Buffalo shooting proves a challenge for Jewish leadership

DAN COLEMAN: Jews and Blacks have the same enemy peddling the Great Replacement Theory but they can't always hear each other

“THEY CAN BE DEALT WITH IN TIME.”

Thus, the manifesto of Payton Gendron, the man charged with killing ten people and wounding three more last week in Buffalo, NY, explained his targeting African-Americans rather than Jews.

Gendron was operating from a belief in the Great Replacement Theory, now central to extremist thinking worldwide. As Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes about race in America, told Slate, the theory holds that “there’s a conflict between the races, and the white race is under threat. The Jews are the ones coordinating this threat.”

This was the view of Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, who titled his 74-page manifesto “The Great Replacement”. Tarrant’s livestream of the shootings can still be found on the web.

The Buffalo shooter is not the first to have drawn deadly inspiration from the Australian-born gunman.

Patrick Wood Crusius, who killed dozens of Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 expressed his admiration of Tarrant in a manifesto of his own.

Blacks, Muslims, Latinos… in a perverse twist on the old advertising slogan, “‘you don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s rye bread”, in the 21^st century, you don’t have to be Jewish to be a victim of antisemitically-informed violence.

But you can be.

The open letter written by the shooter at California’s Poway Synagogue cited Tarrant and expressed the view that Jews “meticulously planned genocide of the European race”.

The man who shot up a synagogue and kebab stand in Halle, Germany said in a livestream before the attack “‘the Holocaust never happened … feminism is the cause of declining birth rates in the West which acts as a scapegoat for mass immigration, and the root of all these problems are Jews.”

Robert Gregory Bowers, the alleged shooter at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, the deadliest attack on Jews in US history, believed in the Great Replacement theory.

Connecting the dots between these events, Gendron scrawled Bowers’ name on the barrel of his rifle before he headed off to Buffalo.

 “We can’t look at and prevent this type of anti-Black violence without understanding antisemitism,” concludes Lowery.

In reviewing this history through a Jewish lens, it is important to bear in mind, that concern about antisemitism should not replace compassion for Black suffering. As Rabbi Sandra Lawson, who is Jewish and Black, told Forward “Black people are in pain, so the hypersensitivity around anything that looks like it's centring white people is going to be painful for Black people, and particularly for Black Jews.’”

But Lawson too sees antisemitism as key to Great Replacement Theory attacks. “This is the tricky thing: anyone who pays attention to this understands that the root of all this vitriol, this white supremacy stuff, is hatred of Jews.”

These killings take place in the context of increasing antisemitic incidents.  According to the latest report from the US Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitic incidents in the US increased by an astounding 34% over the past year. Incidents attributed to extremists increased by nearly 50%.

Of course, the ADL report only includes incidents directly targeting Jews or Jewish institutions. But perhaps our scope of inquiry should be broader. How else are we to combat the growing undercurrent of antisemitism informing the far right and its diverse selection of targets?            

Paige Shoshanah, a survivor of the Halle, Germany attack wrote in the Jewish feminist publication Hey Alma  “Our Jewish communities need to partner with other impacted communities. We are not only stronger together, but safer together. We must hear the plea of our fellow humans and heed it. In that process, we must keep reminding others that antisemitism is a core tenet of white supremacy.”

But the Jewish relationship with other threatened communities is complicated. When ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt described the Buffalo shooting as “a deadly reminder of the dangers of white supremacy,” the statement was met with distrust from some Black activists.

Scores of peace, justice, and civil rights organisations signed a document titled “Open letter to progressives: The ADL is not an ally.”

People of colour often identify their own oppression with that of the Palestinians. It can be challenging to find solidarity with a Jewish community which looks white and is seen as more socially and economically privileged and tarnished by the actions of the Israeli government and settlers.

Leading Jewish organisations do not help matters. Greenblatt labelled Palestine-solidarity groups Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Muslim civil rights organization Council for American Islamic Relations as extremists, calling them  “the photo inverse of the extreme right that ADL long has tracked”.

To make matters worse, when Greenblatt and Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, all those who question the policies of Israel or support the rights of Palestinians become tarred by a very broad brush. As a result, the Jewish community loses potential allies against white supremacist extremism.

The America Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which seems to have embraced the Jewish tradition of being lost in the wilderness, has funded the campaigns of dozens of right-wing Republicans, enemies of American democracy, confident that they will never criticise even the most egregious acts of Israel. Shockingly, they include Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the third ranking house Republican, who is a prominent proponent of the Great Replacement theory.

The conundrum is that Jews cannot convincingly claim to be the victims of white supremacy while simultaneously allying themselves with its perpetrators.

Paige Shoshanah calls for “Jewish spaces to do their own chesbon nefesh, or accounting of the soul, and ask how they are complicit in other aspects of white supremacy”.

Shoshanah argues forcefully that “By supporting racist institutions and white nationalist-adjacent candidates, and by backing away from any semblance of racial justice analysis in order to appease far-right donors and constituencies, Jewish institutions not only uphold the very systems that Black organisers are working to end, but also fail to guarantee Jewish safety.”

If there is a lesson for the Jewish community in the Buffalo massacre it might be that it is time to get real and understand a relationship we have preferred not to see between Black American suffering and the Palestinian experience. To condemn a white supremacist attacking African Americans, while whitewashing Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians smacks of the worst sort of hypocrisy.         

Groups like ADL and AIPAC must aspire to a higher ethic of peace and nonviolence, embracing the arm-in-arm solidarity demonstrated so famously by Rabbi Abraham Heschel when he marched with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sixty years ago.

To truly find solidarity with other oppressed groups, to work together to shine a light on the dark ideology of Great Replacement, Jews must not obscure the threat of antisemitism by cosying up to privilege. Perhaps we can repair the world. But to do so, we must first repair ourselves.

Photo: Mourners gather around a cross during a moment of silence for the victims of the Buffalo supermarket (AP Photo/Joshua Bessex)