Why anti-Semitism is surging across the political spectrum – By Harry Bruinius & Patrik Jonsson (CS Monitor) / Dec 31 2019
One common denominator of the glorification of us-versus-them mentalities has been a rise in anti-Semitism on both right and left. When hate spills across the ideological spectrum, it can be even more difficult to combat.
Rabbi Romiel Daniel felt something particularly poignant this Hanukkah season as he and his congregation sang the words of “Ma’oz Tsur,” a 13th-century Hebrew poem that is sung each night during the ceremonial lighting of the menorah’s candles.
“It is a song about the victory of the weak over the strong, a victory of good over evil, a victory of the holy over the unholy, as such,” says Rabbi Daniel, head of the Rego Park Jewish Center, a synagogue in Queens. “It’s about the fact that all this was possible, not because of man’s strength at all, but because God was on our side.”
But Ma’oz Tsur, which recounts the history of God’s saving acts and is often translated as “Rock of Ages,” also carries a lamentation: “Our salvation takes too long, and there is no end to the bad days,” worshippers sing in the final stanza.
There have been at least 10 anti-Semitic attacks in the New York region during this year’s holiday celebrations, officials say, but many of the city’s Jewish residents remain most stunned by the attack of a machete-wielding man who burst into a rabbi’s home in Monsey Saturday evening, injuring five of a group who had gathered to celebrate the seventh night of Hanukkah.
The attack came 2 1/2 weeks after a pair of assailants in Jersey City, New Jersey, a man and a woman, targeted a kosher supermarket in a Jewish neighborhood, shooting and killing four, including a police officer. Since then, Jewish residents, most of them from Orthodox and Hasidic communities, have been accosted on the streets.
This April, a gunman shot and killed a worshipper in an attack on a synagogue in Poway, California, wounding three others. In October 2018, a gunman stormed into Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, killing 11 and wounding six.
“We cannot overstate the fear people are feeling right now,” tweeted New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who called the recent acts of anti-Semitic violence a crisis and a nationwide epidemic. “I’ve spoken to longtime friends who, for the first time in their lives, are fearful to show outward signs of their Jewish faith.”
Such feelings, says Rabbi Daniel, have come as a shock for many of the members of his synagogue, who include a number of Holocaust survivors, such as the Jewish Center’s chairwoman, Ruth Lowenstein, who witnessed the burning of her family’s synagogue in Berlin.
Continue to article: https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2019/1231/Why-anti-Semitism-is-surging-across-the-political-spectrum
