The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released data that shows the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States has increased by 361% since October 7, 2023. This includes assault, vandalism, harassment, protest/action, and divestment resolutions. In terms of university campuses, anti-Semitic incidents has increased 477%. The top ten Universities include: Columbia, University of Michigan, Harvard, UC, Berkeley, UCLA, Rutgers, Stanford, Cornell, University of Washington, and University of North Carolina. Cornell just allowed Associate Professor of History Russell Rickford back to teaching. He had called Hamas’ massacre of Jews on October 7 “exhilarating.” Once reinstated, he immediately joined an anti-Israel protest.
In 1933 Germany, hundreds of laws were enacted to exclude Jews from public life, the professions, and public education. It happened gradually. Nazi propaganda aimed to demonize the Jewish population so as to make the Germans indifferent to their plight. Hamas propaganda has essentially done the same thing regarding the savagery and brutality carried out against Israel on October 7. Unfortunately, many of Generation Z have bought into their lies and misinformation. This has been shocking. This is what makes the thought that America can go the way of 1933 Germany not so farfetched.
Jewish establishments in New York have been harassed almost daily. Bomb threats against synagogues and schools have increased. A Pakistani national in Canada, Muhammed Shahzeh Khan, intended to use AR-type rifles to “slaughter” Jewish people in New York in an attack planned on the one year anniversary of Hamas’ massacre of October 7. Christopher Brown just received a ten-year jail sentence on a gun charge in a plea deal. He planned to attack a Manhattan synagogue. His accomplice, Matthew Mahrer, who had a gun on him with 19 rounds, has yet to go to trial.
One Jewish hotel in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the Blue Moon Hotel, has been harassed to no end. The owner, whom I know personally and whose son is fighting for the IDF in Gaza, has been receiving daily death threats. His business has suffered especially because of keffiyeh-wearing protesters showing up at his door and malicious online reviews. The protesters have stated in flyers and online: “This hotel belongs to a Jewish terror family and needs to be closed in one way or another. No Mercy!!!
The story of the Blue Moon Hotel is similar to other targets of the pro-Hamas thugs throughout New York and America. On November 7, 2023, Paul Kessler a 69-year-old Jew waving an Israeli flag, was killed by a Muslim pro-Hamas protester in Thousand Oaks, California. On December 4, 2023, an Israeli-style falafel restaurant called “Goldie,” in Philadelphia, was protested against. Senator Fetterman of Pennsylvania called it “pathetic and rank anti-Semitism.” On January 10, an Upper West Side Druze-Israeli restaurant had its glass front door shattered. It was hit again on January 30 with anti-Israel graffiti and a couple yelled at a waiter, “Tell your owner that Israel has no right to exist.”
On March 19, Effy’s on the Upper West Side had red paint thrown at the facade of the restaurant. On June 24, the Adas Torah synagogue in the Jewish section of Pico-Robertson neighborhood in LA was protested against with chants of “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” and “long live the intifada.”
Facebook’s/Meta independent oversight board recently ruled that users of its Facebook and Instagram apps can continue to use the slogan “from the river to the sea” despite it being part of Hamas’ 2017 charter and is “inherently genocidal and anti-Semitic and should constitute hate speech” in a statement by the World Jewish Congress.
This month, Jewish CUNY students were besieged by masked pro-Hamas demonstrators who blocked the entrance to Mr. Broadway, a Kosher deli in New York City’s Midtown South. Owner Moti Zilber said, “It feels like we’re in Germany over here.”
Unless these protesters and rioters are stopped, America is indeed going in the direction of 1933 Germany. Unless anti-Semitism is blotted out, it will not only mutate as some have said, but will metastasize. There should be zero tolerance for anti-Semitism no matter how or where it rears its ugly head. More than just lip service must emanate from those who hold political office.
Joseph M. Frager is a physician and lifelong activist.
