Hate has no home here

In our brilliantly diverse city, countless daily interactions on the street or sidewalk or subway go just fine, thank you, and many actually lead to greater understanding across racial, religious and ethnic lines. But even in the relatively enlightened year of 2018, the virus of hate remains.

On Saturday afternoon in Crown Heights, a neighborhood whose name in the late 20th century was synonymous with racial and religious conflict, an Orthodox Jewish man on his way home from synagogue was beaten and choked.

As the man told CrownHeights.info, a local news site: “As soon as (I greeted) him he began yelling at me, ‘You fake Jews, who are you saying hello to? You’re fake Jews and you stole all my money and robbed me, and stole my mortgage and my house. I want to kill you!’ ”

About a week earlier, another Orthodox man was assaulted nearby; both cases are being investigated as possible hate crimes.

And though anti-Semitic incidents were far and away the most common type recorded in the city in 2017 — 150 of 338 reported bias crimes in 2017, and 46 of 92 so far this year — they aren’t the only animus-fueled illegal behavior.

Friday, a man in a red “Make America Great Again” cap and T-shirt who was hurling ethnic insults punched a young Hispanic man and shoved him onto the subway tracks.

These are, let’s repeat, isolated incidents, and broader racial and religious tensions aren’t what they once were. We remain a city profoundly changed from the one pulled at the seams by the unrest in Howard Beach in 1986 and Crown Heights in 1991.

Fears of white supremacists run amok notwithstanding, bias crime totals dropped from 2016 to 2017, and have dipped again so far this year.

New York City is a pretty harmonious place. All the more reason for us to unite to condemn hate every time it rears its especially ugly head.