US Jews were targets of more anti-Semitic incidents last year than any other year over the past four decades, a surge marked by deadly attacks on a California synagogue, a Jewish grocery store in New Jersey and a rabbi’s New York home, the Anti-Defamation League reported yesterday.
The Jewish civil rights group counted 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents last year, finding 61 physical assault cases, 1,127 instances of harassment and 919 acts of vandalism.
That is the highest annual tally since the New York City-based group began tracking anti-Semitic incidents in 1979. It also marked a 12 percent increase over the 1,879 incidents it counted in 2018.
League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt attributed last year’s record high to a “normalization of anti-Semitic tropes,” the “charged politics of the day” and social media.
This year, the COVID-19 pandemic is fueling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, he added.
“Anti-Semitism is a virus. It is like a disease, and it persists,” Greenblatt said. “It’s sometimes known as the oldest hatred. It never seems to go away. There truly is no single antidote or cure.”
The group’s count of anti-
Semitic assaults involved 95 victims. More than half of the assaults occurred in New York City, including 25 in Brooklyn. Eight of those Brooklyn assaults happened during a span of eight days in December, primarily in neighborhoods where many Orthodox Jews live.
“Objects were thrown at victims, antisemitic slurs were shouted, and at least three victims were hit or punched in their heads or faces,” the report said.
The league defines an anti-Semitic assault as “an attempt to inflict physical harm on one or more people who are Jewish or perceived to be Jewish, accompanied by evidence of antisemitic animus,” it said.
Three of last year’s assaults were deadly.
A 20-year-old former nursing student, John Earnest, awaits trial on charges he killed a woman and wounded three other people during an attack on Chabad of Poway synagogue near San Diego, California, in April last year.
The gunman told a 911 dispatcher that he shot up the synagogue on the last day of Passover because Jews were trying to “destroy all white people,” prosecutors said.
Attacks in Jersey City, New Jersey, killed a police detective in a cemetery and three people at a kosher market in December.
Authorities said the attackers, David Anderson and Francine Graham, were motivated by a hatred of Jewish people and law enforcement.
A 37-year-old man, Grafton Thomas, was charged with stabbing five people with a machete at a Hanukkah celebration at a rabbi’s home in Monsey, an Orthodox Jewish community north of New York City. One of the five victims died three months after the Dec. 28 attack.
Federal prosecutors said Thomas had handwritten journals containing anti-Semitic comments and a swastika.
The league’s report attributed 270 anti-Semitic incidents to extremist groups or individuals.
A separate report by the group, released in February, found that last year was the sixth-deadliest year for violence by all domestic extremists since 1970.
The league counted 919 vandalism incidents last year, a 19 percent increase from 774 incidents in 2018.
Two men described by authorities as members of a white supremacist group called The Base were charged with conspiring last year to vandalize synagogues, including Beth Israel Sinai Congregation in Racine, Wisconsin. Even before his synagogue was defaced with swastikas, Rabbi Martyn Adelberg sensed that anti-Semitic incidents in the US have been increasing as extremist rhetoric migrates from the Internet’s fringes to mainstream platforms.
“It provokes something else, too: an undying outpouring of love,” he said, adding that a crowd of 150 people — at least five times the normal size and consisting mostly of gentiles — attended the first service at the temple after the vandalism. “The support was overwhelming.”
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