How can we rebuild open-minded debate within the Jewish community today?

21centurymanifesto

The Morning Star published DAVID ROSENBERG’s speech at the public launch of Jewish Voice For Labour, at a conference fringe meeting attended by more than 200 people

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A few weeks ago I was in Poland. My fifth visit to a country that many describe simply as the biggest Jewish graveyard.

Three million of its 3.3 million pre-war Jewish population were exterminated by the nazis. Today it has a very right-wing government and active far-right groups. You see anti-semitic graffiti on some walls.

And yet in 15 Polish cities Jewish communities are reviving and growing. In Kazimierz, Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, there are several very old synagogues.

Two function as synagogues; others house exhibitions, bookshops, cultural initiatives. Their doors are open. There is no grafitti on them. Yet none of them are bristling with CCTV, high fences, or hyped-up, walkie-talkie-bearing Israeli guards.

A Jewish community centre founded in Krakow in 2009…

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A Chapter in a Declining Empire

21centurymanifesto

Zoltan Zigedy on the US scene today

Everyone not yet anesthetized by the anti-Russia hysteria, should read Robert Parry’s The Rise of the New McCarthyism. The estimable Parry argues for similarities between today’s overheated political antics and those of an earlier time. He likens the relentless Russia-baiting of 2017 with the red-baiting of the post-war period often identified with Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.

But that is not quite right. Labelling the post-war delirium, characterizing the anti-Communist frenzy of the period as “McCarthyism” places far too much weight on that sole figure. True, Joe McCarthy exploited the climate, pushing the absurdity of the times to even more absurd levels. Yet we overlook the causes of the poisoned atmosphere just as surely as we would if we labelled this moment we live in as “Maddowism,” after the woman committed to exploiting the mania for ratings, after Rachel Maddow’s prodding anti-Russian sentiment…

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