“I’m an American Jew. I’m supposed to be safe here.”
So reads the Anti-Defamation League’s news release on the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
The screed goes on to solicit money for the group’s efforts “every day to protect you and your family.”
“The threat to the American Jewish community is real,” warns the ADL, stopping short of asserting the sky is falling.
I write as a Jewish American. And, though I don’t speak for all members of the tribe, I’m happy to report that most of the Jews I know don’t feel as if they’re living with targets on their backs.
And for good reason: Our ancestors had the luck and foresight to move to a country where it’s safe to light sabbath candles without shutting the curtains.
Such confidence may not be shared by all in the community. Like the troika of parents huddled in a parking lot Friday, discussing their fear of dropping their kids at Jewish day camp.
“You never know,” sighed one dad, raising his eyebrows in a look of authoritative paranoia.
I recognize that look well.
Most of us have learned about anti-Semitism from earliest memory. Shooter James von Brunn personifies the hate we were warned of week after week at religious school. We’ve been indoctrinated, rightly, never to forget our history. We raise our kids pledging it will never, ever happen again.
And it hasn’t, as least to Jews.
Even if a white supremacist happened to open fire in a memorial.
Some might say that I’m missing the symbolism of Wednesday’s rampage or disrespecting the memory of Stephen T. Johns, the guard who took a bullet for a movement.
Some might call me naive or self-hating.
Others will bring up that Jeremiah Wright last week blamed “them Jews” for keeping him from speaking with the president. Or that Alan Berg, the Jewish talk show host from Denver, was gunned down in his driveway by anti-Semites in 1984.
“Some argue that the Jewish sensitivity to anti-Semitism is a neurotic historical remnant with no place in current reality. Think again,” reads Friday’s Intermountain Jewish News.
“Anti-Semitism is real and happening right now in this country,” Bruce DeBoskey, regional director of the ADL, told me. “I’m troubled by where you’re going.”
I have no doubt that some anti-Semitism lingers in a state once run by Ku Klux Klan members. Those sentiments live on in swastikas painted on a Denver synagogue and Jewish kids being called Christ-killers at a Colorado Springs school.
I also don’t dispute that a small number of Jews — like all other minorities — have been targets of isolated hate crimes nationally.
Yes, we’re “supposed to be safe here.”
And in fact, we are, as borne out by violent crime statistics.
ADL’s vigilance goes too far.
A few rogue acts in a country of 300 million hardly constitute what the group calls a “new wave of anti-Semitic violence.” And the threat is hardly “real” enough to duck and cover, or to justify suggestions that we as Americans tolerate hate.
Von Brunn seems to be a lone nut case who believes in a Jewish “conspiracy to destroy the white gene pool.” Why dignify his theories with shrill, exploitative overstatements?
“I realize that it’s a large museum and many people were affected,” says Denverite Michelle Reichmuth, who was on the fourth floor when bullets were fired Wednesday.
“But there are shootings all over the U.S. where all kinds of people are killed that don’t receive anywhere near this kind of sensationalized attention.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
