David A. Love is a writer, commentator and journalism and media studies professor based in Philadelphia. He contributes to a variety of outlets, including Atlanta Black Star, ecoWURD and Al Jazeera. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidALove. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his. View more opinion articles on CNN.
(CNN)The recent wave of nine violent anti-Semitic attacks in the New York area since mid-December, comes as hate crimes against the Jewish community and attacks on synagogues have increased in the US, the UK and elsewhere. Many politicians and media personalities have fanned the flames of hatred by mainstreaming antisemitism, promulgating conspiracy theorizing tropes about Jewish people and legitimizing hate groups who target racial and religious minorities and promote acts of violence against them.
Some of the recent incidents include the killing of six people at a Jersey City, New Jersey kosher market by two assailants, one of whom allegedly expressed interest in the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, and a number of stabbings allegedly by a black man with a long history of mental illness at the home of a Monsey, New York rabbi on the last night of Hanukah.
David A. Love
Responding to the sentiment that it is open season on the Jewish community in America and that lives are in danger, some have sought group punishment for the black community at large, blaming African Americans and even Jews of color for violence against white Jews. Others have blamed the attacks on all Black Israelites, including Rabbi Capers Funnye, a member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis and the chief rabbi of the International Israelite Board of Rabbis, who recently received a social justice award from the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs for his work against racism and antisemitism.
Morton Klein of the pro-Trump, MAGA-friendly Zionist Organization of America, tweeted urging "all Rabbis and Pastors to use their podiums this weekend to preach against the vile frightening attacks/murders of African Americans against innocent Jewish women, children and men. Never Again!"
Others have advocated for more policing of multiracial neighborhoods. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to beef up police patrols in Brooklyn neighborhoods of Boro Park, Crown Heights and Williamsburg, noting that "Hate doesn't have a home in our city" and that "Anyone who terrorizes our Jewish community WILL face justice."
Others still sought a return of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), a group the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a racist-right terrorist organization, whose members have been responsible for attacks in the US and elsewhere.
Indeed, these approaches are wrong: more policing, guns and violence to fight anti-Semitic hate crimes will not make people safer. It will endanger the lives of already marginalized groups who bear the brunt of discrimination and injustice.
As an African-American man who is a member of the Jewish community, I know that more policing will not bring security or safety to my family or those who look like me. After the anti-Semitic, white supremacist attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, many Jewish places of worship across the nation sought greater security measures and a greater police presence.
While an understandable response, such plans do not take into consideration the specific dangers faced by black people, who are viewed with suspicion and treated as potential criminals by the police. Increased security also fails to consider black Jews, who have been regarded as impostors, or potential criminals, who are not really Jewish and who do not belong in a synagogue.
Take for example Yehudah Webster, a black man and a Jewish educator who, while walking in November 2018 with a Torah scroll outside his Crown Heights, Brooklyn apartment was reportedly surrounded and accosted by a mob of Hasidic men and security personnel. Or Jared Jackson, a black, multiheritage Jew and founder and executive director of Jews in All Hues, who notes that, when approaching synagogues, "I have had people call the police and observed mothers running away as I come near the building. Occasionally people stare and others try to educate me about how to read a siddur or explain the Hebrew."
Their experiences aren't unique: Other black Jews have experienced being called schvartze -- a derogatory Yiddish term for black -- have been racially harassed by white Jews and treated like outsiders and interrogated to prove they are actually Jewish.
In response to de Blasio's call for increased policing, some Jewish groups pushed back. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, an advocacy group in New York City, tweeted, "This is what dividing vulnerable communities looks like," adding that "Instead of investing in restorative solutions that prioritize the safety of all communities, [de Blasio] is implementing a plan that treats abuse of Black and Brown communities as the answer to antisemitic violence. It isn't."
Jewish Voice for Peace, another advocacy group, emphasized the need for Jews to seek equality and freedom with allies, but said more cops are not the answer. "We know we have to address rising white nationalist violence -- against Jews, Muslims, Black people and all people of color -- while not relying on the very forces detaining and locking up and killing our friends, family & neighbors," the group tweeted.
And, as @TheHipsterRebbe, a Jewish man of color, noted, the police or the National Guard "may offer some minimal safety to Jews while inflicting worse damage to other ethnic minorities who at the same time have no such sympathy or respite from their own violence."
Rather than increased policing, the best way to fight these religious hate crimes is what Yousef Munayyer of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights calls "a broad, unified front of solidarity between all."
As black Jewish filmmaker and writer Rebecca Pierce noted, "There are people and orgs who are experts in community relationships and violence prevention" who are doing the work that "can be duplicated and amplified if we focus on building stronger communities rather than walls."
People must work together to solve hate with the knowledge that their suffering is interconnected. Visibly identifiable members of all religious groups, including Muslims and Orthodox Jews, have much in common in that they are easily targeted for violence. In the years since the election of Donald Trump, violent hate crimes have reached a 16-year high, and many communities feel it is open season on them.
My children's ancestors include black refugees who fled the South Carolina slave plantation police state during the Civil War, and Jewish refugees who fled the Russian pogroms in the 1880s. However different their circumstances, they bear similarities to the present-day Latinx, Caribbean and African refugees languishing at the border in ICE detention camps, or Muslims facing oppression in China or India -- or America.
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The only people who benefit from our divisions are the "very fine people" who marched in Charlottesville and those who weaponize antisemitism for political gain, promote white supremacist rhetoric and antisemitic conspiracy theories and use tweets and policy to threaten the lives of Jews, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ folks and others.
We must take lessons from interfaith organizations such as POWER, a Philadelphia-area coalition of congregants and faith leaders who organize to fight injustice and solve problems of common concern in their communities. Ultimately, people must take power from those who would divide us, and tackle the problem of hate and violence against others head-on as if it is their own, because it is.
