By Amy Zewe—
Later this month we will feature short interviews with the authors of The Family Research Councils’ April publication titled The Resurgence of History’s Oldest Hatred: 100 Antisemitic Events in the U.S. in the Last 15 Months by Christopher Gacek, J.D., Ph.D. and Lela Gilbert.
You may recall that Lela Gilbert is one of our board members here at The Jerusalem Connection and author of Saturday People Sunday People. Both Chris and Lela are prolific writers and contributors to our community with insightful and often difficult analysis of events and news ongoing world-wide of which we all must be aware, in prayer, and ready to act.
Why a study on this, and why now? To quote from the introduction of the paper, which echoes our own position here at The Jerusalem Connection:
Many of those concerned about antisemitism are Christians, and sometimes people ask us why we are so concerned about the dangers antisemitism poses to Jews since we are not Jewish. There are many good reasons. But to name a few, we believe antisemitism is objectively untruthful and unjust. And we are obligated by the Bible to defend Truth and Justice. We have also noted that where antisemitism successfully rids a nation state of Jews, Christians are soon at risk in that same country as well. As the jihadi slogan goes, “On Saturday we kill the Jews, on Sunday we kill the Christians.” This should unite us in our mutual alarm. But third, and perhaps most important of all, we share a faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We can do nothing less than stand with the Jews, a people God chose as His own many millennia ago (P.2).
You can find a link to this paper on our website and I want to draw attention to the fact that this paper specifically focuses on US events over the past 15 months and make an excellent identification of the four classifications or strains of antisemitism.
- Hard Right Antisemitism
- Black Separatist Antisemitism
- Islam-Based Antisemitism
- Hard Left Antisemitism
What I find thought-provoking is often the latter three tend to work together.
From these categorizations, the paper goes on to document 100 events in the US within the last 15 months and examines the connection to the aforementioned strain. While over 900 antisemitic events within the US occurred in 2019 alone, the study wanted to focus on 100….here’s why:
We wondered about the extent to which a prominent, religious minority in America, Orthodox Jews, was being victimized for publicly living out its religious faith. Consequently, FRC decided to survey what could be publicly discovered about these attacks on the Orthodox. That initial query led us to widen the range of our investigation as we realized the national scope and multi-dimensional threat. Street crime and vandalism were just one aspect of the problem. We observed the ideological groupings described above. And, finally, we concluded that presenting a descriptive listing of a selected set of 100 antisemitic acts and crimes could tell this story more effectively than any policy-centric narrative or statistical analysis could (p.9).
Please join us in the coming weeks and I have each author on to discuss the particulars and what we can draw from this study to discover our own roles in the fight against antisemitism, both in the US and world-wide.
Coupled with the release of the book, The Casualty of Contempt: The alarming rise of antisemitism and what we and what we can do to stop it (also available on our website or Amazon.com another other retail booksellers), we have access to insight that is vital to the fight against antisemitism.
I want to relay to you all that while we have a grave and seemingly timeless problem on our hands, we also have hope. Investigation and examination of the problem and an honest discussion about it is the only way to find truth and justice. God willing.
Shavua Tov; have a great week.
