By Michael Benjamin
New York’s epidemic of anti-Semitic attacks is horrifying. It’s also maddening that city leaders won’t address the elephant in the room — that the suspects in these heinous acts are black.
African-Americans and Jews share a history of oppression. They were allies during the last century’s long struggle for freedom and civil rights. Black anti-Semitism is a shonda — a shame.
The alleged perpetrators might be criminals, sociopaths and mentally ill persons. Even so, it is incumbent on black elected officials, clergy and community leaders to speak out against these horrible crimes — including their ideological dimension — before they come to stain our entire community.
An old colleague, state Sen. Kevin Parker of Brooklyn, disagrees. He says that the strong presence of Brooklyn lawmakers and black clergy at Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Sunday presser denouncing anti-Semitism demonstrated that African-American leaders are standing up against hatred no matter who is doing the hating. But like de Blasio, he put much of the blame squarely on President Trump.
Said Parker: “When the boys in khaki were marching [in Charlottesville] with their tiki torches and chanting, ‘We won’t be replaced,’ they were talking about Jews, not blacks, replacing them.” Parker believes Trump didn’t denounce those white nationalists strongly enough.
Perhaps. But that doesn’t excuse the city’s black leadership for their failure to denounce the anti-Semites in our community directly and forcefully enough.
Like so many African-Americans, my wife, Susie, and I have close friends who are Jewish. Though she isn’t Jewish, Susie belonged to a business networking group founded to promote Jewish entrepreneurship, charity and professional growth. Acting like a surrogate mother, the group’s founder, Jodi Samuels, helped Susie transition to life in New York.
Recent reporting makes it appear that the Monsey machete slasher, Grafton Thomas, may have been infected by the same strain of virulent anti-Semitism that polluted the Jersey City duo who murdered three people in a Jewish grocery store earlier this month. Feds say Thomas had filled pages in his journal with writings expressing affinity with the Black Hebrew Israelites — the same anti-Semitic outfit that allegedly inspired the Jersey City shooters.
Among the Black Hebrew Israelites are a group of street crazies masquerading as a religious sect. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists that sect as a black separatist hate group because of its anti-white and anti-Semitic beliefs.
If Thomas and the Jersey City pair were radicalized by an association with the Black Hebrew Israelites, that would give credence to attorney Brad Gerstman’s belief that a “radicalization of Jew-haters” is happening on social media and nontraditional settings, thereby making it harder for law enforcement to keep tabs on them to thwart attacks.
To counter the growth of the hate, we need models of interfaith dialogue and solidarity. Consider the good works of Sheikh Musa Drammeh in Parkchester to bring together Jews and others outside of his Muslim faith. Drammeh worked closely with the Young Israel Congregation to ensure that his Jewish neighbors had a place to worship freely.
“If we can make smoking socially unacceptable and outlaw foie gras, surely we can make racism and anti-Semitism socially unacceptable,” he tells me.
The Rev. Loren Russell, a friend and Baptist pastor in The Bronx, told me that black churches across the city should open their doors to Hasidic and other Jewish leaders to learn more about their faith. “We need to stand with them against hate.”
Like many in the black community, I’m unsure where this strain of anti-Semitism is coming from and why now. But I know that we need to call it and the perpetrators by name if we are going to eradicate it.
I owe it to my great-uncle Ishmael Bough, who was a black Jew and whose style of dress bore witness to his faith. Uncle Ishmael could have easily been targeted by these deranged haters for his religion based on his dress.
But most of all, African-Americans owe it to our Jewish neighbors, co-workers and friends — as well as to our children and their children — to stand up forcefully to the anti-Semitism that is percolating to the surface in our community.
