The “Anti-Semitism Tax” on Synagogues

In recent years, synagogues across the country have increased funding for security measures, as Howard Husock explains, to “prevent tragedies like the deadly attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 or the hostage-taking at Congregation Beth Israel” in Texas earlier this year. Congregations must make difficult decision about such measures: safety enhancements can make synagogues seem less welcoming, and each dollar spent on security detracts from educational programming, renovations, and so forth. Husock sketches these and other pressures facing American synagogues:

Every Jewish congregation is, as they say in accounting, a tub on its own bottom. There’s no diocese or Sanhedrin to provide financial support. Membership dues keep the lights on. . . . Ours is a reasonably well-off congregation, but those that aren’t face hard choices.

We Jews are hardly the only religious people at risk. There have been numerous shootings at religious sites in recent years, most notably at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina (nine dead), the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas (26 dead), and the Sikh temple of Oak Creek, Wisconsin (six dead). About 80 percent of Protestant pastors say they have some security measures in place, according to a 2019 Lifeway Research survey.

Yet when I reviewed the budgets of mainline Protestant churches in my own community, I found no security line items remotely on par with those in my synagogue. Maybe we are more fearful because of our history, but the Jewish community has been the greatest target of religious-based hate crimes in the U.S. since official reporting started more than a quarter-century ago.

Read more at Wall Street Journal

More about: American Jewry, Anti-Semitism, Synagogues

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