The CEO of the Jewish Federation in Rochester, N.Y., and other officials were the recent objects of an antisemitic letter and sexist cartoon accompanied by racist tropes. In Newton, Mass., there have been seven recent instances of hate crimes in the past two months, including the breaking of windows of Jewish-owned homes, with vandals targeting one residence twice. The actual threats of violence and acts of violence have moved out of the campuses and into the streets, and with the success and the comfort of a lynch-mob atmosphere, physical assaults on Jews as Jews are bound to increase. Even the Anti-Defamation League is finally concerned.
In England, it is reported that authorities are struggling in the face of extremist tactics and actions pushed both by Islamists and the far-right, according to an official report. The adviser to the UK government on social cohesion has concluded that in some areas, there is “no infrastructure in place” to tackle a “triple threat of conspiracy theories, disinformation and harassment that poses a threat to democracy.” At King’s College, death threats canceled a discussion on conflict resolution.
It’s obvious that there has been a progression of violent escalation from protests to intimidation to assaults.
First, they came for the Zionists. Then, they came for the Jews. As the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote, “Anti-Zionism is a belief that Jews—alone among the peoples of the world—do not equally deserve freedom and self-determination in their homeland. It is an ideology of negation and a form of discrimination.”
Yet until lately, senior American Jewish establishment figures—those being paid extraordinary salaries—have been either purposefully ignorant of or complacent in the face of the camp of political progressives evolving into a hotbed of anti-Jewish passion.
Indeed, the only genuine progress being made by those engaged in progressive politics is to move from disassociating from Jewish national identity’s justness to a rampage of vocal denunciations, and on to physical property and bodily harm. Moreover, Jews are in the lead of all this, assuming a Pied Piper role.
The Australian Deborah Weiner has it right. She divides today’s Jews into those who are proud, stand up for other Jews and acknowledge that the vast majority of Jews are Zionists. But somehow, they are the “Bad Jews.” That is because there are other Jews who appear on the media self-described “AsAJew.” They “deracinate themselves from any attachment or connection to the ‘Bad Jews.’”
She further sharpens her point: “The Good Jew despises the Bad Jew. Yet, like Cain and Abel, they are inextricably joined. … Where the Good Jew seeks to demonise his cousin the Bad Jew in the hope that in the next pogrom he will be spared, the Bad Jew knows in the next pogrom no one will be spared.”
That prognosis is not nuclear science. The scenario has been repeated and replayed throughout history. Indeed, prominent among the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre were peace-loving leftists living in Gaza Envelope kibbutzim who sought to improve the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, even driving them to their medical treatments in Israel and employing them in their fields. Those very Jews were murdered, dismembered, raped and incinerated along with others that day. Their politics, their hopes and their vision were of no assistance. The terrorists were seeking out Jews as well as those assisting them. In Arabic, the cries were clearly enunciated: Yahud.
Those AsAJews are in U.S. Congress, too. Sen. Chuck Schumer began his infamous recent speech that the SenateDemocrats website termed “major,” saying, “I also speak for so many mainstream Jewish Americans.” How many? By what right did he make that assumption?
