When Is It Okay To Physically Assault A Jew?
While Jew in the City was originally founded to break down stereotypes about religious Jews, as our organization developed and met people who experienced the underbelly of the Orthodox Jewish world, we realized that not every negative story is a stereotype.
Some bad feelings are due to shortcomings in our community that need to be addressed. We do our best to highlight all the wonderful things that can be found among our people, while at the same time being realistic about the ways we can improve.
If people outside of our community have negative interactions with us, we should consider how we can do better, but with this recent uptick in anti-Semitic attacks directed at the Orthodox Jewish community, there is an unfortunate narrative being espoused: certain individuals are trying to justify Jews being attacked, assaulted, shot, and butchered with a machete. “Gentrification.” “Buying up all the houses.” “Rudeness.” “Past scandals in the community.”
We at Jew in the City find this line of thinking to be outrageous and want to make it clear to the world that it is extremely rare to have a valid reason to assault a Jew. In order to make this lesson easy to understand and disseminate, we created this handy dandy flowchart to show the various reasons people have cited as a possible excuses for violence against Jews. Please help us share this and be sure to have people refer to it if they are trying to justify heinous acts.
If you found this content meaningful and want to help further our mission through our Keter, Makom, and Tikun branches, please consider becoming a Change Maker today.
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I am an Orthodox Jew and have been appalled at how most Orthodox Jews have supported Trump. He ran on a platform of hatred and conspiracy theories, and made the alt-right respectable. He talked about those criminal Latinos (but that’s ok, as we are not Latinos?), he regularly pardons those convicted of police brutality (but that’s ok, because it only applies to black and brown people?). We thought we were protected because of Jared and Ivanka. And now we are shocked that all this hatred and extremism has come to target us?
Is this a joke?
Shouldn’t this apply to everyone and not just the jews?
Thanks for your question. People are specifically justifying violence against Jews. They are citing gentrification, unusual culture, past scandals. The chart is meant to show that these are all inappropriate and that violence is never justified except in one rare instance.
To mention jews specifically, it seems as if your actions of violence would be different if it were anyone else, or else why specifically mention it?
Why is this a question this should go without saying
Because, sadly, people and news organizations are actually justifying violence against Jews. Gentrification, unusual customs, past scandals are all being cited as legitimate reasons for violence against Jews. So we made a chart to show how stupid and wrong this is.