(Jewish Group) Anti-Semitism seminar in Minneapolis confronts the rise of bigotry and hate-crimes ag

Anti-Semitism seminar in Minneapolis confronts the rise of bigotry and hate-crimes against Jews

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

The recent rise of anti-Semitism in the United States crested in October with the murder of 11 worshipers at the Tree Of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Before that, 2017 saw a 57 percent spike in hate crimes from the previous year, and the 1,986 incidents were the second most accounted for since 1979, when the Anti-Defamation League started tracking them.

All of which gave added weight, urgency, and timeliness to Sunday afternoon’s “Anti-Semitism and White Nationalism” seminar, organized by the Minneapolis-based Jewish Community Action and held at CAIR-MN in the basement of the Bethany Lutheran Church in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis. Over the course of two edifying hours in front of a crowd of about 200, panelists Carin Mrotz, executive director of Jewish Community Action; Eric Ward, executive director of the Portland, Oregon-based Western States Center; and Dania Rajendra, faculty and director of union communications at the Worker Institute at Cornell University, talked about the roots and modern-day manifestations of anti-Semitism.

“The Jewish community needs allies,” said Mrotz. “In a moment when we’re being increasingly targeted, we need to have other communities with whom we are in alignment around other things have an understanding of the ways in which we’re being targeted, so that they are able to be our allies and support us. Also, the way anti-Semitism is specifically weaponized right now, white nationalism is targeting not just Jews but many other communities, and so we need to have a structural and systemic understanding of anti-Semitism in order to address it the way we address other types of systemic oppression, like racism, sexism, and classism.”

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