Semitic

Batting back criticism from German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the imprisonment of Pussy Riot band members, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Friday that one of the punk performers had “strung up the effigy of a Jew,” Russian state media reported. While attending a Moscow business forum, Merkel had raised concerns about the two-year sentences for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” handed down to two band members after they staged a “punk prayer” against Putin in a Moscow cathedral.

Batting back criticism from German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the imprisonment of Pussy Riot band members, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Friday that one of the punk performers had “strung up the effigy of a Jew,” Russian state media reported. While attending a Moscow business forum, Merkel had raised concerns about the two-year sentences for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” handed down to two band members after they staged a “punk prayer” against Putin in a Moscow cathedral.

Re "Vatican resolute on Holocaust denier," Jan. 28 I was astonished to read that the pope has rescinded the excommunication of anti-Semitic Bishop Richard Williamson, who claims the Holocaust never happened. As a cradle Catholic, I am appalled that the prelate of my church would hide behind the legal technicalities of canon law to allow this obviously loathsome man to resume his affiliation with Catholicism. This is as horrifying to me as learning that Pope Pius XII at the time of the Holocaust turned a blind eye to the annihilation of Jews, Gypsies and anyone else who did not measure up to the Third Reich standards.

MOSCOW - Unique not only in its high-tech content but also in its political importance, a museum of Jewish history and culture opened to the public Sunday in Moscow, the capital of a nation beset by anti-Semitism for more than two centuries. Several hundred visitors filed into the more than 90,000-square-foot former bus garage and found themselves immersed in a lesson in tolerance. "The opening of such a museum in Moscow is a qualitatively new stage of Jewish life in Russia," said Alexander Boroda, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia.

It's such a quintessentially American thing to do that I'm surprised that someone hasn't already engraved it on our $20 bills: If you shoot off your mouth and hurl stupid insults at innocent people, the best thing to do is to apologize as quickly as possible. It's why Oliver Stone isn't going to become Mel Gibson, even though Stone's crackpot remarks about the "Jewish domination of the media" and the Holocaust sounded just as bad as anything Gibson said in his infamous drunken rant about the Jews after he was picked up by Malibu police for drunken driving.

Officials for both the Ducks and the team's former affiliate in the minor league ECHL declined to comment Wednesday on a lawsuit filed by a former player who said he was forced to "endure a barrage of anti-Semitic, offensive and degrading verbal attacks regarding his Jewish faith" during his time with the organization. Jason Bailey, a 23-year-old forward now playing for the Ottawa Senators' farm team in the American Hockey League, is seeking unspecified damages from the Ducks and the Bakersfield Condors, for whom Bailey played during the 2008-09 season when the verbal abuse allegedly occurred.

  Fashion designer John Galliano testified in a Paris courtroom Wednesday that an addiction to pills and alcohol kept him from recalling any alleged use of anti-Semitic and racist slurs on two separate occasions at a Paris bar. The outbursts cost Galliano his job at Dior, where he was one of the fashion industry's brightest stars, and left him facing accusations that he used profanity and derogatory comments while violating French law prohibiting...

As Paris Fashion Week began on Tuesday, there was only one thing anyone could talk about. The venerable French haute couture house of Christian Dior, credited with putting Paris fashion back on the map after World War II, was rocked in scandal. John Galliano, the flamboyant fashion designer at the helm of the luxury label, and a man known for his over-the-top runway collections, romanticism and love of the bias cut, was being fired. Not because of a collection of clothes but because of a collection of words.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is again extending its reach onto University of California campuses, raising questions about the limits of free speech and how welcome Jewish and Muslim students feel at their schools. But this time, the controversy does not spring from the kind of direct confrontation that occurred two years ago when Muslim protesters tried to shout down the Israeli ambassador during a speech at UC Irvine and then faced criminal prosecution. Instead, the current debate is being stirred by studies UC commissioned about how to cool tempers and whether anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias are serious problems on the system's 10 campuses.

For Southern California's small community of Hungarian-born Holocaust survivors, the little newspaper from Gardena triggers memories of another, faraway time, an age of intolerance when fascist thugs roamed the streets of Budapest. Uj Vilag (New World), a Hungarian-language weekly, harangues against Hungary's 80,000-strong Jewish population, blaming them for a host of ills in the Eastern European country.

PARIS - The older brother of a French militant who killed seven people early this year before being shot to death by police has spoken out against his family in a new book, condemning what he describes as a childhood of hatred, anti-Semitism and violence. Abdelghani Merah, 36, is the brother of Mohamed Merah, 23, who in the name of Islamic extremism shot to death three Jewish children, a rabbi and three soldiers in and around Toulouse in March. The killings have come to be seen here as part of a broader threat of home-grown terrorism.

Re "Debating free speech at Berkeley," Editorial, Oct. 15 Academic freedom and the right to free speech are sacred and deserve protection. At the same time, when anti-Israel activity crosses the line into anti-Semitism and expressions of support for terrorism, it is imperative to urge university officials to issue condemnations. There is a fundamental difference between criticizing Israel's government and its policies and "opposing" Israel's existence. The former may or may not be offensive speech.

In the latest chapter of a long-running controversy over anti-Israel protests at UC Berkeley, the U.S. Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether Jewish students at the university are the victims of a "pervasive hostile environment" in violation of federal civil rights laws. Given the importance of free speech, especially in a university setting, the department needs to tread carefully. The department responded to a request from lawyers for two recent Berkeley graduates who earlier had sued the university complaining about a "dangerous anti-Semitic climate" at Berkeley.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is again extending its reach onto University of California campuses, raising questions about the limits of free speech and how welcome Jewish and Muslim students feel at their schools. But this time, the controversy does not spring from the kind of direct confrontation that occurred two years ago when Muslim protesters tried to shout down the Israeli ambassador during a speech at UC Irvine and then faced criminal prosecution. Instead, the current debate is being stirred by studies UC commissioned about how to cool tempers and whether anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim bias are serious problems on the system's 10 campuses.

BUDAPEST, Hungary - "The Sixth Coffin" has been officially buried. Derided as anti-Semitic agitprop, this work by recently deceased Hungarian playwright-politician-polemicist Istvan Csurka has been the focal point of controversy until it was finally scrubbed from Budapest's Uj Szinhaz's - or New Theater's - new season. But how this production (think: the Hungarian equivalent of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion") ever got anywhere near the performance schedule of a major municipal venue in the first place is part of a larger drama involving this country's leadership and its assault on culture.

For two decades, Dee Tuntkavep has enjoyed a view of pine-shrouded Chandler Boulevard from the upstairs reading room of her Sherman Oaks home. Now all she sees are concrete walls two stories high -- the still-in-progress expansion of an Orthodox Jewish house of worship. In fact, plans for the upgraded Chabad of North Hollywood are for a structure nearly nine times the size of the prayer house it replaces. On its website, the Chabad gives thanks: "Divine Providence has finally shined down on this long-awaited project.

A judge refused Tuesday to throw out a lawsuit filed by a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who alleges he faced retaliation from supervisors after arresting actor Mel Gibson on suspicion of drunk driving in 2006. During the arrest, Gibson allegedly made anti-Semitic slurs, which the deputy documented in his initial arrest report . Deputy James Mee said he resisted a supervisor's request to omit Gibson's derogatory remarks from the report. Since then, Mee has been passed over for promotions and had his job performance unfairly scrutinized, his attorneys said.

In the latest chapter of a long-running controversy over anti-Israel protests at UC Berkeley, the U.S. Department of Education has launched an investigation into whether Jewish students at the university are the victims of a "pervasive hostile environment" in violation of federal civil rights laws. Given the importance of free speech, especially in a university setting, the department needs to tread carefully. The department responded to a request from lawyers for two recent Berkeley graduates who earlier had sued the university complaining about a "dangerous anti-Semitic climate" at Berkeley.

All was not well in Poland and Ukraine, co-hosts of Euro 2012, when the planet's second-most-important soccer tournament kicked off Friday. And that could prove to be both good and bad thing as the sport moves toward World Cups scheduled in Brazil, Russia and Qatar over the next 10 years. It's a bad thing because, in the run-up to Euro 2012, attention has been focused away from the playing field because of charges of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and worries about violence in the host countries.

The people in Israel and Germany who are most outraged by Nobel Prize-winning author Gunter Grass' latest work have one thing in common: They think it's ridiculous, and possibly anti-Semitic, for Grass to assert a moral equivalency between Israel and Iran. Yet by overreacting to Grass' criticism, Israeli officials are acting like, well, Iranians. Grass, 84, is being lambasted in his native Germany over his poem "What Must Be Said," published last week in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.