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A century before Trump targeted Somalis, Jews faced the politics of blame
(JTA) — As President Donald Trump ramped up his rhetoric against Somali immigrants in Minnesota and ordered a surge in immigration enforcement because Somalis took part in a social-service fraud scheme, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey pushed back.
“’When a fraud takes place, when a crime takes place, you investigate it, you prosecute it, you charge it. You arrest the person that did the fraud or the crime, you put him in jail as an individual,” Frey told NPR. “You get held accountable as an individual. That’s how this works in America.
“You do not, however, hold an entire community accountable for the crimes of one.”
Frey’s remarks were echoed by other state and national figures. “We do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, who herself immigrated from Somalia to the United States as a child.
Frey, who is Jewish, didn’t mention his own background in standing up for Somalis, a community of whom Trump has said, “And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you.”
But had Frey turned to Jewish history, he may well have cited another instance in which a powerful political figure blamed an immigrant community for the crimes of a few, and an ethnic group was targeted by nativists who pinned the country’s ills on immigrants.
Frey might have reached back to 1908, when New York City Police Commissioner Theodore A. Bingham leveled what at the time was the most explicit, highest profile accusation of Jewish criminality made by a major American official since Gen. Ulysses Grant expelled all Jews from his military district to combat allegations of cotton smuggling and corruption.
That year, in an article in the North American Review, Bingham claimed Jews accounted for half of New York’s crimes, especially picking pockets, fencing stolen goods, arson and operating gambling and vice operations.
“It is not astonishing that with a million Hebrews, mostly Russian, in the city (one quarter of its population), perhaps half of the criminals should be of that race when we consider the ignorance of the language, more particularly among men not physically fit for hard labor,” Bingham wrote with the stilted prose of a bureaucrat and the dubious authority of the then popular pseudoscience of eugenics.
Bingham buttressed his accusation with statistics: “Forty per cent of the boys at the House of Refuge and twenty per cent of those arraigned in the Children’s Court” are Jews, he claimed. “The percentage of Hebrew children in the truant schools is also higher than that of any other.”
Jewish leaders saw Bingham’s accusations as all the more dangerous because they were based on a shred of truth: “They knew, for one thing, that there was a crime problem on the East Side, not so lurid as Bingham had painted, but serious enough,” wrote Irving Howe in his history of the period, “World of Our Fathers.”
Like Somali-Americans in Minnesota, the Jews of the era were on the cusp — with one foot in the poverty of the tenements and the other in the growing prosperity of a rising working and business-owning class. But the Eastern European Jewish newcomers also had an important lever: the German Jews who had arrived earlier and established positions of power in finance and politics.
Jacob Schiff, the powerful banker and philanthropist, became one of the most forceful critics of Bingham’s article, publicly denouncing it as reckless and un-American. Joseph Seligman, founder of the investment bank J. & W. Seligman & Co., similarly condemned Bingham, insisting that crime was a function of poverty and dislocation, not religion or ethnicity, and pointing out the danger of a police commissioner racializing crime. Both men brought their own statistics and experts to show Bingham had exaggerated Jewish involvement.
The grassroots response was just as strong, with letters to the Yiddish and general newspapers, mass protests and heated sermons.
“Mr. Bingham has been indulging in mere generalities and he should be forced to give facts, including the names, residences, in fact the exact figures of any one week or month, to prove his statements, or else he will be asked to make a public retraction and apologize to the race he has injured,” fumed Rabbi Joseph A. Silverman of New York City’s Temple Emanu-El.
Bingham was, and he did. “By mid-September,” Howe writes, “under severe pressure, Bingham retracted his charges ‘frankly and without reservation.’” He subsequently lost the support of Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. and was forced to resign in July 1909.
Bingham wasn’t the only figure to hold the entire Jewish community responsible for the crimes committed by its members. Eleven years earlier, police commissioner Frank Moss argued in his book “The American Metropolis” that “criminal instincts… are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jews.” Between 1907 and 1909, McClure’s Magazine published articles by the muckraking journalist George Kibbe Turner claiming extensive Jewish involvement in the “white slave trade” — what today we would call human trafficking. While courts found little evidence of a wide-spead Jewish conspiracy to traffic women, “McClure’s used the white slavery investigation and grand jury to stoke anti-immigration and anti-Semitic fears throughout the city,” historian Mia Brett wrote in a paper for the Gotham Center at CUNY.
The Jewish elite counted Bingham’s retraction as a victory, but the incident left many with the impression that the Jewish community needed a better mechanism for organizing around the fight against antisemitism. In New York, that meant the formation of the Kehillah, an ambitious experiment to create a unified Jewish communal organization. The Kehillah included educational and political committees, as well as a “Bureau of Social Morals” — a sort of self-policing body meant to help law enforcement root out crime among Jews. When it sank in that the bureau was only reinforcing an impression that the Kehillah had been formed to dispel, the bureau was scrapped.
The Kehillah lasted until 1922, when it disbanded over — spoiler alert — ideological disagreements among its constituent groups. But it created a precedent for centralized communal organizations to come, including UJA-Federation of New York.
In Minnesota too there are signs that the president’s attacks are strengthening the Somali community by sparking solidarity and organizing.“I think it’s giving us a chance for many Americans to learn about the Somali community, and not only that, but also to see the resilience,” Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR, told CNN. “Also, it’s giving Somali Americans a chance to own their American identity and fight for it.”
When the Bingham incident is remembered, it is often to illustrate how officials trade on xenophobic fears over facts — and why such scapegoating, once unleashed, can do profound damage to both the targeted community and the civic fabric.
“We know that when a few people commit crimes, it does not implicate an entire community and to say so is racist, is xenophobic and just wrong,” Rabbi Adam Stock Spilker of Mount Zion Temple in St Paul told Fox 9 in Minneapolis last month.Meanwhile, the current police chief in Minneapolis, Brian O’Hara, has taken the very un-Bingham-like position that the “real problem” of social service fraud in the state doesn’t justify the “largely political” reaction of the federal government, especially immigration authorities.
“I had not known any Somali Americans until I moved to Minnesota,” O’Hara said Monday on “The Daily” podcast. “The Somali Americans that I have met here, including many of whom are police officers in this city, have been incredibly welcoming of me. From a personal perspective, [the immigration crackdown on Somalis] was just bizarre because I’m also aware that the overwhelming majority of people from that community are American citizens.”
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Vanderbilt launches inquiry into instructor after math question about Israeli occupation draws criticism
(JTA) — Vanderbilt University has launched an inquiry into a mathematics lecturer whose classroom exercise about Palestinian territory drew criticism from the activist group StopAntisemitism.
Tekin Karadağ, a senior lecturer at the university’s department of mathematics, drew the ire of the antisemitism watchdog after it obtained a slide from one of his lectures that used a pro-Palestinian protest slogan and suggested that Israel was shrinking the Palestinian territory.
“Assume Palestine as a state with a rectangular land shape. There is the Mediterranean Sea on the west and the Jordan River on the east,” read the slide. “From the river to the sea, Palestine (…) was approximately 100 km. in 1946. The land decreases by 250 sq. km per year, due to the occupation by Israel. How fast is the width of the land decreasing now?”
Karadǎg, a Turkish national who received his PhD from Texas A&M University in 2021, included the question under “examples related to the popular issues” in a survey of calculus class, according to StopAntisemitism, which wrote in a post on X that Karadǎg was “bringing his anti-Israel, antisemitic bias into his classroom.”
In a statement shared with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Vanderbilt said that the content had been removed and that an inquiry had been launched into Karadağ.
“The university has received reports alleging a member of the faculty engaged in unprofessional conduct related to content shared during course instruction,” the school said. “The content in question has been removed, and a formal inquiry has been initiated consistent with relevant university policy.”
In recent years, rhetoric about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses has grown increasingly fraught, with professors’ commentary on the region sparking heavy scrutiny and, at times, disciplinary measures when their universities have determined that they exceeded the bounds of academic freedom. A recent report by Columbia University’s antisemitism task force found that students frequently experienced pro-Palestinian advocacy in classes entirely unrelated to the Middle East — such as dance or math classes.
The inquiry was not the first time that Vanderbilt took swift action against the expression of pro-Palestinian sentiments on its campus.
In March 2024, the university, which has roughly 1,100 Jewish undergraduate students, was among the first universities to expel students who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. This year, the school’s antisemitism “grade” from the Anti-Defamation League was bumped up from a “C” to an “A.”
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Hugh Laurie rejects ‘Zionist’ label after his tribute to Israeli ‘Tehran’ producer sparks social media firestorm
(JTA) — British actor Hugh Laurie pushed back against being labeled as a “Zionist” after facing a wave of online criticism for posting a tribute to the Israeli producer of the hit television show “Tehran.”
“Dana Eden, who co-created and produced ‘Tehran’, died on Sunday, seemingly by her own hand,” Laurie, who played a nuclear inspector in the show’s third season, tweeted last week. “It’s a terrible thing. She was brilliant, and funny, and an exceptional leader. Love and condolences to all who knew her.”
The seemingly innocuous post eulogizing Eden, 52, who was found dead while filming the latest season of the hit Apple TV+ series in Athens last week, quickly drew a volley of backlash on social media.
“She was part of the occupation force’s propaganda arm,” wrote one user in response to Laurie’s post. “What a shame, didn’t expect you to be a closet Zionist.” Another wrote that Eden “creates propaganda for Israel so that they can kill kids more effectively. People should have no sympathy for her.”
The award-winning series, which follows a young Israeli Mossad agent in Iran, was produced by the Israeli public broadcaster Kan and purchased by Apple TV+ in 2020 for roughly $20 million. Eden’s death, for which no cause has been announced, occurred during production of the show’s fourth season, which had already stalled following Oct. 7.
Laurie is not the first actor to spurn the “Zionist” label, as entertainers in recent years have increasingly faced pressure to declare their views on Israel. In December, Jewish actress Odessa A’zion pushed back on claims she was a Zionist after an image of her wearing an IDF shirt as a teenager circulated online.
On Friday, Laurie, who previously starred in the Emmy Award-winning medical drama “House,” shot back at the criticism.
“Nothing I have ever said or done could lead a sane person to believe that I am a Zionist,” wrote Laurie in a post on X. “However. If someone exults in the death of a friend of mine, yes I will block them. If you wouldn’t do the same in my position, you can f—ck off too.”
Laurie’s subsequent post also drew outcry, but this time from pro-Israel influencers who lamented the actor’s disavowal of the Zionist label, calling him “weak” and a “pathetic weasel” in the replies.
Freelance journalist Angela Epstein replied to Laurie’s post, writing, “Not Hugh Laurie as well. I thought he was one of the decent ones….”
“God almighty, why does no one understand English any more?” wrote Laurie in response to Epstein’s critique. “I have not spoken or written a word that would indicate pro or anti Zionism. That’s what those words mean. Blimey.”
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German anti-Zionist group’s plan to protest at Buchenwald memorial over kaffiyeh ban sparks outrage
(JTA) — An anti-Zionist group in Germany has drawn condemnation after it announced plans for a protest against the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in response to a ban on pro-Palestinian symbols at the site.
The group Kufiyas in Buchenwald claims that the memorial has become a place of “historical revisionism and genocide denial.” It announced a demonstration for April 11, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp.
“Instead of honoring the persecuted and resolutely opposing every genocide, the memorial spreads Israeli propaganda and provides the ideological ammunition for the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” the group says on its website.
Buchenwald, one of the first concentration camps built by the Nazis and one of the largest in the country, was the site of the murder of roughly 56,000 male prisoners, including 11,000 Jews, from 1937 to 1945.
Last year, a German court ruled that the concentration camp had a right to refuse entry to visitors who wear a keffiyeh, a traditional Palestinian headscarf that has been adopted by pro-Palestinian protesters. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by a woman who attempted to wear the scarf to an event commemorating the concentration camp’s liberation.
The woman, who was only identified by her first name, Anna, posted a testimony about her actions on the Kufiyas in Buchenwald Instagram page in which she said she was inspired by the resistance of Buchenwald prisoners.
“Our fundamental principle is this: criticism of the Israeli government’s policies, settlement policy, or actions in the Gaza Strip is legitimate,” said the Buchenwald Foundation’s director Jens-Christian Wagner in a statement outlining the memorial’s protocols. “However, it becomes antisemitic when used to relativize the Holocaust and discredit its victims as perpetrators. We will not tolerate this at the Buchenwald Memorial.”
The campaign against the memorial has been signed onto by a host of pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, which has defended the protest on X as evidence of what “commemorating past German crimes has to do with rejecting current ones.”
In a post on Instagram announcing the protest earlier this month, the Kufiyas in Buchenwald group wrote that it would hold a “public protest” in Weimar, the German city located nearby the concentration camp. The group also said it planned to host lectures and a “tour that vividly illustrates the events in the former concentration camp.”
It was unclear whether the protest is intended to take place outside the memorial itself. Kufiyas in Buchenwald did not immediately respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the location of the protest.
The protest quickly drew condemnation from German leaders, including the country’s antisemitism czar Felix Klein, who told the Swiss outlet Neue Zürcher Zeitung that the protest marked a “new low point in the unfortunately all-too-common reversal of perpetrator and victim roles.”
Michael Panse, the commissioner for combatting antisemitism for the German state Thuringia, where Weimar is located, told the outlet that the protest was “tasteless and historically ignorant.”
The protests also drew condemnation from the European Jewish Congress, which wrote in a post on X that the demonstration represents a “deeply troubling instrumentalization of Holocaust remembrance.”
“Holocaust memorial sites are places of solemn reflection and respect for the victims of National Socialism,” the post continued. “They must never be exploited to promote agendas that deny Israel’s legitimacy or glorify those who perpetrate violence against Jews.”
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