The growing violence in New York and the dangers of politicizing the fight against anti-Semitism. C Follow Jan 3 · Unlisted

Members of the Jewish community gather outside the home of rabbi Chaim Rottenberg in Monsey, N.Y., Dec. 29, 2019, after an attack that took place earlier outside the rabbi’s home during Hanukkah. Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty Images

On Saturday night, December 28, 2019, in Monsey, New York, Grafton Thomas invaded the home of a Hasidic Rabbi where a Hanukkah party was underway and began stabbing the guests with a machete. Five people were wounded, two of whom were hospitalized in critical condition. The attacker then went on to continue his rampage in a nearby synagogue, but found it closed. He was later arrested. Days before carrying out the attack, Thomas had searched online for “Why did Hitler hate Jews?”, “German Jewish temples near me” and “Zionist temples.”

This is the ninth anti-Semitic attack in just one week in New York City. For example, on Christmas day, a man punched and kicked a 65-year-old Orthodox Jew in midtown Manhattan while yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Two days later, in Brooklyn, a woman was arrested for slapping three girls and barking “F- -k you, Jews!” at them. Later that week, a visibly Jewish woman was walking with her 3-year-old son in Gravesend, Brooklyn, when she was approached by another woman who told her “you filthy Jew. Your end is coming to you”. On December 18, an Israeli student was physically and verbally attacked on the New York City subway by another passenger who also praised the deadly shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City and said that it was a shame it was not all Jews who were killed. The victim recorded the incident. The violence did not start in December: on May 1, in Crown Heights, a Hispanic man verbally attacked two Jewish girls, and then shouted anti-Semitic slurs and spat in the face of the man who tried to stop him. Everything was recorded.

As compared to 2019, Anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York City have increased by 90%, according to the city’s Police Department. And these numbers are from June, well before this late rash of violence that left an average of one attack per day in December. While many of the reported crimes are acts of vandalism, such as Nazi graffiti sprayed on memorials, synagogues and cemeteries, in recent months there has been an alarming increase in violent incidents, especially against Hasidic men, in neighborhoods with a large Jewish population such as Boro Park, Williamsburg and Crown Heights.

According to the FBI, since 1995 Jews have been the victims of more religiously motivated hate crimes than any other group. The source of this violence is diverse: although white supremacists were responsible for the most violent attacks in the past two years, such as the Tree of Life massacre, the deadliest on the Jewish community in U.S. history, most of those committed in New York and that of Jersey City, have been perpetrated by African Americans or members of other racial minorities. Anti-Semitism also grows at an alarming rate on U.S. college campuses, especially at the hands of students who support the BDS or other anti-Zionist movements.

However, what has been particularly evident after last month’s anti-Semitic spree in New York is that part of the American progressive movement finds it extremely difficult to deal with this diversity of aggressors: when anti-Semitism does not come from white supremacists or another far-right group, many liberals fail to comprehend it or to give it the attention it deserves. The fact that most of these late attacks have been perpetrated by ethnic minorities made some left-wing activists try to downplay the problem, shift blame and even find excuses for it.

For example, last June, Mayor Bill de Blasio, when asked about the mentioned 90% increase in hate crimes against Jews in his city, said that anti-Semitism was a “right-wing movement” and rejected the idea that the left played any role in it despite the fact that none of the referred crimes had been committed by someone associated with the right.

On the other hand, in an October 2018 article for the New York Times, Ginia Bellafante recognized that anti-Semitism in New York is usually overlooked and not considered a serious issue because it does not fit the progressive narrative since virtually none of the aggressors is associated with the far right. The same article points out that in the city, at that time, attacks motivated by bias against Jews had outnumbered those targeted at blacks by a factor of four and those aimed at transgender people by a factor of twenty. Nationwide figures are not much better: according to FBI data from 2018, Jews are 2.7 and 2.2 times more likely to suffer a hate crime in the United States than African-Americans and Muslims respectively. However, anti-Semitic attacks tend to receive much less coverage and media attention than those committed against the other groups.

Moreover, in its Editorial against Donald Trump’s executive order to define Judaism as a people and not just as a religion, the New York Times itself fully acknowledge anti-Semitism exists on college campuses, that it is connected with the BDS and that Trump’s decision attempts to fight that, but at the same time it concludes that the President is wrong because real anti-Semitism comes from white supremacists. In other words, it seems that it is wrong to focus on the types of anti-Semitism attributable to the Left because “the real one” is that related to Trump, the Right and white supremacism.

In fact, when hate towards Jews comes from liberals or groups backed by liberalism, many so called “anti-racist” activists end up even blaming the victims. For example, after Jersey City shooting, an article published on The New Yorker suggested that an “influx of Hasidic residents” in the neighborhood spurred the assailants “to embark on a shooting spree”. Furthermore, neighbors who were interviewed nearby the kosher deli where the attack took place voiced opinions like “if they (the Jews) ain’t come to Jersey City, this s- -t would never go on” and “get the damn Jews the f- -k out of here” among other things.

Neighbors blame Jews for the attack committed against them in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Comments of this kind also flooded social media, where Hasidic Jews were accused of triggering racial tensions with the local African-American community by “invading” the city and thereby gentrifying the neighborhood. Even a Jersey City Board of Education member, Joan Terrell-Paige, justified the attack on a Facebook post where she referred to Jewish people as “brutes” who bought too many houses in the area. She also asked whether the assailants, who were both killed in the attack, were trying to send a “message”. Terrell-Paige is facing calls to resign from Gov. Phil Murphy and the city’s mayor, but she refuses to even apologize.

Comments on social media blaming Orthodox Jews of “invading” Jersey City.

Facebook post by Jersey City Board of Education member Joan Terrell-Paige blaming the kosher deli shooting on Jews, calling them “brutes.”

On the other hand, after it was publicly known that the machete-wielding madman in the Monsey Hanukkah attack was again African-American, left-wing activists rushed to Twitter to suggest that the situation was “complicated” and that even if “nobody deserves to be attacked”, Hasidic Jews “don’t assimilate”, “have lots of kids and live off of welfare” and “are racist and very capitalist”. Others concluded that that the real problem was white supremacism.

“I love Jews BUT the Hasidim have lots of kids and live off the taxpayers’ money”

“I don’t excuse the attack BUT it is complicated”

“Nobody deserves to be attacked BUT Orthodox Jews don’t assimilate, don’t pay taxes and create no-go s**tholes”

“Orthodox Jews are racist and very capitalist”

“It’s massively complicated, let’s better talk about white supremacism”

Some went even further: after De Blasio’s decision to up the police presence in neighborhoods with large Jewish communities in the face of the rash of anti-Semitic attacks, prominent progressive activists complained because, they argued, cops make people of color uncomfortable. In other words, people of color, the group to which most of the anti-Semitic attackers in the city belong, shouldn’t be put through the ordeal of increased police presence in Crown Heights because of these pesky Jews who need protection. It seems that some liberals are more concerned with the “optics” of an unfortunate but necessary increase in law enforcement than they are with the very real cost of ignoring the problem.

Complaints over De Blasio’s decision to up the police presence in neighborhoods with large Jewish communities

Same as previous

Same as previous

This phenomenon is not exclusive to the United States. In France, for example, the media, justice officials, politicians and even representatives of French Jewry have silenced and excused numerous anti-Semitic attacks when they were committed by Muslims. Shmuel Trigano, a prominent scholar of French anti-Semitism, wrote that between 2000 and 2002, more than 500 of these cases were kept silent and, for a more recent example, French media refused to cover the murder of Sarah Halimi by a Muslim migrant in April 2017 for weeks because France was then in the middle of a presidential campaign and it was feared that the story could strengthen Islamophobic candidate Marine Le Pen. A couple of weeks ago, Kobili Traoré, Halimi’s killer, was confined to a mental institution because a French court ruled that he can’t be held criminally responsible as he was in a “psychotic state from marijuana use” (sic). It is well to remember that Traoré stormed his victim’s home shouting “Allahu Akbar”, recited verses from the Qur’an while savagely beating her to death, and then threw her body from a balcony into a courtyard three floors below.

Additionally, in Sweden, a study from 2013 showed that 51 percent of anti-Semitic incidents were attributed to Muslim extremists, 25 percent were perpetrated by left-wing extremists and only 5 percent were carried out by right-wing extremists. However, while Swedish politicians have no problem condemning anti-Semitism carried out by right-wingers, hesitate tremendously to speak out against hate crimes committed by members of another minority group in a country that prides itself on welcoming minorities and immigrants. The fear of being accused of intolerance has paralyzed Sweden’s leaders from properly addressing hatred of Jews and many even end up using Israel as a convenient boogeyman to explain violence. For example, after the November 2015 Paris attacks, the then Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom said that European Muslims, like Palestinians, radicalized because “they see that there isn’t a future, so they resort to violence”.

To understand why part of the Left is paralyzed and adrift when Jews are attacked by other minorities and not by old-school Nazis, it is necessary to understand the big idea of today’s progressive left: intersectionality. In theory, it’s the notion that every form of social oppression is linked to every other social oppression, but in practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history. This way, intersectionality creates a Manichaean vision of the world, in which it is divided between “us” and “them”, oppressors and victims.

Given this hierarchy, one might imagine that the Jewish people, one of the most persecuted peoples in history -if not the most-, should be considered as victims. Not quite. Jews are increasingly seen by the left as “white”, “privileged”, “capitalists” and, due to their support of Israel, “colonizers”, so they fall into the category of “oppressors” This is crucial because for those committed to an intersectional view of the world, nothing of what those who are branded as “oppressors” ever do will be acceptable and everything done by or in the name of those labeled as “oppressed” will be justifiable. Thereby, from this perspective, the rights of the LGBT community are respected in Israel only to “pinkwash” the oppression against the Palestinians while Palestinian terrorism is considered “resistance” against the “occupation”. In the same way, if African Americans or other minorities attack Jews, it is because capitalist Hasidim invade their neighborhoods, buy too many homes and make house prices skyrocket or because Jews are training the police to brutalize people of color.

In this context, intersectional progressives find it extremely difficult to understand everything that doesn’t fit into that dichotomous and simplistic conception of the world, in which the good guys and the bad guys are sharply defined and perfectly identifiable in each scenario; what happens when one of the “good guys” attacks one of the “bad guys”? Or when the “good guys” kill each other? Whose fault is it? Who or what should be blamed? For example, Representative Rashida Tlaib -with a juicy anti-Semitic record herself- found herself in this dilemma: she initially thought that white supremacists had been behind the Jersey City shooting, so, since the crime fit perfectly in the intersectional narrative where white people are the worst of all and a threat to all minorities, she rushed to Twitter and wrote “white supremacy kills”. When Tlaib finally learned that the murderer had actually been an African-American man, she deleted her tweet and went silent for several hours until she finally sent another message where she made a more general condemnation of hate in the United States.

Rashida Tlaib deleted tweet blaming ‘white supremacy’ for Jersey City shooting.

Another example of this logic can be found in this article published on The Daily Beast, where Jay Michaelson argues that while it is true that most of the recent New York-area attacks have been carried out by people of color who believe in conspiracy theories similar to those of the nationalist right, it is “misleading” to consider them as similar phenomena because the socio-economic context and power relations between aggressors and victims are very different. He concludes by blaming Donald Trump for all the violence.

To sum up: to the intersectional left, Jews are more privileged than African-Americans, Muslims, Hispanics and Palestinians. Therefore, all violence committed against them by or in the name of said groups is somehow justifiable, not so serious, or even deserved. Real anti-Semitism, they argue, the kind we should be concerned about, is that committed by members of a more privileged category than Jews, that is, non-Jewish white people. Thus, the only types of violence that are deemed important by intersectionalists are those where the aggressor ranks higher than the victim in the intersectional scale. When this is not the case, “it is complicated”.

Jew-hatred is not associated exclusively with any particular ideology and should never be treated as if it was: nothing has done more harm to the global fight against anti-Semitism than the repeated attempts to pin it on a political party. Partisan attempts to retcon bigotry from their history and put all the blame squarely on the other side (“anti-Semitism is strictly a right-wing movement”, “real anti-Semitism comes from white supremacists”) are nothing less than a refusal to acknowledge their own side’s capacity for anti-Jewish prejudice.

This of course is not exclusive to the left: last April, Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, said nowhere less than in Yad Vashem that “Nazism was a leftist movement” while Donald Trump suggested in August that Jewish Americans who vote for the Democratic Party show “either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty”. Furthermore, the Israeli right is rightfully and vocally concerned with the growing anti-Semitism among the American and the European left but at the same time is completely silent about that of the Hungarian or Polish right, countries with which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has forged an alliance. Making anti-Semitism a partisan issue provokes that many will only condemn it when committed by rival political actors and turn a blind eye to it when perpetrated by their own.

Anti-Semitism has existed for thousands of years, well before the modern left-right political spectrum system. It infected everyone from Hitler to Stalin. From Linda Sarsour to David Duke. From Jeremy Corbyn to Viktor Orbán. From Christians to Muslims. From white supremacists in Pittsburgh to African-Americans in Crown Heights. And it is currently on the rise on both left and right in America and throughout the West. No community or ideology is immune. Attempts to pin the hate on one side of the political spectrum are attempts to excuse one’s allies at the expense of Jewish lives.

For decades, Israel and Jewish organizations worldwide have worked hard to ensure that the fight against anti-Semitism does not become a partisan issue. Those who make excuses for Jew-hatred when it does not come from white supremacists or who condemn it only when Ilhan Omar is behind it reveal that they conceive bigotry merely as a political tool to wield against their political enemies rather than as a hateful ideology that should always be called out and shunned. Jewish security should never be weaponized for electoral gains.

While Democrats and Republicans pass the anti-Semitism ball at each other, Jews continue to be killed in synagogues by Nazis who accuse them of leading a conspiracy to replace the white race, harrassed on university campuses by students who think they oppress the Palestinians, and assaulted on the streets of New Jersey and New York by minorities who blame them of rising housing prices and police brutality against African-Americans. The incidents have become so common that a young Hasidic New Yorker, after being attacked in the street, said that his grandfather has survived Stalin’s gulag so “me getting punched in the face, I think of it almost comically. It’s a part of being Jewish”. It is time for it to stop being. And to that effect, a good first step would be to start condemning anti-Semitism with the firmness it deserves wherever it exists and whoever perpetrates it.