In recent weeks, Jewish communities across Western Europe have faced a disturbing wave of violence. A synagogue was set on fire in Rotterdam. A Jewish school in Amsterdam was damaged by an explosive device. In London, four Hatzola ambulances were torched. This is the new, violent reality of Jewish life in Western Europe. It is part of a wider and deeply alarming pattern: antisemitism in Europe is no longer confined to online hatred, fringe agitation, or coded rhetoric. It is increasingly taking physical, violent form.

And yet, at precisely such a moment, the international gaze reflexively shifts back to Poland.

The reason is not a comparable wave of antisemitic attacks on the ground, but the inflammatory public behavior of two Polish far-right politicians, Grzegorz Braun and Konrad Berkowicz. For readers outside Poland, it is important to understand that these figures thrive on provocation. Braun in particular has built his public profile on outrage, spectacle, and rhetoric that repeatedly crosses the line into antisemitic insinuation and historical distortion. Berkowicz, though less internationally known, operates in a similar political ecosystem in which extremism is treated as a tool of visibility.

Their performances are loud, vulgar, and designed to travel. And they do.

As a result, Poland is once again portrayed in parts of the international media as a country uniquely burdened by antisemitism, even when some of the most brutal contemporary attacks against Jewish institutions are taking place elsewhere in Europe. This does not mean Poland has no problems. Like every European country, Poland has its extremists, its conspiracy-minded demagogues, and its disgraceful public voices. But judging a nation of 38 million through the lens of a few fringe radicals is not journalism; it is caricature.

This distortion matters.

It matters because it shifts attention away from places where Jews are facing direct physical danger here and now. When synagogues are attacked, schools damaged, and Jewish emergency vehicles burned in Western European cities, public discussion should not be eclipsed by the latest stunt of a pair of Polish radicals chasing headlines. Yet that is too often what happens. A political grotesque in Warsaw becomes more visible internationally than actual anti-Jewish violence in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, or London.

This asymmetry is a matter of political convenience. In some European capitals, there is little appetite for a sustained reckoning with the scale of their own antisemitism problem, especially when it is linked to broader social tensions, radicalization, or failures of integration and law enforcement. It is often easier, politically and psychologically, to point eastward. Poland, with its complicated Holocaust memory debates and combustible politics, makes for a convenient symbol. It is easier to moralize about Poland than to confront fires, bombs, and violent hatred at home.

This is precisely why the damage done by people like Braun and Berkowicz is so serious. They do not merely degrade public life in Poland. They provide the perfect B-roll for a narrative that Western capitals are all too eager to broadcast, distracting from the smoke rising from their own streets. Their provocations help create a false hierarchy of concern in which performative political ugliness in Poland draws more international outrage than real-world attacks on Jews in Western Europe.

Poland does not deserve to be made the face of Europe’s antisemitism crisis simply because two cynical extremists understand how to manufacture scandal. The true scandal lies elsewhere: in the fact that when Jewish institutions are attacked in the West, the broader European conversation can still be diverted by political theater in the East.

That is a dangerous moral and analytical failure. It obscures where Jews are actually under attack. It rewards provocation over reality. And once again, it leaves Poland carrying the symbolic blame for a European problem that is both wider and, in many places, far more violent.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)