Not So Safe

On the night of February 28, 2005, federal judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow returned to her home in Chicago to find her husband and elderly mother lying dead in pools of blood, victims of .22-caliber gunshot wounds to the head. A tragedy, certainly, but a tragedy that couldn’t possibly affect me. Except that there was a distinct possibility that my family and I were the next targets.

In 2002, my father, a Jewish intellectual property attorney, accepted a pro bono case on behalf of the Oregon-based Church of the Creator. It claimed that the Illinois-based white supremacist organization World Church of the Creator had infringed on the Oregonians’ trademark rights by causing confusion between the two separate and ideologically different organizations. The World Church was headed by Matthew Hale, who had made news in the past; he was denied admission to the Illinois Bar Association on character and fitness grounds even though he’d passed the bar exam and held a law degree.

Hale and his followers believe that the Caucasian race is superior to the “mud races,” which include Blacks, Arabs, Hispanics, Asians, and especially Jews, the masterminds of an anti-Aryan plot. In Hale’s plan to achieve racial purity, each ethnicity would be returned to its continent of origin; Jews would be packed off to Madagascar. Nor was this harmless rhetoric. A disciple of Hale’s went on a shooting spree in 1999, killing two African Americans and wounding nine other people.

Although Judge Lefkow initially ruled in the supremacists’ favor, their jubilation was short lived; her ruling was overturned on appeal, leaving her to enforce the appellate court’s decision. She ordered Hale and his group to change its name, which they viewed as unwarranted government intervention. Furious, Hale refused to do so.

Then he contracted with someone to kill her. The hired gun was an FBI informant, and Hale was convicted of soliciting the murder of the judge. In an attempt to reduce his sentence, Hale claimed that Judge Lefkow was not the target; rather, he had been aiming for the “kike” attorney, my father. Soliciting the murder of a federal official comes with additional jail time; Hale’s forty-year sentence would have been substantially reduced if he had taken a hit out on a private citizen.

When Judge Lefkow found her family murdered a year later, the supremacists were the natural suspects. I found out about the attack on the nightly news and immediately called my parents, who were away on vacation.

My father sounded almost nonchalant as he told me he’d have his firm’s security team contact me. He’d been receiving threats since he took the case and had been in close touch with local FBI officials. I, however, never thought that I would be in danger because of my religion or ethnicity. I have never experienced religious bias. I have always considered myself white—immune, though sympathetic, to the racism that plagues other ethnicities. I even feel appropriately guilty for being a member of the oppressive majority.

Security officials are trained to scare you into compliance, and this one did his job admirably. I was told to get out of town if I could, for as long as I could, to vary my schedule until I did, avoid places I usually visited (the gym, the grocery store) and tell security personnel at the college where I taught and the doormen in my building about my situation. He also volunteered to inform local police. I took off the next day to a friend’s weekend house.

Hate crimes are simultaneously sensationalistic and horribly banal. They make news; we are appropriately outraged; we settle back into our lives. Statistics on hate crimes in the United States are available on the FBI’s website, where they are split into five different “bias motivations”: race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, and disability. And while most hate crimes consist of assault or vandalism, every year there are hate crime murders (between three and fourteen each year during 2003–7) in every category, except religion. Who were these people who hate...