antisemitism

Most would agree with the Nigerian-British singer-songwriter Sade that we don’t need any more war, but we are in desperate need of just a little peace. So, what do we do when it becomes clear that the people advocating for that peace are being thrown in prison or portrayed as “terrorists” who are interfering with the “peace process” in the Middle East due to their advocacy for Palestinian human rights?

Mohsen Mahdawi, who is a legal permanent resident in the U.S., was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on April 14 as he exited his citizenship interview at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Vermont. President Donald Trump’s administration accused Mahdawi of potentially undermining the peace process in the Middle East. But despite this accusation, the government has not charged Mahdawi with a crime. Mahdawi was released from detention on April 30 after U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford granted him bail, commenting that Mahdawi had “made substantial claims that his detention was in retaliation for his protected speech.”

It’s a straightforward part of the Easter story: The Roman governor Pontius Pilate had Jesus of Nazareth killed by his soldiers. He imposed a sentence that Roman judges often inflicted on social subversives – crucifixion.

Christians have long been curious about the Jewish custom of Passover. Passover, a major Jewish holiday that remembers the Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt, is an integral part of the events of Christian Holy Week, with the gospels recounting how the meal known as the Last Supper happened around the beginning of Passover that year, right before Jesus was crucified. 

I’m older now and a good bit more skeptical about Israel’s virtue and Israel’s safety. I am far from convinced that Israel could or would serve as a refuge from violence for the American Jewish diaspora — the home of the majority of Jewish people outside Israel. And I think that viewing regions across the world in which the diaspora has settled to be temporary or lesser than ideal is dangerous to Jewish people and to the Jewish experience.

During the medieval Good Friday service, Christians prayed for the “perfidious” — or deceitful — Jews that God might “remove the veil from their hearts so that they would know Jesus Christ.” In another part of the service, a crucifix was placed in front of the congregation so people could venerate the crucified body of Jesus.

As other kids in Austin, Texas recovered from trick-or-treating on Halloween last year, Sarah Adelman worried about white supremacists, her mom, and their synagogue. After a series of antisemitic incidents around Central Texas, someone set fire to Congregation Beth Israel, where Sarah’s mother, Lori, is a leader.

In Maus, Jews are drawn as anthropomorphic mice, while Nazis are portrayed as cats. The book chronicles the Spiegelman family’s attempts to hide from the Nazis, showing the harshness of life in the ghetto, the desperation of parents attempting to protect their children, and the cruelty of Jews in concentration camps. It even addresses the lingering impacts of the generational trauma of the Holocaust on the Spiegelman family in a way that can only be expressed by someone who experienced it firsthand. The story it tells is dark and disturbing, but the story of Spiegelman’s father and the story of the Holocaust requires such a telling.

We are currently in the midst of what the American Library Association condemned in November as “a dramatic uptick” in efforts to challenge or remove certain books from libraries and schools. Many of these censorship efforts have been led by conservative Christians and conservative politicians who are concerned these books will dissuade their kids from embracing what they call “Judeo-Christian values.” But as Ryan Duncan explained, Christians are deluding themselves if they believe banning stories about gender, race, or sex will halt their kids’ curiosity. Ban ’em or burn ’em, these books will not disappear and kids will continue to seek out resources on these topics — to some parents’ chagrin.

The rabbi who led hostages to safety during an attack on his Texas synagogue last month said federally funded security training “gave [him] the courage to act.” Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker urged Congress to increase federal funding for a program that would help other religious leaders prepare for such assaults.