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The weekend was a flurry of texts, emails and calls in the Jewish community:
“Is your family safe?”
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“Did you find your friends?”
“Is your dad’s family okay?”
But the concerns, in this confusing and divisive year of 2023 in America, aren’t only for Israel after the lethal weekend attacks there by Hamas, a terrorist group intent on wiping Israel off the map.
“Immediately, as we woke up to the news on Saturday, we talked to law enforcement,” said Meredith Weisel, the regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in the D.C. area. “We have requested that they continue to increase patrols of Jewish institutions.”
Antisemitic incidents in the United States reached historic levels in 2022 — the highest since the ADL began collecting data in 1979, according to its audit. (Disturbingly, I wrote a similar line when the Jewish Community Center in Fairfax County was covered in 19 swastikas overnight in 2018. The number of acts is exponentially growing.)
There were 19 swastikas painted on a Jewish Community Center in Virginia
Last year, there were 3,697 times that someone vandalized, harassed or assaulted in the name of anti-Jewish hate.
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And against that backdrop — a domestic hostility that has steadily increased year after year — the massacre in Israel feels palpable and even foreboding here in America, where hatred of Jews is very real.
Pamela Nadell is remembering the words painted on a fence near her home in a liberal, diverse suburb of D.C.: “No Mercy For Jews.”
And it’s reminding the American University history professor and chair of the school’s Jewish Studies Program how proximate hatred is today.
“When I was growing up, I didn’t encounter antisemitism up close and personal that way,” Nadell said.
While American Jews like her who remember the 1973 Yom Kippur War may have felt an existential threat when Israel was attacked back then, it wasn’t as personal and immediately menacing as the Hamas attack today.
I remember talking about this feeling — that antisemitism wasn’t open, immediate and threatening in America — with a 71-year-old woman at that Jewish Community Center in Fairfax that was defaced five years ago.
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“I don’t know, I just grew up in a part of Chicago where most people got along,” she said. “There were signs at restaurants and country clubs that said ‘Members Only,’ and we knew that meant ‘No Jews.’ But swastikas? It wasn’t like that.”
For one thing, there was no information highway to spread the hate so quickly back then. Already, monitors at the ADL are seeing an uptick in hate speech and threats online, Weisel said. The group’s website has resources for people who want to help.
“We are definitely worried that here in the U.S. and here in our region,” she said, “when something happens in Israel, we see it repeated here.”
She’ll never forget when she came face to face with vandalism she didn’t expect in America, let alone this region, in 2018.
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“I am a runner; I happened to be out running early in the morning,” she said, and she saw swastikas and “KKK” scrawled all over the place where her family worships in Gaithersburg, Md., the Shaare Torah synagogue. “It stopped me dead in my tracks. It was horrible. This is a place that my kids call a second home. They went to preschool there.”
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Those are the images that come to mind as her family hears the news from Israel and as the incidents across the nation grow, at the same time books about the Holocaust — among them “Night” by Elie Wiesel, “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank and “Maus,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by Art Spiegelman — are being banned from school libraries.
Our time, according to Nadell, is “the high tide of American antisemitism.”
We are approaching the five-year anniversary of the slaughter of 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue.
There was a very real chain reaction to that horror right here in Washington.
Just days after that massacre, D.C. police arrested a man who said he supported that attack. Jeffrey “Raph” Clark, a guy born in D.C. who went to liberal, local schools, had a basement full of nooses, ammo, armored vests and a sketch of someone with a gun aimed at the head of a bearded man wearing a yarmulke.
Alleged white nationalists arrested in D.C. show that hate has no Zip code
Clark alarmed his family when he defended the synagogue massacre. On Gab, he called the shooter a hero and said, of those killed, that “every last one of them deserved exactly what happened to them and so much worse,” according to court documents. (Clark was sentenced to time served after serving almost 10 months for a federal gun charge.)
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These signs are terrifying. And I fear they’ll just increase.
This week, thousands of kids in Montgomery County will head to schools that have been struggling with antisemitic incidents.
Last December, someone painted “Jews Not Welcome” on the entrance sign to the campus of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda. Hundreds of students walked out of class to protest the message.
Then in February, the school system had nine similar incidents in just one week. School officials said there was a 383 percent increase in hate incidents between 2021 and 2022.
According to a spreadsheet showing hate incidents in Montgomery County in March, kids have found swastikas scrawled on desks, drawers, doors, tables and chairs. A child found one on a piece of paper stuffed into his backpack. There was a tiny one on the edge of a Jenga block. Many in bathrooms. This was just one month.
Nine more antisemitic incidents reported in Montgomery County schools
This has parents and students on edge.
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“A lot of kids are going to walk into a school tomorrow, justifiably looking over their shoulders, wondering if something’s going to happen,” said Adam Zimmerman, a Montgomery County Public Schools parent.
He knows there are kids who have family members and friends in Israel who are unaccounted for. He’s hoping the schools will be proactive in helping these students with counseling and messaging, for both Jewish and Muslim students who may be within the emotional blast radius of events happening far from home.
A spokesman for the school district said counselors and social workers will be available, but there will be no systemwide message. And that’s a mistake.
In December, when the hate graffiti rattled Walt Whitman High School, Eliana Joftus, who was the head of the school’s Jewish Student Union last year, tried to explain how deeply that hurt.
“It’s like you carry all your family’s grief with you, and I felt all of that with me when I saw it,” she said. “It was super scary.”
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