The Attacks On Jews We Aren’t Talking About
Much of this has taken place in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. According to the NYPD, assault and robberies on Jews in Crown Heights went from two in 2017 to 10 in 2018. The attackers tend to be African-American, and they sometimes yell out anti-Semitic slurs. There have been at least three such attacks so far this year. You can see a lot of this violence in recovered surveillance footage, but not much of it makes it to the front pages of major newspapers.Most hate crimes reported in New York City are anti-Jewish, police say
And it’s not just happening in Crown Heights. On Tuesday morning, Rabbi Uriel Vigler was heading to his synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when he was accosted by a black man calling him a “f***ing Jew” and “the devil.” The man fled when he saw a security guard. Vigler captured some of the aftermath on video.
These incidents aren’t talked about much because they have no political utility. There’s no fake soul-searching because the attacks have nothing to do with Israel. And there’s no finger-pointing because they have nothing to do with Donald Trump and white nationalism.
There are still other reasons that black-on-Jewish hate crime is largely ignored: Democrats would rather not speak of it because they’re hyper-sensitive about offending African-American voters (and not too worried about losing Jewish ones). Some on the left are so frightened to address this kind of anti-Semitism that they’ve decided it isn’t anti-Semitism at all. An article in the Forward last December more-or-less chalked it all up to the effects of gentrification. And if Republicans bring it up, they’ll immediately be called racists, as they are when they point out Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite new moderate, Pete Buttigieg, just earned his official Democratic presidential-candidate badge by going up to Harlem to get the nod from the mellowing elder statesman of black anti-Semitism, Al Sharpton. Any genuine reflection on the left would surely end the ritual of seeking blessings from a man who said, in in the wake of a murderous pogrom in 1991, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” But Democrats still stand in line every four years to kiss his ring.
More than half of all hate crimes in New York City reported in 2018 and so far in 2019 targeted Jews, authorities said Thursday.Synagogue asked for security funds a year ago; they arrived days before attack
According to New York Police Department figures released Thursday, of the 145 hate crimes reported in January through April 2019, 82 incidents – nearly 57 percent – were anti-Jewish.
In 2018, there were 353 total hate crime complaints, up from 325 in 2017, and the NYPD made 149 arrests. Of these hate crimes, 186 – or nearly 53% – had anti-Jewish bias, up from 151 in 2017.
The NYPD tally is of reported complaints and arrests, not convictions.
Three precincts with large Hasidic populations, all in Brooklyn, reported the most anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2018. The 71st Precinct, which encompasses part of Crown Heights, reported nine anti-Jewish hate crimes, the most of any precinct. Precincts including Williamsburg and Borough Park each had seven.
Sixty-nine – or 37 percent – of 2018’s anti-Jewish hate crime reports resulted in an arrest. Forty of the alleged perpetrators were white, 25 were black, two were Hispanic and two were Asian.
The Chabad of Poway synagogue, where a gunman on Saturday fired his semi-automatic rifle at Jewish worshipers, had applied for a federal grant to install gates and more secure doors to better protect that area. The $150,000 was approved in September but only got awarded in late March.
“Obviously we did not have a chance to start using the funds yet,” Rabbi Simcha Backman told The Associated Press.
Backman, who oversees security grants for the 207 Chabad institutions across California, declined to provide details on the planned security enhancements or to speculate whether they might have changed the outcome of Saturday’s attack.
The shooter killed a woman and wounded an 8-year-old girl and two men — one of them the rabbi presiding at the service on the last day of Passover.
Backman said the synagogue north of San Diego is considering asking authorities to allow some of the money be used to hire security guards, which it doesn’t have now.