On Saturday night, a man stormed into a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s house in Monsey, New York, slashing five Hasidic Jews with a machete. The Monsey attacks came during a week that saw nine incidents targeting Jews in the New York area during the holiday season and in the same month in which two assailants opened fire in a kosher grocery in Jersey City, New Jersey, killing three.

The New York-New Jersey area has the largest concentration of Jews outside Israel and has, until recently, been a place where these communities have felt safe. Yet in 2019, well before Jersey City and Monsey gained national headlines, the region was already seeing a huge spike in attacks on Jews, particularly members of the Orthodox community who are outwardly identifiable as Jewish. Jews have been routinely assaulted. They have been violently mugged. Within a week over the summer, a Hasidic Jew in his 60s was beaten with a brick while another was lacerated in the head when a group of youths threw a stone through the window of his truck. Just a day before the Monsey attack, in Brooklyn, a woman assaulted three Orthodox Jewish women, later telling cops, “Yes, I slapped them. I cursed them out. I said ‘F-U, Jews.’”