From the Editor: We’ve seen far too much antisemitism in recent years

Michael Regenstreif

By Michael Regenstreif

Editor

My wife, Sylvie, and I were on vacation in Clearwater Beach, Florida in December. On December 23, the second night of Chanukah, we joined several hundred other people – locals and tourists alike – at the Chanukah party and giant menorah lighting organized by Chabad of Clearwater.

Held outdoors on the main drag on Clearwater Beach, less than a five-minute walk from where we were staying, it was a typical Chabad Chanukah event with speeches, songs, a magic show, latkes and sufganiyot. One of the big hits of the event was Rabbi Levi Hodakov singing his updated version of Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song.” Local politicians, including Mayor George Cretekos and several other members of Clearwater’s city council, joined in the celebration.

There were a couple of police officers who stood on the edge of the crowd observing the event and the comings and goings but, thankfully, there were no incidents that required their attention.

However, less than two weeks before Chanukah, there was a mass shooting at the JC Kosher Supermarket in Jersey City, New Jersey carried out by a pair of antisemitic extremists. They murdered Mindy Ferencz, 33, an owner of the market; Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, 49, an employee; and rabbinical student Moshe Deutsch, 24, a customer. Three others, including two police officers, were also wounded in the incident. The assailants arrived at the market shortly after they killed a police detective in a separate incident.

Then, on December 28, the seventh night of Chanukah, a masked man invaded the home of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg in Monsey, New York – a small community north of New York City with a largely Chasidic population – and randomly stabbed five Chasidic Jews attending a Chanukah party. Other guests fought back and the suspect escaped in a car. He was arrested by police later that night in Harlem. In the investigation, police found his handwritten journals filled with antisemitic views.

Thinking of those incidents just before and during Chanukah – as well as the antisemitic murders earlier last year at Chabad of Poway in California and at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 – made me stop and think about whether we were safe attending a Jewish event in an accessible public space in Florida, a state where it is easy to acquire weapons and a state with a history of mass shootings – including the high school massacre in Parkland in 2018 that killed 17, and the nightclub massacre in Orlando in 2016 that killed 49.

Although, as already mentioned, there were a couple of police officers present at the Chanukah event on Clearwater Beach, there was no security screening. Anyone and everyone had unfettered access to the event. What would have happened if someone like the attackers from Jersey City or Monsey or Poway or Pittsburgh had been there that night? (By contrast, when we attended a couple of concerts in December at theatres in Clearwater, we could only enter after emptying our pockets and being searched with metal-detecting wands by security guards.)

The sad fact is that we live in a world rife with resurging antisemitism – and antisemitism is coming from so many different directions: from the extreme right, from the extreme left, from Islamist extremists; from some parts of the anti-Israel movement; and from elsewhere. But as Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a world-renowned expert on antisemitism, explained during her visit to Ottawa in November, ultimately “they all sound the same.”

While the internet and its various social media platforms are a great tool to bring people of common interests together and to create and build communities, the internet and social media are also a tool for spreading misinformation – often through conspiracy theories – and hatred.

Sadly, statistics show that there are more hate crimes committed against Jewish targets in Canada than any other minority group. Thankfully, few of those crimes have been violent, but every hate crime is traumatic nonetheless. Who in this community can forget the string of antisemitic graffiti attacks on Jewish buildings in 2016?

In many ways, we’ve made great strides over the years in the fight against antisemitism. On many levels, antisemitism, racism and other forms of bigotry, are no longer acceptable. While just before and during the Holocaust, Canada had a government whose policy toward Jewish refugees was “none is too many,” we now have a government that has apologized for that. Not that many decades ago, the Montreal suburb of Hampstead would not allow Jews to own property in the town, while now the majority of its residents are Jewish.

At the political level, antisemitism has almost ceased to be a factor in Canada in the years since the late Herb Gray became Canada’s first Jewish cabinet minister in 1969. Gray, himself, eventually served as deputy prime minister for four-and-a-half years between 1997 and 2002, and here in Ottawa, where we once had an antisemitic mayor, we have since had two Jewish mayors. There are countless other examples I could cite.

But that doesn’t mean we can stop being vigilant about antisemitism (and all other forms of racism and bigotry) in Canadian political life. The province of Quebec recently passed Bill 21, a law banning civil servants in positions of authority from displaying symbols of their religious belief – including the wearing of a kippah.

Meanwhile we can look to the United Kingdom for lessons on what might happen when variations of antisemitism become mainstreamed. The Labour Party – long the political home to the majority of British Jews – spent the last several years under the leadership of the once-obscure far-left anti-Zionist Jeremy Corbyn, who allowed antisemitism to flourish in the party. Much of British Jewry regarded a potential Corbyn government as an existential threat to the community and breathed a collective sigh of relief in December when Corbyn led Labour to its worst election defeat since 1935 – with most British analysts agreeing that perceived antisemitism was a significant factor in turning many traditional Labour voters against the party.

As much as we need to remain vigilant against antisemitism and stand up to it and fight it whenever it rears its ugly head, we cannot, as Lipstadt warned, allow antisemitism to become central to our identity as Jews. “Then we turn Jews into an object – what’s done to Jews, instead of what Jews do,” she said.

We live in a free and democratic society and while being mindful of the security of our persons and our institutional buildings, we must remain free to live Jewishly – however we each may want to do that. 

Next December, it’s likely that Sylvie and I will be back on vacation in Clearwater Beach. And, as usual, we’ll be at the Chabad of Clearwater Chanukah party.

Antisemitism: ‘The time for silence is finished’

(From left) Rabbi Howard Finkelstein; Deputy Head of Mission Franziska Hagedron, Embassy of Germany; Benoit-Antoine Bacon, president of Carleton University; keynote speaker Professor Deborah Lipstadt; former justice minister Irwin Cotler; Professor Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa, recipient of the Arie Van Mansum Award, at the launch of Holocaust Education Month, November 7 at Kehillat Beth Israel.

Deborah Lipstadt, a world-renowned professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, was keynote speaker at the launch of Holocaust Education Month in Ottawa. Louise Rachlis reports.

“There’s not much we can do to get rid of antisemitism,” said Professor Deborah Lipstadt. “But we can become the unwelcome guest at the dinner.”

“We can’t be quiet,” she told an enthusiastic full house at Kehillat Beth Israel on November 10.

“Telegraph the message especially to young people: You’ve got to speak out! The time for silence is over. We see it on the right, we see it on the left – the time for silence is finished.”

Lipstadt’s talk was the keynote address at the launch of Holocaust Education Month in Ottawa, held on the 81st anniversary of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), the antisemitic pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria that was the prelude to the Holocaust.

The event was organized by the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship at the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies at Carleton University.

Lipstadt famously won the libel suit brought against her by Holocaust denier David Irving in the British courts, described in her book History on Trial. Her most recent book is Antisemitism: Here and Now.

“Antisemitism is part of a grouping of forms of hatred, but it’s different in that it’s a conspiracy theory, with that element of fear,” said Lipstadt. “The template of antisemitism is the way the story of the Crucifixion was used in the Middle Ages,” that the Jews wanted Jesus to be killed because he wanted the moneychangers out, and the Jews asked the Romans to kill him.

As Lipstadt explained, that conspiracy theory went beyond the Church: Voltaire, Karl Marx, and the eugenics movement, “they all sound the same.”

“The antisemite looks on Jews to be feared in a malicious and devious way,” she said. “The Jew becomes the devil or the demon… the only one who can harm God, and he comes in disguise so you don’t know you’ve encountered him until they’ve done their damage.”

She described a Nazi propaganda film that promoted Jews dressed in regular clothing as more dangerous than those with side-locks and traditional garb.

“We all recognize the kind of antisemite who shoots up synagogues,” she said. “Those people are dangerous, but for the dangerous things they do, they are easier to spot and fight… The dinner party antisemite sits at dinner and says he hired an associate – ‘he’s Jewish - but he’s very honest.’”

Then there’s the “stirring up the pot” enabler kind of antisemite on the left and on the right, like Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump, she explained.

“Nice people don’t attend rallies in Charlottesville and chant ‘Jews will not replace us.’”

For many of the people on the progressive left, their view of prejudice is “refracted through a prism of ethnicity, class and power.” Jews are white, privileged and, ipso facto, have power, she said. “They look upon the Jew as someone who could not be a victim of prejudice.”

And the far right “is something else.” They believe “there is a plan afoot for a genocide of white Christians” and these black and brown people, “they’re not smart enough to be doing this on their own, so the Jews are helping them… George Soros has become the Rothschild of the 21st century. That’s what they meant in Charlottesville when they chanted ‘Jews will not replace us.’”

Lipstadt added that a fight over whether antisemitism is worse on the left or the right is useless.

“They both are dangerous in different ways: on the left, structurally; on the right, dangerous in terms of its violence and conspiracy theories.”

Criticism of Israeli government policies is not antisemitic, she said. “It becomes antisemitic when you have this myopic view of Israel being the only one doing a bad thing in the Middle East… You have to ask, what’s going on? Why this myopia? That’s what disturbs me. When you call for the destruction of Israel, that’s antisemitism.”

Holocaust denial, Lipstadt said, is a form of antisemitism.

But the fight against antisemitism shouldn’t become our sole identity, she cautioned. “Then we turn Jews into an object, what’s done to Jews, instead of what Jews do.”

After a standing ovation, Lipstadt was thanked by former justice minister Irwin Cotler, chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, who praised her for stressing “the compelling importance of each and all of us of standing up and being counted. This must be the overriding message we take away. We cannot let antisemitism become the linchpin of our identity and who we are.”

The HEM launch event also included the presentation of the 2019 Arie Van Mansum Award for Excellence in Holocaust Education. Created in memory of Arie Van Mansum, who was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, the award was presented to Professor Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa by Global News journalist Abigail Bimman.

“The legacy of courage and sacrifice of the righteous must be preserved,” said Grabowski. “The history of the Holocaust finds itself under direct attack, including more recent forms of Holocaust distortion.”