national / international
Rally Showed Community
Seeking Comfort, Strength
RON KAMPEAS AND
RUDY MALCOM
M ore than 2,000 peo-
ple spent a swel-
tering afternoon in
front of the U.S. Capitol at a
rally on July 11 that denounced
antisemitism as un-American
and made the case that Jewish
identity and support for Israel
are inextricable.

Those were the unifying
messages of the “No Fear” rally,
but there were diff erences
among the speakers and in the
crowd on how precisely Israel
fi gures in the fi ght against
antisemitism. “To stand united as one with
thousands of other voices in a
loud cry against antisemitism
was empowering,” said Michael
Balaban, president and CEO
of the Jewish Federation of
Greater Philadelphia, who
attended the event. “We must
challenge this vile hatred
through collective actions and
our collective unity in support
of a secure Israel and for our
existence as a fl ourishing
Jewish community and, on
Sunday, we did just that.”
Speaker Ron
Halber, executive director of the
Jewish Community Relations
Council of Greater Washington,
stressed the need to promote
unity among the Jewish people
itself. “While we can have
differences, we need to
reaffi rm the basics: that we’re
all Zionists and pro-Israel,” he
said. “What joins us together
as a community is far greater
than what divides us.

“None of us should need
to be at a rally against
12 Shlomo Noginsky, a rabbi who was stabbed in Boston on July 1, addresses the rally
agaainst antisemitism at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on July 11.

antisemitism in 2021,” he
added. “But we do need to
be here. Because we must
again respond to vile rhetoric,
physical attacks and symbols
of hatred against our people.”
Some of the most searing
messages came from people
who have suff ered antisemitic
attacks in recent years. A
recurring theme among these
speakers was that they never
expected to suff er such attacks
in the United States.

Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi
Shlomo Noginsky,
who sustained stab wounds in a July
1 attack in Boston, appeared
with his arm still in a sling and
in evident pain.

“I was born in the Soviet
Union in the city of St.

Petersburg,” Noginsky said
in Hebrew, with his brother
translating his words to
English. “I remember how even
as a young child, I experienced
terrible antisemitism. Never
in my darkest dreams did I
imagine that I would feel the
AUGUST 26, 2021 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
same way here in the United
States, the land of freedom
and endless possibilities.”
The crowd shouted “Hero!”
as Noginsky spoke. He had held
the attacker at bay outside a
Chabad facility where about
100 children were in summer
camp. There was a sense among
some attending the rally that
Jew hatred was closing in from
all sides.

Joel Taubman, a rising
second-year law student
at George
Washington University, noted how, among
both the right and the left,
there is a “growing acceptance
of antisemitic voices that have
always been there but until
recently were less accepted.”
The only instance of
antisemitism being “out in
the open” for Ava Shulman
used to be when Klansmen
marched down 16th Street to
the Capitol in 1965.

“My father turned the
sprinklers on, and their white
outfi ts got all wet,” she said.

“Now it’s just so pervasive.”
Shulman noted that most
of the attendees were older,
which she attributed to apathy
among younger people, who,
she said, don’t “remember the
Holocaust.” Notably
absent were
representatives of more left-
wing groups that were asked
to join but opted out of
attending because some of the
sponsoring groups adhere to a
defi nition of antisemitism that
encompasses harsh criticism
of Israel, including the
movement to boycott, divest
and sanction Israel. Groups
like J Street and Americans
for Peace Now oppose BDS,
but object to defi ning it as
antisemitic. Melissa Landa, who leads
the Alliance for Israel, a
relatively new group with
a central tenet that BDS is
antisemitic, set the tone at
the outset of the event. She
fi rst started planning for the
rally after antisemitism spiked
during the Israel-Gaza confl ict
in May,
She spoke of the “shared
promise for our children, that
they will be free to live as
proud Jews, and exercise their
religious liberties granted by
the United States Constitution,
free to wear their yarmulkes
and Magen Davids and free
to speak their love of Israel
without being attacked in the
streets of New York or Los
Angeles.” Landa, like other speakers,
named lawmakers on the left
or the right who have in recent
months incurred accusations
of antisemitism. Mentions of
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota
Democrat whose criticism of
Israel has been seen by Jewish
groups and others as crossing
into antisemitism, notably
garnered much louder boos
than those of Marjorie Taylor
Greene, a Georgia Republican
who has drawn fi re for peddling
antisemitic conspiracy theories
and for likening coronavirus
restrictions to Nazi laws on
multiple occasions.

Major mainstream groups
like the Anti-Defamation
League, the American Jewish
Committee and B’nai B’rith
International, as well as the
Orthodox Union and Reform
and Conservative movements,
signed on as sponsors, but few
of their representatives spoke.

Elisha Wiesel, son of
Holocaust survivor and Nobel
laureate Elie Wiesel, appeared
to nod to the concerns of
some liberal groups — that
criticism of Israel and support
for the Palestinians would be
confl ated with antisemitism l