Several months ago a minor scandal erupted when the Rockland County Republican Party created an anti-Semitic video attack ad that fanned the flames of hatred against the large orthodox Jewish community there. It initially tried to pretend that some kind of rogue operator was responsible, but incredibly a News Corp. rag, the New York Post, found out otherwise. The video appears at the top of the article; I warn you that it is truly shocking that a major political party would openly engage in such hatred. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.
Yesterday, a Jew was stabbed while walking to synagogue. There are no suspects, as the only witness was the victim and he is in critical condition. There is no evidence that the Republican Party was directly involved. But verbal hatred has led to deadly violence elsewhere in this country and elsewhere, including synagogue shootings.
Relations between the orthodox Jewish community in Rockland, and the rest of the community, have been bad for some time, and politicians have fanned the flames. And as an orthodox Jew myself I have to admit that there is a lot of blame to be shared on the Jewish side of these issues. But the answer to such problems is not hatred and violence it is bridgebuilding. It should not be hard to call off the official hatemongers, from the very highest places in the government all the way to the lowest levels, and outside of government. I am old enough to remember vile segregationist politicians spouting hate in the 1960s and 1970s, and thought that this part of American history was over. It wasn’t. Anti-Semitic incidents are increasing. There have been a number of recent physical assaults on Jews in Brooklyn and there was an arrest made just yesterday in two of the incidents. And just a few feet from my own home in the Bronx, swastikas appeared on the sidewalk last year:
We can’t stop ALL hatred. But we can have a zero tolerance policy for politicians who promote it or excuse it.