On Saturday, Oct. 27, a gunman slipped into a Pittsburgh synagogue and murdered 11 worshippers. Two days later, Monday, Oct. 29, the Milwaukee community gathered to remember. Despite short notice, Congregation Beth Israel in Glendale was crowded with as many as 2,000 people. Many weren’t Jewish.
“At one point, all faith leaders at the gathering were invited to come forward—and they just kept on coming,” says Hannah Rosenthal, CEO and president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, recalling the turnout. “Rev. David Simon, an Episcopalian, said, ‘You are not alone. We won’t let this happen here.’”
Those are encouraging words amidst a drumbeat of bad news and inflammatory rhetoric. Pittsburgh could happen again, and something very much like it already happened here in 2012 with the Oak Creek Sikh Temple shooting. A toxic brew of bad ideology and the belligerence of contemporary culture and politics—coupled with easy availability of military-grade weapons, ignorance licensed by poor education and widespread emotional disorder—make more shooters inevitable. Although they are not the only religious or ethnic minority with reason for anxiety, Jews, after years of comfortable assimilation into American society, are once again the frequent targets of hatred.
In 2017, the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center endured a series of bomb threats, and this year, Baraboo drew worldwide infamy after a photo surfaced showing students dressed for the junior prom with arms raised in a Nazi salute. Anti-Semitic incidents in our area are tracked by the Jewish Federation’s Jewish Community Relations Council. “Our statistics show a three-fold increase from 2013 through 2017,” says the council’s director, Elana Kahn. She adds that many incidents go unreported. The statistics she cites are not unique to Milwaukee.
How to account for the increase? Rosenthal got a taste of neo-Nazism’s rising prominence in Western as well as Eastern Europe while serving as special envoy on anti-Semitism during Barack Obama’s presidency. In America, in those days not so long ago, “it was considered fringe,” she says. However, crude anti-Semitic remarks were sometimes bandied earlier this century by prominent figures, including the reality TV star and professional wrestling manager who became president of the United States. “In the past, when Donald Trump talked about his ‘massive’ fortune, he said the only people he’d allow to count his money were ‘guys who wear beanies,’” Rosenthal continues.
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Unleashing Hatred
Trump is a curious case, given his daughter’s marriage to a Jew, Jared Kushner, and his son-in-law’s role as White House adviser. He might not be personally anti-Semitic, but he has shown himself willing to manipulate prejudices that flourish on America’s fringe. He brought what once was marginal into the mainstream. Of course, along with belittling individuals at every opportunity, Trump blames many groups for problems real and invented, including immigrants, Mexicans and Muslims. He strongly supports Israel yet sometimes employs anti-Semitic dog whistles, deriding “globalists” (interpreted by some as a nefarious international Jewish network of financial interests) and accusing George Soros of lavishly funding conspiracies against him. Trump is willing to accept and encourage the support of the most nefarious elements in American society as demonstrated by his equivocation after Charlottesville.
“Anti-Semitism has been unleashed and condoned,” Rosenthal says. “Donald Trump has assessed what people will be excited by. Whether or not he is racist, what he says is racist. Through his language, he has unleashed hatred.” Kahn adds, “He built on what was already in progress. He uses fear and a sense of scarcity. After the trauma of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, many Americans were ready to find someone to blame.”
Other forces at work include the dark side of the internet. “It plays a role in civility—the way we communicate with each other,” Kahn says. “It’s easy to say terrible things to other people when you don’t have to look them in the eye. With free discourse, there needs to be some sense of responsibility.”
Harassment, Threats, Assaults
According to a Jewish Community Relations Council audit, many children in Milwaukee area schools have seen swastikas painted on their belongings in 2017 or were assaulted on group chats and in person for being Jewish. Adults have been victimized as well. Vandalism has occurred, including at least one act of arson in addition to spray-painted swastikas and epithets.
Death threats have been hurled from passing cars, on voice messages and through the U.S. mail. Jews have been denounced in flyers circulated at supermarkets for promoting “race mixing.” Comments left on Gov. Scott Walker’s public Facebook page referred to Israeli control over U.S. politics and the power of the “globalist shekel lords.” Meanwhile, congressional wannabe Paul Nehlen, defeated in the Republican primary for Paul Ryan’s seat, tweeted references to Christ killers and “shills for the sheckles (sic).”
Can history repeat itself? Nazism in southeastern Wisconsin goes back to the 1930s, when the pro-Hitler German American Bund ran a summer camp in Grafton and staged rallies in the Milwaukee Auditorium. Then as now, Milwaukee was only one knot in a longer thread. In 1939, 22,000 uniformed Bund members Heil-Hitlered in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Kahn reminds us that the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s roots also extend to that era. Faced by mounting threats, Jewish leaders decided to “fight anti-Semitism by building relationships with the community.”
For Kahn, her work involves attending countless meetings in the Milwaukee area, many with non-Jewish groups and leaders. The council played an advocacy role in social and economic justice issues intended to benefit society as a whole. “We build relationships to protect and defend Jews individually and collectively; and, with our allies, we hope to make the world safer for Jews and other people. We advocate policies that protect all people.”
About that history of anti-Semitism, which reached a climax during the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II: “Is this 1938?” Rosenthal asks. Has the danger risen to that scale? “Absolutely not!” she insists. “It’s different in 2018. We have the lessons of the Holocaust, which happened because no one stood up or fought back. America is the place where we live, and we will hold up America’s values.”
