Record 3,700 antisemitic incidents reported in U.S. in 2022, says ADL

"There were a record 3,697 reported antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2022, according to an annual tally by the Anti-Defamation League released on Thursday.

The figure amounted to 10 incidents per day and represented a 36 percent jump over 2021, which was already a record year. The 2022 tally was the highest since the ADL started keeping records in 1979.

Incidents were reported in every state and the increase could not be attributed to any single cause or ideology, researchers said. Big increases were recorded in white supremacist propaganda activities, non-Jewish schools, college campuses, bomb threats and attacks against Orthodox Jews.

There were increases in each major category — harassment, vandalism and assault.

The ADL Center on Extremism found that harassment climbed 29% over 2021 to 2,298 incidents; vandalism jumped by 51% to 1,288 events; and physical assaults went up 26% to 111.

The assaults were defined as physical attacks on Jewish people, or those perceived to be Jewish, alongside evidence of antisemitism. Orthodox Jews, who are usually more recognizably Jewish, were disproportionately targeted, accounting for 53% of the victims, and close to 60% of the attacks took place in New York City, mostly the borough of Brooklyn. The vast majority of the attacks did not involve a deadly weapon...

Antisemitic incidents connected to Israel or Zionism accounted for 241 events, or 6.5% of the total, a decline compared to 2021, when there was an unusually high number of such incidents related to the Gaza war that year. Dozens of incidents were carried out by people affiliated with the anti-Zionist activist groups Witness for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. Legitimate anti-Israel political protests that did not target individuals or Jewish entities were not counted in the data.

Many of the anti-Zionist incidents occurred around college campuses. For example, a demonstrator at an Illinois Students for Justice in Palestine rally threw a rock at a Hillel building; two students at a New York public college were expelled from a sexual assault survivors support group over Zionism; a student wrote ‘death to Israel’ and ‘heil Hitler’ on a white board in another New York college; and at American University in Washington, DC someone wrote ‘Fuck Israel free Palestine’ on a Jewish student’s door....

The rise in incidents comes as antisemitic beliefs climb in the US. An ADL survey released in January found that the number of Americans who believe antisemitic stereotypes has doubled since 2019 to the highest level in decades.

FBI data has indicated Jews are the religious minority most targeted in hate crimes in the US."