The strategy, produced by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, coordinates work across schools, the police, civil rights authorities, and other agencies through an interagency task force. It doubles funding for the broader Partners Against the Hate grants program to $6.4 million and allocates $1 million for security at nonprofits, including synagogues and other houses of worship.
Notably, the report explicitly defends New Yorkers’ right to protest and doesn’t adopt the flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been used to conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Its commitment to enforcing civil rights and teaching Jewish American history also deserves support. But its account of Jewish insecurity and its outsourcing of much of its work through third-sector organization deserves scrutiny.
Since October 7, 2023, political discourse in New York has been disproportionately concerned with the supposed threats to Jewish New Yorkers, particularly from supporters of Palestinian liberation and Muslim New Yorkers. The campaign against Mamdani intensified that tendency. A secular socialist was portrayed as a Jew-hating Islamist because of his Muslim background and support for Palestinian self-determination. The Israeli government and its supporters, who identify the Jewish people with a violent state, have deliberately blurred the line between being challenged for controversial views (say, defending a genocidal state on a college campus) and being hounded for one’s religious identity.
In reality, NORC research found that people on the hard right held significantly more antisemitic attitudes than other Americans, while those on the hard left held more anti-Israel views.
Still, it’s reasonable to say that amid rising authoritarianism, a right-wing administration, and anger at Israel’s actions, certain forms of antisemitism have grown. These range from naked bigotry to the subtler reification of identity involved in asking Jewish New Yorkers born in the American republic, six thousand miles away, to repent for Israel’s murderous actions.
A real social problem, however, can also acquire the dimensions of a moral panic, and that panic can be weaponized against the Left. Consider a recent example: like other Americans, Asian Americans were victims of violence, some of it racially motivated. Yet the rise of the “Stop Asian Hate” movement brought sweeping claims about what it meant to be Asian in America, rooted in collective vulnerability and identitarian remedies.
Reported hate crimes against Asians did rise during the pandemic amid Donald Trump’s anti-China rhetoric. But the mobilization against those real acts also encouraged a salience bias, in which seemingly every street altercation involving an Asian victim was viewed as a targeted hate crime.
Yet one widely cited tally, from Stop AAPI Hate, consisted mostly of verbal harassment; physical assaults made up about 16 percent of the nearly eleven thousand incidents reported to the organization from March 2020 through December 2021.
Hate crimes against Asians recorded by the NYPD rose sharplyfrom twenty-eight in 2020 to well over a hundred in 2021. But the movement went further, presenting those attacks as a wave of racist hostility directed at a single community. “Asian American and Pacific Islander” is an umbrella label that groups together people with origins across a vast region, divided by class, language, and national background.
The “Stop Asian Hate” remedies were tautological. The movement insisted there was a mass problem that demanded marches and won corporate declarations against hate, new federal hate crime legislation, and pork for community nonprofits. It didn’t matter that some of the most high-profile incidents fit the story poorly.
In January 2022, Michelle Go was murdered while waiting for a train at Times Square. The man charged with pushing her in front of the train was homeless and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia two decades earlier. A better-staffed public transit system, track barriers, more state funding for psychiatric care, and supportive housing might all have helped prevent Go’s murder. Public education about the contributions of an imagined “AAPI community” would not have.
But organizing around identity made those universal solutions harder, not easier, to imagine. And it taught many Asian Americans to feel irrationally unsafe in the cities and towns where they grew up and to understand their safety in racial terms.
The same dynamics are at play in discussions of antisemitism today. When something happens to a Jewish New Yorker, the first response is seemingly to present the incident as evidence of an all-encompassing danger, making other Jews feel less secure. That fear itself then becomes politically noteworthy: “I don’t feel safe in the city of my birth anymore.” Communal identity becomes even more central to how people understand their lives and their relationships with others.
The statistics often cited in response to arguments like these also deserve scrutiny. Advocacy groups’ incident tallies, police records of hate crimes, and surveys of communal anxiety measure different things. Yet in a climate of fear — whether among Asian Americans a few years ago or Jewish people today — they are conflated into evidence of an emergency.
The Anti-Defamation League’s 2021 audit is instructive. It highlighted a worrying 34 percent increase in antisemitic incidents while acknowledging that many of the incidents were identified through new reporting partnerships. Putting aside well-warranted left-wing skepticism of the ADL, the example shows how changes in data collection can complicate efforts to distinguish changes in underlying behavior from changes in reporting.
Even police data on hate crimes don’t necessarily tell us how likely an Asian American or Jewish New Yorker is to suffer violence. That requires attention to absolute numbers, population, the kinds of offenses involved, and their distribution. It also requires political judgments about whether the response should take the form of universal or identitarian investments, and how those investments should be delivered.
The report’s own rhetoric illustrates some of the confusion. Its opening letters move between assaults, vandalism, and “stares and casual comments” in describing a climate of fear. These experiences require different assessments and responses. Surveys showing widespread anxiety cannot independently establish the prevalence of the conditions people fear. Otherwise, the effects of alarm become its justification.
It doesn’t require ignoring the persistence of antisemitism and the potential for its mass emergence to say that American Jews live in secure, prosperous, and integrated settings. Some heinous speech and sporadic violence should not erase the distance between today’s America and the history of Jewish exclusion.
As Hannah Arendt warned, treating antisemitism as an eternal fact of Jewish life can give antisemites an alibi, making a contingent political prejudice appear natural and inevitable. Ahistorical comparisons trivialize the centuries of subordination, pogroms, and ultimately mass extermination that Jews faced in Europe. Along with anti-American rhetoric like Joe Biden’s absurd claim that without Israel “not a Jew in the world is safe,” such comparisons do a disservice to the long struggle that has made the United States a hospitable home for millions of minorities.
The panics that made some Asians afraid of commuting to work, or some Jewish New Yorkers afraid of their neighbors, also rely on rhetoric that leaves us little room to describe a resurgence of structural discrimination. If there is a real antisemitic political movement growing in this country, beyond the acts of a few depraved people, what anti-Jewish laws is it advancing? How is it organizing to deprive Jews of their rights? What social structures are being built to enforce Jewish exclusion?
Online bigotry from people like Nick Fuentes, or even from some supporters of the Palestinian cause, does not itself demonstrate a mass movement capable of imposing anti-Jewish rule. Nor does it establish how much that bigotry affects Jewish Americans’ daily lives beyond the cycle of panic and the reification of identity it encourages. Cherry-picking speech in a country of more than 340 million people, even when every report is accurate, obscures the broader state of our society.
Source: jacobin.com
