My latest: they hate dead Jews, too

Over the weekend in London’s Camden Town, someone defaced a statue of Amy Winehouse.

The statue was unveiled in 2014, and is found at the edge of the Camden Market. It’s not far from where the Ramones played their first British show in 1976, or where the Clash recorded their first album, or the legendary Electric Ballroom – still going – where everyone from the Stones to Bowie to Sid Vicious played.

Winehouse was a soul and R and B singer, mainly, but she loved all of those other bands, so it made sense to have the statue in Camden Town. It depicts her with her signature beehive hairdo. And, so small you can easily miss it, a Star of David around her neck.

Not many people know Winehouse was a Jew, but she was. She was born into a Jewish family in North London in 1983, and attended synagogue maybe once a year. When she was little, she went to a Jewish Sunday school for a while.

And, so, over the weekend, someone defaced her statue. They glued a Palestinian flag to it, covering up the Star of David.

In the big scheme of things, a statue being defaced isn’t life-changing. A statue can be repaired – Winehouse’s has, already – and, most of the time, the person it depicts isn’t around anymore to notice.

But it upsets people, just the same, in a way that is hard for them to put into words. Online, some tried. “How low can some people go?” someone asked, and the Daily Mail noticed. “This is utterly disgraceful,” someone else wrote. “So sad to see this.”

The same reaction followed the defacing of Terry Fox’s statue in Ottawa, during the Ottawa occupation. Some “freedom convoy” types wedged a “Mandate Freedom” sign under his arm, and strapped an inverted Canadian flag to his front. People were angry about that, too.

It takes a deeply execrable person to deface a statue of a young man who raised money to fight cancer, or a young woman who simply had a lovely voice. It takes someone who is completely untethered from decency and reality.

But there’s a qualitative difference between those two acts of vandalism. In the case of Terry Fox, it was done to make a political statement. In the case of Amy Winehouse, it was done to make an anti-Semitic statement. To erase a Jew’s identity, even one who was beloved. To express hatred.

Where does that hate come from? What motivates it?

Acts of intimidation and violence against living Jews have become almost commonplace, these days. Firebombing of synagogues, and elementary schools shot up, in Montreal; community centres set ablaze or vandalized in Fredericton and Montreal; firebombing and targeting of Jewish restaurants and delis in Toronto; homes shot up or spray-painted in Winnipeg and small-town Ontario; even a hospital where all can go, which Jews sometimes support with donations, attacked by a mob.

Attacks like that, as noted, are attacks on living Jews. They’re like October 7, on a lesser scale. But to go after a Jew who is dead – like Amy Winehouse sadly is, her body finally giving out in 2011 – who does that? Who?

In her wonderful but unsettling recent bestseller, People Love Dead Jews, published before October 7, novelist Dara Horn tries to answer that question: that is, killing a living Jew – as Hamas and Gazans assuredly did on October 7, 2023 – is one thing. To erase them, to cancel their actual existence.

But to possess a hatred that is so virulent, so bottomless, that an anti-Semite is moved to lash out at a Jew who has been dead for more than a decade? That’s a more complete variant of hatred.

In her book, Horn recounts how Anne Frank’s diary has sold 30 million copies, and how the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam hosts over a million visitors every year.

But when a young Jew employed at Anne Frank House tried to wear his yarmulke to work? His employers told him to hide it under a ball cap. It took four months for the museum to reverse its decision. Writes Horn: “Four months seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.”

There are many hatreds. There are hatreds based upon skin color, or belief, or gender or sexual orientation, or political ideology.

Hatred for Jews is the worst one, perhaps – because it now extends to hatred of all Jews, whether living or dead.