Free Republic

As New York baked under another summer heat wave, parts of the Riverdale neighborhood in the Bronx, home to a large Jewish community, lost power after Con Edison shut off electricity to protect its equipment.Con Edison announced the outages Thursday, saying it temporarily cut power to some customers in Riverdale to reduce strain on the electrical grid and speed up service restoration. The utility directed affected residents to report outages and seek relief at city cooling centers.

In a recent spate of hate crime attacks on Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, virtually all the perpetrators have been African-American, according to local activists, elected officials, and victims. Yet at a recent news briefing reporting an 82 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the city, when New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio was asked about the attacks, he connected the attacks to national trends, blaming “white supremacy” and “nativism.” “It’s really clear that forces of white supremacy have been unleashed,” de Blasio said in a press conference earlier this month. “A lot of folks used to be...