Yesterday’s attack–a hate crime–at Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall hit me hard. Painful for me personally because I know people who were there. Painful because this was an antisemitic attack on fellow Jews who were peacefully calling out the injustice of the continued captivity and inhumane treatment of hostages taken on October 7, 2023. Painful because one of the victims is a Holocaust survivor.
Whatever one’s views on the conflict in the Middle East, we must all condemn this premeditated hate crime and not allow it to become normalized. The promise of America is a land free of bigotry, where we remain clear about what is right and what is wrong, and where we settle differences through dialogue and the democratic process, not through violence.
Yesterday’s attack hits home in the same way that the King Soopers shooting in Boulder did a few years ago. The Boulder community is resilient and resolute in its values where all people are welcome and hate has no place. I am praying for all twelve victims to fully recover from this heinous attack.
Each year, I give an address on rising hate and antisemitism at Denver’s Babi Yar memorial—which commemorates one of the many massacres during the Holocaust—about the dangers of antisemitism, rising hate, and demonization. Last fall, I explained in my remarks that we witnessed in 2022, “the highest number of antisemitic incidents across the United States” since 1979 when they were first measured. In Colorado, in the wake of October 7th, these attacks rose over 42% from 2023 to 2024. These attacks are fueled by hatred, demonization, and, in this case, a dangerous and abhorrent belief that politically motivated violence is justified.
These statistics, as revealed yesterday, are people’s lives who are forever scared by violence, harassment, and trauma. I have sat with victims and communities to help heal and find purpose in standing up against hate. That’s why I believe deeply that the attack in Boulder, and all such attacks, are an affront to the promise of America—“a land where bigotry has no sanction.” That’s how our first President, George Washington, put it in a letter to a Rhode Island synagogue.
In that letter, he said that he wished the Jewish community in America “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
President Washington also spoke of the importance of bringing light into our world, stating: “May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths.” That, too, is the promise of America and what drew my family here after surviving the Holocaust. Let us hold fast to that tradition and do our part to help lightness prevail over darkness.
Thank you all for standing for what is right in America and for a Colorado where hate has no quarter.
