When he began a career in commercial real estate almost two decades ago, Elli Klapper and his father had a talk. They come from a family of modern Orthodox Jews, but Klapper’s dad urged his son not to wear a yarmulke to the office. The elder Klapper, who worked for the city of New York, worried that wearing a yarmulke could hurt his son's career, causing him to become a target of discrimination. Klapper decided to wear it anyway. “I said, ‘Abba, that was your generation,’” recalls Klapper, who was raised in Queens and now works with investment properties in Teaneck, New Jersey. “We don't have these problems that you did.’ And I was wrong. I was wrong.” Now, 18 years later, he understands where his father was coming from. Klapper says he constantly experiences antisemitism in his business. He can’t quantify the number of times he’s been told to stop “jewing” people down when negotiating. Recently, he brought a real estate client to view a large property owned by an Orthodox Jew. At the end of the meeting, in the company of Klapper and four other people, the client asked a question. “He said, ‘So, if I want to buy a piece of real estate here, I'm going to have to deal with Jews, right?’ I didn't understand what he meant,” Klapper says. “I’m like, ‘Uh, I don't—these are really good guys—we could try to cut a deal.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, but, you know, is there any way I don't have to deal with any Jews?’” Klapper had no idea how to respond, and the group remained silent. “No one said anything,” he says. “We're all standing there. I was the only Jewish guy. And I was like, ‘I'm wearing a yarmulke; he knows I'm Jewish.’ Like, what is going on?”
Klapper’s experiences reflect the tip of the iceberg of a troubling trend in the United States: In the past few years, the number of recorded antisemitic incidents has apexed, and it doesn't appear to be plateauing. Since 1979, the Anti-Defamation League has released an annual audit that tabulates “incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assault” in the nation. According to its most recent audit, 2022 recorded the highest number of incidents ever, at 3,697. That’s a 36 percent increase from 2021. In New York City, “anti-Jewish” hate crime complaints made up 42 percent of all 2022 hate crime complaints, according to the NYPD’s annual report. At 261, the number of these complaints was 73 percent higher last year than five years ago. “The question then becomes, how come? Why is this happening?” says Dr. Jack Jacobs, a professor of political science at CUNY’s Graduate Center who has written extensively about antisemitism. “Antisemitism has lots of causes and stems from lots of places. But I think that the most dangerous of the tendencies, the ones that have resulted in the most extensive violence, are the ones that stem from the hard right, white supremacist movements which have grown in strength and which have been linked to the periphery of the Trumpist movement. And this is playing itself out to this very day.” Emboldened by Trump and the rise of the hard right, cultural icons have entered the fray, including the rapper Kanye West and basketball player Kyrie Irving. Last year, Kyrie Irving promoted a 2018 film which claimed, among other things, that the Holocaust never happened, and West made generalized statements condemning Jews for controlling Hollywood and hip-hop. Irving was suspended from the Nets, and several brands ended partnerships with West. (West’s punishment came swiftly after his antisemitic remarks, though he’s been making anti-Black and misogynist statements for years without repercussions.) In the cases of Irving and West, celebrity endorsements of antisemitic ideas emboldened antisemitic followers. Vandals hung banners over Los Angeles highways, reading “Kanye is right about the Jews.” The CEO of the Holocaust Museum LA told NPR that Kanye “really opened the floodgates.” New York City has been hit hardest. Of the 111 assaults counted by the ADL, 66 took place in the city, and 52 of those in Brooklyn, where half of the city’s Jewish population resides. Klapper has never been physically assaulted, but he’s heard plenty of verbal abuse. “You know how many times I've walked into the subway, and some homeless guy yells at me for killing Jesus?” Klapper says. “I can't tell you how many times I walk the streets of New York City and I get yelled at for either being a capitalist pig or a baby killer. It happens all the time.” The ADL counted 268 instances of antisemitic vandalism in New York state. One of those offenses occurred early one morning last August at the Congregation Beth Shalom of Kings Bay. As Rabbi Asher Altshul approached his synagogue in Brooklyn, he found it defaced: In white spray paint, someone had written “Hitler” on the brick wall. Altshul says that in 2021, so many people in his community were considering moving to Israel that they held a seminar to discuss how to do so. He recently visited half a dozen young families in Florida: members of his congregation who left Brooklyn for Miami. “People feel not as secure as they were, even six, 10 years ago in New York,” Altshul says. “People are concerned about their safety in the city.” Dr. Shay Pilnik, director of the Emil and Jenny A. Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University in New York City, believes Orthodox Jews like Altshul are more at risk, as they’re “very physically Jewish,” meaning “they dress in a certain way, so identifying them as Jews is much easier.” According to the ADL audit, visibly Orthodox Jews made up 53 percent of antisemitic assault victims. “What alarms us is the feeling that antisemitism becomes more and more acceptable behavior,” Pilnik says. “For things to get worse, you don't need to be a violent anti-Semite. All you have to be is somebody who feels that when these people do these things, you turn a blind eye. Or you shrug them off, or you even accept them with some understanding.” One of the techniques for creating a less antisemitic society, Pilnik thinks, is teaching about the history of such ideas and their consequences. He has been working in Holocaust education for a decade, and he says in the first few years, he didn’t much compare Nazi-era antisemitism to current events. Now, he does. He attributes that change to violent events like Charlottesville—where Neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us,” along with anti-Black slurs—and permissive attitudes spurred by radically right-wing politics. “We don't believe that Holocaust education is effective in fighting white supremacists,” says Pilnik. “If there is a white supremacist, antisemite, who is now conspiring to attack Jews, what we have to share with him or with her would not be amicably received.” Instead, he says Holocaust education focuses on informing the mainstream: “those who may become the silent majority.” And in the United States, less than half the population knows that approximately 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, according to Pew Research Center. “You don't want to know what racism, hatred and antisemitism would be like if these topics were flatly ignored at our schools,” says Pilnik. “If we didn't teach, things would be even worse.” Two decades after Klapper attended Yeshiva University for his undergraduate degree, he has now returned to complete a master’s program in Holocaust studies at the Fish Center. He’s fed up with the silence around antisemitism. “Our community is the one getting hit the worst, and no one seems to care,” Klapper says. “One of the things that I think that can help is education. People don't understand what happens when this stuff goes unchecked.” Klapper was raised in part by his four grandparents, all of whom came to New York after surviving the Holocaust, having fled Poland during World War II. Their experiences stick with him. He keeps his passport up to date, just in case. “When you have a grandfather who had numbers on his arm, you view life a little differently,” Klapper says. “He loved America. But he warned me, he said, ‘Be careful.’”
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