Reports of anti-Semitic incidents in the US have reached a record high since last year’s Hamas attacks in Israel, according to a preliminary report by the Anti-Defamation League Center for Extremism (ADL).
The group received more than 10,000 incidents from October 7, 2023 to September 24 this year, more than a 200% increase compared to the same period last year.
It’s the highest since the ADL began tracking such incidents in 1979.
The report comes days after the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement warning of potential violent threats amid ongoing unrest in the Middle East.
Since last October, Hamas has been attacking Israel in which approximately 1,200 people were killed, “American Jews have had no time to rest,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in a statement.
“Instead, we have faced an alarming number of antisemitic threats and met with calls for more violence against Israelis and Jews everywhere.”
The more than 10,000 episodes of antisemitism reported by the ADL include approximately 8,015 incidents of verbal or written abuse, 1,840 incidents of vandalism and 150 incidents of assault.
The states with the highest number of cases recorded in the report were California, with 1,266 incidents, New York with 1,218, New Jersey with 830, and Florida with 463.
The ADL said it expects its initial numbers to rise as it gets more information. The final report for 2024 will be published in the spring of 2025.
Part of the overall increase comes from a change in the way it includes “speech against Zionism, and support for resistance to Israel or Zionists that could be viewed as support for terrorism”, the ADL said.
The ADL’s first report included more than 3,000 incidents of anti-Israel rallies that “expressed clear expressions of support for terrorist groups”, including Hamas and Hezbollah.
Excluding these incidents, the ADL counted 7,523 episodes of antisemitism, a 103% increase from 2022.
After the October 7 attack, Israel began a major military operation in the Gaza Strip with the aim of eliminating Hamas.
Since then, 41,870 Palestinians have been killed and more than 97,000 injured in Gaza, most of them women and children, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said.
The war has inspired a wave of protests across the US, especially on college campuses, many protesting the rise of poverty.
Lebanon, more than 1,000 people have been killed and up to a million people may have been displaced since Israel began attacking Iran-backed Hezbollah.
The ongoing violence in the region has led to an increase in anti-Muslim and Islamophobic incidents as well as across the US.
Anti-Muslim incidents will reach 8,061 in 2023, according to a Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) report released in April. The report marked the highest rate since CAIR began keeping records nearly 30 years ago, with nearly half coming after the October 7 attacks.
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