May 2024

Westerns are arguably the most popular films ever made and have taken a variety of forms—traditional (“High Noon,” “Shane,”), singing-cowboy movies (Gene Autry and Roy Rogers), B-westerns (Randolph Scott, Audie Murphy), even sci-fi space westerns (Han Solo and Chewbaca in “Star Wars”).

On May 1, the US House of Representatives passed the fraudulently titled “Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2023.” It’s not yet law, pending Senate passage and a presidential signature, but the lopsided House vote (320 to 91) should worry all Americans, including the country’s 7.6 million Jews.In theory, the bill merely clarifies how the US Department of Education should interpret Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin by “federally funded programs,” including most colleges and universities.In fact, however, the bill -- by adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism” -- reveals itself as just another underhanded attempt to suppress freedom of speech by placing new conditions on federal funding.The bill expressly includes “the ‘[c]ontemporary examples of antisemitism’ identified in the IHRA definition” in its own definition of antisemitism.Those examples include “[d]enying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” as well as “[d]rawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”“Jews” (who, by the way, are not the only “semites”) and “Israel” are two entirely different things.Jews are an ethnic group bound together partly by ancestry and partly by ancestral religious beliefs.Israel is a Middle Eastern nation-state which clearly, unambiguously, and openly bases itself on a supremacist ideology (Zionism) exploiting that ethnic bond.