Do we have to pick between openly supporting Israel and being accepted by our peers?

I had a reckoning of sorts the other night that drove home a harsh reality: American Jews are more vulnerable in our own country today than ever in our lifetime.

What prompted this observation was an incident not that unusual these days, which is part of what makes it so troubling. My wife and I were among the nearly 900 people who attended a lively debate at The Temple Emanu-El Streicker Cultural Center dealing with “The Great Divide” among Jews on the topic of Israel. (More on that later.) On our way out of the building, we were urgently directed by security officials to exit toward Madison Avenue and avoid a noisy anti-Israel protest, in the other direction, on Fifth Avenue.

But when we got to the corner of Madison, protected by police, we saw and heard a group of protesters, some wearing keffiyahs and holding anti-Israel signs, cursing us as Jews. I realized that, even literally, wherever we turn, and despite law-enforcement protection, we can’t avoid the fact that Jews no longer can take for granted their full and equal acceptance within American society.

And the challenge for us is what to do about it.

The next morning I called Gady Levy, Streicker Center’s executive director, to ask about the high level of security we’d seen employed, which included having attendees show a photo ID along with our tickets, and giving up our phones in the lobby before entering the auditorium. He explained that those cautionary elements, in addition to scores of police and security officials in the area and on site, were also to avoid unruly protests from inside the auditorium as happened last year at a similar event – protests that were videoed by the protesters and seen around the world on social media.

“This is what it takes to be Jewish in New York these days,” Levy ruefully observed.

Of course, he’s right. And it’s not just New York. The problem is global. How sad that we’ve come to expect and rely on increasingly tight security and law-enforcement patrols in and outside synagogues, Jewish schools and other institutions across the country and around the world to protect against the dramatic spike in hate-filled, anti-Israel protests and acts of arson and violence – sometimes deadly.

Is it still safe to be a Jew in America?

Same Question, Darker Answer

Ironically, six years ago I was commissioned to write a piece for The Atlantic given that exact title. I wrote that in more than four decades of reporting on Jewish life, I had “never encountered such a level of palpable fear, anger, and vulnerability among American Jews as I do today, with attacks—verbal, physical, and, in two tragic cases, fatal—coming........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)