Campuses and cities aren’t the only targets of activist ire, as the residents of Teaneck and other N.J. towns have discovered.
Campuses and cities aren’t the only targets of activist ire, as the residents of Teaneck and other N.J. towns have discovered.
O ver the six months since October 7, Jews and Jewish institutions in America have been the target of consistent attacks — both rhetorical and physical — from the pro-Palestinian left. Major demonstrations have roiled deep-blue urban centers across the country, shutting down traffic in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Protests have targeted popular tourist areas, key transit infrastructure, Israeli consulates and embassies, and Jewish organizations. College campuses, centers of progressive activism in normal times, went into overdrive after the Hamas attack. Jewish students were accosted by their peers, professors led celebrations of the October 7 atrocities as “justified resistance,” and pro-Palestinian rallies, with calls for “intifada revolution” and other intimidating rhetoric, have become commonplace. The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT testified to Congress over these antisemitic outbursts — famously embarrassing themselves, with two losing their jobs — as have Jewish students from various universities, but the campus climate of hostility to Jews persists.
These hotbeds of pro-Palestinian activism have been extensively covered by the conservative — and even, at times, the mainstream — media. What has gotten less coverage, however, is a far more disturbing trend: the activist Left taking its pro-Palestinian vitriol to the suburbs.
Throughout the Gaza conflict, we have seen various examples of this shift to the suburbs, but it usually involves far smaller, low-level examples of pro-Palestinian activism. Vandalism is the most common, as in the recent case of a swastika painted on a pro-Israel sign in front of a synagogue in the Philadelphia suburb of Bryn Mawr. But in one of the largest suburban Jewish communities in the country, the progressive activist set has brought the full pro-Palestinian playbook to bear.
Bergen County is home to the largest concentration of Jews in New Jersey, the state with the second-highest percentage of Jewish residents nationally. Three of the county’s boroughs, Teaneck, Englewood, and Bergenfield, have historically been the center of the tight-knit Jewish community, as they are today. They are home to the most religiously observant Jews in the county and the most Israel-affiliated Jews in the nation, as well as numerous synagogues, yeshivas, and kosher restaurants and markets. Just a short drive from Manhattan, these towns are quiet bedroom communities that typify the American suburbs. They have drawn increasing numbers of Jewish residents attracted by the vibrancy of the local community and its embrace by non-Jewish neighbors. Since October 7, this peaceful existence has been significantly disrupted.
The Bergen Jewish community has been the repeated target of anti-Israel protests since the Hamas massacre, but this has ramped up in intensity over the past month amid increased U.S. government pressure to wrap up the Israeli military campaign. Local town councils in Teaneck and Englewood have been disrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters after they passed resolutions in support of the victims of 10/7. Informational events promoting the sale of real estate in Israel, including one in March at a Teaneck synagogue, have seen large protests, with the number of pro-Palestinian demonstrators far outnumbering the Zionist counter-protesters. At that specific event, amid threatening behavior, attacks on passersby, and property damage, police made two arrests. Most pro-Palestinian activists involved in these protests come from a distance, including the large Arab enclave in Paterson known as “Little Ramallah,” several towns over.
These anti-Israel demonstrations are well organized on social media, supported by powerful activist groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), and often include token anti-Zionist Jewish representation, whether from leftist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) or the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic group called Neturei Karta. According to locals I spoke to, these chronic protests and threats to the Jewish community have resulted in concrete action taken to enhance security protocols at Jewish institutions in the area, including schools and synagogues. Local community leaders regularly send out alerts about planned protests, forcing changed plans, new precautions, and, sometimes, the removal of visible signs of Jewish identity. For one resident who spoke to me anonymously because of privacy concerns, these protests explicitly target Jewish neighborhoods with the intention of disrupting residents’ daily lives and re-traumatizing a community that was deeply affected by Hamas’s barbarism in Israel.
Two back-to-back events that occurred just last week are a perfect microcosm of how the tactics perfected in cities and on campuses have migrated to these New Jersey suburbs. The first, which took place on March 31, was ostensibly labeled a “car rally” but was, in reality, a blockade of one of the region’s — if not the nation’s — busiest roads. In this show of intimidation, keffiyeh-clad protesters halted traffic on Route 4 heading into New York City, blasting anti-Israel and antisemitic slogans and waving Palestinian flags. These convoys originate in Paterson but don’t begin their harassment campaigns until they reach majority-Jewish areas. According to locals, these “rallies” have been increasing in number and have affected not only major thoroughfares but residential neighborhoods. One Englewood resident stated that these malign parades have deliberately targeted Jewish neighborhoods and synagogues, frightening many community members. And this is precisely the point, as evinced by the social-media posts of the event’s organizer, which include a video of the 3/31 “rally” with the caption “Teaneck NJ will never be the same.” Police presence has been spotty and is usually limited to escorting these cars to check potential escalation. For some members of the Jewish community, this reactive approach from the authorities is frustrating and shows the need for a greater degree of community action.
That need for unity was tested the very next day, as an anti-Israel demonstration was slated to target a Teaneck synagogue that was hosting a fundraiser for the Israeli first-responder group ZAKA, a volunteer organization that collects and assembles human remains in the aftermath of horrific killings to give them a dignified religious burial. The synagogue that held the event, Congregation Bnai Yeshurun, is located in the heart of a largely Jewish neighborhood. The demonstration was widely promoted on social media, including smears of ZAKA — whose members selflessly perform duties that few others could bear — as “the Zionist organization fueling the Gaza genocide.” Other posts called factual information about Hamas atrocities “false claims” and said that Jews had invented imaginary massacres to cover up the deaths of terrorist fighters. The local police expected a sizeable crowd to protest in front of the synagogue, and indeed a large number showed up. But what was surprising was that the crowd was overwhelmingly in support of Israel — one attendee said it was possibly ten to one — often drowning out the pro-Palestinian demonstrators with songs, positive messages, and the waving of American and Israeli flags.
For several attendees, this was an opportunity to show up for their community, take their safety and cause into their own hands, and demonstrate that the repeated attempts at intimidation would be met with strength and unity. Ami Kozak, an Englewood resident, said he attended to show solidarity and oppose the “ill-informed,” “far-left” protesters who have shown up at almost “anything Jewish or Israel-related” since 10/7. Kozak and other attendees lamented the general ignorance of the protesters and their full embrace of progressive campus-style activism. Harold Hoffman, who responded to a call from local rabbis to join the counter-protest, said that he saw little to suggest that the pro-Palestinian side understood what ZAKA is and how it counts both Muslims and Jews among its volunteers. Another local, David Goldman, told me that he saw a few signs labeling ZAKA as “a lying terrorist organization.” Other placards alleged that documented Hamas atrocities, including mass rape, were “Zionist propaganda.”
The protesters chanted the by-now familiar violent slogans, including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” “Intifada now,” and “There is only one solution, intifada revolution.” It was clear from my conversations with the Israel supporters that the pro-Palestinian demonstrators did not seek dialogue but merely yelled, chanted, and waved their flags — among which were the trendy Yemeni and transgender banners. When they did engage, certain themes were repeated: the idea that Israel should not exist, the refusal to condemn Hamas crimes and calling it a “resistance movement,” and the framing of the conflict through a simplistic oppressor/oppressed dynamic. Although the police did a good job of keeping the protest nonviolent, some explicitly violent threats were leveled at pro-Israel counter-protesters. Goldman himself was targeted by a “rabid” protester waving a Palestinian flag, who said, “I want to put this pole through your heart,” a threat witnessed by Hoffman. Other pro-Israel attendees were called “high-grade dog food” and various other slurs by one particularly menacing protester, as seen in a video obtained by Tablet.
As the hour grew late and the demonstration petered out, however, the preponderance of pro-Israel counter-protesters seemed to have won the day. Their refusal to engage in violent rhetoric and their explicit embrace of American values — including an impromptu singing of the national anthem — showed this community to be joined in a just cause. The counter-protest felt so powerful for the local Jewish community that a planned march on the six-month anniversary of October 7 was canceled by its organizers, who said this would allow community members to attend a rally for the hostages at the U.N. in Manhattan. In a public statement, the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County declared that “Monday evening felt very much like the event we needed,” with community members standing “united, strong, and proud in the face of antisemitism and harassment.”
Nevertheless, many were left with mixed emotions. Hoffman, the son of Holocaust survivors, found the whole experience “frustrating” and lamented the fact that this trouble was being brought to a residential neighborhood by outside agitators. Goldman spoke of his sadness that such disruptive activity was being targeted at a house of worship and the “anxiety that this is what it has come to” for this tight-knit Jewish community. He said that the chronic protests have become a drain both emotionally and financially on these suburban towns, necessitating greater police presence and a heightened sense of threat awareness among locals.
Did any of the counter-protesters sense an end to these anti-Israel and antisemitic demonstrations in their communities? For Hoffman, as long as the war between Israel and Hamas continues and electoral politics plays a role in the American government’s policy, these protests will probably keep happening. For Goldman, the protests are the “social-media war coming to reality”; he sees online propaganda as a major driving force behind them. Kozak echoed these sentiments, saying that “you need to tell the truth and do what’s right, even if there is backlash.” Arguing that “Israel wins in the long run when it asserts its strength,” he said the local Jewish community would do so as well. This is a sentiment that will surely be tested if protests that justify barbarism against Jews continue to move out to the suburbs.