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Sundown: Holocaust Museum Shooter May Get Death

Canada’s Israel boycott, Morocco’s Shoah recognition

by
Marc Tracy
July 29, 2009

• The Holocaust Museum shooter, James von Brunn, was indicted for first-degree murder, and is therefore eligible for the death penalty. [Washington Post]
• Canada’s largest Protestant sect, the United Church of Canada, plans to call for a “comprehensive boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions.” Canadian Jewish groups have called this an “obscene gesture.” [JTA]
• The King of Morocco formally acknowledged the Holocaust, and said it was “tragic”. One prominent activist called it the first instance of an Arab head of state taking “such a clear stand on the Shoah.” [Capital J]
• CBS News Anchor Katie Couric revealed that in 2000 Michael Jackson used the prominent author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach as a conduit to ask Couric out on a date. [Gawker]
• Novelist Michael Chabon, who most recently re-imagined a post-WWII Jewish state in Sitka, Alaska in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, refers to the “fundamental brutality” of circumcision in his forthcoming memoir. (His two sons were circumcised, but with anesthetic, he says.) [Page Six]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.