Credit: PHOTO BY KEVIN FULLER

[UPDATED March 23] Since this article was written, a 19-year-old Israeli man has been arrested in Israel and is suspected of carrying out at least some of the threats against Jewish Community Centers and other Jewish institutions. Clearly I was off base in assuming that all of the threats were anti-Semitic.

That doesn’t account for the damage to Jewish cemeteries in Rochester and other locations, which the Israeli man could not have carried out. And as members of the Jewish community know, it does not mean that anti-Semitism is not flourishing, in the US and elsewhere. Nor does it negate proof of the ethnic hatred that continues to be spewed out – visibly – in the US. But I drew a conclusion about these particular threats that was unfounded. That’s a breach of journalistic standards. Readers who have said I should apologize are correct. I should, and I do.
— Mary Anna Towler

Hate is living among us. Someone with a deep, dangerous loathing – of Jews and heaven knows who else – is spreading fear, here and throughout the country.

In Rochester, it came first in the desecration of a Jewish cemetery on March 2. Then came the March 7 bomb threat at the Jewish Community Center on Edgewood Avenue. And then on Sunday, another bomb threat at the JCC.

I’ve been picturing the Rochester terrorist as a single individual – one of our neighbors, working at one of our companies, shopping alongside us in our stores, driving our streets, and plotting the next move. But it could be more than one person. Maybe the Rochester terrorist doesn’t even live here. Maybe this stuff is emanating from some central headquarters somewhere. The attacks on cemeteries, though – in Rochester, in St. Louis, in Philadelphia – suggest chillingly that locals are either involved or are mimicking the e-mail terrorism.

Also chilling are the signs that these are coordinated attacks: individual acts in places hundreds of miles apart, on the same day. Rochester’s JCC was one of seven hit by the threats on Sunday. The others were in Wilmington, Delaware; Indianapolis; Beachwood, Ohio; Houston, Milwaukee, and Vancouver.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, that makes 117 Jewish facilities that have received bomb threats since January 1. Most of the facilities have been Jewish Community Centers, but the terrorism has also specifically targeted children: day-care centers, pre-schools, grade schools, high schools, and a children’s museum have all received threats.

And the desecration in the cemeteries took place during the same period.

Who is doing this? And why?

Rochester’s terrorist isn’t alone. Is someone or a group of someones organizing this stuff? Or are anti-Semites acting independently, feeding off of the numerous internet sites that spread white supremacist and Christian-identity rantings?

The FBI is pursuing the “who.” That leaves the “why.” Why this hatred toward Jews?

Jews aren’t alone, of course. A recent Washington Post article cited other recent hate crimes: In Florida, a man tried to set fire to a convenience store he mistakenly thought was owned by Muslims. The 64-year-old man arrested for the incident said he wanted to “run the Arabs out of our country,” according to the Post. (The store’s owners are Indian.)

In Washington State, a Sikh man was shot in his driveway. “The gunman reportedly told him to ‘Go back to your own country,” the Washington Post’s report said.

In February, a gunman shot two fellow patrons at a bar in Kansas, reportedly yelling “Get out of our country” before firing. Both of his targets were from India. He killed one and injured another, along with another bar patron.

Anti-Jewish, anti-black, anti-Muslim… none of this is new, of course. But it has come out in the open, and intensified, in the past year, as Donald Trump made the demeaning of others acceptable.

I don’t think for a minute that Donald Trump is purposely encouraging the attacks aimed at American Jews, or that he condones them. So much of what he does is performance art that he may have intended simply to play to his base. Or show off. But he bears responsibility for what is happening. Words matter. And words embolden, particularly when someone with great stature and authority utters them.

Here at home on Sunday afternoon, 12 Corners in Brighton was the site of a rally to express solidarity with the Jewish community. The event had been planned days previously, after the first threat to the JCC, but Sunday’s bomb threat heightened its importance.

And as one of our photographers was standing on the corner of Winton and Monroe as the rally progressed, he watched as a car drove by and the driver yelled out the window at the rally crowd: “Donald Trump!”

Donald Trump’s words matter. There are consequences to his angry rants. And we are witnessing those consequences now.

This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2017.

Mary Anna Towler is a transplant from the Southern Appalachians and is editor, co-publisher, and co-founder of City. She is happy to have converted a shy but opinionated childhood into an adult job. She...

16 replies on “JCC’S, cemeteries, and a president’s angry rants”

  4. Sure is, but I don’t know why people are quick to jump on the “white supremacist” bandwagon. Let’s not forget, there’s a pretty large black nationalist group out there that’s fervently anti-Semitic. How does the saying go, don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched?

    https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/ex…

  5. Thank you, Ms. Towler. The right wing trolls and their usual distortions, diversions and outright lies are wholly representative of our so-called “president” and his minions’ assault on the truth, as if we don’t know the source of this wave of anti-semitism. America’s – and Rochester’s – Jewish men and women sure as hell know the source and are not fooled.

  6. Thank you, Ms. Towler. The right wing trolls and their usual distortions, diversions and outright lies are wholly representative of our so-called “president” and his minions’ assault on the truth, as if we don’t know the source of this wave of anti-semitism. America’s – and Rochester’s – Jewish men and women sure as hell know the source and are not fooled.

  7. Fgt – Why is it that you trolls never read the articles you cite? Had you actually read that Washington Post article (which by the way is an opinion piece, not a news story) you’d have run across the statement…”Overall, however, we wont know for many more months, when the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League have better data to work with, if Nov. 9, 2016, was the start of something new or just a continuation of a regrettable but enduring legacy.”

    Better luck next time.

  8. Sam I read it , the difference being that I understood it and apparently you did not. The article, listed as analysis , not opinion, stated there is no evidence to date of an association between anti-Semitic incidents and President Trump. Yet City and many other media outlets are constantly talking as though there has been a proven increase.
    Is your point really that we cannot evaluate data because it might change in the future?

  9. As we experience this unprecedented rise in anti-Semitism, a full-on assault on the truth and the assault on our democratic institutions, our foremost expert on Stalin, Hitler and the Holocaust, Timothy Snyder, has written a short book, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century.”

    As Snyder, Professor of History at Yale and author of the seminal work “Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin” (2010) and “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” (2015) writes: “The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”

  10. TW, and City staff – 0 for 2 so far on arrests related to threats against the Jewish community. Let us know when a “white supremacist/Christian terrorist” is finally arrested.

    http://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-arrested-…

    Oh TW – Nice irony btw, referring to people as trolls, while hiding on an anonymous troll account….

  12. Ms Towler, when are you going to apologize for smearing Republicans for the threats against Jewish institutions here in the US. Although there was no evidence of who had actually made the threats, other than the ones by a black (doubt he was a Republican) that was trying to get back at his girlfriend, you felt entitled to make false claims. Today, the NYT has reported that a US/Israeli dual citizen has been arrested in Israel for making the threats.

    When will apologies be forthcoming for your big lie?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/23/us/jcc-…

  13. M.A.T. – Thanks for the update, but another thing for you to consider:

    “That doesn’t account for the damage to Jewish cemeteries in Rochester and other locations, which the Israeli man could not have carried out.”

    Two things:

    Obviously the Israeli Jew that was arrested in Israel didn’t knock those over, but who’s to say another Jewish person didn’t?

    and more importantly:

    http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brookl…

    Wind/time damage. Yes, it’s a thing. Many years back I did, uh, “free labor” for several weekends with the MCSD. Most of those days were spent at Mt Hope cemetery. During my time mowing and raking, I came across several downed headstones (which I uprighted as best I could). As much as our political stance makes us want things to be true, that’s not often the case. That’s why I say use the logic and reasoning portion of your brain (it’s there for a reason) instead of just spouting off political talking points. Trust me, I’m Green, but you probably wouldn’t pick that up from any of my posts.

    I could probably go to Mt Hope now and find 50 headstones knocked over. Does that mean vandals did it?

  14. Eric, I think she made a sincere apology, something almost never seen at the national media level. They just go on to the next lies.

    I do get your comment about not assuming the graveyard perps were from the right, although some of them probably were. Anti semitism does appear to be on the rise in th US and Europe. But t is not just on the right. The left in Europe now seems to target Jews, and it clearly is rising on US campuses.

    The real lesson of this though is to wait and see where the evidence leads you before making up your opinion. This morning, the paper in Charleston had an article about a man arrested for writing racial slurs on a library named for one of those murdered here 2 years ago. Imagine my surprise to find out that he was black, not white, as I expected.

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