Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States are at the highest level since the group began recording them in the 1970s

Anti-Semitic incidents in the US reached their highest level last year since the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a civil rights NGO, began recording them in 1979.

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 was found published on Thursday.

Note: The video in the media player is from a previous report.

And the upward trend is alarming.

Last October, a former student killed a University of Arizona professor who he believed was Jewish, according to an Anti-Defamation League report. This past February, a man was charged with two counts of hate crimes after he fatally shot two people who were walking out of two separate synagogues in Los Angeles.

Earlier this month, Stanford University police launched a hate crime investigation after an antisemitic graphic containing swastikas and a likeness of Adolf Hitler was found on the door of a Jewish student’s dorm room.

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“Despite the rise of anti-Semitism, there is still a perception in many people’s minds that Jews are not under threat, that they are successful and wealthy, and not a targeted minority,” said Marc Weitzman, a researcher in the history of anti-Semitism and chief operating officer at Global Jewish Reparations, he told CNN.

The ADL report, which includes information gathered directly from victims and community leaders, as well as from police statistics, shows an increase across a range of hate-based incidents, from offensive comments to anti-Semitic slurs written on property, to physical assaults. The report found that in 2022, there was a 69% increase in attacks against clearly identifiable Orthodox Jews.

“The brazenness of these attacks, sometimes in broad daylight, is a major concern,” Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL Center for Countering Extremism, told CNN.

“The findings of our latest report define what many people in the Jewish community feel – that anti-Semitism appears everywhere and often,” Segal said.

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American Jews are disproportionately affected by hate crimes compared to other religious groups, according to the FBI’s 2021 hate crime numbers. However, official law enforcement statistics for these incidents are underreported, experts told CNN. ADL records indicate that the number of anti-Jewish incidents (both criminal and non-criminal) is three times higher nationwide than FBI records of confirmed hate crimes show, and about 1.5 times higher in New York City than official police records reveal.

Every fourth American Jewish adult, whether orthodox or not, has been targeted in an anti-Semitic incident ranging from physical assaults to in-person or online remarks, according to a separate survey by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) released in February.

The AJC poll found that while both Jewish Americans and the general public see antisemitism as a problem, less than half of the general population believes antisemitism has increased at least somewhat in the past five years, compared to about four in five Jewish Americans.

“While the American Jewish community is acutely aware of growing anti-Jewish sentiment, the general American public is not,” said Robert Williams, historian and executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California. , who also did not participate in the ADL report.

“The non-Jewish population of the United States has not reached this point to realize that they also need to stand up against anti-Semitism, that anti-Semitism is not only a Jewish problem, but a collective problem — it is a threat to national security and it is a threat to our democracy,” Williams said.

Segal sees the situation today as an opportunity for the American people to come together and reject hatred.

“When a synagogue is firebombed, or someone in the community is attacked or harassed, it’s important for others in that community, regardless of their religion or ethnicity, to say ‘This doesn’t represent us,'” Segal said.