Bill de Blasio attacks New York Jewish community amid coronavirus tragedy

Despite the coronavirus outbreak, Tuesday was not a banner day for social distancing in New York City. There were large groups observing a flyover, large groups meeting in parks to enjoy the good weather and fresh air, and a funeral for a revered rabbi in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio chose to renounce and single out just one of these gatherings, and you won’t be surprised to see which one he chose:

The next morning, the community responded to the mayor’s attacks with some inconvenient facts about how the funeral was planned and approved beforehand:

But even if the funeral hadn’t been preapproved in this manner, de Blasio’s tweet still would have been a dangerous escalation against a Jewish community that has faced unprecedented targeted violence for over a year and has lost more than many other communities.

Imagine, for a moment, if the mayor of New York City had decided to break up a pickup basketball game in one of the city’s parks (something that has been happening throughout this crisis) and called in the New York Police Department to swarm the area. Imagine if those playing had been black or Hispanic and that the mayor had then gone to Twitter to threaten every black and Hispanic New Yorker with retribution at the hands of the NYPD if the games continue. The outcry about this kind of racist behavior would justifiably be so swift and so loud it could threaten the mayor’s job security. It should not be any different for anti-Semitism.

Over a month ago, I wrote a warning in these pages to the mayor about what his response could do to the death count in his city. New York now leads the country by a wide margin in deaths and is far and away the most affected city in the country. The mayor’s personal behavior continues to understandably anger New Yorkers — just over the weekend, he took an unnecessary trip with his wife and several aides to stroll through the park in another borough.

Now, the mayor has decided to deflect any responsibility he has for the deaths of New Yorkers (including a large number of those in the Jewish community) and his own actions by making a blanket condemnation and threat to the Jewish community writ large. There’s a word for this: a blood libel. Even while his actions and governance endangered the lives of every New Yorker, de Blasio is placing the blame on the Jewish community.

Sadly, there’s ample historical precedent for this kind of anti-Semitism.

During the Black Death, Jewish communities were, baselessly, the prime targets for blame, condemnation, and violence. Terrifyingly, the Jewish community in New York is seeing a modern-day repeat of those historical events in the most populous city for Jews in the country. This is after months and months of silence from the same mayor’s office about targeted anti-Semitic violence that amounted to a slow-burning pogrom in the city.

It took months for the national media to pay any attention to the violence the Orthodox Jewish community in New York City faced for months. Many of those in government and media routinely scratched their heads, wondering why and how this explosion of violent anti-Semitism was unique to New York.

Here is their answer.

The mayor of New York City has targeted the Jewish community and blamed them for being disease vectors. How the media respond to this egregious attack on the New York Jewish community by their own mayor will be instructive as well. If everyone remains as silent as they’ve been on anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence in the past, we can expect more of it when social distancing orders are lifted — and we’ll know exactly who is to blame.

Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a stay-at-home and homeschooling mother of four and a freelance writer. She is an editor at Ricochet.com, a columnist at the Forward, and a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.