They found him shaken but standing.

A 13-year-old Jewish boy, his morning bike ride to school on Monday in Crown Heights interrupted by a stranger’s fist. No words exchanged. No wallet stolen. Just another attack on another Jewish kid in a city where such violence has become routine.

The boy’s teacher, Yisrael Eliashiv, couldn’t mask his rage. “Pure hate,” he called it in a post on X. “I’m fuming to the point I’ve got a migraine.. You have kids who are 13 or 14 and have grown up with the attitude of ‘if you get assaulted in the street, just take it because nothing is gonna be done. Those are the symptoms not of a sick but of a dead and decaying society.”

Eyewitness accounts reported by the Algemeiner say the attacker was an African American male who fled on foot after beating the Jewish boy. Crown Heights Shomrim, the local Jewish patrol, got the call after the boy made it to school. They’ll do what they can, like always. Still, what came next cuts deeper as the student didn’t see the point in reporting it.

The numbers tell their own story. Antisemitic attacks make up two-thirds of New York’s hate crimes now, according to the New York City Police Department (NYPD) hate crimes statistics. Since last October, 385 Jewish residents have been targeted. Last week it was a man getting slashed downtown. Before that, Jewish kids as young as 10 were jumped on Albany Avenue.

Over the summer, two men spotted a 22-year-old Orthodox student visiting from Israel. “Are you Jewish?” they asked. The answer cost him dearly – one attacker drove a screwdriver into him while the other pummeled his face. They didn’t steal a thing. His religion was all they were after.

Tonight, somewhere in Crown Heights, a 13-year-old boy is doing his homework with a bruised face and a harder heart. His parents are probably telling him it’ll get better. But in a neighborhood where Jewish hatred seems to become the norm, those words are starting to ring hollow.