Month: May 2024

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. He is the author or editor of 36 books, including six about antisemitism. Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles was published this April. He was president of the national AAUP from 2006-2012.

Antisemitism has been part of Judeo-Chrisitan-Islamic culture for centuries, taking various forms and expressions. After its most horrendous and destructive outburst in the 20th-century Holocaust, it gave rise to the collective determination: “Never Again!” Yet recent and current genocidal outcries against Israel and the Jews testify to the enduring power and relentlessness of antisemitism.

On the night of Monday to Tuesday, the Wall of the Righteous, located at the Shoah Memorial in the 4th arrondissement of Paris, was tagged with red hands. This despicable anti-Semitic act refers to the lynching, immortalized by a photograph that has remained famous, showing a Palestinian, brandishing his bloodied hands following the lynching of two Israeli soldiers murdered and dismembered on October 12, 2000, in Ramallah, by a group of Palestinians.

This document that expresses concern about the rise of antisemitism in German has been signed by over 300 academics. The English text follows the German.