Pay attention!

If this were not real life but a novel, it would be fascinating.

To those of us addicted to plot — those of us who read mysteries compulsively, because of the need to know what happened next, who become, say, journalists, because even community journalism not only allows but demands that you ask questions — we are living in a time that’s bursting with surprises and jump shocks and heel turns and cartoons that come alive.

It probably would work better in a book than in a more collaborative medium, because it involves the kind of plot turns that a writers’ room would hoot down right away, because implausible is one thing, but really there are limits.

But we are living in this world. The things that come out of many politicians’ mouths make up in vulgarity what they lack in decency, wit, or insight. The elections in Israel are a mess; to assume that it will all work out well is an assumption tossed out by people on their way to buying a bridge in Brooklyn. And our elections here have unleashed yet more ugliness.

I don’t think that any of us know what causes antisemitism. It’s such an old, unreasoning, foul hatred, but it’s so able to adjust itself to new situations that it seems unkillable. We here in the United States have lived free of it for the last 80 or so years, but it seems that, as Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side said recently, the golden age for American Jews has ended.

And yet. This is not 1930s Germany. We are strong, and there are good people all around us.

The antisemitic action in Philadelphia on Sunday — just before the anniversary of Kristallnacht — was disgusting. Bikers calling themselves Philly Bike on Your Left proclaimed “No business for Zionists!” and targeted six restaurants they decided were Zionist, or just plain owned by Jews who did not denounce and defame the Jewish state. (See the story on page 30.)

The good news? There weren’t that many bikers, and there were a lot of Jews and friends. The restaurants did very well that day.

And we should not forget the antisemitism on the right, which is as virulent and grotesque as on the left. In much of the far-right Christian nationalist world, no one bothers to say that they’re just anti-Israel, but Jews are fine as long as they’re not zios. (Charming term, no?) There, often, it’s chic to admit to hating Jews as Jews, and to admiring Nazis for their efforts to rid the world of them. Of us.

It’s also reminding me of the huge rally and march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest antisemitism in January 2020. We tend to forget it because the pandemic struck just a month or so later, so it was in the fuzzy Before Times. But back then, it was a big deal.

About 10,000 people — many of them Jews, and many of them not — walked across the bridge. It was in direct response to a man waving a machete who got into a house where chasidim were celebrating Chanukah and stabbed six of them. Just a month before, domestic terrorists shot and killed three people in a kosher supermarket in Jersey City. These were clearly antisemitic crimes, acts of both hate and terror.

But one of the most striking things about the march — other than the beauty of the Brooklyn Bridge and the aesthetic pleasure of getting to walk across it, and in the middle of the road — was the friendliness of the crowd, and in particular of the police officers guarding us. They weren’t remote and icy; clearly they were on our side.

If that stops happening — if the official response is remote and icy, if the cops no longer are on our side, if our non-Jewish neighbors don’t march with us — then we really have to worry.

For now, we have to pay attention.

—JP

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