For the vast majority of Americans, the potential collapse of our public health systems and predictions of economic Armageddon have left us frightened and uncertain. But there are some who have found a silver lining in our coronavirus fears: the conspiracy theorists, the racists and the anti-Semites.
Anti-Semitism is a culture of commonly held malicious assumptions and attitudes toward Jews and Judaism.
It wasn’t until I joined Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as an organizer in 2016 that I first experienced anti-Semitism.
What does Dr Ruth, a 91-year-old sex therapist who seems to have done it all have to say to a 22-year-old who grew up with little to no sexual taboos?
The level of shocking anti-Semitic violence in the United States declined in the first month of the year, but the aftershocks from Jersey City, Monsey and Brooklyn continued.
For two years, America did not have a point person dealing with global anti-Semitism, and much has changed in that time: In Eastern Europe, attempts to blur historical facts regarding the Holocaust have increased, especially in Poland, while Hungary experienced a government-backed anti-Semitic smear campaign against George Soros. Anti-Semitic incidents in Western Europe remain on the rise, and in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was widely denounced for failing to deal with anti-Semitism in its leadership and ranks. But the biggest shift in anti-Semitic trends did not happen in distant countries overseas. It occurred in the U.S., where white nationalist anti-Semitism reared its head, leading murderous attacks on synagogues, hateful Nazi marches and countless incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism. In addition, attacks on Jews in the New York area, many of them by African Americans, also saw an alarming surge.
In a world in which any Jew is a potential target of anti-Semitism, it is the most visible Jews who are most threatened. Jews with black hats, with tight curls hanging down below their ears and black coats and women wearing modest head coverings, they are the most vulnerable. Jews in synagogues. In Brooklyn, as in Jersey City and Monsey, violence against individuals in their Hasidic communities is almost an everyday event. If someone wants to do harm to a Jew, Hasidic Jews and their communities are and have become easy targets.
“There’s no such thing as fake news in a courtroom. There are facts—and we’re going to prove the facts.”
“The understandable desire to find Mengele alive and try him, presumably on television, contributed to a reluctance on the part of some to accept the fact of his death.”
An attack that lasted less than a minute on Thursday night marked a new phase in America’s standing in the Middle East. What was until that moment a tense standoff between the Trump administration and the Ayatollahs in Tehran turned into a rapidly escalating conflict, which could lead to anything from a cycle of attacks and counter-attacks to an all-out war.
If you want to understand the nature of resurgent anti-Semitism in the United States, as well as to confront the obstacles to combating it, you could hardly find a more useful guide then by examining the events of the last month of 2019.
I’ve worn a yarmulke in public every day of my adult life. While I can recall a few times when someone yelled at me or hurled an insult my way, these have generally been rare occurrences—except when I’m also holding my husband’s hand.
