Jews went a little bit nuts this week.
Not because two and a half thousand of us turned out for a funeral at the epicenter of this country’s coronavirus pandemic but because after the cops broke things up New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted:
“My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”
Whereupon the Twitterverse exploded.
“Hey @NYCMayor,” tweeted ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt, “there are 1mil+ Jewish people in #NYC. The few who don’t social distance should be called out — but generalizing against the whole population is outrageous especially when so many are scapegoating Jews. This erodes the very unity our city needs now more than ever.”
“This has to be a joke,” tweeted New York City Councilman Chaim Deutsch, a Brooklyn Democrat who is an Orthodox Jew. He added, “Every neighborhood has people who are being non-compliant. To speak to an entire ethnic group as though we are all flagrantly violating precautions is offensive, it’s stereotyping, and it’s inviting anti-Semitism. I’m truly stunned.”
“So, as has been true with moral ciphers from time immemorial, you decided to seek your jollies by attacking Jews,” wrote John Podhoretz in the “New York Post.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, File)
Really?
An old (Jewish) friend of mine likes to say that Jews consider any statement by a non-Jew that begins with the words “Jews are” to be anti-Semitic if it’s not followed by something like “a community that puts a high value on learning and supporting the arts.” In other words, just about whenever a gentile lumps us all together it’s (for historically understandable reasons) a trigger — one that de Blasio certainly pulled.
But there’s more to it than that.
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