In the nineteenth century, they arrived, before anyone else, at an understanding that, in the new world of modernity, competitive advancement—doing well on exams—would provide an alternative to advancement through bloodlines. Why the Jews did[…]
…the ability of an individual halakhist to bring about a change depends, to a certain extent, on his ability to foresee the opposition of his peers to his innovation. From these conclusions, it is possible[…]
…out of the trauma and tragedy of the earlier decades of the 20th century, Jews redefined their image and reconstructed their roles in the post-World War II period. This represented a point in time when[…]
When Adolf Hitler’s party emerged from Bavaria with a philosophy called “Nationalsozialismus,” two of that word’s syllables were quickly repurposed by Hitler’s cosmopolitan opponents. They started calling the new party Nazis — implying, to the[…]
On too many college campuses, political activists embrace exclusionary intersectionality. Jewish students have reported feeling unwelcome in certain social justice coalitions. In such instances, anti-Israel students have become gatekeepers for campus coalitions, citing intersectionality in[…]
Within social and economic justice movements committed to equality, we have not yet collectively come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to White nationalist ideology, and, until we do, we will fail to understand[…]
Jews are not collectively accountable for the actions of all other Jews, any more than Muslims, African-Americans, or immigrants are. If you feel the need to interrogate every Jew and demand they denounce Israel (or[…]
If I live and work, as I do, in the kind of daily, intimate Black-Jewish coalitions that were a mainstay of the civil rights movement but are now supposed to be fraught with mutual suspicion,[…]
Medieval Christian Europe persecuted its Jews because it considered them responsible for the alleged acts of completely different Jews in the Middle East. The Chicago Dyke March just did the exact same thing to American[…]
Over years of speaking about White nationalism in the 1990s and early 2000s in the Northwest and then the Midwest and South, I found that audiences—whether white or of color, at synagogues or churches, universities[…]