The Gendered Experience of Antisemitism
A recent report on antisemitic crimes in New York’s Westchester County shows that there have recently been a minimal number of reported incidents. As Elliot Forchheimer, CEO of the Westchester Jewish Council, explains, these reported incidents tend to be symbolic (such as using swastikas) or online (as typified by rapper Kanye West’s recent hateful comments on social media). These incidents are hateful and should of course be minimized.
As awful as these incidents are, we should be grateful that these are not real-time incidents in person, which tend to be violent and are on the rise in New York City and other areas. The New York City Police Department has reported four times as many anti-Jewish hate crimes this year compared to last year. For example, in two successive incidents this past August, two teenagers in Brooklyn chased visibly Jewish elderly men with a fire extinguisher. In another occurrence the same week, three teenagers stole a kippah off the head of a 13-year-old boy in Staten Island. The next week, in Brooklyn, a crowd of teenagers surrounded a Hasidic man and one of them punched him in the face. People filmed the incident without intervening. The list of such incidents unfortunately goes on and on.
Although the targets of some of these violent attacks are girls or women, most of them are boys and men. Indeed, a recent large-scale study of data on antisemitism in Europe by Mie Astrup Jensen finds that “Jewish men are consistently more likely than Jewish women to experience antisemitic discrimination.” The likely reason? Observant Jewish boys and men are more visibly Jewish than observant Jewish girls and women are. Whether or not wearing a kippah is an obligation—as halakhic authorities have debated based on the Talmud’s instruction to cover one’s head (Shabbat 156b)—observant Jewish boys and men accept it as an outright obligation and wear a kippah visible on their heads. Similarly, due to various religious obligations or traditional practices, they also might have tzitzit fringes visible on their clothing, a tallit prayer shawl draped over their clothing, payot sidelocks hanging down the sides of their face, or large-brimmed hats, long coats, and high socks that signify that their wearers are Jewish. While observant Jewish girls and women have conservative dress codes, they are much less noticeably Jewish.
As our local governments address rising incidences of hate crimes of all kinds—in-person, symbolic, and online—it is crucial that they be specifically attuned to the gendered nature of violent anti-Semitic attacks, precisely because of the distinguishable religious and traditional obligations that many Jewish boys and men take on themselves.
This writing was published in a somewhat different form in The Jewish Press on October 28, 2022.
