Despite a couple of high profile events covered in The Chronicle, 2001 appears to have been a mild year for anti-Semitic incidents in Wisconsin — even after the terror attacks of Sept. 11.
So reported the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations in its 2001 Anti-Semitic Incident Report, released to The Chronicle last week, and Steven Morrison, executive director of the Madison Jewish Community Council.
Even the two extensively reported events both involved expression rather than destructive or violent action. They were: an apparently Holocaust-denying former Waffen SS soldier lecturing to Kenosha high school students in October, and the publication of an anti-Semitic article in a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student newspaper in November.
There apparently has been little in the way of anti-Semitic vandalism, threat or violence directed at Wisconsin’s Jewish communities in 2001.
“There is no cause for concern or change,” said Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations. “We are not seeing different trends” from past years.
She added that in 2001, there were no instances of anti-Semitic graffiti reported in Milwaukee, nor incidents involving physical threats or harm.
The most potentially serious Milwaukee incident took place in June, when an anti-Semitic taxi cab driver harassed an elderly Jewish woman passenger, then held her walker hostage to get her to pay additional money above the value of her county-provided transportation voucher.
The woman, who lived in a Jewish community-owned facility, paid — and was able to get the cab’s number and its license number, and the name of the taxi company. According to Simon, the driver promptly was sanctioned and will no longer be used to transport passengers in that facility, but the woman’s family decided against trying to revoke the driver’s cab license.
The response to this incident demonstrates something else — that authorities in the Milwaukee area generally “are extremely responsive” to such incidents and cooperate well with Jewish organizations like the MJCCR, said Simon.
In Madison, there were several instances of anti-Semitic graffiti, but most of these appeared to involve school- or middle-school children, said Morrison.
But for the first time in many years, Morrison said, there were no instances of anti-Semitic vandalism of any Jewish community institution in Madison. Even the Hillel Foundation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was not targeted in that way “for the first time in many years,” Morrison said.
Moreover, neither Morrison nor any other Madison Jewish community official received any anti-Semitic hate mail in 2001, and “that’s unusual,” he said.
Morrison acknowledged that he and other Madison Jews were “holding our breath” after Sept. 11 and during the various violent incidents in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But while there have been discussions, there “were no actions” even on the UW campus, which has had a history of tensions between Arab/Muslim and Jewish students.
Simon said most anti-Semitic or anti-Israel reactions to Sept. 11 that were reported to her office involved expressions found on the Internet. But the MJCCR didn’t include such instances in its audit because it was difficult to tell if such things were originating locally or were aimed at local people.
However, they demonstrate “the capacity of the Internet to spread and foment anti-Semitism,” said Simon.
Neither Simon, Morrison nor Shoshana Buchholz-Miller, associate director of the Chicago-based Upper Midwest Region office of the Anti-Defamation League, reported any significant incidents outside Milwaukee or Madison besides the Kenosha incident.
Simon expressed concern that while Jewish community institutions have been vigilant about reporting incidents to the MJCCR, many Milwaukee Jewish individuals either do not know how to report incidents or dismiss some incidents — such as things heard or overheard on the job — as insignificant.
“Even when you overhear something in the office, it’s important for us to know about it” in order to be aware of “what’s out there,” she said.
At the MJCCR, anti-Semitic incidents are the purview of the Task Force on Anti-Semitism and Constitutional Law, co-chaired by Inna Pullin and Joel Pittelman.
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