Bullying LDB Legal Advisor and San Francisco civil rights litigator Joel Siegal has posted an informative article on his blog which discusses the use of courts to eliminate bullying in the school. Siegal is counsel to Jessica Felber in her campus anti-Semitism case against the University of California at Berkeley. With attorney Neal Sher, he filed a Title VI complaint against Berkeley with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging that Berkeley maintains a hostile environment for Jewish college students. That case is still pending before OCR. In his new blog entry, Joel describes the legal background for these cases. He also gives a nice shout-out to the Brandeis Center and our president, Kenneth L. Marcus, for our work to eradicate religious bullying in the public schools as well as religious harassment and anti-Semitism in universities and colleges.
Der Landser: Ostfront, 1944 The recent “New York Times’” headline—“Wiesenthal Center Calls for Closing of German Magazine It Says Glorifies Nazism”—reflects what may an ominous divergence in German and American attitudes toward Nazism. As recently as the 1960’s when “Hogan’s Heroes” was a hit television sitcom, “comic Nazis”—inept and even innocuous—were in vogue. The reason may have been that American (and English) audiences were still not ready for portrayals of unvarnished World War II horrors. It’s probably no coincidence that “comic Nazis” disappeared from popular culture in tandem with the rise of realistic discourse about and dramatization of the Holocaust, really beginning with 1977’s television series of that name that aired the same year the Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded. The situation is very different is modern, reunified Germany where portrayals of “normal”—indeed, “normative” Nazis—even bathed in a patriotic, heroic glow have grown rather than declined over the past two decades. At the same time German schools were integrating realistic treatments of Nazi enormities in their curricula, German culture at the elite level was hosting a school of historical Revisionists with a very different agenda. This was so the so-called “Historikerstreit” (historians’ quarrel”) in which historians like Ernst Nolte changed positions to argue that Nazism should be viewed, not so much as an aberration but as an integral part of the history of German nationalism, and the Hitler’s labor and death camps were essentially a wartime adaptation of the harshness of Stalin’s gulags. (more…)