What went unmentioned was the distortion of the Black Hebrew Israelites in the discussion. Bernstein was being polite, but it shouldn't go unremarked when a violent hate group that has inspired a number of murders of Jews gets white-washed as colorful eccentrics.
None of this matters unless Jews in the states quit isolating themselves from other spiritual communities and acknowledge the broader issue. This attack they're experiencing, from the very large faction of extremist-progressives, much larger than any extremist-right faction, is an attack on those of all faiths. All of this is a campaign to once and for all bury God. The progressive cohort thinks it can achieve what no other religion has promised - heaven on Earth. It's a cult. A horrifying one at that. The Bolsheviks are at the gates. They've already begun to storm the capital.
I disagree that declining American support for Israel should be attributed to Wokeness. That assertion seems to be a diversion, allowing those who would make it to avoid real discussion about Americans' and Westerners' growing disgust for the personality, politics, and corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu. I find Wokeness an abhorrent ideology--so it is clearly not the reason for my increasing hesitancy to unquestioningly support the State of Israel. My rapidly waning support for Israel is solely a result of my aversion to and distrust of Netanyahu and his cozy relationship with the far-right Religious Zionism party.
“Jews can no longer safely go to synagogue without an elaborate set of security arrangements.” Overblowing the argument doesn’t create empathy. They absolutely can go without elaborate security just like their christian counterparts in the south who have been attacked by white supremacists.
Bigotry comes from every direction and goes in every direction. I do think people get too hyper by the likes of Kanye shooting off his mouth. You never know what's coming next from Kanye, but I don't see him pulling out a gun and shooting anyone. Or burning down a synagogue. Or supporting racist violence. I saw the term "hate speech" start to gain political tolerance nearly twenty years ago. I saw then, and see now, that the term is not about justice or tolerance. It is about political entities doing an end-run around the first amendment. I will NEVER support any hate speech law.
As for threats to Jews, some are significant. But why would we concentrate on Jews, while ignoring the violence against both black Christian churches and White Christian churches? As I said, the bigotry comes from all directions and goes in all direction. Anyone who tries to compartmentalize the bigotry is him/herself practicing bigotry.
I can't say that I don't discriminate, but I don't do it by race or religion. I discriminate based on who is being honest or dishonest. And fair and unfair. Considerate and selfish. Bigoted or tolerant. Find me a race or religion whose people fall entirely one side of those standards.
And, while we're on this subject, consider Trump and his supporters. We are routinely called racists, homophobes, xenophobes and White supremacists, even though we aren't all White. And, of course, we are called bigots. I would also point out that the most egregious institutional bigotry coming from government is aimed at Trump and his supporters. No president ever has been persecuted by banana republic partisans like Trump has been. No president, EVER. Wanton censorship in violation of both law and ethics has been practiced against Trump and his supporters. Trump supporters are fired from jobs, ejected from school board meetings, harassed by the FBI and persecuted by the DOJ. And, if you think "they have it coming", YOU are the bigot.
Can it happen here? Hard to say but consider this - had I told you five years ago that thousands of businesses would be forced to shut down, millions would be thrust into unemployment, and govt would try to make an unproven vaccine a condition for participation in daily life, would you have believed it? People readily showed their willingness to don the brown shirt. They happily cheered as nurses and doctors and military people who didn't want the jabs were fired. Their media dutifully cast the un-vaxxed as a class of humans to be shunned and un-personed. Why on earth would one history's oldest hatreds be beyond that?
With regards to the email, who is surprised? This is like the Twitter files whose release confirms everything that a number of people suspected was happening. That's not "news," per se; it's more validation of a previous belief, back when anyone who accused the govt of colluding with big tech was called a conspiracy theorist. Likewise, this is not news in the technical sense, either, other than the comfort with which the wokerati are openly hostile to Jews and, of course, to Israel. There is also no rational argument to be had with these people; it's like trying to convince the Covidians that perhaps, maybe, possibly, the vaccine is not all that we were told it is.
Traditional liberalism was drummed out of the left long ago; it no longer exists within Democrat DNA save for a very, very few exceptions. The BDS wing is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dems. Same with the campus hatred of Jews which is documented in numerous ways, from Jewish students under attack or not wanted on student committees to decisions to never invite speakers who might be friendly toward Israel.
As an experiment, give leftists a choice: one year in Israel, or one year in Gaza, Iran, Yemen, Saudi, etc. Which do you suppose they would choose, especially the women? And the gay people. Have them live their convictions.
If by "it" you mean a Holocaust-style massacre, no. It's just not in the DNA of the US.
The real dilemma American Jews face is assimilation into a secular society. Being Jewish is almost (not quite) no big deal. Half of American Jews who get married, marry non-Jews. It's a dilemma and not a problem because problems have solutions and there's no solution to this except to turn your back on liberal democracy and become Orthodox.
Mr. Bernstein is quite right in his fears that liberal democracy is being undermined. No one can predict where this will go. All I can say is that I feel a sense of unease about the future of liberal democracy.
Going to Israel is no solution because, as the latest election proves, Israel is increasingly turning towards hard core ethnic nationalism.
I cant add a lot to what has already been said by others but Ill pose a question. Why are there Jews?
To my eye, the Jewish people were nearly extirpated by the Nazis, and one, if Jewish, could wonder why or how it could ever be that the chosen people of the only god there is required saving by essentially the rest of the secular world since there were none the sorts of supernatural interventions so commonplace in the past?
Its an academic point of course, but where I Jewish this would be the nail in the coffin of belief for me. As well as for most of the customs given that they are so often based, like Passover, in their god not murdering their first born etc.
And right on time, this week's episode of Haaretz Weekly podcast features Yofi Tirosh talking about the antifeminist policies that Smotrich will try to advance in the government such as limiting women's roles in the military and giving more power to all-male religious courts. (I think it is paywalled.)
The reasoning employed here to make it appear that the threat level against American Jews is astronomically high is identical to that used by BLM activists to rhetorically attempt to make anti-Black hate crimes or violence against blacks by police into a "pandemic."
(NB: that figure includes hate crimes of every variety, not just those involving physical attack--e.g., vandalism and other offenses against property, which are typically much more numerous than serious attacks against persons).
That means the chances the average American Jew would be the victim of any kind of hate crime (I repeat, including all types of such offenses, not just the most egregious that get reported in national media, but also things like some idiot writing something offensive on a sidewalk) in 2021 was 1 in 11,242.
Would it be really great to have the number of hate crimes against Jewish Americans *and* aggravated assaults against all Americans at zero? Sure, it would. That's not going to happen in the real world, though. Stupid people who commit such crimes will always exist.
But the odds against being a victim of an aggravated assault in America in 2021 are pretty low, and the odds of being a victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime are much, much lower even than that. Neither of those two rises in statistical terms to the level at which a reasonable person should be spending tons of time gripped by the terror that it's going to happen to him.
Stupid people committing crimes are not the only thing that will always exist. What will also apparently always exist is people with an absolute commitment, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to the idea that America is a murderously dangerous place for minority groups of various types.
But presumably the email writer doesn't want to start at zero in formulating the "unlivable" rate, so let's take triple the number of American Jewish casualties from anti-Semitic shooters starting at the 2018 rate (that's when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 dead and 6 wounded happened.)
So triple that 2018 figure would yield 51 American Jewish casualties. That works out to a risk of about 1 in 150,000.
Now, how about let's compare that to the risk of all Americans being murdered in 2021? Not just shot, mind you, but murdered.
Given an American population in 2021 of around 333 million, that yields almost a 1 in 15,000 risk of being murdered. So the average American is about 10 times more likely to be murdered than the average American Jew is to be shot by an anti-Semitic shooter, even in a hypothetical year when we're working with a total of Jewish casualties that is three times higher than the highest number in recent history.
(Yes, yes, if you're really committed to the ideological rhetoric, you could look at this and go "But American Jews are facing *both* the overall murder risk and the anti-Semitic shooting risk, and that's what's so unfair!" I can't quickly locate reliable online data on the murder rate specifically for Jewish American victims but it is certainly comparatively quite low given that murder victim rate correlates strongly with socioeconomic status and Jews as a group in the US are highly concentrated near the top end of that stratification system. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/ So if you calculated just the average murder risk for non-Jewish Americans--remember Jews are a tiny percentage of the overall US population--you'd certainly find a risk level there much higher than the combined murder and anti-Semitic violence risk for American Jews.)
The average American Jew who is convinced the chances he's going to be attacked at synagogue are really high is indistinguishable from the Black person who thinks there's a huge risk every time a cop stops him for running a stop sign that his life is in danger. Both beliefs are neatly falsified by evidence. They are also both arguably fueled to a significant degree by ideologues irresponsibly talking about these phenomena without getting into the statistical realities.
I don’t want to come off crass, but I don’t see any hard evidence here linking the left and anti semitism. I can concede that there are many pro Palestine/anti Zionist activists on the left (imo mostly Muslims) who are genuine bigots and seem to genuinely hate Jews.
As for the climate change analogy, maybe. Sorry, anti semitism is endemic to the right. Historically and in the present, from western Christians to eastern Muslims, hatred of Jews is largely found on the right.
The same Ukraine that also backed Nazis who explicitly persecuted Jews? Anti semitism was endemic throughout Europe at that time, you weren’t gonna find many regimes who weren’t willing to persecute them. Hell the Habsburgs blamed Jews for their infertility.
“The Iranian Revolution Guards are leftists”
You mean the IRG that cracks down on unions, labor strikes, Liberal/secular activists and backs religious theocrats?
Most ultra-orthodox Muslims are actually conservatives using liberalism to falsely perpetuate ‘Islamophobia’. Salafis, Deobabdis and the like have the same asinine religious beliefs and observations as Haredi Jews minus some theological differences. However, both of these religious groups misuse religious texts for their own sense of power, manipulation and control.
GTFO with your lunatic smear that Hitler “invented the concept of animal rights”. When humans who eat the meat of other animals are directly financially supporting and smugly, giddily promoting subjecting almost countless millions of defenseless innocents to lives of total misery and terror and agony via rampant extreme sadistic abuse and industrial slaughter. I might as well ask you as someone obviously not only horrified by the Holocaust and determined to prevent the marginalization and abuse, let alone killing of the members of any group of humans (as I am) why you on a daily basis so blithely support almost unimaginable cruelty on a truly staggering scale to obviously very highly-sentient fellow animals, simply because they are of different species? What, your religious book tells you torturing *those* innocents to death is ok? Your religious tradition says it’s ok to torture other animals to death as long as certain religious technicalities are followed? Watch footage from any one of many entirely legit undercover investigations or employee whistleblowers at slaughterhouses and try to tell me they’re just Cartesian automatons and don’t really experience extreme pain and fear. If your religion really tells adherents to be kind to animals, not very many are listening. When you don’t need to eat any animal products in order to eat very well and very nutritiously (not to mention at less monetary cost and far less cost to the earth) then choosing to eat them out of habit or preference is both gratuitous and barbaric. But go ahead, be a moral idiot while cherry-picking one extraordinarily infamous vegetarian who died seventy-five years ago to try to smear everyone today who actually cares about not needlessly abusing other animals.
Please. Is there anything under the sun you think *is not* about anti-Semitism or itself proof of anti-Semitism? Your level of paranoid solipsism is almost deranged. And the comment i replied to is proof of that. Can you not stop for a few seconds and take a deep breath and consider how utterly ridiculous it was to try to claim that animal rights was invented by Hitler to try and demean Jewish people? That you would just casually toss out that claim, amid spraying who knows how many other half-baked comments around the page, shows how unserious a thinker you are. Why don’t you stop grossly trivializing anti-Semitism - which is something I take seriously and find very concerning. If you were actually serious you might have taken some care and put some thought into making a claim that bore up under the tiniest bit of scrutiny. Hitler?! Why not, for instance, Jeremy Bentham: “The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny… The question is not ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?'” Instead, you’re apparently so certain that everything of consequence under the sun that has ever existed is or was primarily about your group, and specifically a conspiracy to attack all Jewish people. There is nothing anti-Semitic about any animal welfare or rights organization or supporter with whom I’m familiar. Are some on the intolerant intersectional left who perhaps lump animal rights in as one more aspect of matrix of oppressions perhaps anti-Semitic to the extent they’ve adopted idiotic slurs about Jewish people being an “oppressor group” and Israel being about “white settler colonialism”? Maybe. I find that entire bundle of group hierarchies and group-based bigotries pretty repellant. Personally, if anything, I have a bit of a pro-Jewish bias based on several influential professors I admire and many dear friends, and I have generally very warm feelings re: Israel and the compelling idea behind it. But you are so seemingly obsessed with divining anti-Semitism in anyone who disagrees with you about anything and any group or movement you don’t care for - for whatever reasons - you can’t and won’t see anything else.
The entire movement about working to stop cruelty and abuse toward helpless innocents of other species can thus, through yours lens, only be an invention of the fevered mind of Adolf Hitler and its meaning and purpose must be only about persecuting your group. Do you also think badminton and rollerskating and hybrid vehicles were invented to “get the Jews”? You are so simultaneously sanctimonious and self-pitying you cannot see anything else. Not only did Hitler invent the concept of animal rights to oppress your group, it’s also necessary to mention that, according to you, no one but your group is actually kinder to animals. Of course. On that basis, I thought I’d ask you: if being kind to animals is a core religious admonition and commitment which in your view makes your religion and its adherents special in a positive way, why don’t more people of your religion actually follow that admonition in word and deed? Nope, can’t do that. It only proves that _____ is anti-Semitic. Just like 7-11 and cat litter and anything and everything else that briefly flits before your blinkered consciousness. I asked you the exact same question I’ve asked dozens of Christians who are indifferent or hostile to animal rights: do you think it’s ok to abuse animals because [you think] your religious book says so? Did you want me to ask you if you think it’s ok to abuse other animals because *the Christian Bible* says so? I asked you the exact same thing I’ve asked Muslim adherents of halal diets: do you think the observance of religiously-based technicalities in how animals are slaughtered for consumption makes it ok? Was I supposed to ask you about halal rather than kosher dictates?
You’re totally missing the entire other point re: what made your ugly, baseless assertion so actually offensive: you casually tried to smear and delegitimize an entire basic ethical commitment about mercy, compassion, and empathy for the suffering of others by ascribing it entirely to Hitler…when the sadistic abuse of other animals and their agonizing, terrifying industrial slaughter is so very much like what Hitler and his henchmen and followers did foremost and most horrifically to six million Jews, but also to a lesser extent to Sinti and Roma, and Slavs, and gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities, and anyone else they considered subhuman/ lesser species. I can hardly count how many Jewish friends have made that direct comparison to me. Like my friend, Solveig, in Berlin, who never flinches from saying (about the rampant torture and brutally remorseless slaughter of mothers and babies of other species:) “This is what they did to us!” And please don’t try the sophist’s slight of hand of claiming I’m “comparing Jews to animals”. We’re all animals. Is the human “family” we all share somewhat distinct from other species of animals? By definition, yes, in some ways. But only in some ways. We are more alike than not, by far. Which is why I asked you about the specific religious basis if any on which you justify or excuse treating thinking, feeling members of other species so much like Hitler treated other humans he considered subhuman. I gave you the credit and complement of assuming that you universalize the moral basis on which you’re so committed to opposing the abuse and oppression of your group, to every other historically and/or potentially vulnerable group. Maybe you don’t see things that way and only care about your group. See above, re: startling degree of solipsistic paranoia. Or, maybe you extend that circle of empathy and compassion only to other groups of humans. If so, I want to know what the precise distinction is that makes their utter agony at our hands and on at a staggering scale ok. For a lot of religious people, it seems to boil down to some version of “God told us we’re special and can do whatever we feel like to other living beings.” I genuinely wanted to know: what exactly in your mind makes torturing other humans to death almost unfathomably horrible, but doing so to a dog or a cat or a pig or a cow, let alone almost countless millions of them A-OK. Or, in more utilitarian terms, if you think human’s lives are more important, what fraction of that value exactly would you assign to a dog or a pig who wants desperately not to be torturer and killed? How gratuitous in need and yet grievous in its intensity and protracted in duration must their agony and terror be before you begin to care?
If you’re going to bring Hitler into this discussion based on such a ludicrously concocted smear and try to associate his monstrous crimes with the very people whose entire creed is opposing the abuse of the most vulnerable sentient beings living among us, human and otherwise, it’s fair to ask you: why do you think it’s ok to treat other in most ways quite similar species in very much the same ways Hitler tortured and slaughtered human beings he othered as “subhuman”? If those other species’ basic emotional and social capacities is more similar to ours than not, and if their physical forms and functions are very much like ours for very similar evolutionary reasons, and if their emotional and social and sensory experiences of the world are much more alike ours than not (and we have plenty of reason to believe many other species actually have a sharper, more intense - if less abstract - sensory experience of the world) it’s utterly perverse and nonsensical to at once a) try to demean and dismiss the compelling ethical concerns of animal rights activists by baselessly trying to associate their movement with Hitler, while b) pretending that actually treating other highly-sentient animals much the way Hitler murdered other human beings is basically just fine.
If you had told me a year or two ago that we were on the verge of prohibiting the recognition of the differences between male and female biology, I would have said you were psychotically paranoid. It can happen here. Anything can happen here.
White nationalists are the heritage of southern rednecks affiliated with the Democrat Party. Today’s liberal Democrats should look to their submission to leftist ideology as ginning up antisemitism.
This is so interesting. I loved Glenn and John’s discussion and I’m fascinated by this response. The prevailing sentiment among many today is “stop complaining, Jews, you can’t be victims since you turned out okay, and you’re no saints yourselves”. This paves the way for all manners of abuse, from synagogue shootings down to most Jewish college students reporting they are afraid to let anyone know they are Jewish. In a time where most people flaunt their intersectional status, that one strikes a nerve.
The issue here isn’t limited to Jews - it’s what happens anytime you put “The” in front of the identity - The Jews, The Blacks, The Asians, The Gays - it dehumanizes the individual to a point of tacit approval to blame the Collective for perceived or real harms by any one member. As Kmele Foster noted recently, who wants to be blamed or lauded for the failures or successes of other people, just because we share immutable characteristics? How did we devolve to that point?
What went unmentioned was the distortion of the Black Hebrew Israelites in the discussion. Bernstein was being polite, but it shouldn't go unremarked when a violent hate group that has inspired a number of murders of Jews gets white-washed as colorful eccentrics.
None of this matters unless Jews in the states quit isolating themselves from other spiritual communities and acknowledge the broader issue. This attack they're experiencing, from the very large faction of extremist-progressives, much larger than any extremist-right faction, is an attack on those of all faiths. All of this is a campaign to once and for all bury God. The progressive cohort thinks it can achieve what no other religion has promised - heaven on Earth. It's a cult. A horrifying one at that. The Bolsheviks are at the gates. They've already begun to storm the capital.
Who killed more Jews this year?
White nationalist or blacks?
I disagree that declining American support for Israel should be attributed to Wokeness. That assertion seems to be a diversion, allowing those who would make it to avoid real discussion about Americans' and Westerners' growing disgust for the personality, politics, and corruption of Benjamin Netanyahu. I find Wokeness an abhorrent ideology--so it is clearly not the reason for my increasing hesitancy to unquestioningly support the State of Israel. My rapidly waning support for Israel is solely a result of my aversion to and distrust of Netanyahu and his cozy relationship with the far-right Religious Zionism party.
“Jews can no longer safely go to synagogue without an elaborate set of security arrangements.” Overblowing the argument doesn’t create empathy. They absolutely can go without elaborate security just like their christian counterparts in the south who have been attacked by white supremacists.
I like everything about this essay. However...
Bigotry comes from every direction and goes in every direction. I do think people get too hyper by the likes of Kanye shooting off his mouth. You never know what's coming next from Kanye, but I don't see him pulling out a gun and shooting anyone. Or burning down a synagogue. Or supporting racist violence. I saw the term "hate speech" start to gain political tolerance nearly twenty years ago. I saw then, and see now, that the term is not about justice or tolerance. It is about political entities doing an end-run around the first amendment. I will NEVER support any hate speech law.
As for threats to Jews, some are significant. But why would we concentrate on Jews, while ignoring the violence against both black Christian churches and White Christian churches? As I said, the bigotry comes from all directions and goes in all direction. Anyone who tries to compartmentalize the bigotry is him/herself practicing bigotry.
I can't say that I don't discriminate, but I don't do it by race or religion. I discriminate based on who is being honest or dishonest. And fair and unfair. Considerate and selfish. Bigoted or tolerant. Find me a race or religion whose people fall entirely one side of those standards.
And, while we're on this subject, consider Trump and his supporters. We are routinely called racists, homophobes, xenophobes and White supremacists, even though we aren't all White. And, of course, we are called bigots. I would also point out that the most egregious institutional bigotry coming from government is aimed at Trump and his supporters. No president ever has been persecuted by banana republic partisans like Trump has been. No president, EVER. Wanton censorship in violation of both law and ethics has been practiced against Trump and his supporters. Trump supporters are fired from jobs, ejected from school board meetings, harassed by the FBI and persecuted by the DOJ. And, if you think "they have it coming", YOU are the bigot.
Can it happen here? Hard to say but consider this - had I told you five years ago that thousands of businesses would be forced to shut down, millions would be thrust into unemployment, and govt would try to make an unproven vaccine a condition for participation in daily life, would you have believed it? People readily showed their willingness to don the brown shirt. They happily cheered as nurses and doctors and military people who didn't want the jabs were fired. Their media dutifully cast the un-vaxxed as a class of humans to be shunned and un-personed. Why on earth would one history's oldest hatreds be beyond that?
With regards to the email, who is surprised? This is like the Twitter files whose release confirms everything that a number of people suspected was happening. That's not "news," per se; it's more validation of a previous belief, back when anyone who accused the govt of colluding with big tech was called a conspiracy theorist. Likewise, this is not news in the technical sense, either, other than the comfort with which the wokerati are openly hostile to Jews and, of course, to Israel. There is also no rational argument to be had with these people; it's like trying to convince the Covidians that perhaps, maybe, possibly, the vaccine is not all that we were told it is.
Traditional liberalism was drummed out of the left long ago; it no longer exists within Democrat DNA save for a very, very few exceptions. The BDS wing is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dems. Same with the campus hatred of Jews which is documented in numerous ways, from Jewish students under attack or not wanted on student committees to decisions to never invite speakers who might be friendly toward Israel.
As an experiment, give leftists a choice: one year in Israel, or one year in Gaza, Iran, Yemen, Saudi, etc. Which do you suppose they would choose, especially the women? And the gay people. Have them live their convictions.
If by "it" you mean a Holocaust-style massacre, no. It's just not in the DNA of the US.
The real dilemma American Jews face is assimilation into a secular society. Being Jewish is almost (not quite) no big deal. Half of American Jews who get married, marry non-Jews. It's a dilemma and not a problem because problems have solutions and there's no solution to this except to turn your back on liberal democracy and become Orthodox.
Mr. Bernstein is quite right in his fears that liberal democracy is being undermined. No one can predict where this will go. All I can say is that I feel a sense of unease about the future of liberal democracy.
Going to Israel is no solution because, as the latest election proves, Israel is increasingly turning towards hard core ethnic nationalism.
I cant add a lot to what has already been said by others but Ill pose a question. Why are there Jews?
To my eye, the Jewish people were nearly extirpated by the Nazis, and one, if Jewish, could wonder why or how it could ever be that the chosen people of the only god there is required saving by essentially the rest of the secular world since there were none the sorts of supernatural interventions so commonplace in the past?
Its an academic point of course, but where I Jewish this would be the nail in the coffin of belief for me. As well as for most of the customs given that they are so often based, like Passover, in their god not murdering their first born etc.
Free Palestine now - from a Jew who lost 25 family members at Auschwitz.
And right on time, this week's episode of Haaretz Weekly podcast features Yofi Tirosh talking about the antifeminist policies that Smotrich will try to advance in the government such as limiting women's roles in the military and giving more power to all-male religious courts. (I think it is paywalled.)
It is off topic by itself and should have been a reply to the last one.
The reasoning employed here to make it appear that the threat level against American Jews is astronomically high is identical to that used by BLM activists to rhetorically attempt to make anti-Black hate crimes or violence against blacks by police into a "pandemic."
The total number of all FBI reported hate crimes against American Jews in 2021 was 676. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/antisemitism-jews-target-of-58-percent-of-all-religiously-motivated-hate-crimes-in-us-678228
(NB: that figure includes hate crimes of every variety, not just those involving physical attack--e.g., vandalism and other offenses against property, which are typically much more numerous than serious attacks against persons).
The total number of Jews in the US is around 7.6 million. https://www.jns.org/opinion/how-many-american-jews-are-there-and-does-it-really-matter/.
That means the chances the average American Jew would be the victim of any kind of hate crime (I repeat, including all types of such offenses, not just the most egregious that get reported in national media, but also things like some idiot writing something offensive on a sidewalk) in 2021 was 1 in 11,242.
For comparative purposes, note that the odds of the average American being a victim of an aggravated assault in 2021 were about 1 in 413, or nearly 30 times greater. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191231/reported-aggravated-assault-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/
Would it be really great to have the number of hate crimes against Jewish Americans *and* aggravated assaults against all Americans at zero? Sure, it would. That's not going to happen in the real world, though. Stupid people who commit such crimes will always exist.
But the odds against being a victim of an aggravated assault in America in 2021 are pretty low, and the odds of being a victim of an anti-Semitic hate crime are much, much lower even than that. Neither of those two rises in statistical terms to the level at which a reasonable person should be spending tons of time gripped by the terror that it's going to happen to him.
Stupid people committing crimes are not the only thing that will always exist. What will also apparently always exist is people with an absolute commitment, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to the idea that America is a murderously dangerous place for minority groups of various types.
It is claimed in the email that "Jewish life" would be "render[ed]...unlivable" if "domestic shootings" of Jews tripled. Tripled from what base rate? In 2021, there were zero American Jewish casualties from anti-Semitic terrorists. That's 0.00. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/2021-saw-highest-ever-number-of-incidents-targeting-jewish-americans-report/ar-AAWBsYz.
But presumably the email writer doesn't want to start at zero in formulating the "unlivable" rate, so let's take triple the number of American Jewish casualties from anti-Semitic shooters starting at the 2018 rate (that's when the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that left 11 dead and 6 wounded happened.)
So triple that 2018 figure would yield 51 American Jewish casualties. That works out to a risk of about 1 in 150,000.
Now, how about let's compare that to the risk of all Americans being murdered in 2021? Not just shot, mind you, but murdered.
There were about 23,000 murders in the US in 2021, in a population of around 333,000,000. https://www.foxnews.com/us/us-murder-rate-continued-grim-climb-in-2021-new-fbi-estimates-show
Given an American population in 2021 of around 333 million, that yields almost a 1 in 15,000 risk of being murdered. So the average American is about 10 times more likely to be murdered than the average American Jew is to be shot by an anti-Semitic shooter, even in a hypothetical year when we're working with a total of Jewish casualties that is three times higher than the highest number in recent history.
(Yes, yes, if you're really committed to the ideological rhetoric, you could look at this and go "But American Jews are facing *both* the overall murder risk and the anti-Semitic shooting risk, and that's what's so unfair!" I can't quickly locate reliable online data on the murder rate specifically for Jewish American victims but it is certainly comparatively quite low given that murder victim rate correlates strongly with socioeconomic status and Jews as a group in the US are highly concentrated near the top end of that stratification system. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/10/11/how-income-varies-among-u-s-religious-groups/ So if you calculated just the average murder risk for non-Jewish Americans--remember Jews are a tiny percentage of the overall US population--you'd certainly find a risk level there much higher than the combined murder and anti-Semitic violence risk for American Jews.)
The average American Jew who is convinced the chances he's going to be attacked at synagogue are really high is indistinguishable from the Black person who thinks there's a huge risk every time a cop stops him for running a stop sign that his life is in danger. Both beliefs are neatly falsified by evidence. They are also both arguably fueled to a significant degree by ideologues irresponsibly talking about these phenomena without getting into the statistical realities.
I don’t want to come off crass, but I don’t see any hard evidence here linking the left and anti semitism. I can concede that there are many pro Palestine/anti Zionist activists on the left (imo mostly Muslims) who are genuine bigots and seem to genuinely hate Jews.
As for the climate change analogy, maybe. Sorry, anti semitism is endemic to the right. Historically and in the present, from western Christians to eastern Muslims, hatred of Jews is largely found on the right.
I do. It know where you live but in NYC all colleges are extremely left and extremely antisemitic... especially city colleges - openly antisemitic...
The same goes for other city organizations...
did you check out the link to the poll I provided in the article?
Interesting survey. A few surprises. Need to download the pdf as other version is very hard to read.
Yes, support for or against Zionism isn’t a proxy for anti semitism in my opinion.
“The Red Army invaded Ukraine”
The same Ukraine that also backed Nazis who explicitly persecuted Jews? Anti semitism was endemic throughout Europe at that time, you weren’t gonna find many regimes who weren’t willing to persecute them. Hell the Habsburgs blamed Jews for their infertility.
“The Iranian Revolution Guards are leftists”
You mean the IRG that cracks down on unions, labor strikes, Liberal/secular activists and backs religious theocrats?
“The IRG has revolutionary in their name”
Well I guess the DPRK has “democratic” in it so it MUST be a democracy lmao
Most ultra-orthodox Muslims are actually conservatives using liberalism to falsely perpetuate ‘Islamophobia’. Salafis, Deobabdis and the like have the same asinine religious beliefs and observations as Haredi Jews minus some theological differences. However, both of these religious groups misuse religious texts for their own sense of power, manipulation and control.
PETA, Biden... Marx... lol cmon this is hysteria.
GTFO with your lunatic smear that Hitler “invented the concept of animal rights”. When humans who eat the meat of other animals are directly financially supporting and smugly, giddily promoting subjecting almost countless millions of defenseless innocents to lives of total misery and terror and agony via rampant extreme sadistic abuse and industrial slaughter. I might as well ask you as someone obviously not only horrified by the Holocaust and determined to prevent the marginalization and abuse, let alone killing of the members of any group of humans (as I am) why you on a daily basis so blithely support almost unimaginable cruelty on a truly staggering scale to obviously very highly-sentient fellow animals, simply because they are of different species? What, your religious book tells you torturing *those* innocents to death is ok? Your religious tradition says it’s ok to torture other animals to death as long as certain religious technicalities are followed? Watch footage from any one of many entirely legit undercover investigations or employee whistleblowers at slaughterhouses and try to tell me they’re just Cartesian automatons and don’t really experience extreme pain and fear. If your religion really tells adherents to be kind to animals, not very many are listening. When you don’t need to eat any animal products in order to eat very well and very nutritiously (not to mention at less monetary cost and far less cost to the earth) then choosing to eat them out of habit or preference is both gratuitous and barbaric. But go ahead, be a moral idiot while cherry-picking one extraordinarily infamous vegetarian who died seventy-five years ago to try to smear everyone today who actually cares about not needlessly abusing other animals.
Please. Is there anything under the sun you think *is not* about anti-Semitism or itself proof of anti-Semitism? Your level of paranoid solipsism is almost deranged. And the comment i replied to is proof of that. Can you not stop for a few seconds and take a deep breath and consider how utterly ridiculous it was to try to claim that animal rights was invented by Hitler to try and demean Jewish people? That you would just casually toss out that claim, amid spraying who knows how many other half-baked comments around the page, shows how unserious a thinker you are. Why don’t you stop grossly trivializing anti-Semitism - which is something I take seriously and find very concerning. If you were actually serious you might have taken some care and put some thought into making a claim that bore up under the tiniest bit of scrutiny. Hitler?! Why not, for instance, Jeremy Bentham: “The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny… The question is not ‘Can they reason?’ nor, ‘Can they talk?’ but, ‘Can they suffer?'” Instead, you’re apparently so certain that everything of consequence under the sun that has ever existed is or was primarily about your group, and specifically a conspiracy to attack all Jewish people. There is nothing anti-Semitic about any animal welfare or rights organization or supporter with whom I’m familiar. Are some on the intolerant intersectional left who perhaps lump animal rights in as one more aspect of matrix of oppressions perhaps anti-Semitic to the extent they’ve adopted idiotic slurs about Jewish people being an “oppressor group” and Israel being about “white settler colonialism”? Maybe. I find that entire bundle of group hierarchies and group-based bigotries pretty repellant. Personally, if anything, I have a bit of a pro-Jewish bias based on several influential professors I admire and many dear friends, and I have generally very warm feelings re: Israel and the compelling idea behind it. But you are so seemingly obsessed with divining anti-Semitism in anyone who disagrees with you about anything and any group or movement you don’t care for - for whatever reasons - you can’t and won’t see anything else.
The entire movement about working to stop cruelty and abuse toward helpless innocents of other species can thus, through yours lens, only be an invention of the fevered mind of Adolf Hitler and its meaning and purpose must be only about persecuting your group. Do you also think badminton and rollerskating and hybrid vehicles were invented to “get the Jews”? You are so simultaneously sanctimonious and self-pitying you cannot see anything else. Not only did Hitler invent the concept of animal rights to oppress your group, it’s also necessary to mention that, according to you, no one but your group is actually kinder to animals. Of course. On that basis, I thought I’d ask you: if being kind to animals is a core religious admonition and commitment which in your view makes your religion and its adherents special in a positive way, why don’t more people of your religion actually follow that admonition in word and deed? Nope, can’t do that. It only proves that _____ is anti-Semitic. Just like 7-11 and cat litter and anything and everything else that briefly flits before your blinkered consciousness. I asked you the exact same question I’ve asked dozens of Christians who are indifferent or hostile to animal rights: do you think it’s ok to abuse animals because [you think] your religious book says so? Did you want me to ask you if you think it’s ok to abuse other animals because *the Christian Bible* says so? I asked you the exact same thing I’ve asked Muslim adherents of halal diets: do you think the observance of religiously-based technicalities in how animals are slaughtered for consumption makes it ok? Was I supposed to ask you about halal rather than kosher dictates?
You’re totally missing the entire other point re: what made your ugly, baseless assertion so actually offensive: you casually tried to smear and delegitimize an entire basic ethical commitment about mercy, compassion, and empathy for the suffering of others by ascribing it entirely to Hitler…when the sadistic abuse of other animals and their agonizing, terrifying industrial slaughter is so very much like what Hitler and his henchmen and followers did foremost and most horrifically to six million Jews, but also to a lesser extent to Sinti and Roma, and Slavs, and gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities, and anyone else they considered subhuman/ lesser species. I can hardly count how many Jewish friends have made that direct comparison to me. Like my friend, Solveig, in Berlin, who never flinches from saying (about the rampant torture and brutally remorseless slaughter of mothers and babies of other species:) “This is what they did to us!” And please don’t try the sophist’s slight of hand of claiming I’m “comparing Jews to animals”. We’re all animals. Is the human “family” we all share somewhat distinct from other species of animals? By definition, yes, in some ways. But only in some ways. We are more alike than not, by far. Which is why I asked you about the specific religious basis if any on which you justify or excuse treating thinking, feeling members of other species so much like Hitler treated other humans he considered subhuman. I gave you the credit and complement of assuming that you universalize the moral basis on which you’re so committed to opposing the abuse and oppression of your group, to every other historically and/or potentially vulnerable group. Maybe you don’t see things that way and only care about your group. See above, re: startling degree of solipsistic paranoia. Or, maybe you extend that circle of empathy and compassion only to other groups of humans. If so, I want to know what the precise distinction is that makes their utter agony at our hands and on at a staggering scale ok. For a lot of religious people, it seems to boil down to some version of “God told us we’re special and can do whatever we feel like to other living beings.” I genuinely wanted to know: what exactly in your mind makes torturing other humans to death almost unfathomably horrible, but doing so to a dog or a cat or a pig or a cow, let alone almost countless millions of them A-OK. Or, in more utilitarian terms, if you think human’s lives are more important, what fraction of that value exactly would you assign to a dog or a pig who wants desperately not to be torturer and killed? How gratuitous in need and yet grievous in its intensity and protracted in duration must their agony and terror be before you begin to care?
If you’re going to bring Hitler into this discussion based on such a ludicrously concocted smear and try to associate his monstrous crimes with the very people whose entire creed is opposing the abuse of the most vulnerable sentient beings living among us, human and otherwise, it’s fair to ask you: why do you think it’s ok to treat other in most ways quite similar species in very much the same ways Hitler tortured and slaughtered human beings he othered as “subhuman”? If those other species’ basic emotional and social capacities is more similar to ours than not, and if their physical forms and functions are very much like ours for very similar evolutionary reasons, and if their emotional and social and sensory experiences of the world are much more alike ours than not (and we have plenty of reason to believe many other species actually have a sharper, more intense - if less abstract - sensory experience of the world) it’s utterly perverse and nonsensical to at once a) try to demean and dismiss the compelling ethical concerns of animal rights activists by baselessly trying to associate their movement with Hitler, while b) pretending that actually treating other highly-sentient animals much the way Hitler murdered other human beings is basically just fine.
If you had told me a year or two ago that we were on the verge of prohibiting the recognition of the differences between male and female biology, I would have said you were psychotically paranoid. It can happen here. Anything can happen here.
White nationalists are the heritage of southern rednecks affiliated with the Democrat Party. Today’s liberal Democrats should look to their submission to leftist ideology as ginning up antisemitism.
This is so interesting. I loved Glenn and John’s discussion and I’m fascinated by this response. The prevailing sentiment among many today is “stop complaining, Jews, you can’t be victims since you turned out okay, and you’re no saints yourselves”. This paves the way for all manners of abuse, from synagogue shootings down to most Jewish college students reporting they are afraid to let anyone know they are Jewish. In a time where most people flaunt their intersectional status, that one strikes a nerve.
The issue here isn’t limited to Jews - it’s what happens anytime you put “The” in front of the identity - The Jews, The Blacks, The Asians, The Gays - it dehumanizes the individual to a point of tacit approval to blame the Collective for perceived or real harms by any one member. As Kmele Foster noted recently, who wants to be blamed or lauded for the failures or successes of other people, just because we share immutable characteristics? How did we devolve to that point?
But the texts say that homosexuals are to be murdered wherever they are found, dont they?