The Shaarei Shomayim synagogue in Toronto and another nearby synagogue were hit with gunfire earlier this month.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Yes, this is another column about antisemitism. If you’re wondering, why are they on about this again, have a peek at the news. If you’re grumbling – enough already! – maybe there’s a different question you should ask yourself.
Antisemitism is infecting daily life – violently and openly. But also more quietly, even silently. Each act, from microaggression to murder, fuses to create an atmosphere of normalcy for this hatred. And for the hated? Fear.
In this environment, antisemitism is expressed loud-and-proudly: for instance, this past weekend, in the same month as three Toronto-area synagogues were shot at, it showed up as caricatures of Jews that could have been lifted from 1930s Germany. In a regularly targeted Jewish neighbourhood of Toronto, people carried signs depicting Jews as rats, as a hook-nosed crybaby or ogre-like man-creature emerging from a cave. The guy carrying the latter didn’t even bother to disguise his face.
When a truck plows through the doors and down the hallway of a Detroit-area synagogue where more than 100 children are attending preschool, the driver armed and aggrieved, and a pundit offers an explanation that the synagogue is called “Temple Israel,” you’ve really got to wonder at the ignorance.
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Members of the Lebanese-American attacker’s family were killed by Israeli air strikes in Lebanon (the U.S. Department of Homeland Security says his brothers were members of Hezbollah). But what do the children attending Jewish preschool in Michigan have to do with that?
On social media, it’s everywhere. The “comedian” Christopher Titus posted about the U.S. becoming “the Jewnited States of Jewmerica.” (Since deleted.)
Sometimes this hatred is openly violent; for instance, the beating of two Hebrew-speaking men at a San Jose, Calif., restaurant last week.
Sometimes the hate is expressed privately, perhaps even in polite company. It happens silently too: as in, we’re not going to hire/contract/use that person because her views – i.e., the state of Israel has a right to exist – are not fashionable. Yes, this is happening.
While Jewish schools and synagogues are targeted throughout Europe, a Guardian journalist published what could only be read as an apologia for targeting Jewish institutions in an outrageous column about an upscale bakery (Jewish-founded, now a chain) opening in the same neighbourhood as a Palestinian restaurant. He opined that Palestinian activism is “increasingly defined by small acts of petty symbolism. A smashed window. A provocative sticker.”
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Most sane people understand that a smashed window at a Jewish-owned shop – or synagogue, or school – is not “small” or “petty symbolism.” (See: Kristallnacht.)
The Guardian amended the column three days after it was published (and after much outcry) to remove that reference.
At a soccer match in Norwich this month involving Britain’s largest Jewish school, a mother reports hearing chants including “dirty Jew” and “go back to the gas chambers.”
Twenty per cent of British students would not want to room with a Jew, according to a report by the British Union of Jewish Students published on Monday.
In the U.S., a Manhattan Institute survey released in December found that 25 per cent of Republicans under 50 say they themselves openly express antisemitic views. And that 37 per cent of Republicans think the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was greatly exaggerated. The same survey found slightly higher levels of anti-Jewish sentiment among Democrats than Republicans of all ages.
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So yes, antisemitism is a widespread and grave problem – confirmed. After Detroit, former Republican David Frum used the word “pandemic” to describe its ever-increasing mainstreaming.
You’ll need a lot more paper than Schindler’s Post-It, to quote an Oscars “joke,” to keep track of it all.
The tougher question is how to tackle it.
My colleague Robyn Urback is calling on government leaders to address the nation about this urgent issue – to make it clear that this stops now.
Also writing in The Globe and Mail, Michael Geist urges passage of anti-hate and bubble-zone legislation, and real consequences for antisemitism within organizations such as unions, university campuses and school boards.
B’nai Brith is calling for a Royal Commission on Antisemitism.
Why aren’t corporations and other Canadian groups speaking out? Where are all the statements we saw during the emergence of Black Lives Matter?
There are still people clinging to the insistence that this is not antisemitism, that it’s political protest, fair and square. As for those synagogue shootings, nobody was hurt, were they?
Is that the bar? That we need someone to actually be killed in this country for some proper self-reflection? For someone to finally do something meaningful? We had all better hope not.