That was the half-year that was, on The Scroll Plus the flotilla to take to the air, and more in the news A little bit of Prague for your collection of whimsical trinkets  | |  When Yale shuttered its Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism last month, critics saw anti-Israel political correctness. But the project may simply have been a casualty of the university's global ambitions. Charles Small remembers the precise moment when the fate of his Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, known by its acronym YIISA and pronounced "yeesa," was sealed. On August 23 last year, he was preparing to give the welcoming address at the largest academic conference ever convened on the subject of anti-Semitism, a conference he had meticulously planned for over a year. Some 500 people were in the audience to attend the three-day event, "Global Anti-Semitism: A Crisis of Modernity," including more than 100 academics from 18 countries working in 20 academic disciplines. While the conference featured panels like "Christianity and Antisemitism" and "Law, Modernity and Antisemitism," the clear thrust of the confab was to shine a light on contemporary Islamic anti-Semitism, with a particular focus on the declared enemies of the State of Israel. Small, a lecturer at Yale, was sitting between his parents, who had traveled from Montreal to witness their son's crowning professional achievement. Before he rose to speak, Small's mother turned to him. "Charles, Yale must be so proud of you," she said. "You can stay here the rest of your career." More  | In The Bible Now, two scholars look for modern answers to pressing political questions—from gay marriage to capital punishment—in the Bible. The problem is that such an exercise is unnecessary. More |  | Playing music: Books on too-expensive concert tickets, the too-Jewish-sounding Simon and Garfunkel, and the just-Jewish-enough Louis Armstrong More | |
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