Over the past year, human rights groups like B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch published damning reports on Israel’s systematic oppression of the Palestinians. For the first time, these groups called Israel an apartheid state. What was new in this terminology is that they not only called the Occupation apartheid, but Israel itself an apartheid state […]
Arab Jews: the ‘Nakba’ That Wasn’t Zionist claims of a historic mass expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands are largely hype, hasbara, and myth
Over the years, a recurring hasbara trope has accused Arab states of ethnically cleansing their entire Jewish populations in the years between 1948-1956. They marshal vivid maps displaying the numbers of Jews originally in these countries and how many are left currently. Phrases like “expulsion,” “refugee,” “Jewish Nakba,” and “pogroms” are bandied about as if […]
Anti-Semitism and Anti-Palestinianism: Two Sides of Same Hateful Coin
Peter Beinart published a Jewish Currents essay last month about the attack by the Israel Lobby and its water-carriers in Congress against progressive Muslim women of color, notably Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. He noted that the same pro-Israel groups and Jewish leaders who are the first to shrey–anti-Semite!–are almost always the first to […]
How Hitler Killed Half the Jewish Diaspora and Zionism Projects Death of the Rest
I recently participated in an online panel that accompanied the screening of the film documentary, Yiddish: the Mama Loshn, for the Boulder Jewish Film Festival. I was not invited to the panel as a Yiddishist or professor of Yiddish or Jewish history (the three other panel members were). Instead, director Pierre Sauvage asked me to […]
