It's the 1930s all over again …

… Flying While Jewish: Suspicion can fan the odor of intolerance. | City Journal. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

My husband and son now wear baseball caps over their yarmulkes whenever they fly, and they’ve never been accused of smelling since. A coincidence? Maybe. Or, if observant Jews being identifiable as such are more likely to be targets, then they would be less likely to be targeted if not immediately recognizable as Jewish. Mocking religious Jews seems to be in vogue. Christoph D’Haese, mayor of the Belgian city of Aalst, recently defended a grotesque float of giant, sneering Hasidic puppets standing on gold coins with money bags at their feet. Several dozen people on the float—dancing to a ditty about “getting extra fat” and filling coffers to make them “Jewishly beautiful”—were apparently just trying to have fun. “Carnival participants had no sinister intentions,” explained the mayor. It would be sinister, however, if soon the only visibly-Orthodox Jews in Europe were of the plastic sort atop this float. After an 8-year-old boy wearing a yarmulke was savagely attacked by strangers in the northern Paris suburb of Sarcelles, community leaders in both France and Germany have warned Jews in the past year not to wear headcoverings in public as they may be killed.