People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present

Uncoolness is pretty much Judaism’s brand, which is why cool people find it so threatening—and why Jews who are willing to become cool are absolutely necessary to Hanukkah antisemitism’s success.

“He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché,” she writes, and later elaborates: “He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. . . . It was sheer thoughtlessness—

The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility—and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.

mean, rather, that perhaps we are giving people ideas about our standards. Yes, everyone must learn about the Holocaust so as not to repeat it. But this has come to mean that anything short of the Holocaust is, well, not the Holocaust. The bar is rather high.

Imagine the private humiliation of changing your name, of accepting the unspoken yet undeniable fact that this intergenerational marker of who you are is publicly considered revolting. Imagine the betrayal: At enormous risk and expense, you or your parents had fled other places to spare yourself and your children this very same humiliation, but now

What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world. These are stories without conclusions, but full of endurance and resilience. They are about human limitations, which

In Saudi Arabia, for instance, decades of pan-Arabist and Islamist propaganda have left the public ignorant that Jews even lived in the kingdom at all after the Islamic Conquest, despite recent official efforts to recognize the kingdom’s remarkable Jewish historical sites, including the ruins of entire Jewish cities.

“These are people who are rooted in a clear sense of identity—who they are, what they love, what they hate, what they value—that gives them a footing to assess a situation.”

Jews have lived throughout the Middle East and North Africa for thousands of years, often in communities that long pre-dated the Islamic conquest.