Not (Only) in Kansas Anymore: Anti-Semitic Violence Is Up Across America [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

With the Internet fueling hate, violence against Jews is on the rise.

My mother's mother was a Polish Jew who was sent to a forced labor camp during World War II, where she witnessed babies being killed and narrowly avoided being shot or sent to the crematorium multiple times. Her three sisters, three brothers, and young son were slaughtered by the Nazis.

After the war, she was reunited with her husband. They and my mom, who was born in a German displaced persons camp, moved to the United States in 1949, leaving the anti-Semitic, blood-drenched memory of Europe behind.

“What they show on television, what they show in the books, is not 1 percent what I saw there myself,” my grandmother said before she died, in her thick Yiddish accent. “When Hitler would have computers, like they have here now, he would take the world.”

Her video testimony, taken by my cousin, was recorded in the early 1990s, but her words about computers fueling anti-Semitism ring eerily true today: Anti-Semitic violence is on the rise, according to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish human rights organization, and the Internet is home to an unquantifiable hotbed of hatred toward Jews and other minority groups.

more: http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/04/25/anti-semitic-assaults-on-rise