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The Pitt News •

Opinion | One year later: Perspective from a Tree of Life congregation member

Outside the doors of the upstairs chapel in the Tree of Life Synagogue is a glass case containing a Torah scroll rescued from Czechoslovakia sometime during the Holocaust. Judah Samet, a fixture at the synagogue, survived the Holocaust as a young child — his family escaped death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Both Samet and the Torah scroll were witnesses to the most depraved, deva
Jewish News Syndicate •

The hardest blow? To speak the truth

From the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in America to the Students’ March in Poland, the degree to which Jews have impacted Jewish life from the university scene cannot be overstated. By contrast, from Jewish quotas to academic boycotts, the degree to which universities have attempted to suppress that impact cannot be overstated either. Today, we are seeing campus anti-Semites popularize that same hatred, using only a different name in anti-Zionism—and it’s being endorsed by student newspaper
Jewish News Syndicate •

Pittsburgh universities must adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism

Buried en masse and unmarked throughout Eastern and Western Europe, in Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem and everywhere in between lay the victims of history’s longest and most lethal hatred: anti-Semitism. The evidence of its wrath on the Jewish people is an exhaustive study leaving an indelible stain on society. But even as anti-Semitism wields its might once again, specifically on college campuses, many still contest what it actually constitutes.

And to some extent, this makes sense. A forma
Times of Israel •

The False Zion of Progressive Jewry

In 1987, Judaic scholar Jacob Neusner penned an op-ed for the Washington Post arguing that American Jews are living in the Promised Land. Between the unprecedented freedom and security, along with our disproportionate achievements in nearly every field, Neusner concluded that “America is a better place to be a Jew than Jerusalem.”

Accordingly, if there ever were an American Dream, then Jews are certainly the living embodiment of it, but it has since devolved since the Zionist Dream has become a
Algemeiner Journal •

Exposing the Lies and Hate of the BDS Movement

In a conversation with American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) on March 31st Omar Barghouti appears to have charged Jews as thieves, settler colonialists, racists, purveyors of apartheid, ethnic cleansers, supremacists, and murderers — or at least the 95 percent of American Jews who support Israel.

Barghouti is one of the leaders of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He swears that neither he nor his movement is antisemitic. But perhaps that is because he believes the very defi
Algemeiner Journal •

The Palestinians Compare Israel to the Nazis, But They Were the Real Collaborators With Hitler

On a Spring day in 2018 during the March of Return riots, Palestinians at the Gaza border flew a swastika-emblazoned kite carrying a Molotov cocktail into Israel. From the black smoke of burning tires arose another swastika, only this time interposed between two Palestinian flags. Was it a mere coincidence that this also occurred on Adolf Hitler’s birthday?

The genocidal imagery that accompanied the rioters in Gaza has a sordid history that many anti-Zionist activists conveniently forget and so
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle •

Anti-Zionism is the university’s new anti-Semitism

Amid a rise in anti-Semitism in the United States, some institutions of higher learning also have become breeding grounds for the age-old hatred. But instead of the explicit Jewish quotas, ghetto benches and employment discrimination of the past, the new anti-Semitism occupying the lecture halls and student unions comes wrapped in the guise of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist politics.

The good news is many Jewish students are finally paying attention to what is happening on college campuses across
Algemeiner Journal •

Israel Respects Gay Rights; the Palestinians Do Not

The University of Pittsburgh’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) held a meeting in October on the topic of “pinkwashing” — the accusation that Israel exploits the LGBTQ+ community to propagandize a progressive image of the country, and to obscure the reality that Israel is allegedly an apartheid state.

Pinkwashing is one of many false narratives manufactured by anti-Israel organizations. Like any country, Israel is not perfect and not without prejudice; but it strives to be a b
Times of Israel •

Never Forget, Ever Forgotten

In the winter of 1944, an Auschwitz-Birkenau prisoner named Murray Scheinberg watched as the camp’s latest arrivals exited the boxcar of a train and onto a selection ramp to be chosen for either forced labor or certain death in the gas chamber. One Nazi officer took particular notice of a woman carrying her six-month-old child and demanded that it walk — something it obviously couldn’t do. When the mother refused to give up her child, Scheinberg watched in horror as the officer ripped the baby f
Jewish Journal •

The Libelous Claims on National SJP’s Panel

On February 19, 2021, the Institute for Policy Studies’ Middle East Fellow Khury Petersen-Smith and the National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) organization shared their latest iteration of anti-Semitic libels and hypocrisy during “Freedom Intertwined: Organizing for Collective Liberation,” a virtual panel hosted by NSJP. The event framed Palestinian self-determination as part of a “collective entanglement” with all oppressed peoples — all except the Jewish people.

But it didn’t take