Posts Tagged: Harold Brackman
Jewish Run-ins with the Police — Past and Present
When New York was still New Amsterdam, Asser Levy demanded the right to serve in the citizen militia -- the colonial equivalent of the police. New...
Jews in Advertising and Public Relations
What’s the difference between advertising and public relations? Advertising has a boulevard -- Madison Avenue -- named after it! But both professions reflect the decisive...
America’s Founding Fathers and the Jews
Around Presidents’ Day every year, there are well-meaning declarations that America’s founding fathers were friendly to Jews and Zionism. Friendly quotations are easy to find, but...
Bernie Sanders and the Last Hurrah of Jewish Socialism
I view Bernie Sanders from the perspective of a historian knowledgeable about Jews and the American Left. Historically considered, he is the ideological heir of...
Still Looking for the Lost Tribes of Israel
On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus -- together with his Hebrew-speaking interpreter Luis de Torres -- made landfall in the Bahamas, greeted by enigmatic Arawak...
High School Students Demean the Holocaust
In suburban Colorado, high school students posted a picture on Snapchat under the caption: “Me and the boys bout to exterminate the Jews.” In an...
Ignorance About History Makes a Comeback for America’s Youth
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a member of “The Squad,” is getting some flack for claiming that millennials are more “informed” and “willing to...
Jewish Predicaments: 1939 and 2019
The American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, not noted as a political thinker, nevertheless knew something about political paradoxes. Fitzgerald wrote: “The test of a first-rate...
Did You Know Richard Wagner Almost Brought His Antisemitism to the US?
Six years ago -- on the 200th anniversary of his birth -- Richard Wagner was still in the news, due to never-ending controversies over whether...
America’s Crisis of Religion
In the past, the religiosity of the American people always remained striking. But no longer. According to a new Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans...
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s Orwellian Untruths About the Holocaust
The political scientist Leo Strauss wrote a book, Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), arguing that great philosophers typically practiced deception because they had...
Ben Hecht: Hero of Israel and the Holocaust
F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Two new biographies -- Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving...
The Poway Chabad Synagogue Tragedy Has a Local History
Nicknamed “the city in the country,” Poway was once a sleepy agricultural community in northern San Diego County, until it boomed with the addition of...
The Troubling History Behind Quebec’s New Law to Ban Kippahs
Quebec’s new government has created a firestorm by proposing a new law outlawing the wearing of religious head coverings by public servants. The rationale is...
