(Jewish Group) Why Anti-Semitism Is on the Rise in the United States

My grandmother Sarah would not have been surprised by the upsurge in anti-Semitism during the past few years. “Scratch a goy, you’ll find an anti-Semite,” she used to say, using the Yiddish word for non-Jew. I didn’t agree with her, but I understood where she was coming from—both geographically and psychologically.

She was born in Lithuania around 1883 and immigrated to the United States as a young girl. Her family left Eastern Europe to escape the violent pogroms against Jews. They arrived in the United States to discover that anti-Semitism—including the violent variety—existed here, too.

For centuries, Jews have confronted discrimination, persecution, and slaughter—during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, and the Holocaust. Most Jews came to the United States to escape anti-Semitism, including the largest wave who fled Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Still, Jews also faced physical violence in United States, including the lynching of Leo Frank outside Atlanta in 1915, the attacks on Jews by American Nazis and other street thugs during the 1930s and 1940s, and the bombings of synagogues in response to Jews’ support for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Now we’re facing a new wave of overt anti-Semitism, including violence against Jews. We saw it in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, where white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Jew haters chanted racist and anti-Semitic slogans, wore uniforms with swastikas, and killed a counter-protester. In October 2018, a man stormed the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh armed with a semi-automatic rifle and three semi-automatic pistols. He fired all four weapons, killing eleven Jews at worship. Six months later, in April 2019, a man armed with a rifle fired shots inside the Chabad synagogue in Poway, near San Diego, killing one woman and injuring three others, including the synagogue’s rabbi. In December, attackers killed three people at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey. A few weeks later, on the seventh night of Hanukkah, a man entered the home of an Orthodox Jewish family in Monsey, New York, pulled out a machete, and stabbed five worshippers.

According to the New York City Police Department, more than half of the 423 reported hate crimes in the city last year were directed at Jews. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), there were 1,879 attacks against Jews and Jewish institutions in the United States in 2018, the third-highest year on record since it began tracking such data in the 1970s. In addition to violent attacks, the last few years have also witnessed the vandalizing of hundreds of Jewish gravestones in Pennsylvania and Missouri and anti-Semitic graffiti painted on the walls of synagogues and other Jewish institutions.

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