Entries by Howard Rotberg

Sometimes It Takes a Few Pogroms

Sometimes it takes a few pogroms to drive home the solution, inducing Diaspora Jews to make Aliyah as their forebears left Europe. Merriam-Webster defines “pogrom” as “an organized massacre of helpless people – specifically such a massacre of Jews.” According to theOxford English Dictionary, OED), the word pogrom entered English from Yiddish which borrowed it from Russian. The OED gives two […]

Racism and Genocidal Racism

Thane Rosenbaum, writing in Jewish Journal, on June 7, 2021, makes an important point: “The apparent unwillingness, or cowardice, of many American Jews to identify with the existential dilemma of Israelis—and its spillover effect on Jews walking on American or European streets—is appalling. The cautionary, parallel tale of the cosmopolitan Jews of 1930s Berlin and Vienna, […]

The Western cultural Stockholm Syndrome

Are US leftists, so enamored of the supposed victims of racism, creating an antisemitic Stockholm Syndrome of “domestic terrorists”? I spend a lot of time reading about and writing about worrisome cultural trends in what have traditionally been the liberal democracies of the West, including America, Canada, Australia, Israel and a weakening Europe. I am […]

THE PROBLEM WITH MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Is The Stream Being Poisoned?

I understand the concern of many in traditional newspaper journalism about the unfair advantage that social media has when earning advertising revenue from free content generated by traditional media which has to pay its journalists. However, the mainstream media needs to look in the mirror to see if perhaps its bias and political and cultural positions […]

From Cancel Culture to Political Exterminatism

Falsely accused racists are the new Jews. Anything is justified against them. How long till political exterminationism gets physical? “Exterminationism” is generally defined as genocide of an ethnic or religious group. Accordingly, I use the term political exterminationism to connote a wish or a course of action to destroy or exterminate one’s political enemies. This seldom involves […]

HONOR, RESPECT, SUBMISSION: The Contemporary Moral Confusion

The Macmillan Dictionary defines the verb to “honor” (spelled “honour” in Britain and Canada) as “to show your respect or admiration for someone, especially by giving them a prize or title, or by praising them publicly.” And so, George Floyd, whose adult life was spent in years of crime and jail sentences and in impregnating and then abandoning […]

Son of a Slave

Some folks know me as a retired lawyer, having been very involved in my community. Other folks may know me for my conversions of unwanted heritage buildings into affordable rental housing for modest income working people, in various cities – which was actual “social justice” work, rather than the “virtue-signalling” with other people’s money which seems […]