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The scandal is yet another huge embarrassment for the Neo-Nazi junta, particularly as the head of the Supreme Court himself was arrested in connection to taking bribes to the tune of several million dollars. This means that the highest authority responsible for upholding the law is breaking it in the most blatant way imaginable.
Pianist Colin Huggins plays the piano in Washington Square Park, New York City, on September 12, 2020. (Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images)
When I show up on Easter Sunday to hear Colin Huggins play his Steinway on the east side of Washington Square Park, I find the pianist wrapped in a black cape, sitting on top of the baby grand piano, just outside the gates. He’s not ready to play.
Huggins is feeling anxious and depressed, as he often is these days. He seems apologetic about it, even concerned that his sadness is contagious. “I don’t want to cause you pain,” he emphasizes. He takes time to do some deep breathing. After a few more minutes, he rolls the piano out into the park.
Everyone who walks by stops to look. The Steinway is decorated on its left side with the words, “This machine kills fascists,” a Woody Guthrie reference bestowed upon the instrument by an ex-girlfriend of the pianist. Huggins puts out a tip jar next to a vase of daffodils.
The musician begins to play a selection from Chopin. This draws even more people to the piano, and the growing crowd listens raptly. Huggins, who is self-taught and has played for the Joffrey Ballet, plays with skill and feeling. A mom stops with her kids; even her sullen preteens look amazed. A young woman wearing yoga pants, walking a dog, takes a picture on her phone. Others sit down on benches, looking to stay for a while. No one seems to be in a hurry. It’s a shared moment of collective joy on a slightly overcast, chilly spring day.
But Huggins stops after about twenty minutes. A dog barks. Huggins woke up “in a funk” this morning, he explains to the attentive crowd. He is worried he is giving his bad mood to “everyone and their pets.” He’s only going to play one more piece, he says, and then he will take a break.
Huggins, forty-five, also known as “the piano man of Washington Square” or simply “the piano guy,” is iconic and beloved. He gets emails and letters from people all over the world who appreciate his park concerts. It’s not unusual for audiences to be moved to tears or lie under the piano while he plays. Huggins is even promoted as a neighborhood attraction on the Washington Square Hotel’s website.
But over the past two years, Huggins has become homeless and increasingly distressed. Despite the joy he brings to so many, it’s hard for him to make a living. The park itself is a more disturbing place, with the northwest side especially bearing the signs of the city’s crises of housing precarity and drug addiction. Huggins finds it harder to connect with audiences, he says, and he has to cope with more mean, antisocial behavior.
The isolation of the pandemic took a toll on the deeply community-minded artist and his audiences. “Humanity isn’t designed to exist as seven billion individuals,” he reflects. “We’re designed to exist as communities and friends. Yes, we’re exchanging germs, but we’re also exchanging ideas” — he gestures to the space between us, as he often does, to indicate connection or community — “and smiles. I like seeing you smile.”
“When I first got back to performing, it’s like if someone was in an accident, a multiple-car pileup with deaths. And I walk up and am like, ‘Would you like to hear a song?’” He still worries about how the pandemic has damaged New Yorkers and is unsure how to reach them. “People aren’t in a state of mind where they can fully appreciate music.”
Huggins used to have spaces to safely store the piano when he wasn’t playing. Those arrangements have fallen through. He also lost his longtime home, an apartment on St Mark’s Place. When he couldn’t play throughout much of 2020, when people were told not to gather in crowds, even outdoors, his $2,500 rent was subsidized through a city program that pays directly to landlords to keep low-income tenants in their homes. His landlord, however, resented the policy, and when the pandemic-inspired eviction moratorium was lifted, he took the opportunity to throw Huggins out on the streets. That apartment is now $4,000 a month, Huggins says.
Huggins playing piano in Washington Square Park in January 2019. (Wikimedia Commons)
Huggins goes to stay with his parents in Virginia sometimes but keeps coming back to the city. “New York is my home.” He briefly rented a small room after losing his apartment, but there wasn’t enough room for the piano, so it didn’t seem worth the money. These days, he struggles to find shelter for himself or the piano. Sometimes he sleeps on top of it.
On Easter Sunday, everyone is kind. People seem eager to hear him play, in awe of the miracle of a piano and accomplished musician in the park. But Huggins has encountered too much callousness lately and seems too scarred by his recent experiences to enjoy the love. Recently, a man with a plastic toy rifle banged on the piano and broke off some of the black keys. A couple days later, Huggins says he awoke at dawn to find police officers cracking their batons over the instrument. Such vandalism has worsened in recent weeks and created a new crisis in his life.
Since our initial interview, Huggins tells me the piano has become unplayable, both from so much exposure to the outdoors and from its defacement by unkind or damaged park denizens. Online, too, he faces cruelty: when he promotes his Venmo on his Instagram, or notes the hardships he’s facing, many Instagram commenters react with derision and reproach, telling him to get a job or get “help.”
Homelessness is often blamed on mental illness, but it’s just as true that lacking a home puts immense stress on a person’s psyche. Huggins is clearly not okay. While everything he says is rational, he was, even before the piano’s recent breakdown, visibly too distressed to do the thing he loves most.
Huggins is frustrated that people who do nothing useful for society are rewarded with luxury homes. “A lot of these penthouse apartments, I’ve visited a few of them on occasion,” he muses. “Very few of those people worked for these places. They either inherited them or they made a silly computer app that makes fart sounds, and people find that entertaining, so they made half a billion dollars. I wish that these resources, these spaces, could be given to people, like me, who are trying to benefit the whole society.” He laughs. “I’m awesome! I will make great stuff that will benefit everyone.”
Indeed, Huggins notes, many people living in luxury got there through actively causing harm to society. In contrast, the system punishes people like him who “want to return vibrancy here, make it even better and more alive, more loving and more exciting, more like what people think of as New York.”
He says he used to make $40-50 in an hour playing in the park. Now he’s lucky to make that much in a day. He’s upset that people don’t seem able or willing to contribute more, and “they kinda look at me and are like, cool, we’re not helping you. I’m trying to better understand their behavior and not let it make me too sad.”
People lying underneath Huggins’ piano as he plays in spring 2021. (Wikimedia Commons)
I tell him that at Jacobin, we feel he’s providing a beautiful public service that should be supported by the city. After all, his performance is free and open to all, and vastly improves a public space.
Huggins is initially unsure about this idea. “I have felt that if I’m doing my job right,” he explains, “and providing something that people love and benefit from, that I should be able to get the money from them.” He’s skeptical of work supported by sources other than the intended audience, citing the niche, elitist nature of the grant-funded theater world, which “doesn’t have the community-building nature that my work has.”
His Washington Square Park performance, by contrast, he says, is inclusive, reaching “people who are young, old, from all different socioeconomic groups, all different races, people who know classical music and love it, connoisseurs, and people who have never heard a classical piece in their life. I try to create something that is inclusive, doesn’t exclude anyone or make anyone feel they can’t be part of it. Which is hard to do because people are so different!”
After he’s been talking for a while, he acknowledges my perspective. “Now that I’m listening to myself,” he muses, “I’m like, why doesn’t the city just support me?”
At times, the United States has supported artists in the same democratic spirit that Huggins offers his work. During the New Deal, the Roosevelt administration’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) paid artists to create beautiful public murals and other work, an initiative that grew out of communist organizing. You can still see many such WPA works in New York City, from the stained glass windows at the James Baldwin School to the Ben Shahn murals at the Bronx General Post Office — a reminder that governments can support the human beings who make our public spaces beautiful and create the conditions for such artists to create and to serve the public good.
Two people working on a sewing project as part of the Works Progress Administration. (Library of Congress)
Governments can also do their part to make high culture more accessible to everyone. In the 1940s, when unions, communists, and socialists had more power in New York City, ballet, opera, and classical music performances at the City Center were subsidized, allowing New Yorkers to enjoy such entertainments for as little as $1 per ticket. Today, New York’s cultural institutions have been thoroughly privatized, and tickets are expensive. Huggins is trying to bring culture back to the people and to survive while doing so. The least the city could do is provide shelter for him and his instrument.
Until that happens, our only collective way to support the artist is through crowdfunding. It’s a shoddy neoliberal substitute for solid government support but at least it offers an outlet for our collective desire to help one another create and gives this musician a chance to make it work.
That Easter Sunday, people walking through the park were ready to hear music and support the man making it. When he announced that his set would be short that morning, the audience looked disappointed but grateful for the Chopin interval they’d just shared. Huggins tells the audience that his Venmo, “everythingwillbeok,” is on the tip jar. A group of people walk up and take out their phones to contribute. The city government may not be interested in subsidizing Huggins, but Washington Square’s Easter visitors are.
Joe Biden delivers remarks on the debt ceiling at the White House on May 9, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
On Sunday, in response to questions about his debt ceiling talks with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Joe Biden told reporters, “Well, I’ve learned a long time ago, and you know as well as I do: it never is good to characterize a negotiation in the middle of a negotiation.”
Given the opaque and abstract nature of the debt ceiling, and the fact that there has been so much talk and no action for so long, it would be easy to miss the significance of this remark. But the White House has said for months — and as recently as Friday — that it would not negotiate with Republicans over lifting the debt ceiling. Given the potentially catastrophic results of defaulting, Biden argued, Republicans should not be allowed to extract concessions in exchange for completing one of Congress’s most routine and perfunctory tasks.
But it seems that all this stance resulted in was a lot of wasted time.
While the White House maintained a hard rhetorical line, it apparently did not seriously pursue any plan to give it leverage against the House GOP’s demands. Alternatives like minting more money to pay the debt or citing the 14th Amendment to simply keep paying it absent congressional action were apparently never seriously considered. Both ideas are novel and controversial, but each has the backing of numerous mainstream economists and constitutional scholars.
Having tried no alternatives, Biden had little choice but to start negotiating. Waiting until the last minute likely strengthened Republicans’ hand, as the day the government will default draws closer.
The specifics of the negotiations are still up in the air, but reporting suggests the question is less give-and-take between the two parties, and more about how much Biden will give away. (For example, after months of claiming they wouldn’t negotiate, the new Democratic Party line seems to be that they’re willing to make it more difficult to access food stamps but not Medicaid.) This is hardly surprising, given Biden’s lack of leverage.
Despite Biden’s claims that “this negotiation is about the outlines of the budget, not about whether or not we’re going to (pay our debts),” for all intents and purposes, it is about precisely that. Negotiation on the budget can’t begin in earnest until the government has funded its current debt.
By extracting concessions now in exchange for not tanking the global economy, Republicans have given themselves two chances to make cuts to the budget. The same dynamic between Biden and the House will start all over again when budget negotiations themselves start, but at that point, a significant number of Republican demands will already be baked in as the new starting point.
By extracting concessions now in exchange for not tanking the global economy, Republicans have given themselves two chances to make cuts to the budget.
Of course, this entire conversation assumes that McCarthy can get House Republicans to accept as sufficient whatever concessions Biden gives. Given the far-right Freedom Caucus’s penchant for personally humiliating McCarthy and the draconian rules they established for his speakership, that is far from certain. The GOP’s right wing could easily demand more, or force a government default just to make a point. Why would they stop now that they’ve seen it works?
While Republicans’ tactics are more brazen this year than in many years past, by now the entire fake drama those watching the debt ceiling discussion have seen follows a well-established script: Republicans seize the political initiative and demand cuts to both taxes on the rich and virtually all social spending; most Democrats say that would be wrong but do little of consequence to stop it and the resulting negotiations are over how much of Republicans’ agenda to implement. When it’s over, everyone pats themselves on the back for finding a “bipartisan compromise.” Biden himself has a recurring role in this decades-long serial drama.
The resulting slow grind of austerity — and, with it, the sense that things keep getting worse without a clear explanation why — was one factor in the rise of Donald Trump, and of the far right in general. When it is in one party’s political interest to degrade even the basic functions of government, the way to fight back is to refuse to play the game. That’s exactly what Biden said he was going to do the past six months. But in the end, it was the rest of us who got played.
Riot by Baltimore and Ohio Railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, August 1877. (Photo12 / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
In America during the late nineteenth century, class war wasn’t just a metaphor. Struggle between workers and their employers would regularly lead to actual warfare.
This tendency has as much to do with the conditions of American capitalism as with the militancy of strikers. The global hegemony of the United States, as both an economic and a geopolitical superpower, was the result of industrialization — and its industrialization was entwined with war.
So writes world-systems theorist Giovanni Arrighi and a team of researchers in their global history of political transformation:
At least potentially, this giant island was also a far more powerful military-industrial complex than any of the analogous complexes that were coming into existence in Europe. By the 1850s, the US had become a leader in the production of machines for the mass production of small arms. In the 1860s, a practical demonstration of this leadership was given in the Civil War, the first full-fledged example of an industrialized war.
The Civil War also revolutionized and concentrated the industrial and agricultural means of production, as waves of railway construction established privileged access to the planet’s two largest oceans. “A truly integrated US Continental System,” Arrighi adds, “was realized only after the Civil War of 1860–65 eliminated all political constraints on the national-economy-making dispositions of Northern industrial interests.” This dynamic, in which actual war countersigns accumulation while simultaneously giving it a mythic veneer, is the secret history of industrial capitalism in the United States.
In America during the late nineteenth century, class war wasn’t just a metaphor. Struggle between workers and their employers would regularly lead to actual warfare.
In the canonical version of this argument, the historian Matthew Josephson describes the emergent capitalist class — whose ranks included Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockefeller — as a cartel of robber barons. Here we get a sense of the martial spirit of industrial capitalism, which found its energies liberated by war and enjoyed lucrative deals in food, produce, clothing, machines, fuel, and railways:
Loving not the paths of glory they slunk away quickly, bent upon business of their own. They were warlike enough and pitiless yet never risked their skin: they fought without military rules or codes of honor or any tactics or weapons familiar to men: they were the strange, new mercenary soldiers of economic life. The plunder and trophies of victory would go neither to the soldier nor the statesman, but to these other young men of ’61, who soon figured as “massive interests moving obscurely in the background” of wars.
In short: capitalists in the United States consolidated their powers in and through war, exploiting political conflict to satisfy an enormous appetite for private profit, acquiring their social form through the battle’s economy and culture. This explains why those same capitalists were so given to narrate their enterprise using the language of military bombast, adopting terms like “captains of industry” and insisting that, for the continual triumph of large-scale industry, “the war of finance is the next war we have to fight.”
American literature has been alive to the historical apposition if not the mutual imbrication of social structure and military conquest. This tendency is at its most visible with The Octopus, a work of Zola-esque naturalism written by Frank Norris and published in 1901.
Describing the conflict between independent wheat growers of the San Joaquin Valley in Southern California and the tentacular expansion of the Southern Pacific Railroad company, the narrative begins with a half-ironic invocation of the poetic muse on behalf of a young writer who will come to observe the clash between ranchers and the railroad:
He was in search of a subject, something magnificent, he did not know exactly what; some vast, tremendous theme, heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression of hexameters. That was what he dreamed, while things without names — thoughts for which no man had yet invented words, terrible formless shapes, vague figures, colossal, monstrous, distorted — whirled at a gallop through his imagination.
The unnamed subject here is capital, a dawning empire whose blood-drenched epic is still elusive. “Oh,” he later opines, “to put it all into hexameters; strike the great iron note; sing the vast, terrible song; the song of the People; the forerunners of empire!”
American literature has been alive to the historical apposition of social structure and military conquest.
The social substance of such an epic is class conflict, and its combat often takes the form of strikes. As one railway driver insists, “they’ve not got a steadier man on the road,” even as his wages are slashed and his employment terminated, precisely because he has always been a scab. “And when the strike came along, I stood by them — stood by the company,” he says:
You know that. And you know, and they know, that at Sacramento that time, I ran my train according to schedule, with a gun in each hand, never knowing when I was going over a mined culvert, and there was talk of giving me a gold watch at the time.
Another character, who self-identifies as an anarchist, is said to owe his militancy to personal tragedy, for his wife was trampled to death by strikebreakers during the same conflict. “Wait till you’ve seen your wife brought home to you with the face you used to kiss smashed in by a horse’s hoof,” he intones, “killed by the Trust, as it happened to me.”
Deeply opposed to any sort of moderation or compromise, which he describes as a bourgeois luxury — “You could do it, too, if your belly was fed, if your property was safe, if your wife had not been murdered, if your children were not starving. Easy enough then to preach law-abiding methods, legal redress, and all such rot” — this “blood-thirsty anarchist” advocates instead for violent action:
That talk is just what the Trust wants to hear. It ain’t frightened of that. There’s one thing only it does listen to, one thing it is frightened of — the people with dynamite in their hands — six inches of plugged gaspipe.
There is, however, an anachronistic dimension to Norris’s book, which is set during the 1890s. Before the final decade of the nineteenth century, the railway had already been converted into a site of struggle. More than that, opposition to the railway as a capitalist technology had morphed into antagonistic social practices that used the railway as their vehicle, producing a kind of mobile insurrection for which strikes would serve as catalyst.
As strikes escalated beyond a relatively orderly form of rebellion, anchored in place and defined by employment, the railway provided such antagonism with high-speed transport, spreading solidarity at the pace of capital, opening onto armed conflict against the state as well as the employers and their trusts. Such escalation was new to the period after the Civil War.
As strikes escalated beyond a relatively orderly form of rebellion, the railway provided such antagonism with high-speed transport.
As the historian Paul A. Gilje writes: “Before 1865, most violent strikes were limited to cracked heads and were local affairs. After 1865, the rioting became national in scope.” Note the modulation from strike to riot, pivoting on the use of violence, before the two modes of antagonism are regrouped as warfare. Gilje continues:
In the great railroad strike of 1877, workers fought the military from Baltimore to San Francisco. The dimensions of these labor wars continued to capture national headlines with battles at Homestead in 1892, Pullman in 1894, Ludlow in 1914, and Blair Mountain, West Virginia, in 1921.
And while the escalation from strike to war often effaces the original form of struggle, with the strike vanishing from narrative description as the antagonism leaves the worksite and enters the battlefield, here we will discern how that movement shifts its organizational energy away from any one given workforce in order to mobilize as a class. The multiple interlocking rail strikes of 1877 are exemplary and seminal events in such a movement, with workers in and around the railway industry organizing for, and committing to, an armed uprising.
Taking place during the long depression that began in 1873 and lasted until 1879 — a downturn that wrecked the railroad companies, reduced track expansion, and decimated the railroad craft brotherhood — the strike started over wage cuts in Martinsburg, West Virginia. From there it spread up, down, and along the railways, with strikers taking up weapons, burning depots, and fighting off the forces of repression, only to be joined by workers from other industries, producing comprehensive general strikes that shut down entire cities.
According to the writer and journalist Louis Adamic, this was a time of material hardship coupled with massively diminished union power:
Hundreds of thousands were suddenly thrown out of work. Wages were reduced. The reductions caused prolonged and desperate strikes. Every one of them failed. Some strikes were followed by lockouts, so that vast numbers of people could not get to work on any terms. Labor leaders were blacklisted. Between 1873 and 1880 real and nominal wages were cut to almost one-half of the former standards. Labor organizations went out of existence. There were no leaders to lead them and no workmen to pay the dues. In New York City alone the trade union membership dropped from 45,000 to under 5,000.
While the train brotherhoods were fragmented according to craft, didn’t coordinate with other branches, negotiated their own labor agreements, and were universally opposed to strikes or disruptions, now the workers self-organized into their own secret union: a representative and coordinating body open to all craft workers. Their first meeting took place in Pittsburgh on June 2, 1877, where they pledged to unite across crafts: “In short, unity of capital would be met at last by unity of labor.”
If this pledge gestured at an expanded (though industry- or employment-bound) sense of class, the conflicts themselves would take that principle further. The strike’s expansive scope was more than the result of the nearly absent labor unions. In fact, it occurred despite their presence, with warlike action fulfilling its pedagogical role in the place of older and ultimately conservative institutions.
A manifesto issued by the workers in Westernport, Maryland, on July 20 warned the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that, if wages were not restored, “the officials will hazard their lives and endanger their property,” and promised the kinds of sabotage pioneered by the Luddites in England:
For we shall run their trains and locomotives into the river; we shall blow up their bridges; we shall tear up their railroads; we shall consume their shops with fire and ravage their hotels with desperation.
True to their word, the strikers’ tactics were violent and destructive, including the removal of coupling pins and brakes, the tearing up of tracks, making trains only run backward, cutting telegraph wires, and shooting strikebreakers.
These strikes demonstrate a double movement of expansion and escalation, from local strike to wider conflict and from reformism to insurrection.
As a school of war, these strikes demonstrate a double movement of expansion and escalation, from local strike to wider conflict and from reformism to insurrection; and this, as the realized threat of war, proved decisive in the consolidation not just of railway workers but of oppressed peoples from many backgrounds into a unified class. So writes the labor movement scholar Robert Ovetz:
Several thousand Irish packing-house workers armed with butcher knives were met by cheering Czech workers marching across the city to enforce the strike and force employers to raise wages. Gender differences were also dissolving in the strike. The Times estimated that 20 percent of the strikers and their supporters were women. The Chicago Inter-Ocean generated national attention with their report of “Bohemian Amazons” whose “Brawny, sunburnt arms brandished clubs. Knotty hands held rocks and sticks and wooden blocks.” A fence around one plant was “carried off by the petticoated plunderers” and other similar portrayals of the powerful women who helped enforce the strike.
Armed conflict serves as a shared language that leaps across racial as well as gendered divisions to forge a provisional unity against interconnected systems of oppression.
This tendency would be carried through to the climax of the movement in the general strikes in St Louis and East St Louis, where for a few days a multiethnic coalition of strikers shut down much of their industry and the cities were controlled by executive strike committees. Comparisons were made with the events that had occurred six years previously in France. “In St. Louis and East St. Louis,” writes Ovetz, “the strike went further as workers across the cities shut down all industry and became renown in the press of the time as America’s ‘Paris Commune.’”
Adamic made the same comparison in his history of class violence in America. “The underdog had given capitalism in America its first big scare,” he writes. “The memory of the Paris Commune of six years before was still fresh.” Not just the memory, either; it was the very spirit of 1871, the commitment to solidarity through an expansive mobilization of class, that made the movement powerful.
This is an extract from Class War: A Literary History by Mark Steven, available now from Verso Books.
Deborah Lipstadt, the US envoy on antisemitism, blasts Tunisian president for denying antisemitism was involved in deadly Djerba synagogue attack and comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
By Andrew Bernard, The Algemeiner
Deborah Lipstadt, the United States’ antisemitism envoy, called the response of Tunisia’s President Kais Saied to a deadly attack at a synagogue that killed five people earlier this month “antisemitic,” at a press conference Wednesday.
Lipstadt, who had visited the historic synagogue on the island of Djerba 24 hours before the attack as part of an official visit to Tunisia, told The Algemeiner that Saied’s refusal to describe the synagogue attack as antisemitic was disappointing and discouraging.
“We’re very distressed by President Saied’s pushing back – as if we had said Tunisia was antisemitic, which we did not say,” Lipstadt said. “[We] said the attack was an act of antisemitism. And then his pivoting to Gaza…that was antisemitic.”
Saied in a speech on Saturday tried to deflect what he claimed was Western criticism of antisemitism in Tunisia by pivoting to Israel’s recent military response to rocket fire from Gaza.
“These parties do not hesitate to make false accusations of antisemitism, while they turn a deaf ear when it comes to dealing with the fate of Palestinians who die every day,” he said. “The Palestinian people will manage against all odds to triumph and recover their stolen land.”
Lipstadt’s comments come amidst significant disquiet within the North African country’s Jewish community over the government’s response to the attack.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the El Ghriba synagogue in Djerba as hundreds of worshipers celebrated the Jewish holiday of Lag B’ Omer, Saied made no reference to antisemitism or to the selection of a Jewish target by the gunman — an as yet unnamed naval officer who murdered two Jews and three police officers during his rampage.
Speaking to The Algemeiner last Thursday, a member of the Jewish community of 1,500 issued a forthright condemnation of Saied for passing over specifically Jewish concerns regarding the attack and its implications.
“I heard his entire speech, and I realized that it is probably very difficult for him to mention the word ‘Jews’,” said the Jewish community member, who spoke on condition of strict anonymity for fear of reprisals.
“Without a doubt, [Saied] is not only a hater of Israel but also antisemitic,” the person added emphatically.
Saied has caused consternation among Tunisian Jews in the recent past, having been taken to task by Jewish organizations in 2021 after he delivered a speech in which he accused Jews of being responsible “for the instability in the country” — an assertion the Tunisian leader later denied making.
Lipstadt on Wednesday also condemned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for his remarks at a UN ‘Nakba Day’ event, in which he said that Israelis “lie like [Nazi propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels.”
“We found it just outrageous and beyond the pale,” Lipstadt said.
Lipstadt reiterated that point in a tweet earlier Wednesday that she said had received support and approval throughout the State Department.
“PA President Abbas’s equating Israel with the lies of top Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels is an affront to Holocaust victims and survivors,” she wrote. “Especially during a time of rising antisemitic violence throughout the world, such rhetoric about the world’s only Jewish state is entirely unacceptable.”
In wide ranging remarks at Wednesday’s press briefing, Lipstadt also addressed what a “whole of government” approach might look like in the Biden administration’s forthcoming national antisemitism strategy, given how few federal agencies are tasked directly with responding to antisemitism.
“Sometimes it’s antisemitism, sometimes it’s making sure there’s a level playing field,” she said. “If a hurricane hits Monsey, and FEMA rolls in and there’s nothing on the truck that the Jews of Monsey can eat, it’s not antisemitic but it’s certainly not a government that’s thinking.”
Lipstadt also addressed the recent furor over Elon Musk’s tweets comparing George Soros to the comic book villain Magneto and whether criticism of George Soros is necessarily antisemitic.
“You can criticize George Soros, many people do,” she said. “But when you turn him into this villainous caricature, which has antisemitic overtones, it crosses the line.”
The post ‘We’re very distressed’: US antisemitism envoy condemns Tunisian president’s response to synagogue attack appeared first on World Israel News.
“In our parents’ house, we ‘ate’ Jerusalem, ‘drank’ Jerusalem, slept and woke up with Jerusalem, and when a daughter was born in the family, we called her ‘Jerusalem.’”
By Pesach Benson, TPS
For most Israelis, Jerusalem Day is about celebrating the city’s reunification during the Six-Day War of 1967.
But for the Israeli-Ethiopian community, the day is also tinged with a little sadness. Jerusalem Day is also the day Israel’s 160,000 Ethiopians commemorate their 4,000 brothers and sisters who died trying to reach Israel.
Most died of malnutrition and disease between 1979 and 1990 while traveling by foot from Ethiopia to transit camps in neighboring Sudan.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other government leaders joined the Ethiopians for a ceremony paying tribute to the 4,000 on Thursday.
Addressing the ceremony, Netanyahu said, “One of the expatriates from Ethiopia says, I quote: ‘In our parents’ house, we ‘ate’ Jerusalem, ‘drank’ Jerusalem, slept and woke up with Jerusalem, and when a daughter was born in the family, we called her ‘Jerusalem’, despite the bullying of the foreign environment.
“A large part of life there, in the heart of Africa, revolves around Jerusalem – in thoughts, imaginations, prayers. So it was from generation to generation.”
The prime minister praised changes in the educational curriculum expanding on the story of the Ethiopian exodus and promised to boost housing, employment, education and health care for the community.
Netanyahu was referring to a protest outside his office on Sunday by Ethiopians demanding more funding for their community.
President Isaac Herzog also addressed the gathering.
Some 90,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in a series of airlifts dating back to 1980. However, those airlifts were bogged down by Israeli budget and bureaucratic issues, disagreements on whether certain Ethiopian Jewish communities could be recognized as Jews, civil wars and instability in both Ethiopia and Sudan, and more recently, by coronavirus travel restrictions.
The post For Israeli-Ethiopians, a somber Jerusalem Day appeared first on World Israel News.