right; it says that Wieseltier accused Sullivan of anti-Semitism, when Wieseltier actually accused Sullivan of recklessly engaging in venomous rhetoric that gives aid and comfort to anti-Semites and stokes anti-Semitism. This may be cold comfort to Sullivan […]
Archive | Anti-Semitism
Foxman vs. Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh made comments on his radio show (scroll down–if you find this post of great interest, you should probably read the whole three-paragraph monologue, which makes the relevant context abundantly clear) suggesting that Pres. Obama may be subtly appealing to anti-Semitism through his attack on “bankers” and “Wall Street,” and that Jewish voters, in […]
Confusing Overrepresentation with Domination
An especially pernicious common fallacy is the assumption that if a given group is overrepresented in some field, that must mean that they dominate it, and are using their supposed “domination” to promote the group’s interests. My better half quotes this example described by historian Paul Johnson in his book Modern Times: Of course underlying […]
More One-Sided “Reporting” from the NYT
Here’s the way the New York Times describes an ongoing controversy over whether the Berkeley Daily Planet is obsessively anti-Israel and perhaps anti-Semitic: For the last six years, The Berkeley Daily Planet has published a freewheeling assortment of submissions from readers, who offer sharp-elbowed views on everything from raucous college parties (generally bad) to the […]
Putting Heidegger in the library’s grave of discarded lies
Monday’s New York Times has an interesting article about the forthcoming English edition of Emmanuel Faye’s book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935. In brief, Faye argues that Heidegger’s pro-Nazi views were not incidental, but were at the core of his life’s work. Accordingly, suggests Faye, […]
What Kind of People Affiliate with Human Rights Watch’s Middle East Division?
This kind: Helena Cobban is on the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division. In a recent blog post, she took exception to the Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb criticizing her because “she likes to compare Israel to Hamas.” (H/T: Richard Landes) Cobban was offended not because Goldfarb was wrong, […]
God Bless America:
You might have missed this, assuming that, unlike me, you don’t comb the NYT sports pages for odd little items like this. According to a report in Saturday’s paper, Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, a “a fixture at Yankee Stadium for years with his stirring rendition of God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch, was […]
Guardian Debunks Ahmadinejad Story
Not a Jew. I pointed out previously that persons of Jewish descent in anti-Semitic societies sometimes become openly anti-Semitic themselves to prove their lack of loyalty to the Jewish community. The flip side is that people with no Jewish descent (e.g., with very high probability, Hitler) are often alleged by their political enemies to really […]
Was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Born Jewish?
This could just be disinformation, but if true it explains a lot. Note that some of the worst anti-Semites in history, including Torquemada and Karl Marx, were of recent Jewish descent, and used anti-Semitism to ingratiate themselves with their non-Jewish constituencies. Ha’aretz: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s scathing attacks against Israel and his repeated denials of […]