USA
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Garland was raised in Conservative Judaism. His family name had been changed from Garfinkel several generations earlier. ↩︎
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Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Administers the Oath of Allegiance and Delivers Congratulatory Remarks at Ellis Island Ceremony in Celebration of Constitution Week and Citizenship Day ↩︎
Administration Continues to Weaken US Government
On Tuesday afternoon, the Trump administration announced that 443 federally owned properties were eligible to be sold, including such iconic buildings as the D.C. headquarters of the Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
But there was a problem: Many of the agencies affected were unaware that their buildings were going to be on the list because their directors had not been consulted, according to a General Services Administration employee briefed on internal deliberations, including a Wednesday meeting of top officials at the agency that oversees federal real estate.
The list was later pared down to exclude most D.C.-area buildings, then completely removed overnight, with the GSA webpage where it previously had been displayed featuring a new comment saying that the list will be “coming soon.”
A warning sign for democracy in the United States.
Deborah Lipstadt Explains Why She Won’t Teach at Columbia
Deborah Lipstadt explains why she won’t teach at Columbia:
My decision to withdraw my name from consideration for a teaching post at Columbia is based on three calculations.
First, I am not convinced that the university is serious about taking the necessary and difficult measures that would create an atmosphere that allows for true inquiry.
Second, I fear that my presence would be used as a sop to convince the outside world that “Yes, we in the Columbia/Barnard orbit are fighting antisemitism. We even brought in the former Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.” I will not be used to provide cover for a completely unacceptable situation.
Third, I am not sure that I would be safe or even able to teach without being harassed. I do not flinch in the face of threats. But this is not a healthy or acceptable learning environment.
On too many university campuses, the inmates—and these may include administrators, student disrupters, and off-campus agitators as well as faculty members—are running the asylum. They are turning universities into parodies of true academic inquiry.
Lipstadt (born 1947) is an American historian and diplomat, best known as author of the books Denying the Holocaust (1993), History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005), The Eichmann Trial (2011), and Antisemitism: Here and Now (2019). She served as the United States Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism from 2022 to 2025. Since 1993 she has been the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
President Joe Biden delivers remarks at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Days of Remembrance Ceremony
May 7, 2024 at the U.S. Capitol:
The full text is available on the White House website.
My favorite quote from President Biden’s speech:
To the Jewish community, I want you to know I see your fear, your hurt, and your pain.
Let me reassure you, as your President, you are not alone. You belong. You always have, and you always will.
And my commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel, and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state is ironclad, even when we disagree.
What It’s Like to be Visually Jewish at Yale
Bret Stephens writing in The New York Times:
Netanel Crispe, from Danby, Vt., is a 21-year-old junior studying American history at Yale. He is also, to his knowledge, the university’s only Hasidic undergraduate. When he chose Yale, he told me this week, he was “looking for an institution that asserted its position in terms of maintaining and protecting free expression while not backing down on its principal values.”
It hasn’t worked out that way.
On Saturday evening he and his friend Sahar Tartak, a Yale sophomore and an Orthodox Jew, paid a visit to the university’s Beinecke Plaza, where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up an encampment.
“I was wearing my black hat; I was very identifiably Jewish,” Crispe said. “I was yelled at, harassed, pushed and shoved numerous times. Every time I tried to take a step someone confronted me inches from my face, telling me not to move.” Tartak said she was hit in the left eye by a Palestinian flag held by a demonstrator. She ended up in the hospital, luckily without permanent injury. “Thank God, there was a small sphere at the end of the pole,” she told me.
Holocaust Museum Calls on American Colleges and Universities to Protect Jewish Students following Eruption of Antisemitism
The shocking eruption of antisemitism on many American college and university campuses is unacceptable and university and all other appropriate authorities must take greater action to protect Jewish students. Demonstrators at Columbia University calling for Jews to return to Poland — where three million Jewish men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators — is an outrageous insult to Holocaust memory, a failure to appreciate its lessons, and an act of dangerous antisemitism.
America is hardly the Third Reich, but the Holocaust teaches the dangers of pervasive societal antisemitism, and awareness of this history must guide our actions in the present. Nazi ideology was official state policy, but it found a receptive audience on university campuses based on well established contempt towards Jews.
The CIA and Nazi War Criminals
The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group to locate, identify, inventory, recommend for declassification, and make available to the public at the National Archives and Records Administration, all classified Nazi war criminal records of the United States.
In 1995, the National Security Archive posted the CIA’s secret documentary history of the U.S government’s relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen’s group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a “double edged sword” that “boosted the Warsaw Pact’s propaganda efforts” and “suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB.” [See Volume 1: Introduction, p. xxix]
The declassified “SECRET RelGER” two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of “the new and close ties” formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.
The full posting is available here.
X’s Lawsuit Against Anti-Hate Research Group Dismissed
X sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate in July in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California after the organization published several articles that claimed its researchers had discovered a rise in hate speech on the platform following Elon Musk’s takeover. X said that the group’s research was harming its business by scaring away advertisers, costing it millions of dollars.
On March 25, 2024, U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer in California dismissed X’s lawsuit:
Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation, and only by reading between the lines of a complaint can one attempt to surmise a plaintiff’s true purpose. Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose. This case represents the latter circumstance. This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.
Imran Ahmed is the founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Ahmed started the Center after seeing the rise of antisemitism on the left in the United Kingdom and the murder of his colleague, Jo Cox MP, by a white supremacist, who had been radicalized in part online, during the EU Referendum in 2016. He holds an MA in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Imran lives in Washington DC, and tweets at @Imi_Ahmed.
Steven Spielberg, Honored by USC Shoah Foundation, Cautions Against Rise of Extremism
On March 25, 2024, Steven Spielberg, the winner of three Academy Awards, was honored by the University of Southern California, 30 years after founding the school’s Shoah Foundation and releasing the landmark Holocaust film “Schindler’s List.”
Spielberg denounced the “rise of extremist views” and called for people to use “the power of empathy” against antisemitism or anti-Muslim hate. He also spoke out on behalf of both those killed by Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 and innocent women and children killed in Gaza.
“We can rage against the heinous acts committed by the terrorists of Oct. 7 and also decry the killing of innocent women and children in Gaza,” the filmmaker and Shoah Foundation founder said as he accepted the University of Southern California’s highest honor, the University Medallion. “This makes us a unique force for good in the world. And here’s why we are here today to celebrate the work of the Shoah Foundation, which is more crucial now than it even was in 1994.”
Jews in Hiding
Dara Horn, writing in The Atlantic:
At a Shabbat dinner I attended at one college, students went around the table sharing what they wished they could say to their non-Jewish friends: I wish I could say I want to spend a semester in Israel. I wish I could say I work at a Jewish preschool. I wish I could say I volunteered at a Jewish hospital. I sat at the table stupefied. They were in hiding.
US Attorney General Speaks Out Against Antisemitism
US Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke to the ADL’s “Now Is Never” Summit in New York on March 7, 2024.
Garland1came from a family of immigrants who fled religious persecution early in the 20th Century and sought refuge in the United States. His grandmother was one of five children born in what is now Belarus. Three made it to the United States, including his grandmother. Two did not make it. Those two were killed in the Holocaust.2
Jerry Seinfeld Heckled by Anti-Israel Supporters
TMZ:
Jerry Seinfeld exited the annual State of the World Jewry address . . . in NYC to anti-Israel protesters accusing him of supporting genocide … but he didn’t seem too fazed.
The event featured Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press.
Very sad.
This is the address that Bari Weiss delivered at 92NY, a proudly Jewish cultural and community center where people all over the world connect through culture, arts, entertainment and conversation.