Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Last week I wrote about “The New Blood Libel,” a wave of anti-semitic mythography following the election of Donald Trump. Earlier in the week, bomb threats closed Jewish Community Centers across the Eastern seaboard. I’m afraid it’s going to get worse. Meanwhile, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, an Orthodox Jew, is rising in the ranks of …
I have a new piece at Pacific Standard, my first column for them since signing on as a regular contributor. It’s called, “The New Blood Libel.” It’s not the piece I expected to be writing. I thought I’d write first about DeVos and disability education under Trump, or maybe healthcare and mortal risks to vulnerable …
Dylan Roof, the murderer of 9 black people in South Carolina, rejected a psychiatric evaluation and mental health defense because psychology is a “Jewish invention.” It’s an important example of the way that hatreds intersect. Obviously, his hatreds manifested in acts of violence against black worshipers in church. He didn’t, say, attack a synagogue. But …
3) We know that Breitbart ran a story on the cancellation of A Christmas Carol, blaming the family, with a nativity picture in a church. pic.twitter.com/NsxrkSMO2Y — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 23, 2016 A few days ago, would-be theocrat Todd Starnes, a Fox News Christianist pundit, published and performed an inflammatory segment about a school …
Apparently anti-semites use (((name))) to indicate to their friends that someone is a Jew who needs to be attacked on social media, which – as this article explains – is hard for the non-initiated to track. It’s clever and ugly. I removed links in the quote below, as I don’t want you accidentally clicking over. …
Medieval art historian Asa Mittman has a new piece in The Conversation on the survival of the Blood Libel myth. He talks about the medieval origins and dissemination of the myth that Jews ritually murder Christian children and use their blood to make their Matzoh (note: they/we don’t. They/we never did). He called it a …
Crucifixion of William of Norwich, Holy Trinity church, Loddon, Norfolk As a historian, I work on narrative, memory, and myth. I’m interested in how people respond to events by creating new stories or re-interpreting old ones, applying a narrative lens to the world around them. I have a specific focus on the 13th-century Mediterranean, but I …