In the documentary, Brittan Heller, the ADL’s first director of technology and society, said she saw the largest spike in antisemitism on social media after journalist Julia Ioffe wrote an extensive profile of Melania Trump.
And it’s easier to dispense with tropes and conspiracy theories when you’re talking to and talking about real human beings.” Antisemitism in the political discourseĪs chief political correspondent for CNN, Bash covered the antisemitic tropes that dominated the 2016 election and the reluctance of former President Donald Trump to call them out, including attacks on Jewish journalists. “Keep the mezuzah on your door – because it’s all about education, it’s all about normalization. “If you are observant and you want to wear a kippah, you wear a kippah,” she continued. “I’m speechless at the kind of response that I’m getting to this,” she said.īash said that what she had taken away from this is that while it’s in the DNA of Jews to stay quiet and not draw attention to themselves, as a defense mechanism for people who have been persecuted for thousands of years, “the right thing to do is, like my young son knew, innately to wear the Jewish star.” It’s all been positive.” Two people who emailed her said that after reading the story they have committed to wearing the Star of David necklace they kept in their drawer. “I got more reaction to almost anything I’ve ever done,” she said. In an op-ed published on Friday, Bash shared a conversation she had with her 10-year-old son Jonah last Hanukkah in which he asked her to wear a necklace with the Star of David to proudly display her Judaism.īash said the feedback she received after publishing the essay – including emails from strangers – was highly positive. Now a member of Temple Micah, a Reform synagogue in D.C., Bash displays a mezuzah at the doorway of her residence.
She went to the Reform movement’s Camp Harlam in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania and was bat mitzvahed at Temple Beth Or in New Jersey. She said some of her “vivid memories growing up was going to services on Friday nights and having Shabbat dinner” with her parents, Stuart and Frances Schwartz.
“Judaism has always been part of my life,” Bash said. “Very intuitively, I knew that it was severe antisemitism that upended and changed the trajectory of my family,” she said. Her grandfather told her stories about how the gypsies helped them get across the mountains to Hungary. A week after her mother was born, her grandmother learned that her entire family had been killed by the Nazis. “I honestly didn’t realize how much hate was zeroing in on Jews,” Bash said.īash, who is Jewish, said that her recent work “fits the sense of history and the sense of a family” growing up with grandparents who escaped the Nazis. The Anti-Defamation League tallied in 2021 the highest number of antisemitic incidents since it started tabulating antisemitism in 1979. In the opening part of the documentary, Paul Abbate, the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirms that the threat level against the Jewish community in America is at historic levels, higher than it is towards people of other religions.
“The numbers just made it, unfortunately, very newsworthy,” Bash said. The producer of the CNN documentary, Melissa Dunst Lipman, pitched the idea following the increased attacks and the hostage standoff in Colleyville. In an interview, Bash said she was honored when asked to do the project for the network, but was also sad that it was even necessary. She also spoke with Ruth Steinfeld, who survived a Nazi concentration camp after being taken to safety by a French organization hiding Jewish children, who said she sees the same kind of hate bubbling up in recent years. In the CNN documentary, “Rising Hate: Antisemitism in America” set to air on Sunday evening and available on demand beginning Monday, Bash visits various Jewish communities still reeling from recent attacks, including Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas and the Chabad of Poway synagogue in California. Three decades later, now a prominent anchor and the chief political correspondent at CNN, Bash is taking a lead role in amplifying those teachings amid a dramatic rise in antisemitic violence across the U.S. When Dana Bash was in her early 20s, her grandfather Frank Weinman took her on a family trip through his childhood towns in Vienna, Hungary and Slovakia along with a Nazi ghetto in Czechoslovakia to give them an up-close perspective of the horrors of the Holocaust and the lessons to be learnt.
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