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Several distressing incidents of antisemitism transpired this week. A German-Jewish celebrity musician was denied service at the Westin Hotel in Leipzig for wearing a Star of David necklace, an outrage that went viral on German social media. In Berlin, fans of the Maccabi Haifa football team were subjected to antisemitic abuse during a match against Union Berlin at an Olympic stadium built by the Nazis for the 1936 games.
Depraved vandals painted Holocaust-denying graffiti on nine barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the Holocaust’s greatest atrocities took place. Security forces in Belarus killed a prominent Jewish pro-democracy activist, justifying the action with Soviet-style antisemitic propaganda on pro-regime media. In Saudi Arabia grisly antisemitic books were featured at the kingdom’s flagship book fair.
In the UK, a man rode his bicycle into a group of Jewish children, punching one of them, an Islamic charity is under investigation for promoting antisemitic lectures, a Conservative party councilor was suspended for affiliation with an antisemitic fascist group, and the vice-chair of a local Labour party branch was suspended after claiming that Labour is changing for the worse because [party leader] Sir Keir Starmer’s “wife is Jewish.”
A Jewish girl was assaulted and subjected to antisemitic slurs after leaving her school bus in Cleveland, Ohio, and multiple mezuzah’s have been torn down from student residences at the University of Indiana. Taken together, these events are a pernicious reminder of the imperative to combat all forms of antisemitism regardless of the ideological origin of the perpetrator.
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