Sensational media coverage of recent hate crimes has overblown the actual threat to the Jewish community, critics charge.
And some say the community is overreacting.
“We don’t want to turn our places of public gathering into fortresses,” said Temple Isaiah of Contra Costa County’s Rabbi Judy Shanks. “We need to find a balance — especially as leaders in the Jewish community — between reasonable security measures and making sure that what we create is not a bunker mentality.”
While recent attacks on Jewish institutions have received international attention, “the reality is, statistically, these events have not increased over the past 20 years,” Shanks noted.
“However,” she added, “the news coverage has. The way the media works today, we see coverage as it happens, and it makes it scarier. Each time we see these reports, we feel like, ‘Those are our children. That’s us.'”
Author and historian Leonard Dinnerstein of the University of Arizona, who has written extensively about waves of anti-Semitism in America, agrees.
“If you watch TV, you see that they play the same scene, of police leading the children away from [North Valley Jewish Community Center] by the hand, over and over,” he said. “It creates the illusion that it’s happening over and over, and it’s not.”
The convergence of three recent hate attacks — last week’s gunfire assault at the Los Angeles-area JCC, the June 18 arson attacks on Sacramento-area synagogues, and a July 4 shooting spree in the Midwest — have also lent credence to that illusion.
“It’s very important to move from being afraid to being rational,” said University of Southern California sociologist Barry Glassner, author of “Culture of Fear.”
Otherwise, he said, “we are not being true to our history. Throughout history, Jews have, by being rational, been able to outwit those who would destroy us.”
According to a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of active supremacist organizations actually has declined by almost half in the last three years. Militia groups, which had tens of thousands of members a few years ago, have fallen off markedly. From a high of 858 in 1996, the number had plunged to 435 by 1998.
That report does note that although there are far fewer groups, those that remain are the most violent of their ilk.
But Joe Roy of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch project said reports of an impending explosion of millennium-related violent acts by white supremacists is “highly unlikely.”
“As Y2K approaches, probably half the [white supremacist] movement will be in a defensive posture,” he said. “If the power goes out and a utility company truck shows up, they’ll see it as the New World Order coming after them.”
Reports of low numbers offer cold comfort to those who counsel those in distress, though.
Said psychologist Joel Crohn, who practices in San Rafael and Berkeley: “What if they only kill 100 Jews in New York? So what if it’s only one-tenth of 1 percent? It doesn’t take too many terrorists to create a tremendous amount of damage.”
The more important issue — and one the community will be grappling with long after the media coverage dies down — is that the attacks “strike at the heart of Jewish ambivalence,” he contended.
“This was our worst fear: That our children would be indiscriminately shot. Jews have always been targets, and if my only connection to being Jewish is that I like corned beef and cabbage, that’s just not enough to justify the terrible risk. It has to mean more. In America, we have a choice. Some will distance themselves from Jewish life, and some will affiliate much more strongly.”
This moment of reckoning mirrors one Crohn has witnessed often in his 15 years of experience counseling interfaith couples.
“Invariably there is a moment when the Jewish partner turns to the non-Jewish partner and says, ‘What are you going to do when they come for me?’ There’s this primal anxiety that exists in Jews — and there has always existed this moment of decision in post-World War II Jews. Part of loving anyone, anything, is accepting the vulnerability.”
But American Jews must move beyond vulnerability, according to USC sociologist Glassner.
American Jews can either use their sense of outrage and pain to bring about change, he said, or else become victims of permanent terror, incarcerating themselves behind bulletproof shields, gated windows and electronic car-key systems.
“The worst mistake you can make is to give bigots power they don’t have and don’t deserve by cowering behind our gates,” he said. “You just end up with the wrong people locked up.”
But because current fears are based on real incidents, there is much to do, according to Glassner and others.
Glassner sees “one glaring answer: preventive police work of a much higher caliber than there has been. Someone like Buford Furrow [who was arrested in the Granada Hills JCC shooting] should be well-known to policing agencies. It should not be the case that after his makes the statements he did, he is ignored, that he is stockpiling weapons and is ignored.”
In addition, Glassner recommends channeling fears into working for stronger gun-control legislation and enforcement.
“Efforts like those are much more likely to prevent [future attacks] than becoming obsessed with security efforts,” he said. “We can raise a generation of children who can’t go out of the house because their parents are too afraid or we can get mobilized.”
Nevertheless, the issue remains troubling for those who school and care for the youngest members of the community. “We must assure our children that being a Jew is a safe thing to be,” said Isaiah’s Shanks. “We don’t want them to feel intimidated or vulnerable because they’re Jews.”
Rabbi Eric Weiss of the Ruach Ami: Bay Area Jewish Healing Center concurred.
“Children’s questions are so difficult,” said Weiss, who advised responding to “the obvious [hidden] question” with “‘I’m here with you,’ a hug and a kiss — and an armed guard at the door.”
Meanwhile, although few Jewish children today are subjected to continuing taunts from their peers, many of their American-born parents and grandparents hold other memories.
Author Dinnerstein, for example, remembers when Jewish children were routinely pummeled in America’s schoolyards and neighborhoods, and he finds the current emotional crisis baffling. While current attacks are the work of “crazies” far outside the mainstream, he said, anti-Semitism was once acceptable, even institutionalized.
Today, “everyone sees the skinheads as bizarre,” he said. “Nobody thinks they’re normal. We’re dealing with a bunch of crazy people, and in a country of 30 million people, you think you’re not going to encounter any crazy people?”
Unlike during the World War II era, when anti-semitism was prevalent here, government and nonprofit groups have responded with a vengeance to the spate of hate crimes, Dinnerstein noted.
Crohn, on the other hand, contended that American Jews of the baby boom and beyond have succumbed to an “it can’t happen here” mentality.
“We’ve gotten comfortable,” he said. “These are people who have reached adulthood who haven’t grown up around Holocaust survivors.”
To that end, Weiss offers a road map: “Our faith tells us the way to keep from being a victim is to realize we live in a fragile world, and to make it better,” he said. “We are a people of hope. We have the future in our hands.”