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No surrender
The shooting rampage in a Los Angeles Jewish day-care center draws attention from around the world, but does little to soften the resolve of gun supporters.
By Vivienne Walt
[08/12/99]

"Christian Identity is for pantywaists"
Right-wingers debate Buford Furrow's goals and his organizational ties.
By Jeff Stein
[08/12/99]

Guns and money
The owner of the firm that made the assault rifle used in the L.A. shooting was, until recently, a key George W. Bush fund-raiser.
By Jake Tapper
[08/11/99]

America the armed
Today anti-Semitism is virulent but rare, while guns are everywhere
By Harold Meyerson
[08/11/99]

L.A. killer's "wake-up call to America to kill Jews"
Anti-Semitism was the motive in Tuesday's shooting at a Jewish day-care center in Los Angeles.
By Vivienne Walt
[08/11/99]

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Several months before Furrow's attack, and a similar assault on Orthodox Jews as well as other minorities in the Chicago area, the American Jewish Committee released some startling poll results. The survey found that 62 percent of American Jews named anti-Semitism their greatest danger. Intermarriage was a distant second, at 32 percent.

Such a finding seemed inexplicable in a nation where 34 Jews serve in Congress -- including both senators from Wisconsin, that overwhelmingly Christian and heavily German state, as well as from California, site of Furrow's rampage -- and where the rate of interfaith marriage hovers between one-third and one-half by various estimates. But the primal fears borne of two millennia of exile, culminating in the Holocaust, yield only begrudgingly to the reality of American tolerance -- some might say ardor -- for Jews.

What has been striking about the reaction to the most visible and odious recent instances of anti-Semitism is the behavior of gentiles. A spate of bigoted vandalism four years ago in Billings, Montana, stirred 10,000 Christian households to display logos of a menorah in solidarity. The arson of three synagogues in Sacramento, Calif., in June brought 1,500 non-Jews, including 200 clergy, to a public meeting.

Yet against all this evidence of decency there persists a belief in many Jewish hearts, minds and institutions that anti-Semitism is immutable and omnipresent. Anti-Semitism persists, of course, and the proof has come in this summer's wave of hate crimes. But it persists on the loony margins, far from the American mainstream that 50 years ago gladly tolerated anti-Semitic quotas at Ivy League colleges, white-shoe law firms, tony neighborhoods and elite social clubs. Those actions harmed perhaps the majority of American Jews, if in insidious, bloodless ways.

Jews will be giving an undeserved power to one crackpot like Furrow -- a would-be mental patient with an assault rifle and a headful of white-supremacist dogma -- if they make him stand for anything larger than a tiny, albeit toxic, margin of American life. They will invest him with the very sense of importance the avenging Aryan surely craved when he bravely sprayed 70 bullets at unarmed children.

I am hardly immune to the panicked impulse to believe that America harbors a multitude of Jew-haters. My children go to day camp at a Jewish community center much like the one Furrow attacked, and the shootings terrified me. On the morning after, police officers monitored every arriving vehicle at their camp. Strolling through the hall on the way to my 5-year-old daughter's "Campfire Time" sing-along, I was interrogated by the camp director. The canvas bag holding my camcorder, I later realized, must have looked mighty suspicious.

But shouldn't reflex give way to reason? It is one thing -- and quite a sensible thing -- to track such fanatical groups as Christian Identity and the Order, as the FBI, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League already do. It is another to let bigots become the only catalysts for Jewish identity.

Next page | Does hatred by gentiles give Jewish life meaning?