As “Prairie Home Companion” radio show host Garrison Keillor might say if he were speaking for Wisconsin Jewry and looking back over 2005, “Well, it has been a quiet year in Madison and Milwaukee, my largest home towns.”
And it was, at least as far as anti-Semitic incidents are concerned.
Both Paula Simon, executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, and Steven H. Morrison, executive director of the Madison Jewish Community Council, recently told The Chronicle that there were no significant anti-Semitic incidents in either city during 2005.
“There has been no violence and no threats to Jewish institutions” during that year, said Simon about Milwaukee. It has been “a good year” with “no major stuff,” she said.
And from Madison, Morrison told The Chronicle in an e-mail, “This is the first time in my memory that no incidents of any kind were reported to us” during a year.
This is not to say the two cities have been entirely free of expressions of anti-Semitic sentiment.
The MJCCR’s 2005 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, whose release was announced late last week, lists several instances of “anti-Semitic expression, both written and verbal” that occurred last year. They include:
• A privately-owned sailboat spotted in a local yacht club named “Zyklon,” whose owner, when asked about it, said he named the boat after the gas used to murder Jews in Nazi death camps during World War II.
• At one of the local universities, a picture poster on the door of a faculty member’s office was defaced with a swastika drawn on the face of one of the professor’s Jewish colleagues.
• The distribution of white supremacist and anti-Semitic flyers in a Milwaukee neighborhood in June.
Madison, too, saw a distribution of hate literature. In December, a White Freedom Party publication called The Aryan Alternative was placed in driveways of people’s homes on the city’s west side.
Morrison said, “It would take many, many more years of non-activity to convince me that anti-Semitism in Madison was a phenomenon of the past.”
Simon also said in an interview in her office that underreporting of incidents, including incidents of expression, remains a problem. She said this may occur because people “do not know how to respond” to such instances.
She added that she recently gave a presentation about anti-Semitism at the Teen Day of Discovery, held Jan. 29. The teens there from “three different high schools in the North Shore” said that “they hear things frequently that might be considered anti-Semitic.”
When she asked the kids what they made of it, some of them attributed such comments to “ignorance or economic class issues.” One girl said that when she replied to such a comment by saying that she is Jewish, the speaker said, “I don’t mean you.”
Simon added that the teens didn’t appear to feel “threatened or ostracized.”
Nevertheless, “it troubles me that kids are hearing these things” and this is something the council “will focus on” this year.
Milwaukeeans wanting to report anti-Semitic incidents to the MJCCR or to obtain guidelines for reporting such incidents, call 414-390-5777 or visit the council’s Web site, www.mjccr.org.
Information for Madison is available from the MJCC, 608-278-1808 or www.jewishmad ison.org.
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