Hostility against Jews Growing in America & Europe

For the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victim s ar e Orthodox Jew s. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confiden t anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestin e.

This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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For the past couple of years, there have been reports about an uptick in “random” assaults in New York. Men are just walking along a street in Brooklyn, and they get sucker-punched. Except it isn’t random. The victim s ar e Orthodox Jew s. This growing uptick in assaults has been punctuated by mass killings at Jewish synagogues in San Diego, Pittsburgh, and upstate New York. In recent weeks, as a conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza has become the occasion for a coming-out party for a newly confiden t anti-Zionist wing in the American Left, we also see newly confident thugs assaulting Jews in Manhattan’s Diamond District while shouting slogans about Palestin e.

This is a scandal beyond words. Secular and religious Jews are formed to be sensitive to these upsurges in hostility and violence because their history as a people in exile tells them that these spasms of violence do not just subside. They tend to grow and grow until Jews are finally forced to emigrate. Jewish life is dying out in Paris precisely because of a growing pattern of street harassment and assaults that are punctuated by terrorist attacks aimed at killing masses of Jews at synagogues and kosher supermarkets. Parisian Jews are leaving for Israel. There was a time they might have left for New York. I expect that for many Jews, the realization that New York could go the way of Paris would be the bitterest pill to swallow.