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Rabbi Lipskier weighs in on recent rise in antisemitism

Posted 1/11/23

During the turn of the 19th century, antisemitism in Russia was a government-sanctioned occurrence, said Rabbi Mendy Lipskier of the Chabad Edelman Jewish Center in Fountain Hills.

Lipskier grew …

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Rabbi Lipskier weighs in on recent rise in antisemitism

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During the turn of the 19th century, antisemitism in Russia was a government-sanctioned occurrence, said Rabbi Mendy Lipskier of the Chabad Edelman Jewish Center in Fountain Hills.

Lipskier grew up listening to stories of Soviet-era Russia, hearing about his grandfather’s experience of Russian pogroms – violent anti-Jewish riots aimed at expelling Jews from Russia.

Today, society is separated by years of Jewish acceptance around the world, yet in recent years, antisemitic hate crimes in major U.S. cities have been ticking up, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

In 2021, the U.S. experienced 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism reported to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), marking an all-time high of antisemitic incidents on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979.

In 2022, New York experienced a preliminary count of 260 antisemitic crimes from Jan. 1 to Dec. 1, and Chicago saw 30 antisemitic episodes from January through October compared to eight in the same period in 2021.

In Arizona, the major antisemitic event was the murder of The University of Arizona Hydrology Professor, Thomas Meixner, who was shot and killed on Oct. 5 of last year because Murad Dervish, a terminated teaching assistant, mistakenly believed Meixner was Jewish.

Every year, the Jewish human rights organization, Simon Wiesenthal Center, releases its Top Ten List of Worst Antisemitic Incidents. The report found Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, as 2022’s greatest antisemitic threat for leveraging his immense social media platform to weaponize hate, bigotry and ignorance.

“You don't need to read a study to know that there's an uptick in antisemitic incidents, vandalism and rhetoric, especially on social media,” Lipskier said. “There’s no doubt that it’s concerning.”

Growing up in the small New Jersey town of Morristown where his father served as a rabbi at the Rabbinical College of America, Lipskier was raised in the Jewish faith accompanied by its perennial prejudice.

“I came to understand that a lot of the antisemitism that exists comes from ignorance,” Lipskier said. “People are afraid of what they don’t know.”

At an early age, Lipskier was taught to love his country and the many faces that inhabit it, knowing that life was quite different for his ancestors and their religious freedom. It is from this ancestral and patriotic allegiance that Lipskier summons an answer to the recent rise in vitriolic hate-speech and actions against Jews on school campuses, on the street and across social media.

“One of the ways to combat antisemitism is to celebrate your Judaism, to normalize Jews and normalize Judaism,” he said. “As Jews, we need to celebrate our Judaism more outwardly with more confidence.”

Lipskier asks Jews to proudly profess their Judaism to the world; to wear their yamakas, to affix mezuzahs on their doorposts, to attend synagogue and to do a mitzvah. To those in the community who are not Jewish, Lipskier says that kindness and courteousness are the keys to banishing hate.

“I think it's important that we make our town, our institutions, our homes, our schools, beacons of light. Not just neutral, but actively promoting goodness,” Lipskier said. “So instead of spending our limited time and resources on educating our youth on how bad hatred and bigotry is… we can focus on becoming do-gooders. And when one is busy doing good, there is little time or interest for hating or as the adage goes, ‘even a little bit of light dispels much darkness.’”

In response to a rising tide of antisemitic rhetoric, the Biden administration announced in December a new interagency taskforce to crack down on hate crimes and antisemitic violence in the U.S.

In addition to a government-wide response to antisemitism, the internet responded in kind when, within hours of one of Ye’s (Kanye West) recent antisemitic outbursts, former fans, who have been abandoning Ye’s music in droves, took to the social media platform Reddit to transform a subreddit dedicated to him, showing support for the Jewish community and upvoting Holocaust remembrance posts.

“We live in a society where the vast majority of the people are not hateful,” Lipskier said. “The vast majority of the people in the United States, and especially right here in Fountain Hills, are good, kind people.”

These values of goodness and kindness are what brought Lipskier and his family to Fountain Hills to establish the Chabad, to connect Jews with Judaism and to promote learning opportunities for those interested in Judaism.

“I find it to be a very loving town, very accepting town. Not without our issues, but I think we have a lot of good to export to the rest of the world; what it means to work together, what it means to accept one another.” Lipskier said.