Anti-Semitic incidents in the US reached their highest level last year since civil rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) began recording them in 1979. The incidents including assault, vandalism, and harassment increased by more than a third in just one year and reached nearly 3,700 cases in 2022, a new ADL report published Thursday found.
CNN And the upward trend is alarming. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which tracks incidents of anti-Jewish violence and bias, says they saw a 75% increase in anti-Semitism reports to the agency’s 25 regional offices after Israeli-Palestinian fighting began. The figure jumped from 127 incidents in the two weeks prior to fighting to 222 in the two weeks after violence broke out.
Last October, a former student killed a University of Arizona professor who he believed to be Jewish, according to the ADL report. This February, a man was charged with two hate crimes after he allegedly shot two people who were exiting two separate synagogues in Los Angeles.
Earlier this month, Stanford University police launched a hate crime investigation after an antisemitic drawing containing swastikas and an image resembling Adolf Hitler was found on a Jewish student’s dorm room door.
“Despite the rise of antisemitism, there is still a perception in many people’s minds that Jews are not under threat, that they are successful and wealthy, and are not a targeted minority,” Mark Weitzman, scholar of the history of antisemitism and chief operating officer at The World Jewish Restitution Organization, told CNN.
The ADL report, which includes information gathered directly from victims and local community leaders, as well from police statistics, shows an increase across a range of hate-based incidents, from offensive comments to antisemitic slurs written on property, to physical attacks. In 2022, there was a 69% increase in attacks against visibly identifiable Orthodox Jews, the report found.
“The brazenness of these attacks, sometimes in broad daylight, is a huge concern,” Oren Segal, Vice President of the ADL Center on Extremism told CNN.
“The findings of our latest report quantify what a lot of people in the Jewish community have been feeling – that antisemitism seems to be popping up everywhere and often,” Segal said.
American Jews are disproportionately affected by hate crime compared to other religious groups, according to the FBI hate crime figures for 2021. Yet official law enforcement statistics of these incidents are notoriously underreported, experts told CNN. ADL records indicate that the number of anti-Jewish incidents (criminal and not) is more than three times higher countrywide than the FBI records of confirmed hate crimes show, and almost 1.5 times higher in New York City than what official police records reveal.
Every fourth American Jewish adult, Orthodox or not, was targeted in an antisemitic incident ranging from physical attacks to remarks in person or online, a separate survey by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) published in February found.
The AJC survey found that while both Jewish Americans and the general public see antisemitism as a problem, less than half of the general population think antisemitism has increased at least to some extent in the past five years, compared to about four in five Jewish Americans.
At the same time, designated terrorist group CAIR is complaining that the new definition of “anti-Semitism” will be a deterrent to Muslim hate speech about Israel.
As can be seen here, CAIR’s reports of anti-Muslim hate/bias are people getting in trouble for pro-Hamas statements and, or actions at work or at school.
Check it out – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIO-Wr3op3I
Anti WASP ism is on the rise too.
Muslums are the biggest cry bullies on the planet.
One act of harassment towards any group is one too many but I would love to the numbers that CAIR has posted of anti-Muslim harassment proven. I read where it complained about a little child looking and pointing at a woman in a burka and calling it anti-Muslim hate. The woman, if the incident actually took place, seems to have never been around children who are curious and to see a woman for the first time dressed from head to toe in a black sheet would certainly obtain my curiosity. On the other hand Jewish ladies with their children have been harassed and synagogues, businesses and homes have been proven to have been desecrated.