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Q&A with Ayal Feinberg, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights at Gratz College
Ayal Feinberg
“There is no more important factor in explaining variation
in antisemitic hate crimes in this country than Israel being
engaged in a particularly violent military operation.”
Q: Talk about the four drivers you identify to explain the motivations and manifestations of antisemitic incidents: opportunity, distinguishability, stimuli, and organization.
A: We can think about opportunity as target group concentration, so places that have higher concentration of Jewish individuals. That can be a more static measure, like where people live, but it can also be related to any sort of group concentration, such as a rally for Israel.
When it comes to distinguishability, we’re talking about target group visibility. Not all Jewish communities are equally visible, especially to perpetrators, which is why in many cases Jews, as opposed to other minority groups, are targeted through vandalism; there’s an institutional focus more than an individual focus. Distinguishability applies to the fact that the Orthodox community, whose members are visibly identifiable as Jewish, has a higher likelihood of being targeted. It could also be a factor in a large gathering, where all of a sudden, individuals who we might not know are Jewish are now identifiable as Jewish.
Stimuli is any sort of event that increases target group salience—this can be at the geopolitical level, like the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, but it can also be things that are happening at the domestic level. For example, we see a correlation between the celebration of Jewish holidays and increased reporting of hate crimes.
And then lastly, organization. I utilized a variety of different measures here, looking at neo-Nazi groups, racist skinhead groups and several other group types. As we know from perpetrator statistics, these groups are frequently responsible for many of the bias incidents that take place. We often think of hate crimes as so-called crimes of passion, however a sizable number of perpetrators engage in serious planning and utilize group organization in order to commit acts of hate. We call some of these “message crimes,” where some of the value is that in concentrated communities, your crime is going to reverberate and have a larger effect with that community.
Q: You name poor economic conditions and Israeli conflict violence as two examples of stimuli. Can you explain how these operate?
A: There’s some limited evidence that the economy helps to explain variation in antisemitic attitudes and beliefs. But that doesn’t translate in my research into behavior. What we do see consistently is that when Israel is engaged in military operations that have significant casualties, there are real effects. In fact, there is no more important factor in explaining variation in antisemitic hate crimes in this country than Israel being engaged in a particularly violent military operation.
Q: Will you do an updated study on the correlation between a rise in antisemitic hate crimes and Israeli military activity after 2014, and especially after October 7?
A: The trend lines don’t change when the data is extended through 2020, and I’m currently working on doing updated analysis through 2023. It takes time for hate crime data to be reported, but I’ve evaluated bias incidents and other incident-level data we have from places like New York City, and my initial results absolutely hold.
Q: So, if someone sees a horrific image of an injured child in Gaza, how does that translate to perpetrating a crime against a Jewish person here in the United States, or even just yelling at someone on the street who they assume to be Jewish?
A: Talking about this at the socio-psychological level is a good place to start. So, if you see some sort of behavior that you vehemently disagree with, but you feel like you have no agency to change it, what do you do? (And let me be clear, I’m absolutely not justifying the perpetrators of bias incidents or hate crimes—I’m just trying to get inside their heads.) You see this horrific image and you ask, who is responsible for supporting this type of behavior that has led to this moral, ethical challenge that I’m confronted with? Well, you think, Jews in the United States care greatly about Israel as part of their identity, many lobby on behalf of Israel, so Jews are partly to blame. And then maybe you ask: How do I go about altering their behavior and altering the policy preferences of the country? Maybe you join a protest or you engage in a letter-writing campaign, you talk to your politicians. But in many cases, there’s no direct recourse to change the behavior that upsets you. And, frankly, you want to punish the group that you believe is responsible.
My colleague Dr. Jacob Scott Lewis at Washington State University and I ran a survey experiment back in 2022 where we evaluated the effect of exposure to news stories to see whether exposure affected the perpetrator group evenly. Study participants saw news stories with identical headlines, except the perpetrators changed: Israeli bombs destroyed a hospital and apartments in Gaza; Russians did the same in Mariupol, Ukraine; and Saudi Arabia in Sanaa, Yemen. Our main question was whether there’s something different about the way Jews in the United States are blamed for the actions of Israel, then let’s say Russian Americans are for the actions of Russia, or Muslim Americans are for the actions of Saudi Arabia or even ISIS.
In the study, American Jews were the only group that saw higher levels of reported blame post exposure than the control groups, so this notion of blame is something that’s specific to, at least in our survey experiment, Jews and Israel. So then we thought, okay, maybe we should also ask about the idea of a responsibility to speak up. Again, the only group that is seen as responsible to speak out are Jews.
THE WORD ON THE STREET
What We Need Is a Brazen Type of Love
by Rabbi Avram Mlotek
As I approached my son’s daycare on the Upper West Side, a man called out to me shouting, “Shalom!”
“Shalom,” I replied, making a peace sign, and continued walking.
“Stop the genocide!” he proceeded, and when I kept walking, he continued to shout louder and louder.
“Tell your prime minister!”
I didn’t tell him that as an American citizen I don’t vote in Israeli elections, but this man knew what he was really saying.
Jew, tell your prime minister.
As a rabbi who wears his kippah in public, I am no stranger to occasional harassment on the subway. Since the start of the Israeli-Hamas war, these encounters have increased in New York City.
At work, I was stopped by a private aide at a nursing home who asked me if I was “the Jewish rabbi who loves Israel,” and then berated me for not talking about how “Israel murders all the Palestinian babies.” When I engaged her on these comments, she denied Hamas’ butchery on October 7.
This kind of harassment should be unacceptable in the workplace and in the streets regardless of one’s political or religious affiliation.
Unfortunately, it is the type of language that often slides under the radar of those Jews who find their place among those chanting for Palestinian liberation. Indeed, Palestinians deserve liberation and Israelis deserve new political leadership, but there seems to be no room for nuance in the political warfare in the streets or online.
Surely, the Jewish and ethical response demands we mourn and grieve for every innocent life lost, especially children. Protests against the current Israeli government or protests that are humanitarian focused are understandable and important. However, whatever the outcome of this current conflict, will we be able to say definitively that Jews have a right to live without persecution and terror in their own ancestral homeland? Anything less is antisemitic. We might demand a cease-fire, but to align with those that want an end to the Jewish state fuels the fire of Jew hatred.
I know there are those in the Jewish community who point to certain concepts from the past such as the Bund, the Jewish labor movement of Eastern Europe, as a viable example of a Jewish anti-Zionist movement. The Yiddish term doikayt, “hereness,” expressed the idea that Jews had a right to live wherever they dwelled and has been adopted today by those opposed to the Jewish state. This idea, however, never came at the exclusion of living in Israel. Indeed, there were Bundists living in Israel. More important, these current voices often forget the solidarity the Bund extended to traditional Jews, especially in times of crisis.
In 1936, Bund leader Vladimir Kossovsky wrote an article in the Yiddish language daily Naye Folkstaytung. He noted that although the Bund rejected all religious ceremonies, it opposed the government-proposed prohibition against Jewish ritual slaughter because that proposed prohibition both stood in opposition to the economic interests of the Jewish population and played into the hands of antisemites.
Does standing in solidarity with those who shout “go back to Europe,” who paint swastikas, who seek the undoing of the Jewish state and the millions of residents who live there, with cries for Intifada not play into the hands of current antisemites?
To my progressive family: I stood and marched with you demanding justice, wearing my kippah, as we rallied for women and for Black lives and broke bread at Iftar dinners. I have officiated wedding ceremonies for queer and same-sex couples, striving to be an ally to all those in their unique religious homes. I mourn and grieve for the loss of all innocent lives including Palestinians. I want an end to this brutal war that leaves Palestinians and Israelis free of Hamas’s fundamentalism.
Where is the concern for the fact that amid this painful Middle Eastern backdrop, the Syrian refugee crisis remains the world’s largest? That gay life and Jewish life are illegal under Hamas rule? Or that it is still physically dangerous for kippah-wearing Jews like myself to enter Arab lands? The human heart must remain flexible enough to hold an array of sufferings.
Today, when antisemites on the left and right revel in the Jewish people’s infighting and imagined demise, we might remember the Bundist self-defense groups. These groups came into effect in Czarist Russia at the beginning of the 20th century to counter pogromists and defend Jews regardless of their observance levels or political persuasions. We need this brazen type of ahavas Yisroel, love of one’s fellow Jew, during such times of terror.
For now, I will continue to wear my kippah, especially my pride-filled rainbow one, as I walk the streets of our large New York City shtetl, even if it attracts hateful remarks. I just wish that it didn’t feel like the hate was so often coming from those who ought to know better, whose voices I recognize.
Avram Mlotek, a grandchild of Holocaust survivors and noted Yiddish culturalists, is a rabbi, cantor, social worker and writer in New York City.
SELECT INCIDENTS
United Kingdom, May 25: George Galloway’s Workers Party drops candidate who claimed on a video that a “coven of Jews” had seized America.
United States, May 25 : A 17-year-old and an 18-year-old carve swastikas into playground equipment in Elmhurst, IL.
United States, May 22: Pro-Palestinian activists at Drexel University and UC Santa Cruz want their school to cut all ties with Chabad and Hillel.
Belgium, May 17: Israeli tourist suffers broken jaw after being attacked by mob in Belgium.
READ FULL ANTISEMITISM MONITOR REPORT
OPINION EXCERPT
Silencing Criticism in the Name of Antisemitism Awareness
by Omer Bartov
[F]or many years now, consecutive Netanyahu governments have pushed other countries to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism and to make it the law of the land. The goal of this endeavor is simple—namely, it strives to shut down, indeed criminalize, criticism of clearly indefensible Israeli policies whose ultimate objective is settlement and annexation of the occupied territories and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.
The other effect of Israel’s attempt to ram the IHRA definition down the throats of other governments is a predilection to collaborate with right-wing regimes or parties, which could not care less about antisemitism or which have antisemitic tendencies themselves. It is for this reason that Netanyahu formed close connections with such leaders as Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping and, most relevant to the current moment, has for years leaned on support from the most Trumpist elements of the Republican Party. To be sure, Orbán, Putin and Trump share the authoritarian tendencies of Netanyahu and his supporters. Xi and Modi have developed their own types of ethno-nationalism in line with the ethno-nationalist tendencies of Israel’s increasingly extremist right.
In other words, defining criticism of Israel as antisemitic is the best way to help the current Israeli leadership practice unchallenged extremist, racist policies. But it is also a convenient way to make extremist, bigoted, racist and, yes, also antisemitic American and European leaders look squeaky clean. Describing liberal and tolerant opinion, concern with human rights and equality, and opposition to oppression and displacement as antisemitic legitimizes those who would like to practice precisely those very same policies against their own minorities, opponents and critics. This is what the weaponization of antisemitism means—using allegations of antisemitism to practice intolerance and authoritarianism.
Israel Today: A Wide-Open Conversation
with Yossi Klein Halevi and Amy E. Schwartz
“I moved to Israel in 1982, and my position has been fairly constant since then—which is that a Palestinian state, on the one hand, is an existential need for Israel, but it’s also an existential threat. October 7 has reinforced both of those conclusions.
Ideologically, I remain a centrist, which means I’m at that very difficult meeting point between recognizing the truth of the left’s position and the truth of the right’s position. And if you push me—Well, make up your mind—I would say that I’m a little bit more afraid of the absence of a two-state solution than I am of the creation of a two-state solution.”
—Yossi Klein Halevi, author of The New York Times bestseller Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor
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