In covering the recent murderous attacks on Jews in New Jersey and Rockland County, some journalists have connected them to tensions between close-knit Orthodox communities and their neighbors involving zoning, school boards, and the like. David French notes that such an approach often amounts to “waving away the mountain and focusing on a pebble.”
[T]o the extent that we know the attackers’ motivations, their hatreds ran very, very deep. The Monsey attacker searched [the Internet for answers to] the question “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?” One of the Jersey City attackers followed “Black Hebrew Israelite theology,” a fringe belief that, [as one writer sums it up], holds that “African Americans are the true descendants of the ancient Israelites and that Jews are essentially pretenders to the faith.”
People do not launch machete attacks over zoning disputes. They don’t open fire in kosher supermarkets because their new neighbors don’t make good salaries. There might be “simmering local conflicts” over zoning (welcome to America; there are always “simmering local conflicts” over zoning), but none of that is truly relevant to deadly violence.
No, the unpleasant truth is that when populations of new and different people (especially religious or racial minorities) move to new and different towns, they all too often encounter vicious bigots. They don’t create vicious bigots. We understand this clearly in the race context. Spend five seconds searching on the web, and you can see truly shocking video from the 1970s of racist white crowds chanting vile insults in residential neighborhoods in New York. When their new neighborhoods integrated, they encountered vicious racists. They didn’t create vicious racists.
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