New York City’s Hidden Anti-Semitic Violence

While hardly on the bloody scale of last Saturday’s massacre in Pittsburgh, physical assaults on Jews in New York City—not to mention anti-Semitic graffiti and similar acts of vandalism—are far more common than most would believe. Often the victims are visibly religious, and the attacks get relatively little attention from the press. Ginia Bellafante writes:

For several years now, expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have made up the preponderance of hate-crime complaints in the city. [This year alone], there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews—142 in all—as there have been against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of twenty.

Within the course of a few days this month, a swastika showed up on an Upper West Side corner and two ultra-Orthodox men were attacked on the street in ḥasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn in separate incidents. In one of them, according to the police and prosecutors, a Muslim livery driver jumped out of a car and started beating up his victim, seemingly at random, yelling “Allah.” . . .

When a ḥasidic man or woman is attacked by anyone in New York City, mainstream progressive advocacy groups do not typically send out emails calling for concern and fellowship and candlelight vigils in Union Square, as they often do when individuals are harmed in New York because of their race or ethnicity or how they identify in terms of sex or sexual orientation. . . . Sympathies are distributed unevenly. Few are extended toward religious fundamentalists of any kind, who reach the radar of the urbane “Pod Save America” class only when stories appear confirming existing impressions of backwardness. . . .

The Anti-Defamation League . . . reported that nine of the twelve physical assaults against Jews categorized as hate crimes in New York State were committed in Brooklyn and involved victims who were easily marked as members of traditionally Orthodox communities. Outside that world, they were hardly noticed at all.

Read more at New York Times

More about: American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Hasidism, Jewish World, New York City, Ultra-Orthodox

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF