“Everybody Knows: As the Leading Targets of Hate Crimes, Jews Are Routinely Being Attacked in the Streets of New York City. So Why Is No One Acting like It’s a Big Deal?”, 2019-07-16 (; backlinks):
The incidents now pass without much notice, a steady, familiar drumbeat of violence and hate targeting visibly Jewish people in New York City…The increase in the number of physical assaults against Orthodox Jews in New York City is a matter of empirical fact. Anti-Semitic hate crimes against persons, which describes nearly everything involving physical contact, jumped from 17 in 2017 to 33 in 2018, with the number for the first half of 2019 standing at 19, according to the NYPD’s hate crime unit. Jews are the most frequent targets of hate crimes in New York City, and have been for some time (although this number is somewhat skewed by the fact that swastikas, which are by far the city’s most common hate incident, are automatically categorized as an anti-Jewish hate crime)…these seemingly random incidents—just the first few days of May saw an unprovoked attack in Lefferts Park in which a woman tried to pull off her victim’s sheitel, two violent assaults on Hasidic men in Williamsburg, and a possible attempted vehicular attack in the same neighborhood—is part of a typhoon of violence that in other contexts might call for a Justice Department Civil Rights Division investigation. The fact that the victims are most often outwardly identifiable, ie. religious rather than secularized Jews, and the perpetrators who have been recorded on CCTV cameras are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, inverts the perpetrator-victim dynamics with which most national Jewish organizations and their supporters are comfortable. A close look at these cases reveals no apparent connection to neo-Nazis, the alt-right, Donald Trump, jihadism, the BDS movement, or any other traditional cause of anti-Jewish behavior.
…Past spikes were seemingly less nebulous in origin. About five years ago, the so-called “knockout game”—a trend of teenagers committing or filming public sneak attacks—resulted in ~19 assaults on Jews in the city, according to Evan Bernstein, the New York and New Jersey regional director of the Anti-Defamation League. “The knockout game was definitely a real thing”, Molinari said, though he noted that the fact the attacks were apparently motivated by a quest for social media fame usually undermined the chances of pursuing hate crimes charges, including when visible Jews were the target.
This latest wave has no evident organizing principle behind it aside from pure hostility against targets that are unmistakably Jewish. In March, a 32-year-old man kicked a double stroller in Crown Heights and was charged with child endangerment. In late 2018, a 26-year-old man who turned out to be a former intern for then City Council Speaker Christie Quinn set fires at a remarkably pluralistic range of Jewish institutions in Brooklyn. In another odd and widely publicized incident, someone smashed the glass storefront of a crowded Chabad house, the only shul in the non-Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, at around 1:30AM. on a Saturday morning in February and then escaped with the help of a driver waiting around the corner. “We don’t see patterns of perpetrators committing crimes”, says Molinari. “For the most part, 360 crimes are being done by 360 very diverse people,…there’s no connective tissue between any of these perpetrators.” Not a single incident during the spike has been traced to a white supremacist group or any other organized entity.
…One Jewish community activist who met with the mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice said that at the time of the meeting in mid-June there was no director, no dedicated staff, and nothing to show of the office outside of fairly preliminary efforts. As of early July, it was still unclear exactly what this entity will actually do, and there was no official launch date. Deutsch refrained from speculating about the reasons for any hesitation on de Blasio’s part, at times implying that the mayor’s staff might not have kept him updated or engaged on the issue. “Sometimes people are too busy, they’re inundated with issues that come up every single day”, he said. “That’s why you have staff.” At best, this means that the administration’s seeming complacency toward violent anti-Semitism is the result of lagging intraoffice communication, rather than any intentional policy on anyone’s part. At worst, it means De Blasio is actively avoiding the issue. In any case, much remains to be done. When asked about the office, an officer in one of the NYPD precincts where several attacks had occurred said, “we have nothing to do with that.” Molinari said he had been involved in one meeting with the mayor’s office about the effort. “The police commissioner and the higher-ups are all determining how exactly to implement that and what our place is going to be”, he said. None of the victims or community leaders mentioned in this article reported any substantial contact with anyone regarding the new office.
An honest reckoning with the problem carries plenty of its own risks. The spike in incidents complicates the current national political narrative around anti-Semitism, which maps a narrow left-right paradigm on to Jews and their terrorizers. The overwhelming majority of the alleged perpetrators in New York are either black or Hispanic, and casting anti-Semitism as an issue pitting Jews against various other minority groups threatens to re-agitate problems that many in the Jewish and surrounding communities hope no longer exist…Yaacov Behrman, a Crown Heights-based educator and member of the local community board, believes that a sociological study of attitudes toward Jews among the city’s young people is an essential first step to countering anti-Semitism. Such an investigation might involve anonymous questionnaires administered in public schools. He doubts it will ever happen. “Personally I think the city is scared of what they’re gonna find and never do it”, he told Tablet. “I think the city is concerned they’ll find anti-Semitism numbers are very high in Brooklyn.”