February 8, 2012

Looking at Hate

April 13, 2010

by Daniel E. Levenson

 

One of the things I that I often have trouble adjusting, to after spending time in Israel, is the degree to which so many American Jews seem complacent about Anti-Semitism and threats to Jewish communities around the world. While I would never suggest that we should go back to the bad old days when Jews were kept out of universities because of quotas or suffered outright discrimination, I also can’t help wondering sometimes if here in America the Jewish community has grown too comfortable. While Anti-Semitism may not be blatantly obvious on a daily basis in places like Boston, New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, the fact remains that even within the United States there are neo-Nazi and racist organizations that seek to blame the Jewish people for the ills of the world. Furthermore, there is still a strong undercurrent of latent Anti-Semitism (as well as racism) in places like Boston, which people are too often unwilling to address.

 

The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism and Racism at the Tel Aviv University is one organization which tracks Anti-Semitic acts around the world, and according to their website, in the United States in the year 2008 (the year for which the most recent information was available online) there were  “A total of 1,352 incidents of vandalism, harassment and physical assaults against Jewish individuals, property and community institutions were reported.” The report goes on to detail how domestic and world events, such as the 2008 US Presidential election, the world economic crisis and Israel’s operation in Gaza, provided opportunities for a number of individuals and organizations to launch verbal and physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions within the United States.  While the report notes that there was an overall decline in the number of incidents, it is still deeply troubling to read the report and see that violent rhetoric and deeds are still being perpetrated out of hatred for the Jewish people. I am particularly troubled by the way that anti-Israel sentiments mix with Anti-Semitism, the former often seeming to provide cover for the latter.

 

In America there are groups that are working hard to combat hate, but they have a big job to do. On the Anti-Defamation League website the organization recently posted an article describing a number of speeches made by Louis Farrakhan in February and March of this year, in which they report that he accused Jews of controlling the movie and music industries as well as banking, with nefarious intentions. Unfortunately, this kind of hate speech is not limited to a few lunatics on the fringe, nor does it only appeal to people in Nazi uniforms or white sheets, which brings me back to my earlier point. We should not live our lives in paranoia, afraid that at any moment the Jewish people will become, en masse, the target of another genocide, but at the same time we should not delude ourselves into believing that just because we have become an integral part of American society that we are somehow now immune to the kind of hatred and violence that took so many innocent lives in 1096 in the Rhineland, 1492 in Spain or 1939 in Germany. Unfortunately that hatred is real and still very much alive. Since I returned from Jerusalem, at the end of this past August, I have often thought about what it means to be a Jew, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, and specifically in America. Here in the United States we may not have to worry, directly, about an emboldened Iran or Hezbollah rockets, but we face threats of our own, threats that come from people like Louis Farrakhan and David Duke, and the people who are willing to listen to them. Perhaps we can feel safer here in American in the 21st century than at any other place and time in our history, and this is certainly not a bad thing, but for me the bottom line is that sadly we also cannot afford to ignore the threats that still exist around us, nor the lessons that history, and even the events of our own present day, continue to teach us.