Emet: Truth

This track is from my memoir-in-progress about my grandfather's life in pre-Holocaust Hungary and my own personal journey through Judaism. In this scene, I'm learning an important lesson in college about perception and reality when it comes to Muslim-Jewish relations. For links to more excerpts, please visit my website. http://howardlovy.com/category/memoir/

Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, in her new book, Antisemitism: Here and Now, turns to the causes and forms of anti-Jewish hatred: the most-ancient of conspiracy theories. I interviewed Lipstadt for an article in Publishers Weekly, but much was left on the cutting-room floor. Lipstadt kindly allowed me to run our entire interview in my podcast. I begin with my own first anti-Semitic experience from my early childhood in Georgia. Then Lipstadt and I discuss a range of topics, from the Women's March and Alice Walker, to the roots of anti-Semitism and what we can do about it.

For more of my podcasts and Jewish-themed writing, please visit http://howardlovy.com/ Today you're going to meet two people, two Jewish idealists who thought they were fighting alongside people who believed as they did, who believed in social justice. But found, instead, that their status as Jews placed them apart from their peers. Jews are used to Nazis. But when Jewish activists face hatred from the left, it stings harder because these are people who are supposed to have their back. And this seems to be happening more and more. Under the guise of anti-Zionism, it's spilling over into blatant anti-Semitism. There are those who say that we shouldn't confuse the two. But it's getting more and more difficult. Somehow, through layers and layers of mythology about Jews and about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jews are being made to feel uncomfortable, and in some cases, actually purged, from causes they believe in. Gretchen Rachel Hammond lost her job after her coverage of the Chicago Dyke March in 2017. That was when three Jewish women were kicked out of the demonstration for waving a Star of David pride flag. But there's so much more to Gretchen's story. Listen in her own words. Nisi Jacobs has been marching for social justice for a long time. So, of course she was with the original Women's March to protest President Trump. Then, suddenly, the Women's March stopped being about women as the leadership pivoted to embrace anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan and attack Israel. Nisi talks to me about what she and other Jewish women did next. They launched the Women's March for All. But, of course, there's much more to Nisi's story. My Mother's Son: Tikkun Olam, roughly translates from Hebrew into “repair the world." To many Jews, this idea forms the theological basis for social-justice activism. But in this excerpt from the book My Mother's Son, read to you by author David Hirshberg, this idea of repairing the world is twisted into a whole new meaning. My Mother's Son, by the way, is published by Fig Tree Books, which specializes in literature about the Jewish American Experience.