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Israeli Cafe in New York City Vandalized With Fake Blood

Effy’s Cafe, an Israeli Cafe in New York City, was vandalized on March 18, 2024. Photo: Screenshot

An Israeli cafe in New York City’s heavily Jewish Upper West Side was vandalized over the weekend with fake blood and threatening graffiti, spurring local lawmakers to call for a hate crime investigation.

Red paint was doused on the facade of Effy’s Cafe, a Kosher eatery in the borough of Manhattan owned by Israelis, and the phrase “form line here to support genocide” was sprayed on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

“Targeting a small business because of who it’s owned by — Israeli, Palestinian, or any other group — is not only wrong, it’s self defeating,” said US Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on X/Twitter. “The recent attack on Effy’s Cafe is a cowardly act of antisemitism that cannot, and will not, be tolerated in our community.”

New York City Councilwoman Gale Brewer said she had called on the New York City Police Department (NYPD)’s Hate Crime Task Force to open an investigation into the vandalism. Other graffiti was found nearby at Riverside Park the same day which said, “Israelism is Terrorism.”

Police said that the vandals have yet to be apprehended.

Just hours after the vandalism, dozens of local residents — some draped in Israeli flags — showed up to Effy’s to help clean the graffiti and dine-in as a show of support.

By Monday afternoon, all signs of the attack had been removed.

Upper West Siders coming together to clean up the antisemitic graffiti on Israeli Jewish Effy’s Cafe on W96th Street. @NYCMayor pic.twitter.com/qFwZvRiKTt

— Melanie Notkin (@SavvyAuntie) March 18, 2024

Israeli and Jewish restaurants have been attacked repeatedly in New York City since Hamas’ Oct.7 onslaught across southern Israel.

In December, Hummus Kitchen, a Kosher restaurant on New York City’s Upper East Side neighborhood, was vandalized by a woman who ripped down the Israeli and American flags hanging inside the establishment, according to videos shared on social media.

The attacks come amidst a wave of property damage against Jewish organizations and institutions across New York.

Antisemitic property crimes rose 85 percent in the city following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, NYPD data from December showed. There were 135 anti-Jewish complaints over a two-month period, up from 73 during the same period the prior year.

The post Israeli Cafe in New York City Vandalized With Fake Blood first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Democrats, Republicans Make Final Push for Jewish Voters on Eve of US Presidential Election

US Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) speaks during the House Financial Services Committee hearing in Washington, DC, Sept. 30, 2021. Photo: Al Drago/Pool via REUTERS

Both Democratic and Republican parties are scrambling to galvanize Jewish support on the eve of the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.

In what is projected to potentially be the closest presidential election in over 20 years, both parties believe that Jewish voters could play a major role in determining the election’s outcome. As the race for the White House enters the final hours, Democrats and Republicans have deployed some of their most vocal pro-Israel allies in a last-minute pitch to the Jewish community.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) visited Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to court Jewish voters who feel alienated by Rep. Summer Lee’s (D-PA) unrelenting anti-Israel rhetoric. Torres sought to assuage fears that Vice President Kamala Harris harbors similar views on Israel as Lee.

In addition, Torres defended the Biden administration’s record on Israel, arguing that a potential Harris administration would continue to strengthen ties with the Jewish state and mitigate any threats from Iran.

“I joined the Harris campaign in showing solidarity with the Pittsburgh Jewish community, which has been profoundly shaken by both the Tree of Life mass shooting and the post-October 7th outbreak of antisemitism,” Torres told Jewish Insider.

“I did my best to reassure the Jewish community that the Democratic Party — despite the background noise on Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok — has been and will remain fundamentally pro-Israel and that the Vice President herself falls squarely within the pro-Israel consensus that has historically governed American politics, rejecting both the [a]nti-Zionism of the far left and the America-[F]irst isolationism of the far right,” Torres continued.

On the conservative side of the aisle, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) filmed a video with the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) in support of former President Donald Trump.

“This is the most important election cycle in our lifetime, and as we have seen on college campuses, the rot of antisemitism is real in the Democratic Party.

She accused the Biden White House of betraying Israel and the Jewish people. She lambasted the Biden administration for their failure “to combat antisemitism”

“It is Republicans who have always – and will always – stand strongly with Israel, and stand up and clearly condemn antisemitism,” Stefanik said.

While serving on the Education and the Workforce Committee, Stefanik has lambasted administrators of elite universities for their mealy-mouthed condemnations of antisemitism and tolerance of anti-Jewish violence on campus. Last December, Stefanik engaged in a fiery back-and-forth with the presidents of Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over a purported antisemitic campus atmospheres.

Early indicators suggest that Harris is expected to win a smaller share of the Jewish vote than previous Democratic candidates. Jewish voters, highly-concentrated in important areas such as the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia, could prove critical in Harris’s bid to win the White House.

Liberal CNN commentator Van Jones cautioned Monday that Harris has suffered an erosion of Jewish support in the Philadelphia metro.

Jones said that he’s “worried” that the “Jewish vote in the suburban areas” of Philadelphia have dramatically soured on Harris.

“Biden won the Jewish vote [in suburban Philadephia] by 70%” Jones said, referencing the 2020 election.

“Some polls show Kamala at 50-50” among Jewish voters in suburban Philadelphia, Jones lamented.

The post Democrats, Republicans Make Final Push for Jewish Voters on Eve of US Presidential Election first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Quiet antisemitism in Toronto’s Roncesvalles Village leaves a resident wondering how this area is considered ‘progressive’

In a gentrifying West Toronto neighbourhood full of signs advocating for Black lives, transgender youth and the unhoused, the clerk’s refusal to hang up a sign of my own design […]

The post Quiet antisemitism in Toronto’s Roncesvalles Village leaves a resident wondering how this area is considered ‘progressive’ appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Jewish Boy Assaulted on Way to School in New York City, Assailant Remain at Large

Illustrative: An ambulance used by Hatzalah in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Orthodox Jews in New York City are again frustrated with a lack of law and order in the Five Boroughs following another attack against a member of their community, this time a child.

According to multiple accounts, an African American male on Monday morning smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. The incident was the second known assault on an Orthodox Jew in the area in less than a week.

“He was riding his bike between Winthrop and Clarkson, near the hospital, when a man slapped him. He arrived at school shaken, and the school contacted his parents and Crown Heights Shomrim [a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and also serves as a neighborhood watch group],” Yaacov Behrman, a local Jewish leader, posted on X/Twitter.

Behrman — a liaison for Chabad Headquarters, the main New York base of the Hasidic movement — added that the boy was filing a police report.

A teacher of the young man, Yisrael Eliashiv, added that the assailant, who remains at large, “smacked [the boy] across the face for no reason other than hate. Thankfully, he got away before anything else happened.” The teacher then noted that his student did not initially think to notify the police because he doubted the attacker would receive any punishment.

“I’m fuming to the point I’ve got a migraine … You have kids who are 13 or 14 and have grown up with the attitude of ‘if you get assaulted in the street, just take it because nothing is gonna be done.’ Those are the symptoms not of a sick but of a dead and decaying society,” Eliashiv wrote.

Crown Heights, home to a large Orthodox Jewish population, has seen numerous antisemitic hate crimes in recent years. In July 2023, for example, a 22-year-old Israeli Yeshiva student, who was identifiably Orthodox and visiting New York City for the summer holiday, was stabbed with a screwdriver by one of two men who attacked him after asking whether he was Jewish and had any money. The other punched him in the face.

Earlier that year, 10- and 12-year-olds were attacked on Albany Avenue by four African American teens.

Monday’s assault came just days after an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking through downtown Brooklyn last week.

These latest attacks on the Orthodox Jewish community continue a trend.

According to a report issued in August by New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, antisemitic incidents accounted for a striking 65 percent of all felony hate crimes in New York City last year. The report added that throughout the state, nearly 44 percent of all recorded hate crime incidents and 88 percent of religious-based hate crimes targeted Jewish victims.

Meanwhile, according to a recent Algemeiner review of New York City Police Department (NYPD) hate crimes data, 385 antisemitic hate crimes have struck the New York City Jewish community since last October, when the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas perpetrated its Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, unleashing a wave of anti-Jewish hatred unlike any seen in the post-World War II era.

Beyond New York, anti-Jewish hate crimes in the US spiked to a record high last year, and American Jews were the most targeted of any religious group in the country, according to a report published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in September.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

The post Jewish Boy Assaulted on Way to School in New York City, Assailant Remain at Large first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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