A Little Blue Square

This is not about the Patriots, a former quarterback, or how owner Robert Kraft plans to rebuild the team. In fact, it’s not about football at all. It’s about “a little blue square” and how Kraft and others hope it will change the way we think about antisemitism and the 2.4 percent of our population who are Jews.

If you watched the NBC sitcom “The Voice” on Monday and didn’t leave the room during the commercials, you will have seen the little blue square. It appeared just before the break, a small patch of blue taking up 2.4 percent of the screen. It was followed by the first ad of a campaign to enlist more Americans to stand up against anti-sematic hate.

In a recent audit, the Anti-Defamation League found that 2022 saw the largest number of attacks against Jews – assault, harassment and vandalism – since the organization started tracking these figures in 1979.

If you think antisemitism is not a problem in Stoneham, recall the morning after Halloween last fall when the 11-year-old daughter of a Jewish family, coming down the front steps, found six swastikas on their lawn, along with hateful messages and the words “Hell bound. Have fun!” Other phrases included “Jesus Hater” and “Jew Bitch.”

The targeted family later posted on Facebook: "Words cannot express how it felt waking up and finding this on my front stairs."

“When the economy sputters, when a virus spreads, people crave a scapegoat, and Jews have long been a target,” a Washington Post reporter wrote about the incident. But there’s more to it than a poor economy and an epidemic. Antisemitism is at the heart of the white nationalist movement. It drove extremists to violence at the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. And it was the motivation for the 2018 massacre of 11 Jews in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. And it was present at the Mar-a-Lago lunch former President Trump had with Holocaust deniers in November.

Appearing on morning TV this week, Kraft wore a little blue square on his lapel. He explained why the campaign is directed at the vast majority of Americans who are not Jews. He hopes the little blue square will be a reminder that when non-Jews stand up, speak up against hate speech, counter jokes and slurs, hold white supremacists accountable, antisemitism will be defeated.

I hope to see the little blue squares in Stoneham. Soon.