Losing My Monarchism: A Jew in the Motherland

By Jonathan Katz May 28, 2015

Some people go to the United Kingdom and develop a love for the royal family. I went to the U.K. and became strongly anti-monarchist. Don’t get me wrong: the current Queen is fantastic, and the British monarchy is one of the most fascinating traditions alive today. But there’s something I find utterly ridiculous about a…

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Honoring the Holocaust in the Land of the Liberators and Bystanders: A Jew in the Motherland

By Jonathan Katz April 16, 2015

Seventy years ago, on April 15, 1945, the British Army liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and its 60,000 mostly Jewish, starved, and diseased prisoners. Among these prisoners was my maternal grandmother – who had survived several deportations, from Kovno (Kaunas) to Vaivara to Bergen-Belsen – and had lost her first child, first husband, and most…

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White Whine and South African Jews – A Jew in the Motherland

By Jonathan Katz February 17, 2015

One familiar thing about the United Kingdom for me is that I frequently hear South African accents. Here in the colonial heartland, I have met a lot of folks like me: born to South African [Ashkenazi] Jewish parents abroad, raised abroad, and with varied ties to South Africa. Some, like me, maintain citizenship in South…

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Israel Now is What White South Africa Was

By Jonathan Katz May 7, 2014

 Activists often term Israel’s Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and sometimes Israel itself, as constituting an “apartheid state.” So too do political figures concerned with ending the awful situation – be they Omar Barghouti, John Kerry, or Tzipi Livni. Indeed, it is a convenient, short, and powerful way to term the brutality of…

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Learning From Ari Shavit’s ‘My Promised Land’

By Alex E. Lipton March 27, 2014

  I My stepfather always told me that all the best books have maps.  So when I opened Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel a map was the first thing I looked for.  I found it on the first page of the book, just after the title page and the…

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Note to the US: British colonialism sucked

By Ben Sales July 1, 2010

People love to show how intellectual they are nowadays by drawing historical parallels between the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other seemingly similar past events. Thus, Iraq is Vietnam; no, wait, Iraq is the Tripoli Wars; no, wait, Iraq is the Gulf War gone bad… No, wait, says Christopher Dickey, Iraq and Afghanistan should…

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