Stop weaponizing anti-Semitism charges
Several months ago, during one of my all too infrequent visits to the United States, I was walking with a friend down in Chelsea when we were accosted by a homeless man.
“F***ing Jew bastards,” he screamed at us. “Heil Hitler!”
Although I had grown up in Manhattan and was used to the rantings of the borough’s more colorful characters, the blatant anti-Semitism left me speechless. This was ironic considering my profession. As a journalist, I have covered anti-Semitism for years. But that encounter was the first time that I had personally been targeted.
Things have gotten very bad, very fast. According to the AntiDefamation League, anti-Semitic incidents reached “nearhistoric levels” last year. Closer to home, the NYPD has reported an unbelievable 82% rise in hate crimes against Jews.
Rising anti-Semitism has also infected the national discourse, with politicians such as Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat, tweeting that American support for the Jewish state was “all about the Benjamins.”
On the far right is where another stripe of anti-Semite increasingly finds aid and comfort. In late 2015, then-candidate Donald Trump told Jewish Republicans that they would not support him “because I don’t want your money.”
Unfortunately, it often feels as if politicians on both sides of the aisle are more interested in using anti-Semitism as a cheap way to score political points, attacking their opponents and conveniently ignoring bigotry by their supporters and allies.
As Mayor de Blasio put it last week, “I want to be very, very clear — the violent threat, the threat that is ideological, is very much from the right.” Jews subject to anti-Semitic attacks on the streets of Brooklyn would say otherwise. The endpoint of such partisanship will be a weakening of social constraints against hate as people learn to interpret any condemnation as political theater.
I personally witnessed just how such a scenario could play out when I covered the Ukraine crisis for the Jerusalem Post.
By early 2014, Ukraine’s proRussian president had fled following months of street protests and the Kremlin had decided to take action, seizing the Crimean peninsula and instigating a separatist rebellion in the Donetsk
region. During this period of instability, anti-Semitic incidents, primarily vandalism, increased, as did the level of Russian fake news reports alleging that Ukraine had been taken over by a fascist junta.
Russian media repeatedly claimed that Ukrainian Jews were in danger while the Ukrainians blamed almost every single incident on Russian provocation. In a letter to the World Jewish Congress in 2015, Ukraine’s prime minister explicitly claimed that such incidents were intended “to throw discredit upon [the] Ukrainian authorities.” You cannot combat anti-Semitism if you deny it exists. And while blaming everything on Russia was bad policy, it did contain an element of truth: Some of the incidents were Russian provocations.
In early 2014, a rabbi in occupied Crimea arrived at his synagogue to discover that it had been defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, including the symbol of a Ukrainian ultranationalist group which had been drawn backwards. It led him to suspect that maybe the anti-Semitic vandalism wasn’t motivated by Ukrainian racism at all.
The Russians weren’t alone in weaponizing hate. Not long after the incident in Crimea, the Jews of separatist-occupied Donetsk were shocked when several masked men handed them flyers calling on the city’s Jews to register or face penalties. The separatist leaders denied any knowledge of this demand, leading many to believe that this was a Ukrainian disinformation operation.
Over the course of the coming years, the Russians would repeatedly report false narratives of rising anti-Semitism in Ukraine, claiming that there had been a pogrom in Odessa, that Jewish schools and newspapers were being shuttered and that Jews were fleeing the country out of fear.
In the end, anti-Semitism became poisonously politicized.
We cannot allow the United States to hurtle down the same road.