VIOLENCE

certain professions or allowed to rent apartments, said Deborah Lipstadt, a historian at Emory University.

Those forms of discrimination aren’t “nothing,” she said. But, they weren’t violence, either.

Now, dangerous rhetoric and violence threaten the lives of people who are Jewish, even if it doesn’t necessarily threaten their careers.

“You had various and sundry things, but you never had actions like this,” said Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory. “What we’re seeing today is a cross between general violence in society and antiSemitism. ... The confluence of gun violence with the anti-Semites.”

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization that advocates for justice, tracks anti-Semitic incidents in the country and said there were almost 60 percent more of them in 2017 compared to the previous year — the largest increase in a single year since the organization began tracking incidents in 1979.

“Anti-Semitism has always existed, but I think in America we’ve thought it was so out to the fringe we didn’t need to worry about it,” said Sarah Breger, deputy editor at Moment Magazine, which has a largely Jewish audience and started an online antiSemitism monitor in January. “I think people are definitely taking it seriously now.”

Breger saw incidents of anti-Semitism start during the 2016 election and then morph into something scarier, like the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website telling citizens of a small Montana to attack Jews in the town, and a “Unite the Right” rally Cantor Jack Chomsky, left, and Rabbi Alex Braver, right, lead morning services on Tuesday at Tifereth Israel synagogue in Columbus. As part of the service, they read the names of the slain synagogue members in Pittsburgh.

in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 that included marchers using Nazi salutes, carrying swastika flags and yelling “Jews will not replace us.”

Last year, there was a flurry of bomb threats at several dozen Jewish community centers across the country, including one at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Columbus.

Earlier this month, a bomb was sent to the house of a prominent Jewish investor and philanthropist, George Soros, as well as others. None detonated and no one was harmed. Then, Saturday, came the deadliest attack against Jews in America, Breger said, which possibly opened some people’s eyes to the rise in anti-Semitism.

Lynda Zielinkski, a 75-yearold Holocaust survivor, was expecting some kind of tragedy to happen when she heard about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

“I just had this sense we were at a point,” the Berwick resident said. “I was just so Nathan Gordon prays during a service Tuesday at Tifereth Israel synagogue in Columbus.

afraid that it would just pass as nothing, that people would ignore it because basically that’s what happened in Europe.”

When talking about how hatred in the country got to this point, some pointed to President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about anti-Semitism and how it might impact white nationalists. They didn’t blame Trump but, like

Lipstadt, said his words make him complicit.

“The president and people like him have played on the trope of anti-Semitism in a really repulsive way,” said Cantor Jack Chomsky, who works at Tifereth Israel and said he is personally angry at what happened in Pittsburgh. “That’s very significant and a real quantum leap from what was going on before. It was

not coming from mainstream candidates of mainstream parties.”

After the Charlottesville rally, Trump insisted there “were very fine people on both sides.”

The day of the Pittsburgh shooting, at a Future Farmers of America convention and expo in Indiana, Trump talked of the shooting.

“This was an anti-Semitic act. You wouldn’t think this would be possible in this day and age, but we just don’t seem to learn from the past,” he said. “The vile, hate-filled poison of anti-Semitism must be condemned and confronted everywhere and anywhere it appears. There must be no tolerance for anti-Semitism in America or for any form of religious or racial hatred or prejudice.”

More than 50 percent of Americans said Trump’s decisions and actions as president have encouraged white supremacist groups, according to a poll by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute. Five percent said they believe the president has discouraged the groups, while about 40 percent say Trump’s behavior has had no effect.

Still, Zielinski maintains hope that anti-Semitism and those who perpetuate it will be defeated one day. She’s heartened to see more people speaking out against what’s going on today than did when the Nazis were rising to power.

“It’s a good feeling about Americans when they stand up and say ‘No, this is unjust, we’re not going to allow this to go on,’” Zielinski said. “That’s the big difference, of course. It didn’t happen with the Nazis. Maybe we’ve learned something that will not allow it to happen again like it did in the Nazi era.”