A great tragedy in D.C. yesterday, as a neo-Nazi murdered an African-American security guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. The neo-Nazi was 88, the numerology of which will not be lost on white supremacists. As we mourn Stephen Tyrone Johns, a thought.
There’s been much attention given to a few lines written in an online chat on the Washington Post’s website by Rabbi David Saperstein, who heads up the Reform movement’s public policy arm. Asked by a reader from Virginia what the response to the shooting had been in the Jewish community, Saperstein wrote:
…This represents something else that is perhaps distinct to Jews in America compared to other groups. Other religious targets may be subject to vandalism or even discriminatory acts, but there are few other religious institutions that day in and day out must be concerned about acts of terrorism in the form of bombs, gun attacks, etc. On many levels Jews have been and remain the quintessential victims of religious intolerance and hatred in western civilization.
I say that knowing that today Muslim mosques have been targeted for vandalism. We just had a murder take place against a doctor in a church this past week and others are subject to acts of prejudice, but the notion of an entire community being concerned that their house of worship, their institutions might be targets of violent acts anywhere in the country still haunts American Jewry today with all of the successes that America’s freedoms have brought to us.
I don’t quite buy it. The victories of the radical right in this week’s elections to the European Parliament make a strong argument that Muslims have superseded Jews as the quintessential victims of Western intolerance, and the Southern church burnings of the 1960s loom large in the recent history of religiously motivated hate crimes. But Saperstein’s point is heavily qualified, and not indefensible. Over at Jewlicious, however, lisa strips the sentiment down to something troubling. Riffing on Saperstein, she writes, “Only Jews are fearful that our places of worship, burial, collective memory, cultural preservation and gathering may be targeted for hate crimes.”
lisa’s going for gold in the old Oppression Olympics. Only Jews, huh? There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the historical oppression of Jews. There’s something sick, however, about making exclusive claims to victimhood. Check out the FBI’s 2007 hate crime report. If you set apart religiously motivated hate crimes from hate crimes motivated by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, it’s true that more perpetrators targeted Jews. But while there were 320 offenders who were motivated by an anti-Semitic bias in 2007, there were 2,509 who were motivated by an anti-Black bias, and 1,454 who were motivated by the sexual orientation of the victim.
This is an old argument, but an important one. A danger of the role that Birthright has played in shaping the Jewish identity of our generation is that the ten day program is long enough to instill an appreciation of Jewish persecution, but not long enough to put that persecution in context. Rabbi Saperstein knows enough to cite the vandalism of mosques and the murder of Tiller. lisa, apparently, does not. The result is a breathtakingly arrogant few lines.
