Open Season in openly New York City Jews

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The attack that sent 31-year-old Yossi Hershkop to the hospital was an unmysterious crime, the opposite of a stone-cold whodunnit. Security cameras recorded clear video of a group of four men approaching Hershkop’s car, with two of them repeatedly punching him through the driver’s side window while his 5-year-old child sat in the back seat. Another camera recorded the license plate and model of the attackers’ getaway vehicle. The assault took place around 3:40 p.m. on July 13, 2022, on a busy street in Crown Heights. Hershkop believes his assailants were identified later that evening.

In an ideal world, a victim’s personal background would be irrelevant to whether their attackers are arrested and prosecuted. But at least in theory, Hershkop is someone with enough of a profile to keep the police and prosecutors focused on his case. The young Chabad Hasid is an energetic yet shrewdly understated local political activist—the kind of person who knows the total number of newly registered voters in Crown Heights off the top of his head, or who you might WhatsApp when you need to reach a particular City Council member later that afternoon. He also manages a large urgent care center in Crown Heights, a position of real civic significance during New York’s COVID nightmare. Hershkop is also a personal friend of mine, although even people I am not friends with should expect the police to move quickly when they’re able to easily identify the people who bloodied them on camera in broad daylight in front of their child.

The police did not move quickly. No arrests were made during the two weeks after the attack, a span in which the getaway car got ticketed in a totally unrelated incident, Hershkop says. On July 27, an exasperated Hershkop tweeted: “No arrests have been made, despite the assailants’ vehicle having been seen all over the neighborhood. My son still has a lot of trauma from the incident & we now Uber instead of walk whenever we need to go out.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the first arrest in the case was made the day after that tweet, some two weeks after the attack. The first suspect was released on bail after the judge ordered a bond of $10,000, significantly less than the district attorney had requested, according to Hershkop. Hershkop is confident that after a long period of delay, the NYPD is now making efforts toward arresting the second individual who physically attacked him.

Perhaps the attack, which stemmed from a seemingly innocuous dispute over a parking space—a common enough occurrence in a densely populated place like Crown Heights, and one that almost never ends with anyone in the hospital—was just too fraught of an event for the police to want to handle too aggressively. Maybe someone feared that drawing additional attention to a group of young Black men attacking a prominent Orthodox Jew would threaten to inflame tensions in a neighborhood with a long but mostly improving (and generally misunderstood) history of racial division.

Maybe, but maybe not: Overload in the New York court system, increasingly lenient prosecutors and judges, and a police department in which officers are quitting at a growing clip, all make it easier for even open-and-shut cases to languish, and for people at every level of the system to find excuses not to resolve them.

The dysfunctional handling of public order takes different forms across the city, and across the country: Philadelphia is experiencing record murder rates; San Francisco experimented with decriminalizing certain forms of property crime, at least until its pro-reform district attorney lost a recent recall election. As with various other recent American traumas, the ambient disorder has its own distinct characteristics as far as Jews are concerned. In a study released this past July, the New York-based group Americans Against Antisemitism found that of the 118 adults arrested for anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York City since 2018, only one has been convicted and sent to prison.

Earlier this month, an Orthodox Jew from Baltimore named Aryeh Wolf was gunned down in broad daylight as he attached solar panels to the roof of a building in a gentrifying neighborhood in southeast Washington, D.C. As with Hershkop’s attack, Wolf’s murder was a motiveless crime in which the motive was obvious.

In New York, street harassment, minor assaults, and even full-on beatings of visible Jews are almost a banality now, too frequent over too long of a period to be considered an active crisis, even in the communities most affected. The city reported a 76% year-over-year rise in hate crimes during the first three months of 2022—attacks on Jews more than tripled, accounting for much of the spike. When reached for comment by email, the NYPD’s public information office stated that the Hate Crimes Task Force has made 44 arrests related to attacks on Jews so far in 2022 compared to 33 in all of 2021.

The report from Americans Against Antisemitism only dealt with incidents in which the NYPD found enough evidence of a bigoted motive to refer the case to the department’s Hate Crimes Task Force.

Devorah Halberstam, a veteran anti-hate crime activist based in Crown Heights, co-founded a civilian review board that advises the NYPD on how to proceed with incidents that could be classified as hate crimes. The group has been meeting each month for the past year. She stressed that any failure to punish such attacks isn’t a problem limited to Jewish victims. In a widely publicized case this past January, a 62-year-old Asian woman was attacked outside of her home in Queens. She fell into a coma and died 10 weeks later. Halberstam said the killing was not prosecuted as a hate crime, even though it seemed to have no other motive besides hatred of Asians. “It’s not against the Jewish community. It’s not against the Asian community,” Halberstam said of the rarity with which hate crimes charges are pursued. “It’s the broader picture.” Halberstam blames the sparse number of guilty verdicts on the vagueness of New York’s hate crimes statute, leading prosecutors to drop hate crime charges in order to pursue lesser allegations that can be more easily proven in court. “If you make the guidelines stricter, they don’t have as much leeway to get out of it,” Halberstam said.

A backlog in the criminal courts further gridlocks the system. In early 2022, the state had over 47,000 open criminal cases, an increase of 15% compared to the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Americans Against Antisemitism found that there were nine anti-Jewish hate crime prosecutions in the city that had been pending for two years or more.

The Americans Against Antisemitism analysis only refers to incidents that generated police reports and entered the criminal justice system. Some unknowable number of attacks on Jews occur beyond any official awareness. “Most hate crimes are not even reported in the first place,” says Dov Hikind, founder of Americans Against Antisemitism, and a former power broker in the New York State Assembly.

Hershkop agrees. “Eighty percent never even got to the point of making a police report,” he speculated, referring to Jewish victims of bias incidents. “That’s how we’re artificially hiding hate crimes. People are so burnt out and so not believing in the system that they don’t even make a police report.”

Even the Jews who do report what are obviously identity-motivated crimes against them can be treated with a revealing indifference. In June, 26-year-old Yizchak Goldstein was sucker-punched on East 33rd Street near Park Avenue at around 1 p.m. Goldstein, who was visiting from Miami, was wearing a kippah, unlike his nearby cousin. The attacker didn’t run off. “He squared off to fight,” Goldstein said. “He wasn’t afraid of the cops—he literally joked to me, call 911 … he was so confident.” When Goldstein did call the police, he discovered that the assailant, who had disappeared down the crowded street at a walking pace, was right not to be worried. The officers told Goldstein that they could not treat the assault as a hate crime because the attacker didn’t say anything antisemitic to him.

That wasn’t all. “They said that even if we catch this guy he’ll be out in a few hours and that this happens every single day,” Goldstein recalled.

Whether it’s because of a lack of confidence in the authorities, fear about the consequences of coming forward, or a somewhat fatalistic view of the inevitability of antisemitism, some number of the city’s Jews believe that crimes against them aren’t worth reporting. The Jewish community is not unique in this respect, either. A range of different types of crime, from hate crimes against Asians to sexual assaults on the subway to bodega robberies are believed to be dramatically undercounted. One popular explanation for the supposed disconnect between the 75% of New Yorkers who say they are concerned about violent crime and the official crime rate, which has risen only slightly, is that the city is in a state of undue panic, with a fearmongering media and cynical public officials driving a false perception of declining public order. Another, perhaps more plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that the official crime rate itself is an undercount, and that ordinary poll respondents have either seen or experienced crimes more frequently than the official numbers reflect.

The growing sense of chaos, of which the failure to punish antisemitic attacks is a possible symptom, exposes a tension within the current governing project in New York and beyond. Criminal justice reform is aimed at correcting real and longstanding inequities; at the same time, rising crime denies large numbers of law-abiding citizens, most of them women or members of minority groups, of their basic right to safety. In the case of hate crimes, which are one of the most extreme ways that human beings can express their bigotry, newfound sensitivity toward the accused, however justified, clashes with a societywide crusade against bias and racism.

When irreconcilable visions of equity are in conflict—when it’s a stark choice between punishing a criminal and protecting a targeted group, for instance—a bizarre inertia prevails. Homeless encampments will be made permanent with the help of well-meaning aid groups and public service agencies, as in Los Angeles and San Francisco; public drug use will be turned into a supposedly manageable feature of city life even as living conditions plummet, as in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood. Focusing all of society’s attention on the scourge of bigotry, only to refrain from prosecuting a spiking number of hate crimes, is the inevitable default position when no one tries to reconcile the gaps between people’s everyday needs and ascendent notions of fairness. When nearly everyone’s apparent goal is to create as little friction as possible, and to avoid pushing too hard against the gaping contradictions in how our cities are now governed, the result is situations like Yossi Hershkop’s—and maybe Aryeh Wolf’s, too.

Shhh, we don't talk about that, it confuses the narrative.

Why would someone be out of jail in a few hours for sucker punching someone for no reason. Strange legal system

So they'd be bailed out but wouldn't they get charged with a crime?

Sorry if I'm being slow. The person who did the sucker punch doesn't care about being charged with assault so he was being brazen? How would keeping him in jail before his court date be much more of a deterrent than the actual sentence?

Cos it would count as time served,if he was sentenced to prison anyway.

Hopefully NYC's current mayor Eric Adams, a black former cop and very much a law-and-order person, will be able to make some substantial improvements.

I hope also that the BLMers will grow up and realize that "Defund the Police" is NOT the answer. Substantial police reforms are needed -- not just a few minor band-aid reforms -- but the needed reforms will cost more money, not less. Abusive police tactics are the cheap and easy way to do policing.

Be that as it may, on a more positive note: Although, yes, we're currently experiencing a crime wave, NYC's crime problem still doesn't seem to me to be anywhere near as bad as what I remember growing up. I remember a climate of extreme fear, up through a little after 2000 or so. Back then, almost everyone I knew had been a victim of at least one major crime. It's not that bad now, at least not yet, and hopefully it won't get that bad.

Anyhow, whatever the causes of the recent crime wave, it's important to note that the crime wave is happening almost everywhere in the U.S.A. It's not confined to NYC, or to blue states.

What political party controls those cities, and often has had complete local control for decades?

The New York Police Department on Monday reported 45 antisemitic hate crimes in the city last month, amid fears of rising Jew-hatred across the US.

The tally for November amounts to an antisemitic hate crime in the five boroughs every 16 hours, on average. Jewish security groups have said that many attacks likely go unreported.

Anti-Jewish attacks made up 60 percent of all hate crimes in the city last month.

The figure for November represented a 125% increase over the same period last year. Every month except April and May this year has seen an increase over the same month in 2021.

Overall, crime is up in New York City compared to last year, although murders and shootings have decreased.

The NYPD has confirmed 195 anti-Jewish hate crimes between January 1 and September 30, far more than against any other group. Jews are consistently targeted more than other minorities in the city in both absolute and per capita terms.

The incidents range from assault to verbal harassment, property damage, and antisemitic graffiti.

In the most high-profile incident last month, two men were arrested after threatening to “shoot up a synagogue.” Police seized weapons and a Nazi armband from the suspects and have increased security at synagogues in response.

In some of the other incidents, a vandal sprayed “Free Palestine” onto the side of a Chabad movement outreach vehicle; a man threw rocks at a Jewish school; four suspects assaulted a Jewish man on a Brooklyn street; and attackers shot a Hasidic woman and her son with a gel pellet gun.

The rise in hate crimes in New York corresponds with nationwide trends.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and other New York leaders, including Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Tish James, have close ties to New York’s Jewish communities and have worked to address antisemitism.

Adams attended an international antisemitism summit in Greece this week, and Hochul last month signed legislation aimed at combating hate and bias crimes.

On Saturday, members of the antisemitic Black Hebrew Israelite group were filmed in Brooklyn expressing support for Adolf Hitler, Kanye West, and NBA star Kyrie Irving, who promoted an antisemitic film in late October and later apologized.

“We support Hitler because Hitler was killing your people,” the group told a Jewish bystander. “You’re not a Jew, you’re the seed of the devil.”

The Holocaust “did happen and we’re glad that it happened,” they said at a rally outside the Barclays Center, the home court of Irving’s team, the Brooklyn Nets.

On Sunday, attackers shot a 7-year-old Jewish boy and his father with a BB gun in front of a kosher grocery store on Staten Island.