Since Hamas’ murderous pogrom against Jews in Israel Oct. 7, 2023, and provocative Jew-hating mobilizations worldwide organized under the pretext of protesting Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, attacks on Jews have spread.
Rami Glickstein and his wife, Rivi Glickstein, were walking through Midtown Manhattan on a visit from Israel Oct. 27 when a man shouted at him, “What is your religion?” He grabbed Glickstein’s kippah and began punching him.
He was hospitalized with head injuries and a broken nose. “For me,” Rivi Glickstein told the Jewish News Syndicate, “it’s like 1939,” referring to the onset of the Nazi Holocaust in World War II.
Children aren’t spared from attack. Five kids between the ages of 8 and 13 were playing in a public park in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago with a substantial Jewish population, Oct. 7 when 20 youths between the ages of 12 and 14 came up and asked if they were Jewish. When the children said yes, the gang began shouting, “F–k Israel” and “You are baby killers, so we’re going to kill you.” Some shot gel-gun pellets at the kids, yelling they would “get a real gun and kill you Jews.” Oct. 7 was the second anniversary of Hamas’ pogrom.
“This was not ‘kids being kids,’” Daniel and Robyn Burgher Ackerman, parents of one 13-year-old girl who was attacked, told the press. “This was a targeted, violent antisemitic attack.”
Authorities in Skokie, who confirmed the attack occurred, said the case was “closed,” a stunning refusal to respond.
In the United Kingdom, the West Midlands Police ruled that fans of the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team would be banned from an upcoming match in Birmingham Nov. 6, saying there was a security risk. In November 2024 some 30 Jews were injured, including five who had to be hospitalized, when thugs ambushed fans of the Israeli team in Amsterdam.
“I don’t think who goes to a football match should be a political thing,” Steve Tomkinson told the Telegraph. “The potential problem isn’t the Maccabi fans coming, it’s people coming from all over to protest against them.”
These violent attacks on Jews have been especially common by Hamas supporters on college campuses. Masked protesters disrupted a lecture by professor Michael Ben-Gad on the City St. George’s campus of the University of London Oct. 22, demanding he apologize for having served in the Israel Defense Forces.
“As a citizen, I was obligated to serve,” Ben-Gad said in a press interview. “I was born less than 20 years after nearly my entire family was gassed at Treblinka,” he added. “I would have crawled over cut glass to get to that induction center to put on the uniform and defend my people.”
After the university offered him paid leave, Ben-Gad said, “I insisted that I will turn up to every single lecture.”
These attacks, and hundreds like them around the world, pose a deadly threat not only to Jews, but to the entire working class