Contrary to what are surely the prevailing assumptions, anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.

Within the course of a few days this month, a swastika showed up on an Upper West Side corner and two ultra-Orthodox men were attacked on the street in Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn in separate incidents. In one of them, according to the police and prosecutors, a Muslim livery driver jumped out of a car and started beating up his victim, seemingly at random, yelling “Allah.” Just this week, more swastikas appeared in advance of Halloween on Garden Place, a popular trick-or-treating spot in Brooklyn Heights, hate messages were left inside of a Prospect Heights synagogue prior to a political event mediated by Ilana Glazer, of “Broad City,” and an anti-Semitic acronym was found on a pickup truck’s vanity license plate in Queens.

If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy. During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.

Quote:Within the course of a few days this month, a swastika showed up on an Upper West Side corner and two ultra-Orthodox men were attacked on the street in Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn in separate incidents.

Quote:In one of them, according to the police and prosecutors, a Muslim livery driver jumped out of a car and started beating up his victim, seemingly at random, yelling “Allah.”

A related issue is that bias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore. “When we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them.” So begins an essay by James Baldwin that appeared in The New York Times in 1967 titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.

Anti-Semitic Attacks Fuel Continuing Rise in Hate Crimes in New York (Feb 18): . . . Rabbi Eli Cohen, the executive director of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council, has begun visiting nearby public schools with Geoffrey Davis, an African-American community leader, to try to understand what may be driving the attacks, as many of the assailants arrested by the police have been young men of color.

Historical event more recent than the Jewish landlords of James Baldwin's 1940s to 1960s recollections: . . . the Crown Heights riots of 1991, when the neighborhood was thrown into turmoil for three days after a car escorting the Lubavitcher rebbe, the leader of the Chabad Jewish movement, struck two small children of Guyanese immigrants, killing one. During the rioting, a Jewish student was stabbed to death by a black assailant.”