New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has presided over a stunning spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes in a city that has been at the heart of the American Jewish experience since the first big waves of Jews immigrated to the United States in the 19th century. The city has long been a place where Jewish culture has thrived and where Jews of all levels of observance could openly and safely worship. Yet between 2017 and 2019, complaints of hate crimes targeting Jews rose by 52%, according to police data, reaching a modern record of 229 as last year came to a close with a flurry of attacks. The incidents have taken many forms, ranging from verbal harassment to brutal beatings.
As violence rose and community leaders raised alarms in 2019, New York’s proudly progressive and “woke” leader ignored the problem until he no longer could, at which point he misrepresented it. When pressed on surging anti-Semitic violence last June, de Blasio had a convenient explanation: “I think the ideological movement that is anti-Semitic is the right-wing movement.” Dismissing a reporter who asked him about the global spread of anti-Semitism from the Left, he reiterated, “I want to be very, very clear, the violent threat, the threat that is ideological is very much from the Right.”
De Blasio’s statement was so stunningly wrong that it was even contradicted by police officials at the time. As the New York Post reported, “NYPD Chief Dermot Shea said at the same press conference that perpetrators of hate crimes ‘run the gamut’ from teens, to people with mental illness, to first-time offenders, and career criminals.” A baffled Chaim Deutsch, a Democrat representing Brooklyn, where many of the attacks have taken place, said, “I have not seen any white supremacists coming in here committing these hate crimes.”
No wonder de Blasio’s record on fighting anti-Semitism has been so abysmal.
The failed leadership of de Blasio is an example of the real-world danger of trying to explain anti-Semitism as merely the provenance of one side of the political spectrum. By narrowly defining anti-Semitism as a far-Right problem that has suddenly bubbled up under President Trump, liberals and their allies in the media are not only spreading misinformation but are making it more difficult to address a complex and growing crisis seriously. Failing to understand that anti-Semitism comes in many forms is one reason why rising violence against Jews has been able to fester and grow.
Unfortunately, de Blasio’s effort to explain anti-Semitism as merely right-wing does not make him unique. As anti-Semitism has reared its ugly head, liberals have gone out of their way to categorize it in a way that fits neatly with their partisan interests.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose campaign has provided a safe haven to anti-Semites of the Left, argued that the spike in anti-Semitic attacks nationwide was “a result of a dangerous political ideology that targets Jews and anyone who does not fit a narrow vision of a whites-only America.”
One of Sanders’s prized endorsements came from Rep. Ilhan Omar, who has brought anti-Semitic conspiracies about all-powerful Jewish puppet masters to the halls of Congress. She has claimed that Israel “hypnotized the world,” that congressional support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” and that her critics “push for allegiance to a foreign country.”
Yet Omar’s communications director, Jeremy Slevin, had the temerity to rant on Twitter, “Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force Anti-semitism is a right-wing force.”
If ever there were a reason to kill off the myth that hatred of Jews is an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, it would be the deadly attacks on Jews in the New York area during the holiday season. On Dec. 10, a shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, New Jersey, killed three. One of the assailants turned out to be a member of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, a revelation that awkwardly forced Rep. Rashida Tlaib to delete a condolence tweet that claimed “white supremacy kills.” On Dec. 28, an African American male invaded the home of a rabbi during a Hanukkah celebration, slashing five with a machete.
From college campuses, to the streets of New York, to the ugly corners of the internet, to the poison coming from the U.K. Labour Party, to the inferno of hatred sweeping through Europe, the targeting of Jews is not confined to any one political group. There are right-wing anti-Semites for sure, but anti-Semitism is also a burgeoning problem on the Left. What’s more, the pure hatred of Jews is often not identified with any ideology at all. It is, as scholars have pointed out for years, a virus that mutates and adapts according to the time and place.
The trope that anti-Semitism is a right-wing phenomenon also made politicians such as de Blasio and Omar appear as if they were living in a parallel universe. A passing awareness of the violent Jew-hatred in Europe explodes the myth. “The identity of the German synagogue attacker may have sounded familiar to American Jews, who have endured multiple attacks by far-right extremists over the past year,” reported the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in October after an armed man tried to break into a synagogue in Halle. “But the suspect’s identity was more surprising for Jews in Western Europe.”
Why? “The murder of two people in Halle on Yom Kippur was the first lethal anti-Semitic assault in decades in that region by a far-right extremist. Most of the terrorist attacks against Jews there over the past 30 years have been carried out by radical Muslims.”
An attack on a Jewish site outside the U.S. carried out by someone on the far-Right is rare.
Indeed, throughout Europe, a climate of fear has once again descended upon the Jewish community. In 2013, a non-Jewish Irish journalist donned a yarmulke for a day in Malmo, Sweden, after someone wrote to his newspaper asking if it was safe for Jews to visit. “I’ve lived in Malmö for two years, and there have been lots of violent crimes during that time, but I’d never felt scared until I put on the kippah,” he told Tablet, citing hostility from all across the demographic and political spectrum.
In 2015, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg asked if it was time for Jews to leave Europe. They are less than 1% of France’s population but were, at the time Goldberg was writing, the target of 51% of the country’s hate crimes. “Violence against Jews in Western Europe today, according to those who track it, appears to come mainly from Muslims, who in France, the epicenter of Europe’s Jewish crisis, outnumber Jews 10 to 1.”
And it certainly isn’t just coming from Muslim immigrants from notoriously anti-Semitic countries in the Middle East and North Africa. There is the standard left-wing anti-Semitism dressed up as “anti-Zionism,” the difference between the two seeming to be strictly theoretical at this point. In 2017, a German court affirmed a lower court ruling that a 2014 arson attack on a synagogue wasn’t anti-Semitic; it was judged an expression of criticism toward Israeli policy.
Germany may be a particularly symbolic case, but it’s arguably less significant a marker of European anti-Semitism than what has been happening in Britain. On the eve of December elections, 87% of British Jews agreed that Jeremy Corbyn, the socialist leader of the Labour Party, was an anti-Semite. The atmosphere of permissive Jew-hatred he fostered — Corbyn drove Jewish politicians from the party and rewarded and protected the bigots who aided in that purge — created such anxiety that Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, felt compelled to speak out. “The question I am now most frequently asked is: What will become of Jews and Judaism in Britain if the Labour Party forms the next government?” Mirvis wrote in the Times.
He added: “The way in which the leadership of the Labour Party has dealt with anti-Jewish racism is incompatible with the British values of which we are so proud — of dignity and respect for all people.” This prompted a second, unprecedented intervention, this time from the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, with a public note of support for Mirvis and the Jewish community. The bigoted bullying by the British Left had shocked the country’s religious establishment.
Yet it must be said that the unwillingness to confront anti-Semitism that doesn’t come from the Right exists in Europe as well. An American Jewish Committee survey of French attitudes toward anti-Semitism, the results of which were released Jan. 20, found that non-Jewish French citizens overestimate the role of the Right in their country’s wave of Jew-hatred and underestimate the amount coming from the Left and from what the survey termed “Islamism.” Jews in France, according to the survey, make no such mistake.
Does that mean there’s no anti-Semitism from the political Right in Europe? Of course there is. The German far-Right is stirring, the rise of right-wing Hungarian nationalism has brought with it a surge of anti-Semitic sentiment, and the internet has made it easy for the American alt-right to link up and organize with its European counterparts.
The point is not that anti-Semitism comes from one side of the aisle or the other. It’s that anti-Semitism adapts to its political environment and takes whatever form it must to thrive.
And thrive it does.
Philip Klein is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner. Seth Mandel is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.
