American Jewry’s Days of ReckoningThe question is, what has the Reform movement done for American Jews? According to a few hundred Jewish demonstrators who congregated outside New York City Hall on Sept. 22, the answer is: nothing.
The purpose of the demonstration was to demand that city officials take effective action to stem the rising wave of anti-Semitic attacks in the city.
According to a report published in May by the New York Police Department, from January through May of this year, New York City experienced an 83% rise in hate crime. Fifty-nine percent of hate crimes in the city are directed against Jews, and anti-Semitic attacks have risen 90% in the past year.
Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America, was the only leader of a major Jewish organization among the participants. Aside from two New York City councilmen, no Jewish politicians attended the event. New York Senator Charles Schumer wasn’t there. Neither were any of the Jewish representatives from New York.
The Union of Reform Judaism also didn’t send a representative.
It isn’t difficult to understand why almost every Jewish leader ignored the rally. The Jews under assault aren’t their sort of Jews. And the people attacking them aren’t their sort of anti-Semites.
The Jewish victims in New York are not Reform Jews. They are ultra-Orthodox Jews. And they don’t live in Manhattan. They live in Brooklyn.
Shortly after the NYPD released its hate crimes report, New York’s Mayor Bill De Blasio held a press conference in Brooklyn. There he insisted that the anti-Semitic assaults are the work of the far right. In his words, “I think the ideological movement that is anti-Semitic is the right-wing movement.â€
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Unfortunately for De Blasio, there are no neo-Nazis in Crown Heights and Williamsburg. The perpetrators of the attacks against his city’s Jewish community are not Trump voters. They are his voters.
Most of the perpetrators are African Americans, and as such, like the Reform Jews, they are members in good standing of the progressive camp in American politics.
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Last month the Amcha Initiative, which documents, investigates and combats anti-Semitism on college campuses, published its 2018 report on-campus anti-Semitism. The report revealed that classic anti-Semitic attacks—that is, right-wing anti-Semitic attacks—decreased by 42%. In contrast, 2018 saw a 70% increase in leftist anti-Semitic attacks on campuses.
The report’s most alarming finding is that faculty members are playing a central role in propagating and inciting anti-Semitism on campuses by pushing academic boycotts of Israel. Their decisive role—and the fact that their actions are largely backed by university administrators—indicates that anti-Semitism has become institutionalized in American academia.
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The frustrating fact is that these liberal Jewish organizations could make a difference if they wished. If major Jewish groups, including the Reform movement, were to wage a serious, sustained campaign against U.S. academia’s institutionalization of anti-Semitism, liberal politicians would be doing much more than they have been to combat the phenomenon.
Notably, as they hem and haw, the same Trump administration which the liberal Jewish establishment regularly accuses of unleashing anti-Semitism is taking steps to curtail the scourge of academic Jew-hatred.
This points out a confluence of interests: liberal Jews, Reform and non-religious, dislike the Orthodox; Lib/Prog pols don't like the Orthodox for the conservative moral views. So the Conservative, the Orthodox, and the Hasidim are safe targets for Lib/Prog anti-Semites.
Not unlike Fundamentalists and Evangelicals have been for a couple of decades for mainline Protestants, Libs, and Progs.
