Enough is Enough: Stop Ignoring Antisemitism in America

Picture Above: The Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA. Image courtesy of their website: https://www.tolols.org/

On Saturday, October 27th, 2018, a gunman armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle and three handguns barged into Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during the Saturday Shabbat services and killed 11 civilians. The shooter, Robert Bowers, has been taken into police custody, and it appears that he worked alone. As he ran into the synagogue on Saturday morning and begin shooting at innocent people praying, Bowers shouted anti-Semitic slurs.

According to the New York Times, This shooting is the deadliest act of violence against the Jewish community in the United States.

People often don’t realize the extent to which antisemitism has been a part of American history. This shooting is the most recent in a long line of incidents against Jewish people. Anti-Semitism has a long history in the United States, and it is something that every Jewish person living here realizes at a certain age. Growing up, the synagogues I went to hired private security on major holidays. The temple my family attends regularly has a lock on the front door that requires a code to open the door. The Jewish school I attended for 4 years had a police officer standing at the front door every morning. The Jewish Community Center (JCC) nearby installed a gate around the entire property and has hired security every day. My Facebook feed was crowded with countless news articles about right- and left-wing antisemitism on college campuses while I prepared to go to college. I’ve been in text conversations where jokes about the Holocaust— jokes about systematic genocide— are made without thought. Not only is antisemitism in the United States real, we’re reminded of it daily.

 The New York Times reported that “According to an annual report by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued earlier this year, the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged 57 percent in 2017, the largest rise in a single year since the ADL. began tracking such crimes in 1979.” This statistic from the ADL includes everything from harassment to outright violence. The Los Angeles Times reported that according to the ADL report, “The majority of those incidents were harassment, which rose 41% to 1,015 incidents, including 163 bomb threats against Jewish community centers and synagogues. Vandalism rose 86% to 952 cases.”

Bowers—the Tree of Life shooter—established an antisemitic presence online long before the attack. For months, he expressed his anger and hatred through social media, specifically on the platform Gab, “a social network that bills itself as a being dedicated to free speech and which is increasingly popular among alt-right activists and white nationalists.” His biography read “Jews are the children of Satan.” He distributed racist memes and believed Jews were the “enemy of white people.” Minutes before the shooting, he wrote, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

This act of domestic terrorism, without a doubt, is a hate crime, and that cannot be ignored. When asked about the shooting, Rabbi Marvin Hier of Simon Wiesenthal Center said, “I’m afraid to say that we may be at the beginning of what has happened to Europe, the consistent anti-Semitic attacks.” Hier is right. The shootings and the hate crimes of the past few years is something we’ve seen before.

On November 9 to November 10, 1938, Nazis in Germany burnt down synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, and murdered nearly 100 Jews. This incident, known as “Kristallnacht” or “The Night of Broken Glass,” resulted in the arrest of 30,000 Jewish men, who were sent to concentration camps.

During World War II and the Holocaust, the Nazis segregated the Jewish communities of Europe by force into ghettos. These ghettos were enclosed, overcrowded neighborhoods with armed soldiers. There was never enough food, as Germans would deliberately starve the inhabitants by only allowing them to purchase small amounts of food. Inhabitants of the ghettos either died due to disease, starvation, or shootings. Even if they survived those horrors, a majority of the inhabitants were deported to killing centers, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Enough is enough is enough.

Yes, Americans are not seeing Jews being treated the exact same way they were treated in Nazi Germany and Europe in the 1940s. But that does not mean antisemitism does not exist. By February 4, 2017, JCCs in the United States received nearly 50 bomb threats since the start of that year. On April 13, 2014, Frazier Glenn Cross Jr., a prominent former Ku Klux Klan leader, shot two people at a JCC and one at a Jewish retirement community in Overland Park, Kansas. In July of this year, Walter Edward Stolper attempted to set fire to his condominium building in Miami Beach, Florida. He told a business associate that he wanted to “kill all Jews” inside the building.

Just because the hate crime is not identical to what we have seen in the past does not mean it is not a hate crime.

Enough is enough.

I should not be scared to wear my Star of David necklace in public. My friends should not feel hesitant to reveal that they are Jewish. My synagogue should not have to invest so much into security cameras, guards, and alarms. People should be able to go to school, work, and temple without reminders that these precautions are necessary because there are so many people in this country, like Bowers, who hate us because of our religion. The future of Jewish people in America should not be a reflection of the past, with armed officers and isolation. That is not freedom of religion. Instead, we, as Americans, need to stop allowing and unintentionally supporting antisemitism, its believers, and the violence that occurs in its name.

When the New York Times interviewed Bowers’ neighbor, Chris Hall, about the gunman, he said, “The most terrifying thing is just how normal he seemed… he just looked like an average 50-year-old dude.”

Enough is enough. I have the freedom to practice my religion. Let me do so in peace.