Our reaction to the events in Pittsburgh began with mourning for the victims. From mourning we moved to the legitimate fear that comes from living in a nation where easily procured weapons of mass death terrorize people of color, Muslims, LGBTQ people and—as always—Jews.
Seriously, for a White House struggling to shake off criticism of being too hospitable to extremists and anti-Semites on the margins of its support base, the Trump administration’s reluctance to fill the of anti-Semitism envoy is starting to raise concerns.
The Anti-Semitism Monitor reports anti-Semitic incidents around the world by country and date on a weekly basis.
In 2014, four people were shot to death at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium, two years after the killings of four Jews, including three children, at the Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse in the south of France. These tragedies and others like them made it clear that anti-Semitism, that pernicious prejudice, was alive and well.
The news from Central Europe seems to be uniformly bad: democracy threatened, rule of law subverted, historical revisionism triumphant. It all carries a nasty 1930s flavor. To Western readers, moreover, most of that news seems to come from Budapest and Warsaw. We don’t hear much from such places as Bratislava, Bucharest or Ljubljana—and no news is good news, right? Look again.
This is the new normal for many members of the Pittsburgh Jewish community: splitting their time between mourning the dead and protesting the hate that brought about the tragedy.
After the horrific attack this past Shabbat at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in which 11 of our brothers and sisters were brutally murdered, we can’t help but be shaken and concerned for the America we have come to know and love.
For the foreseeable future, for the rest of my lifetime, our synagogues, our day schools and our community centers will be less accessible, less open to world than in the past.
People living in a weak democracy know too well that dangerous rhetoric leads to dangerous consequences.
