Posted on 12/18/19
| News Source: WSJ
The deadly attack in a New Jersey kosher market last week punctuated several years of growing and increasingly violent incidents of anti-Semitism in the U.S., a marked turnaround from declines that had lasted more than a decade.
The shooting in Jersey City, where three people were killed at the market, was the third deadly attack at a Jewish space in just over a year. In April, a shooting at a synagogue outside San Diego killed one worshiper and injured three others, including the rabbi. In October last year, a shooter killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
“It would appear these kinds of acts of anti-Semitism are now the new normal,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitic incidents.
Mr. Greenblatt said that anti-Semitic incidents had been declining in the U.S. since 2001. That trend began to reverse in 2014.
In 2017, anti-Semitic incidents—including harassment, vandalism and assault, as reported to the league by victims, law enforcement and the media—jumped 57%, the largest single-year increase since the group began tracking such data in the 1970s. While 2018 was slightly better, it still had the third-highest total of anti-Semitic incidents the group has ever recorded, with anti-Semitic assaults more than doubling from 2017.
The FBI, which compiles hate-crime data based on reports from local law-enforcement agencies, found the number of such incidents rose 29% in 2018 from 2015.
As of September, anti-Semitic hate crimes in New York City—home to the U.S.’s largest Jewish population—were up 51% this year from the same period last year, according to New York Police Department data. That included a string of assaults against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, as well as a sharp rise in anti-Semitic subway graffiti. In one incident this year, “DIE JEW BITCH,” along with a swastika, was scrawled over a poster of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Read more at WSJ