Words of the Week: Alvin Rosenfeld and Leslie Lenkowsky

“The first question Mr. Biden’s working group should answer is whether it supports the IHRA definition. With clear guidance about what anti-Semitism means, federal agencies, as well as other jurisdictions and organizations such as colleges and universities, would then know what they should be looking out for. The public would also have a better understanding of how, when and where anti-Semitism is arising.”

Source: Alvin Rosenfeld and Leslie Lenkowsky, “Can the Biden Administration Define Anti-Semitism?” (The Wall Street Journal)

Words of the Week: Amy Schumer

I’m grateful to Amy Schumer not only for the clip, but also for pointing everyone to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum page, which led me another brief film (of a different sort) that I recommend: https://www.ushmm.org/antisemitism/what-is-antisemitism/antisemitism-today.

Words of the Week: W.E.B. DuBois

“There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade. Adolf Hitler hardly ever makes a speech today without belittling, blaming, or cursing Jews. Every misfortune of the world is in whole or in part blamed on Jews. There is a campaign of race prejudice which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen, and I have seen much.”

Source: W.E.B. DuBois, quoted in the first episode of Ken Burns’s latest documentary, The United States and the Holocaust (beginning at 1:21:40). I did a bit of digging: DuBois wrote these words in 1936.