‘Inconvenient Anti-Semites’ in New York’s War on Hate
Three blind spots render incoherent the promises of liberal politicians to protect Jews from attack.
By Elliot Kaufman
Dec. 16, 2022 11:31 am ET
After a long month of attacks on Jews in New York City, the big guns held a symposium at a Manhattan synagogue Monday. One by one, Mayor Eric Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Sen. Chuck Schumer and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pledged to fight anti-Semitism. After blaming Donald Trump, Ms. Hochul announced a new hate-prevention initiative and vowed, “When you attack one of us, anyone, that is picking a fight with 20 million other New Yorkers, starting with your governor.”
Liberals love to fight hate, but I’d rather they punish crime. Americans Against Antisemitism has studied 194 anti-Jewish assaults and 135 property incidents in New York City since 2018 but can identify only two offenders who have been sentenced to prison. Others receive probation or counseling or their charges aren’t followed up. “There are practically no serious consequences to be had,” the group concludes in a July report.
Examples abound: In May 2021, a Brooklyn man with an attempted-murder charge pending yelled “F—ing Jews! I’m going to f— you up” and punched a 67-year-old man in the head. He was arrested but hate-crime charges were dropped and he pleaded down to a misdemeanor.
The New York Police Department reported 45 hate crimes against Jews in November, more than double the monthly figure from a year ago. It records 278 such crimes this year, up 53%, and 100 arrests, up 61%. Why don’t prosecutions and prison sentences follow? “I’ve asked the question for years with the DAs of the world, with legislators,” Rabbi David Niederman, a top Satmar Hasidic leader in Brooklyn, says in an interview. He gets no answer.
This is the first blind spot in the war on hate. Determined to “end mass incarceration,” liberals have pulled back police, narrowed prosecutions, restricted cash bail, and gutted mandatory minimums. At the same time, liberals want to crack down on certain “bad” crimes, such as those motivated by hate. But the scholar James Q. Wilson showed long ago that criminals don’t really specialize. Just as substantial proportions of drug and property offenders go on to commit violent crimes, the majority of hate-crime offenders have prior, non-hate-related arrests.
Someone who punches a Jew on the street is also likely to punch and menace others, commit robberies and deface property. By fixating on special hate instead of shared criminality, liberals miss how bringing incarceration rates to multidecade lows has left on the streets antisocial criminals predisposed to attack Jews.
When they do attack, the system breaks down. Youths are unlikely to be prosecuted, so there’s little reason for police to book them. Harassment is barely worth a prosecutor’s time. An assault isn’t a hate crime unless the attacker states his motive—and even then, it’s burdensome to prove, so the hate-crime charge is often dropped and the attack treated as a regular assault. Then, many defendants plead down or have their charges dropped. “They get a slap on the wrist, at best,” Rabbi Niederman says. Since New York’s bail reform prohibits judges from considering the danger defendants pose to others, most criminals are released immediately. At last, when incarceration rates fall, activists call it justice.
The second blind spot is the victims. Israel Bitton, head of Americans Against Antisemitism, observes, “A lot of the secular Jews aren’t responding with the same alacrity they would if people started hitting heads of the United Jewish Appeal walking down Fifth Avenue.” Of the 194 anti-Jewish assaults his group has tracked, three-quarters were in four Brooklyn neighborhoods, and 184 of the victims were Orthodox Jews, identifiable by their dress. These are the Jews who can’t hide.
Less-religious Jews were stunned by Kanye West’s anti-Semitic ravings in a way that Orthodox Jews could never be. For many of the latter, Louis Farrakhan-inspired Hitler talk and conspiracies are humdrum, the stuff of street abuse. “This is an experience of anti-Semitism,” says Rabbi Motti Seligson of Chabad-Lubavitch, a Brooklyn-based Hasidic movement, “that the rest of the Jewish community not only doesn’t experience but is completely oblivious to.”
The third blind spot is the perpetrators. Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor from 2014-21, was hardly unique in speaking of the threat to Jews only from white supremacists. Yet the majority of anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York are committed by other minorities—blacks especially, but also Hispanics and Muslims. “These are inconvenient anti-Semites,” Mr. Bitton says. Liberals would rather stick to their story: Minorities are always victims of racism, never racists themselves.
Meanwhile, surveys since the 1960s have shown that Jew-hatred in America is most prevalent among blacks. As traditional prejudices fused with radical separatist ideologies, anti-Semitism became part of the rhetoric of black politics and protest, the language not only of the street but of preachers and politicians, artists and intellectuals, imbuing criminal violence against Jews with spurious political significance.
When, after a tragic car accident, black rioters in Crown Heights beat up any Jew they could find for three straight nights in 1991, and the Rev. Al Sharpton denounced the victims as “diamond merchants” who reaped what they had sown, liberals looked the other way. Mayor David Dinkins feigned ignorance. The New York Times fudged the story. They couldn’t face up to black violence and Jew-hatred or the costs of hamstringing law enforcement.
Three decades later, the liberals who run New York are still looking away. That’s what makes them liberals.
Nothing did so much to improve black-Jewish relations in Brooklyn as the general reduction in crime since the 1990s. But as shootings in New York more than doubled between 2019 and 2021, alongside a deterioration in public order, attacks on Jews surged. Until there are consequences for criminals, including the Jew-haters among them, why should anyone expect the attacks to subside?
Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor.
