More than 30 cars and homes in our neighborhood and the Orthodox synagogue across the street had been defaced with anti-Semitic, racist and sexually obscene graffiti. They’d painted “Jew” on an SUV and thrown a rock through its window. They’d painted swastikas on a memorial at Rodfei Sholom; KKK on its gate; “nigger” on the congregation’s stately sign. They’d done the same in parts of our neighborhood, including defacing the north entrance with black swastikas. The graffiti on our street was barely legible and wasn’t specifically anti-Semitic or racist, and the victims were mostly not Jews and white, so there, the vandalism seemed random. Our house had been spared, but our next-door neighbor’s truck had been spray-painted.
The other acts of graffiti, however, weren’t random at all. When I heard what happened, I felt as if the core had fallen out of me. The news camera had been there not because of graffiti in a rich suburb, but because something powerfully disturbing had happened: Hate had come to my neighborhood in the middle of the night. Or, perhaps even worse — hate had been there all along, and finally reared its ugly head.