Brooklyn Bar Association Tackles Antisemitism Litigation and Legal Advocacy at Holocaust Remembrance Event

As antisemitic incidents climb in New York and beyond, the city’s legal community reconsiders its responsibilities in defending civil liberties and confronting hate.

It is a grim paradox that New York City—home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel—has witnessed a surge in antisemitic incidents not seen in decades. In 2023, the city recorded more than 260 antisemitic hate crimes, according to the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force—a dispiriting 40% rise from the previous year and a stark reminder of old prejudices resurfacing in contemporary garb. This sobering reality framed the recent Brooklyn Bar Association (BBA) event, “Litigating Against Antisemitism,” held as both a Holocaust remembrance and a reckoning with the city’s present trials.

The BBA’s commemoration was more than a ritual nod to history. It centred on how litigators can use the tools of their trade—statute, precedent, and public advocacy—to counteract not just visible hate, but the subtler forms embedded in institutions and discourse. David Dince of Brandeis University and Ben Schlager of the National Jewish Advocacy Center shared the dais, delineating both the legal strategies and the moral ambiguities facing Jewish communities and their allies today.

Few would dispute the first-order implications for New York. When hate speech goes unchallenged, it does not remain inchoate: it mutates into vandalism, violence, and entire communities living in a state of low-level dread. For lawyers, especially those in the city’s storied legal societies, the stakes are not merely professional; they are existential. The profession must now weigh how aggressively to wield civil litigation, invoke federal and state anti-discrimination laws (notably Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and New York’s own Human Rights Law), or press for prosecutorial action in ambiguous cases.

As Messrs Dince and Schlager pointed out, simply prosecuting high-profile acts does not guarantee deterrence or justice. More often, they argued, it is the persistent, less-public skirmishes—in schools, workplaces, and online spaces—that set the tone for whether bias calcifies or recedes. The city’s lawyers are rediscovering the value—and limitations—of precedent; landmark cases from postwar New York and the 1960s heyday of civil rights litigation offer only partial guidance for today’s diffuse, digitally fuelled threats.

The legal response, therefore, is multi-layered. Civil suits against hate groups—modelled on the precedents set by the Southern Poverty Law Center—remain one route, though usually slow and expensive, often yielding symbolic rather than monetary victories. Criminal prosecutions can be swift but risk trampling on First Amendment protections, a line New York’s district attorneys must tread gingerly. Administrative remedies—such as challenging hate speech in publicly-funded settings—require sustained vigilance and, sometimes, the stomach for tedious regulatory wrangling.

What bodes for New Yorkers amid this upsurge in antisemitic sentiment? Recent polling by the Anti-Defamation League and Pew Research Center suggests that a palpable minority of Jewish residents are rethinking visible expressions of faith in public. Anecdotally, local synagogues now invest heavily in security apparatus; some yeshivas and community centres have adopted measures once associated with embassies or consulates. Soaring insurance premiums and the cost of litigation add a material gravity to the city’s already punishing expense ledger.

Yet, as is often the case in New York, the local becomes political. The City Council has ramped up hearings on antisemitism, vying with Albany for moral leadership and legislative spectacle. Mayor Eric Adams, under pressure from watchdog groups, recently announced a paltry allocation of $25 million to shore up security for Jewish nonprofits—a fraction of the sums disbursed in post-2016 hate crime waves. Meanwhile, older divides are re-emerging, often masked as debates over free speech, policing, or education. The legal community’s newly minted activism threatens to collide with entrenched skepticism—not to mention an electorate weary of culture-war litigation.

Lawyers in the age of algorithmic bias

New York’s dilemmas are not unique. Across the Atlantic, figures in France and Germany grapple with similar waves of hostility and the limits of court-ordered remedies. In the United Kingdom, the Law Society’s guidance on anti-discrimination litigation echoes the Brooklyn Bar Association’s prescriptions, while Tel Aviv’s courts have become a global reference point for hate-crime jurisprudence. But nowhere is the legal, demographic, and cultural knot as Gordian as in Gotham.

The national political mood scarcely helps. With disinformation and conspiratorial thinking rampant, litigators face a Sisyphean task when antisemitic memes or tropes are laundered through social media ecosystems. Attempts to hold platforms liable under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act have stalled in Congress, and state-level efforts remain piecemeal. In this environment, even robust court victories risk being drowned out by digital noise—a Sisyphean task for legal advocates.

Still, New York’s legal lions have one distinctive edge: the city’s centuries-old civic compact, which, at its best, affirms the pluralism enshrined in the Constitution, and, at its worst, struggles in public. Wary as we are of pat optimism, we reckon the BBA’s event signals an overdue reinvigoration of that compact—reminding lawyers that the fight against antisemitism is not simply about preserving memory, but about shaping the terms of daily civic life.

Washington may dither, and Albany may posture, but in the end, New York’s lawyers—by litigating relentlessly, even pedantically—can bend not just statutes but social norms. It is no panacea; there will be pyrrhic victories and frustrating appeals. But vigilance, procedural as much as rhetorical, remains the city’s best hope.

As the bar weighs solemn remembrance against daily responsibility, New Yorkers will judge its efforts by outcomes, not oratory—a standard as brisk and unyielding as the city itself. ■