The word spread quickly Monday. Tova du Plessis got a call from a concerned customer of her tiny bakery in Philadelphia’s East Passyunk neighborhood: Essen Bakery, which specializes in babka, challah and other Jewish-style baked goods, was on the list. Soon, she had a flood of orders from supportive patrons and a police car stationed outside her shop.
The scene was similar at more than 30 other Philadelphia eateries and markets that a pro-Palestinian group this week targeted for a boycott because they were “owned by Zionists” or “raising money for the Zionist state,” or equated “Palestinian resistance with Anti-semetism [sic].” Yet another list targeted places that serve Israeli food, which the boycott’s organizers, the Philly Palestine Coalition, said is “a means of erasing Palestinian existence.”
On Wednesday, du Plessis, who is Jewish, was still processing the shock of being targeted because of her religion. “I’ve been aware that antisemitism has been on the rise in America, but I’ve wanted to believe it was a really small number of people,” she said. “But to have my business targeted because you are Jewish shatters that sense of denial.”
Nearly a month after the Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and sparked the fast-expanding Israel-Gaza war, a wave of antisemitic incidents — from vandalism and graffiti to bomb threats, boycotts and anti-Jewish chants — has swept across much of the world, with particular surges in Europe and the United States. Anti-Muslim hate crimes have likewise spiked, including the stabbing death of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy in Illinois.
The war, which has to date killed more than 8,000 Gazans, has unleashed strong emotions, including anger that sometimes focuses on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and has now extended in many places to actions — at times violent — targeting Jews around the world.
On the same evening when the Philadelphia boycott was announced on social media, about 6,000 miles away, in Russia’s Muslim-majority Dagestan republic, a mob of hundreds of people burst through security controls at the regional airport, waving Palestinian flags, chanting anti-Jewish slogans and searching for Israelis who had arrived on a flight from Tel Aviv. More than 20 people were injured and 60 were arrested, according to Dagestan’s Interior Ministry.
Over the past couple of weeks, in Berlin, a Jewish center was firebombed; in Paris, at least nine synagogues and Jewish schools received bomb threats; and in New York, a man on a 42nd Street subway platform punched a woman in the face because “you are Jewish.”
“This is a more raw, hard-edged antisemitism,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international affairs for the American Jewish Committee. “In past wars or conflicts, we saw more verbal attacks and graffiti. Now, there’s a virulence that does set this apart.”
In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, which catalogues antisemitic, anti-Muslim and other hate-driven incidents, said the number of cases of harassment, vandalism and assault against Jews soared by nearly 400 percent in the first 16 days after the Hamas attack, from 64 during the same period last year to 312 this year.
Beyond the overt attacks, many Jews also describe a frightening shift in attitudes toward them, from friends, co-workers and strangers alike.
“I operate in very dark places, and this has surprised even me,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism. “We know that conflict in the Mideast brings a backlash in the United States, but to see this overt support for the Hamas attack, to see dozens of videos of people ripping down posters of kidnapped Jewish children, is pretty unprecedented. I just don’t get that kind of hatred or denial of Jewish suffering.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, Baker said, “there was a heartwarming response around the world — buildings lit up in Israeli blue and white at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and the parliament in Sofia, Bulgaria. But as Israel said it was going to respond, you started to hear, ‘Well, it didn’t happen in a vacuum.’ It was like, ‘We pay lip service to your pain, but let’s move on.’ In Jewish communities around the world, there’s the sense that we have been abandoned after the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.”
In the United States, some of the most visible antagonism aimed at Jews has taken place on college campuses — about 15 percent of the antisemitic incidents in recent weeks, Segal said. At Yale University in New Haven, Conn., the school’s Slifka Center for Jewish Life sent students a statement citing “unprecedented levels of antisemitism here at home, including at Yale,” such as incidents of professors and students posting social media comments celebrating Hamas’s attack or justifying the terrorist group’s actions as Israel’s fault.
“While we have received much-needed support and kindness from both within and outside the Jewish community, many of the people with whom we share a campus have been unsympathetic, and even hostile, to our suffering,” wrote Rabbi Jason Rubenstein. “We’re feeling isolated and even threatened because, in a very real sense, we are.”
In the Washington area, “parents are worried about their kids being attacked at school, rabbis are getting calls, observant Jews are wearing baseball caps instead of yarmulkes, and I’ve had people tell me they’re hiding the Stars of David they wear around their neck,” said Ron Halber, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.
The Philadelphia boycott is perceived as plainly antisemitic by many Jews, even as its advocates insist that their targets are Zionists and Israelis. To du Plessis, the bakery owner, the idea that her business is labeled as “owned by Zionists” is so obviously a case of religious bias that it’s hardly worth discussing.
“I can’t even entertain the question when the intention is to target me as a Jew,” she said. Du Plessis, who grew up in an observant Jewish home in South Africa and whose grandfather fled Austria to escape the Nazis’ genocidal murders of the Jews, said she runs a bakery “for the neighborhood, for the city, for all people. In general, I’m not someone who publicizes my ideological beliefs.”
But two days after the Hamas attack, she wrote on Instagram that “I, Tova du Plessis, owner of Essen Bakery, stand with Israel. I stand by Israel’s right to exist, to be a home for all Jewish people, to defend herself. My heart is broken in pieces. May we overcome and may we heal.”
If that solitary post has now put her on a boycott list, she’s not sorry. “I’ve been a critic of the Israeli government for all of my adult life,” she said. “But I did not open a bakery to serve any particular community.” On Wednesday, du Plessis’s shop had a big uptick in orders, with many customers saying they wanted to show support.
A little more than a mile north of Essen Bakery, Allan Domb’s restaurant, Schlesinger’s Deli, started fielding calls from diners: “What can we do to help?” people asked. Domb plans to extend his opening hours to accommodate the new crowds.
“I really did not think it would get to this point,” said Domb, a former Philadelphia City Council member. “It reminds me of Kristallnacht and how the Nazis forbade people to buy from Jewish merchants. It is scary. But I have faith that the majority of Americans don’t share that viewpoint.”
The boycott — whose organizers call themselves a group of “Palestinian, Black and Indigenous community members and organizations” — is aimed at 36 restaurants, bakeries and markets that are “owned by Zionists” or serve Israeli food.
“Restaurants and businesses claiming to sell ‘Israeli’ food … are part of an ongoing colonial campaign of stealing, appropriating and profiting off Palestinian food and culture,” said the coalition, whose organizers did not return a request for comment.
A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Corey Saylor, said that he was not familiar with the Philadelphia boycott but that “it is 100 percent on the table to criticize supporters of Israeli apartheid.” He added that too often, “people engaging in criticism of the state of Israel have been accused of bias.”
But to Jason Holtzman, executive director of the Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, the boycott is a giant step beyond ordinary criticism. “This boycott really takes antisemitism to a new level,” he said. “Already, people are telling me they’ve had their yarmulke ripped off their head, and the police are advising some people to take Israeli flags down from their doorways.”
Holtzman noted that anti-Muslim attacks have also increased in recent days — a nationwide trend, according to the ADL and CAIR, which counted 774 anti-Muslim incidents in the first 18 days after the Hamas attack, a threefold increase over the same period last year. CAIR’s Saylor pointed at efforts to target pro-Palestinian demonstrators, such as trucks with digital message boards driving around Harvard University flashing the names of students who had spoken out against Israel’s reaction to the Hamas attack or corporations that decided not to hire students.
“Islamophobia and antisemitism are equally despicable and not even slightly helpful in resolving the current situation,” Saylor said.
In Malmo, Sweden, where a large immigrant Muslim community has been active in protesting Israel’s retaliation against Hamas, Rabbi Moshe David HaCohen, who co-directs with Imam Salahuddin Barakat an Islamic-Jewish cooperation group called Amanah, said “the friction of what used to be a political debate has become very emotional, and many Jews feel unsafe. At the same time, many Muslims feel they are being targeted as terrorists because they’re supporting the Palestinians.”
Although some Muslims have “reached out and said that all Jews must be safe, even offering to protect our synagogue,” HaCohen said, “there have also been chants of ‘Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning,’” a reference to Muslims’ seventh-century expulsion and massacre of Jews in a town in modern-day Saudi Arabia.
“The narratives are so far apart right now,” the rabbi said. “I still hope for a breakthrough, but right now is very challenging.”
In Canada, Jewish groups reported an increase in antisemitic incidents since the Hamas attack. In Toronto, police charged a 40-year-old woman with assault last week after she attacked a woman who had challenged her while she was tearing down posters in support of Israel.
In Hungary, there have been few violent incidents, but Jews are fearful. “Jews are hearing, ‘Go back to Israel.’ All the Jewish institutions here have raised security,” said Marcell Kenesei, executive director of the Budapest Jewish Community Center.
Kenesei said the Hamas attack “triggered a lot of Holocaust anxiety, that this could happen to any of us, anytime. … My sister in Berlin decided maybe she will not send her daughter to the Jewish school — before, it was the place for safety; now, it’s a target.”
The wave of antisemitic incidents — startling to some American Jews, wholly expected to others — has driven Jews of varying political and social backgrounds to demand more vocal support from longtime allies.
Some politically conservative Jews are using the surge in anti-Israel sentiment as an opportunity to argue to liberal American Jews that their close ties with left-leaning Black, gay, women’s and immigrant rights organizations have not stopped many of those groups from taking pro-Palestinian stances in the war.
“Stop whining,” wrote Rabbi Dov Fischer, vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, an organization of Orthodox rabbis. “Fight back.” He urged “woke” liberal Jews on college campuses to “get out there and affirm you are Jews. … Accept that the [diversity, equity and inclusion] Woke have no room for you,” he said.
But for the most part, the war and the spike in antisemitic incidents have united American Jews, according to leaders of several Jewish organizations.
“There’s a lot of ridiculousness on both extremes,” said the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Halber. “Many on the left thought that just because they were aligned on other issues, that would translate into support for Israel from other liberal groups, and that was terribly misguided.
“And on the right, those who are trying to cast aspersions on [President] Biden when he’s been consistently supportive of Israel should be shunned for doing that,” he said. This is a time for Jewish unity, and that’s what we’re seeing. The Jewish community is traumatized, and it is coming together.”
Amanda Coletta in Toronto contributed to this report.
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