Free Republic

While I was visiting Germany over the long weekend, this stomach-turning story broke and made a bit of a splash, and understandably so.  The German government's top official on combating anti-semitism has recommended that Jews take steps to hide their religious and ethnic heritage while in public, in order to prevent hate crimes and incidents against them.  This would be a stunning admonition coming from any senior figure in Berlin, but it's particularly galling and alarming coming from the man explicitly charged with fighting anti-Jewish bigotry in a nation with an exceptionally dark history on the subject.  Against this grisly...

A leading Jewish authority in Marseille, southern France, asked fellow Jews on Tuesday to refrain from wearing their traditional skullcap to stay safe after a machete-wielding teen attacked a Jewish teacher. Zvi Ammar, head of the Israelite Consistory of Marseille, said he is asking Jews to go without the kippa "until better days". His call came a day after a 15-year-old Turkish Kurd attacked and wounded a Jewish teacher on a street in Marseille

The chief rabbi of the French city of Toulouse, Harold Avraham Weill, was ordered Sunday to remove his kippa inside a polling station before voting in the city's local elections. The demand was made by a polling clerk from the Left Front coalition, according to a report by Russian news site Russia Today. France prohibits wearing religious symbols, such as crucifixes, Jewish skullcaps and Muslim headscarves, in state schools. However, the law does not apply in cases in which schools are used as polling stations during the Election Day. The incident on Sunday marked the first time the law was...