Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Orthodox children cross the street in Monsey, New York, December 30, 2019.
A sharp spike in anti-Semitic attacks marked the end of 2019, causing alarm for Jews on the East Coast and across the United States. Three people and a police officer were murdered at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, and days later, on the seventh night of Hanukkah, five Orthodox men in Monsey, New York, were stabbed.
Just over a year since 11 Jews were killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and amid an increase in the number of incidents of vandalism in Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, there is an urgent need to confront anti-Semitism.
But the current solutions being offered by political leaders, law enforcement, and some Jewish communal leaders that prioritize increased police presence and armed security are likely only to make conditions more difficult for other minorities and marginalized communities. In particular, a strictly security-focused approach has the possibility of alienating neighbors and by extension exacerbating existing tensions among them. (This is especially because Orthodox Jews often live alongside communities of color, as both groups are more likely to be lower-income or poor.)
Like all minorities, America’s Jews deserve to be protected from violence and free to practice religious observance in peace. But Jews, and allies who wish to stand with us, should see the proposed cosmetic solutions for what they are: an attempt to enhance feelings of safety at the expense of certain individuals or groups that ultimately fails to address the core issues at the heart of rising anti-Semitism.
For progressives asking what they can do to fight anti-Semitism, or if they have a role to play in this moment, the answer can be found by looking squarely at the conditions that have led here, conditions defined by economic inequality, fueled by right-wing populism, and stoked by conspiracy and scapegoating. Hopefully the answer is clear: Not only do progressives have a role to play, but doing so is core to the progressive political project.
WE CANNOT KNOW what drives each and every act of violent anti-Semitism. But we do know that since 2013, and more so since Trump became president, the number of hate crimes against Jews and all minority groups—African Americans, Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim, immigrants, Latinos, and LGBT people—and the number of hate groups in the U.S. have both risen precipitously. The rise in anti-Semitic attacks cannot be separated from this wider context.
This increase comes at a time when the president of the United States, aided and abetted by conservative and alt-right media, and a Republican Party so committed to white supremacy and tax cuts for the wealthy that it has been fully ceded to extremists and fundamentalists, traffics heavily in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories as a way of furthering his anti-immigrant, anti-poor, white supremacist agenda.
A person in search of an explanation for why their lives are so difficult, their wages have stagnated, their children’s schools are underfunded and under-resourced, decent jobs are hard to come by, or housing costs keep skyrocketing need only look to the president or Fox News, or tumble down a YouTube rabbit hole for an answer: George Soros is paying for hoards of immigrants who are invading your towns and taking your jobs; the globalists control the money; Jews and the brown and black people they support are coming to replace you.
There is, of course, a small group of people who are responsible for the inequality that people experience and feel in their daily lives, today’s beneficiaries of the mutually reinforcing systems of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. They are the one percent and they sit at the head of the major pharmaceutical, tech, energy, financial, and real-estate companies that spend billions of dollars lobbying and bribing politicians each year to deregulate industry, erode workers’ rights, and rig the system in their favor. (The top one percent globally, incidentally, is only 1.7 percent Jewish.) Mutual interest has brought these corporate interests into alignment with the right and far right, just as it did in Nazi Germany.
But the conspiracy theories once reserved for the margins, now mainstreamed and promulgated by Donald Trump, are designed to deflect blame away from the rigged system—and the group of political bedfellows doing the rigging—and place it instead on an abstracted idea of “the Jews.” It’s a trick as old as, well, St. Paul (and older), but as we see again today, it works.
ANTI-SEMITISM IS NOT RANDOM, even when it is being perpetrated seemingly at random by random individuals. It is a phenomenon that points to a wider political problem in need of a political solution.
The British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn regrettably missed this point. For two years, investigations into anti-Semitism among party members were presented as a matter of weeding out “bad apples.” They focused on individuals and social media posts, when they should have turned the crisis into an opportunity to “lean in” and make fighting anti-Semitism a natural, proud, and obvious part of their political project—including when it appears on the left.
Solidarity cannot be confined to acts of symbolism or words on a poster.
Here in the U.S., we can learn from that mistake. Progressives need not hesitate or question if or how fighting anti-Semitism is part of their work, or seek to downplay it when they see it in their ranks. By connecting the dots between neoliberal political and economic interests and the far right’s nationalist agenda and conspiratorializing, we see that explaining and taking on the real causes of inequality and “cultural alienation” is part of fighting anti-Semitism.
The progressive agenda—breaking up monopolies, taxing the rich, organizing workers, providing free health care and education, and ending the criminalization and detention of black and brown Americans and immigrants—is the answer. As Dania Rajendra, the head of Athena, a new campaign taking on Amazon, reminds us, “We know the best way to push back against fascism is by expanding our democracy and redistributing wealth.”
This is true today internationally, not just in the United States.
In the days following the stabbing in Monsey, there was a viral post on social media that linked that event with other anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. and U.K., and compared them as a whole to Kristallnacht. But the comparison is preposterous fearmongering, and frankly untrue. Neither American nor British Jews are being targeted, dragged out of their homes, or attacked by any arm of the state.
There are, however, groups of minorities being torn from their homes and families, placed in detention centers and concentration camps, and targeted across the world—Muslims in China, Myanmar, and India; undocumented immigrants within the U.S., Central American migrants and refugees at the border. Ethno-nationalism and nativist populism is a global issue, not a Jewish one; combating it a progressive political project, not a project of law enforcement.
On Sunday, a group of Jewish institutions organized a solidarity march against anti-Semitism. Many thousands of Jews and their allies crossed the Brooklyn Bridge in a rare display of unity across Jewish denominations and political affiliations. It was an important moment to make the issue of anti-Semitism visible and urgent to a wider, non-Jewish audience. But solidarity cannot be confined to acts of symbolism or words on a poster.
Ahead of the march, Senator Charles Schumer announced he will introduce a new bill to add $250 million for houses of worship to beef up security. But just as progressives (including Schumer) know the answer to gun violence is not more guns, so too do we know that anti-Semitism cannot be addressed simply by adding more surveillance at the local Jewish Community Center.
Sunday’s march organizers demanded a stop to hate and fear. As progressives, we of course agree. And at the same time, our goal must be more systemic and more specific: to be unequivocal in naming how hate and fear turn into violence, identifying the bad actors and systems that benefit, and building a multiracial, multiclass coalition to bring about a world in which all are free to thrive. In New York, many of the groups who came together in recent years to defeat Amazon’s HQ2 and pass sweeping tenant protection laws are showing us how this might look by organizing community-based responses to hate violence that explicitly reduce reliance on the NYPD. The fight for Jews to live and practice proudly, comfortably, and visibly in America must be a bigger fight for the safety, dignity, and freedom of all of us.
This article has been updated.
