Demonstrators outside PC-USA General Assembly in Louisville, July 28, 2022.

PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH-USA ASSEMBLY ACCUSES ISRAEL OF APARTHEID

At its biennial General Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky, in late June, PC-USA adopted a resolution, rooted in antisemitic ideology, titled “On Recognition that Israel’s Laws, Policies, and Practices Constitute Apartheid Against the Palestinian People.” Commentators noted the location of the conference in Louisville, Kentucky, where eight months ago, an antisemitic gunman attempted to murder a Jewish member of the Louisville City Council member in his campaign office. This attack, coupled with a string of recent arson and vandalism incidents at Chabad of Kentucky, led some to question why the Presbyterian Church is obsessed with defaming the Jewish state and putting Louisville Jews at risk of further peril.

NEO-NAZI, “GOYIM DEFENSE LEAGUE” GROUPS REMAIN ACTIVE THROUGH JUNE

The Anti-Defamation League reported over 1200 antisemitic incidents throughout the USA in the month. The Goyim Defense League, founded in 2018 and based in Sonoma County, California, was especially active, particularly in Florida. The group’s website states, “The content on this domain is meant to educate people to a view of history that has never been shared with the general public, and perhaps intentionally hidden by some very evil people who need to be held accountable for their actions!” The group distributes antisemitic fliers in neighborhoods nationwide and promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories online.

July 5 update: Antisemitic flyers found in Chatham (boston.com).

JEWISH GROUPS DECRY “BDS MAP” FOR ANTISEMITIC TROPES AND THREAT OF VIOLENCE

An interactive map published in early June by a pro-BDS Boston-area activist collective—featuring names and addresses of local Jewish groups—has been widely condemned for propagating antisemitic tropes and potentially inciting violence.

In a joint statement, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, Anti-Defamation League New England, and Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston noted, “Under the guise of an interactive map, the innocuously named ‘Mapping Project’ is promoting a list of Jewish communal organizations in Massachusetts that it contends are ‘responsible for colonization of Palestine or other harms such as policing, US Imperialism and displacement.’”

According to the Mapping Project, “Our goal in pursuing this collective mapping was to reveal the local entities and networks that enact devastation, so we can dismantle them. Every entity has an address, every network can be disrupted.”

NY CITY COUNCIL ADDRESSES “PERVASIVE” ANTISEMITISM AT CITY UNIVERSITY

The New York City Council postponed a June hearing on antisemitism on college campuses to accommodate the schedule of the chancellor of the City University of New York. At the rescheduled hearing on Thursday, June 30, Chancellor Felix Matos Rodríguez failed to appear anyway. Instead, he sent a lawyer and two witnesses to appear on Zoom, as the council’s Higher Education Committee investigated what it calls “a pervasive culture of anti-Semitism on City University of New York’s campuses.”

JEWISH GROUPS UNITE IN SUPPORT OF SAFER COMMUNITIES ACT

Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) sent a letter to members of Congress expressing support for the bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The June 23 letter signed by 189 national and local organizations, Jewish federations, network communities and Jewish Community Relations Councils, linked the wider issue of mass shootings to anti-Semitic attacks in recent years. “We are no strangers to trauma caused by mass shootings, and necessarily prioritize Jewish communal security and work to advance measures to secure Jewish and other faith-based institutions,” the letter said, and went on to recall the murders at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in 2006; the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park, Kansas, in 2014; the Tree of Life/Or L’Simcha attack in Pittsburgh in 2018; the shooting at Chabad in Poway, California, 2019; “and so many other similar incidents.” The Senate-approved bill passed the House on June 24.

GERMAN HIGH COURT ALLOWS ANTISEMITIC SCULPTURE TO REMAIN

Germany’s highest court has rejected a Jewish man’s attempt to have a 700-year-old antisemitic statue removed from a church where Martin Luther once preached. The federal court of justice upheld rulings by lower courts on the Judensau, sculpture on the town church in Wittenberg – one of more than 20 such relics from the Middle Ages that still adorn churches across Germany and elsewhere in Europe – pointing to the addition in recent decades of a memorial and an information sign. Placed on the church about 13 feet above ground level, the sculpture depicts people identifiable as Jews suckling the teats of a sow while a rabbi lifts the animal’s tail.

Global Antisemitism News Roundup, June 2022