When we first heard the news that Mayor Adams, as part of his plan to pay for the migrant crisis, intends to impose a hiring freeze at the Police Department – which the New York Times reports was calculated to bring the number of officers below 30,000 for the first time in decades – we thought that now was a particularly bad time to weaken law enforcement. To the contrary, what we need now is not the jargon and speeches about tolerance and brotherhood we are getting, but action built around a strong and empowered police force, a serious and rejuvenated criminal justice system and deploying the myriad of city regulatory and administrative agencies to manage the current wave of antisemitism while the longer-range solutions are developed.
The proliferation of large demonstrations ostensibly opposing Israel’s war effort against Hamas was frustrating enough to say the least – and politically alarming. But they were not the whole story. What was significant also was that what seemed to be in play was a palpable and defining antisemitism – paradoxically even when the marchers were primarily Jewish. And ominously, this was marked by a simultaneous spike in hate attacks on Jews.
When so-called activists are able with legal impunity to illegally shut down bridges and roadways in the name of anti-Zionism that is really repackaged antisemitism, the plain message is that their cause is something legitimate, has the blessing of the government and trumps the rule of law and the rights of others.
And when young thugs even now roam Jewish neighborhoods, at will targeting Jews simply walking in the street for harassment and worse without serious or any legal consequence, antisemitic violence becomes routinized and ordinary.
Dealing with antisemitism in the short term will require getting the message out that antisemitism will not be tolerated in the real and not philosophical sense. And antisemites will not be coddled. A good place to start would be imposing serious consequences on those high school students in Hillcrest, Queens who, last week, upon learning that one of their teachers – white and Jewish – had attended a pro-Israel rally, chased her in the school hallway forcing her to barricade herself in a locked classroom.
Hundreds of students ran amok in the hallways waving Palestinian flags and screaming “Free Palestine” and “This teacher needs to go.” We wonder what would be the reaction of school officials if the teacher had been black and the students white?
And this is to say nothing of the years of complaints from Jewish college and university students who complained bitterly, to little avail, that they were being regularly harassed on campus because they were Jewish and their efforts to address audiences disrupted.
We are reminded that in recent years there has been a glut of policies and executive orders adopted here in New York City to make sure that there is equity – not equal opportunity – for blacks when it came to the municipal work force. The former meant a quota-like number of blacks in the work force, while the latter meant that everyone would have an equal opportunity to compete for a job.
Significantly, the city soon began requiring all heads of agencies to devise ways to ensure the hiring of blacks and to keep careful records – subject to audit – of what they came up with.
May we respectfully suggest that a similar proactive approach could work in dealing with antisemitism. Surely it is not asking for too much to require city officials to seek out ways to deal with antisemitism and record what they devise.
We would also suggest that the ADL be called upon to explain how an undercurrent of antisemitism of the magnitude of what has surfaced during the war between Israel and Hamas was able to fester under their very noses? We are certain that they were as surprised as the rest of us. But then, they, not the rest of us, collected millions over the years to address that very problem.
