As Elie Wiesel’s Likeness Comes to the National Cathedral, Don’t Forget That He Was an Ardent Defender of Israel

On Monday, a carving of Elie Wiesel was unveiled at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, where it stands alongside depictions of Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others. While expressing his appreciation to this church for honoring his father not just as a great humanitarian but also as an “observant Jew,” Wiesel’s son Elisha voices his concern over the way his father’s legacy has been obscured or misappropriated:

[T]he hardest thing for me is when I come across people who invoke his protests, read his books, and cry for the dead Jews—then condemn in unforgiving terms the 6 million Jews living in Israel who refuse to depend ever again on others to rescue them. So I remind the world that my father didn’t advocate just for the people of Kosovo, Darfur, and Cambodia. He also supported Israel and defended her right to exist in peace and security.

My father understood what it meant to live in a world without a Jewish state, and he saw the anti-Zionist movement for what it was: an extension of millennia-old anti-Semitism, which unfortunately is becoming more common and acceptable today.

Today my father is being honored as a friend of the church. But as a child, he would cross the street to avoid one, and the beatings from the worshipers within; on Christmas Eve he knew to stay off the streets altogether. My great-grandmother sang him mournful songs about Jewish communities decimated over outrageous lies that they murdered Christian children to make matzah with their blood. How do I help our Christian friends understand that the Jewish people still face blood libels today?

Read more at Washington Post

More about: anti-Semitsm, Anti-Zionism, Elie Wiesel, Jewish-Christian relations

Universities Are in Thrall to a Constituency That Sees Israel as an Affront to Its Identity

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.

Read more at Dispatch

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel on campus, University