Author: Jonathan S. Tobin /JNS.org

Being an aide to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as one of his companions in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968—the day the leader of the civil-rights movement was shot and killed—conferred a certain status on Rev. Jesse Jackson that amounted to secular sainthood. Parlaying that clout into being the first serious African-American candidate to run for president—with his two ultimately unsuccessful, but impactful, campaigns for the Democratic Party nomination in 1984 and 1988—gave him a place in history that nothing else he did or said could take away. Those résumé items are the main reasons why Jackson,…

OPINION: Jonathan S. Tobin What does it say about a country where some rudimentary knowledge about the Holocaust is commonplace, but where misleading analogies about it are a routine occurrence in public discourse? You can ask the same question about the use of the most important term to come out of the Shoah. The word “genocide” was coined in its aftermath to describe the systematic mass slaughter aimed at the extermination of a single people. But in a country where it is estimated that about three-quarters of American K-12 students get lessons on the murder of 6 million Jews by the German…