At 1 a.m. Wednesday morning, Avi Reiss, owner of Trio Gifts, a Judaica shop on Raritan Avenue in Highland Park received a phone call from the police saying a window of his shop had been broken. Someone launched a piece of pavement through the store’s large front window, shattering it entirely, Reiss—who had been manning the store since that early-morning call—explained over the phone as the wind tore through the gaping hole.

Rabbi Ed Prince, the mashgaich responsible for overseeing the kosher cooking at Jerusalem Pizza, arrived at the Raritan Avenue pizzeria at 7:30 a.m to a broken window, and noticed several other damaged storefronts over a five-block commercial stretch. Also hit was kosher restaurant Park Place and Judaica Gallery. Jack’s Hardware, which is Jewish-owned, sustained a broken window. Other visibly Jewish establishments, such as a kosher Chinese restaurant, kosher butcher, and jewelry store, were not damaged.

The Wednesday morning attacks occurred only days after a brick was thrown through the window of the nearby Rutgers Hillel Saturday night, which Hillel executive director Andrew Getraer—who lives in Highland Park—said broke a computer and shattered glass across the office, and which is being investigated by the police. Further troubling for Getraer, who saw the Raritan Avenue damage on his way to work Wednesday, a Rutgers student active in the Jewish student community, who wears a yarmulke, was allegedly confronted in Highland Park’s kosher Dunkin’ Donuts Tuesday night by a man who identified himself as a neo-Nazi and referenced Kristallnacht—the night the Nazis destroyed Jewish-owned shops—while being thrown out by employees. The incident was reported to the police, as well as the university and the Anti-Defamation League.

The Highland Park Police Department issued a statement about the Raritan Avenue attacks, saying, “Detectives are actively investigating these incidents and are in contact with and coordinating efforts with other law enforcement agencies that may be able to expedite the investigation.”

The Police Department of Highland Park, a close-knit community with an active Jewish population, acknowledged the troubling nature of the damaged storefronts, if inconclusively: “We would also like to briefly address the fear that these are acts motivated by anti-Semitism or that these are bias crimes. The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office has been notified, but it is too soon to reach a conclusion.”

“We are appalled by the targeting of Jewish stores and Jewish campus institutions at Rutgers,” said an ADL regional leader. “These shocking crimes target the entire Jewish community as these locations appear to have been selected because of their Jewishness.

Highland Park, which Rabbi Prince called a “one-horse town,” has a population of just below 14,000 people, with nearly 10 synagogues, two Jewish day schools, a Yeshiva high school, and a girls’ school serving the town’s predominantly Orthodox Jewish residents, one of which is Highland Park mayor, Gary Minkoff. Trio Gifts was open for business Wednesday, as were the other businesses. “You can’t keep a good shop down,” Reiss explained. “The plan is to fix the window and move on.”

• New Anti-Defamation League and Israel Project surveys find robust support among Americans for Israel versus the Palestinians. [JTA]

• Some folks in Midwood, Brooklyn, decided to celebrate the 73rd anniversary of Kristallnacht with some anti-Semitic graffiti. [Gothamist]

• #FF @jackabramoff. [Ben Smith]

• Foreskin Man has a friend, and her name is Vulva Girl. And she has a song. [PR Web]

• Punk-rocker Jello Biafra, who once canceled a show in Israel in the spirit of boycott, reports back from the Holy Land. “My hunch is that most Palestinians are not like this and just want peace. But Hamas is no joke, and suicide bombers and rockets are very very real.” [Alternative Tentacles]

• Tzipi Hotovely, you are the 24th hottest woman in politics. Mazel tov? [Complex]

• There’s a salmonella-related recall of MealMart kosher broiled chicken livers. [AP/WSJ]

• The ADL has condemned a pro-life film that, it argues, equates abortion and the Holocaust. [JTA]

• The Baltimore Orioles’ new general manager is Dan Duquette, a founder of the Israel Baseball League. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

• San Franciscans, head to the Mission to check out this Idelsohn Society-sponsored pop-up Jewish record store. [Boing Boing]

• The great Hamptons eruv battle rages on. [Hampton Bays]

• One of the top female super flyweights in the world is a 33-year-old Jewish Argentinian. [JTA/Jewish Journal]

Happy Veterans Day. Thanks to all who have served.

• The European Union is expanding sanctions against Syria. [WSJ]

• A nice tribute to Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of a German official kicked off Kristallnacht 73 years ago yesterday. [Heeb]

• Retired Jewish ballplayers Shawn Green, Brad Ausmus, and Gabe Kapler are all in on the national Israeli baseball team. [ESPN]

• Great article on Kreayshawn. Most people don’t realize Kreayshawn is Jewish! [NYT Magazine]

• Great article on TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. Most people don’t realize Arrington is Jewish! [Bloomberg Businessweek]

• Great article by Tablet Magazine columnist Shalom Auslander on his obsession with hard-core pornography. I think most people realize that Auslander is Jewish. [GQ/Longform]

Jewish rapper Drake has not cancelled his planned show at Penn State tonight. Tweeted Salon’s Alex Pareene, “This is Drake’s ‘James Brown saves Boston’ moment.” It was nice to laugh a little last night.

Everybody has flowers in their front yard in Sunnyside Gardens, but Otto’s flower arrangements stand out: His garden’s neat choreography rivals that of a North Korean mass performance. Trying to reach the ultimate perfection, Otto, in his mid-70s, is always sweeping, digging, raking, pruning, and polishing things. On hot summer nights he sits on his stoop listening to German folk music on an old cassette recorder, while his Puerto Rican wife, whom I’ll call Maria, watches baseball games in the living room.

Otto never misses an opportunity to tell me how much he aches for Germany. Born and raised in the western state of Nordrhein-Westfalen during the Third Reich, Otto immigrated to the United States in the 1950s because his company relocated. He thought he’d eventually go back, but he met Maria and the couple married. In 1982, they bought a house in Queens.

Our block is perhaps the most diverse one in the world. I am a Protestant born and raised in Germany; my husband is Catholic, from Mexico. We met in 2004, in New York City, and married in 2006. Our neighbors are from Pakistan, India, Great Britain, Peru, Ecuador, Australia, China, Turkey, and Ireland. We are white, pink, beige, brown, and black. Our neighbors are Protestants, Jews, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and Muslims. Most recently, an Orthodox rabbi with his wife and four children moved from Israel to a house on our block to take the pulpit at the Young Israel of Sunnyside congregation, which had been without a rabbi for several years. The synagogue celebrated his arrival with a little parade down our block. Neighbors of all shades and creeds sat on their stoops in the sun; some took pictures and waved at the float that carried the rabbi’s neatly dressed children. In Sunnyside Gardens my husband and I felt at home for the first time in decades. It seemed like a safe and welcoming place.

***

Aside from our nationality, Otto and I have little in common. We both married Latinos, as he once noted, but in addition to an age gap of nearly four decades, we have different tastes in music, clothes, literature, and garden decor. Until recently, Otto left German tabloid magazines on my front porch for me to read, and not wanting to hurt his feelings, I never told him that they went right into the recycling bin. But despite our differences, when Otto asked me to check in on Maria while he traveled to Germany for a trip, I agreed. This may be his last trip home, he said.

Taking care of Maria was far more demanding than I had imagined. I was supposed to drop by once a day and make sure that Maria hadn’t suddenly fallen ill or down the stairs.

“My head is spinning,” she told me on the first morning. “It feels like I have one head on top of the other.” I looked at Maria’s head. I saw nothing wrong. I offered to take her to the doctor, but Maria waved off my offer. “I’ve felt like this for years,” she said.

The next day Maria complained about back pain. “Damn Otto!” she said. “He screwed up my back.” When I asked what happened, she said, “He had a heart attack and fell on top of me.”

Each day Maria complained about something else. She hated hospitals because of the black nurses, and Jews because her sister was married to an allegedly lazy one. She hated the envelope I bought for the “Home Sweet Home” calendar she wanted to send to her sister (presumably the one who married the “lazy Jew”). Maria also hated the milk and the potatoes her Puerto Rican neighbor got her. She even hated Sunnyside. (“Too many trees,” she said.) I was sure that Maria hated me too.

The last few days of Otto’s absence, Maria played possum. I rang the bell but no one opened. Just to make sure everything was OK, I walked past her house at night to check whether the lights came on. They did.

When Otto returned from his vacation, he stopped by my house. “I’m sorry about my wife,” he said. “I think she’s faking it.” There was no way of denying that something was wrong with Maria, so I didn’t.

But what was wrong with Otto that he would be married to Maria? He didn’t strike me as a hater. He, too, had mentioned his lazy Jewish brother-in-law, but added apologetically, “You know there are good Jews and bad Jews.” At least he’s trying to make a distinction, I thought. I decided to let it slide.

***

While we never dared retaliate against the stunning stained glass of the town’s ubiquitous Catholic churches, vigorous snowball battles between Jewish and French kids (often with rocks embedded in the snow) were an almost daily activity in the wintertime. I recall this warfare rather fondly, as I do many more unhealthy aspects of growing up in a charged and diverse environment in the days before “diversity” became an abstract social ideal.

We kids did not shake; we fought back. And the shattering of glass did not evoke Kristallnacht to the many equally unshaken Holocaust survivors then living in Outremont. The most frequently targeted shuls simply installed wired window shields. Problem solved.

How different has been the worried response to this weekend’s attacks on four synagogues and a yeshiva in Montreal’s most heavily Jewish-populated township, Cote St. Luc. The vandalism, which left a number of windows shattered but no one hurt and no Torah scrolls or sacred books damaged, led the evening news on both of Montreal’s English television stations. “Montreal Jews Shaken After Four Synagogues, School Vandalized” read the headlines in Monday’s Montreal Gazette. The story also led the Sunday evening news on Canada’s national CTV network.

One might credit this sudden flood of attention to the prevailing ethic of political correctness, in which slurs and petty hate crimes that were once accepted as part of life in the big city are now taken with the utmost seriousness. After all, the very idea of creating a separate, more seriously punishable, criminal category for “hate-based crimes” only emerged in the 1980s, in both Canada and the United States.

Yet the real reason the recent spate of attacks on Montreal’s Jewish institutions—as well as some recent physical assaults on Hasidic Jews in Outremont—is newsworthy is that ethnic violence is no longer local, and the perpetrators (those who have been apprehended to date) are not Quebecois street toughs. After the firebombing of the United Talmud Torah in the Montreal suburb of Ville St. Laurent in 2004, the nasty work of North African Muslim immigrants, the Jews of Montreal came to a painful realization that they were no longer dealing with rock-filled snowballs. Today’s attacks are not a continuation of the lame local games we used to play. They are something new, and more frightening.

The Montreal Chamber of Commerce has long showcased the city as a taste of Europe within driving distance of New York and Boston, which it is. But, along with the sweetness of old Europe, Montrealers have been tasting the ugliness of the new Europe’s serious violence and racial tensions, generated by a rapidly growing underclass of Muslim immigrants.

Unlike American states, as well as Canada’s other nine provinces, Quebec enjoys complete autonomy in the domain of immigration policy—and has long given priority to immigrants from former French colonies such as Haiti and Vietnam. Today, the largest numbers of French speakers come from former colonies in Arab lands from Morocco to Lebanon. The city of Montreal today has the world’s largest Lebanese community outside of Beirut and the second-largest Moroccan and Algerian diasporas, after Paris and Marseilles. As in France itself, these immigrants have brought a deep, historically rooted contempt for European cosmopolitanism and heavy doses of anti-Semitism. Those apprehended by the Montreal police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for involvement in the dozen or so attacks on Jewish institutions in the city during the past five years—which included the fire-bombings of a synagogue and a Jewish day school—were all Quebeckers of North African descent. None were native French Quebecois.

How the city’s Jewish community, already severely depleted by the mass exodus that followed the rise to power of the separatist Parti Quebecois, fares remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: Attacks on Jewish institutions such as those of last weekend are part of a grave international problem. And Montreal is increasingly becoming a lure for those who dream of more spectacular—and potentially devastating—acts of terror.

Memphis, Tennessee-born Burson is a classically trained violinist who has made detours into folk and bluegrass. You can learn more about her in the podcast, but for now, we’ll just leave you with a taste of her music:

Underneath all these good vibes, though, I detected something else as well: jealousy. The scene from Chicago earlier this month was so moving because it signaled that American democracy had matured. It was a giant collective stride—through tens of millions of pulled levers—toward overcoming our nation’s greatest birth defect. For Germans, as anyone spending time here could quickly tell you, there is a constant and obsessive self-examination of their own burdensome history. Not a night passes without a Holocaust documentary on television. Memorials abound. Schools have integrated the war into all levels of their curriculum. Yet, still, this heightened awareness does not seem to have lessened the fear of an ever-resurgent anti-Semitism. There will most likely never be a Jewish chancellor here to provide, in one fell swoop, an immediate rebuke to the past. But that’s not the problem. It’s the nature of anti-Semitism itself that always seems to be shifting. And a little-covered debate that roiled the German parliament this past month—overshadowed, as most things were, by the Obamania—showed once again the slipperiness of the particular prejudice Germans are fated to continue confronting.

Gate of the Rykestrasse synagogue

Two weeks ago was the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. German society, now expert at such commemorations, gestured in all the appropriate ways. Angela Merkel visited the newly renovated Rykestrasse synagogue. Mozart’s Requiem was performed at the Gendarmenmarkt. All the newspapers featured reviews of a new exhibit about the burning and pillaging that augured worse to come. The public centerpiece of all this memorializing was to be a standard resolution, a statement of concern, really—unanimously supported by all the members of the Bundestag—decrying anti-Semitism and calling for renewed vigilance. It almost didn’t happen. When a vote finally took place on November 5, it was only after the ruling coalition of Christian and Social Democrats and the extreme left party had engaged in a brutal round of accusatory historical regurgitation. Der Spiegel said everyone concerned in the episode “should be red in the face with shame.” In the end, to avoid what would have been a full-blown fiasco, two separate statements for the dueling factions were produced and passed.

Why did this no-brainer of a resolution create such problems for German lawmakers?

Since January, representatives of the five major parties in parliament had been working on the bill, which would establish a panel of experts to present regular reports on anti-Semitic activity in Germany. This had begun to seem even more urgent lately. A survey in September indicated an increase in such incidents, with 530 anti-Semitic acts in the first half of 2008, or—as it was dramatized here—an average of one Jewish cemetery vandalized every week. This was, in a way, a known evil. It’s been a long time since anyone, German or Jew, was surprised anymore by the works of the active but small neo-Nazi presence here. For the most part, besides their sound and fury, they do little more than annoy Germans concerned with polishing any remaining swastikas off of their good name.

The problems came from another direction. Early last month, the Christian Democrat representative proposed to add—to the standard elegiac language remembering the Holocaust—a clause that instantaneously upended the negotiations: “it must be recalled that Israel was never recognized by East Germany, that Jewish businesspeople were dispossessed by the East German government and had to flee, and that East Germany broke international law by delivering weapons to an anti-Israeli Syria in 1973.”

The political party that governed East Germany didn’t disappear after the wall fell. It became Die Linke, a small but vocal opposition force in the Bundestag. The Christian Democrats didn’t hide their objective. Bringing up the East German past was their way of sabotaging any chance of a joint resolution. After months of negotiating, the conservatives decided they would rather not add their names to any document, even one as anodyne as an anti-anti-Semitism resolution, if it also bore the signature of their socialist archenemies.

While the move might have seemed a cynical, political ploy on the part of the Christian Democrats—and was criticized as such, by no less than the Jewish community’s governing body—they had their history, for the most part, right. From at least 1967, the Communist world was officially anti-Zionist. East Germany, like its Soviet overlord, offered financial and propaganda support to belligerent Arab regimes. Cartoons in newspapers depicted Israeli soldiers as Nazis and the state sheltered PLO militants. The Zionist entity was an imperializing force, an oppressor whose existence should be mercilessly opposed.

The question was whether this history lesson belonged in a resolution condemning more clear-cut forms of anti-Semitism like swastikas and skinheads.

Here was an issue quite familiar to Americans in the past few years—and particularly so on university campuses, with their Walt and Mearsheimers. To what degree is there, as Abraham Foxman of the ADL consistently reminds us, a “new anti-Semitism” masking itself as anti-Zionism? Or, in the terms it was debated here in the past weeks, could one march in solidarity with Hezbollah, as some Left parliament members did during the summer war of 2006, attend a rally that demanded “Death to Israel,” and still claim in good faith to be an opponent of anti-Semitism?

The resolution was almost abandoned over this divisive question—the Left arguing that their legitimate criticism of Israel was being used against them as a cudgel and the Christian Democrats affirming that the German state had to be unambiguous in its defense of Israel. Eventually, fearing embarrassment, both sides agreed to a compromise: There would be two separate resolutions, but their language would be absolutely identical. The East German history was dropped. In its place, a statement that still angered enough of the rank and file leftists that eleven parliament members of their party refused to sign: “Those who take part in demonstrations where Israeli flags are burned and anti-Semitic slogans are shouted are not a partner in the fight against anti-Semitism.”

Protestors walk behind a banner reading “Stop the War” while holding up pictures of the Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and waving Lebanese flags as they protest against the conflict in the Middle East, July 21, 2006, in Berlin.

How to deal with Israel is, of course, not a new problem for Germany. While the Communist East maintained its anti-Zionist position, West Germany spent the post-war years rebuilding international goodwill through the hundreds of millions of dollars it threw at the Jewish state in the 1950s and ’60s. Even after the Six Day War, when the rest of Western Europe soured on Israel, West German governments were hardly ever heard to utter a critical word. If left-wing groups like the Baader-Meinhof gang were known to support their Palestinian revolutionary counterparts, the mainstream German public and their conservative and liberal governments never spoke in the harsher tones of, say, France. Reunification was, in many ways, a subsuming of the East by the West, a dynamic that was true also of the new Germany’s approach to Israel. This was evident as recently as the 2006 Lebanon War. A Pew poll found that even as Europeans’ views of Israel plummeted, twice as many Germans as French still viewed Israel more favorably than the Palestinians.

To listen to the voices out of the Israeli foreign ministry, this might be changing. Germany is “becoming more ‘European’ in its attitude towards Israel,” one official anonymously told Yediot Aharonot last month. Of particular concern to the Israelis is the German unwillingness to follow America’s condemnation of Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions—a stance that might end up putting a serious damper on their Obama fever when the new president makes his first move on this issue. By including anti-Israel sentiment in their definition of anti-Semitism, Germans now have to ask themselves this tricky question: Given the Iranian president’s well-articulated views about Israel’s future place on a world map, could German accommodation of Iran be considered anti-Semitism?

The issues raised by the resolution were more than just political. As Germany becomes more “European,” abandoning some of its reflexive pro-Israel positions—Iran being only the most obvious example—the resolution perhaps represented a first awkward attempt at drawing a border between acceptable and unacceptable forms of criticism of the Jewish state. If the Left was offended, it was because it never cared much for these borders to begin with. But for the vast majority of Germans and their government representatives, it’s clear that figuring out how to oppose Israel without being accused of the “new anti-Semitism” is not so simple.

Asked about this dilemma, Andreas Nachama, a historian, rabbi, and managing director of the Berlin museum Topography of Terror, responded that if criticism of Israel were a measuring stick for anti-Semitism, most Israelis would also be considered anti-Semites. And yet, he continued, “it’s not so easy to distinguish” exactly what does cross the line. “There is here in Germany also a thoughtless, one could say unreasonable, critique of Israel, that does enter the realm of anti-Semitism.”

So which is it? It’s safe to say, at the very least, that there is some confusion, even for German Jews. How much more so then for all the other Germans? Just when they thought they had gotten it all down—when to bow their heads, how to look Jews in the eyes, when to produce anger and when tears—it now seems something as elemental as the words, “anti-Semitism” might have to be redefined once again.

Gal Beckerman is a writer living in Berlin. His history of the Soviet Jewry movement will be published in the fall of 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Originally published on November 26, 2008.