Last month, my dear friend Amy texted me pictures taken from the stalls in the bathroom where her daughter is a high school student in the Midwest. One picture had a swastika, the lower left corner said, “Kill” while the upper right corner read, “Jews.” “Kill Jews” was scrawled on other parts of the stall as well. Her daughter is one of a handful of Jews in a school of 1500.
The statements scrawled on the stall of the high school articulated a clear threat to the physical safety of Jewish students and yet there was a part of Amy that understandably felt numb, exhausted. With a constant stream of hate, the burden is left on the disenfranchised to navigate which form of discrimination rises to level where combatting it is a survival-based necessity and which to ignore or accept as the collateral damage of being a minority.
A few short months before this incident, eleven members of the Tree of Life Congregation were massacred in cold blood, targeted for their Jewish identity. According to FBI data released in November of last year, hate crimes against Jews increased thirty-seven percent between 2016 and 2017.
Anti-Semitism, like Islamophobia, is undoubtedly on the rise. Now more than ever, it is essential that Jews and Muslims recognize one another as natural allies against the common threat of white supremacy and continue to cultivate an alliance rooted in social justice, dignity and recognition.
This is already happening. For example, crowdfunding campaign by the Muslim American community to support the Tree of Life Congregation raised nearly $250,000. In 2017, a similar campaign raised over $150,000 to help with cleanup after a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis had been vandalized. After a mosque burned down in Texas, a neighboring synagogue offered their keys for Muslims to continue their worship services.
A Center of Christian-Muslim Engagement for Peace and Justice: 