Rabbis from Ukraine and Italy were among the witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing (Catherine Reid/Medill).
WASHINGTON — When comedian Seth MacFarlane joked about Jews running Hollywood during the Academy Awards, the Anti-Defamation League quickly labeled the remark “offensive and not remotely funny.”
An official of the ADL told a congressional hearing Wednesday that remarks like McFarlane’s are part of a growing trend of anti-Semitism around the world, especially noticeable in Europe.
At a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on anti-Semitism, Andrew Srulevitch, director of European Affairs for the ADL, said the problem has become severe in Greece.
Srulevitch cited Golden Dawn, the fascist and third most popular party in the country that’s openly anti-immigrant and sells copies of Mein Kampf in its bookstore.
“Jewish communities feel extremely vulnerable,” Srulevitch said.
A recent ADL survey of 5,000 Europeans found that the overall level of anti-Semitism in Hungary rose to 63 percent of the population, in France it increased to 24 percent and in Spain it rose to 53 percent.
Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., chairman of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health, global human rights and international organizations, said anti-Semitism is not confined to Europe. He cited figures from a recent U.S. survey that showed Jews, while only 2 percent of the population, are the victims of 63 percent of religious hate crimes
“Unparalleled since the dark ages of the Second World War, Jewish communities on a global scale are facing verbal harassment, and sometimes violent attacks against synagogues, Jewish cultural sites, cemeteries and individuals,” Smith said.
Katrina Lantos Swett, chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, quoted her father, the late Thomas Lantos, a California Democrat who was the only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress.
“We must heed the injunction of my late father….who said, ‘The veneer of civilization is paper thin; we are its guardians and we can never rest,’” Swett said.
Willy Silberstein, chairman of the Swedish Committee Against Anti-Semitism, said silence in the face of anti-Semitism “is never again an option.”
Silberstein told the story of Rabi Shneer Kesselman, an Orthodox Jew who was harassed in the Swedish city of Malmo recently.
“People spit at him, throw cans after him, threaten him and call him things like bloody Jew,” Silberstein said.
Silberstein added that much of the discrimination he has seen comes from Muslim immigrants from the Middle East who saw the effects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Elisa Massimino, president and CEO of Human Rights First, said U.S. political leaders should confront hate speech as a one way to combat anti-Semitism around the world.
“Through your relationships with politicians in other countries….call out the lack of counter-speech by political leaders in the face of anti-Semitism,” Massimino said.
Religious author and commentator Eric Metaxas also pushed for the U.S. intervention in the crisis of religious liberty in his testimony.
“We used to lead the world in this,” Metaxas said. “We hardly do anymore.”
