The Biden administration is working to fight a "gobsmacking" rise of antisemitism globally in the weeks since Hamas attacked Israel, the State Department's special envoy for combating antisemitism said, as policymakers and Jewish community leaders say they are witnessing an alarming spike in anti-Jewish incidents that has unsettling historical precedents.
In Russia, a mob chased the exiting passengers of a plane from Tel Aviv, searching for Jews. In Paris, Stars of David were spray-painted onto the homes of Jewish families. In the Netherlands, a Jewish day school has started teaching remotely because it says it cannot guarantee the safety of its students.
Now the Biden administration is trying to encourage communities around the world to protect the security of their Jewish citizens as it works more broadly to contain the fallout of the Hamas attack and the Israeli retaliation.
The State Department envoy, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, is a decorated scholar of antisemitism through history. She famously prevailed against Holocaust denier David Irving in a years-long trial in British courts. But even she said she is taken aback by the vitriol that has spiked after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which the Israeli government has called the biggest single-day killing of Jews since the Holocaust.
"I find myself gobsmacked, flabbergasted. And I don't flabbergast easily. You can't be a scholar of the Holocaust and be surprised by things," Lipstadt said. "And yet even I have a hard time. I don't want to say uncomprehending, because I can comprehend, but I have a hard time absorbing all that's going on."
Lipstadt was in Italy when the attack happened, has visited Switzerland and France, and planned to go to Germany on Saturday, for now making Europe, home to large Jewish communities, the primary focus of her efforts to encourage leaders to try to calm anti-Jewish sentiments. Her job as ambassador does not extend to incidents of antisemitism inside the United States, though she said she was at a recent Education Department meeting at which American Jewish leaders talked about rising incidents of antisemitism on university campuses across the country.
The attacks on Jews since Oct. 7 are "not only quantitatively but qualitatively different," Lipstadt said. The French Interior Ministry says there have been more than 800 antisemitic attacks in its country since the day of the Hamas attack, more than the count for all of 2022. At a "day of rage" protest in France last week, 85 percent of the parents of youths in Jewish schools kept their children home, Lipstadt said French authorities had told her.
"There's something quite different happening here," she said. "It's eerie."
Some people involved in attacks on Jews have cited Israel's aggressive campaign in Gaza as their motivation. Lipstadt said that makes little sense, given that an individual Jewish citizen of France or Sweden has no control over or responsibility for the actions of the Israeli government.
She said that she hoped to use the power of her office to draw attention to the issue and to push other governments to stay vigilant about protecting their Jewish populations.
"We take this seriously," Lipstadt said. "Jews may not seem to present as other victims of religious, ethnic, racial bigotry present, but it is to be taken seriously. So I think that that's one of the messages that I transmit, that the United States government, this administration and previous administrations, both sides of the aisle of Congress, rarely do we get to use the word bipartisan concern, you know, but certainly on this issue, there is bipartisan concern."
Antisemitism has a long historical connection to broader challenges to the health of liberal democracies, Lipstadt said. "It's the amber light that gets really strong right before the traffic light is going to turn to a very bright red," she said. "This hatred is certainly a threat to democracy and threat to governmental stability. No country I know that tolerated extensive antisemitism remains a democracy."