“People are concerned here, and people are concerned all over the country,” said Moshe Schapiro, the rabbi of the Chabad Hasidic community in Hoboken and Jersey City. This is just the latest act of deadly violence against Jews: Last spring, a shooter murdered a woman at a synagogue in Poway, California, and a year ago, another gunman killed 11 Jews at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. That’s why yesterday’s kosher-grocery-store shooting is so complicated to explain, and yet so straightforward: As Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me in an interview today, “Jews are being shot in the supermarkets where they shop, simply for the crime of being Jewish.”ĭetails of the Jersey City shooting are still emerging, but Mayor Steven Fulop has said that the shooters clearly “targeted” a small kosher grocery store in a shoot-out that killed a police officer, a shopper, a store employee, and Mindel Ferencz, who owned the store with her husband. Many Jews feel scared by anti-Semitic violence and discrimination, and yet they disagree about its source and cause. It is impossible to name a single enemy responsible for the apparent recent spike of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States Jew hatred easily shape-shifts to fit the purposes of many ideologies. This is the pernicious nature of anti-Semitism: It emerges in many different forms, from all sides of the political spectrum. The two incidents were a study in how fraught debates about anti-Semitism have become: In the face of a tangible, deadly attack, activists immediately jumped to fears that the American government is about to begin targeting Jews. On the evening of the Jersey City shooting, reports of a planned executive order that would allow the government to pursue complaints of anti-Semitism on campuses led some rabbis, activists, and journalists to compare President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. Especially in the realm of politics, fear is extremely close to the surface: Any statement or action from the Trump administration related to Jews immediately conjures intense backlash from progressives, whether or not it’s based on facts. Slurs shouted at Jews out shopping during a measles outbreak. Jewish students pushed out of progressive circles on campuses because of their presumed views on Israel. A string of assaults against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. A swastika scrawled on the outside of a synagogue. In recent months, America has faced nearly nonstop reports of anti-Semitism in all forms. This is the thought that has been haunting Rabbi David Niederman, a leader of the Satmar Hasidic Jewish community: How will he and others explain that two shooters apparently targeted a kosher grocery store run by members of his community in Jersey City, New Jersey, yesterday? “How long,” Niederman asked at a press conference hosted by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio today, “are these children going to live with their scars?” Jews have once again been murdered, and their children will have to live with the knowledge of that violence.
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