Anorak

Art and More

[Sonia Sodha @soniasodha]

‘Unisex toilets outside the main toilet area for menstruating girls.’ In a British school in 2026. This is where ‘be kind’ policies have got us.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

[Nicole Lampert @nicolelampert]

The Travelodge in Manor House is well used by the ultra orthodox community for when their relatives come to stay.
People checking in this week were horrified to find ‘Free Palestine’ on the TVs of their bedrooms.
Every day, there’s a new way to frighten Jewish people.

[Anorak @TheAnorak]

It’s back and it’s blatant:

[Tobias Huch @TobiasHuch]

https://t.co/qaJGNsPQDq

[Anorak @TheAnorak]

This is normal :

[teresa smith @treesey]

- I know why Starmer would do it: his wife is Jewish

@ShelaghFogarty Keir Starmer doesn’t have people banned from the country because his wife is Jewish. Neil, can you hear yourself?

- That’s why he supported Mandelson

Can you hear yourself?
- I know exactly what I sound like

[Anorak @TheAnorak]

Championes!!!

[Simon Schama @simon_schama]

moving and upsetting - this woman "sick of feeling we can only be safe by not being Jewish and being invisible.." This is the disgrace of the UK right now

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

This matters.
An obscure London event on the history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms in Judea and Israel is cancelled because of ‘security concerns’ and it turns out this was a reaction to a campaign to fill and then undermine the event by activist disrupters.
How strange! Why would a posse of aggressive activists be interested in the arcane details of bullae and steles and ostraca and inscriptions and numismatics in some small South Levantine kingdoms in the Iron Age?
Well, it is a little more than that which is why it is both disturbing and important. And it matters because at its least it is a threat to history in Britain’s - but also the world’s - greatest temple of History @britishmuseum - and its scholarly integrity.
The BM and its leadership are decent and well-meaning and have explained that they wished to save an event from disruption by bullying vandals but I am sure the BM realizes it is essential to announce a new event fast lest it give the impression that the permission of tiny cadres of aggressive bullies are required before it hold events. But the significance is wider than an event about the Moab and Tel Dan steles in a great museum.
British cultural life is the right and exercise of civic and cultural freedom – a privilege of our liberal democracy - that does not require the permission of gangs of ideological activists nor can it cancelled or postponed nor endured at their beck and sufferance nor permitted with a bend of the knee to their permissions or veto. But that is what this appears to be.
Across the cultural world in the West, though the bewildered middleaged managers of our institutions that are confronting and often submitting to a wave of self-righteous blackmail and mob threat, there is an increasingly thin – indeed ever more fragile and sometimes nigh invisible – line between ‘security concerns’ – and institutional pusillanimity.
Then there is the history itself.
This event concerns the study of the ancient kingdoms of Judah and Israel that existed between roughly 1100BC and 586BCin the Levant. It is not a coincidence that this was chosen for disruption. The history of the Judean kingdoms and the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem that stood for most of the time between 1000BC and 70ADetc is important and fascinating history in its own right, supported by complex and growing archaeological finds.
These small kingdoms and the subsequent Temple priestly mini-state (restored by the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius 539BC) and then the larger Judean kingdoms of the Hasmoneans and Herodians – between 167BC and 135AD chronicle the long indigenous history of Jews in the region – which the protesters are keen to erase. This is a political project of ideological erasure and malicious incitement of course concerned with the complex, brutal Israel-Palestine conflict that has now gone on for a hundred years and is unlikely to be solved in a small lecture theatre in the British Museum. But it also attempts to deny or erase Jewish history itself – and by implication the heritage of British Jews who live here in Britain, a small community that is now under cultural and sometimes physical threat.
Incidentally - but it is worth saying, this history does not deny anyone else’s history, nor the many other small realms in this region through ancient times nor the many names of the region and its entities and the historical origins of those names (Canaan, or Philistia or Peleset, Phoenicia, Aram Damascus or Moab or later Nabatea and the provinces of Palaestina Prime, Seconda and Tertia and the Ghassanid kingdoms and so on etc etc). The history of one can not be used to erase the history of the other and does not need to do so. The pursuit of knowledge which is one of the delights of human life and is the mission of the BM and indeed anyone who writes, reads or enjoys history, can celebrate and recognize all of these.
Yet this protest and the many like it deployed across Britain nowadays is the opposite of that - an attack on history using the methods of intimidation and vandalism. Much of this involves distorting or dismantling actual history or often lying to replace it with a fabricated ideological structure that nourishes no one and helps no one but degrades our culture and civic life not to speak of history itself. By the way, the frequent claims that these histories or names are ‘denied’ or ‘noone knows them’ is nonsense: anyone and everyone who is interested knows this history. (Much of it appears for example in my book Jerusalem a history of the Holy Land.)
And this is relevant not just to those of us who write study or enjoy the history of the region but also to those who believe that cultural life and civic society is a right that must not be submitted to the aggressions and plots of loud well-organized much-indulged ideologues who take advantage of the freedoms of our society to undermine its principles and the very freedoms they are designed to guard.
Just as vital is a rule of history itself that concerrns the rise and fall of civilizations: the society that ceases to allow to free discussion of ideas and stops respecting and recognizing the value of scientific and historical sources and facts is a society that will fail.

[Dave Rich @daverich1]

Imagine if, during Black History Month, the British Museum advertised an event about ancient black civilisations in Africa, and it had to be postponed because racists planned to disrupt the event.

That’s what just happened, but to Jews. https://t.co/ucpFTfAGBZ

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

The Bund is fascinating and always interesting and it is great that there is a new book on this for people who have not heard of the party but this review like the Bund itself is a triumph of wish over reality, fantasy over history, ideology over facts.
The Bundists who werent killed by Hitler were shot by Stalin inc Liber Alter Erlich Feffer Markish Bergelson, some secretly, some in the Jewish AntiFascist Committee case, others in the Night of Murdered Poets 1952. Autonomous Jewish life in the Soviet Union was destroyed: Stalin arranged a faked carcrash to kill the famous Jewish actor Solomon Mikhoels. By 1952, he was planned in the Doctors Plot a killing purge of Soviet Jews.
It was a dangerous world and Stalin like all Marxists loathed socialists more than he hated imperialists and he also loathed nationalists: since Bundists were both Jewish and socialist, he regarded them with lethal malice.
It is odd that people on X keep saying HItler killed the Bundists and 'others went off to Stalin's Gulags.' No, most of the Bundist leaders never made it to the Gulags. They were shot in the back of the neck in Moscow or Kuybishev etc
The argument of the review and apparently the book is that this is a wonderful Jewish culture in p art because does not lead to a Jewish republic of Israel. But actually, the whole point is that the entire world, the universe, that created the Bund, was the realm of Eastern European and Russian Jewry that was entirely liquidated by Hitler killed in the gas chambers of the murder camps - but also effectively ended by the Bolshevik Revolution in Soviet Russia. Some Bundists acquiesed in the Bolshevik revolution; some were even excited by Stalin's creation in 1928 of a Bolshevik Zion, an Autonomous Jewish Oblast, Birobizhan, on the distant Chinese border.
The ex-Bundists who joined the JAC during WW2 were regarded by Stalin as dangerous Jewish nationalists if not American agents and were killed in waves. Of course a few Bundists made it to NYC and Israel. In other words, whatever else radical ideologues would like this story to prove, whatever trajectory they would prefer Jews to have taken, the Bundist experiment merely illustrates the exact opposite - that the European way was closed decisively and forever.
The Economist is generally delightful and essential reading but this review strangely erases the actual history to make the same point of the book. Given all of the above, it is just a little bit of a euphemism to say as it does: ‘Bund ceased operating in 1949'.

PS There are a lot of very good histories of the Bund that do not manipulate the material for the sake of presentday ideologies. Some of the history of Stalin and the Bund is in my 2003 book Stalin the Court of the Red Tsar.

[spiked @spikedonline]

If you call Jews ‘baby-killers’, and accuse them of dog-rape, and dream of the destruction of their nation, then I have some bad news for you – you are an anti-Semite, says Brendan O’Neill
https://t.co/FwRU6p7ch0

[Henshi @HenshiG]

In September 1943, Italy fell under German occupation. The SS hunted Jews for deportation to Auschwitz.

In Assisi, a 32-year-old Franciscan friar named Rufino Niccacci—peasant-born, Guardian of San Damiano Monastery, and someone who had never met a Jew—received an order from Bishop Giuseppe Nicolini.

“We are hiding Jews in every monastery and convent in Assisi.”

“If we’re caught, we’ll be shot,” Rufino replied.

“Yes,” the bishop said. “As many as can come.”

Rufino accepted.

What followed was one of the war’s most daring rescues. Jews fleeing from Rome, Florence, and the north poured into Assisi.

Rufino hid them across 26 monasteries and convents—including the Basilica of Saint Francis and ancient cloistered houses that had never admitted outsiders.

They disguised Jews as monks and nuns. Rufino taught them Latin prayers, how to walk, pray, and sit in chapel. Children memorized Catholic rites they didn’t understand.

A local souvenir shop owner, Luigi Brizi, and his son printed hundreds of flawless fake identity cards, claiming the bearers were from already-liberated southern Italy.

The SS raided repeatedly. They searched monasteries, convents, and homes. They found nothing.

For eight months, an entire town kept the secret. Not a single betrayal. A German colonel, devout Catholic Valentin Müller, was stationed there. He loved Assisi’s churches, attended Mass, and even toured holy sites with Rufino—never knowing (or never acknowledging) the hundreds of hidden Jews around him. He successfully petitioned to make Assisi a protected hospital town, removing combat troops.

Inside the convents, quiet miracles occurred. Jews observed Yom Kippur with the nuns’ blessing; the nuns prepared the breaking-fast meal. Rufino arranged Hebrew lessons for the children, ensuring they could still practice their faith while pretending to be Catholic.

“They were children of God,” he later said. “What else were we supposed to do?”

The network nearly broke in May 1944 when the Bishop’s secretary, Father Aldo Brunacci, was arrested and interrogated. He revealed nothing. Vatican pressure secured his release.

One month later, on June 16, 1944, the Allies liberated Assisi. All 300 hidden Jews walked out alive. Not one had been caught or deported.

They had been sheltered by hundreds of nuns, priests, and townspeople who knew the penalty: priests across Europe were being executed for less.

One informant could have doomed them all. It never happened.

After the war, Rufino returned to quiet Franciscan life. He founded a settlement for poor Christian and Jewish families, served as a parish priest, and avoided fame.

In 1974, Yad Vashem named him Righteous Among the Nations. He planted a tree in Israel and quietly reunited with one of the women he had saved.

He died in 1976 at 65, asking to be cremated in solidarity with Holocaust victims. The Church buried him traditionally. Today, few outside Assisi know his name.

Yet his legacy endures in the thousands of descendants of those 300 saved souls.

An entire town proved it was possible to choose humanity over fear.

No collaborators. No betrayals. No exceptions.

They did not yield.

May all of their memories be a blessing, especially Friar Rufino Nicacci.

[Deborah E. Lipstadt @deborahlipstadt]

Well said. Well argued. Opinion | Hatred of Israel and the Degradation of the West - The New York Times https://t.co/1cqNTRrtlP

[Anorak @TheAnorak]

One of these people failed in management:

[Anorak @TheAnorak]

@GoonerGirl1969 It’s sinking in

[Anorak @TheAnorak]

Gooners - the wait is over!

[Anorak @TheAnorak]

Unreal!!!!

[Anorak @TheAnorak]

@nicolelampert Thank god for the football! And Spurs down - the dream is on!