By Jonathan S. Tobin
(JNS) — When faced with a problem, the political class always knows what to do: They pass a law that, while not always useless, is usually more about dealing with appearances than substance.
That’s the best way to understand legislation proposed in the New York state legislature to regulate the protests outside of synagogues, which are the latest manifestation of the surge of antisemitism that has made itself felt across the nation since Oct. 7, 2023.
The bill, which seeks to create a 25-foot buffer zone around houses of worship within which protesters may not enter, is the most tangible response yet to what happened last month when raging pro-Hamas demonstrators laid siege to Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s usually quiet Upper East Side because of a Nefesh B’Nefesh program held there with information on how to go about moving to Israel. But after this week’s equally shocking assault on individuals entering a pro-Israel event at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles’s Koreatown neighborhood, we may expect similar attempts to use the law to protect Jewish congregations across the country.
What needs to be recognized is that if synagogues are now as controversial and as much a focus of aggressive protest as abortion clinics once were, it’s no longer possible to pretend that Jew-hatred in the United States hasn’t reached a tipping point.
The analogy isn’t arbitrary.
The New York bill is, in fact, an attempt to amend existing legislation that creates buffer zones around abortion clinics. Politicians aim to do the same when it comes to houses of worship.
But those appalled by what happened at both Park East and Wilshire Boulevard need to recognize that such a law isn’t the real solution. The issue is the way that mainstream media has essentially legitimized the reason why these thugs are turning out to harass Jews in the first place.
After Oct. 7, the proverbial Overton Window of acceptable discourse has been moved to accommodate the pro-Hamas crowds. Not too long ago, support for the cause of destroying Israel was considered a sure sign not merely of hatred and bigotry, but of the sort of extremism that ought to be confined to the fever swamps of the far left or far right. These days, advocacy for such a genocidal goal is seen as a legitimate political discussion.
This was best illustrated by mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s reaction to the Park East incident, when he stated that he opposed demonstrations outside synagogues that aim to intimidate people but still chided the congregation, saying that “these sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.”
The reference was to the event being held there that night by the 20-plus-year-old Nefesh B’Nefesh group that promotes immigration to Israel. Doing so is actually protected by international law. Later, his stand was justified in a piece published by the left-wing Forward newspaper. It said the argument behind Mamdani’s comment was an assertion based on the issue that since some Jews who make aliyah wind up in the heart of the ancient Jewish homeland in Jerusalem, or in Judea and Samaria, and are therefore “settlers,” the shul was essentially facilitating the creation of international criminals.
That’s an outrageous smear. But similar justifications were presented on behalf of the thugs who sought to disrupt the Los Angeles event because it was organized by the Israeli Consulate to discuss security strategies with a focus on AI innovations and included the Elbit Systems firm. Elbit is an Israeli technology company that is under fire because of its role in developing tools to defend Israel from terrorism.
The problem isn’t what Elbit does. It’s the fact that the bizarre red-green alliance of leftists and Islamists that oppose Israel’s existence defines such efforts as not merely illegitimate but “genocide.”
That’s why the focus on the narrow issue of impeding the ability of threatening mobs — who chant slogans about wiping out the Jews and their state to inspire fear in everyday citizens — by making synagogues no-go zones misses the point why these outrages are happening. What those who are concerned by these incidents need to address is the way such vile arguments about “genocide,” which are nothing more than modern blood libels about the Jews, have been legitimized by educators, union members, journalists and politicians who would never be seen shouting a rude remark or getting into a shoving match with a person entering a synagogue.
What those who want to respond to these incidents should be doing is not merely denouncing the vulgarians for going overboard in expressing their hostility to Israel. Rather, they should stop treating the claims about “genocide” and famine in Gaza and “apartheid” inside the Jewish state as reasonable assertions any more worthy of debate than the claims of latter-day Nazis like Nick Fuentes about the Jews controlling banks, the weather and the world.
A generation of young people who get all their news from social media is an ideal audience for these falsehoods. They’ve been convinced to believe that the exaggerated casualty figures — in which all the Palestinian dead in the fighting with Israel, including terrorists, are counted as women and children — are accurate. And they either don’t know about or don’t believe the truth about the Palestinian atrocities committed on Oct. 7 or just think the Israeli victims had it coming. They’ve been conditioned by their educational experiences and what they read or hear from opinion leaders to think that Jews have no rights. They have been taught to believe that Jews are “white” oppressors, no different from the bad guys in the Jim Crow South or apartheid-era South Africa, rather than a mix of citizens from all parts of the world, including Middle Eastern countries that kicked them out long ago.
There are consequences when the Times treats advocacy for the “genocide” blood libel as a defensible opinion. The same is true when Democratic and Republican politicians listen to claims that the Jews are purposefully seeking to wipe out an entire people, rather than being the intended victims of Palestinian attempts at Jewish genocide. Their failure to push back against such outrageous falsehoods sends a message to the entire country that transcends any effort to regulate the most unruly protesters.
The willingness to normalize Mamdani is the most obvious symptom of what has gone on.
That a person for whom the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet is the driving force of a burgeoning political career — he is, after all, 34, and the mayoralty will be his first significant political position — and the organizing principle of his advocacy is an appalling turn of events. But rather than treat him as a pariah, as the chattering classes would behave if someone like Fuentes or David Duke, leader of the Ku Klux Klan, were elected to any office, he’s been feted and fussed over by leaders on both sides of the aisle. That not only includes leading Democrats, but President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
While they aren’t wrong to praise his skill as a manipulator of the media, treating his antisemitic beliefs as merely a curious eccentricity or merely a questionable aspect of his appeal to young voters is to normalize such abhorrent views. Instead, they are treating anyone who dares to call him out as an “enemy of the Jewish people” — as Benjamin Tisch, the brother of New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, rightly did — as the problem. That Commissioner Tisch publicly apologized for her brother’s accurate comment undermines the notion that she will be an effective check on the mayor-elect’s excesses. It also sends Mamdani, his Jew-hating advisers and members of the pro-Hamas mobs besieging synagogues, the message that they are legitimate actors.
The question isn’t, as the sponsors of the New York synagogue buffer zone legislation said, how they can protect the free-speech rights of protesters without making the lives of synagogue-goers hell. Rather, it is how leading liberal opinion leaders, including many left-wing Jews who never miss an opportunity to bash the Israeli government or to bolster arguments that strip Jews of rights that no one would deny to any other people, now fail to treat antisemitism as a disqualifying character flaw. More than that, such sentiments should deem them unfit for office or a position of influence in academia or journalism.
We should welcome efforts to protect synagogue-goers. But what we should really be pushing back against is a cultural climate in which Israel and the expression of normative Jewish beliefs are now considered illegitimate. As long as that is true of mainstream American public discourse, the safety of worshippers or any other action of an identifiable Jew will always be in question.