fbpx

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

ADVERTISE
pick up locations
HOME DELIVERY
donate

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

April 28, 2019

NY Times Apologizes for Anti-Semitic Cartoon

Leave a Comment / Analysis, Online, United States /

The New York Times issued an official apology on April 28 over their publishing of an anti-Semitic cartoon on April 25.

The cartoon, which appeared in the Times’ international edition above a column about immigration from Thomas Friedman, showed President Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke and sunglasses being guided by a dog with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s head. Progressive Zionist activist Erin Schrode tweeted that the cartoon implied “that the United States is being ‘blindly’ led by Jews and/or the Jewish state.”

https://twitter.com/AnneBayefsky/status/1122314922719875073

In response to backlash from the cartoon, the Times published a statement on April 27 acknowledging that they made “an error of judgment” in publishing it:

The statement was not well-received. Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted, “The offensive image @nytimes published was #antiSemitic propaganda of the most vile sort. This type of content normalizes #antiSemitism by reinforcing tropes of Jewish control, and does so at a time when #antiSemitism is surging.”

Others weighed in:

On April 28, the Times issued another statement saying that they were “deeply sorry” about the cartoon.

“We have investigated how this happened, and learned that, because of a faulty process, a single editor working without adequate oversight downloaded the syndicated cartoon and made the decision to include it on the Opinion page,” the statement read. “The matter remains under review, and we are evaluating our internal processes and training. We anticipate significant changes.”

Greenblatt tweeted that the Times’ apology was “insufficient.”

“New procedures obviously are needed but @nytimes must do more,” Greenblatt wrote, suggesting that the Times start implementing “sensitivity training for their staff on #antiSemitism” and “educate readers on the persistent poison of anti-Jewish hate.”

American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris still had a few questions for the Times:

Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote in an April 28 op-ed that the Times’ decision to publish the cartoon reflected “an astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism — and that, at a publication that is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice, from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to transphobia.”

“Imagine, for instance, if the dog on a leash in the image hadn’t been the Israeli prime minister but instead a prominent woman such as Nancy Pelosi, a person of color such as John Lewis, or a Muslim such as Ilhan Omar,” Stephens wrote. “Would that have gone unnoticed by either the wire service that provides the Times with images or the editor who, even if he were working in haste, selected it?”

Stephens added that “the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper” has resulted in anti-Semitism being viewed “as a form of political opinion, not ethnic prejudice.”

On April 29, a spokeswoman for the Times told the Daily Beast that the newspaper would cease running cartoons from CartoonArts.

NY Times Apologizes for Anti-Semitic Cartoon Read More »

Updates from San Diego: Community Gathers, Prays, Grieves

Leave a Comment / News, Online, San Diego Shooting, United States /

SAN DIEGO – Shaina, a 15-year-old girl, corralled her younger sister and six other kids and led them out a back exit of Chabad of Poway, saving lives, according to her mom Debra.

“She was so brave, she’s a hero,” Debra said from the driveway of a Poway Chabad junior rabbi’s house this morning. She declined to give her last name.

As the gunman sprayed bullets in the sanctuary, Shaina led the group of kids out the back, down some steps to the backyard of the junior rabbi’s house. They ended up in the street at the end of a cul de sac behind the Chabad house when a neighbor four houses down spotted them and took them in.
“My daughter didn’t sleep a wink last night,” Debra said. “She has been terrified.”
Fighting back tears, Shaina pointed out the path she took leading kids out of the sanctuary. Men escaping behind her, in such a panic, knocked over a fence on their way out the back and out onto the street.
The junior rabbi’s house has been a meeting point throughout the morning for congregation members. Grief counselors will be on hand from 12-4 today and for the next three days at the house available to those affected.

Locals have been leaving flowers, cards, candles and heart shaped posters at the corner of Summerfield and Espola across the street from the Chabad.

Four Jews huddled together chanting the Shema in front of Chabad. They lit two candles and left flowers.

Updates from San Diego: Community Gathers, Prays, Grieves Read More »

ADL CEO: ‘We Need to Recognize That White Supremacy Is a Global Terror’

Leave a Comment / Online, San Diego Shooting /

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in an April 28 appearance on MSNBC that white supremacy needs to be recognized as “a global terror threat.”

Greenblatt – who was at Poway, where the shooting occurred at the Chabad of Poway on April 27, killing one person and injuring three others – said that the 19-year-old shooter who is allegedly responsible for the act “socialized” and “optimized” his white nationalist views on social media.

“Technology companies and Silicon Valley in general have a particular responsibility to play to ensure that this kind of rhetoric, which previously couldn’t see the light of day, stops spreading on their platforms,” Greenblatt said. “They literally have been exploited by extremists, and it is time for us to interrupt that and end it now.”

Greenblatt proceeded to call on politicians at the national level to stop emboldening white nationalist extremists with their rhetoric on “immigrants, to talk about minorities, to talk about policy.”

“We need to recognize that white supremacy is a global terror threat,” Greenblatt said, “and the administration, like prior administrations, has devoted a lot of resources in dealing with the threat of Islamist jihadist violence, and that is indeed a problem… but make no mistake, there’s a through line from Charlottesville to Pittsburgh, to Christchurch, now here in San Diego County.”

Greenblatt called on the Department of Homeland Security to dedicate more of its resources toward dealing with right-wing extremism.

The full appearance can be seen below:

Greenblatt appeared on MSNBC again later in the day.

ADL CEO: ‘We Need to Recognize That White Supremacy Is a Global Terror’ Read More »

Suspect in Poway Synagogue Shooting Was an Equal Opportunity Hater

Leave a Comment / Online, San Diego Shooting /

Elijah the Prophet was nowhere to be found in San Diego County on the last day of Passover, and definitely not at Chabad of Poway, where one congregant was killed and three injured, including the rabbi, by a suspected right-wing extremist packing a semiautomatic rifle on the morning of April 27.

In keeping with anti-Semitic violence spreading the globe, a symbolic seat was set aside in the synagogue not for Elijah, the resolver of all disputes, but for the Angel of Death, that final plague that passed over the Jews before their exodus from Egypt, but wickedly followed the Diaspora for millennia thereafter.

True to form, six months after 11 people were killed at the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, a similarly motivated white supremacist — the San Diego County suspect — was also on a crusade to kill Jews.

The Chabad of Poway and the Tree of Life in Pittsburgh are now bi-coastal anti-Semitic bookends — an unthinkable reminder that houses of worship are no longer such safe houses.  Synagogues are undeniably targets, whether (as in recent years) in Paris and Copenhagen, or now in Pittsburgh and San Diego. The day of rest for Jews now has the potential for a bloody dog-day afternoon, with helicopters overhead, police scrambling about, yellow tape quartering off crime scenes and the sight of barriers and additional security the next day.

Most people will only dimly remember that a similar Passover attack on Jewish gathering places occurred five years ago in Kansas City.  Paradoxically, Christians ended up as the only victims that time.

The San Diego shooter took to social media months ago to admire the handiwork of the gunman in Pittsburgh, along with the legacy of Hitler.  He also reminded us that Muslims have it no better than Jews.  He proudly took credit for the fire on March 24 at the Islamic Center in Escondido.  Seven people were inside that building, but thankfully, none were injured.

In true rightist, nationalist, white supremacist fashion, it turns out he is an equal opportunity hater.

All this comes as a coda to the church bombings in Sri Lanka last week and the killing of 50 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand in mid-March.  With the recent fire at Notre Dame placing the cathedral in the news, it should be remembered that in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” the church is a sanctuary for the scorned.  Today, seemingly, places of worship can no longer guarantee refuge for anyone.

Cultivating unity is a good survival strategy.  Jews and Muslims are being forcefully reminded that they are brothers not only in the bible, but also in arms, sharing the indignity of anti-immigrant fervor—stigmatized, scapegoated and murdered for the same psychotic rationales.

Perhaps this is a good time to point out that only in universities are Jews considered privileged white colonialists.  Ultranationalists are clearly not of the same opinion. For them, Jews are as unwelcome as any darker skinned, marginalized, intersectional American or European for that matter.  The extreme left and right can, apparently, agree on only one thing: No Jews or Zionists allowed.

Government officials are designating the San Diego shooting as a hate crime, as if it could be anything else.  A man walks into a synagogue firing a machine gun while spewing anti-Semitic slurs. President Donald Trump speculated that it “looks like a hate crime. Hard to believe.”

Really?  How hard?  In our polarized country, divided by so many grievances and smoldering anger everywhere, hatred may be the one believable, reliable truth.  Since the shooter was acting alone, the president mercifully withheld the “very fine people on both sides” assessment.  No moral equivocation.  This time the act was plainly condemnable.

But perhaps not enough to stem the causalities of social media.  Anti-immigrant messages on Facebook and Twitter have become the preferred soapbox of those who once would have had their mouths washed out with soap.  Social media hosts hide behind the First Amendment, choosing not to act responsibly—or at all.  European nations at least make regulatory demands. America polices the internet with no more vigilance than it once did the Wild West.

As for American Jews, the realization is finally dawning that their country is not immune from the world’s oldest prejudice.  “It couldn’t happen here” is no longer a surety.  Once there were mere quotas. Today killings may become customary.  The rising statistics of anti-Semitism are written in blood.

European Jews are still in greater danger of course largely because American Muslims, unlike their European counterparts, have displayed little violence against their Jewish neighbors.  Indeed, the presence of righteous neighbors renders any throwback to the 1930s a feeble comparison.  Most Americans and their civic leaders have shown an outpouring of solidarity.  Flowers and candles are left; assistance is offered.  It’s very different, actually.

Except for the funerals.

Thane Rosenbaum is an author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, an essayist and a distinguished fellow at NYU School of Law where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio.  His forthcoming book is titled  “Crossing the Line: The High Cost of Weaponized Speech.” Visit his work here.  

Suspect in Poway Synagogue Shooting Was an Equal Opportunity Hater Read More »

Netanyahu Calls for Stepped-Up Fight Against Anti-Semitism in Wake of Poway Synagogue Shooting

Leave a Comment / Online, San Diego Shooting /

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for the international community to “step up the struggle against anti-Semitism” in a statement issued in the wake of the shooting attack on a suburban San Diego synagogue.

“This is an attack on the heart of the Jewish people,” Netanyahu said of the shooting on Saturday morning at the Chabad of Poway during services for the Sabbath and the last day of Passover. One woman was killed and three people were injured.

A statement from the Prime Minister’s Office said that Netanyahu will convene a “special discussion” in light of the “upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks around the world.”

Netanyahu was among the Israeli leaders who spoke out following the attack.

“It’s immoral to attack people of any faith at any place of worship. It must be stopped!” Jewish Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog said in a statement.

President Reuven Rivlin mourned with the family of Lori Gilbert-Kaye, a 60-year-old woman who was killed.

“We are with you in these difficult times. We love and embrace you,” he said in a statement. “The Jewish people will never allow anti-Semitism and hatred to triumph. We are strong and we are proud of our heritage and our identity of love for each other and our fellow humans.

“The murderous attack on the Jewish community during Pesach, our holiday of freedom, and just before Holocaust Memorial Day, is yet another painful reminder that anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews is still with us, everywhere.”

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, said in a statement that it “strongly condemns the actions of the anti-Semitic white supremacist at this house of worship.”

“As we approach Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is dedicated to commemorating the memory of the six million men, women and children murdered for being Jewish, we shall gravely consider the dangers of unchecked anti-Semitism,” it said.

Its chairman, Avner Shalev, said world leaders must speak out and condemn anti-Semitism “in all its expressions, and immediately implement legal, moral and educational measures, both to protect the lives of their Jewish citizens, and also to fight against the outbreak of antisemitism that we have witnessed lately.”

Netanyahu Calls for Stepped-Up Fight Against Anti-Semitism in Wake of Poway Synagogue Shooting Read More »