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Anti-Semitism in America

(Wall Street Journal) Gerard Baker - There's something especially unsettling about the newest eruption of the oldest hatred - anti-Semitism. We live in an age of heightened awareness of ethnic and racial victimhood, but in the quarter-century the FBI has kept records, hate crimes against blacks have declined by more than a third between 1996 and 2019. By contrast, the number of anti-Semitic crimes - which are, proportionate to the share of Jews in the population, much more frequent than anti-black crime - has scarcely changed. In the past, most of the anti-Semitic attacks in the U.S. have been the product of the usual depraved minds: white supremacists or sick individuals deciding to take out their pathologies on the group most often blamed for society's flaws. But mostly they haven't occurred as the kind of street-level response to geopolitical events that is too common among political activists in Europe. This latest outbreak, however, has come about in direct response to the recent conflict in Gaza. The wider political and cultural environment is what makes this outbreak of anti-Semitism especially unsettling. The latest conflict in the Middle East has been made to fit the binary classification of the human race into oppressor and victim on the basis of identity. The wide penetration of this notion into the consciousness and discourse of prominent elected figures is new.
2021-05-25 00:00:00
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