Joe Mendels pointed me to this report from the Associated Press concerning what Jewish organizations in Russia are calling a “…surge in antisemitic manifestations”.

In Ulyanovsk, a group of about a dozen young men painted swastikas Tuesday on
the walls of a synagogue and cursed at members inside, the Federation of Jewish
Communities of Russia said.

In Volgograd, anti-Semitic slogans were scrawled on a memorial to Holocaust
victims Sunday, the group said.

Last week, several young men burst into a synagogue in Nizhny Novgorod,
throwing religious books out a window and beating up a security guard, it said.
All three cities are in western Russia.

These vicious attacks upon the Jewish community have to be seen against the background of racist violence and hate crime in Russia more generally. The respected Sova Rights Center in Moscow documented hundreds of racist attacks in 2007, which resulted in a staggering 67 deaths, with a further 550 injured.

There are several observations to be made here, most obviously the apparent indifference of the Russian authorities, as highlighted in the Sova report. But western participants in the debate on anti-Zionism and antisemitism should also take stock of events in Russia and other former communist countries, especially those who insist that we are now living in a post-antisemitic age in which accusations of antisemitism are a devious trick used by pro-Israel organizations to stifle debate.

If anything shows that this is not the case - that antisemitism, along with racism, continues to be a living phenomenon with often deadly consequences - it’s the mean streets of Russia’s cities.