By Nina Siegal
US News and World Report

Late in March, Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old Jewish grandmother and Holocaust survivor, was found dead – stabbed to death with her body partially burned – in her Paris apartment. Two men in their 20s were placed under formal investigation on charges of murder motivated by anti-Semitism. French interior minister Gérard Collomb told Parliament that one of the alleged killers told the other, “She’s a Jew. She must have money.”

French authorities are still investigating the circumstances of the case, but Jewish advocacy groups across the world have situated the murder in the broader context of rising anti-Semitism in France, and across Europe.

For Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, the slaying is “a sad symbol of what we are returning to.” In January, in a speech at the European Parliament, Kantor warned that Europe is no longer safe against anti-Semitism because the last generation of Holocaust survivors and witnesses is dwindling. Knoll’s death, he said, is another sign.

“There have been far too many of these murders and attempted murders of Jews in France to call them sporadic,” Kantor wrote in an email. “This murder should not just appall us, it should serve as a final wake-up call that more must be done not just to protect Jewish communities and institutions, but also all individuals at risk.”

Lethal violence against Jewish people is certainly not an everyday occurrence, but the brutal murder of a woman who had already experienced the horrors of mass genocide has been particularly painful to the international Jewish community. It follows other shocking anti-Semitic incidents in France, such as the 2012 killing of three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse by an Islamic fundamentalist, and the 2015 murder of four people at a Jewish supermarket, linked to the Charlie Hebdo killings.

More recently, a Syrian man turned himself in to German police last week after admitting to using a belt to beat an Israeli man wearing a yarmulke in Berlin. The incident sparked protests this week and – in a nation sensitive to its relations with its Jewish community – has drawn the condemnation of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

There is rising concern about the safety of Jewish people and communities in Europe, as the number of violent attacks aimed at Jews in many countries has risen in recent years. Jewish leaders are speculating on the reasons why this may be occurring now. Some, such as Kantor, argue that 73 years after the end of World War II, Europe is no longer inoculated against anti-Semitism. Others blame the rise of populist, nationalist political parties, while still others point to radicalized Muslims, who, according to recent data from the University of Oslo, are most often the perpetrators.

Knoll’s murder follows another attack in April 2017, when Sarah Halimi, a 65-year old Orthodox Jewish physician and kindergarten teacher in Paris, was beaten in her apartment and then thrown out a window. Both women had lived alone and had previously complained of anti-Semitic threats, according to Noémie Halioua, a French journalist with the Jewish weekly newspaper Actualité Juive and the author of a new book on the Halimi case.

While racially motivated hate crimes have decreased in France overall, there has been an uptick in anti-Semitic violence in the past year, from 77 incidents in 2016 to 97 in 2017, according to a report released by the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University in early April. The authors of the study cautioned that the information could not be verified by their criteria.

The report also found that physical violence against Jewish people around the world dropped by 9 percent from 2016 to 2017, but anti-Semitic sentiment, hate-speech, threats and cyberattacks have become mainstream throughout Europe, they asserted, leading to a “corrosion of Jewish life.”

Kantor says anti-Semitic violence has become “an almost daily occurrence in parts of Europe and apparently, Jews no longer feel that they can rely on the preventive actions of the law enforcement authorities to protect them even in their own homes.”

The report concludes that the rise of anti-Semitism can be attributed to “the constant rise of the extreme right, a heated anti-Zionist discourse in the left, accompanied by harsh anti-Semitic expressions, and radical Islamism.”

The Anti-Defamation League, an American Jewish nongovernmental organization, counts Knoll’s death as the 11th anti-Semitic murder in France in the past 12 years. The group estimates that assaults on Jews that take place twice a week on average in France, creating a sense of insecurity for the entire Jewish community.

Sharon Nazarian, its senior vice president of International Affairs, has spent the past several months traveling to European capitals such as Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Brussels, Budapest and Rome, speaking with Jewish community leaders and government officials.

“What I’m hearing from them is a real nervousness, a feeling insecurity, a lack of safety, both physically and also for their Jewish way of life,” said Nazarian in a telephone interview. “It’s really unprecedented going back to World War II. A lot of warning bells are going off and red flags are going up and we’re very, very concerned.”

She says “a loss of a sense of shame that did exist for decades after the war” about anti-Semitic attitudes has contributed to the shift, along with the rise of nativist right-wing politicians, anti-Zionist left wing activists, and scapegoating of Jews for other global problems.

Violent incidents, the Kantor Center report finds, have decreased because of better security and intelligence in protecting Jewish communities. But the report stresses that “it is overshadowed by the many verbal and visual expressions, some on the verge of violence, such as direct threats, harassments, insults, calls to attack Jews and even kill them en masse.”

Alvin Rosenfeld, director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University and an author of many books on the Holocaust and the perspectives of it, argues that anti-Semitism has never truly left Europe.

“The view that knowledge of the Holocaust would somehow be prophylactic, and it would guard against the return of anti-Semitism, seems now to be naive, and I admit that I myself subscribed to that view,” he says. “It just isn’t the case that Holocaust memory guards against the repeat of Jew hatred.”

He agrees that the rise of anti-Semitic sentiment stems from a multiplicity of forces. “We’re living at a time in which neo-nationalism, neo-nativism, populism, autocracy and theocratic extremisms are all coming to the fore, in some cases with a great rush,” he said. “Anti-Semitism, together with hatred against other types of people, flourishes in such a climate.”

Emile Schrijver, general director of the Jewish Cultural Quarter in Amsterdam, says anti-Semitism is not as bad in the Netherlands as it is in other countries, such as France. Yet, he adds, “there are very real threats and we have occasional incidents that are clearly of an anti-Semitic nature here,” he said. ‘This is different than the past. It happens more often. But in Holland, at least, I don’t see a reason to panic.”

He added, “anti-Semitism is definitely back in our streets, and there’s no denying it,”

He adds: “And we should never make it more harmless than it is. The answer for me is don’t go overboard, don’t overreact. The way to turn it around it to talk about it openly and give it the right name.”

By Shiri Moshe

Algemeiner

Two groups that work to support Jewish students on campus called on New York University on Tuesday to take action against 53 student clubs that pledged to boycott their Zionist peers.

In a letter sent to President Andrew Hamilton, representatives for StandWithUs and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law denounced a recent pledge signed by cultural and political groups at NYU, which committed to boycotting “NYU’s pro-Israel clubs, Realize Israel and TorchPAC, by not co-sponsoring events with them.”

The student coalition also expressed support for the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, and agreed to blacklist Israeli goods and off-campus Zionist organizations, from StandWithUs to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights group.

“There are violations of NYU policy here, and conduct foreseeably undertaken in support of this statement could potentially violate state and federal law,” StandWithUs and the Brandeis Center warned. “Moreover, it indicates a reprehensible joint effort to marginalize and stigmatize the Jewish student community at your university.”

While commending Hamilton’s denunciation of BDS and support of academic freedom at a recent town hall — comments that were reportedly met with hisses by some student activists — the groups urged the president “to role model that call to action.”

“Reject this discriminatory statement firmly, specifically, and unequivocally to the entire campus community,” including by emphasizing that efforts to stigmatize NYU students based on their identity are unacceptable, they recommended.

An investigation should also be carried out, and disciplinary action undertaken if violations of NYU policies are found, while “training and education” on bias and intolerance should be granted to the campus community on an annual basis, the groups wrote.

Tensions between groups supportive of the BDS campaign and those who oppose it have intensified at NYU following the publication of the boycott pledge earlier this month.

More than 1,750 people signed a petition launched last week by Realize Israel and TorchPAC, while some of the pledge’s signatories claimed to “have been victims of tireless harassment” since taking their public stance.

NYU Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine — two groups that spearheaded the BDS coalition — also launched an “Israel Apartheid Week” campaign on April 15 to spread awareness of BDS, which seeks to isolate Israel until it accepts a number of Palestinian demands. These include the “right of return” of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and their five million descendants into Israel.

Realize Israel and TorchPAC, in turn, hosted “Israel Peace Week” — complete with a critical lecture on BDS, a service for Israel’s memorial day, and a communal Shabbat dinner.

On Friday, Realize Israel will celebrate the country’s 70th Independence Day with its annual “Rave in the Park,” which hundreds have expressed interest in attending. A coalition of 9 NYU student groups — as well as clubs from Columbia University and the City University of New York system — plan to protest the event, calling it a “disturbing public celebration” marking “70 years of Israel’s existence as a settler colonial state.”