Brandeis Center Blog

The Hague’s Van Ostade Housing Project—once part of a traditional Jewish neighborhood—now belongs to a transformed Schilderswijk which the Dutch increasingly know as the “Sharia Triangle.” There aren’t enough Jews left to form a minyan. But Frabrice Shomberg, an artist born in England, stubbornly continues to make “kippah walks” and build a Sukkah as a […]

Last week a coalition of 14 national organizations including the Brandeis Center sent a letter to the presidents of more than 2500 four-year U.S. colleges and universities, urging them to protect Jewish students in light of the alarming rise in anti-Semitism both here and around the world. The letter, authored by the Zionist Organization of […]

According to the (London) “Guardian,” Adel al-Faqih, Saudi health minister, said measures have been put into place to bar Muslim pilgrims from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea to enter Saudi Arabia. In contrast, the Obama Administration is doing nothing to heighten screening measures at airports. A CDC administrator on CNN could not decide whether the […]

The spate of Islamist beheadings—of hundreds of indigenous Christians and Muslims in Iraq and Syria and a handful of Westerners in those places plus London, Algeria, and now Oklahoma—has been called “do-it-yourself jihadism.” Whereas the 9/11 attacks required pilots’ licenses, these beheadings require only rudimentary butchering credentials. Of course, the impact has been electric, exceeding […]

The Muslim Brotherhood was unceremoniously booted from power by Egypt’s no sissy General Sissi. Yet its love affair with the West’s elites continues. No less than President Obama in his recent UN Speech touted cleric Sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah as a moderate voice for peace despite abundant evidence that Bin Bayh helps lead a Brotherhood […]

Theodore Dalrymple has aired out the recent exhumation of the body of Richard III, the English King killed at Bosworth Field in 1485 by Henry Tudor who founded the illustrious Tudor dynasty as Henry VII. Vilified by Shakespeare as the ignominious hunchback who murdered his brother, nephews, and wife to seize the throne, Richard died […]

Andrew Sullivan, the premier logger, who’s a Brit transplant, is currently suffering a disillusionment more like poor unBritish Candide as the philosophy he was weaned on—Dr. Pangloss’ “It is the best of all possible worlds”—is mugged by reality. First, he had to abandon he’s pro-Israel politics when he discovered, much to his chagrin, that Israeli […]

For more on the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic connections of Scottish Nationalism, see: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/09/16/why-scots-leader-compares-israel-to-isis/ http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Scottish-Jewish-community-leader-Independence-would-not-be-favorable-for-policy-toward-Israel-375558

Obama’s belated anti-ISIS/ISIL Coalition is being called a “coalition of the unwilling,” compared to George W. Bush’s against Saddam Hussein which actually evoked authentic if narrow enthusiasm. It also has aspects of an arranged marriage forced upon unwilling parties. Anyway, this may be the indigenous rationale that Secretary of State Kerry is using to try […]

The Nineteenth Century—Darwin’s Century—was The Age of Evolution. The Twenty-First Century may turn out to be The Age of Devolution. Take the Scots—you can have them! Once the model of British industriousness, their aging population now enjoys among Europe’s highest dependency rates, keeping their standard of living afloat with subsidies from the hated South which […]

1940’s “Phoney War” bears some resemblance to 2014’s “Phantom War.” True, today there is no Hitler around planning to Blitzkrieg France in six months. But the Mideast is not lacking in “mini-me” Hitlers. Some argue that the threat posed by ISIS/ISIL is being overblown. Maybe that “Islamic State”—with 31,000 soldiers and billions in oil revenues—remains […]

“Nazism has disappeared, but [not] the obsession it represents for the contemporary imagination. . . . Is such attention fixed on the past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction of spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to understand; or is it again and still, an expression of profound fears and, on the part […]

We will fight ISIS/ISIL with bloodless drones and other people’s boot’s on the ground until hell freezes over—or Islam, that quintessential “religion of peace,” embraces the Sermon on the Mount. As has been said elsewhere, reentering the Syria-Iraq fray, we require the leadership of a Michael Corleone. Instead, we have his feckless brother, Fredo, at […]

This afternoon, the Brandeis Center commended the European Sociological Association (ESA)Network 31, after the Network passed the first pro-active anti-boycott resolution by a professional European academic association late last week.

In a politically suspicious expulsion, an Israeli citizen, Rabbi Asher Krichevsky, his wife, and their six children were told they 15 days to leave Russia. His punishment comes after Krichevsky was fined 2,000 rubles, or about $50, for selling kosher wine from the Chabad House without a liquor license. Optimists in the Obama State Department […]