Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on January 27, 2020

As president, I will always have Israels back, Mr. Bloomberg said.

Mr. Bloomberg has also long opposed the movement of economic boycotts and sanctions against Israel known as B.D.S., or Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

The Democratic presidential candidates across the board have condemned anti-Semitism, especially after the recent attacks in Monsey, N.Y., when five people were stabbed in a Hasidic rabbis home during a Hanukkah celebration and an Orthodox Jewish man was stabbed while walking to synagogue. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., said his administration would devote $1 billion to combat violent extremism, and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has a plan to fight white nationalism; both of their plans aim to fight anti-Semitism.

But the field as a whole has not addressed the specifics of anti-Semitism enough, said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League.

We are certainly hearing about this issue more than we have before, Mr. Greenblatt said in a phone interview. But the real question candidates must address is, he said, How do you move from rhetoric condemning anti-Semitism to real plans rooting it out?

Many American Jews have found themselves caught in an uncomfortable tension between traditional liberal American Jewish values and Mr. Trumps alliance with Israel. Mr. Trump, who won 24 percent of Jewish voters in Florida in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center, has also been trying to strengthen his support by making anti-Semitism and backing of Israel a partisan issue.

Mr. Sanders wrote about his Jewish identity, his relatives who were murdered by Nazis and the recent rise of anti-Semitic violence in a personal essay in November for Jewish Currents, a progressive Jewish publication. Unlike Mr. Bloomberg, he criticized what he called false accusations of anti-Semitism by Mr. Trump against progressives and called for the end of Israels occupation of Palestinians.

We should be very clear that it is not anti-Semitic to criticize the policies of the Israeli government, he wrote. We must also be honest about this: The founding of Israel is understood by another people in the land of Palestine as the cause of their painful displacement.

See more here:

Bloomberg Warns of Anti-Semitism Rearing Its Ugly Head - The New York Times

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