JNS
“This is the first time in American history that the same exact synagogue has been hit twice for the same fundamental cause, which is blaming the Jew for the problems that the perpetrator perceives exist,” Gary Zola told JNS.
Two attacks at a synagogue in Jackson, Miss., some 60 years apart, had the same root: antisemitism in the American South.
So argues historian Gary Zola, a rabbi, executive director emeritus at the American Jewish Archives and professor emeritus of U.S. Jewish history at Hebrew Union College, the seminary for Reform Judaism.
The Ku Klux Klan bombed both Beth Israel Congregation and its rabbi’s home in 1967 at the height of the U.S. civil-rights movement, but Zola told JNS that Jew-hatred, and not the synagogue’s support of equal rights for blacks, was the motivating force, just as it was in Saturday’s arson attack.
More than a dozen synagogues were bombed in the South during the fight for civil rights, but never before had the same building been hit twice, according to Zola.
“The changes may be different, but the person who’s the scapegoat historically is always the Jew,” Zola told JNS. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the irony is, and to me, this is the first time in American history that the same exact synagogue has been hit twice for the same fundamental cause, which is blaming the Jew for the problems that the perpetrator perceives exist in America.”
Examples include blacks gaining power. Legalization of abortion. Gay marriage. New technology—television then, social media now—changing the way Americans consume news and view their society.
“What was upsetting people in the ’50s and ’60s in the South was what you would call cultural change, a struggle against the cultural issues that these people in the South at that time held dear and didn’t want to face up to changing,” Zola told JNS.
“Now the issue may not be the battle of civil rights and desegregation,” he said. “But I think it’s quite evident that there are people all over America who are battling to hold on to some kind of America that they think has been taken away from them or is being taken away from them, and they want to fight back.”
The suspect in the arson, Stephen Spencer Pittman, admitted that he set fire to the only synagogue in Jackson “due to the building’s Jewish ties,” according to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi. Pittman reportedly referred to Beth Israel as the “synagogue of Satan,” according to investigators.
Zola said that a lot of attention has been paid to the bombings of churches during the fight for civil rights, but more than a dozen synagogues were hit as well.
“The reason for that, of course, was very similar to what is happening today,” he told JNS. “Back in the late ’50s and ’60s, the bigots in the South and, by the way, there was quite a bit of bigotry in the South at this time.”
“Again, we Northerners tend to think that after the Holocaust, there was this period of regret and an effort to kind of look down on antisemitism, anti-Jewish bigotry, but that’s a skewed view,” Zola said. “In the South, you have real bigotry toward the Jews, and the Jews are a very pronounced minority in the American South.”
Some Southerners may have blamed Jews for the civil-rights movement, according to Zola.
“One of the things that the bigots in the South begin to talk about is, well, you know, the blacks would not be advocating for themselves this way, and they wouldn’t be so uppity if it weren’t for the Jews,” he said.
‘A strong, strong presence’
Antisemitism was around in America 100 years before then, Zola said.
“Bigotry and antisemitism have a strong, strong presence in the South. It always has since the Civil War, not necessarily before, but since,” he told JNS. “It continues to this day, especially in remote places, once you get yourself out of the cities, and you go out into the very small rural communities.”
“I don’t want to cast everyone in the South with one brush, but this was a serious problem,” he said.
Even as Jew-hatred spiked following Israel’s response to the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, the war really had little to do with the rise in Jew-hatred, according to Zola.
“You say to yourself, ‘OK, so people have gripes about how Israel prosecuted the war in Gaza,” he told JNS. “The question then arises is why has that become the cause célèbre for these people who are angry, whereas you and I could name seven other places around the world, not to mention Ukraine, where none of this bothers them.”
“To me, there’s always a connection, because Israel is constantly referred to in the news as the Jewish state,” he said.
