Vaccine Refusal Spreads the Virus of Antisemitism

A sad sight has returned to the streets of New York -- and doubtless, to other cities around the country in which a growing majority of residents have vaccinated themselves from COVID-19. People are wearing masks again inside residential and office buildings, in grocery stores and even outdoors in the heavy summer air. I can only share impressions at this stage, but the atmosphere seems a little more relaxed than in 2020 when the absence of a vaccine meant that mask-wearing, however unpleasant, was a public-health requirement. At a bustling store I visited last week in Manhattan, I observed that approximately half the people there were properly masked, another third wore their masks dangled around their chins, and the remainder weren’t bothering at all. (Happily, no one was yelling at anyone else about it.)