Ellison hears Jewish community's hate-crime fears.

Byline: Kevin Featherly

Except for a few incidents when he was a child, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey says his life has largely been free from anti-Semitism. But that changed suddenly, Frey said last week, after he took a public stand against President Donald Trump's Oct. 10 visit to the city.

"I've felt it in a real severe, explicit fashion," Frey told a crowd at Temple Israel, during an Oct. 16 stop on Attorney General Keith Ellison's ongoing hate-crime listening session tour.

"I've been called 'kike' and 'an effin' Jew,' I can't tell you how many times," Frey said. "I've been called, more on the implicit side, a 'globalist' even more times."

The phenomenon of scapegoating Jews has made an unwelcome return, according to the mayor. "It's been rising over the last years dramatically," Frey said. "I've felt it rise."

Frey's was the first of perhaps a dozen stories told by local Jewish community members while Ellison scribbled notes. The gathering was equal parts therapy session and suggestion box, though the concerns shared were not for Jews alone.

Various speakers addressed the deadly bullets that recently flew inside a Christchurch, New Zealand mosque as well as a Pittsburgh synagogue. They were as worried about the firebombing of a Bloomington Muslim community center as they were about the swastikas painted on trees in Edina's Pamela Park.

Several also lamented the bulked-up security that houses of worship, across religions, have been forced to deploy in response to violence.

"It's critical to see the intersections here," said Isaiah Breen, communication director for Jewish Community Action and a forum panelist. "The same folks who are interested in coming to our houses of worship and hurting or killing us also want to do that for many other communities."

What's needed to combat those forces, he said, is solidarity.

Personal anecdotes

One 77-year-old Jewish man at the session spoke of his near-fatal beating in 1965, when he was a young soldier still in boot camp. He survived the attack, he said, because a Christian soldier stepped in to fight beside him.

A Jewish woman spoke of being confronted by two Muslim women in the store where she worked, after they noticed her Star of David necklace. "'Death to you,'" one customer hissed. "'I don't buy anything from a goddamned Jew,'" said the other.

Terry Gips, a friend of the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, described the anti-Semitic hate mail and death threats that the late senator used to...