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Amsterdam, the city once referred to as “Mokum,” Yiddish for “safe place,” turned hostile for visiting Israelis attending a soccer game between Maccabi Tel Aviv and host AFC Ajax when a violent, pre-planned pogrom took place late last Thursday night, November 7. The deliberate targeting of Jews in Europe was eerily reminiscent of Kristallnacht, the notorious Nazi pogrom that occurred on November 9-10, 1938. Nearly 86 years later to the day, Jews were once again hunted down on the streets of Europe.
The Amsterdam pogrom was merely the latest disturbing development in the ongoing post-October 7th global wave of Jew-hatred. Jewish religious institutions, businesses, and community centers have been regularly vandalized in the wake of the Hamas massacre and ensuing wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Holocaust memorials have been defaced, synagogues firebombed, and Hillel student centers tagged with graffiti. In Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital’s only kosher restaurant had its windows smashed. Even sites of past terrorist attacks against Jews – the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – have faced threats of violence.
So far this year, the Antisemitism Research Center (ARC) by CAM has monitored 460 incidents of violence or vandalism around the globe that have targeted Jewish locations. (For a full list of incidents, click HERE.)
Of the 140 incidents with clear motivation, 124 were motivated by far-left or Islamist ideologies, or 88.6%.
In the United States, the ARC has recorded 216 incidents of violence or vandalism targeting Jewish religious institutions, businesses, and community centers this year. Broken down by state, Florida saw the most incidents at 61 (due in large part to a mass bomb threat sent to 50 synagogues across the state), followed by New York at 49, Pennsylvania at 41, and California at 18. Among the Jewish institutions targeted were a Florida synagogue near where shots were fired, a Jewish cemetery in Ohio where more 200 headstones were desecrated, a Jewish federation building in Michigan defaced with “Free Palestine” graffiti on its front doors, and several Jewish restaurants in California that were attacked.
While the data emphasizes more broadly that anti-Jewish threats and acts of violence are increasingly commonplace worldwide, the specific incidents themselves convey an equally important warning. While the motivation behind the majority of these incidents targeting of Jewish or Israeli sites is uncertain, the incidents that do have a clear ideological motivation are overwhelmingly motivated by far-left or radical Islamist ideologies.
The extreme hostility extreme leftists and radical Islamists proudly harbor against “Zionists” and the “Zionist entity” creates an environment ripe for attacks on Jews, validating hate as “anti-Zionism” and erasing the post-World War II taboo against antisemitism. Jewish houses of worship, places of business, community centers, homes, and even Jews themselves are not safe in an atmosphere where any real or imagined ties to Israel legitimize acts of vandalism and violence.
The pogrom in Amsterdam is a recent example of this concerning development in action. For example, journalist Mehdi Hasan excused the premeditated targeting of Israelis and Jews in Amsterdam, defending the perpetrators of the pogrom by implying that they simply responded to racist chants and acts by Israeli fans. Far-left media outlets such as Jacobin and Iranian state-run PressTV framed the violence that befell Jews in the streets of Amsterdam as provoked, ignoring not only the fact that the attacks were planned well before the alleged racist remarks occurred but also the nature of the pogrom itself, whose perpetrators bragged of a “Jew hunt” and called their victims “Cancer Jew.”
The truth is clear: Jews and their institutions are in the firing line of the antisemites who claim only to oppose “Zionism” and “Zionists.” If “Jews” are not the victims of this surge in “anti-Zionism,” why is it that a statue of Anne Frank in Amsterdam was vandalized with paint twice? The vandals did not just throw paint on the statue randomly, but spray-painted “Free Gaza” in red on the base and covered her hands in the red paint, clearly charging her, a prominent figure in Jewish history who endured horrific persecution at the hands of the Nazis, with violence against Palestinians. On the same continent where six million Jews were slaughtered, today’s antisemites invert and distort the memory of the Holocaust by accusing murdered Jews of being tainted by the “crimes” of their progeny. In the twisted logic of the antisemite, yesterday’s Jewish victim of genocide is as guilty as today’s genocidal Jew.
For this same reason, the acceptability of antisemitism under the guise of anti-Zionism, a Holocaust memorial in Germany, a kosher restaurant in France, and the office of a Jewish professor in Australia were among the hundreds of Jewish locations targeted alongside Israeli locations in recent months.
The criminal antisemites behind these attacks are equal-opportunity Jew-haters. All Jews, regardless of their actual ties to Israel, are tarred as “collaborators” in “settler-colonialism,” “apartheid,” and “genocide,” making them “legitimate” targets. In this worldview, Jews are guilty until proven innocent. While this hateful ideology is not the motivation for every incident, such twisted thinking foments an environment of increased hostility toward Jews, validating and condoning the targeting of Jewish, as well as Israeli, people and property.
At the local, regional, and national levels, governments that have not already done so must adopt and enforce the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism, the most widely-adopted and well-respected such definition whose tenets best explain contemporary manifestations of Jew-hatred.
Kristallnacht occurred 86 years ago, but the hate that fueled it endures. It is up to good people of conscience everywhere to hold elected officials accountable and ensure that Jews are protected from hate.
