By now most of my readers know that I grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s most of which time was before the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948.  In the mid-1940s the population of the Bronx was somewhere between 1.3-1.4 million people of which about 600,000 were Jewish which meant that this one borough of New York City was about 45% Jewish.

When I speak about that period, I often refer to it as having lived in an American “Shtetl” referring back to how the Jewish villages in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe were often characterized.

The difference was that in America Jews, for the most part, did not fear pogroms or violent antisemitism although, truth be told, there was sufficient negativism about Jews to go around even in the land of the free and the home of the brave of the 1940s and 50s.

We lived in a mixed Jewish and Irish-Catholic neighborhood and, as kids, were often beaten up by our Irish neighbors. But the good thing was that our public schools were 95% Jewish as the Catholic kids went to Catholic schools which were well located throughout the borough.  Given the realities of life there in those days I vividly recall my mother regularly saying, about our Catholic neighbors, “Don’t get them angry!”  I used to think that was a ghetto mentality unnecessary in liberal America which was founded on the principles of religious freedom for all.

And yet, in 2026 America, we find, time and time again, that the roughly 7.5 million Jews who represent just 2.4% of the US population, continue to be termed causal whenever the economy turns south or the general population feels frustrated and alienated.

America’s current war of choice with Iran seems to have exponentially ramped up America’s residual antisemitism given that Israel is America’s partner in this war.

To be sure the average American citizen is being affected in the pocketbook by what has been going on these last 28 days since the beginning of the war.   Whether it is welcoming home the bodies of US military who have become fatalities in this war, the increased cost of food, higher prices for air fares or the 34% increase in fuel for American cars, everyone is feeling the pinch.  Concomitantly President Trump’s disapproval ratings are the highest they have been in either of his two terms in office.

Still, I was shocked by a picture someone sent to me of a gas pump at a Sunoco filling station in Jackson, Ohio (see below) that had a sticker affixed to it, with a caricature or a man dressed as a religious Jew pointing to the price per gallon indictor with the text: “The Jews Did This.”  Jackson is a small town of 6,200 people in a rural area in southern Ohio close to the Kentucky border.

To this writer this type of thing is way different that one person entering a synagogue and killing people, or two people going to Bondi Beach and killing people, or three people setting Hatzolah ambulance ablaze in London’s Golders Green neighborhood.  Those were individual actions by demented people carrying out their frustrations by choosing to kill Jews for whatever insane logic was coursing through their warped brains.  But this is something else again.

I don’t know who was responsible for the label on the gas pump in Ohio.  However, if I had to take a guess, I would bet that there was some anti-Jewish group behind it who financed the design and printing of the stickers who then recruited individuals to place these stickers on gas pumps in different locations in the US.

The timing is not incidental. As the war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran fuels public anxiety over oil, coupled with escalation, and economic fallout, the same historical scapegoat is dragged out once again: the Jews.  That is how antisemitism works.  It takes a geopolitical conflict, strips away reality, and turns Jewish people into a target for public anger.

Hopefully, the American Jewish Community will not lull themselves into a false sense of security believing that “it” cannot happen there.  I’m still not sure my mother was taking the right approach when she said “Don’t get them angry.” Nevertheless, there is a marked change in the American psyche when it comes to Jews and it would be a huge mistake to write this off as a quack event.  Doing so would be bad both for the Jewish community and for America as a whole whose very foundations of tolerance are challenged now seemingly every day and in every place.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)