Coronavirus spread tied to spike in anti-Semitism

In 2019, New York witnessed a high number of anti-Semitic incidents. Lawmakers, community leaders, members of law enforcement and ordinary citizens spoke of the importance of tolerance and respect for all people.

It seemed to work — for a short time. Then the COVID-19 outbreak began, and as fears of the novel coronavirus ramped up, so, too, did anti-Semitism. And with people locked in their homes, people took to the Internet to spread their hate.

“Since the beginning of March 2020, we have been receiving disturbing information on accusations on Jews, Zionists and Israelis, as individuals and as a collective, for causing and spreading the coronavirus,” noted a report on global anti-Semitism by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University and the European Jewish Congress.

Among those Internet lies are allegations that Jews have poisoned wells (an accusation that has been around since Medieval times); that Jews or Israel are using the virus to destabilize the world economy and gain control; Jews or Israelis have already produced a vaccine to the virus and will sell it to the rest of the world for a large profit; the virus is punishment because Jews have not accepted JC; and that Jews created the virus as a weapon against Muslims and Iran.

“During times of crisis, people too often turn to scapegoats, and such a troubling trend is beginning to emerge with COVID-19,” says Jennifer Rich, executive director of the Rowan Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Rowan University in New Jersey. She adds that the rise in anti-Semitism related to the virus “seems to be part of a broader trend in this instance. The ‘anti-other’ — anti-Semitic, anti-Chinese, racist, xenophobic — rhetoric is everywhere.”

Online anti-Semitism has increased in recent weeks and taken various forms, including “Zoombombing,” where an online programs being conducted by Jewish groups are interrupted by neo-Nazis or white supremacists who managed to log into the virtual program.

In the heavily Jewish towns of Monsey and Lakewood people have taken to Facebook and Twitter to protest what they believe are mass violations by the Jewish community of local stay-at-home orders. In some cases, posters have threatened to take matters into their own hands. Just what that means, however, is left up to the imagination and leads to fear and concern among residents.

“We’ve seen this type of veiled threat that walks right up to the line and stops just short, and leaves it up to the interpreter to determine what they mean by that,” says Alexander Rosemberg, deputy regional director NY/NJ region for the Anti-Defamation League. “But many in the community, when they see that, will be afraid and will see it as a direct threat much more than a veiled threat.”

Rosemberg says that while it is up law enforcement and prosecutors to determine the nature of a criminal offense, the concern centers on “the connection between the things that happen online and eventuality of things we may see expressing themselves in the real world because you may have individuals taking these statements and acting on them.”

“No one should use COVID-19 as an excuse to promote anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or stereotypes,” New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal told JNS. “The virus does not discriminate in who it affects, and people must not use the virus as an excuse to discriminate or to foster hate.

“To say we are not listening to the rules because 10 people or 20 people got together, what about everyone else? There are 150,000 people [in Lakewood], and everything’s empty,” said Rabbi Avi Schnall, NJ director of Agudath Israel. “The shopping plazas are shut down, the schools are shut down, the synagogues are shut down.”

“If you’re going to report on Lakewood when 10 people are gathering, then you need to balance it by all the wonderful things are doing,” he continued. Among those initiatives are food drives to minority communities, including Hispanic families, who have been out of work since the outbreak began with no paychecks and no way to feed their families.

“This pandemic has the capacity to bring out the best and the worst in people, and it has done so already,” says Grewal, “but we will get through this if we join together.”