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Antisemitism in Today's America

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Antisemitism in Today's America Alvin H. Rosenfeld Antisemitism in Today’sAmerica LeonardDinnerstein’s Antisemitism in America,published in 1994,remains the most comprehensive and authoritative studyofits subject to date. In his book’sfinal sentence, however,Dinnerstein steps out of his role as areliable guide to the past and ventures aprediction about the future that has proven to be seriously wrong.Antisemitism, he concludes, “has declinedinpotency and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.”¹ In the years since he for- mulated this optimistic view,antisemitism in America,far from declining,has been on the rise, as Iwill aim to demonstrate. Ibegin with apersonal anecdote. During alecture visit to Boca Raton, Florida,inJanuary 2017,Iattended religious services at one of the city’slarge synagogues and was surprised to see heavy security outside and inside the building. “What’sgoing on?” Iasked afellow worshipper. “Nothing special,” he replied, “having these guys here is just normal these days.” It didn’tstrike me as normal, especiallyinAmerica.From visitstosynago- gues in Europe, Iamused to seeing security guards in place—mostlypolicemen but,inFrance, sometimes also soldiers. As targets of ongoing threats, Europe’s Jews need such protection and have come to relyonit. Whysuch need exists is clear: Europe has along history of antisemitism,and, in recent years, it has be- come resurgent—in manycases, violentlyso. European Jews are doing,then, what they can and must do to defend them- selvesagainst the threats they face. Some, fearing still worse to come, have left their homecountries for residence elsewhere; others are thinking about doing the same. Most remain, but apprehensively,and some have adopted ways to mute their Jewish identities to avert attention from themselves. Forinstance, they mayfeel it no longer prudent to wear Jewishskullcaps or otherJewish mark- ers, like jewelry with the Magen David, in public. Somehaveremoved the mezuzot (the markers of aJewish home that contain biblical verses) from their outside doorposts. It’sanervous, edgy waytolive, but for many,that’sJewish life in today’sEurope. America,wehavelonged believed, is different—even exceptional—for being largely free of ongoing, serious anti-Jewish hostility.The great majorityof AmericanJews go about their dailylives withoutencountering overt antagonism. UnlikeJews over the centuries who oftensuffered from intolerance and persecu- L. Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1994), 250. OpenAccess. ©2021Alvin H. Rosenfeld, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the CreativeCommons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110671995-019 368 Alvin H. Rosenfeld tion as residents of Christian and Muslim lands, American Jews know thatthey live in acountry that is freeand democratic and upholdsthe values of religious and ethnicpluralism. They enjoy full civil and political rights, have not been subjectedtofederallyimposed restrictive legislation that singles out Jews, and have never faced pogroms or other forms of massviolence, as theirEuropean an- cestors did. At the same time,however,social antisemitism is part of the country’shis- tory,and in earlier decades, AmericanJews experienced varyingdegrees of dis- crimination and exclusion in employment,residential neighborhoods, universi- ties, resorts,social clubs,and even hospitals. Ahard-edged antisemitism, at its most extreme reflectingNaziviews, was at times aprominent part of the public discourse of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s,and duringthese years Jews werefre- quentlyaccusedofdisloyalty,economic profiteering,and war-mongering. Acts of aggression against individual Jews and Jewish institutions have also occurred over the years. Someofthese acts have been lethal,but they have been largely episodicand not chronic or continuous. So, while the United States has hardlybeen free of antisemitism, American Jews, for the most part,havelong felt generallyaccepted, and the great majority are fullyintegratedinvirtuallyall strata of Americanlife. The Jewishpresenceinthe arts, entertainment,educa- tion, business, medicine, science, politics, and other spheres of Americanlife has been prominent and productive for decades. When it comes to having to con- tend with antisemitism, then, America, in comparison with Europe and parts of the Muslim world, looks far better;and, over the past half-centuryormore, most Jews have felt secure and at home in this country and have prospered in it. Recent events, though, have begun to rattle these feelingsofsafety and be- longing. BeginninginearlyJanuary 2017,and continuingonanalmostdaily basis for over two months, bomb threats weremade against over 150 American Jewishcommunity centers, schools, civil rights agencies, homes for the elderly, and other organizations across thirty-eight states.² In this same time frame, sev- eral Jewishcemeteries weredesecrated; synagogues were attacked; and swasti- kas werescrawledonJewish property in numerous places.Believing their com- munitiestobeunder assault by newlyemboldened right-wing activists, many AmericanJews wereunnerved by the rapid surfacing of such hostility.They sensed that America was enteringanew and more threatening era, one marked by the emergence of areenergized antisemitism togetherwith overt forms of in- “Bomb Threats to Jewish Institutions in 2017,” Anti-Defamation League, issued March15, 2017, accessed May18, 2020,https://www.adl.org/news/article/bomb-threats-to-jewish-institutions- in-2017. Antisemitism in Today’sAmerica 369 tolerance, bigotry,and hostility directed against others. While much of their anxiety diminished when the perpetrator of most of the bomb threats turned out to be atroubled Israeli teenager, manynevertheless began to feelthat they could no longer take their safety for granted.³ Aware that anti-Jewishhostil- ity has been on the upsurge globallysince the turn of the millennium,Jews ev- erywhere have begun to feelmore vulnerable.⁴ Would these feelings of unease begin to reshape the livesofAmericanJews into amore wary and defensive pos- ture? Or would the country’straditions of freedom, tolerance, and respect for pluralism and diverse culturaland religious traditions be resilient enough to allow AmericanJews to go about their livesmore or less normally? It is still tooearlytoanswer these questions clearly,but it is possibletoob- servecertain developments in recent yearsthat have introduced new sources of concern for AmericanJews. Iwill devote the remainder of this paper to briefly discussingthree prominent areas of Americansocial and political life that seem especiallyhospitable to today’santisemitism. Each of these needs to be taken seriouslyinits ownright,and the synergy among them is potentiallyhigh- ly destructive.Iwill alsobrieflypropose some of what needs to be done to coun- ter these troublingdevelopments. Terror Attacksand Jews as Targets Unforeseen at the time whenDinnerstein was writing his book, terrorism and the need to guard against it have become defining features of Americanlife. In the aftermath of the attacksof9/11/2001, Americansingeneral are more apprehen- sive about their security thanthey had been before.Jews mayfeel this disquiet more than most,and for several reasons:(1) Jewishpopulations in the United States are densestonthe east coast,wherethe attacks took place. In the Jihadi imagination, New York City,the country’sfinancial center,isa“Jewish” city;it mayhavebeen targeted for that reason, and it is feared that it will be again. (2)Atthe time of the attacks on New York’sWorld Trade Center,rumors started up that the Israeli Mossad was behind these assaults and that Jews who worked in the Twin Towers had been tipped off ahead of time not to come to work on the T. Pileggi, “Jewish Israeli-US Teen Arrestedfor PhoninginJCC Bomb Threats,” Times of Israel, March23, 2017,https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-israeli-teen-19-arrested-over-jcc-bomb- threats/. Formoreonthe recent upsurge of antisemitic hostility,see A. H. Rosenfeld, ed., Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), and A. H. Rosenfeld, Deciphering the New Antisemitism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 370 Alvin H. Rosenfeld daywhen the planeshit; reasonable people know this story is absurd, but it per- sists to this dayinparts of the Arab world and elsewhereand signals to Jews that,inatime when conspiracy theories about covert Jewishpower are in wide circulation, their innocencecannot be taken for granted. (3) Athird reason Jews are worried todayisthatinanumber of cities, including Paris, Toulouse, Brussels, and Mumbai, there has been aclose link between Jihadi terror attacks in general and the choice of Jews as targets in particular; in the United States itself, attacks against Jews have sometimes been precursors to largerattacks against Americaninstitutions, as in the 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane by El Sayyid Nosair, two of whose accomplices then participatedinthe 1993 World Trade Center bombing.⁵ There have been other incidentsofthis kind as well, some of them successful, others foiled before they could take place. (4) Afinal cause of Jewish unrest comes with the recognition that ideological antise- mitism,inboth its neo-Nazi and Jihadi forms, is one of the motivators for terror attacksagainst Americantargets, including AmericanJews and Jewish institu- tions.⁶ To illustrate ideological antisemitism as it manifests in Jihadi attacks, I quote from Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the AmericanPublic,”
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