Anti-Defamation League

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares179 Views

    Writers Guild Faces Backlash for Not Condemning Hamas Attack

    by

    A union leader told members that the board’s viewpoints were varied and that a consensus could not be reached.Just weeks after the Writers Guild of America displayed solidarity by ending a monthslong strike and voting overwhelmingly in favor of a new contract with the major entertainment companies, the union is being roiled by a fight over its lack of a public statement condemning the Hamas attack on Israel.On Oct. 15, eight days after the attack, a group of screenwriters signed an open letter to the Writers Guild asking why it had not issued a statement condemning the attack. They noted that other major Hollywood unions had issued such statements. The letter now has more than 300 signers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”) and Gideon Raff (“Homeland”).It questioned why the Writers Guild had previously made public remarks in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and #MeToo reckoning but remained silent “when terrorists invaded Israel to murder, rape and kidnap Jews.”On Friday, 75 members of the guild took part in a Zoom meeting to discuss what to do about the silence. Options included withholding dues until the guild leadership convenes a proper conversation on the issue with its membership, according to a person who attended the discussion and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its delicate nature. Other members are considering resigning from the guild by filing for financial core status, in which they would pay reduced dues and still receive the contractual benefits of the collective bargaining agreement.Later Friday, Meredith Stiehm, the president of the Writers Guild of America West, sent an email to members who had inquired about the lack of a response. “Like the membership itself, the board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach,” she wrote in the letter, which was viewed by The New York Times. “For these reasons, we have decided not to comment publicly.”Calls to the union on Monday were not returned.Jewish leaders have encouraged Hollywood’s biggest voices to speak out in favor of Israel.“When celebrities speak out, it sends an important message to their tens of millions of followers that this is the right side to be on,” Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in an opinion piece published in The Hollywood Reporter.“In light of how distorting social media algorithms can present the world,” he added, “it’s even more important for these voices to cut through.”The writers’ union is not the only Hollywood organization dealing with fallout.On Sunday, Creative Artists Agency announced to its employees that Maha Dakhil, the highest-ranking female agent in the motion picture group, had resigned from the company’s internal board and was stepping away from her leadership role within the motion picture group after posting inflammatory remarks on Instagram that accused Israel of committing genocide.Ms. Dakhil has apologized for her comments. According to an email sent by the agency’s chief executive, Bryan Lourd, which was reviewed by The Times, she will continue to represent her clients, who include Natalie Portman, Tom Cruise and Reese Witherspoon. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Between Kanye and the Midterms, the Unsettling Stream of Antisemitism

      by

      For American Jews, this fall has become increasingly worrisome. On Thursday alone, the F.B.I. warned of threats to New Jersey synagogues and the Nets suspended Kyrie Irving.Simon Taylor was on his way to an appointment in Flatbush when he pulled into a local filling station one afternoon last week. It was a lovely fall day in Brooklyn, but as he began to fuel up, the climate turned sour: Another customer, spotting the skullcap atop Rabbi Taylor’s head, launched into an expletive-laden rant about how much he hated Jews, and then, when the rabbi photographed his license plate, started chasing him with an upraised fist.Rabbi Taylor, a 58-year-old father of five who oversees social services and disaster relief programs for an umbrella organization of Orthodox Jews, was shaken. A native of England who now lives in Brooklyn, he wondered if the incident was connected to a mainstreaming of antisemitic rhetoric in America.“I’ve never had anything like this in New York, and it definitely felt to me like this whole Kanye West thing had something to do with it,” said Rabbi Taylor, referring to the ugly utterances of the hip-hop legend Kanye West, now known as Ye. “All it takes is a couple influential people to say things, and suddenly it becomes very tense.”For Jews in America, things are tense indeed. Next week’s midterm elections feel to some like a referendum on democracy’s direction. There is a war in Europe. The economy seems to be teetering. It is a perilous time, and perilous times have never been great for Jews.“When systems fail, whether it’s the government or the markets or anything else, leaders often look for someone to blame,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, which seeks to monitor and combat antisemitism. “Jews have historically played that role.”Antisemitism is one of the longest-standing forms of prejudice, and those who monitor it say it is now on the rise in America. The number of reported incidents has been increasing. On Thursday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned of a “broad threat” to synagogues in New Jersey.Social media has clearly made it easier to circulate hate speech, and that means outbursts like Ye’s, in which he posted on Twitter that he would “go death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” get more attention. (Many have noted that Ye has about twice as many followers on Twitter as the world’s population of Jews.)Ye’s persistent outbursts have been followed by attention-getting signs of support: In Los Angeles, a group of emboldened antisemites hung a “Kanye is right about the Jews” banner over an interstate on Oct. 22, and then on Saturday similar words were projected at a college football stadium in Jacksonville, Fla.“There’s no doubt that the normalization of antisemitism in the highest echelons of our culture and our political establishment is putting toxins in our eyes and our ears,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish denomination in the country. “It’s dangerous, and it’s deadly. It has been unleashed and accelerated in the last few years, and actual attacks have risen.”For many Jewish people across the country, the sense that overtly antisemitic rhetoric is emanating from so many spheres simultaneously is unsettling.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsElection Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.Biden’s Speech: In a prime-time address, President Biden denounced Republicans who deny the legitimacy of elections, warning that the country’s democratic traditions are on the line.State Supreme Court Races: The traditionally overlooked contests have emerged this year as crucial battlefields in the struggle over the course of American democracy.Democrats’ Mounting Anxiety: Top Democratic officials are openly second-guessing their party’s pitch and tactics, saying Democrats have failed to unite around one central message.Social Security and Medicare: Republicans, eyeing a midterms victory, are floating changes to the safety net programs. Democrats have seized on the proposals to galvanize voters.Steve Rosenberg, a former executive at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, said he was put “over the edge” by an incident last weekend in which a prominent basketball player, Nets guard Kyrie Irving, defended his support of an antisemitic documentary (and garnered praise from Ye in the process). On Thursday, the Nets suspended Mr. Irving, citing his “failure to disavow antisemitism.” He posted an apology on Instagram late Thursday night.Mr. Rosenberg said the incident had particular resonance for him because of the current politics of his home state.“In Pennsylvania we are really at a crossroads,” he said, describing himself as a conservative independent who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but could not bring himself to vote for either major-party candidate in 2020.Mr. Rosenberg said that this year he is voting for Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, because of his concerns about the Republican Doug Mastriano, who has alarmed many Jewish voters over incidents including criticizing Mr. Shapiro for sending his children to a Jewish day school. (Mr. Mastriano has said his criticism was directed at Mr. Shapiro’s decision to send his children to an “expensive, elite” school, and not based on the school’s religious affiliation.)But his concerns cut both ways. In his state’s race for the Senate, Mr. Rosenberg is voting for the Republican, Mehmet Oz, citing concern that the Democrat, John Fetterman, “will vote with the left-wing woke progressive anti-Israel” faction in the Senate.The years since the election of Mr. Trump — a champion of Israel’s right wing and the father of a convert to Judaism, but also the beneficiary of societal anger that has often had ugly undertones — have seen a rise in attacks against the Jewish community, which some leaders associate with Mr. Trump’s reluctance to distance himself from groups that traffic in antisemitism.At the same time, the left has been rattled by rising divisions within the Democratic Party over Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, pitting those who have traditionally supported Israel against a rising class of progressive activists and lawmakers who ally themselves with the Palestinian cause. It is a fracture that has made the politics of the moment even more complicated for many American Jews.“There’s this constant discussion and debate as to where it is worse — is it worse on the right or the left — when it’s present on both sides, no question,” said Rabbi Moshe Hauer, executive vice president of the Orthodox Union. “There’s been an ascendancy on the right, but there’s also been a very significant uptick on the left, and the evolution of antisemitism on the left is a major development.”A new study by a group of academics including Leonard Saxe, the director of the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, found that Jews across the political spectrum are equally concerned about what it calls “traditional anti-Semitism,” but that conservatives are more concerned than liberals about “Israel-related anti-Semitism,” meaning anti-Jewish views that can be conflated with criticism of Israel.There are fissures: In Pittsburgh this week, a group of more than 200 Jews signed a letter criticizing a PAC related to AIPAC, the pro-Israel group, for donating to a Republican congressional candidate, and, in the process, also criticized AIPAC for supporting “lawmakers who have promoted the antisemitic ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory.”A spokesman for AIPAC, Marshall Wittmann, said the organization had opposed the Democratic candidate as a “detractor of America’s alliance with the Jewish state.” Mr. Wittmann said AIPAC had supported 148 “pro-Israel Democrats” this election cycle.Mr. Trump, who remains deeply involved in American politics and has been teasing a possible comeback run in 2024, raised eyebrows when he called on American Jews to “get their act together” by expressing more support for Israel. And recently released documentary footage from last year showed him complaining about his lack of support among American Jews, and asking about the filmmaker, “Is this a good Jewish character right here?”Mr. Mastriano’s wife made a similar point, telling a reporter “we probably love Israel more than a lot of Jews do.” One of Mr. Mastriano’s top advisers recently called Mr. Shapiro “at best a secular Jew.”In a moment in which conspiracy theories about election fraud have established themselves in the mainstream Republican Party, rhetoric about Jewish power takes on an alarming new cast. A poll by the Public Religion Research Institute in 2021 found that almost a quarter of Republicans agreed that “the government, media and financial worlds in the U.S. are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child-sex trafficking operation.”“Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory,” said Deborah Lipstadt, the United States special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism. “The Jew is seen as more powerful, the Jew is richer, and is smarter but in a malicious way.”Ms. Lipstadt said she sees antisemitism as “the canary in the coal mine” for a broader set of threats to democracy.A thread of antisemitism connects many of the nation’s recent spasms of political violence: the “Jews will not replace us” chants during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017; the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt worn to last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol; the Holocaust denial in blog posts that appear to have been written by the man accused of breaking into the residence of the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week, hoping to break her kneecaps, and, upon not finding her at home, attacking her husband with a hammer.And throughout this year’s election season, troubling rhetoric has surfaced.In Texas, the Republican candidate for railroad commissioner, Wayne Christian, agreed last week to stop using the slogan “vote for the only Christian” after complaints from his Democratic opponent, Luke Warford, who is Jewish.In an email, Mr. Christian said he has been using the slogan since first running for office, has traveled to Israel and has “nothing but love and support for the Jewish community.” But Mr. Warford isn’t buying it. “If you take him at his word that he didn’t know he was running against a Jewish candidate, it’s still an antisemitic thing to say,” he said.Institutional leaders say the anxiety in their communities is palpable. “Many feel we are in a ‘before’ moment,” said Rabbi Noah Farkas, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.He added: “There’s an old adage that every Jew knows where their passport is.”Last week, the Jewish Democratic Council of America released a digital ad juxtaposing images including rallies in Nazi Germany, the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol, antisemitic graffiti and the recent “Kanye is right” banner above the freeway in Los Angeles.On Sunday, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, sponsored a television commercial during the Patriots-Jets game, asking viewers to speak up against antisemitism.Rabbis across the country are grappling with how to address the issue with worshipers. Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn this week sent an email to its members announcing a sermon this weekend on antisemitism, noting the upcoming election as well as news coverage of rising antisemitism, and saying, “It is difficult not to feel anxious about the future.”Younger Jews sense a shift in society. “For people of my parents’ generation, there was a certain sense of safety with regard to antisemitism in America,” said Meshulam Ungar, a 21-year old junior at Brandeis and a vice president of the Brandeis Orthodox Organization. “Things have gotten more dangerous for us.”The consequences of antisemitism are on vivid display in the culture right now. A new Ken Burns documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” was released in September by PBS and details how American antisemitism affected the nation’s willingness to take in refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. On Broadway, the best-selling new play of the fall season is Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” about three generations of a Jewish family in Austria largely destroyed by World War II.Brandon Uranowitz, one of the play’s leading actors, said performing a story about the deadly effects of antisemitism in this climate has become both more painful and more important. “All of a sudden, objects in the mirror are closer than they appear,” he said.Off Broadway, a group of artists is staging an unexpectedly timely revival of “Parade,” a musical about the antisemitism-fueled 1915 lynching of a Jewish man in Georgia. Ben Platt, that production’s star, made a similar observation, saying, “It’s felt urgent in a way that is shocking to all of us.”Meanwhile, tragedies of terror loom in recent memory for many — including the 2019 killing of a woman at a California synagogue by a gunman shouting about how Jews were ruining the world, and this year’s hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue by a man complaining about Jewish power.Rabbi Jeffrey Myers has watched the steady stream of headlines about antisemitic rhetoric — and the sometimes muted responses to it — with sadness and horror. “When people don’t speak up, their silence is deafening,” he said.Rabbi Myers was speaking the day after the fourth anniversary of the killing of 11 people at Tree of Life, his synagogue in Pittsburgh. The gunman later told police he “wanted all Jews to die.” Rabbi Myers survived the shooting, which remains the deadliest attack on Jews in American history.“Speech is just the beginning,” Rabbi Myers said. “It moves from speech to action.” More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      After Criticism, Academy Museum Will Highlight Hollywood’s Jewish History

      by

      The new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which tried to present an inclusive history of film, overlooked the role Jewish immigrants played in creating the industry.LOS ANGELES — When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a 300,000-square-foot tribute to Hollywood, opened here last fall, it was lauded for honoring, in an industry historically dominated by white men, the contributions that women, artists of color and people from many backgrounds have made to film, an essential American art form.“We want to ensure that we are taking an honest, inclusive and diverse look at our history, that we create a safe space for complicated, hard conversations,” the museum’s director, Bill Kramer, said the day after the museum opened as he welcomed guests to a panel discussion titled “Creating a More Inclusive Museum.”But one group was conspicuously absent in this initial celebration of diversity and inclusivity: the Jewish immigrants — white men all — who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system. Through dozens of exhibits and rooms, there is barely a mention of Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer, to list just a few of the best-known names from Hollywood’s history.The omission, which came at a time of increasing concern about rising antisemitism across the country, soon drew complaints from Jewish leaders, concern from supporters of the new museum and a number of critical articles, including in Rolling Stone and The Forward, which ran a piece headlined “Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?”“I was there opening night: I was shocked by the absence of an inclusion of Jews in the Hollywood story,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, a group that tracks antisemitism and hate crimes.Now, museum officials say, that is going to change.The museum was criticized for overlooking the first- and second-generation Eastern European Jews who helped create Hollywood, including Louis B. Mayer.Margaret Herrick LibraryBarraged by complaints, the museum plans to open a new permanent exhibition next spring devoted to the origins of Hollywood, and specifically the lives and contributions of the Jewish studio founders who were largely responsible for creating the world that is being celebrated by the sellout crowds flocking to the new museum.Kramer said in an interview that the Academy Museum had always intended to open a temporary gallery devoted to the subject. “We’ve long had this on our list to do, and we knew this was going to be in our first rotations,” he said recently over coffee at Fanny’s, the museum’s restaurant. But the criticism prompted museum officials to shift gears and decide to enshrine it as a permanent exhibition.“Representation is so important,” Kramer said “We heard that and we take that seriously. When you talk about the founding of Hollywood studios, you’re talking about the Jewish founders.”The dispute highlights the challenges museums across the nation face in an atmosphere of heightened sensitivities about issues of representation and race and gender. It is particularly complicated for the Academy Museum, as it tries to walk the uncomfortable line between being a place of scholarship and a sales tool for an industry struggling to reinvent itself as audiences abandon movie theaters for their living rooms.“It’s a colossal miss,” said Greenblatt, of the Anti-Defamation League. “Any honest historical assessment of the motion-picture industry should include the role that Jews played in building the industry from the ground up.”Some historians said the omission appeared to be the latest example of Hollywood’s strained relationship with its Jewish history.“You have to understand that Hollywood in its very inception was formed out of a fear that its founders — and those who maintained the industry — would be identified as Jews,” said Neal Gabler, the author of “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” a book about the Jewish studio heads. “It’s almost fitting that a museum devoted to the history of Hollywood would incorporate in its very evolution this fear and sensitivity.”Still, Jewish leaders said they were heartened by the museum’s response to their complaints. Kramer and other museum leaders reached out to rabbis and Jewish scholars, including Gabler and Greenblatt, asking their guidance on what should be included in the new gallery to repair this breach.“I am convinced they are going to do the right thing,” Greenblatt said.What that is, though, is not yet clear. The exhibition is being planned for a relatively modest 850-square-foot gallery on the third floor of the building. Dara Jaffe, the curator, said the exhibition, which will be called “Hollywoodland,” will be a broad look at the origins of the industry. It will highlight the biographies and achievements of the founders of the major studios, as well as of some lesser-known Jewish filmmakers.Carl Laemmle, who was born to a Jewish family in Germany, became a founder of Universal Pictures and later worked to help German Jews escape from the Nazis. Margaret Herrick Library“We want to answer the question of: Why Los Angeles?” Jaffe said. “Why is this the place where the world capital of cinema blossomed? It’s not a coincidence that many of the founders are predominantly Jewish. It’s a specifically Jewish story and a specifically Jewish immigrant story.”The exhibition will not open for a year, and key details, from how it will be presented to what kind of artifacts will be included, are still in the planning stages.Haim Saban, an Israeli American philanthropist and media entrepreneur who with his wife, Cheryl, donated $50 million to the museum, becoming one of its most important benefactors, said in an email that the promise of a new gallery “not only underscores how seriously the Academy Museum has taken the feedback, but demonstrates an understanding of the critical role that Jewish founders had in the establishment and shaping of Hollywood.”Saban was among the major backers of the museum to register his concern within days after it opened. He and his wife were critical to financing what ended up to be a $487 million project; the main exhibition hall at the museum was named the “Saban Building” in their honor.Some are asking how a museum that took such care to highlight the contributions of people from a diverse array of backgrounds — it created an Inclusion Advisory Committee to offer guidance on how to deal with these issues, and made a call to “Embrace Diversity and Be Radically Inclusive” one of its guiding principles — neglected to account for the role of some of the biggest names in Hollywood history.“There is a historic tendency of Jewish people in the industry to play down the fact that they were Jewish,” said Rabbi Kurt F. Stone of Boca Raton, Fla., who grew up in Los Angeles and is one of the rabbis the museum consulted after the backlash began. “But do I have an answer as to why they screwed up so badly? I don’t.”Sid Ganis, a former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and a lifetime trustee of the museum, said he was surprised at the depth of the outrage that emerged after the museum opened its doors. “It was vocal and real and something we paid attention to,” he said.Ganis, a longtime proponent of the museum, said organizers were always aware of the importance of Jews in Hollywood history, adding that this was not an oversight. “We just hadn’t gotten to it yet,” he said. “Opening the museum at the end of October, the beginning of November, was an enormous undertaking. And we made choices. It was something we always knew we were going to attend to. But now, even more so.” More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Television

      Whoopi Goldberg Apologizes for Saying Holocaust Was ‘Not About Race’

      by

      Ms. Goldberg’s comments, on Monday’s episode of “The View,” came amid growing ignorance about the Holocaust and rising antisemitism.Whoopi Goldberg, the comedian and actress who is also a co-host of the ABC talk show “The View,” said repeatedly during an episode of the show that aired on Monday that the Holocaust was not about race, comments that come at a time of rising antisemitism globally. She later apologized.In the episode, Ms. Goldberg said the Holocaust was about “man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” When one of her co-hosts challenged that assertion, saying the Holocaust was driven by white supremacy, Ms. Goldberg said: “But these are two white groups of people.”She added, “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.” As she continued to speak, music came on, indicating a commercial break.There was a fierce backlash. Jewish groups said Ms. Goldberg’s comments were dangerous and the latest example of growing ignorance about the Nazi genocide. During World War II, under a policy of mass extermination, the Nazis killed six million Jews — about a third of the world’s Jewish population at the time — because they believed Jews were an inferior race.Later Monday, Ms. Goldberg appeared on Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” where she apologized, explaining that, as a Black person, she thinks of racism as being based on skin color but that she realized not everyone sees it that way. “I get it. Folks are angry,” she said. “I accept that, and I did it to myself.”She apologized again on Tuesday at the start of “The View.” She expressed remorse over her remarks, saying she realized that they were misinformed and that she had misspoken.“I said something that I feel a responsibility for not leaving unexamined because my words upset so many people, which was never my intention,” Ms. Goldberg said. “And I understand why now, and for that I am deeply, deeply grateful because the information I got was really helpful and helped me understand some different things.”On Monday, Ms. Goldberg had been discussing a Tennessee school district’s recent decision to remove a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust from its curriculum when she made her initial comments on Monday’s episode. On Monday night, she released a statement apologizing for them. On Tuesday, she said that she had learned from the experience.“It is indeed about race because Hitler and the Nazis considered Jews to be an inferior race,” she said. “Now, words matter, and mine are no exception. I regret my comments, as I said, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people, as they know and y’all know because I’ve always done that.”During an appearance on the show on Tuesday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said it was critical to combat hate and misinformation about the Holocaust.“The Holocaust happened and we need to learn from this genocide if we want to prevent future tragedies from happening,” Mr. Greenblatt said.Mr. Greenblatt suggested that “The View” should consider adding a Jewish host to its panel.“Think about having a Jewish host on this show who can bring these issues of antisemitism, who can bring these issues of representation to ‘The View’ every single day,” he said.Ms. Goldberg, 66, did not mention having a Jewish background, as she has in the past. She has said in interviews that she does not practice any religion but identifies as Jewish and adopted her distinctive stage name partly because of that. She was born Caryn Johnson.In 1994, Ms. Goldberg mentioned her ties to Judaism in an interview with The Orlando Sentinel, after the Anti-Defamation League criticized a recipe that she contributed to a charity cookbook for “Jewish American princess fried chicken.” The title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, she said.“I am a Jewish-American princess,” she told the newspaper. “That’s probably what bothers people most. It’s not my problem people are uncomfortable with the fact that I’m Jewish.”This week, the criticism of Ms. Goldberg’s remarks was intense. Before he was invited onto “The View,” Mr. Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League wrote on Twitter: “No @WhoopiGoldberg, the #Holocaust was about the Nazi’s systematic annihilation of the Jewish people — who they deemed to be an inferior race. They dehumanized them and used this racist propaganda to justify slaughtering 6 million Jews. Holocaust distortion is dangerous.”And Mrs. Goldberg’s former co-host, Meghan McCain, said on Twitter on Monday that antisemitism was “a poison that is increasingly excused in our culture and television — and permeates in spaces that should shock us all.”According to a 2014 report by the Anti-Defamation League, more than one billion people globally hold antisemitic views. More than a third of people in the 102 countries polled had never heard of the Holocaust, the report found.Jewish communities around the world have indicated an increase in annual antisemitic incidents, according to research by the Anti-Defamation League. That feeling is pronounced in Europe, where 89 percent of Jews felt that antisemitism in their countries had increased between 2013 and 2018, according to a 2018 European Union survey of about 16,500 Jewish people.The survey also found that 40 percent of European Jews worried about being physically attacked, and across 12 E.U. countries where Jews have been living for centuries, more than a third said they were considering emigrating because they no longer felt safe as Jews.Last month, the United Nations adopted a resolution that condemns denial and distortion of the Holocaust. Ms. Goldberg’s comments also came weeks after a gunman held several people hostage at a Texas synagogue for 11 hours.David Baddiel, a British comedian and the author of the book “Jews Don’t Count,” said in an interview that antisemitism has very little to do with religion itself — descendants of Jewish people who had converted to Christianity were also killed in the Holocaust because they were viewed as members of the Jewish race.“If you are a race, an ethnicity, as Jews are, that have suffered persecution over many, many centuries, principally because that happens to be who you are, happens to be who your parents are, happens to be who your ancestors are, then that is racism,” Mr. Baddiel said.“There is no other word for it.” More