The Anti-Defamation League’s statistic that anti-Semitic incidences have increased by 57 percent since Donald Trump became president isn’t terribly precise, as it turns out. Tablet Magazine recently investigated the methodology of the ADL’s annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents and found a few quirks that should make you question the idea that Trump’s America is unsafe for Jews.
The ADL recorded 1,986 perceived acts of anti-Semitism in 2017, which is a 57 percent increase over the year prior. But at least 150 of these incidents came from one person — a “troubled Jewish teenager” from Israel who made baseless bomb threats to multiple American Jewish institutions, causing a massive panic early last year. A second man, a fired reporter for The Intercept (he had invented and falsely attributed quotes) attempting to intimidate his former girlfriend, made at least eight copy-cat threats that he was somehow hoping to pin on her. These two individuals, who probably were not acting out of personal hatred of Jews, account for roughly 24 percent of the total year-over-year increase.
And they might account for even more. Because as Tablet points out, the ADL relies on self-reporting — which is to say, widespread concern over the sudden and truly terrifying rash of threatening calls to Jewish Community Centers and the visibility of the alt-right could have led more Jews to report incidents in which they perceived themselves to be on the receiving end of an anti-Semitic act. One could hardly blame them at the time the bomb threats were in the news.
You might also remember a few grotesque acts of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries from around that time. Tablet reports that at least one of the cemetery vandals had no animus towards Jews at all — the perpetrator was a repeat criminal and angry drunk who acted on inebriated impulse.
None of the above threats or apparent threats against Jews had anything to do with who the president was, although at the time Trump’s personal culpability was nearly assumed in all of the reporting.
Absolutely none of this is to say that anti-Semitism isn’t a very serious problem in American life. However, those are a few caveats to the oft-repeated 57 percent statistic.
Anti-Semitism in America is clearly louder and more salient than it used to be. That’s probably a bigger problem than its frequency. Although the number of anti-Semitic assaults fell from 36 to 19 from 2016 to 2017, the increase in anti-Semitic vandalism nearly doubled. Something is certainly inflaming the hatred of anti-Semites.
Finally, it seems as though the epicenter of anti-Semitic empowerment is the American college campus, and specifically campuses in liberal areas.
According to a selection of incidences shared by the ADL, Stanford University alone had six anti-Semitic incidents in 2017. Princeton had five, Rutgers had eight, Georgetown had four, and colleges in the area of Portland, Ore. had five. At the Rhode Island School of Design, an anti-Semite made a swastika “out of human feces discovered in [a] gender neutral bathroom on campus.”
And it seems as though, with activism in high schools on the rise, anti-Semites are being radicalized younger and younger. The largest number of anti-Semitic incidences occurred at K-12 schools, and based on the information available, it seems that a significant portion occurred in high schools, with students as the perpetrators. Something about American academia is normalizing anti-Semitism.
As with all statistics, take the 57 percent point with a grain of salt. Anti-Semitism is certainly growing more ferocious and unavoidable, but don’t panic — yet. The one area we still need to seriously target to prevent an increase in salience from becoming a storm are schools, and we need to do so now.
