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NYC’s Eric Adams, at mayors’ meeting in Greece, says antisemitism has become normalized
(New York Jewish Week) — Likening the growing threat of antisemitism to a frog that’s slowly boiled alive, New York City Mayor Eric Adams spoke about the dangers of hate during his speech at the Mayor’s Summit Against Antisemitism in Athens, Greece.
The two-day summit, which began Wednesday, is a gathering of more than 50 mayors and municipal leaders from across the globe. It was created in partnership with the Combat Antisemitism Movement, a global coalition of 65 Jewish and interfaith organizations; the Center for Jewish Impact, an Israeli relationship-building organization, and the Jewish Federations of North America.
“We have never had so many local and municipal leaders in one place, sharing best practices and learning from each other on how to fight Jew-hatred,” CAM CEO Sacha Roytman Dratwa said in a press release.
During the first day of the conference, Adams was presented with the CAM Civic Leadership Award for “his dedicated commitment to fighting antisemitism and religious bigotry of all forms,” according to a press release.
In a video of his acceptance speech obtained by the New York Jewish Week, Adams cited the parable of the frog — which he said he remembered as a science experiment from his school days — in which a frog would immediately jump out of water that was too hot. However, if a frog was in water and the temperature rose gradually, it “would stay there until it boils itself to death.”
“That is where we are right now with antisemitism and hate that is pervasive across not only our country in Amerrica, but across the globe,” Adams said. “The temperature is just increasing so slightly that we’ve allowed it to normalize in every part of our lives. We’ve been accustomed to it.”
In Athens, Greece on Wednesday, @NYCMayor Adams spoke about how the temperature of antisemitism is ‘increasing so slightly that we’ve allowed it to normalize in every part of our lives.’
‘We’ve been accustomed to it,’ he said. ‘It has become popular.’ pic.twitter.com/eKgTjRLq6q
— Jacob Henry (@jhenrynews) November 30, 2022
He also called social media “the flame that continues to fuel the hatred that you are seeing.”
“Those who hate no longer are isolated in the corners of their bedrooms or homes or in their clubs,” Adams said. “They have now combined together to create the hate that we are experiencing.”
“Those who are perpetrating hatred should not have five million followers on social media,” he added, “and those of us standing up for what’s right only have 100,000.”
Adams also shared another childhood anecdote about how he used to box as a kid. He said he would do well during training but often get beaten up in the ring. His coach told him that he leaves his “best fight” in the gym.
“This is the gym,” Adams said, referring to the room, whose audience included the mayors of Vienna, Paris and Albuquerque. “This is not the ring. The ring is on the ground in our communities.”
Adams also talked about how the Community Security Initiative, the Jewish security organization, helped lead to the arrest on Nov. 20 of two men who wanted to shoot up a synagogue in New York City.
“It was due to a Jewish organization that was monitoring the social media channels and chatter that they were able to give an early warning sign to connect with the law enforcement community,” Adams said. “That’s the coalition and coordination that we need.”
He also spoke about how his “Breaking Bread” initiative — in which people from different ethnic groups sit down for dinner together — can be used to fight hate. Adams brought the program up last week in a closed-door meeting with New York City’s Interfaith Security Council.
Referring to New York’s large Jewish population, he referred to the Big Apple as the “Tel Aviv of America.”
He added that the key to success in fighting hate “lies with the mayors.”
“Mayors are the cities,” Adams said. “We solve the national problems on the local level. This award is just the beginning of what I want to show in my accomplishmen as the mayor of the City of New York on how we fight and defeat antisemitism, and all of the anti-hate that we see in our lives now.”
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The post NYC’s Eric Adams, at mayors’ meeting in Greece, says antisemitism has become normalized appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him
In 2022, during a reporting trip to London, I had tea with a source who confessed to me that her mother’s central interest was the work of Tom Stoppard. It was more than an interest, really: “He was the main thing in her life,” she said.
There are artists you admire, and then there are artists you flat-out adore. Particularly cerebral types, like Stoppard, risk falling into the first category: They may generate great thoughts, but those great thoughts have a great chance of leaving you cold. That wasn’t the case for Stoppard, who died Saturday at 88, and was a thinker worth adoring. His best work achieved a rare balance: Audiences left his most affecting plays with both a fresh perspective on the world, and a feeling of great warmth toward it.
I felt that myself, after seeing a much-heralded revival of Stoppard’s Travesties on Broadway in 2018. It’s quite a highbrow play, about the brief intersection, in Switzerland during World War I, of the lives and work of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, founder of Dadaism. It made me laugh until I cried. And the gloss Stoppard bestowed on this obscure episode of history followed me out of the theater, giving a brief sheen to everything and everyone I saw. I felt as though I floated back to Brooklyn, and as if the Q train might be full of personalities I’d never guess were important until years afterward.
Much of Stoppard’s work revolved around the question of what it really means to live an important life — one that is not just full, but has some kind of identifiable impact on others. The main character of Travesties isn’t Joyce, Lenin or Tzara; he’s an endearingly self-satisfied British diplomat, Henry Carr, who briefly found himself in the same circles as those luminaries. As the play opens, decades later, he’s trying to conjure up a memoir about his time in the presence of the greats, with the implication that he deserves to be considered among their ranks.
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play that made Stoppard into a star at age 29, the two title characters grapple with their inability to in any way change the course of a narrative — that of Hamlet — that they know will lead to their deaths. In Shakespeare in Love, the film that won Stoppard an Oscar in 1998, he and his coauthor Marc Norman imagined the king of English playwrights as a young man full of talent but still struggling toward greatness, in need of an overwhelming emotional shock to propel him into complete ownership of his gifts.
There are the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries of the ambitious trilogy The Coast of Utopia; the intellectuals seeking to redefine the world and its history in Arcadia; the striving academics of The Hard Problem; the newly emancipated Viennese Jews of Leopoldstadt, the play Stoppard wrote that most profoundly invoked his heritage. Over and over, variations of the same question emerge. What does it mean to live completely and well, as an individual and a member of society?
“If there is any meaning in any of it” — “it” being the brutal course of history, its neverending cycles of destruction — “it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities,” Joyce declares in Travesties. Later, Carr echoes him — a surprise, as the two hold very little respect for one another. When told that the only relevant function of art is “social criticism,” he protests.
“A great deal of what we call art,” he says, “has no such function, and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants.”
Not everyone wants to be an artist, and, as Carr reflects at the end of Travesties, it’s a sure thing that not everyone can be. But in the wake of Stoppard’s death, I’ve found myself thinking about the mother of my one-time source, so enraptured by what Stoppard created that her own child saw his work as the most profound passion of her life.
It’s easy to say that kind of effect made Stoppard’s life important. But the quieter story, I think, is that it made that devoted fan’s life important, too. Because she loved Stoppard, she saw herself as more firmly secured in her own existence; she saw herself as having a purpose and place.
To help someone experience their own significance — to gratify the common hunger that afflicts us all — is a great gift. And Stoppard gave it to many, including to me.
The post The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran to Boycott World Cup Draw Over Visa Restrictions
Soccer Football – World Cup Playoff Tournament and European Playoff draws – FIFA Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland- November 20, 2025 The original FIFA World Cup trophy is kept on display during the draws. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Iran intends to boycott next week’s World Cup draw due to the limited number of visas allocated to the country’s football federation.
According to the Tehran Times, the United States issued visas to only four members of Iran‘s delegation, with requests for three additional visas denied, including one for Iranian Football Federation (FFIRI) President Mehdi Taj.
“We have informed FIFA that the decisions taken are unrelated to sport and that the members of the Iranian delegation will not participate in the World Cup draw,” FFIRI spokesman Mehdi Alavi said on Friday, per the report.
Alavi said the federation has been in contact with FIFA in an effort to resolve the situation.
The World Cup draw will take place on Dec. 5 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The expanded 48-team World Cup is being hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, 2026. Matches will be played at 16 venues, including three in Mexico and two in Canada.
The draw will sort the teams into 12 groups of four. The top two teams from each group and the eight best third-place teams will advance to the knockout stage.
Iran has secured a spot in its fourth consecutive World Cup and seventh appearance overall.
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Dublin to Rename Chaim Herzog Park in a Move Slammed as Attempt to Erase Jewish History
Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington
i24 News – Citing the Gaza war, Dublin city council voted to rename a park honoring Israel’s sixth president, the Irish-born Chaim Herzog, in further manifestation of anti-Israel sentiment in the country.
While a new name is yet to be chosen, reports cite efforts by pro-Palestinian activists to change it to the “Free Palestine Park.”
Former Irish justice minister Alan Shatter harshly criticized the vote, charging that “Dublin City Council has now gone full on Nazi & a committee of the Council has determined it should erase Jewish/Irish history. Herzog Park in Rathgar is named after Chaim Herzog, Israel’s 6th President, brought up in Dublin by his father, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, a friend of Eamon De Valera, who was Chief Rabbi of Ireland & Israel’s first Chief Rabbi… Some councillors want the Park renamed ‘Free Palestine Park.”
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland issued a statement regarding the renaming of Herzog Park.
“It sends a hurtful and isolating message to a small minority community that has contributed to Ireland for centuries. We call on Dublin City Councillors to reject this motion. The removal of the Herzog name from this park would be widely understood as an attempt to erase our Irish Jewish history.”
A virtuoso diplomat and an intellectual giant, Herzog had served in a variety of roles throughout his storied career, including a memorable stint as the ambassador to the United Nations, where in 1975 he delivered a speech condemning the Soviet-engineered resolution to brand Zionism as a form of racism. The address is now regarded as a classic, along with the oration from the same session by the US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar slammed the decision, saying that Ireland’s “antisemitic and anti-Israel obsession is sickening.”