Shulamit Reinharz

I am writing to give you an idea, Hillary, for salvaging your connection with young women so that you can win the primaries in the many states ahead of you. But first, an anecdote that foreshadowed this controversy between the feminist generations. In September 2015, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute invited Letty Cottin Pogrebin to have a public conversation with Anita Hill, who, as you know, is a distinguished university professor at Brandeis. The audience included fabulous women in their 60’s and up, and terrific women of college age. By the time the conversation was over, the older women of the second feminist wave were astonished and the younger women of the third wave were insulted. Little did I realize that this event would portend the future and the primary elections.

The country of Yemen is regularly in the news as radical Islamists overwhelm the existing government. Although this has been the fate of various countries lately, Yemen provides an instructive case for those of us interested in Jewish survival. Scholars debate the exact origins of Jews in Yemen, but all agree that Jews have been a part of the Yemeni landscape since ancient times. Fast forward to the 20th century and what becomes important is that after World War I, when the British assumed control of the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Yemen actually became two countries – the Northern Kingdom of Yemen and the British Protectorate of Aden.

Amid the tragic, anti-Semitic events in Paris and all over Europe and Israel, I also see examples of something else, for which I have coined the term, “anti-anti-Semitism.” A recent example was the declaration by the French Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, that “if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.” Without Jews, France will lose Jewish creativity, intellectual productivity, arts and advances in all fields of endeavor. Even more recent was the historic step Canada took on January 28, 2015 in signing the Ottawa Protocol to Combat Anti-Semitism.

While I was in France in March a few weeks before Passover, a side trip to Pau turned into a life lesson on the relationship between remembering and memory. My trip started in Toulouse, where I was invited to give a talk at a conference marking the launch of a new organization devoted to the study of European Jewry. I knew that Toulouse was relatively close to Pau, the town associated with the concentration camp named “Gurs”.