Understanding New York City’s Growing Anti-Semitism Problem

According to recent data from the New York Police Department, 56 hate crimes were committed against Jews in the city in February 2022—a five-fold increase from this time last year. These include incidents of physical violence, vandalism, and harassment. Robert Cherry argues that civil-rights groups have failed to respond adequately to these acts, and further contends that when such groups do respond, they reflexively, often mistakenly, attribute all anti-Semitic crimes to white-supremacist movements.

Anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York City have recently increased by 409 percent, representing more than half of all hate crimes citywide. Many of these incidents targeted Orthodox people dressed in distinctive clothing, like the Jewish man who was punched in the Bedford Stuyvesant [neighborhood of Brooklyn] on February 7 while walking on Shabbat, for which a fifteen-year-old was charged with assault and committing a hate crime. Yet it has not led civil-rights organizations to act, unless they can connect these attacks to right-wing extremists or white supremacists, even when the evidence does not support such a link.

These organizations focus on instances of right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda rather than on those who are committing actual anti-Semitic hate crimes. For example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recently issued a report, “White Supremacist Propaganda Continues to Remain at Historic Levels in 2021.” It highlighted flyers posted by three obscure white-supremacist groups in New England, none of which were responsible for any other anti-Semitic acts.

A similar instance occurred when New York anti-Semitic assaults jumped two years earlier. Then-New York Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly insisted that the attacks were driven by a white-supremacist movement connected to Donald Trump, and a report by the ADL on the spike in anti-Semitic assaults in New York followed de Blasio’s lead. As the reporter Armin Rosen pointed out, these spurious suggestions were made “despite clear evidence that . . . many of the attacks are being carried out by people of color with no ties to the politics of white supremacy.” Indeed, FBI statistics demonstrate that black Americans are disproportionately perpetrators of hate-crime attacks on other groups, including Asian Americans.

Not only do many civil rights organizations ignore any focus on hate-crime perpetrators, but they also shy away from confronting campus anti-Semitism that goes under the guise of anti-Zionism.

Read more at RealClear Religion

More about: ADL, Anti-Semitism, New York City

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society