The Antidefamation League on Tuesday released an audit on antisemitic hate crimes for 2021 that revealed a significant spike in incidents year-over-year from when the ADL first began tracking in 1979.
The annual “Audit of Antisemitic Incidents” recorded 2,717 incidents of assault, harassment, and vandalism reported to the ADL, with an average of seven incidents per day which is a 34% increase year over year. Assaults increased by 167% in 2021, with 88 reports recorded and 131 victims, but no fatalities even though 11 of these assaults involved deadly weapons.
Out of the incidents of antisemitism in 2021, 18% of them, or 484, resulted from domestic extremism.
While the reasons for the spike are unclear, ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt said that “we do know that Jews are experiencing more antisemitic incidents than we have in this country in at least 40 years, and that’s a deeply troubling indicator of larger societal fissures.”
Out of the total number of incidents, 1,776 of these incidents were defined as harassment, which includes the use of slurs, stereotypes, or conspiracy theories, which is a rise of 43% from 2020. Acts of vandalism damaged 853 properties with antisemitic intent, which represents a rise of 14% compared to 2020. For 578 of these vandalism incidents, which represented two-thirds of the total, swastikas were present.
Read the article by Maggie Valenti in the International Business Times.
[Editor: Appalling editing to misspell the word ‘antisemitic’ in the title of an article on antisemitism.]