According to the ADL, antisemitism is on the rise:
There's something odd about this. After years of modest declines, there's a sudden doubling in 2016-17 and then another doubling in 2021-22. Altogether, antisemitic incidents have quadrupled over the past seven years.
Does that seem plausible? Is it an artifact due to the rise of smartphones making it easier to report incidents? Or because we've gotten more sensitive to small offenses we would have ignored in the past? Or because, as a nation, we've genuinely gotten more antisemitic? That seems unlikely, especially since antisemitic hate crimes reported by police departments have stayed absolutely steady over the past two decades.
Your guess is as good as mine here. But if, in fact, antisemitic incidents haven't truly gone up since 2015, it means the amount of overt antisemitism on university campuses has been pretty low for the past couple of decades. I would be interested in knowing if there's any source for more reliable data about this over time.
It exploded with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, when he made it OK to be a racist in public again. The same people who hadn't been voting for decades (presumably due to a dearth of racist candidates) were also keeping their bigotry to themselves because it was frowned on in public.
That's my guess. No way it is a coincidence that this happens as Trump runs for president.
This. How is this not obvious?
I, also, suspect that this is the major factor.
There likely is some aspect of the more recent upswing (2020-present) that is related to the Israel-Hamas conflict (both in the sense of increased activity perceived as anti-Semitic and in actual increased activity), but this doesn't explain the earlier rise 2016-2018.
Even the earlier peak may not indicate an actual increase in anti-Semitism per se, but instead an increase in its -expression- as people became more comfortable being overtly anti-Semitic.
The amount of Jew-Hate is staggering on the off brand message boards....everything is the fault of the conniving, secretive, mendacious Jew.
And that's just saying everything nicely, it is much worse on the boards. I am frequently shocked by the virulence of this and I sense I would not be surprised to see a 19th Century Russian /German type Pogrom against the Christ killing Jews.
Kevin, you just don't know...it is terrible out there. Best Wishes, Traveller
The amount of hate towards everyone is staggering on the off brand message boards.
But there was a high level of antagonism against Jews in Russia and Germany during the periods you are talking about. Today politicians, at least on the right where the anti-Semitism mostly lies, have to be defensive about any hint of anti-Semitism, while being free to be open about hatred of Muslims.
The defining feature of pograms was that although they were carried out by civilians, they were carried out against a group without the protections of the authorities and with the knowledge that if Jews fought back the authorities would come in to protect the people committing the pograms, not the victims of the pograms. In this country Muslims might have reason to fear that they are in that position, but except maybe in the most backwater of rural areas, Jews do not. (And I don't know that it is even true in the most backwater of rural areas).
When both parties are fighting to portray the other side as the anti-Semitic party it is not actually time to be fearful of pograms.
Lon Becker: … at least on the right where the anti-Semitism mostly lies
That’s what I would have thought before Oct, but I don’t think that’s what’s producing campus anti-semitism since then. It’s certainly not what Elise Stefanik is all stituched about. That has to be what she perceives as leftist anti-semitism.
Is that real? Or is it her and her allies trying to tamp down criticism of Netanyahu with this smear?
I really don’t know, but if we’re trying to fight it then we need to understand what’s actually going on. Can someone enlighten me?
Thank you for visiting these cesspools of human behavior so we don't have to!
It could also be the protests against how Israel treats the Palestinians. There's been a constant attempts to claim any criticism means you are supporting terrorists...or worse! Bibi at his best.
Note--there are real issues with antisemitism, but protesting illegal settlements is not one of them.
The ADL, I am afraid, is not a reliable source for this sort of thing. They are very much party to this debate and use their "data" as political tools.
The ADL is repeating the FBI's very public data, admittedly for their own Jewish purposes. If you feel they've made an error, please do point out where and how they are wrong.
If, on the other hand, you're just making unsupported accusations against a prominent Jewish organization in a thread about antisemitism? Well, A+ for irony, I suppose.
I don't like posting twice, but here is the lead story on one board...with already 172 congratulatory posts for killing this Jew in Seattle...apparently the vehicle jumped the curb to kill this father of three out for a run.
Of course, as I think about this a little more...I had a great colleague killed up Arrowhead while on a morning run, as was Stephen King, the macabre author, who survived. So maybe it wasn't targeted...so people shouldn't be giving congratulations(!)
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-777572
FBI UCR of anti-Jewish hate crime incidents:
2019 953
2018 835
2017 938
2016 684
2015 664
2014 609
2013 625
2012 674
2011 771
2010 887
You only gave one decade, and it suggests that there has been a rise since 2016 with 3 of the 4 highest years being the last three years. Maybe adding the data from the previous decade would change this impression. But with the data set you provide it suggests that 2010 is an outlier or the result of a previous surge, things settled at a lower level and then rose again after the 2016 election. (That 2011 is the fifth highest suggests the end of another surge.
Feel free to add the rest of the data: https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime
I figured that because the curves roughly aligned to ADL's data, there wasn't much cause to look all the way back to 1995.
The data is located in Table 1 in each year.
Interesting, this is what the data looks like. I can't get the figure for 2007 because of a strange security warning. But extending the data makes 2012-2016 look like a low point for anti-Semitic crime, and the more recent years as a partial return to the norm. The trough shows up a bit in the data above. And 2019 comes before the large increase in Drum's graph, so the crime reports may follow in subsequent years.
The picture is actually one of falling anti-Semitic crime until something coinciding with Trump's appearance on the political scene jump starts it.
2009 931
2008 1013
2007
2006 967
2005 848
2004 954
2003 1025
2002 1087
Niall Ferguson @ The Free Press: “It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.”
In other words: FFS, wake up!
When was Ferguson ever a credible source?
Ditto. When Niall got a column in (Newsweek? Time? US News? I forget which), I finally dropped my subscription.
I think it's unintentional on the parts of @weolmstead and @salamander, but both their comments are revealing in regard to the narrow range of left-leaning discourse.
I have recently started observing to various friends and acquaintances that it's simply impossible to get a sense of the current emergency with anti-Semitism if all one does is read Liberal news media.
If a news org has a DEI or "equity" statement (and the WaPo, NPR, and the NYT, among others, are all guilty of this profound lapse of journalistic integrity), then it's guaranteed that they are full of, and likely terrorized by, Leftist staffers who virulently espouse anti-Jewish sentiments.
I don't think there's ever been a moment in my life where it is more necessary to read conservative news sources and commentaries. That is where most if not all of the analysis of the very real Leftist anti-Semitism plaguing our country is written.
But if all you do is read dailykos and NYT and Kevin's blog, and all you listen to is NPR, then all you hear are either a.) Leftist voices spreading anti-Semitism or b.) Liberal voices who are terrorized, unduly influenced by, and/or utterly cowed into meek submission by those Leftists.
What is of some late night interest to me is that any thread regarding the Palestinian question results in almost immediately 100+, if not 200+ comments. And yet, here we sit on Antisemitism at six (six!) comments, half of them mine...lol
But I must also confess to my own very recognized by me, my own Antisemitism. Because I've been to Israel, hung with soldiers at the farthest extreme of the Golan, (why not, I'm a former soldier, there is a natural affinity), and went diving at the other extreme at Eilat in the Red Sea, I still often see myself saying...in this writing or that...eg, "As a Non-Jew I find the bricking up of the Lion's Gate in the Walls of Old Jerusalem to prevent the coming of Christ re-born, from entering the city again to be of smiling interest."
See what I did there? I disassociated myself from being a Jew...this is how I know that Antisemitism to be very real....even progressive myself distance myself from being labeled a Jew. When I don't do this, I often do catch some flack..
Pretty shameful on my part, actually. Best Wishes, Traveller
Is it possible that some of the most recent "incidents" are actually antizionism, which is portrayed as antisemitism. Thought I'd seen somewhere where the ADL was treating them as same, even though they aren't.
@samgamgee:
In the words of Chuck Schumer: "Anti-Semitism is a word that has been used throughout history when Jewish people are judged and measured by one standard and the rest by another. When everyone else was allowed to farm and Jews could not; when anyone else could live in Moscow and Jews could not; when others could become academics or tradesmen and Jews could not. The word to describe all of these acts is anti-Semitism.
"So it is with anti-Zionism; the idea that all other peoples can seek and defend their right to self-determination but Jews cannot; that other nations have a right to exist, but the Jewish state of Israel does not.
"Anti-Zionism, unfortunately, continues to bubble up in many different forms. There is perhaps no greater example than the pernicious effort to delegitimize Israel through boycotts, divestment, and sanctions. The BDS movement is a deeply biased campaign that I would say, in similar words to Mr. Macron, is a “reinvented form of anti-Semitism” because it seeks to impose boycotts on Israel and not on any other nation."
There is a very good article on antisemitism in the last edition of the New Yorker magazine.
It deals with the conflation of antizionism and antisemitism and with the speech codes in Europe about the Holocaust.
Gee, what happened in 2016 that might have encouraged bigots to become more vocal? Quite a headscratcher.
It is hard to be sure without any sense of what the incidents are, especially if they aren't crimes. The most likely explanation of the jump in 2016, as a couple of people have already pointed out, is the rise of Trump and his making open bigotry more acceptable. Is the second jump a result of his lose? Obviously when the conspiracy theories rise, the blaming of Jews rises as well. But this assumes the later rise is actually anti-Semitism rather than criticism of Israel, and so comes primarily from Trump supporters. And that isn't clear from the data.
Social media could contribute since it is easier to find anti-Semitic comments on-line, but are those really the significant years for social media?
The timing of the doubling of anti-Semitic incidents - 2016-2017 - means the explanation is plonkingly obvious. We might as well call it the Trump Effect.
Well, first of all, what is being called "anti-semitism"? Does it include
* criticism of Israeli policy
* calls for rights and better treatment of Palestinians
* criticism of Bibi Netanyahu
* opposition fo zionism
* opposition to "settler" (aka "squatter") activities and violence
* reference to "money", "noses", etc
In short, what are they actually measuring?
Those are interesting "questions" you raise. Do you have any reason to believe the FBI (the original source for the data Kevin presents) is categorizing any of that completely legitimate speech as hate crimes? If so please should present it. Here and as many other places as you can, since the FBI categorizing protected political speech as criminal it's a pretty clearcut violation of the First Amendment.
But if you don't have any evidence of that? If you're "just asking questions" about swastikas painted on synagogues, and threats to slit the throats of specific Jews, and etc? Then I've got a question for you: How would you react to a right-winger "just asking" if burning crosses on African-Americans lawns was okay because people really don't like Obama or VP Harris or Fani Willis or etc?
Are you serious? I mean, really?
I have no idea of what questions those "anti-semitism" numbers have been generated from; that's why I asked. Yet all of the items I've noted have been branded as "anti-semitism" in recent discourse. So it's a valid question.
As to your last paragraph, no, I'm not Tucker Carlson in drag. And all the rest is just foam-flecked raving. If not projection.
Evidently I was unclear. Let's try again.
Your answer indicates that you're pretty damn unclear yourself. You seem to be confusing the FBI with the Pew Research Center. The FBI doesn't do polling on antisemitism. They record *criminal* antisemitic acts.
If I call the police, or my local FBI office and complain that you "criticized Israeli policy" or Bibi, or even me for having a big nose, they'll pat me on the head and tell me to run along. My whining won't show up on the count of antisemitic *crimes*.
I was under the impression that you knew this. I thought you were suggesting that hate crimes were being triggered by Jews holding objectionable political positions.
Sounds like that's not the case, and you're asking "Is all this hate crime just people expressing political views?"
The answer is a simple "No".
You seem to be conflating the antisemitism events reported by the ADL with the hate crime stats from the FBI. They are not the same, but I think you knew that.
No.
As a non-jew, the amount of anti-semitism I see has in fact increased.
And I'm not even a target of it.
I don't want to mistake anti-semitic rhetoric on the rise for coming to the anti-muslim/arab acts. Lots of deaths lately on both these scales and it's not okay.