American Jews are being asked to get used to something that European and Middle Eastern Jews have been accustomed to for thousands of years, namely, to live with targets on their backs.
The United States was always different. Yes, Jew-hatred has always existed even here in America but almost never in an open, brazen, or violent manner. It was always much more of the we-won’t-let-them-into-our-country-club variety or quotas at leading Universities. To the extent that Jews died as a result of American antisemitism it was, in the most egregious case, by not allowing them to enter the United States during the holocaust, especially after FDR’s disastrous appointment of anti-Semite Breckenridge Long as head of the visa section of the State Department during World War II.
But with that painful and monumental exception, the United States has been one of the greatest blessings to world Jewry in our long and painful history.
Until now.
The nonstop and deadly attacks on American Jews and especially synagogues boggles the mind. Are we caught in some weird Hollywood nightmare? From Pittsburgh to Poway to Jersey City to Monsey to Texas, with many painful stops in-between, American Jews are now accustomed to dead congregants, flashing police lights, and security whenever they go and pray.
It was something that as an American Jew I had to get used to when I first moved to Oxford, England to serve as Rabbi in 1988 when I was sent by the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The tank-like military vehicles and soldiers with submachine guns you saw outside Shuls in London, Rome, Brussels, and Berlin were…. well, downright un-American.
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/344139/why-did-the-fbi-deny-antisemitism-in-texas/