Anti-semitism

Wednesday

Simon Sebag Montefiore

How my ancestor dealt with anti-Semitism

From our UK edition

I’m not a member of the Establishment, even though I’m writing this in what might be described as its literary organ. I know my voice will be correctly interpreted as that of a maverick outsider riding shotgun into the lair of privilege. The early weeks of Andy Burnham’s First Lordship of the Treasury have been defined by clips using edible class indicators – baps, crisps, beer – to signal that, despite Cambridge and decades in Westminster, he is a contra-establishmentarian. But there’s nothing new in this (except TikTok). Walpole scoffed Norfolk apples in the House to garnish his backwoods-squire credentials; Lloyd George declared, ‘The day of the cottage-bred man dawns’, promoting his taste for bara brith.

Tuesday

David Edmonds

Why we must forgive Immanuel Kant his misogyny and racism

From our UK edition

If the only story you’ve heard about Immanuel Kant’s life is that it was so regular that the citizens of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) would set their watch by his daily walk, then this book has much to teach you. In fact the provenance of this oft repeated anecdote is an essay by the German poet Heinrich Heine, who, far from being an eyewitness, had never even met Kant: ‘Everything had its set time, and the neighbours knew that it was exactly half past three when Immanuel Kant, in his grey frock coat, rattan cane in hand, emerged from his front door.’ The Kant that emerges from these pages is less dull and more recognisably human than his metronomic image. He played billiards, gambled and socialised with the great and good of Königsberg.

Sunday

Alan Dershowitz

‘Goy’ and ‘goyim’ are not pejorative terms

The words goy and goyim are thrown around by Jews and non-Jews to mean very different things and to convey very, very different impressions. Some antisemites try to weaponize these terms to accuse Jews of being exclusionary or discriminatory against goyim (the correct Hebrew pluralization of goy, rather than the anglicized “goys”). Some Jews have also weaponized the term against their enemies: Ben Shapiro has accused, Tucker Carlson, of “goyslop” for falsely claiming that Jews want “goyim” to die defending Israel. The original meaning of the word goy is neutral. It simply means “nation.” The Bible describes the Jewish people as “goy Kadosh” – a holy nation. In post-biblical eras goy has come to mean “gentile” – any person or nation that is not Jewish.

ben shapiro goy goyim

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Jewish artists are no longer safe in France

It is dangerous to be a Jewish artist in France. On Saturday, the well-known DJ Barbara Butch was forced to abandon her performance during a music festival in the Alpine city of Grenoble. Butch is an icon of the LGBT movement and best-known, among international audiences, for appearing in the "Last Supper" skit during the Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. On that occasion the 45-year-old Butch infuriated conservative figures on both sides of the Atlantic with her irreverence. Donald Trump labeled the parody a "disgrace," as did the Vatican, which deplored "the offense done to many Christians and believers of other religions." On Saturday, it was the far-left who took offense to the presence of Butch.

Tuesday

Lucy Moore

Our resentment of migrants is centuries old: the Little Englanders of the Tudor era

From our UK edition

This Little World opens with a description of the riots of 1517, an explosion of pent-up hostility and resentment against ‘strangers and aliens’. Recently arrived migrants from France and the Low Countries were blamed for aggravating the poverty and want suffered by locals. That Easter, a rabble-rousing preacher had called for Londoners to remedy this injustice: ‘As birds would defend their nest, so ought Englishmen to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weale.’ Soon afterwards, on the May Day holiday, apprentices gave drunken, unruly vent to their frustration in riots. Five hundred years flash by and so little has changed.

Wednesday

Graham Robb

The tragedy of Paul Celan – trapped in his own allusive poems

From our UK edition

Some time in the late 1950s, Jacques Derrida and other intellectual luminaries at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris were surprised to be told that the excruciatingly introverted German-language instructor they had been avoiding in the corridors for several years was ‘the greatest living poet in the German language’. Paul Celan was reputed to be as ‘difficult’ as his poetry – rebarbative, then intriguing and finally unforgettable. His best known poem is ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), which may refer to Jewish musicians in a Nazi death camp: ‘Black milk of dawn, we drink you at night...’ He can be heard online reciting the poem in a rising tone of suppressed hysteria.

Wednesday

Noa Hoffman

Revealed: the Green plot against Zack Polanski

From our UK edition

As Keir Starmer struggles to keep his crown, another leadership battle is raging. Away from the media spotlight, there is a fight for the future of the Green party between its various official ‘Special Interest Groups’ and its leader, Zack Polanski. What are they fighting about? Why, Palestine and racial politics of course.  On one side, Polanski and his officials are at least trying to appear to be dealing with allegations of anti-Semitism and extremism within the party. On the other, a powerful affiliate group, the Global Majority Greens (GMG), is accusing its leader of creating a ‘hierarchy of racism’, with allegations of anti-Semitism taken more seriously than other complaints.

Wednesday

Maureen Lipman

I refuse to be cancelled

From our UK edition

I have been opening a play. It is called Allegra and is about a woman who is relentlessly happy. This is not typecasting. ‘Why do we actors have so much self-esteem and so little self-respect?’ demanded Edmund Kean in the eponymous play Kean,which I last saw in 1990. Funny, I never forgot that line. I’d been bobbing along merrily in rehearsals, learning, improving, rejecting and rejoicing. Now, suddenly, it was a technical rehearsal in a real theatre, the Brighton Royal, and there was a microphone taped under my wig, battery packs belted to my underwear – real orchestrations, quick-change shoes. My ancient make-up sticks must be laid out and lip and tongue exercises from my Lamda days, 60-odd years ago, must be performed.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Letters: it’s hard to undo dumbing down

From our UK edition

Tales from the City Sir: Simon Jenkins’s article on Liverpool Street Station (‘Horror storeys’, 9 May) is inaccurate, and an insult to every councillor on the City of London planning committee, whose professionalism I defend. Saying the committee was ‘clearly going to approve’ the application amounts to an allegation of predetermination. That is a serious charge against every councillor present. It is also untrue: 22 members heard the case and three voted against. Sir Simon writes that ‘both schemes were presented to a packed City planning committee’. This is also untrue. There was one planning application before the committee that day.

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Golders Green attacked, borrowing costs soar and rat virus hits cruise ship 

From our UK edition

Home Two Jewish men aged 76 and 34 were stabbed in Golders Green, north London. Essa Suleiman, 45, a British man born in Somalia, was charged with their attempted murder and, earlier on the same day, that of Ishmail Hussein (whom he had known for about 20 years) in Southwark. The Golders Green attack was declared a terrorist incident. Sir Mark Rowley, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, condemned Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green party, for reposting a message on X accusing the police of ‘repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head when he was already incapacitated by Taser’; Mr Polanski apologised.

The Spectator

Anti-Semitism is a virus – and it’s spreading

From our UK edition

To eradicate a virus, one needs precision. The origin of the threat needs to be identified, as do the circumstances of its incubation and spread, and the vulnerability of specific hosts. The wrong response risks making things worse. Anti-Semitism is a virus, and, as the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained, one that mutates over time. Originally, it was a religious prejudice; post-Enlightenment, it developed into a racial hatred, fuelled by a twisted version of social Darwinism. It was thought that after the unique evil of the Holocaust, the single greatest crime in history, when man became wolf unto man, the virus had at last been defeated. But in our own time a new variant has emerged.

Charles Moore

Keir Starmer is downplaying the Islamist threat to Jews

At Tuesday’s anti-Semitism ‘summit’ in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word ‘Islamists’. But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: ‘We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.’ Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognise that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leave Jews alone.

Douglas Murray

The obvious truth about anti-Semitism

From our UK edition

There are many ways to do nothing. One is to sit on your hands; another is to call for ‘a conversation’. I have noticed quite a lot of calls for ‘a conversation’ since the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green last week. Some politicians and pundits have even been bold enough to call for a ‘national conversation’. This is when you can tell people are pulling out the big guns. One reason I say it is also a variant on doing nothing is because this has happened so many times before. I remember Theresa May standing near the site of the London Bridge attacks in 2017, surrounded by various leaders, insisting that we need to tackle ‘extremism’. The results were a real stunner – even for connoisseurs of inertia.

Monday

Simon Diggins

Britain is facing an Islamist insurgency

The recent horrific attack in Golders Green has generated much anger and despair at this latest in a series of concerted, violent assaults currently aimed primarily at the Jewish community, but with a clear lineage to earlier Islamist outrages such as the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby and the London Bridge attacks of 2017 and 2019. The UK terrorism threat level was raised to "severe" following the attack on Thursday. But terrorism, "an action or threat designed to influence the government or intimidate the public," is an inadequate descriptor of what we face in Britain. Instead, I believe we face a different problem: a full-blown insurgency.

islamist

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

The Golders Green atrocity is the final straw

It is undeniable now: war has been declared on British Jews. A fascistic crusade is being waged against our Jewish compatriots. The anti-Semitic atrocity in Golders Green today is further brutish proof of this unsettling fact. We’ve had fire bombings at synagogues, the murder of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and now this frenzied knifing of Jews in London. There can be no more equivocating – this is a moral emergency. The most sickening thing about today’s knife pogrom is that it was entirely predictable The scenes from Golders Green are truly grim. Video clips show the suspect wielding his knife with demented fury at two visibly Jewish men.

golders green
Paul Levy

The doyen of the France’s culinary scene is unmasked

From our UK edition

For some reason it took nearly a decade for the news of a revolution in the restaurants of France to reach the British media. The Americans were much quicker off the mark. In March 1972, Raymond Sokolov reported in the New York Times that a chef near Lyon named Paul Bocuse, along with several of his colleagues, including Michel Guérard and Alain Senderens, were serving their customers ‘a radical simplification of the grand cuisine of the 19th century, the heavy, formal style of cooking codified by Escoffier’. Luke Barr, whose latest book is a compelling history of this culinary earthquake, last wrote about the crook, embezzler and fraudster who curiously remains the patron saint of professional cooks in Ritz & Escoffier (2018).

Wednesday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Olly Robbins is sacked, inflation rises and the Strait of Hormuz is (briefly) opened 

From our UK edition

Home Sir Keir Starmer tried to explain himself to parliament after Sir Olly Robbins was sacked as permanent under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office, its chief civil servant. Sir Keir complained that as Prime Minister he had not been told that Lord Mandelson had failed to satisfy UK Security Vetting when he took up his post as ambassador to Washington. Sir Keir said that he had not been told before 14 April. In the Commons he said: ‘I did not mislead the House.’ Even before Lord Mandelson’s appointment, the Cabinet Office had compiled a due diligence report, given to the Prime Minister, which cited concerns about the peer’s ties to China and Russia. Zarah Sultana, the Your Party MP, had to leave the Commons chamber after saying: ‘The Prime Minister is a bare-faced liar.

Sunday

Rod Liddle

Don’t blame Kanye for his abject idiocy

Grade: C– Kanye? No, I can’t, quite. I will always quietly overlook the idiotic political sensibilities of the conformist millennial legions who comprise our pop charts – the keffiyeh-clad Hamas wannabes, the BLM halfwits, the greenies, the men-can-be-women wankpuffins – in order to let their music be judged on its own merits, free from boomer political disdain. But songs such as “Heil Hitler” and all those swastikas? Well, they are just a stretch too far for me. The man is an abject moron. Some will say, so what? There have been loads of abject morons down the years in pop. Why draw a line in the sand for Kanye West? Good question. And it turns out it’s not his fault.

kanye west

Tuesday

Ariane Bankes

Why one of Renoir’s most celebrated paintings languished unloved

From our UK edition

Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in all the promise and innocence of a pampered childhood by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Aged 40, Renoir was then the coming portrait painter for the gratin of Paris, as he struggled to make ends meet with smart commissions from wealthy sponsors – a network of Catholic and Jewish banking families that included the Ephrussis (memorialised by Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes), Camondos, Rothschilds and Cahen d’Anvers.

Lee Langley

A dying fall: The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler, reviewed

From our UK edition

Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon? We meet the composer in 1911 aboard the SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic, homebound and dying. A respectful ship’s boy brings him a tray of tea as he sits on the sundeck, wrapped in a blanket, contemplating the ocean and his turbulent life.