Old hate in new bottle

Ayear ago today, a man walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue during Shabbat morning services to kill Jews. Today, it is incumbent on all Americans not only to mourn those beloved in memory — Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger — but to face, without a blink or a flinch, the depressing fact that anti-Semitism is resurgent.

It doesn’t all look like the visage of the paranoid person who unloaded his firearms in a place of worship. He had posted antiSemitic screed online; he reviled the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. He believed George Soros was orchestrating a foreign invasion.

He was among the deplorable few who, triggered by President Trump’s hateful language against globalists and newcomers, fancy themselves soldiers in a civil war.

In the first half of 2019, the Anti-Defamation League reports nearly 800 anti-Semitic incidents nationwide. Since the Tree of Life massacre, a dozen white supremacists have been arrested for plotting or threatening to attack Jewish targets.

Here in New York, home to more Jews than any city in the world, we’ve seen a surge synagogue vandalism; brutal street attacks; anti-Semitic slurs. Add them up, and there’s been a 48% year-over-year increase in antiSemitic hate crime complaints.

Extermination fantasies will fail, as Hitler’s did. But fear is rising. Americans are feeling uncomfortable or unsafe for worshiping as they choose, for being who they are.

Until the nation confronts that growing reality, it will fall far short of its promise made by George Washington to the Jews of Newport, R.I.: “happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”