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      Antisemitism on Campuses, Ivy and Beyond

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      More from our inbox:A Middleman’s Role in Drug PrescriptionsObjection, Your HonorTrump vs. the Environment Alex Welsh for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?,” by Bret Stephens (column, June 26):Mr. Stephens has issued a sobering and well-documented indictment of antisemitism on elite campuses. The question asked by the headline is timely and troubling for many Jewish high school students and their families.As noted by Mr. Stephens, confused administrators and revisionist curriculums contributed to this crisis. But the insensitivity and hypocrisy of supposedly idealistic and enlightened college students may be the most striking and unkind cut of all.“Safe spaces” and rules against “microaggressions” have become commonplace on campuses. Yet when Jewish students made it known that calling for deadly attacks on Jews (“Globalize the intifada!”) is offensive and intimidating, they were ignored.Chants in favor of colonization or racism would never — and should never — be met with such indifference. It hurts.Perhaps the headline of Mr. Stephens’s column should be rephrased: “Have Elite Universities Abandoned American Jews?”Alan M. SchwartzTeaneck, N.J.To the Editor:While the Ivies have claimed the antisemitism spotlight this year, Jew-hatred is flourishing on many other campuses, including mine, the University of California, Davis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Labour Wins Back the Trust of Jewish Voters

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      From the day that Keir Starmer became the head of the Labour Party in 2020, he made repairing ties with British Jews a priority, calling antisemitism a “stain” on the party.On Thursday, many British Jews who had turned away from Labour in the 2019 general election gave the party another chance. Labour won back several North London constituencies with significant Jewish populations.Nearly half of Jewish voters planned to support the Labour Party in Thursday’s election, according to a poll of 2,717 Jewish adults who responded to the Jewish Current Affairs Survey taken in June, before the election.Britain’s 287,000 Jews make up less than 0.5 percent of the country’s population, and some of them had been politically homeless under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party’s former leader, who was accused of having let antisemitism flourish within the party. Jewish support for the party under Mr. Corbyn reached a low of 11 percent in the 2019 general election, according to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which focuses on Jewish life in Europe.“It’s very clear that Jews have flocked back to what I think to many people has long been their natural political home,” said Jonathan Boyd, the executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, which is based in London.Sarah Sackman, the Labour candidate for the North London constituency of Finchley and Golders Green, where nearly one in five voters are Jewish, the largest proportion in Britain, was elected on Thursday. Labour candidates in the North London constituencies of Hendon, where 14 percent of voters are Jewish, and Chipping Barnet, where nearly 7 percent of voters are Jewish, also won.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked No More: Otto Lucas, ‘God in the Hat World’

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      His designs made it onto the covers of fashion magazines and onto the heads of celebrities like Greta Garbo. His business closed after he died in a plane crash.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.To many fashionable women in the mid-20th century, no hat was worth wearing unless it was made by Otto Lucas.A London-based milliner, Lucas designed chic turbans, berets and cloches, often made from luxe velvets and silks and adorned with flowers or feathers.His designs made it onto the covers of magazines like British Vogue, and onto the heads of clients who reportedly included the actresses Greta Garbo and Gene Tierney, and the Duchesses of Windsor and Kent.The name Otto Lucas was ubiquitous in England, and at the height of his success, he sold thousands of hats each year around the world.The British actress Zena Marshall wearing a hat designed by Lucas.Colaimages/AlamyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How a 1933 Book About Jews in Magic Was Rescued From Oblivion

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      Richard Hatch was searching the card catalog of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, hunting for intriguing titles under the subject heading “Magic.” It was 1979, and Hatch was a young graduate student in physics, but he’d long nurtured an amateur’s passion for the conjuring arts and, on this day at least, he preferred to read about sleight of hand than quantum mechanics.His rummaging stopped when he spotted a title called “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.” Hatch had spent four years of his youth in Germany so he translated it instantly: “Jews in Magic.” The card said the book was written by someone named Guenther Dammann and published in Berlin in 1933.He paused. A book about Jews in magic, from Germany, in the very year that the Nazis assumed power and started burning “un-German” books in bonfires across the country. It seemed obvious. This was an antisemitic tract, identifying Jews to make it easier for the government to persecute them and the public to shun them.Awful, Hatch thought. He then looked for a magic book he actually wanted to read.Hatch would go on to earn two graduate degrees in physics but left the field in 1983 after realizing that his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science. He became a full-time “deceptionist,” as he calls it. While he honed his craft and looked for gigs, he translated a 1942 German book about the famed Austrian magician J.N. Hofzinser. That brought him to the attention of a collector of Judaica and magic books who urged him to translate a fascinating rarity he’d acquired: “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.”Hatch earned two graduate degrees in physics but ultimately left the field because his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science.Russel Daniels for The New York Times“That’s when I realized that the book was about the great contributions that Jews have made to magic,” Hatch said in an interview.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stanford Reports on Antisemitism and Anti-Muslim Bias Show Extent of Divide

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      One report documented antisemitic threats. The other, anti-Muslim threats. Both signaled that there may be little room for agreement.Stanford released on Thursday dueling reports on campus culture — one on antisemitism and the other on anti-Muslim bias — that revealed mirroring images of campus life in recent months that may be impossible to reconcile.One report found that antisemitism has been pervasive at the university in both overt and subtle ways, while the other stated that the school had stifled free speech among pro-Palestinian students and faculty. They were emblematic of the rift between Jewish and Muslim groups on campus, and showed that any kind of accord between the two groups and the university were distant.The reports are among the first outcomes of universities’s reckonings with their handling of the flurry of protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and pro-Israel counterprotests, over the past academic year. As students across the nation marched on campus, set up encampments and, in some cases, got arrested, universities were met with the difficult challenge of balancing students’ right to free speech and campus safety. At Stanford, 13 pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested a few weeks ago after barricading themselves in the president’s office. The report on antisemitism — by a university subcommittee on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias, consisting of faculty, students and an alumnus — found that acts of antisemitism have ranged from an anonymous threat on social media against a student journalist who had written about antisemitism to what students said was intimidation in the classroom and residence halls.“Antisemitism exists today on the Stanford campus in ways that are widespread and pernicious,” the group wrote in the report. “We learned of instances where antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias reached a level of social injury that deeply affected people’s lives.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sigmund Rolat, Who Used His Wealth to Memorialize Polish Jews, Dies at 93

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      A Holocaust survivor and a shipping financier, he returned to his home country, where his parents and brother perished, to help build a museum and other memorials.Sigmund Rolat, a Polish Holocaust survivor who tapped the wealth he accumulated as a businessman in the United States to support cultural projects in his homeland, most notably a museum devoted to the history of Jews in Poland that stands on the grounds of the Warsaw Ghetto, died on May 19 at his home in Alpine, N.J. He was 93.His son, Geoffrey, confirmed the death.Mr. Rolat believed that except for the dark chapter of World War II, with Nazi atrocities at concentration camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka in occupied Poland, the history of Polish Jewry was a mystery to most Jews, and most Americans. He donated millions of dollars to help build the interior and other elements of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which opened in 2014, and he became a major fund-raiser and an influential voice on its board.“I want the gate of our museum, and not the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ gate, to be the first gate that will be seen by Jews visiting Poland,” Mr. Rolat told Forbes magazine in 2014, referring to the cynical inscription (“Work sets you free”) that greeted inmates when they entered the main Auschwitz concentration camp.The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews sits on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. Mr. Rolat donated millions for its construction. It opened in 2014.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York Times“The Jews should first learn our shared history,” he added. “And then, of course, they should see Auschwitz, but with a better understanding of what happened there.”The main exhibition at the museum tells the story of Poland’s Jews over 1,000 years, from the Middle Ages to the present, using artifacts, paintings, replicas and interactive installations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Doug Emhoff Calls Trump a ‘Known Antisemite’ as Biden Team Steps Up Attacks

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      Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, called former President Donald J. Trump “a known antisemite” in a video released on Tuesday, a notable escalation of attacks by President Biden’s campaign against Mr. Trump over his language about Jews.Mr. Emhoff’s remarks came in an afternoon social media post by the Biden campaign with the anodyne title “Second Gentleman @DouglasEmhoff responds to Trump attacking Jewish Americans.”“The last person I’m going to take advice from as a Jewish person is a known antisemite who’s had dinner with antisemites, who said there was ‘good people on both sides’ after Charlottesville,” Mr. Emhoff says in the video, after he apparently watches a weeks-old video of Mr. Trump proclaiming that Jews who vote for Mr. Biden “have to have their head examined.”Mr. Emhoff adds for emphasis, “He’s the last person I’m going to take advice from.”The Biden campaign has been seeking to extend a news cycle that began this week when Mr. Trump posted, then later took down, a video on social media that included old-time newspaper headlines saying a victory by him in November would bring about a “unified Reich.” Mr. Biden, in a video released by his campaign, accused Mr. Trump of using “Hitler’s language.”The Biden campaign and its surrogates have previously condemned Mr. Trump for using antisemitic language. Two weeks ago, a Biden campaign spokesman, Charles Lutvak, blasted Mr. Trump for employing “patronizing antisemitic shtick” after the former president said Jews who voted for Mr. Biden “should be ashamed of themselves.”Mr. Trump has long flirted with antisemitic language and imagery, and shown support for far-right backers who are openly antisemitic.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Schtick’s Pop-Up Event Series for Seder Celebrates Jewish Culture

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      The dinner parties held by Shtick, a pop-up series celebrating Jewish culture, draw out New York’s influencers, artists, designers and celebrities.Why was this Seder different from all other Seders?Start with the setup: a glittering table set for 100, running the length of a drafty warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. And it was not just any old warehouse; this is where Joyva, the stalwart kosher candy company, stores its stacks of halvah, a fudgelike sesame confection.Then there were the guests: not your typical Passover assortment of Tisches, Kaplans and Rubensteins. Sitting elbow to elbow at the table, waiting to snap matzo, were dozens of New York influencers, artists, designers, creative directors, chefs and fashionistas. If the prophet Elijah showed up midway through the meal, his seatmates would have surely asked for his Instagram handle.Also unlike most seders, this one, on Thursday night (before the start of the holiday), featured a D.J. with face tattoos who blasted a Hot 97-style air horn at intervals throughout the evening.It was all the doing of Shtick, a pop-up dinner party series around the city that celebrates Jewish culture. The events are mostly invite-only. Guests at the Seder and past parties have included Brett Gelman, the actor; Samantha Ronson, the D.J.; Richard Kind, the actor; Chi Ossé, the Brooklyn city councilman; and the actor David Schwimmer.Shtick is more or less a one-woman project, run by Jacqueline Lobel, a freelance television producer and director whose aim, she said, is to organize “Jewish communal dining experiences that are sexy.”The event began with a cocktail hour on the factory floor at Joyva, a kosher candy company. Its co-president, Richard Radutzky, helped Jacqueline Lobel, Shtick’s founder, announce the start of the Seder.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More