How identity politics excuses anti-Semitism

New York has been the scene of a number of vicious anti-Semitic attacks over the past few weeks. The most shocking occurred in the final days of December when a machete-wielding man barged into a Hasidic rabbi’s home in Monsey (30 miles north of New York City) and stabbed five people who were celebrating Hanukkah.

The visceral terror of the Monsey attack – a lunatic with a machete violating a religious ceremony in a rabbi’s home in the middle of the night – has sparked a wider recognition that anti-Semitic violence has become a serious problem in New York and elsewhere in the US. The past weeks have been especially terrifying for Jewish people, who have been subject to a ‘kind of slow-moving pogrom’, as one observer put it. In the week between the shooting at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City in mid-December, which killed six, and the stabbings in Monsey, there was an attack nearly every day on Jewish New Yorkers.

The siege in Monsey prompted elected officials – including New York City mayor Bill DeBlasio and New York state governor Andrew Cuomo – to condemn anti-Semitism. Their interventions are welcome, but many are asking: where have you been? The same could be asked of the media, which have, up to now, been treating anti-Semitic attacks with a collective shrug of the shoulder.

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