For so long, American Jews have felt secure here in a way they hadn’t almost anywhere else. But the attacks on the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue in October 2018 and the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California this year have shattered that illusion.
The shootings, which left 12 people dead, also proved that anti-Semitism isn’t just on the rise in America — it has fully risen and now needs to be urgently challenged.
Bari Weiss, opinion writer at The New York Times, explores why it’s happening and what to do about it in her new book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism” (Crown), out now. The Pittsburgh Tree of Life massacre hit her particularly hard. Weiss’ family is from the area, and her bat mitzvah, a Jewish ceremony when a child turns 12 or 13, was at that very synagogue.
Weiss argues that current anti-Semitism in America comes from some old and expected places: white supremacists were behind both synagogue attacks, and in August 2017 neo-Nazis marched on Charlottesville, Va., chanting “Jews will not replace us.”
But the rot comes from new sources, too.
Between the fans of Louis Farrakhan who organized the original Women’s March in 2017 and the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar who, among other things, used an old “dual loyalty” trope to accuse Jews of pushing “allegiance to a foreign country,” Jewish Americans are suddenly feeling under attack from the left as well as the right.
With this comes a divide: “Your” side versus “my” side, and which side is more anti-Semitic or dangerous.
Weiss doesn’t have time for any of that. It’s all bad, it all must be called out and confronted. “It is hard to overstate the failure of those who claim to be the biggest defenders of liberal values — the journalists, intellectuals, commentators, professors, feminists, gay-rights activists and so on” to speak up for Jews when the attacks come from the left, she writes.
“In the circles American Jews tend to travel in, calling out politicians like [Republican Rep.] Steve King is easy,” notes Weiss. “Calling out Ilhan Omar is not.”
As for critics who tell Weiss she doesn’t understand the threat of white supremacy, she told The Post: “I’m from a community where white supremacists killed 11 of my community members, and the idea that I don’t sufficiently understand the threat of white supremacists in America is just astonishing to me.”
While the anti-Semitism of the left hasn’t been violent in America yet, Weiss admits, it has erupted in murder and mayhem in Europe. She chronicles it: Ilan Halimi, tortured and murdered in 2006. Sarah Halimi, beaten and thrown out a window in 2017. Mireille Knoll, Holocaust survivor, stabbed nine times and set on fire in 2018.
These atrocities all occurred in France, a free country where Jews once also felt comfortable and at home.
Weiss argues that Muslim immigration to Europe has caused a serious spike in anti-Semitism across the continent, a fact that Europeans are loathe to confront.
Though Weiss is pro-refugee and states that “welcoming the stranger” is a part of Jewish tradition, she also contends that “looking at the impact that these newcomers have had on European countries and their Jews — and what the European experience might portend for America — there is reason to worry.”
Until recently, Weiss writes, America has been different. Jews in this country get to live with “open-hearted Jewish values” instead of “hard-headed ones” because “survival had no longer been our concern.”
Now that it is, she urges Jews and their allies to fight back. Instead of taking reactive measures like protests or petitions, she advocates an open, proactive way of living. Hiding is not an option.
“Ask yourself: Can I safely assert my Jewishness where I live?” Weiss writes. “Vigils honor the dead. But they don’t do much for the living. Solidarity does.”
For example, when the German government’s special representative for anti-Semitism said “he could no longer recommend Jews wear a kippah at every time and place in Germany,” the German tabloid Bild printed a cutout kippah for everyone to wear in a show of unity.
But Weiss also advises to “allow for the possibility of change” because anti-Semitism can be unlearned. She cites several examples of people who rejected Jewish hatred, including the godson of David Duke, who was once “a rising star in the bigoted world” but later turned his back on his own family and their beliefs.
For those afraid to assert their faith, Weiss offers a quote from Natan Sharansky, a refusenik in the Soviet Union who fought for his right to live freely as a Jew:
“You can’t teach anyone to be brave,” he said. “All you can do is show them how good it feels to be free.”