Armin Rosen at the Tablet has done a deep and important dive into the rise in anti-Semitic attacks in New York. The attacks predictably have nothing to do with the left’s usual obsession with right-wing extremism.
And one response jumped out at me.
Attitudes toward the rise in violent anti-Semitic attacks are somewhat different further south, in Crown Heights and Borough Park.
Menachem Moskowitz, a 52-year-old who was nearly strangled to death when a man attacked him outside of his synagogue in Crown Heights on a Shabbat afternoon in early 2018, screaming that the Jews stole his house, speculated that his community was being blamed for the Trump presidency.
(“When I was in the headlock I started to say Shema Yisrael,” Moskowitz recalls. “I thought that was it.”)
Others suggested that demonization of Israel has created a more hateful and permissive atmosphere—the irony being that the Satmar community in Williamsburg has a complex and generally negative relationship with Zionism, rejecting the legitimacy of the idea of Israel as a “Jewish state.”
Orthodox Jews in New York tend to vote Republican in national elections.
One more reason for the Left to ignore these attacks.
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