Introduction: Racism and Antisemitism Roger Berkowitz
One day before the 2019 Hannah Arendt Center Conference on “Racism and Antisemitism,” a gunman in Germany tried to storm a synagogue where Jews were praying. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year for Jews. Foiled by security, he killed two people outside. Like the gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, the German gunman livestreamed his attack. He “identified himself as Anon, denied the Holocaust, denounced feminists and immigrants, then declared: ‘The root of all these problems is the Jew.’”1 The shooting of Jews in Germany on Yom Kippur barely registered. And no wonder. Hateful attacks on Jews, Muslims, blacks, gays, trans people, refugees, and other minorities are rising. The list of unarmed black men and women killed by police continues to grow, including Michael Brown, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Tanisha Anderson, Tamir Rice, and Botham Jean, who was killed in his own apartment by an allegedly confused off-duty white police officer in Dallas. Here is a partial list of targeted racist mass killings in the last few years: • Twenty-two people were killed and twenty-four injured in a mass shooting in El Paso targeting Mexicans and the so-called Hispanic invasion of Texas.2 • One woman and three others were injured at the shooting inside the Chabad Synagogue in Poway, California, by a gunman who blamed Jews for a white genocide, a common conspiracy theory; he published a rant in which he wrote, “Every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race.”3 • Fifty-one people were killed and forty-nine injured in attacks at the Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Center in Christchurch, New Zealand. The gunman streamed his attack on Facebook after issuing a 74-page manifesto titled “The Great Replacement,” a reference to the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory discussed in the essays by Adam Shatz, Marc Weitzmann, and Thomas Chatterton Williams in this volume. • Two people were killed and five wounded at an attack on a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, by a gunman who openly expressed his hatred of women and wrote about rape, torture, and murder in his journals. • Eleven people were killed and seven injured inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh during Shabbat services. The gunman blamed immigrants and migrant caravans from Central America; he posted
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