Anti-Semitism Is Alive and Well in Brooklyn

You probably know it already, but anti-Semitism is alive and well in Brooklyn. Jews are being systematically attacked for being Jewish… and the media has chosen to ignore it. Why? Because the perpetrators are members of minority groups, blacks and Hispanics.

If they were white Trump supporters, David Marcus remarks in The Federalist, the media would be blazing with stories about how Trump is Hitler. Since the perpetrators are minority group members, the media is largely ignoring the story... or covering up the identities of the anti-Semites.

Imagine that members of a religious minority were being frequently physically assaulted in America’s largest city at alarming rates. Imagine if members of that minority were being cold-cocked or spit on randomly for doing nothing more than being who they are and dressing how they dress. Imagine what a powerful and important story this would be to our country, how mobilized the media and government would be to stop it. But what if I told you that this is happening in New York City right now, and nobody seems to care very much? How can this be? I’ll explain it.

Orthodox Jews in New York City, specifically in Brooklyn, have experienced alarming rates of physical assault over the past year. The New York Police Department says that hate crimes in the city are up 67 percent this year. Of those, a whopping 80 percent have been anti-Semitic hate crimes. Just this week an Orthodox Jew just walking down the street was attacked from behind, punched in the head by an attacker who then ran away. In another incident this week, an Orthodox Jew was attacked by a group of men, one of whom shouted “You (expletive) Jew.”

This is an all too familiar story in Brooklyn these days, and there is a reason it isn’t being treated as a crisis by our media or government. That reason is that many if not most of the assailants are black or Hispanic men. In an article in The New York Times last October that was careful to point out, although without much evidence, that people of all descriptions are committing acts of anti-Semitism, Ginia Bellafante writes (emphasis mine), “In fact, it is the varied backgrounds of people who commit hate crimes in the city that make combating and talking about anti-Semitism in New York much harder.”

We should be clear about what this means. It means that if these assaults were being committed by white men in hoods or MAGA hats, it would not be “hard to talk about.” It would be a clear-cut case of bigotry that needs to be fought with every tool in our arsenal. Instead, journalists are wringing their hands about intersectionality, and careful not to indulge the narrative that these physical attacks are coming from blacks and Hispanics in bordering neighborhoods, even though that narrative is absolutely true.