Erika Dreifus

“[The New York Times Book Review Editor] surely does not mean to, but she manages to treat anti-Semitism as just another point of view — not a hatred with a unique and appalling pedigree that has led to unending slaughter, including the murder of 6 million, pogroms in Kielce in Poland (1946), York in England (1190) and the lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia (1915). What’s lacking from the Times is appropriate shock at Alice Walker’s bigotry and its own refusal to admit a mistake. An apology would be fit to print.”

Source: Richard Cohen, “Anti-Semitism Is Not Just Another Opinion: The New York Times Should Know Better” (The Washington Post)

“Every single Jew I know, and I know plenty, observant or not, confesses nowadays to being suddenly very aware of their Jewishness, and alive to the potential reaction it can provoke from both the right and, more worryingly (given its professed antiracism), the left. I, too, have been the target of anti-Semitic abuse in the last two years. If someone like me, with only the haziest notion of what the Torah or the Talmud are, can be such a target, I wonder at how much hatred is out there, waiting to boil over again.”

Source: “On Being a Jew-ish Schoolboy” by Nicholas Lezard (The New York Review of Books, with a tip from JTA)

“A passion for Jewish peoplehood — for the collective identity and survival of the Jewish people, and a concern for the actual individual Jewish people who make up the peoplehood — requires the inconvenient act of caring about the survival and safety of Jews everywhere regardless of the version of antisemitism that they face or that they fear.”

Source: Yehuda Kurtzer, “Antisemitism, and the Inconvenience of Collective Identity”