Tonight, Israel marks the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Gabrielle Briner movingly reflects on the experience of bearing the scars and stories of survivor grandparents in the wake of the loss of her Zayde last year.
David Schraub wades into the raging antisemitism definition wars, asking why the proponents of the latest, left-leaning entrant is unwilling to actually label anything as antisemitic.
After two years of going to the polls and a year of COVID, an exhausted, disheartened Israel is still caught in a neverending election story: In President Rivlin’s words, after four elections, “democracy has exhausted itself.” Noa Landau thinks there’s only one way to break the impasse.
Eric Yoffie finds a silver lining in the mess, in Ra’am head Mansour Abbas’ rise to kingmaker status. Netanyahu isn’t boosting him for normative reasons, “but if Israel’s Arabs get a champion and if a Zionist party gets an Israeli Arab partner” then there’s been real progress.
Freed spy Jonathan Pollard just gave his first, gobsmackingly tone deaf interview since immigrating to Israel in which he exhorted American Jews to follow his catastrophic example of betrayal. Jonathan Tobin warns U.S. Jews not to get mixed up in Pollard’s fantasy world.
Farid Hafez’s home was raided by Austrian police after an ISIS attack in Vienna, despite the lack of any possible link between them. He asks if this is a warning sign for how Austria and France plan to restrict their Muslim citizens' lives, in the fight against an always undefined “political Islam.”
The vaccination rate in the U.S. is speeding up but it’s meeting resistance. Arnon Grunberg was asked to intervene when a friend's mother comes under an anti-vaxxer's sway: He thought facts could help. In his touching, disturbing piece, Grunberg describes how anti-vax conspiracy theories are destroying families.
