Uncategorized
A new version of the famous Holocaust diary is being called ‘Anne Frank pornography’ and getting banned from schools
(JTA) – Among the many books that conservative parents have recently asked their children’s schools to remove is a lushly illustrated version of the most famous Holocaust diary.
The graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, published in English in 2018, has found itself at the center of a growing number of controversies involving book removals from school libraries. A small number of passionate activists have pushed for the book to be removed from schools in Florida and Texas, calling it “pornography” and even “antisemitic.” Sometimes, they’ve succeeded.
The movement to police children’s literature — particularly graphic novels — on the basis of race, sex and gender has encompassed thousands of different titles, and it has grown to become a potent political force with potential reverberations for the 2024 presidential race. The official who has played one of the biggest roles in enabling parents to challenge school library books, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is now running for president.
To defenders of the illustrated book — including the foundation created in Frank’s memory, historians and Jewish groups — the inclusion of Anne Frank’s diary among the list of banned books is a sign that the movement is bigoted and misguided.
Proponents of removing the book from schools say the graphic adaptation is essentially an obscene version that distorts Frank’s legacy and aids in “grooming” children. Even some Jewish parents and at least one Jewish lawmaker have objected to the book’s presence in schools.
“I read the diary of Anne Frank many times as a kid. I don’t remember any of that stuff that they put in that graphic novel,” Florida Rep. Randy Fine told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Calling the adaptation an “Anne Frank pornography book,” Fine continued, “And frankly that graphic novel is antisemitic. To sexualize the diary of Anne Frank in that sort of inappropriate way, it is antisemitic.”
Here is what you need to know about the book, the criticism it’s facing and the context that has made it a flashpoint in a deepening culture war.
What is ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’?
Published in 2018, “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” is a new, abridged version of Frank’s famous diary presented in comic-book format. The project was authorized by the Anne Frank Fonds, the Switzerland-based foundation started by Anne’s father Otto Frank, which controls the copyright to the diary Otto rescued after he survived the Holocaust. Anne herself perished in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after hiding out for most of the war with her family in an Amsterdam annex.
The Oscar-nominated Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, together with illustrator David Polonsky, put the new book together. It was intended as a companion piece to the 2021 animated film “Where Is Anne Frank,” which Folman directed.
While the film tells the fanciful story of Anne’s imaginary friend Kitty coming to life and wandering through modern-day Amsterdam, the book is a straightforward, though heavily truncated, rendition of Anne’s original diary. All of the entries it reproduces are taken from her original text, and dialogue between the characters in the annex is based on Anne’s own recollections of their conversations. Some of its supporters resist the label “graphic novel,” which they say implies the story is fictional.
The new book, the foundation says, is not meant to replace Frank’s original diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 as “The Secret Annex” and in English in 1952 as “The Diary of a Young Girl.” That book, along with subsequent editions that restored some passages edited out of the first publication, continues to be published and widely read in dozens of languages.
Why and how is the book being challenged?
A handful of parent activists, the largest “parents’ rights” group in the country and at least one Republican state lawmaker — Fine — have specifically gone after “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” as part of their larger campaign against what they say is obscene and pornographic content in schools. After a few isolated incidents of parental opposition to the book over the last year, their efforts have gained steam in recent months.
Organized by members of “parents’ rights” groups such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education, parents nationwide have brought challenges against thousands of books in school libraries, the vast majority of which deal with topics of race, gender and sexuality. This movement began as parents organized to oppose COVID-19 mask mandates in public schools, and picked up steam in the aftermath of the 2020 racial justice protests following George Floyd’s murder, as well as recent political controversies involving LGBTQ-focused issues such as medical procedures for trans children.
The groups operate under the presumption that their children’s educators and librarians might be trying to sneak leftist viewpoints (including what they call “critical race theory” and “gender ideology”) into the classroom, or even that they are “grooming” their children.
Increasingly, such parents have trained this focus on books, and have become particularly sensitive to any literary depictions of sex and/or LGBTQ identity — particularly in graphic or comic-book format. Some of the most-banned books in schools across the country are graphic novels and memoirs with LGBTQ themes, including “Gender Queer” and “Fun Home.”
“People are just so uncomfortable with the idea of seeing anything represented visually,” said Kasey Meehan, director of the Freedom to Read program at the literary free-speech activist group PEN America. “Time and time again, when graphic novels are taken, an image is pulled out of context or an image is held up and declared as porn.”
Florida has emerged as a frontier for this movement under the leadership of DeSantis, who is a Republican. Under new laws he championed, educators can face felony charges for making obscene material accessible to students; the state also has a new law, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” by its critics, that prohibits any classroom instruction on sexual identity or orientation in elementary and middle school, and limits it in high school.
Why are parents complaining specifically about the graphic adaptation?
Critics of the book say they are objecting to the small handful of passages in which Anne describes sexual matters. In one, she discusses a time she asked a female friend if they could show each other their breasts, but was rebuffed. (“If only I had a girlfriend,” she muses.) In another, she describes clinical details of her own vagina.
These passages are Anne’s own writing, and were part of her actual diary. Folman and Polonsky reproduce them in the book and show a full-page illustration showing her wandering through a garden of female nude statues in the Greco-Roman tradition.
This illustration, which is presented as coming from Anne’s imagination, has garnered the most intense blowback from parents. In Facebook groups devoted to book challenges, some members have shared screenshots of the page as evidence of the adaptation’s obscene qualities, questioning why any parent would want their child to read it.
Some people challenging the book have offered other explanations. Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms For Liberty whose Florida district has removed the book, told JTA that she was troubled by the fact that the adaptation only replicates a small percentage of the original diary, while leaving out what she believed to be crucial context: the original epilogue that shifted from Anne’s first-person narration to a larger study of the victims of the Holocaust. (An afterword does appear in the graphic adaptation.)
Inveighing against current child literacy levels she said are woefully low, Justice was also infuriated by the idea that Frank’s diary needed an illustrated version to begin with.
“Anne wrote the diary when she was 13,” she said. “So the diary is written at a level where children of that age can completely understand it.”
What has happened when parents have challenged the book?
The book first grabbed headlines in August 2022, when administrators at Keller ISD, a public school district in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, ordered staff to remove it (along with a selection of other books) from their shelves. The book had been challenged by a single parent the previous year, and the school’s new board, backed by right-wing special interest groups, had ordered its review policy for classroom materials to be completely overhauled. Any books that had ever been challenged in the district were to be removed from circulation until the matter had been resolved. Following public outcry, the book was returned to Keller’s shelves a week later.
A second Texas school district, Katy ISD outside Houston, had also placed the book under review during the 2021-22 school year, ultimately determining it was only appropriate for high school students.
The book soon landed on the radar of parent activists in Florida. One Florida school district, Indian River County Schools on the state’s Atlantic coast, ruled in April that the book was “not age-appropriate” at any level of instruction, including high school. A parent there had challenged it, claiming that the book “minimizes the Holocaust.”
After a review, the district agreed with the parent, telling JTA it had determined the book to be “a fictional novel,” “not the real diary of Anne Frank,” and filled with “inappropriate content.” The district superintendent issued a statement backing the ruling, citing Florida’s statewide Holocaust education mandate as a reason why the school should not make the book available to students.
The national leadership of Moms For Liberty issued a statement siding with the district — and emphasizing that Anne Frank’s diary is not itself objectionable.
“There are multiple versions of Anne Frank’s diary of varying age appropriateness available to students,” the statement said. “Only this ONE version was removed.”
Justice, the Moms for Liberty cofounder, is a former board member for Indian River County Schools and still lives in the area. She told JTA she does not like the book either and said its removal was a sign of the system working as it should: School administrators took a parent’s challenge seriously and came to a decision.
“If the superintendent and the school board wanted it there, it would be there,” she said. “If the Holocaust education group in the county had wanted it there — these are Jewish people — had wanted it there, it would be there.”
Another Florida school district, Clay County Public Schools outside Jacksonville, has kept the book restricted from student access for some five months and counting, following a single parental complaint earlier this year. That parent, Bruce Friedman, is Jewish, and has become a leading voice of the broader book challenge movement. He challenged the graphic adaptation along with hundreds of other books in his district that he deemed to be inappropriate for students. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s grooming,” he told JTA about the adaptation.
Facing a backlog of book challenges, Clay County in April altered its challenge policy to make it harder for parents like Friedman to file blanket requests to remove many books at once for broadly defined reasons. But notably, the district retained the pending challenge to “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation” even after its policy change. A final decision on the book is still pending.
How are the book’s supporters responding to the criticism?
Activists opposed to the book banning movement and experts on the diary’s publication history say critics of the Anne Frank adaptation are wrong even about the most basic facts of their objections.
First, while the visual format of the graphic adaptation (which incorporates some surreal imagery) arguably lies somewhere between fact and artistic interpretation, and its rendition of the diary is severely abridged, the book did not invent the passages these parents find objectionable, as some have alleged. Those came, word for word, from Frank herself. Both passages were fully restored to her English-language diary beginning with versions published in the 1980s, largely without incident.
A crucial part of the argument against the graphic adaptation is the idea that both of these passages were excised from the initial English-language edition of the diary. Both Friedman and Fine have told JTA they have no recollection of having read the passages with sexual content in their own childhood memories of the diary.
They almost certainly did, said Ruth Franklin, a book critic and author who is writing a book about Frank and her diary to be published next year by Yale University Press. According to Franklin’s research, the very first English-language edition of the diary did indeed include one of the two passages the parents are now objecting to: the part where Anne discusses her attraction to another girl.
Franklin said that, contrary to popular belief, Otto Frank was the one who pushed for the passage to be included in the diary’s first English-language edition after it was excised from the Dutch original. Otto is often portrayed as having been responsible for removing the passage so as to sanitize Anne’s language for a general audience.
Contemporary parents who insist they did not read the passage as children, she said, are “misremembering.”
“If they were to actually go to the library and open up the edition that has been in print since 1952, they would be unhappily surprised to find what’s there,” Franklin said. “It seems inconsistent to me to go after the graphic adaptation and not the diary itself.”
At least one parent has objected to the unabridged text-based version of the diary before. In 2013, a Michigan mom challenged an unabridged edition of the diary, citing the same passages that today’s parents are objecting to in the graphic adaptation. She argued that the unabridged diary was “inappropriate for the middle school,” and tried to push her daughter’s district to swap out the “definitive” edition of the diary for the original version that excised one of the objectionable passages. The parent’s objection made national news, was the subject of much condemnation and was ultimately rejected by the district.
Conditions in schools have changed in the last decade, with parents in multiple states newly empowered to challenge books in their children’s schools. The movement has caught up not only the graphic version of Anne Frank’s diary but a growing number of other titles with Jewish and Holocaust themes.
Meehan of PEN America suggested that the parents who objected to Anne exploring her sexuality were doing so because of the passages’ latent LGBTQ themes, meaning that the text had become an example of “intersectionality,” or representing more than one marginalized group. Some of the book’s opponents, including Justice, have separately attacked the idea of intersectionality.
“When there are multiple themes represented in a book,” Meehan said, “then that book becomes even more a focus of efforts to remove it.”
For the Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss group that controls the diary and authorized the adaptation, the situation is clear-cut. From across the Atlantic, the group issued a statement responding to challenges of the diary in all its forms: “We consider the book of a 12-year-old girl to be appropriate reading for her peers.”
—
The post A new version of the famous Holocaust diary is being called ‘Anne Frank pornography’ and getting banned from schools appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Can Netanyahu win again? The secret to his political survival – and why it may finally fail him
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was once dubbed “King Bibi” for his remarkable ability to win elections, starting with his surprise victory in 1996 at age 46. The number of political rivals who have risen and fallen during his decades in power is almost impossible to count.
But with the Oct. 27 election just days away – three years after Israel’s worst security failure under his watch and amid deep divisions at home and declining international support — could this finally be the 77-year-old Israeli leader’s last stand?
Recent polls show Netanyahu’s Likud party trailing former military chief Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party. Several right-wing and religious parties are also polling below the 3.5% threshold needed to enter the Knesset, threatening to waste thousands of votes that Netanyahu may need to secure a majority. Meanwhile, the opposition appears more organized and motivated than in previous elections, posing a serious threat to his nearly two-decade dominance of Israeli politics.
Netanyahu has spent much of his political career proving predictions of his demise wrong. In 2015, he defied polls and led the Likud Party to a surprise victory after warning on Election Day that Arab voters were heading to the polls in droves. In 2021, after 12 consecutive years as prime minister, he was forced into the opposition by an unlikely coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. He returned to power less than two years later, almost immediately igniting mass protests over his judicial overhaul agenda, which his rivals said would concentrate power and eviscerate Israeli democracy.
Then came Oct. 7, the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Israelis were furious over the security failures that allowed Hamas to breach the border and kill about 1,200 people. Families of hostages demanded the immediate return of their loved ones, and even longtime supporters questioned whether he could remain prime minister after the end of the military campaign in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s political future appeared bleak. Mazal Mualem, a political commentator and author of Cracking the Netanyahu Code, said in an interview that everyone close to Netanyahu whom she spoke with in the weeks after the attack believed it was over. “Bibi was the only one who thought he would survive,” she said, using Netanyahu’s nickname.
But Netanyahu refused to resign. He kept his right-wing coalition together through the war in Gaza, survived nationwide protests and hearings in his ongoing corruption trial. In a remarkable political achievement, he became the first Israeli prime minister in more than 50 years to lead a government through its full four-year parliamentary term — something he himself had never accomplished before in his long career.
How did Netanyahu survive?
In interviews with the Forward, Mualem and another Netanyahu biographer, Anshel Pfeffer, reflected on how Netanyahu has survived when his political career appeared doomed. They offered different explanations, but agreed on one thing: Netanyahu can never be counted out.
Pfeffer, a correspondent for The Economist and author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, said that while there’s “no equivalent” to his political instincts and campaign skills, Netanyahu also lacks certain human instincts, including “shame” and “introspection,” that might otherwise have forced him to step aside. “He has no shame,” Pfeffer said.
Netanyahu’s ability to hold on to power, Pfeffer added, also relied on a political system he spent decades building, in which the political careers and financial interests of his allies are tied to his success. That helped him keep far-right partners such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, along with the Haredi parties, in his coalition despite disagreements over the war and military draft exemptions.
Mualem sees another reason Netanyahu survived: He transformed. “It’s almost as though he killed the old Bibi and a different person was born,” she said.
Netanyahu, once known for his risk-averse doctrine and being at times moderate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, became more willing to take bold military action. Under his leadership, Israel killed the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, launched strikes against Iran and expanded its military presence in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. Mualem argued that this transformation helped Netanyahu win back voters who had turned against him after Oct. 7 and strengthen his standing among his political base. “He went to war for himself and for the country,” she said. “He didn’t give up.”
Can he do it again?
Netanyahu is now counting on those same political skills to carry him through another difficult election.
Recent polls show the parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc holding an average of 55 seats, short of the 61 needed for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The two Arab lists — the United List, a coalition of three Arab Israeli parties, and Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas — are generally counted outside either bloc. But their projected 13 to 15 seats could determine whether Netanyahu’s opponents can form a minority government or at least unite to elect a Knesset speaker from their ranks, giving them significant influence over the legislative agenda. Opposition leaders remain divided over whether they should cooperate with Arab lawmakers.
With little chance of winning over voters firmly opposed to him, Netanyahu is focusing on right-wing voters who supported him in previous elections but are now considering staying home. His goal is to convince them that the alternative to his leadership is too risky.
Netanyahu’s campaign slogan, “It’s the right or Palestine,” is tapping into post-Oct. 7 fears about the establishment of a Palestinian state, warning that an Eisenkot-led government dependent on Arab support will lead to Palestinian statehood. He made a similar claim in 1996 when he suggested Shimon Peres would divide Jerusalem.
Mualem said Netanyahu is approaching this race as if it were his first campaign. “Netanyahu’s secret isn’t magic,” she said. “It’s hard work and a refusal to give up. He never raises his hands in surrender.”
Shalom Lipner, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East program, said Netanyahu has another important advantage: As prime minister, he can largely shape the national conversation. When attention turns to issues that expose his political weaknesses, including Haredi military exemptions or his government’s responsibility for Oct. 7, Netanyahu can redirect the focus to Hamas, Iran or other security threats.
Lipner, who served under seven consecutive Israeli prime ministers between 1990 and 2016, compared it to President Donald Trump’s political style. Both leaders, he said, are skilled at drawing attention to issues that favor them.
Earlier this week, Trump endorsed Netanyahu for reelection, giving his longtime ally another opportunity to highlight their partnership in confronting Iran. “If Israel has the wrong leader, which would be anyone other than Bibi, America will have to do this work ourselves, and I am not inclined to do so,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Netanyahu seized on the endorsement to rally his base and try to persuade undecided voters that his close relationship with Trump is essential to Israel’s security. “We have a job to finish,” he told Trump during a phone call that was turned into a campaign clip.
Lipner believes Netanyahu’s tactics face greater limits than in previous elections because Israeli voters have become increasingly skeptical and entrenched in their views.
Still, Netanyahu has little reason to stop trying.
Israeli political commentator Amit Segal suggested that the statement about working with Trump for the coming two years was aimed at swing voters tired of Netanyahu, but who “will find it easier to support him for final arrangements for one last job,” with the implicit expectation that this would be his final term.
The day after the election
For both Netanyahu and his opponents, winning more votes on Election Day is only half the battle. The bigger challenge is finding a way to form a government afterward.
Under Israel’s electoral system, the 37 parties running in this election cycle must win at least 3.25% of the national vote to enter the Knesset. Votes cast for parties that fail to cross that threshold do not translate into seats, potentially costing their political allies crucial seats available for redistribution.
That makes the fate of smaller right-wing parties, including one led by retired general Ofer Winter and a reservist-backed, economy-focused party led by former minister Yoaz Hendel, particularly important in determining the balance of power.
Voter turnout and first-time voters will therefore be critical to the makeup of the political map.
Even if Netanyahu does not win 61 seats, he could still benefit if the opposition cannot agree on a government. Polls show that a majority of voters want a different prime minister, but those voters are spread across parties with sharply different ideologies and priorities.
Eisenkot has suggested establishing a minority government with Arab lawmakers abstaining to allow it to be sworn in without formally joining the coalition. Other opposition figures, particularly Avigdor Lieberman, are opposed to alliances with Arab members.
These divisions are Netanyahu’s greatest hope. If the opposition can’t come to an agreement, that could set the stage for another election, leaving Netanyahu as prime minister until a replacement government is sworn in.
Is this his last stand?
All three experts said it is too early to predict whether this election will mark the end of Netanyahu’s career.
“At one point it’s going to be your last stand,” Lipner said. “I just don’t know if this is it.”
“Netanyahu has found so many ways to come back against all the odds against him,” Pfeffer said. “So you certainly can’t count him out, and I’m not going to try to.”
Mualem suggested that even if Netanyahu loses power, he may simply return to the opposition and wait for his rivals to fail. “Netanyahu doesn’t have another life,” she said. “Politics is the only life he has.”
The post Can Netanyahu win again? The secret to his political survival – and why it may finally fail him appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
While AIPAC’s critics rejoice as lobby shifts strategy, its defenders push back
(JTA) — AIPAC’s critics gloated on Thursday after the pro-Israel lobby announced that it was ending direct contributions and candidate endorsements. But defenders of the storied Washington institution pushed back at that characterization, saying instead that the organization had made a smart course correction amid strong political headwinds stoked at least in part by antisemitism.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee announced the decision in a letter to its members on Wednesday, explaining that the lobby would now shift its focus to mobilizing individual donors. The abandonment of direct PAC contributions and candidate endorsements marks a significant reversal in a strategy that AIPAC launched in 2021, ahead of the 2022 election cycle. The letter informed donors that AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, also launched in 2021, would continue to operate.
The move came in an increasingly tense political cycle for AIPAC, which it called “one of the most challenging environments in recent memory.” The lobby has become a target for progressive candidates, particularly Democratic Socialists of America members, who have sharply criticized candidates who receive donations from AIPAC. In turn, the organization has become a symbol of undue political influence among some voters.
The DSA responded to the lobby’s policy shift by saying that “AIPAC has realized what we all already knew: working people do not want their tax dollars to fund apartheid and genocide.”
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch and a staunch Israel critic, wrote that AIPAC’s decision shows that “candidates don’t want its backing,” while the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace posted that AIPAC was now deeming itself “too toxic.”
Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of the liberal pro-Israel lobbying group J Street, which has frequently tangled with AIPAC on social media, argued in a statement that “AIPAC can’t save its brand by folding its PAC.” Describing AIPAC as “a once-revered organization,” he said the lobby became toxic not due to its support of candidates but “because of the policies it asks those candidates to defend.”
But those with ties to AIPAC defended the move as one that will actually help the lobby fortify its impact. “It’s a marker of institutional health when they can look around at the reality, see it for what it is and change themselves accordingly,” Jonathan Greenberg, director for combatting antisemitism at Defending Education and a former AIPAC staffer, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They recognized that their political ground had shifted and that they needed to change with that shift,” added Greenberg, who served as AIPAC’s Midwest political director until 2011 and ran for state office in Illinois as a Republican a year later.
Calling out what he described as a “horrifying demonization campaign” against AIPAC in Washington, he said he believes that the lobbying group made this strategic decision in an effort to continue operating amid widespread antisemitism.
“The pro-Israel community is still going to be deeply involved in campaigns,” added Greenberg, who identifies as a political conservative but no longer a Republican. “AIPAC is just wisely understanding that the way the organization operates can change, so that it can still be the voice that it’s always been on Capitol Hill.”
Recognizing that the U.S. political landscape is undergoing profound changes amid deep dissatisfaction across party lines, a former AIPAC spokesperson who requested anonymity to speak freely pointed out that institutions must evolve to stay effective. Other major interest groups, such as the pharmaceutical, hospital and real estate industries, are advancing their priorities with a variety of tactics, including lobbying, direct contributions, super PACs and networks of donors, the person noted.
In fact, one point of agreement on Thursday between AIPAC’s supporters and detractors was that the 72-year-old institution wasn’t going anywhere. “Mobilizing greater resources for AIPAC, pro-Israel candidates, and our super PAC is critical,” the AIPAC letter stressed, as it pledged to reinvest in its long-standing network of members nationwide.
“AIPAC staff and local leaders will continue working with you on political fundraising efforts, recommending contributions to candidates who are worthy of your support, and ensuring your resources are deployed in the most effective ways possible,” the letter added.
Indeed, opponents of the lobby indicated that the change in approach did little to satisfy them – and potentially opened up new lines of attack. DSA charged that AIPAC would “try to bankroll the same candidates under a different name.”
“You can’t hide AIPAC,” the DSA added. “The world has woken up.”
J Street’s Ben-Ami maintained that AIPAC’s decision to keep its super PAC even as it dropped its PAC “only doubles down on the dark money politics that helped create its problem in the first place.” Traditional PACs can contribute a maximum of $5,000 to individual candidates in each race, while super PACs can spend unlimited funds to independent political communications that serve to support or oppose candidates. Both have to disclose their donors, but super PAC donors aren’t always transparent about the origins of their money.
Tali deGroot, J Street’s vice president of political and digital strategy, likewise assessed that AIPAC’s influence wouldn’t disappear in the next election cycle.
“Instead, AIPAC’s donors and its super PAC will keep spending heavily in our elections, only now voters will have a harder time seeing where that money comes from,” deGroot said.
Defending Education’s Greenberg acknowledged that AIPAC’s choice to increase its reliance on its super PAC could fuel even more opposition to the lobby.
“But I don’t think fashioning ourselves to placate antisemites gets us anywhere,” he continued. “What we know about antisemites, from thousands of years of dealing with them, is that if we don’t give them this reason, they’ll find another reason.”
The former AIPAC spokesperson said the jury was out on whether the AIPAC pivot would improve its public image. “The question is whether AIPAC’s shift reflects a broader evolution in how organizations and interest groups engage politically, and whether changing its approach will change how the public perceives its influence,” the former spokesperson noted.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post While AIPAC’s critics rejoice as lobby shifts strategy, its defenders push back appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
UK adopts sweeping measures against antisemitism in schools
(JTA) — The U.K. has adopted sweeping measures to combat antisemitism in English schools, prompting pushback from the country’s largest teachers’ union.
The move came after a new government-commissioned review found that three in five Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism in English schools. The most common incidents were jokes, stereotypes and comments about Jewish people. About half of respondents who witnessed or experienced antisemitism said the incidents were not reported, most often because they did not think they would be taken seriously.
The government on Wednesday accepted 27 recommendations from the report, including dedicated antisemitism training for leaders and staff, improved recording of antisemitic incidents and moves to build a better understanding of Jewish life, identity and contemporary antisemitism.
The government commissioned the report following a spate of high-profile attacks on Jews in Britain, including an attack on a synagogue in Manchester last year that left two men dead.
The report’s author, Sir David Bell, the vice chancellor of the University of Sunderland and former chief inspector of schools in England, recommended addressing antisemitism distinctly from other forms of racism. He argued that antisemitism was a “uniquely complex” problem because of intertwined racial and religious dimensions, since Jewish identity can encompass both an ethnicity and a religion, along with expressions of prejudice that hold all Jews responsible for the actions of Israel.
The government will also encourage English schools to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. The definition is supported by many mainstream Jewish organizations and has been adopted by 47 countries, including the U.K., but critics say that it conflates some forms of antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
British Education Secretary Lucy Powell called Bell’s review a “generational moment” and said that “implementation is now my priority.”
However, the National Education Union, the largest union representing teachers, lecturers, teaching assistants and support staff in the United Kingdom and Europe, raised concerns on Wednesday about recommending the IHRA definition for schools. NEU general secretary Daniel Kebede said in a statement that the definition “risks deepening the problem rather than tackling it, and actively undermining efforts to confront antisemitism.”
“The IHRA’s contested framing risks blurring the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and the genocide in Gaza, leaving teachers with uncertainty when they need clarity,” said Kebede. He cited a risk that “children who cannot critically explore issues through classroom discussion will instead seek their answers in online and unsafe groups.”
Kebede also encouraged Britain’s Department for Education to strengthen guidance on all forms of racism, not only antisemitism, saying that 65% of teachers report they have not received any antiracism training in the past year.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, an umbrella organization for British Jewish communities, celebrated the antisemitism report and the government’s adoption of its proposed measures. The group specifically praised the report’s “clear recommendations that schools and local authorities follow government guidelines by adopting the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism as a tool to deepen understanding of contemporary antisemitism.”
“We remain concerned about undue external influence on schools driven by narrow political agendas, and tendentious materials seeping into schools and increasing disharmony, and we will continue to press for vigilance against this,” said the Board of Deputies.
The post UK adopts sweeping measures against antisemitism in schools appeared first on The Forward.
