Anti-Semitism: Journalistically parsing its current upsurge both here and abroad

I recently spent time in Costa Rica where I was able to visit the nation’s central Jewish “compound” in San Jose, the capital city. My guide was a member of one of the country’s leading Jewish families.

I called it a compound — as opposed to a campus — because that’s how it felt. High concrete walls that seemed more appropriate for a military facility than what I actually encountered — a broad, grassy, central plaza surrounded by a small kosher restaurant, a community history and Holocaust museum, a private Jewish school, a large synagogue I was told is filled on important Jewish holidays and for rites of passage, a senior citizens center, and assorted other community offices.

Had I not been escorted by a member of a leading Costa Rican Jewish family, my wife and I would have had to submit, for security reasons, our identifying information eight days in advance of a visit. As it turned out, thanks to our friend, we just show up and were whisked past the armed guards waiting outside the compound’s thick metal doors.

All this in a nation with only about 3,000 Jews — most able to trace their ancestry to World War II-era Poland — and who our guide insisted face relatively little overt anti-Semitism or anti-Israel sentiment. And yet they're fearful. Why?

Because Jews across the world — particularly so in Europe but also in tiny Costa Rica and even the United States — increasingly feel insecure because of a rising tide of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel actions — the two are often wrongly conflated, by both sides — being reported in the international press, as they should be.

The majority of GetReligion readers, I’m sure, are familiar with this turn of events. But let’s probe a bit deeper. What’s causing this upsurge today?

Is it an ugly resurfacing of the historical anti-Semitism that Jews have faced since the earliest decades of Christianity's split from Judaism, the first of the big three Abrahamic faiths?

Or is it a product of the further globalization of Islam, sparked in part by Muslim immigrants fleeing poverty and violence in their native lands, and the impact this and their general attitudes toward Israel has had on the societies in which they've resettled?

I’m writing this sitting on the deck of a rainforest lodge in a remote corner of southwest Costa Rica just a few miles north of Panama. And I’m wondering; when will today’s afternoon tropical downpour begin?

They don't call them rainforests for nothing.

The forest surrounding the Golfo Dulce is thick and seriously humid, filled with a dazzling variety of climbing, slithering, flying, and just plain-old walking wildlife doing what they can to survive and multiply. (My wife would be happy to do without the gazillions of insects, but it just ain't a rainforest without them. Sorry.) And the best part?

Virtually all the hills and mountains here are government protected. No hunting, no logging -- no human habitations other than a few widely scattered, and small, lodges along the gulf’s shoreline and reachable only by small boat.

Given where I am, is it any wonder that the following two stories caught my attention the day previous to my arrival here last week?

The first was from The New York Times, detailing the rapid loss of rainforest environments around the globe -- and their importance to slowing the growing planetary upheaval we call climate change. Click here for that story. If you happen to know little about how critical rainforests are to the global environment, or how fast they're disappearing, please read this piece in full. Consider it a crash course.

The second piece is from the Washington Post. It carries the enchanting dateline, “ABOARD THE SHIP MORE SPACIOUS THAN THE HEAVENS.” That’s the name of a ship commanded (not literally; I'm sure he didn't steer it) by the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, one of the world's most environmentally oriented global religious leaders.

Just goes to show you that while you may be a staunch theological traditionalist -- is there any Christian body more traditionalist in form than the Orthodox churches? -- you can still be quite progressive on other issues. This is one reason the GetReligion team is not fond of journalists pinning shallow labels on people with complex beliefs.

Here’s the top of the story written by Juliet Eilperin, who deserves a shoutout for her prolificacy and ability to toggle between being the Post’s senior national affairs correspondent chronicling the Trump administration’s policy changes, and global environmental stories.

(Wait. Maybe that’s how she stays sane in today’s Washington.)