L'acteur Michael Douglas confronté à l'antisémitisme en Europe

Dylan, 12 ans, le fils de Michael Douglas et Catherine Zeta-Jones a fait l'objet d'insultes antisémites en 2014 pendant que la famille passait des vacances dans le sud de l'Europe.  En Europe, on aurait dit que l'enfant exagère et que l'auteur des insultes le fait par ignorance ou par bêtise.  Mais Michael Douglas ne s'est pas tu.  Il a raconté la scène. Le père de Michael Douglas, le grand acteur américain Kirk Douglas, est juif, mais ni sa mère ni sa femme ne le sont pas.  Cependant, son fils, grâce à ses amis s'est rapproché du judaïsme et se considère juif ("Several years ago Dylan, through his friends, developed a deep connection to Judaism, and when he started going to Hebrew school and studying for his bar mitzvah, I began to reconnect with the religion of my father.").

Via Israelly Cool

Hollywood actor and part-Jew Michael Douglas has written an op-ed in the LA Times after his son suffered antisemitic abuse in Europe last year.

Los Angeles Times éditorial par Michael Douglas:

Last summer our family went to Southern Europe on holiday. During our stay at a hotel, our son Dylan went to the swimming pool. A short time later he came running back to the room, upset. A man at the pool had started hurling insults at him


My first instinct was to ask, “Were you misbehaving?”

“No,” Dylan told me through his tears.

I stared at him. And suddenly I had an awful realization of what might have caused the man’s outrage: Dylan was wearing a Star of David.

After calming him down, I went to the pool and asked the attendants to point out the man who had yelled at him. We talked. It was not a pleasant discussion. Afterward, I sat down with my son and said: “Dylan, you just had your first taste of anti-Semitism.”

In my opinion there are three reasons anti-Semitism is appearing now with renewed vigilance.

The first is that historically, it always grows more virulent whenever and wherever the economy is bad. In a time when income disparity is growing, when hundreds of millions of people live in abject poverty, some find Jews to be a convenient scapegoat rather than looking at the real source of their problems.

If we confront anti-Semitism … if we combat it individually and as a society, and use whatever platform we have to denounce it, we can stop the spread of this madness.

A second root cause of anti-Semitism derives from an irrational and misplaced hatred of Israel. Far too many people see Israel as an apartheid state and blame the people of an entire religion for what, in truth, are internal national-policy decisions. Does anyone really believe that the innocent victims in that kosher shop in Paris and at that bar mitzvah in Denmark had anything to do with Israeli-Palestinian policies or the building of settlements 2,000 miles away?  SUITE.