apex gaming88 The Year American Jews Woke Up
apex gaming88 The Year American Jews Woke Up
American Jews were aware, before the pogrom of Oct. 7, 2023, that antisemitism was once again a problem in our collective life.
We were aware, if we belonged to a synagogue or worked out at a local Jewish Community Center or sent children to Jewish day schools, that squad cars were often present outside and that the security procedures and budgets of Jewish institutions kept growing. We were aware that, in Williamsburg and other Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Jews were being routinely shoved and sucker-punched by local bullies. We were aware of the white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville, Va., and of the far-right murderers who stormed synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, Calif., and of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s obsession with Rothschild space lasers, and of Donald Trump inviting Kanye West to Mar-a-Lago after the rapper had threatened to go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE.”
We were aware of the antisemitism that infected the leadership of the Women’s March and of the enduring popularity of Louis Farrakhan within influential segments of the Black community. We were aware of the F.B.I. statistic, from 2021, that Jews were the victims of more than 50 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes, despite being barely one-fiftieth of the overall population. We were aware that a British Muslim man traveled 4,800 miles to Texas to take hostages at a synagogue — and much of the news media chose to ignore the plainly antisemitic angle of the story.
We were aware. But unless we had been directly affected by it, the antisemitism didn’t feel personal. The calls were in the news, but not quite in our lives.
AwakeningsAfter Oct. 7, it became personal. It was in the neighborhoods in which we lived, the professions and institutions in which we worked, the colleagues we worked alongside, the peers with whom we socialized, the group chats to which we belonged, the causes to which we donated, the high schools and universities our kids attended. The call was coming from inside the house.
It happened in innumerable ways, large and small.
The home of an impeccably progressive Jewish director of a prominent art museum was vandalized with red spray paint and a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist Zionist.” A storied literary magazine endured mass resignations from its staff members for the sin of publishing the work of a left-wing Israeli. A Jewish journalist scrolled through Instagram and recognized an old friend from Northwestern gleefully tearing down posters of Hamas’s hostages while saying “calba” — dog in Arabic — to the pictures of kidnapped infants and elderly people. A leading progressive congresswoman was asked during a TV interview about Hamas’s rapes of Israeli women and called them an unfortunate fact of war before quickly returning to the subject of Israel’s alleged perfidy. An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor petitioned the Berkeley City Council to pass a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation in light of the resurgence of antisemitism and was heckled by demonstrators. An on-campus caricature depicted an affable Jewish law school dean holding a knife and fork drenched in blood. A Columbia University undergraduate posted on Instagram: “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Tucker Carlson platformed a Hitler apologist. Trump warned Jews that he is prepared to blame them should he lose the election.
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