BARI WEISS: Do Not Look Away From Evil.

I had Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who survived the attack, write this op-ed in the Times two days after he was shot. In it he warned: “Over the years people I know have been harassed and assaulted by thugs in the neighborhood where I grew up, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in incidents that typically go unreported by the press.”

Indeed, when I tell people I’m from Pittsburgh they flash with recognition and sympathy. But I highly doubt one would elicit the same response if you told a group of strangers you were from Jersey City, where a kosher grocery was shot up in 2019 by attackers linked to the hate group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. Or if you told them you were from Monsey, New York, where, that same year, a machete-wielding fanatic stormed a Hanukkah gathering at a rabbi’s home. Or if you said you were from Crown Heights or Borough Park, where street crimes against Orthodox Jews have become a regular feature of life.

The value of a victim should not be dependent on the identity of their victimizer. This is why any totalizing ideology, from right or left, that claims people are either pure or impure, real Americans or pretenders, saints or sinners, all good or all bad, collectively innocent or collectively guilty depending on the circumstances of their birth, is so dangerous.

It blinds us to the truth. It erases our common humanity. And it must be rejected.

One more thing:

Tablet just published this important essay about antisemitism among the well-educated. A new survey shows that the old understanding — that ignorance breeds antisemitism — may not be true. “Those political causes making use of anti-Semitism are increasingly favored by the well-educated in this country,” write the authors.

Read the whole thing.