When Buford Furrow surrendered Wednesday, he reportedly told police he had emptied an assault rifle on a Jewish day camp in Southern California as a "wake-up call to America to kill Jews." What Furrow accomplished with his despicable act, to the contrary, was to unite American Jewry by reawakening the single reliable source of identity left in an ever more fragmented community: the fear of anti-Semitism.
Several months before Furrow's attack, and a similar assault on Orthodox Jews as well as other minorities in the Chicago area, the American Jewish Committee released some startling poll results. The survey found that 62 percent of American Jews named anti-Semitism their greatest danger. Intermarriage was a distant second, at 32 percent.
Such a finding seemed inexplicable in a nation where 34 Jews serve in Congress -- including both senators from Wisconsin, that overwhelmingly Christian and heavily German state, as well as from California, site of Furrow's rampage -- and where the rate of interfaith marriage hovers between one-third and one-half by various estimates. But the primal fears borne of two millennia of exile, culminating in the Holocaust, yield only begrudgingly to the reality of American tolerance -- some might say ardor -- for Jews.