This past month has offered a clear picture of how antisemitism actually works.It does not arrive from one political direction.
It arrives from both ends at once.In Manhattan’s Diamond District on October 21, a 26-year-old Jewish man was stabbed in the back while doing outreach.The attack is being investigated as a possible hate crime; a woman has been arrested and charged.
In north London around the same time, three Jewish women —including one pushing a baby in a stroller — were assaulted in the Stamford Hill area. A suspect was detained by community security volunteers and later charged; police treated the incidents as suspected antisemitic hate crimes.These were not isolated street crimes.
They fit a pattern in which visibly Jewish people are targeted while the broader political conversation treats Jewish safety as secondary or suspect.WEAPONIZING THE CHARGE OF GENOCIDE FUELS AN INCREASINGLY DANGEROUS ANTISEMITISMA surveillance image shared by Manhattan Shomrim shows the suspect in the Oct.21 attack on a rabbi in Manhattan’s Diamond District.
(Manhattan Shomrim Safety Patrol)At the same time, online and in the streets, both extremes have continued to treat Jews as the explanation for larger problems.During France’s October student-led cost-of-living protests that turned into the country’s worst street violence in years, Palestinian flags and keffiyehs appeared regularly among the rioters. Separately, a monitoring group documented more than 1,300 posts on X blaming Jews, Israel, or the Mossad for the unrest — classic conspiracies about Jewish elites, Rothschild’s and orchestration of chaos. Far-right accounts declared that "the Jews did this to France." Far-left accounts framed the same events through the language of colonization and resistance.
The two sides do not agree on economics, immigration, or the future of the country.They do agree that Jews belong in the story as the problem.Protesters hold a Palestinian flag during demonstration...