In Brooklyn, Attacks on Jews Have Become Commonplace, but the New York City Government Does Nothing

July 17 2019

According to the New York City Police Department, the city has seen nineteen violent anti-Semitic attacks in the first half of this year and 33 in 2018, compared with only seventeen in the previous year. There is reason to believe many more unreported incidents have taken place. Overwhelmingly, the victims are Orthodox Jews in the ḥasidic Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Williamsburg. Armin Rosen, examining this phenomenon, notes that no discernible pattern can be identified among the perpetrators, who have no links to anti-Israel groups, Islamists, the alt-right, or any known anti-Semitic ideology:

One popular explanation both within and beyond the affected communities is that Jews are being blamed for gentrification. . . But if rising housing prices really are causing the anti-Semitism surge, then it means New York’s harassers and attackers are little different from Jew-haters of centuries past, who have always blamed their Jewish neighbors for whatever the current evils happen to be—whether it’s bubonic plague or the arrival of wealthy newcomers. Nor is there a public record showing dozens of random attacks against gentrifying white hipsters in the same neighborhoods. . . .

Another explanation for the spike is that there is no spike: Orthodox Jews have always been attacked and harassed in New York. The perception of a rise in anti-Semitism may therefore be a function of heightened vigilance and reporting, social media, and omnipresent security cameras in Jewish neighborhoods.

Whatever the explanation, Rosen continues, the official response has been lackluster:

There is scant evidence that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration or local politicians have made stopping physical attacks on Jews in New York City a priority. After [he was nearly strangled to death outside of his synagogue in Crown Heights in 2018], recalls Menachem Moskowitz, “not one politician came to me to find out what happened or comforted me.”

[In fact], the city’s response has been shockingly aimless. In late 2018, City Councilman Chaim Deutsch and City Council Speaker Corey Johnson began pushing for the creation of an office of hate-crime prevention, which de Blasio announced this spring. In June, the mayor said he would move up the anticipated launch date from November to an unspecified point later in the summer. . . . So long as the city can ignore the scope of what it’s up against, there’s little or no pressure to address the problem.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, Brooklyn, Hasidim, New York City

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy