We may not know who is behind it, but in Ukraine, someone used historically rooted Eastern European anti-Semitism to stir up controversy in the Ukraine/Russia debate. In the U.S, three people were left dead after Frazier Glenn Cross went on an alleged shooting rampage in a Kansas Jewish community center on April 12. Afterwards, Cross went on to a nearby Jewish retirement home and opened fire. Anti-Semitism is the subject of national and international discussion once again.
The evidence of rampant anti-Semitism is astounding. A New York Times op-ed published in response to the killings stated that 65 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes recorded by the FBI are committed against Jews. In 2013, Israeli researches reported a 30 percent increase in anti-Semitic attacks worldwide over the year before. In January, a vandal scratched a swastika into a Northwestern student’s car. Finally, in the neighborhood where I went to high school, a liberal bastion in the heart of Los Angeles, eight cars had swastikas spray painted onto them in Hannukah colors back in November.
Many motivations could have led Cross and the other anti-Semites involved in the aforementioned crimes to take action as they did. Shifting the focus slightly, an interesting question to ask is why in spite of the fact that such crimes are a large part of our society, we do not talk about them outside of the occassional media frenzy. While it is important to note that anti-Semitism takes place in the context of widespread discrimination against minorities of many races and creeds throughout the world that are deserving of attention and coverage, anti-Semitism is unique in that in spite of its statistically proven prevalence, it is viewed by some as "trivial" in comparison with other forms of discrimination.
On the subject of the supposed triviality of anti-Semitism in comparison to other forms of hate, the commonly accepted refrain is that “Jews are so rich” that discrimination doesn’t affect them. This kind of stereotyping is a pathetic excuse for violence as well as being a calculated distortion of reality. It should go without saying, but not all Jews are wealthy. Many of them are just barely getting by, or you wouldn’t have groups like the Jewish United Fund providing food assistance to Jews in need.
Further, the fact that Jews have achieved disproportionate success in areas such as business and science, does not nullify discrimination against them. For some people, not all discrimination is equal and discrimination against the Jews is not equal to that against other groups because of Jewish achievements. To these people I would say that they are right in a sense – since discrimination against Jews accounts for 65 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes in the U.S., based on this metric, Jews are singled to an unequal degree in comparison to other groups. Furthermore, writing off violence and crimes against groups of people, whatever their race or religious beliefs, just because some of them are well-off or privileged in some respects suggests a dangerously unstable view of morality that creates a breeding ground for anti-Semitism.
In addition, the success of some Jewish people doesn’t make anti-Semitism any less real for those less able to overcome its effects. Anti-semitism is very real for the 3,120 French Jews who left Europe for Israel in the last year, many of whom cited anti-Semitism as their motivation for leaving a country where 40 percent of all hate crimes are committed against Jews.
It’s hard to fathom how a group of people whose ancestors went through the systematic killing of six million of its members only a few generations ago is somehow not “oppressed enough" to merit widespread concern for the increasing amount of violence against it. While it may not be common practice to discuss discrimination against a group such as the Jews that is disproportionately successful, it is relevant to local, national and international discourse alike. Honest conversation about the roots of anti-Semitism and its continued relevance today is an avenue through which atrocities such as those carried out by Frazier Glenn Cross can hopefully be prevented in the future. The bottom line is that if anti-Semitism is consciously or even subconsciously shunted to the side of discussions of race, discrimination and religion because it is viewed as less bad, less relevant, and/or less legitimate than other forms of discrimination, we vindicate anti-Semitic ideology and we give our tacit consent for its perpetuation. Is that the kind of world we want to live in?