\”The Merchant of Venice\” is 400 years old. The play was first entered on the register of the Stationer\’s Company in July 1598, along with a proviso that it shouldn\’t be published till the Lord Chamberlain gave his consent. And that didn\’t happen until 1600. It may be of some small comfort to know that, even in Shakespeare\’s day, artists and managers had to shear their way through red tape.
\”Where was God during the Holocaust?\” For a moment, there was silence. Three Los Angeles rabbis sat before a group of German theology students in the Berliner Dom church, waiting for their answer. \”It is a question many Jews have asked,\” said Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, 55, president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, during a recent German-government-sponsored visit. \”Have you confronted this question yourselves?\”
The recent revelations about the South OrangeCounty Community College District\’s desire to offer a course that, inpart, blames the Mossad and the Anti-Defamation League for theassassination of President John F. Kennedy read something like a badclipping from the area\’s far-right past.
Elon Gold is an Orthodox Jewish comedian whoplayed an offbeat Jewish guy from Long Island on the recent WBsitcom, \”You\’re the One.\” Though the short-lived series wascancelled, Gold has plenty of Jewish-themed TV and even movieprojects in the works. During a recent conversation with TheJournal\’s Naomi Pfefferman, he said he owes it all to\”Seinfeld.\”
During World War II, did an anti-Semitic Swiss government split up Jewish refugee families, require the men to perform back breaking work in forced labor camps, and treat Jews markedly worse than Christian refugees?
Many modern forms of anti-Semitism, not least the Dreyfus Affair, can be seen as a reaction to the emancipation of the Jews in Western and Central Europe following the French Revolution, according to Dr. Michael Berenbaum.
Few, other than historians of the period, will recognize July 12 as a date of any significance in the annals of European anti-Semitism.
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