Bringing Holocaust Denial to Campus: Interview With ‘Hoaxocaust!’ Star Barry Levey

by Derek M. Kwait for newvoices.org

Yesterday, I reviewed Hoaxocaust!, a new play performed and written by Barry Levey that satirizes Holocaust denial simply by putting the arguments of some of its biggest proponents, Arthur Butz, David Irving, Robert Faurisson, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in context. I saw the show the night of September 11 (coincidentally), then on September 12, I caught up with Levey in a coffee shop in Downtown Manhattan to discuss what it is like to portray such horrible people, how Holocaust denial and similar conspiracies spread, the Holocaust’s role in American Jewish identity, and his plans to take the show to campus.


Have you heard  from anyone portrayed in the play?

No. Sometimes I’m grateful I haven’t heard from any of them, and sometimes I think getting sued by a crazy Holocaust denier wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

It would be good publicity.

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Popping New York’s Jewish Bubble

by Jonathan Katz for newvoices.com

I grew up in the New York area: capital of the world, city of no rival, the Fourth Rome (defeating the Third, and there shall be no Fifth). True, I could note that this place – city and suburbs thereof – is overconfident, maddeningly arrogant, and rude to a horrifying degree. Yet it was a marvelous, diverse place to grow up, filled with the strange wonder and confident hum of a global center. Especially as a Jew – for this city and its surroundings comprise a Jerusalem of America.

To be a Jew in New York is to in many ways be completely normal: though our people only comprise one out of ten of the region’s population, the number of Jews in New York is overwhelming. One out of eight Jews in the world lives somewhere on a MTA or New Jersey Transit line leading to Midtown Manhattan; the city of New York has more Jews than any city other than Tel Aviv. Rosh Hashanah is a city-wide public school holiday. To be a Jew in New York is remarkably easy, especially compared to anywhere else in the Diaspora; some, myself included, argue that it is even easier than Israel. One never has to worry about kashrut or finding a synagogue for the observant, events and memory for the secular, and finding a Jewish match for us all. Who would want to live anywhere else?

…there are many reasons to leave this bubble of Jewish ease.

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Jewish Professors Hit Back Against Pro-Israel Campus 'Blacklist'

40 'Heavyweight' Academics Attack AMCHA Initiative

By Paul Berger for The Jewish Daily Forward

A Jewish advocacy group is warning students about 218 Middle East studies professors in colleges and universities across the country whose classes might contain “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.”

The AMCHA Initiative singled out the professors because, during the conflict between Israel and Hamas this past summer, they signed a petition calling for an academic boycott of Israel.

“We believe the professors who have signed this petition may be so biased against the Jewish state that they are unable to teach accurately or fairly about Israel or the Arab-Israel conflict, and may even inject antisemitic tropes into their lectures or class discussion,” wrote Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, co-founders of the AMCHA Initiative.

Now, 40 of America’s leading Jewish studies professors, including Hasia Diner of New York University and Robert Alter of the University of California, Berkeley, have signed a statement calling AMCHA’s actions “deplorable” and a threat to academic freedom. Bernard Avishai, a business professor who splits his time between Dartmouth College and Hebrew University and who has written extensively on Jewish matters, also signed the statement, which said, “We find it regrettable that AMCHA, so intent on combating the boycott of Israel, has launched a boycott initiative of its own.”

The Jewish studies professors say their worries go beyond AMCHA’s list of Middle East professors.

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First Results of the Jewish Student Survey are In!

from newvoices.com

Preliminary results of the Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students 2014 are out. Started last spring by Drs. Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar at the Trinity College Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, this is the first comprehensive scientific survey ever of an underrepresented and under studied demographic: American Jewish college students. They polled 1,157 self-identified Jewish students across the country on a number of key issues to find out what’s on the minds of the next Jewish generation. So, according to their findings, what are the crucial issues facing young Jews today? Kosmin and Keysar prepared this Wordle of student answers to that question:

Chart 1

“In your opinion, what are the crucial issues concerning young Jewish people like yourself today?”

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