8 | MARCH 9 • 2023 

PURELY COMMENTARY

opinion 

Beyond the ‘Day of Hate’
M

y synagogue sent out 
a cautiously anxious 
email about an event 
on Shabbat, Feb. 25, a neo-Nazi 
“Day of Hate.
” The 
email triggered 
fuzzy memories 
of one of the 
strangest episodes 
that I can 
remember from 
my childhood.
Sometime 
around 1990, in response to 
local neo-Nazi activity, some 
Jews from my community 
decided to “fight back.
” I don’t 
know whether they were 
members of the militant Jewish 
Defense League or perhaps 
just sympathetic to a JDL-style 
approach. When our local 
Jewish newspaper covered the 
story, it ran on its front cover a 
full-page photo of a kid from my 
Orthodox Jewish high school. 
The photo showed a teenage boy 
from behind, wearing a kippah 
and carrying a baseball bat that 
was leaning threateningly on his 
shoulder.
As it happens, “Danny” was 
not a member of the JDL, he 
was a kid on his way to play 
baseball. Sometimes, a baseball 
bat is just a baseball bat. But not 
for us anxious Jews in America: 
We want to see ourselves as 
protagonists taking control 
of our destiny, responding to 
antisemites with agency, with 
power, with a plan. I’m sorry 
to say that as I look around our 
community today, it seems to 
me that we have agency and we 
have power — but we certainly 
don’t seem to have a plan. 
The tactics that the American 
Jewish community uses to 
fight back against antisemitism 
are often ineffective on their 

own and do not constitute a 
meaningful strategy in the 
composite. One is that American 
Jews join in a partisan chorus 
that erodes our politics and 
fixates on the antisemitism 
in the party they don’t vote 
for. This exacerbates the 
partisan divide, which weakens 
democratic culture, and turns 
the weaponizing of antisemitism 
into merely a partisan electoral 
tactic for both sides. 
Another tactic comes from 
a wide set of organizations 
who have declared themselves 
the referees on the subject 
and take to Twitter to name 
and shame antisemites. This 
seems to amplify and popularize 
antisemitism more than it does 
to suppress it. 
A third common tactic is to 
pour more and more dollars 
into protecting our institutions 
with robust security measures, 
which no one thinks will 
defeat antisemitism, but at least 
seeks to protect those inside 
those institutions from violence, 
though it does little to protect 
Jews down the street. Richer 
Jewish institutions will be safer 
than poorer ones, but Jews will 

continue to suffer either way. 
A fourth tactic our communal 
organizations use to fight 
antisemitism is to try to 
exact apologies or even fines 
from antisemites to get them 
to retract their beliefs and get 
in line, as the Anti-Defamation 
League did with Kyrie Irving, an 
approach that Yair Rosenberg 
has wisely argued is a no-win 
proposition. 
Yet another tactic is the 
insistence by some that the 
best way to fight antisemitism 
is to be proud Jews, which has 
the perverse effect of making 
our commitment to Jewishness 
dependent on antisemitism as a 
motivator. 
And finally, the most perverse 
tactic is that some on both 
the right and the left fight 
antisemitism by attacking the 
ADL itself. Since it is so hard to 
defeat our opponents, we have 
started beating up on those that 
are trying to protect us. What 
could go wrong?
Steadily, like a drumbeat, 
these tactics fail, demonstrating 
themselves to be not a strategy at 
all, and the statistics continue to 
show a rise in antisemitism. 

Perhaps we are too fixated 
on the idea that antisemitism is 
continuous throughout Jewish 
history, proving only that there 
is no effective strategy for 
combating this most persistent 
of hatreds.

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS
Instead, we would do well to 
recall how we responded to a 
critical moment in American 
Jewish history in the early 20th 
century. In the aftermath of 
the Leo Frank lynching in 
1915 — the murder of a Jewish 
man amid an atmosphere 
of intense antisemitism — 
Jewish leaders formed what 
would become the ADL by 
building a relationship with law 
enforcement and the American 
legal and political establishment. 
 The ADL recognized that 
the best strategy to keep 
American Jews safe over the 
long term, in ways that would 
transcend and withstand the 
political winds of change, was 
to embed in the police and 
criminal justice system the idea 
that antisemitism was their 
problem to defeat. These Jewish 
leaders flipped the script of 
previous diasporic experiences; 
not only did they become 
“insiders,
” but they also made 
antisemitism anathema to 
America itself. 
For Jews, the high-water 
mark of this strategy came in 
the aftermath of the Tree of Life 
shooting in Pittsburgh. It was 
the low point in many ways of 
the American Jewish experience, 
the most violent act against Jews 
on American soil, but it was 
followed by a mourning process 
that was shared across the 
greater Pittsburgh community. 
The words of the Kaddish 

Yehuda 
Kurtzer 
JTA

Activists protest racism and hate after swastikas were found in Adam 
Yauch Park in Brooklyn, New York, Nov. 20, 2016. 

ANGELA WEISS/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

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