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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

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Howard Levitt and Dr. Josh Josephson embark on a gustatory journey from Paris to Copenhagen, tasting the richly creative and exquisitely traditional

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As judges on Canadian and international restaurant review panels, which we are in some cases not allowed to name, we had been waiting impatiently through the pandemic for the day the world reopened. We immediately booked a trip to what are, along with Tokyo and San Sebastian, Spain, the worlds two best restaurant cities, Paris and Copenhagen.

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Some might find the latter surprising, but Copenhagen is home to No. 1 and No. 2 on The Worlds 50 Best Restaurants list, Noma and Geranium, whose ratings came out a week after we returned. There was only one Canadian restaurant in the top 100.

The movement to Nordic cuisine started, like much of food evolution elsewhere, with developments in France, from old style, complicated, heavy sauces, marinades and longer cooking times to what the French called nouvelle cuisine, involving none of the above but, instead, fresher ingredients and more use of herbs. Chefs became extremely inventive, creating new combinations and pairings. In France, virtually all of the ingredients are recognizable to us, while in Copenhagen they use local historical techniques of fermentation, smoking, wood oils and unique indigenous plants from foraging. They also use anatomical portions unfamiliar to us, such as, at Jordnaer, the small fatty portion of the shoulder of a king crab.

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Dishes that are commonplace here are revised to create something else. For example, again at Jordnaer, the bread and butter was a brioche-like Japanese milk bread saturated with goat butter, accompanied by a pat of sweet cow butter. The musky goat butter combined with the grassy, pasture-like cow butter had surprisingly harmonious flavours. Simple. The taste of butter on butter was surprisingly good.

Another feature of Danish cuisine is the use of insects as an ingredient, something Josh avoided. Howard partook, but did not find added value to the flavours.

We had eight meals in Paris, covering some of the new currents in French restaurant cooking, from brasseries to creative market cuisine, to the entirely experimental. The restaurant that surprised us the most, and to which we would quickly return, was Shabour, a heavily booked, one-star Michelin restaurant run by renowned Israeli chef Assaf Granit.

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Everyone sat at a counter, across from chefs on the kitchen side who assembled, served and discussed the courses. The dishes had riffs on traditional Jewish cuisine, such as gefilte fish and beet borscht. The gefilte fish, traditionally the lowest of the low, was skinned sea bass with carrot cream and caviar.

Broken borscht soup featured red cabbage, cream of beetroot with sage, pickled baby beetroot glazed with feta cheese, bacon, lobster steamed in vodka, cream of feta and horseradish, dill oil, powdered red cabbage and lemon juice! One of our favourites was a hay-smoked pigeon sandwich with a sauce made of smoked pigeon skin, cured lemon and sumac. The sauce alone required four days of very slow reduction to achieve its rich-tasting density.

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In Canada, particularly Toronto, restaurants often overcharge for seafood towers of less-than pristine shellfish. Paris has Le Duc, with its fabulous seafood, or Le Dome, where one encounters 10 varieties, some in different sizes, of the best and most pristinely fresh oysters sourced anywhere. Those from Maison Gillardeau are so prized that the shells are laser-engraved to prevent counterfeiting.

We then flew (with not even flight attendants wearing masks) from France, which no longer has a restaurant in the worlds top 20 on The Worlds 50 Best Restaurants list, to Copenhagen, home of the top two.

Noma had a seasonal game menu, including reindeer brain and duck brain, as part of its rustic, earthy menu, with a dessert presented in a marrow bone, the femur of a roe deer, filled with rendered fudge of deer marrow with blueberries and calendula flowers. Also available was a version of traditional Danish pastry fried in bear fat with an egg-yolk sauce and crispy duck skin, all accompanied by a spoon covered with the reduced sauce of caramel and bear stock.

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Geranium had a refined, sophisticated approach, both in preparation and gustatory experience. One such dish featured oyster pearls, kelp and rugbrod with parsley ash, king perch and oyster, accompanied by apple and broccoli pearls, snail egg pearls and Danish cheese.

Neither of us had ever experienced the level of sophistication of this harmonious range of ingredients, fine details of presentation and combination of intriguing flavours.

We had a reservation at the two-star Michelin Jordnaer secured by our hotel, but it failed to confirm and we arrived to be told that we had been cancelled, replaced and no table was available. We were bereft. After protracted pleading (begging), the chef apologetically gave us his friends-and-family table in the kitchen, replete with occasional free tastes during the meal.

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We raved about the exceptional dining experience.

Indeed, it was Howards favourite meal of the trip, with course after course of exquisite, jewel-like displays and harmoniously tasteful selections of specialized ingredients. It reminded us in some ways of the presentation evident in the highest-end kaiseki Japanese cuisine. Of course, in what other great restaurant in Japan or anywhere can you find such unique esoteric local ingredients as lambs blood powder and coagulated formic acid derived from dried ants, the kind you will find in Nordic cuisine and that we had at our Alchemist meal?

Compare the following to a square grid-patterned waffle at a Canadian diner: A hollow roasted waffle shaped into a fenestrated flower, the interior of which was filled with a salad of fjord shrimp, chives, lemon zest, sour cream and mayonnaise, and topped with caviar.

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Danish comfort food is best known for its smorrebrod, an open-faced sandwich of buttered, dense, brown rye bread that may be topped with cold cuts or fish and cheese and veg garnishes. It has always been an artisanal composition of mostly traditional local ingredients. Schonneman has not changed in decades and is well worth visiting, but not easily entered. Indeed, they told us they had no further reservation spots available for months. Montergade, although no better, has modernized the approach to make it more consistent with the newer Nordic style.

The most fascinating and revolutionary dining experience of the trip, if not our lives, was at Alchemist, the $15 million construction extravaganza. This restaurant only seats 45 people once a night and has double that number in staff. The meal is eaten in 50 courses over 7 1/2 hours in five separate culinary theatres for the meals different stages. From mimes dancing with you to private recitals by members of the Danish philharmonic and a planetarium-like room with a dynamically changing kaleidoscope display overhead, presented during the main courses, the Alchemist experience is so remarkable it requires its own column.

Howard Levitt is a prominent employment lawyer, judge on several Canadian andinternational restaurant review awards and memberof the Chevaliers du Tastevin.

He has written restaurant review columns for this paper.

Dr. Josh Josephson, research optometrist, former owner of The Cookbook Store, former president of the International Wine and Food Society, Toronto, is a judge for several Canadian and international restaurant surveys, member of the Chevaliers du Tastevin; Chaine des Rotisseurs.

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What they're eating at the world's best restaurants, from oyster pearls to rendered fudge of deer marrow - National Post

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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

Oftentimes, I think its the little other things that can make a story special.

Or, in my case, speical. Thatll make sense later.

This past weekend, I took a trip up to Detroit with two friends to see a concert featuring early 2000s megaband Evanescence and the female-led rock group Halestorm.

The concert was rad, and everything my teenage inner child needed, as Evanescences Fallen was one of the main soundtracks of my high school career.

But this is a story about a few other things that happened, little ancillary tidbits from that trip that I think really add some color to the overall story. And, at least, I find them amusing.

The entire state of Michigan, smells like weed

If youve followed my columns, you know Im a fan of a bold, ludicrous overstatement to make a point. But seriously, during our time in Detroit, it seemed like we couldnt go anywhere without smelling marijuana.

Recreational marijuana is legal in Michigan now evidenced by about a billion billboards in the Steuben County Interstate 69 corridor and directly across the border so youd expect it to be more prevalent than the occasional run-ins in Indiana.

And maybe youre thinking, Well, Steve, you were going to a concert and theres weed at every concert! which seems to be true at least from my experience, but no, I mean it seemed like it was everywhere.

We got to our hotel, got checked in and are walking down the hallways to our room and BAM, weed. Bought a bootleg concert T-shirt from a guy on the sidewalk near the arena (more on that in a bit) and BAM, weed. Sitting in the concert enjoying the show and about midway through, BAM, weed.

Despite being someone who is anti-smoking after watching cigarettes kill off my mom and other in-laws, Im generally for marijuana legalization with reasonable public safety guard rails in place.

But, after 24 hours of smelling weed nonstop in Detroit, Id consider not supporting legalization just to avoid the constant reek.

I ate one of the best sandwiches Ive had in a long time

After arriving at the hotel, we needed to get some dinner. There were a couple places nearby including a grilled sub place and a pizza joint with an Italian menu beyond just pizzas.

But right next door to the hotel was the self-styled Detroit Famous Bread Basket Deli. This little joint had the markings of being a Jewish-style deli, so my expectation was I could get a giant sandwich exploding with meat.

We called in our order (the place had no walk-ins due to COVID) and picked it up at the window and took it back to our hotel room.

I had ordered a Reuben sandwich on rye (the second night in a row eating sauerkraut as part of my dinner after having a Polish sausage with kraut for dinner on Friday night after having a taste for that) and I opened up the paper for this sandwich and OH, MY, GOD.

This beast was inches thick with corned beef, piled with kraut and cheese and dressing on some perfectly toasted bread. I had to unhinge my jaw to get a full bite of this monster and it was SO GOOD, easily the best sandwich Ive had in years.

It made me ask the question once again Why dont we have good food in northeast Indiana?

I already know the answer to that question. Unlike Chicagoland where I hail from, northeast Indiana is comparatively ethnically un-diverse. Mostly starchy rural Germanic immigrant types who like to eat rice-filled dumplings on mashed potatoes between bread and coated in a bland and tasteless white gravy.

Give yourself a melting pot of Polish, Italian, Greek, Jewish and Middle-Eastern people among others and then youll get a recipe for some dynamite cuisine.

Buying a bootleg concert T-shirt

On our way into the concert (we had purchased parking in the attached multi-story garage), we were approaching the Little Caesars Arena and, as we got there, we ran across guys standing out on the sidewalk hawking T-shirts.

Buying a T-shirt at a concert is akin to highway robbery, but theres a certain level of sketchiness with buying off a guy on the street.

But while we were waiting in line to get into the garage, I figured Id give it a shot. I checked my wallet for cash $21 in there and rolled down the window to ask a guy how much.

Twenty bucks, he said. Sold! One XL please.

I took a look at my new T-shirt (which had an aroma of weed on it, of course, because Michigan), and was pretty pleased. But why was this being sold out on sidewalk at a reasonable price?

As I glanced over it, I realized that in smaller type on the back of the T-shirt it says Speical Guest: Lilith Czar.

Leave it to the newspaper editor to find a typo, right?

My thought: Who cares if theres a typo on the back in small type introducing the opening act? I just scored an otherwise cool shirt for less than half of the price of an indoor vendor.

We had a good laugh and officially made speical the memorable theme of the rest of our trip.

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The Anti-Defamation League has said that, a year after Facebook banned Holocaust denial from the platform, there remain cracks in enforcement that allow deniers to disseminate hate speech.

While Facebook has banned certain search terms related to Holocaust denial, others remain available, bringing up video and pages.

Theres still a lot of Holocaust denial on Facebook, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said this week. We urge the platform to take additional steps to address these cracks in enforcement as well as to ensure that the ban is more consistently applied across the platform.

The ADL noted that content it flagged in several instances as denying the Holocaust had gone untouched by the platform.

It also said groups that deal with conspiracy theories, though not Holocaust denial exclusively, also traffic in denial claims.

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As ADL has explained to Facebook for years, Holocaust denialism is hate speech. It is the deliberately antisemitic attempt to claim that the Holocaust never happened or that a much smaller number of Jews did die, said Greenblatt. This offensive content causes pain and harm for Jews, particularly at a time of rising concern about antisemitic incidents.

Over the past year Facebook has increasingly moved to combat Holocaust denial, removing offending content as well as directing people who search for information about the Holocaust toward accurate third-party information, using the same approach it has taken to combat misinformation about elections and COVID-19.

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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

2016 film

Denial is a 2016 biographical film directed by Mick Jackson and written by David Hare, based on Deborah Lipstadt's 2005 book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier. It dramatises the Irving v Penguin Books Ltd case, in which Lipstadt, a Holocaust scholar, was sued by Holocaust denier David Irving for libel. It stars Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius and Alex Jennings.

Denial premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2016.[4] It was theatrically released in the United States by Bleecker Street on 30 September 2016,[5] and in the United Kingdom by StudioCanal and Entertainment One on 27 January 2017.

Deborah Lipstadt is an American professor of Holocaust studies whose speaking engagement is disrupted by David Irving, a writer on Nazi Germany. He files a libel lawsuit in the United Kingdom against Lipstadt and her publisher for declaring him a Holocaust denier in her books. As the burden of proof in UK libel cases lies with the accused, Lipstadt and her legal team, led by solicitor Anthony Julius and barrister Richard Rampton, must prove that Irving lied about the Holocaust.

To prepare their defence, Lipstadt and Rampton tour the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland with along with Professor Robert van Pelt who explains about the operation of the gas chambers, while the research team subpoenas Irving's extensive personal diaries. Lipstadt is annoyed by Rampton's apparently disrespectful questions on the subject, and frustrated when the team minimises her involvement in the case, arguing that she harms its chances of success. Members of the British Jewish community plead with her to settle out of court to avoid creating publicity for Irving. However, her team has a promising start when they persuade Irving, by appealing to his ego, to agree to a trial by judge instead of a jury, which he could have manipulated to his advantage.

Irving conducts his own legal representation, facing Lipstadt's legal team. Irving endeavours to twist the presented evidence for the defence. Lipstadt is approached by a Holocaust survivor who pleads for the chance to testify, but Lipstadt's legal team insists on focusing the trial on Irving.

Irving tries to discredit professor van Pelt's evidence for the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, claiming there were no holes on the roof for the Zyklon B gas crystals to be introduced. His soundbite "no holes, no holocaust" dominates the media coverage. Furious, Lipstadt demands that she and the Holocaust survivors be allowed to take the stand. Julius angrily counters that Irving would only humiliate and exploit a survivor on cross-examination, as he has in the past. Rampton visits Lipstadt at her home to explain his approach and earns her trust. In court, he subjects Irving to skillful cross-examination and exposes his claims as absurd, while expert testimony from respected scholars like Richard J. Evans expose the distortions in Irving's writings.

As the trial concludes, the judge, Charles Gray, worries the defence by suggesting that, if Irving honestly believes his own claims, then he cannot be lying as Lipstadt asserted. However, Gray eventually rules for the defence, convinced of the truth of Lipstadt's portrayal of Irving as deceitful. Lipstadt is hailed for her dignified demeanour, while her legal team reminds her that, despite her silence during the trial, it was her writing that countered Irving's lies and provided the basis for the victory. At a press conference, Lipstadt praises her lawyers for their strategy.

In April 2015, Hilary Swank and Tom Wilkinson were selected to star in the film, based on the book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier by Deborah Lipstadt, with Mick Jackson directing, and Gary Foster and Russ Krasnoff producing under their Krasnoff/Foster Entertainment banner with Shoebox Films.[6] Participant Media and BBC Films co-financed.[7] In November 2015, Rachel Weisz replaced Swank, and Timothy Spall joined the cast, with Bleecker Street distributing the film.[8] In December 2015, Andrew Scott, Jack Lowden, Caren Pistorius, Alex Jennings, and Harriet Walter joined the cast.[9] Howard Shore composed the film's score.[10]

Principal photography began in December 2015 and concluded by the end of January 2016.[11] Denial was filmed in London and at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Poland.[12]

The film had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2016.[13] The film was released in the United States in a limited release on 30 September 2016,[14] and in the United Kingdom on 27 January 2017.[15]

Denial received positive reviews from critics. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 82%, based on 164 reviews, with an average grade of 6.79/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "If Denial doesn't quite do its incredible story complete justice, it comes close enough to offer a satisfying, impactful drama and another powerful performance from Rachel Weisz."[16] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 63 out of 100, based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[17]

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Denial (2016 film) - Wikipedia

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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

In her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, published in the UK in 1994, Lipstadt (now the Dorot professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in the US) had called Irving a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history. He sued her for defamation in the high court, alleging, correctly enough, that what she had written damaged his reputation as a popular writer on Nazi Germany and the Second World War.

Her allegations also affected his earnings, since his reputation was built not only on his racy and readable prose style but also on his claim to have discovered more original sources and to be more accurate and thorough than other historians were. The defence opted for justification that is, it decided to prove that Lipstadts allegations were factually correct, an absolute defence in law.

That is where I came in. The defence lawyers asked me to go through Irvings writings and speeches to see if Lipstadts charges were correct. Its worth noting thatI had complete freedom to do this, got no instructions from the defence, and was paid the standard expert witness fee, an hourly rate that meant that I could have concluded that Irving was a great historian and everything Lipstadt had written was wrong, and still received my payment. Moreover, I had to swear in court that I had written my report objectively and without any fear or favour, and sign an affidavit to the same effect.

In the event, I found that Irving was indeed a Holocaust denier, at least after the late 1980s. Together with my team of researchers, I discovered a huge number of manipulations and falsifications of the historical record in his work, with words inserted into or taken out of documents where they were not present in the original, mistranslations, mistranscriptions, misdatings and much more besides.

The clinching factor was that all these errors went to support David Irvings central contentions: that there were no mass gassings of Jews, that Adolf Hitler did not know about the extermination of the Jews (or if he did, tried to stop it), that there was no central planning of the mass killing of Jews, and that most of the evidence for the mass murder had been concocted after the war.

If Irving had merely been careless, then his mistakes of fact and quotation would have had a random effect on his arguments, some telling for them, some against. But the effect was anything but random, indicating that the mistakes were deliberate and not accidental. All of this can be read in the transcripts of the trial, available online, and in my book Telling Lies About Hitler (Verso, 2002).

In the event, Irving lost the case comprehensively, and was ordered to pay more than 2m in legal costs, which led to his bankruptcy. It kept open the lines of public debate about the Holocaust, whereas if he had won, Lipstadts book would have been pulped, and nobody would ever again have been able to call someone a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history without facing the threat of an expensive libel suit. The case received massive and worldwide publicity and became the subject of several books apart from my own. It had a powerful educative effect, as all the newspapers carried detailed reports of the factual aspects of the Holocaust, Auschwitz, the gas chambers and the role of Hitler in ordering the extermination of the Jews.

The trial was also the subject of a hastily put together drama-documentary on Channel 4 television, in which I appeared in the witness box as an old man with a white beard, which was evidently what the television people thought Cambridge professors looked like.

Some time later, however, there was a more considered documentary on BBC Two, Holocaust on Trial, for which the producers phoned me up beforehand to ask me my age, height, weight and hair colour, with a view to casting an actor who at least looked vaguely like me. They chose Michael Kitchen (the lead actor in the television series Foyles War).

The programme was an effective and intelligent mix of archive footage, talking heads and courtroom scenes. By a curious chance, I was walking through Londons Fitzrovia one sunny day a few months after the programme had gone out, when I spotted Michael Kitchen relaxing with a friend in a pavement cafe. I wouldnt normally do this, but the opportunity was too tempting to miss, so I went up to him. Are you Michael Kitchen? I asked. Yes, he said wearily. You played me on television, I said. That got his attention. Its not every day that an actor meets one of the characters hes played in person. He got up and I explained who I was. He remembered the occasion. I hope I played you to your satisfaction, he said. Yes, I replied, in fact you played me far better than I played myself, because you could rehearse the lines while I only had one shot at them!

Media interest in the case did not die down after the broadcast. Not long after this, Ridley Scott started to put together a movie on the case, commissioning the playwright Ronald Harwood to write a screenplay. Harwood had just won an Oscar for The Pianist and knew a lot about the Nazi period, which he had covered in a number of plays and movies.

But Scott evidently wasnt satisfied with his work, for he handed it over to a Hollywood script doctor, Nicholas Meyer (author of a wonderful short novel about Sherlock Holmes, The Seven Per Cent Solution, in which Watson inveigles Holmes into allowing himself to be psychoanalysed by Sigmund Freud, who was, like the great detective, experimenting with cocaine at the time). But even a writer of Meyers credentials (including two Star Trek movies) was seemingly unable to rework the screenplay to Scotts satisfaction, and the movie was never made.

The problem, I guess, was that it is notoriously difficult to make courtroom dramas work on the big screen. As someone who was present for most of the three-month Irving trial, I can testify to the fact that trials are mostly tedious in the extreme, with lengthy periods of acute boredom punctuated only briefly by the occasional moment of high drama. These were very few and far between in the Irving v Lipstadt case. Also, there was no individual, personal story on which to hang the action. Movies need a human figure or figures on which to focus and with whom the audience can identify, and in a large and complex legal action there seemed to be nobody who could fit the bill.

By 2005, however, this had changed, with the publication of Deborah Lipstadts History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving. The book is her own, very personal, account of the trial, beginning with her consternation at being served with an English high court writ, and going on to depict her relations with the lawyers who handled her defence, the solicitor Anthony Julius and the barrister Richard Rampton in the lead. Lipstadt described in detail, often movingly, the frightening experience of a lone author with little or no means being sued for a large sum of money, and facing a complete loss of academic reputation if she lost. (Later editions of the book were entitled History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier.)

In due course the books potential as the basis for a play or movie was recognised by the leading English playwright and screenwriter David Hare (who had been knighted for his services to the theatre in 1998). Hare had focused, among other things, on the Nazis, with a film called The Reader (2008), dramatising Bernhard Schlinks novel about the postwar life of a female concentration camp guard. He came to see me as part of a series of interviews of participants in the Irving v Lipstadt trial and, as his assistant took copious notes, we talked for two hours about my memories and impressions of a case that now lay more than a decade in the past.

I told him I felt by this time that it had been a kind of black comedy: it was an action that should never have been brought, with many absurdities (Holocaust denial being the most obvious, but by no means the only one), at the same time as it dealt with the most profound and disturbing of historical issues.

Hare commented that everyone he had talked to had viewed the trial in a different light. But if he was thinking at one time of an approach similar to Kurosawas film Rashomon, in which the action appeared from a series of different perspectives, he had clearly abandoned this by the time he sat down to write the screenplay. Very cleverly, he centred the action on Deborah Lipstadts own experiences. In the film we see her shocked and dismayed when the writ is so unexpectedly served, and we follow her determination to defend herself in court as she makes her way to London. Once there, she is shocked all over again when Julius and Rampton tell her she will not be allowed to go onto the witness stand or indeed to say anything at all either inside the courtroom or outside it until the trial is over. As the two lawyers explain in the film with the stiff-upper-lip Britishness contrasted with American brashness the aim of the defence is to focus exclusively on Irving and his writings and speeches. Anything that distracted from this would allow him to shift this focus away and muddy the waters. The burden of the defence must rest on the contributions of the expert witnesses, they declare. Reluctantly, Deborah Lipstadt agrees.

In a series of meetings to prepare for the trial we assembled a starry cast of experts including Christopher Browning, the leading American specialist on the Holocaust, Robert Jan van Pelt, the Dutch-Canadian historian of Auschwitz and its buildings, and Peter Longerich, author of the major German work in the field.

Since the trial was held, with Irvings agreement, without a jury, all we had to do was to write our reports and submit them to the high court, and then appear on the witness stand to be cross-examined about them by Irving, who had decided to conduct his case in person rather than entrusting it to a barrister.

David Hare reduced this team to just Van Pelt and myself. I wasnt too happy about the way the movie presented me and my two researchers in a pre-trial conference as determined to nail Irvings falsifications. In fact, we approached our task without any preconceptions: Irvings work may have attracted a large readership, but it was of no interest to academics or university teachers so none of us was familiar with it. As we set to work on going through his writings, we became progressively more astonished at what we found. None of this sense of outraged surprise made it through to the movie.

What it did do very well was to transform the tedious and often pedantic detail of the courtroom proceedings into a brief and dramatic summary. When Van Pelt arrived from Canada, heavily jet-lagged, and took the witness stand, Irving ambushed him towards the end of the day with a specious point that would have taken a good deal of time to refute, much to our consternation.

In fact, Van Pelt recovered strongly the next day, though this does not really come across on the screen. Instead this temporary setback is used to dramatise once again Lipstadts scepticism about the defences reliance on expert witnesses and articulate her feeling that she should be allowed on the witness stand herself. In the end, when I or rather my character, played by John Sessions take the stand, the conclusions of my team are presented in a couple of brief sentences, but enough to make it clear that our detailed evidence has backed up the defences case.

Thus the films focus on Deborah Lipstadts personal experience of the process cuts down the courtroom action drastically without betraying its essentials. In addition, since movies of course need a touch of glamour, the role of Laura Tyler, a young paralegal assistant who helped prepare and organise the defence, is strengthened by scenes from her private life.

Perhaps all this means is that indeed, as David Hare had pointed out to me, everyone involved in the trial had a different perspective on it. I wasnt much aware of the trauma Lipstadt was undergoing, the less so since we did not in fact see one another that often, and when we did, she seemed chirpy and upbeat.

Understandable though her anxieties were in retrospect, none of us on the defence side had the slightest doubt that we would win; the only question was by how much. No doubt the movie had to present the issue as finely balanced, with Irving standing at least a50-50 chance of winning, otherwise there would have been no tension and no suspense, both of which it succeeds in evoking very well. But thats not how it seemed to us at the time.

Overall, the film is, I think, true to the spirit and mostly also true to the letter of the whole affair. The courtroom scenes are taken directly from the trial transcripts, as they ultimately had to be. Some of the dialogue surrounding the trial is invented, and the personality traits of some of the characters are exaggerated (Richard Rampton, for example, was, and is, a bit of a wine buff, but to have him appearing in virtually every scene outside the courtroom clutching a bottle of claret seemed to be rather over the top).

The movie also perhaps inevitably plays on the familiar stereotypes of the feisty American and the restrained Brit. But none of this, apart from the initial remarks of myself and my researchers at the preparatory conference, seems to me to betray the essence of what the trial was about or how it was fought. For this, we can be grateful for the skill of the leading actors, Rachel Weisz, Tom Wilkinson, Timothy Spall, Andrew Scott, Caren Pistorius and the other players.

As for me, I look forward to meeting actor John Sessions in person and assuring him that Im more than satisfied with the way that he plays me.

Professor Richard J Evans was regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge from 2008 until his retirement in 2014. His books include Telling Lies About Hitler (Verso, 2002).

This article was first published in the February 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine

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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

If Holocaust survivor Misha Defonsecas personal tale of escaping Nazi Germany as a child by being accepted into a protective pack of wolves, which she turned into a bestselling book, seems too astonishing to be true, Netflixs documentary Misha and the Wolves puts it under a microscope that examines both its veracity and why people want to believe in it.

Misha and the Wolves is the story of a lie, says filmmaker Sam Hobkinson. When you make a documentary film about an untruth, you are inverting the form, turning it on its head. There is a fiction at the heart of your non-fiction film and it releases a ton of formal and creative possibilities. I wanted to make a psychological thriller about belief, about how and why we believe the stories we are told, and it seemed this was the perfect story to do it with.

Hobkinson said that he and his crew had to be judicious about he way they presented the falsehoods at the core of Defonsecas tale. We were always aware that this could be seen as a film that fanned the flames of Holocaust denial the theory that if one Holocaust account is questionable, how can we believe any? he explained. Many potential funders were queasy about signing up to a film that might be seen to do this. We were at pains to stress that we wanted to wrestle the story back from the Holocaust deniers by using it as a plea for rigor of research based on fact.

A further challenge came with the onslaught of the global pandemic. We shot the film during the first wave of COVID, says Hobkinson. I am based in the U.K., so there is no way I could physically be present for the U.S. filming, and I made the terrifying decision to do it remotely. Luckily we had scouted locations and met the interviewees before lockdown, which made it possible. I was worried I wouldnt get the same emotional connection via a Zoom link, but thanks to some clever technological setups, I believe I came away with exactly what I would have done had I been in the room.

The filmmaking process ultimately created a tremendous awareness of the power and responsibility of storytelling, Hobkinson revealed. Mishas story should be a reminder to all storytellers that, if the ingredients are right, the audience are willing to invest a huge amount of emotion in what you have to say, he says. It made me realize the power one has in ones hands as a storyteller, and in many situations the huge amount of responsibility that goes along with it.

By deconstructing Defonsecas compelling fabrication, Hobkinson says he hopes the film will will make audiences think about the manipulative aspects of storytelling and filmmaking, especially documentary film storytelling. I also hope it will make them think about how trauma can make us re-invent our pasts. And finally I hope it will make them understand the importance of the rigor of research and skepticism in the hunger for unbelievable true stories.

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Misha and the Wolves Director Sam Hobkinson on the Challenges of Making a Documentary About Fiction - Hollywood Reporter

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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

Danzig served in the Israeli Army and is a former police officer with the New York Police Department. He is an attorney and active member of StandWithUs, where he is the local advisory board president, and Herut North American, where he is a national board member. He lives in Del Mar.

On Oct. 26, the San Diego Unified School District Board of Education passed a resolution condemning antisemitism, as its defined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), and as requested by every synagogue and mainstream Jewish organization in San Diego. Since then, Israel-haters in San Diego have been wringing their virtual hands over the audacity of a school district to define antisemitism the way most Jews define it (in a state that over the previous five years saw a 40 percent increase in antisemitic hate crimes, and in a country where Jews are the targets of 60 percent of all faith-based hate crimes).

Recognizing they cant simply say that they oppose such resolutions because Israel-haters want to exploit Jew-hatred in order to incite hatred against Israel (the worlds only Jewish state and home to nearly half of the worlds Jews), the Israel-haters wax apoplectic about how the IHRA definition chills free speech because it supposedly makes legitimate criticism of Israel antisemitic, is a tool for weaponizing antisemitism, and will somehow increase anti-Arab or anti-Muslim hatred.

I addressed why these claims are specious and themselves antisemitic in an an essay last month.

Likely because the IHRA definition in pertinent part provides it is antisemitic to deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor, we are seeing claims that being anti-Zionist is not antisemitic, as well as claims by Israel-haters actually comparing Zionism with racist colonialist ideologies like Manifest Destiny (which was used to justify Americas westward expansion and brutal conquest of Native Americans).

These claims are false and also incredibly insulting to the vast majority of Jews, who either are Israeli or feel a very strong attachment to Israel. Moreover, these claims get to the core of why the Arab-Israeli conflict persists, and why, despite at least eight different peace and partition offers since 1937 (to create the first independent Arab state west of the Jordan River), no such offer has ever been accepted.

While the Israel-haters try to redefine Zionism to make it seem somehow equivalent to colonialist ideologies like Manifest Destiny, the truth is that the definition of Zionism is quite simple: Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people, like all other peoples, have a right to self-determination and sovereignty in part of their Indigenous homeland.

Not only is there nothing in the definition of Zionism that believes Jews are superior to any other people or race, the idea of Jews being Zionist and even willing to fight for their right to be sovereign in their homeland predates the phony European concept of race by over 1,500 years. We just finished celebrating Hanukkah. While many Americans may think Hanukkah is a Jewish version of Christmas, or just a fun, candle-lighting, jelly-donut-eating holiday, that would be incorrect. Not that Hanukkah isnt fun (it is), but at its core, Hanukkah is a celebration of a successful Jewish revolt in the land of Israel and the reestablishment, after centuries of Greek colonial rule, of Jewish sovereignty and self-determination in Zion (another word in Hebrew for Jerusalem).

Nearly 300 years after the successful Jewish revolt against the Greek/Selucid Empire, the Jewish peoples Zionism led to other Jewish revolts against colonial rule, this time against the Romans. From those ultimately unsuccessful revolts, archeologists have found numerous Judean coins, including coins inscribed in ancient Hebrew with the words: Freedom for Zion. It is that longing for freedom in Zion, the 3,000-plus year history of the land of Israels centrality in the Jewish peoples faith, culture and consciousness, coupled with the sad reality that the Jewish people have been regularly subjected to deadly discrimination and oppression in almost every land in the Diaspora, which led to the 19th century political movement called Zionism. And when Israel gained its independence in 1948, Zionism became the worlds first successful Indigenous movement of a dispossessed and colonized people regaining sovereignty in their Indigenous homeland.

Like many Indigenous peoples throughout the world, Jews were consistent victims of European oppression and violence for centuries, precisely because they were perceived as not being a part of the superior European world beginning with the Greek colonialization and attempted Hellenization of the land of Israel and continuing through World War II when over 6 million Jews were murdered. Throughout this time period, the Jewish peoples dream of freedom in Zion and for sovereignty in the land of Israel (what the Romans called Palestina) never waned. It is why at every Passover seder, and in countless other prayers, the Jewish people have regularly prayed and sang in Hebrew about their longing for a return to Zion.

It is this context that makes the arguments of the I am only anti-Zionist antisemites so clearly hollow. As Zionism simply stands for the proposition that the Jewish people have a right to sovereignty in part of their Indigenous and historical homeland, saying you are anti-Zionist, but not anti-Jewish, is the equivalent of saying you are not anti-Maori, but only want to deny the Maori any sovereignty in their Indigenous lands, or that you are not anti-Algonquin, Mississaugas, Odawa, Oji-Cree, Ojibwe, or Potawatomi, you just hate the Anishinaabe movement for a sovereign Native American state called Anishinaabaki.

As for those dishonestly comparing Zionism with Manifest Destiny, or other supremacist forms of colonialism, it bears noting that when the descendants of the English, French and Spanish conquered and colonized North America, they never discovered a single archeological finding written in ancient English, French or Spanish; but archeological artifacts written in Hebrew and referring to Jewish kings, Jewish prayers (that Jews still say to this day) and even to ancient vitners in the land of Israel are ubiquitous.

What the I am only anti-Zionist antisemites also ignore (or more aptly seek to deflect attention from) is how closely anti-Zionist tropes track antisemitic tropes, which for centuries were used to incite discrimination and violence against Jews.

The 19th-century antisemite demonized Jews, among all peoples on Earth, as the primary cause of the worlds problems. Anti-Zionists demonize Israel, the Jew among the nations, as the primary cause of the worlds problems. For the 19th-century antisemite, Jews were bloodthirsty baby killers. Anti-Zionists routinely demonize the one Jewish state as a bloodthirsty baby killer. The 19th-century antisemite demonized Jews as being nefariously in control of banks, the media and governments. Anti-Zionists regularly demonize Israel or Zionists as controlling the banks, media and foreign governments. The parallels are clear.

But the most antisemitic aspect of the anti-Zionist creed has to be the ubiquitous attempts to erase Jewish history and to tar Zionism as a colonialist endeavor. George Orwell famously said, The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

That erasure is at the core of anti-Zionism. It is also at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Because ultimately, the anti-Zionists claims about colonialism are what psychologists refer to as projection. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Arab armies from the Arabian Peninsula conquered and colonized all of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Since then, their descendants, just like the descendants of Europeans in all of the lands conquered by Europeans, have generally resisted all Indigenous rights and independence movements. It is why over the past millennia, there has never been an independent state for the Kurds, Amazigh, Copts, or any other Indigenous people in the MENA (other than the Jewish people).

Antisemitism is the oldest form of bigotry. For over 2,000 years. it has led to countless expulsions and murders of Jews. Today, it includes anti-Zionism, a hatred of Jewish sovereignty and of the ability of Jews to defend themselves in their own state. Many want to paint this hatred as somehow being progressive, when the core motivation behind this hatred is a regressive desire to destroy the one successful Indigenous rights movement in the MENA, and to once again make Jews stateless and defenseless. No one should allow themselves to be taken in by such counterfactual duplicity.

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Opinion: Dont be fooled. Zionism is an Indigenous rights movement and being anti-Zionist is antisemitic. - The San Diego Union-Tribune

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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

More than 60 faculty members at USC have signed an open letter urging the universitys leadership to publicly and explicitly rebuke a student for several inflammatory comments she made online earlier in the year, including a tweet saying she wanted to kill every motherf---ing Zionist.

In the Dec. 1 letter addressed to USC President Carol Folt, Provost Charles Zukoski and board of trustees chair Rick Caruso the latest in a series of letters from several of the same signatories the faculty asked officials to rebuke Yasmeen Mashayekh, a 21-year-old civil engineering student, and to distance USC from her hateful statements.

The silence of our leadership on this matter is alienating, hurtful, and depressing, the letter read. It amounts to tacit acceptance of a toxic atmosphere of hatred and hostility.

On Dec. 3, Folt and Zukoski responded with a letter saying that the matter has disturbed us deeply as we understand very well the hurtful impact of the statements on Twitter that you quoted, not only to those who are Jewish but also to those of us who know how harmful antisemitism is when left unchecked.

The university leaders said that over the summer, when the university first learned about the tweets, which have since been taken down, they removed Mashayekh from her paid mentoring position in the Viterbi School of Engineering. Screenshots of the deleted tweets were republished just before Thanksgiving by outside organizations that encouraged people to write to school officials about Mashayekh, who serves as a diversity, equity and inclusion senator for the Viterbi Graduate Student Assn.

Folt and Zukoski noted that it would violate state law for the university to remove anyone from a student-elected position based on protected speech.

Officials said the university has taken steps to deepen our understanding of manifestations of antisemitism on campus and has an initiative that works on empowering young people to recognize and counter hate in their communities.

But the administrations response hasnt satisfied many of the faculty members who signed the letter, or Mashayekh and her supporters.

I dont feel safe on campus, Mashayekh, who is Palestinian, said in an interview, noting that she has received several death threats, which intensified again recently after her image and deleted tweets were reposted by groups that compile dossiers of students and academics they consider to be anti-Israel.

Mashayekhs supporters are circulating a letter urging university officials to make a statement that demonstrates support for a student who is currently being disproportionately singled out.

For USC chemistry professor Curt Wittig, who signed the open letter, its critical to think about the current situation within a broader historical context. We are living in troubling and politically explosive times, Wittig said, and if some major upheaval happens, history suggests that people will look for scapegoats.

Jews were the main target of that scapegoating in the first half of the 20th century, Wittig said, noting that there has been a recent spike in hate crimes, including many antisemitic hate crimes.

Colleagues have heard directly from some Jewish students who told them they were deeply frightened by the tweets, Wittig said, adding that he thought the universitys response earlier in the month read like a deflection memo. It fell far short, Wittig said, of the unambiguous moral stand he thought was warranted in response to the highly offensive tweets.

We expect something a little more forceful, he said.

Judith Hirsch, a professor of biological sciences, agreed.

If a Jewish student had written the same tweets about Palestinians, she said, we would be equally distressed.

Mashayekh, who is finishing up her undergraduate civil engineering degree but also has started taking courses toward a graduate degree, said she informed the school of the targeted harassment she has been facing for several months and hasnt been satisfied with its response. In addition to losing her paid mentoring position, she said, her name was recently removed from the Viterbi Graduate Student Assn. website, where her role as a diversity, equity and inclusion senator involves planning events such as dinners and movie nights. Mashayekh said she worries that she wont be able to find a job in the future or pay off her loans.

Mashayekh recently tweeted that her goal is to normalize the language of resistance regardless of what that looks like. Asked if, in retrospect, she would have done anything differently, she said, Obviously, I didnt expect any of this, adding that she sent the tweets earlier in the year from an anonymous account, which was eventually tied back to her.

I just really wish I didnt have to think about what I would change, she said. I wish people didnt expect Palestinians to be the perfect victims.

This is the third such incident to roil the troubled campus since August 2020 involving Middle East politics and free speech, as well as accusations of racism and antisemitism. Faculty members, student groups, alumni, outside activists and others have entered the fray and taken sides in the tangle of controversies.

In an interview, Zukoski, the universitys provost, said he was limited in what he could say specifically about the case because of privacy issues but said there was no retribution involved in removing the student from the paid mentoring position, adding that she was offered other opportunities on campus.

Zukoski said the current situation has been difficult for university officials to navigate; not only does it involve an intractable geopolitical conflict, he said, but it touches on the reality that much of hate speech is legally protected.

And then theres the added layer that much of this is playing out online.

How to handle social media and the amplifier it gives topics, he said, is a national issue that were all grappling with.

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'Toxic atmosphere of hatred.' USC faculty outraged over response to student's tweets - Los Angeles Times

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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

A growing number of Israelis are acknowledging that their country practices Apartheid. Resigned to the fact that the occupation has become a permanent reality, thus relegating half of the non-Jewish population in historic Palestine to the status of second- and third-class citizens, Israel's evolution as a country that practices Apartheid is admitted even by self-described Zionists.

"The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic State," said Amos Schocken, co-owner and publisher of Haaretz. "But, instead, has become an Apartheid State, plain and simple".

Now in his 70's, Schocken made the remarks in an indignant response to a right-wing member of the Israeli Knesset, Amichai Chikli of the Yamina party. The 40-year old denounced what he calls the Israeli left, saying that they had undermined Zionism.

Schocken, who describes himself as someone who "adhere[s] to genuine Zionism" rejected Chikli's criticism. "People such as Chikli think they're Zionists, but when they support and maintain an Apartheid regime, they're anti-Zionists," Schocken added, hitting back at the Israeli right.

Around the same time as Schocken denounced Israel's Apartheid system in his column last week, Israeli author, David Grossman, suggested that "Apartheid" was the right terminology to describe the reality in the occupied West Bank.

Read: 'Israel is an Apartheid state' say a quarter of US Jews

"Maybe it should no longer be called an "occupation," but there are much harsher names, like "Apartheid," for example," said Grossman, who is described as one of Israel's most prominent authors, told Army Radio.

In his remarks, Grossman said that the government of Naftali Bennet was an upgrade to Benjamin Netanyahu, but added that "it cannot do the most important thing cure Israel of the sick evil that is the occupation."

Read: Israel is an Apartheid State, say ex-Israel envoys to South Africa

Schocken and Grossman are among a growing list of Israelis who have acknowledged Israel's status as an Apartheid State since the release of the report by Human Rights Watch and B'Tselem in April.

One can say many things about this, but one cannot say Israel is fulfilling Zionism as a Jewish and democratic state.

According to the Partition Plan, incidentally, the city of Hebron would have been in the Arab state, and even after the War of Independence, Hebron was part of the Kingdom of Jordan. It wasn't in Israel.

Today in Hebron there's a Jewish-Israeli settlement, but it can only exist because about 500 IDF soldiers ensure its security every day. There is no place else like it in Israel.

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Product of Zionism is 'Apartheid, plain and simple', says Israeli publisher - Middle East Monitor

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Posted By admin on December 14, 2021

This piece first appeared at the Forward.

Israel sits in the center of the roiling debate over what is and isnt antisemitic.

Top Jewish establishment leaders have twisted themselves into knots trying to explain precisely when and how criticism of Israel crosses the line into antisemitism. And even when they draw what seems to be a red line, there are caveats.

Meanwhile, many progressive Jews and Palestinians balk at what they see as frivolous accusations of antisemitism leveled at those trying to stand up for Palestinians suffering under Israeli rule.

Now, a new term has entered the debate, one promoted by pro-Israel advocates who say it can bring clarity to the confusing feud over the definition of antisemitism. Zionophobia an obsessive animosity toward the idea of a homeland for the Jewish people represents the idea that discriminating against Jewish Zionists is a form of bigotry distinct from antisemitism.

Zionophobia, however, seems to have touched off more wrangling between those who deem it yet another way to delegitimize any criticism of Israel, and those who say it captures the discrimination they experience for supporting the Jewish state.

Judea Pearl, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who is active in the campus debates over Israel, appears to haveoriginally coined the term in 2018. But it only drew widespread attention earlier this month after it was used in a letterfrom University of Southern California faculty concerned about statements made by an engineering student on campus.

More than 65 professors wrote that they were not only concerned with the continuing instances of anti-Semitism and Zionophobia on our campus.

The terms appearance in the letter and asocial media postfrom the controversial pro-Israel group Canary Mission quickly drew a mix of mockery and condemnation from pro-Palestinian activists online. Critics seized on the idea that embracing a political ideology like Zionism could make one a member of a group that should be shielded from discrimination.

An Open Letter to @USC & @USCViterbi signed by 64 professors including Andrew Viterbi himself!

"We, the undersigned faculty, wish to register our dismay about ongoing open expressions of anti-Semitism and Zionophobia on our campus that go unrebuked."https://t.co/dMW2Egu1EF pic.twitter.com/tdrwu4RABB

Canary Mission (@canarymission) December 2, 2021

We are absolutely NOT making zionophobia a thing, novelist Rebecca Podoswrote on Twitter. Zionists are not an oppressed or marginalized class of people. Others were more flip: They keep creating new ridiculous terms, another user wrote. Yeah, Im definitely apartheidphobic.

new phobia just dropped https://t.co/BGYbBASMzn

(@Axolotl_pragmat) December 2, 2021

But Pearl argued that discriminating against Zionists is a form of religious bigotry aimed at Jews, even if those attacking the movement are not otherwise antisemitic.

Zionism (The eventual return to Zion) is at the core of Jewish identity, more fundamental even than divine supervision, Pearl wrote in an email. Hence discrimination on the basis of Zionist beliefs amounts to racism discrimination on the basis of an immutable quality.

Despite this, Pearl said that claims of antisemitism leveled against anti-Zionists are too blunt to capture this form of discrimination because many of those who oppose Zionism are either Jewish themselves or friendly toward Jews outside the context of Israel.

I see hordes of BDS cronies volunteering to fight for the right of Jewish students to have a Kosher cafeteria, to pray three times a day, and to wear Yarmulke in public, Pearlwrote in a 2018 blogoutlining the term. And they truly mean it, as long as the Yarmulke is not decorated with blue and white Magen David.

The term has other proponents, including Jewish Journal editor David Suissa who lamented that Zionists on college campuses lacked the protections given to gay, Muslim and transgender students.

All societal phobias from homophobia to Islamophobia to transphobia are unacceptable, except, apparently, for Zionophobia, Suissa wrote in a columnlast year.

And while the term has been slow to catch on outside of southern California, other Israel advocates have floated similar arguments about how what is traditionally called anti-Zionism can effectively discriminate against Jews even if not all Jews believe in Zionism or support Israel.

Misha Galperin, chief of the National Museum of American Jewish Heritage, has compared Zionism to Shabbat observance. While Jews may differ in their approach to both concepts, Galperin said, demonizing either one strikes at the heart of an important religious belief for many Jews.

If somebody denies you the belief in observing Shabbat because its part of the Jewish religion, nobody has any doubt thats antisemitic, Galerpin said. And if somebody denies you the fact that you are identified with a state which is also part of our religion that is also antisemitic.

Still, Pearls promotion of Zionophobia runs counter to the way most major Jewish organizations focused on both antisemitism and advocating for Israel have treated anti-Zionism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliancesworking definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted and aggressively promoted by much of the Jewish establishment, states that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination in Israel may be antisemitic but that it depends on the context.

In recent months, both the American Jewish Committee and Anti-Defamation League took what appeared to be more unequivocal approaches to the question of whether opposition to Israels existence as a Jewish-majority state is antisemitic.

We as an organization certainly believe that anti-Zionist rhetoric and speech should be treated as antisemitic in every respect, Avi Mayer, the American Jewish Committees senior spokesperson,told Forward opinion editorLaura Adkins in October.

Similarly, ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt responded to the controversy over Sunrise D.C.s boycott of three pro-Israel Jewish groups in October bystating on Twitter: To be clear: excluding groups solely because they support Israel is antisemitic.

However, we remain concerned that these litmus tests targeting Jewish groups are becoming increasingly common.To be clear:excluding groups solely because they support Israel is antisemitic.

Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) October 22, 2021

But others in these organizations subsequently qualified those bold declarations.

Kenneth Bandler, director of media relations for the AJC, said that the organization believed anti-Zionist hate speech, as opposed to all expressions of anti-Zionism, should presumptively be treated as antisemitic.

And a spokesman for the ADL shared with the Forward a definition that the organization uses, which noted that anti-Zionism was not inherently antisemitic, although it became so if it was used to disparage Jews who feel a connection to Israel.

Pearl prefers to sidestep the messiness these definitions can foster.

Every time we label an attack against Israel anti-Semitic we lose the high moral ground and the conversation drifts to where we cannot win, he wrote in the 2018 article titled, Zionophobia our only fighting word.

If Pearl hopes that his new word will free the debate over Israel from a back-and-forth over the definition of antisemitism, he may be disappointed. Alon Confino, who helped organize theJerusalem Declaration on Antisemitismover concerns that too many institutions were treating anti-Zionism as antisemitism, said the invention of Zionophobia seemed like an attempt to stifle political speech.

Zionism is a national political movement, said Confino, a Holocaust scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. National political movements are always debatable.

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Can a new word 'Zionophobia' clarify the debate over Israel? J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

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