The New York Times logo. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The New York Times has a news article reporting on antisemitic violent attacks against Orthodox Jews in New York.

The Times article offers one explanation for this phenomenon: gentrification.

“Most of the antisemitic incidents in New York have not been perpetrated by jihadists or far-right extremists, but by young African-American men,” the Times reports, citing the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt. Then the newspaper adds, “Local leaders said that phenomenon grows out of tension in areas where longstanding African-American and Jewish communities have been squeezed by gentrification.”

Only one leader is quoted by the Times on this point:

“You have this mixture of African-Americans and Hasidic people, and then you have gentrification,” said Gil Monrose, an African-American pastor at Mt. Zion Church of God 7th Day who lives in Crown Heights. “All of this is colliding in Crown Heights and it leads to young people committing crimes where they live.”

“Sometimes people want to blame different groups for the fact that they are being priced out of the neighborhood, but the Jewish community is not to blame for that because the Jewish community is being priced out too,” he said. “That’s why they went to Jersey City.”

Well, it’s nice of the Times to report on these problems, and it’s nice of Monrose to acknowledge that the Jews are “not to blame.” But the “gentrification” explanation for the outbreak of antisemitism fails to satisfy, for a variety of reasons.

First of all, if it is really “gentrification” that young African-American men are upset by, why don’t they beat up the gentrifiers, that is, the wealthier new arrivals to these neighborhoods, the hipsters or the yuppies, rather than Orthodox Jews who have been there for a long time?

In addition, these neighborhoods — Williambsburg and Crown Heights, in particular — have been gentrifying for decades. Yet, though there was a progrom in Crown Heights in 1991, the current outbreak of antisemitic violence seems relatively sudden and recent.

What are some possible explanations for the wave of antisemitic violence other than “gentrification”?

It’s possible that the Times attention to the topic is an example of something I noticed back in February 2017 under the headline, “Trump’s Big Achievement: Making The New York Times Care About Antisemitism.” I wrote then, “Of all the possible consequences of a Trump presidency that have been warned about or hoped for, a heightened attention by New York Times editors to antisemitism probably falls in the category of unexpectedly positive developments (though here, too, to the extent that it inaccurately depicts Jews primarily as victims, we may want to be careful what we wish for).”

It’s possible too that the outbreak of antisemitism (or the attention to it) is a result not of Trump but of Democratic Party politicians, such as Ilhan Omar, a Democratic representative from Minnesota who is from Somalia. She openly advocates a boycott of Israel and has said American political support for Israel is “all about the Benjamins,” a reference to $100 bills.

Maybe the violence has something to do with the bail reform that went into effect in New York on January 1. That is a possibility that the Times explored in a different article but makes no mention of in this one.

Perhaps the hate is being spread from local mosques, of which there are several.

And if “gentrification” is the cause of the tension, one wonders, too, why the Hispanics aren’t attacking, as they did in the early 1990s? Or, for that matter, why aren’t the Orthodox Jews, who also face gentrification, attacking random people on the streets?

Usually when a neighborhood gentrifies the consequence is less street crime, not more.

Ascribing motives or causation for antisemitism, which is essentially irrational, is always a risky endeavor. But I myself was priced out of a Brooklyn neighborhood a few years ago, and it never occurred to me to beat anyone up over it, least of all a visibly Orthodox Jew. So attributing the anti-Jewish violence solely to “gentrification” seems inadequate.

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. More of his media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.