The crisis of anti-Semitic violence
Violence between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East is often accompanied by spikes in anti-Semitic activity in the United States, but what’s happened over the last week or so has been different.
As Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, put it to me, Jewish organizations are somewhat inured to, say, pro-Palestinian graffiti on a synagogue following a protest. What’s new, and more reminiscent of the sort of anti-Semitic aggression common in Europe, is flagrant public assaults on Jews — sometimes in broad daylight — motivated by anti-Zionism.
In Los Angeles, for example, a caravan waving Palestinian flags stopped near a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood, where men got out and attacked diners sitting outside. A witness recalled them asking, “Who’s Jewish?” In New York, a 29-year-old Jewish man on his way to a pro-Israel rally was beaten and pepper-sprayed by a group of men hurling anti-Semitic slurs. In southern Florida, men in an S.U.V. reportedly pelted a visiting Jewish family with garbage and shouted: “Free Palestine” and “We’re going to rape your daughter. We’re going to rape your wife.”
What’s distinct about these attacks, said Greenblatt, is “the brazenness and the boldness.”
These apparent hate crimes are, first and foremost, a catastrophe for Jewish people in the United States, who’ve just endured four years of spiking anti-Semitism that started around the time Republicans nominated Donald Trump in 2016. “It feels like it’s a new front opening up against the American Jewish community,” said Greenblatt.
But this violence also threatens to undermine progress that’s been made in getting American politicians to take Palestinian rights more seriously. Right-wing Zionists and anti-Semitic anti-Zionists have something fundamental in common: Both conflate the Jewish people with the Israeli state. Israel’s government and its American allies benefit when they can shut down criticism of the country as anti-Semitic. [Continue reading…]