From boycotts to firebombs, Israel-Gaza war brings wave of antisemitism

The word spread quickly Monday. Tova du Plessis got a call from a concerned customer of her tiny bakery in Philadelphia’s East Passyunk neighborhood: Essen Bakery, which specializes in babka, challah and other Jewish-style baked goods, was on the list. Soon, she had a flood of orders from supportive patrons and a police car stationed outside her shop.

The scene was similar at more than 30 other Philadelphia eateries and markets that a pro-Palestinian group this week targeted for a boycott because they were “owned by Zionists” or “raising money for the Zionist state,” or equated “Palestinian resistance with Anti-semetism [sic].” Yet another list targeted places that serve Israeli food, which the boycott’s organizers, the Philly Palestine Coalition, said is “a means of erasing Palestinian existence.”

On Wednesday, du Plessis, who is Jewish, was still processing the shock of being targeted because of her religion. “I’ve been aware that antisemitism has been on the rise in America, but I’ve wanted to believe it was a really small number of people,” she said. “But to have my business targeted because you are Jewish shatters that sense of denial.”

Nearly a month after the Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and sparked the fast-expanding Israel-Gaza war, a wave of antisemitic incidents — from vandalism and graffiti to bomb threats, boycotts and anti-Jewish chants — has swept across much of the world, with particular surges in Europe and the United States. Anti-Muslim hate crimes have likewise spiked, including the stabbing death of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in Illinois.

The war, which has to date killed more than 8,000 Gazans, has unleashed strong emotions, including anger that sometimes focuses on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and has now extended in many places to actions — at times violent — targeting Jews around the world.

On the same evening when the Philadelphia boycott was announced on social media, about 6,000 miles away, in Russia’s Muslim-majority Dagestan republic, a mob of hundreds of people burst through security controls at the regional airport, waving Palestinian flags, chanting anti-Jewish slogans and searching for Israelis who had arrived on a flight from Tel Aviv. More than 20 people were injured and 60 were arrested, according to Dagestan’s Interior Ministry.

Over the past couple of weeks, in Berlin, a Jewish center was firebombed; in Paris, at least nine synagogues and Jewish schools received bomb threats; and in New York, a man on a 42nd Street subway platform punched a woman in the face because “you are Jewish.”

“This is a more raw, hard-edged antisemitism,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international affairs for the American Jewish Committee. “In past wars or conflicts, we saw more verbal attacks and graffiti. Now, there’s a virulence that does set this apart.”

In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which catalogues antisemitic, anti-Muslim and other hate-driven incidents, said the number of cases of harassment, vandalism and assault against Jews soared by nearly 400 percent in the first 16 days after the Hamas attack, from 64 during the same period last year to 312 this year.

Beyond the overt attacks, many Jews also describe a frightening shift in attitudes toward them, from friends, co-workers and strangers alike.

“I operate in very dark places, and this has surprised even me,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism. “We know that conflict in the Mideast brings a backlash in the United States, but to see this overt support for the Hamas attack, to see dozens of videos of people ripping down posters of kidnapped Jewish children, is pretty unprecedented. I just don’t get that kind of hatred or denial of Jewish suffering.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, Baker said, “there was a heartwarming response around the world — buildings lit up in Israeli blue and white at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and the parliament in Sofia, Bulgaria. But as Israel said it was going to respond, you started to hear, ‘Well, it didn’t happen in a vacuum.’ It was like, ‘We pay lip service to your pain, but let’s move on.’ In Jewish communities around the world, there’s the sense that we have been abandoned after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.”

In the United States, some of the most visible antagonism aimed at Jews has taken place on college campuses — about 15 percent of the antisemitic incidents in recent weeks, Segal said. At Yale University in New Haven, Conn., the school’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life sent students a statement citing “unprecedented levels of antisemitism here at home, including at Yale,” such as incidents of professors and students posting social media comments celebrating Hamas’s attack or justifying the terrorist group’s actions as Israel’s fault.

“While we have received much-needed support and kindness from both within and outside the Jewish community, many of the people with whom we share a campus have been unsympathetic, and even hostile, to our suffering,” wrote Rabbi Jason Rubenstein. “We’re feeling isolated and even threatened because, in a very real sense, we are.”

In the Washington area, “parents are worried about their kids being attacked at school, rabbis are getting calls, observant Jews are wearing baseball caps instead of yarmulkes, and I’ve had people tell me they’re hiding the Stars of David they wear around their neck,” said Ron Halber, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.

The Philadelphia boycott is perceived as plainly antisemitic by many Jews, even as its advocates insist that their targets are Zionists and Israelis. To du Plessis, the bakery owner, the idea that her business is labeled as “owned by Zionists” is so obviously a case of religious bias that it’s hardly worth discussing.

“I can’t even entertain the question when the intention is to target me as a Jew,” she said. Du Plessis, who grew up in an observant Jewish home in South Africa and whose grandfather fled Austria to escape the Nazis’ genocidal murders of the Jews, said she runs a bakery “for the neighborhood, for the city, for all people. In general, I’m not someone who publicizes my ideological beliefs.”

But two days after the Hamas attack, she wrote on Instagram that “I, Tova du Plessis, owner of Essen Bakery, stand with Israel. I stand by Israel’s right to exist, to be a home for all Jewish people, to defend herself. My heart is broken in pieces. May we overcome and may we heal.”

If that solitary post has now put her on a boycott list, she’s not sorry. “I’ve been a critic of the Israeli government for all of my adult life,” she said. “But I did not open a bakery to serve any particular community.” On Wednesday, du Plessis’s shop had a big uptick in orders, with many customers saying they wanted to show support.

A little more than a mile north of Essen Bakery, Allan Domb’s restaurant, Schlesinger’s Deli, started fielding calls from diners: “What can we do to help?” people asked. Domb plans to extend his opening hours to accommodate the new crowds.

“I really did not think it would get to this point,” said Domb, a former Philadelphia City Council member. “It reminds me of Kristallnacht and how the Nazis forbade people to buy from Jewish merchants. It is scary. But I have faith that the majority of Americans don’t share that viewpoint.”

The boycott — whose organizers call themselves a group of “Palestinian, Black and Indigenous community members and organizations” — is aimed at 36 restaurants, bakeries and markets that are “owned by Zionists” or serve Israeli food.

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