Between a Boulder and a Hard Place  

I had come to Boulder, Colorado, with a question. After a firebomb attack in broad daylight, has Boulder become a microcosm of a story now playing out across America, where the radicalized left has created a permissible environment for violence? In this liberal Colorado enclave, the local council has been hijacked, having become a forum for anti-Israel agitating rather than the boring business of keeping the streets clean

There’s bold. Then there’s Boulder.

Bold means hosting a Jewish festival one week after a terror attack. Bolder still means doing it right on the very grass where Molotov cocktails flew just the week before, when an illegal Egyptian national shouting “Free Palestine” hurled Molotov cocktails and aimed a flamethrower at a crowd of Jewish families on a solidarity walk for the hostages still being held in captivity in Gaza. Later, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who has been charged in state court with 118 counts, including attempted murder, assault, and illegal use of explosives, told police that he was driven by a desire “to kill all Zionist people.”

In the center of the Boulder Jewish Festival, where music was meant to echo and children were meant to dance, a simple barricade curves inward like a wound still open on the spot where the grass still remembers. Just days ago, this was the scene of the firebomb attack on a peaceful march for Israeli hostages, a solidarity walk organized by the local Boulder chapter of Run for Their Lives, a national group that’s been sponsoring weekly events since October 7, 2023, in support of the hostages held in Gaza. Just a week ago, this gentle slope became the site of another in a string of anti-Semitic terror attacks. Fifteen injured. One elderly woman nearly killed.

Now it’s a quiet, reverent island in the middle of an otherwise boisterous rally celebrating 30 years of Jewish life in Boulder. Bouquets of flowers, all as fresh as the scars etched in the minds of the onlookers, lean against the cold metal barricade. A handwritten sign at the far end reads, “Reject hate in all its forms.” Passersby instinctively slow their pace.

At the 30th annual Jewish Festival, attendees said to number in the thousands delivered a message that was loud, public and unmistakable: We won’t be intimidated.