REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: The Whitewashing of Antisemitism, a Hatred of Many Colors.

It was a common occurrence on the streets of one of New York City’s Jewish neighborhoods: A man dressed in the long black coat and broad hat worn by Hasidic Jews was walking in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, his two young children in hand, when suddenly a black man ran up behind him and hit him hard on the back of the head.
Incidents like that one last May unfold repeatedly in New York, several of them in December alone – an outdoor menorah in Coney Island vandalized; a father and son wearing yarmulkas shot with a BB gun on Staten Island; a group of visibly Jewish boys chased by a gang firing a taser and shouting “Jews run! Get out of here”; a Hasidic man beaten outside a bus stop in Crown Heights.

Such attacks are part of a larger groundswell of antisemitism that has received wide notice across the country in recent years. But what has not gotten much attention is the reticence to even mention the ethnicity of antisemitic perpetrators unless they are white. It appears that discussion of this ancient hatred is being constrained by contemporary politics. . . .

“When anti-Jewish attacks are due to white supremacy, you get a clear condemnation,” said Bitton, executive director of Americans Against Antisemitism, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “When it’s committed by others, it’s ‘inconvenient antisemitism,’ because it becomes difficult for some to understand that members of groups that are also victimized by hate crimes are no less capable of committing hate crimes.” . . . Data collected about antisemitic violence in New York, home to America’s largest Jewish population, shows clearly that when it comes to antisemitism, minorities are often, even disproportionately, perpetrators, not victims. Since 2018, according to New York Police Department crime reports, there have been 129 arrests of suspects in violent hate crimes against Jews; 92 of the suspects, or 72%, were members of minority groups. The crime reports don’t do a further breakdown – what proportion of the minority perpetrators may be black, Hispanic, Muslim or something else – but the available evidence indicates that a substantial number of the attacks are being perpetrated by young black men.

All humans are capable of being both victims and perpetrators of hate crimes. To deny that is to be racist.