Jews in Scotland are talking in greater numbers about leaving the country over a rise in anti-semitism there. The Director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities told the Australian Herald Sunday that “Many Jews actively discuss leaving Scotland because they feel alienated, vulnerable and not at home.”
The Anti-Defamation League reported a surge in anti-semitic incidents across Europe. And at the beginning of 2018, the New York Times said, “the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged 57 percent in the previous year [2017]... The increase is the largest in a single year since the A.D.L. began tracking in 1979.“
In Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, during a Unite The Right Rally, a group of white men chanted by torchlight, “Jews will not replace us.”
Last October, the deadliest anti-semitic incident in American history unfolded at the Pittsburgh synagogue Tree of Life. A man shouting anti-semitic slogans and carrying multiple firearms shot eleven people to death and wounded seven.
More recently, an opinion piece in The Washington Post by Richard Cohen takes the New York Times to task for publishing an interview with Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, and failing to call out her anti-semitic reading list.
After Walker names the second book on her nightstand, And The Truth Shall Set You Free by British conspiracy theorist David Ickes, Cohen writes, “The book is so repellently anti-Semitic that Icke's usual publisher wouldn’t touch it. Among other things, it endorses ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ which blames evil Jews for much of the world’s ills. The book also suggests that schools ought to balance lessons on the Holocaust with questions over whether it happened, and it reveals that the world is run by a cabal of giant, shape-shifting lizards, many of whom just happen to be Jewish.”
Guests:
Nathaniel Murrell, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, University of North Carolina Wilmington
Emily Losben-Ostrov, Rabbi, Temple of Israel, Wilmington, NC
Anti-Defamation League: https://www.adl.org/
