A Holocaust denier mounted a display at the public library in Marshfield.
Milwaukee Arab/Palestinian/ Muslim protestors expressed anti-Semitic and anti-Israel messages with signs and shouts before and during a Mideast scholar’s speech in Glendale.
In one Madison and one Milwaukee high school, individual Jewish students were assaulted by individual non-Jewish students who made anti-Semitic remarks.
These were the most dramatic of the few and largely minor anti-Semitic incidents that occurred in Wisconsin during 2003, according to the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, the Madison Jewish Community Council and the Anti-Defamation League’s Greater Chicago/ Upper Midwest Regional Office.
In Milwaukee, the MJCCR released its 2003 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents last week. As in previous years, “the pattern remains consistent,” with most of the less than ten reported incidents involving written or spoken “expression,” said MJCCR executive director Paula Simon.
In addition to the protest in Glendale last April during the speech by Daniel Pipes, other “expression” incidents included, according to the report:
• A Jewish organization received a series of crank telephone calls, including a voicemail message, “I am Adolph Hitler; kill the Jews.”
• The anti-Semitic National Alliance organization distributed some written materials in Elm Grove, Brookfield and Mt. Pleasant.
• A swastika was carved in an ice pond visible to a Jewish institution.
In the case of the one violent attack in the Milwaukee high school, which the family did not want discussed in detail, Simon said that the MJCCR had spoken with the school’s administration and families of other Jewish students there. It had concluded that “this was an isolated event” and that there is “no culture of prejudice, racism or intolerance at that school.”
The perpetrator was both charged in juvenile court and was subject to disciplinary action by the school’s administration, she added.
A similar incident was reported in Madison, said Steven Morrison, executive director of the Madison Jewish Community Council. In October, a Jewish freshman was harassed and beaten by a larger, non-Jewish student who made anti-Semitic remarks at the time.
There, too, the incident was isolated and “was handled well by the school and the authorities,” Morrison said.
There were more vandalism incidents reported in Madison than in Milwaukee in 2003. Morrison said that a Jewish fraternity on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus had a window broken; the sign in front of Madison’s Chabad Lubavitch House was vandalized; and in the late summer a number of buildings, though not housing Jewish institutions, were spray-painted with racist and anti-Semitic graffiti.
But such incidents have been “few and far between,” said Morrison. Madison is a place “committed to diversity and pluralism and celebrating the differences we have.”
Though the Milwaukee organization was aware of the Marshfield incident, its 2003 audit made no mention of it because Marshfield is outside MJCCR’s area of focus. The Chicago ADL office will include the incident in its audit for the year, according to associate director Elana Stern.
Stern added that while she can’t discern a Midwest regional pattern yet, Wisconsin did not have the “most egregious” incidents in the region in 2003. The worst was the arson of the CANDLES Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute, Ind., in November, she said.
Morrison and Simon agreed that the Wisconsin movements opposing the U.S. war in Iraq have not been, as Simon said, “fueled or co-opted” by anti-Israel or anti-Semitic forces or groups, as has happened elsewhere.
In the Midwest generally, such linkages were “prevalent,” according to Stern, but it “has died down a bit,” she said.
All three agreed that the Jewish community underreports incidents; they encourage community members to report even minor instances of anti-Semitic expression or behavior.
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