In the 1997 film Face/Off, Cage and Travolta swap faces. Welcome to L.A. 2017, where parents swap races. Folks often ask me how I came to attend an all-black high school. Alexander Hamilton High (“Hami”) was supposed to draw evenly from L.A.’s white/Jewish Westside, and the area east of ...

Former president Jimmy Carter is seen by some, rightly or wrongly, as someone who has never been terribly fond of Jews. I would argue that even if a case can be made that Carter has a beef against living Jews, he’s pretty enamored of dead ones. After all, he’s the president who launched the ...

The German word “Vernichtungskrieg” (“extermination war”) refers to a war in which there can be no negotiated peace, no truce, no détente. One side wants the other side to completely cease to exist. The best way to wage an extermination war is to convince yourself that your enemy is really ...

Are We All Nazis? is a 1978 book written by psychologist Hans Askenasy. The title is a little misleading. The book isn’t about whether all humans secretly harbor a desire to stuff Jews into concentration camps. Rather, Askenasy explores the implications of the infamous “Milgram experiment” at ...

Move over, Muhammad; you’re no longer the only sacred icon that can’t be drawn as a cartoon. Black people are now on the small and exclusive list of things that will spark an instantaneous jihad if sketched by an artist. And the ground zero for black cartoon proscription? Chicago, a city in ...

I picked a bad day to talk to Dick Tofel. Although, to be fair, I’m not certain there’s ever a good day to talk to Dick Tofel. But without question, last Friday was a bad day for such a conversation. It was one hundred degrees in the shade, the peak of L.A.’s worst heat wave in years, so I ...

Former Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy is literally Mr. Peace. He founded the Washington Peace Center in D.C., and he’s taught classes on peace and nonviolence at Georgetown University, American University, and the University of Maryland. After 9/11, he wrote an op-ed for the L.A. Times ...

So many white “dindus.” Last week, in the wake of the car-ramming incident at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, hundreds of alt-rightists and white nationalists decided to drop the bravado and go all “dindu nuffin.” “Antifa started pickin’ on us and we wuzn’t even doin’ ...

There’s an old joke about a young comedian making his first appearance at a club in the Catskills. The opening act is a legendary old Borscht Belt comic, whose routine consists entirely of calling out numbers. “17…32…8.” And with every number, the audience responds with uproarious ...

Professor Mohammed Abed is a man with a message: Genocide has gotten a bum rap. Sure, genocide can be bad, but in a pinch, genocide might just be your best friend…especially if you’re a “person of color.” Indeed, Abed reasons, it’s sometimes “morally required” to commit genocide, ...