Antisemitic Incidents Reach New High in U.S., Anti-Defamation League Says

The number of antisemitic incidents in the United States last year was the highest since the Anti-Defamation League began keeping track in 1979, the Jewish advocacy group announced on Thursday.

In a new report, the A.D.L. counted 3,697 incidents throughout the United States in 2022, a 36 percent rise from the year before. A majority were characterized as harassment, including online, but the tally also included 111 assaults and more than 1,200 occasions of vandalism.

The report is the latest indication that antisemitism in the United States is on the rise, a trend that has been reflected in American culture and politics, sending fresh waves of alarm through Jewish communities. It also mirrors data gathered by the federal government, as well as a separate academic study tracking incidents of bias against many religious groups.

Anti-Jewish enmity has been expressed in openly antisemitic leaflets and graffiti, or brazen physical attacks, especially on visibly Orthodox Jews. But it is also palpable in harder-to-track discourse online and in troubling public rhetoric from celebrities like Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who tweeted last fall that he would “go death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” And right-wing politicians and commentators have stoked fears of “replacement theory,” the conspiracist idea that elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” white Americans. The cumulative effect is an atmosphere in which threats, slurs and conspiracy theories brew online but are increasingly visible offline, too.

“We’ve seen antisemitism normalized in ways that would have been unimaginable a few years ago,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive and national director of the A.D.L. “If people see conspiracies behind every misfortune, it doesn’t take long for them to look at the Jews and say they’re the problem.”

Incidents documented by the A.D.L. include a white supremacist group using laser projectors to cast antisemitic messages on buildings in Florida, an individual yelling antisemitic obscenities at a synagogue’s preschool in Michigan and a gunman taking multiple hostages at a synagogue in Texas. The report also includes some incidents characterized as anti-Zionist or anti-Israel. The A.D.L. said it did “not conflate general criticism of Israel or anti-Israel activism with antisemitism.”

The report documents relatively few incidents of physical assault, although they, too, are on the rise. The 111 incidents include a case in which an Arizona professor, Thomas Meixner, was killed by a former student who believed incorrectly that he was Jewish, according to the A.D.L. report.

It also records several incidents in Brooklyn in which individuals shot BB guns at Jewish people, and a case in which a person yelled “Kanye 2024” before striking a Jewish man in Manhattan and causing him to fall. The Manhattan case was one of 59 incidents last year in which perpetrators directly referenced Ye after his antisemitic outbursts in October.

The report highlights sharp rises in incidents targeting schools and college campuses, attacks on Orthodox Jews and bomb threats to Jewish institutions.

This is the third time in the past five years that the A.D.L. has declared its count a record high. Five states — New York, California, New Jersey, Florida and Texas — account for more than half of the total incidents.

“We’re in a new era for antisemitism,” said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, which monitors hate crimes in American cities. “We’re now seeing Jews becoming a default target.”

Mr. Levin’s organization, which is unaffiliated with the A.D.L., released its own report on Tuesday revealing that religion-based hate crimes in select major American cities rose 27 percent last year, with a majority of incidents targeting Jews. Hate crimes against Jewish people made up 78 percent of the religion-based crimes tracked by Mr. Levin’s organization, and the number rose by more than a quarter from the previous year.

The latest report on hate crimes from the F.B.I. also suggests an uptick. The bureau counted 817 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2021, a rise over 2020, although that was a year in which public transportation and houses of worship were closed for long stretches.

Hate crimes overall rose by 12 percent in 2021, the bureau reported. (The F.B.I.’s count looks at only criminal offenses, not the wider array of noncriminal incidents tracked by the A.D.L.)

In December, the Biden administration announced the creation of an interagency task force to combat antisemitism, citing “the threat it poses to the Jewish community and all Americans.”