To the editor: Visitor contributor Rabbi Noah Farkas writes that antisemitism is “a Los Angeles drawback” (“L.A. has more to do to fight antisemitism and protect Jewish residents,” June 4). It positively is. However additionally it is a San Francisco Bay Space and San Diego drawback, a California drawback and an American drawback. The shortage of solidarity he speaks of in protection of civil rights, fairness and equality for Jews is a state and nationwide drawback. We really feel it as painfully and as palpably in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco as in Los Angeles. We wrestle with the identical challenges of being under-resourced to make sure the bodily security of Jewish group members at faculties, senior facilities, synagogues and group facilities.
We wrestle, too, with the shortage of recognition and inclusion of the variety of the Jewish group together with Ethiopian, Mizrahi and Sephardic voices, as Farkas notes, in addition to Asian, African American and Hispanic Jews in ethnic research curricula. Jews at California faculties and universities expertise well-documented marginalization, gaslighting and invidious concentrating on by means of verbal and bodily abuse and violence, harassment, exclusion and discrimination, as Farkas illustrates. We’d like motion and allyship on an area, state and nationwide stage on a bipartisan foundation throughout society and with the help of the total variety of the American folks. Solely then will Jewish folks in America be secure and solely then will we come nearer to attaining freedom, equality and entry to justice for all.
Noam Schimmel, Berkeley
This author is a lecturer in international research at UC Berkeley.
..
To the editor: Farkas says L.A. should do extra to struggle antisemitism. This invitations the query: Or what? What’s going to the Jewish group of Los Angeles do if the federal government and residents of the town and county of Los Angeles proceed to disregard antisemitism? The phrase “should” implies that there will likely be penalties for failure to behave. Farkas ought to lead the Jewish Federation in creating a plan of motion that may maintain Los Angeles’ leaders accountable for combating antisemitism and that may impose precise penalties if these leaders fail.
Stuart Creque, Moraga, Calif.
..
To the editor: I doubt antisemitism is increased now than earlier than. Nevertheless, the expression of it definitely is. That is a part of a normal coarsening of public expression that was exacerbated in 2016 by a presidential candidate who referred to as folks names and is imply and confrontational. When he stated that there have been “very superb folks on each side” in 2017, he opened the Pandora’s field of hate that has its expression in vile and violent antisemitic assaults. So long as this tone is about from above, we could have violence, like that towards lawmakers in Minnesota, and all kinds of hate-induced assaults. Measures that Farkas suggests will do little to counter this narrative of open expression of hate by our leaders.
Harlan Levinson, Los Angeles
