It’s better in America: That was the message of a panel of experts considering the rise of the extreme right and of anti-Semitism in the United States and Europe.
That was the good news at the forum Monday sponsored by Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. No one, however, could quite pin down why Americans were more resistant to anti-Semitism than Europeans.
“It’s far from perfect,” said Ira Forman, until January the international anti-Semitism monitor for the State Department. “We do it now better than we did 50 years ago, there’s no guarantee we will continue to do it, and frankly, we do it better with anti-Semitism than with anti-Muslim rhetoric and with racism.”
Forman cited American communities that spontaneously rallied to counter anti-Semitism in their midst, notably the citizens of Whitefish, Montana, who a year ago demonstrated ahead of a planned neo-Nazi march targeting the town’s tiny Jewish community, and Oklahoma civic leaders in 2013 who called on a state lawmaker to apologize for using the phrase “jew down.”
People gather in Chicago, Illinois on August 13, 2017 to protest the alt-right movement and to mourn the victims of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Scott Olson/Getty Images/AFP)
In both cases and in many others, he said, the drive to counter anti-Jewish rhetoric came in communities with few Jews and seemed driven more by non-Jews who were repelled by the rhetoric.
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