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Keywords: Jew

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Are Israel boycotts really anti-Semitic?

    • Na'ama Carlin
    • 14 February 2018
    12 Comments

    When New Zealand singer Lorde cancelled her 2018 concert in Israel, she joined the ranks of artists who boycott Israel to protest its occupation of Palestine. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement is contentious in Israel/Palestine activist or Jewish circles, with some calling it anti-Semitic.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Hate thrives as much in the open as in the dark

    • Fatima Measham
    • 08 December 2017
    21 Comments

    It is apparently not enough for Muslims, Jewish, queer and Indigenous peoples to deal with homegrown hate; they must deal with imported brands, too. The latest such visitor was feted by Leyonhjelm, Hanson, Latham and assorted hangers-on. There was something pathetic about it, the scramble to goad 'lefties' about their 'worst nightmare'.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Judaism and dissent

    • Na'ama Carlin
    • 20 July 2017
    22 Comments

    Speak out against Israeli policies towards Palestinians and you are betraying fellow Jews. This narrative is common, and we see it today in relation to human rights organisations in Israel. It is not new. The same thing occured decades ago, when scholar Gershom Scholem accused Hannah Arendt, the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, of lacking 'love of the Jewish people'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Ghosts of grief in modern, secular Paris

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 19 April 2017
    1 Comment

    Cynical about the prospect of any kind of afterlife, Maureen nonetheless spends time holed up in an old Parisian mansion, trying to commune with the spirit of her dead twin brother. She is employed by a difficult and demanding fashion model as a personal shopper; literally, she spends her paid working days buying clothes, shoes and jewellery for someone else. The juxtaposition of the pure materialistic focus of this work, and her doubt-riven incursions into the spiritual realm, is intriguing.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Vienna bronze

    • Michael Sariban
    • 14 March 2017
    3 Comments

    When she fell, at last, out of this life, I caught him as intended, solid as belief ... eyes raised, palms turned to Mecca, his fixed magnetic pole. A Vienna bronze, perhaps 1920s, most likely a Jewish workshop - a fusion of metals and cultures, before Holocaust, West Bank or Gaza; a figure in robes, on a small carpet, its yellows and reds realistically creased, his sandals ... Aesthetics ranked high in her life - a second, earthly religion - all the style she could afford in the world her parents had fled to.

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  • RELIGION

    A symbolic solution to the marriage debate

    • Brian Lucas
    • 09 September 2016
    42 Comments

    Marriage, and more broadly any other close domestic relationship, is a fundamental social institution. Could not the federal legislation move away from defining marriage to a regime where it recognises marriage? It could recognise Catholic marriage (as described in the Code of Canon Law). It could recognise Anglican or Jewish or Islamic marriage and it could recognise secular marriage (which could include a same sex relationship). On this basis the various 'marriages' are different but equal.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Food for thought in atheist inspired animation

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 12 August 2016
    1 Comment

    There's a bagel character, coded as Jewish, and a lavash (Armenian flatbread), coded as Palestinian, who clash because they have to share an aisle. 'Isn't the aisle big enough for both of you?' asks Frank. In this and other ways the film points to the destructive power of religious belief corrupted by self- or socio-political interest. On the other hand it ignores the role religion can play in developing robust ethical thinking about the ways in which we can interact meaningfully with others and the world.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's 'alien' relations then and now

    • June Factor
    • 03 August 2016
    13 Comments

    In 1940, Prime Minister Robert Menzies received a letter from a woman in Western Australia: 'I have heard on the wireless the news that Australia would be willing to receive internees from England. I beg to protest; we have enough of the scum here already, too many in fact ... I sincerely trust that a U-boat gets every one of them.' The 'scum' she rejected so emphatically were the German and Austrian refugees, predominantly Jewish, soon to travel to Australia as 'enemy alien' prisoners.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Great white filmmakers can't dismiss diversity

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 10 March 2016
    6 Comments

    When questioned about diversity in his films recently, Joel Coen replied: 'You don't sit down and say, "I'm going to write a story that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog".' The answer is disingenuous at best. Filmmakers choose what stories to tell and how; with a few exceptions, the Coens tell stories about white men. Just as Quentin Tarantino ought to continue discussing the role violence and misogyny play in his films, the Coens should engage meaningfully with questions of diversity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Humanity found in ritual amid death camp horror

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 03 March 2016

    In the history of the Second World War and the deathly screed of the Final Solution, the Sonderkommando cuts a pitiable figure. These Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and other death camps who were forced to perform the logistics surrounding mass murder - the carting and disposal of dead flesh - though patently victims, were viewed by some as collaborators. Son of Saul provides an immersive and impressionistic extrapolation of this ethical and actual horror.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Mixed loyalties don't negate Australianness

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 25 January 2016
    11 Comments

    I arrived in Australia at the ripe old age of five months. I learned Australian values by a process of gentle osmosis. Many Indigenous Australians learned these values in a less gentle fashion. Today, many Australian Jews show a strong loyalty to the world's only Jewish state. Others combine loyalties with other ancestral homelands. Australian Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists and Hindus have similar broadened loyalties. Exactly how such loyalties make them any less Australian beats me.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    On blaming Muslims for Paris

    • Justin Glyn
    • 19 November 2015
    12 Comments

    It is possible to find 'texts of terror' in Jewish, Christian and Muslim Scriptures. They need to be responsibly understood and explored with a close understanding of their context. We did not demand all Catholics stand up and denounce every IRA attack, nor that all Christians apologise for Anders Breivik. Similarly, why should we expect all members of a religion with over a billion adherents with multiple ancient variants to actively disown every horror claimed to have been committed in its name?

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