| Washington Wrap |

Hate Crimes Against Jews on the Rise

By Omri Nahmias | November 21, 2018

A new FBI report on hate crimes found that in 2017 Jews were the most targeted of all religious groups, suffering three times as many offenses as Muslims.

Jews trailed only African-Americans in the total number of attacks against them, 938 to 2,013. However, there are eight times as many African-Americans as Jews in the United States.

The annual report, released last week, showed there was a 37% uptick in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017 and a 17% rise in hate crimes generally, the third consecutive year showing an increase. In all, there were 7,175 hate crimes reported in the United States.

A table entitled “Crimes against Jews” includes 1,017 victims (there are more victims than incidents) and shows that the majority of attacks against Jews involved vandalism. Given the FBI definition of the term “victim” — “an individual, business/financial institution, government entity, religious organization, or society/public as a whole,” the implication is that the victim in these cases was most often a Jewish building — whether a home, community center, or shul.

Per the report, 234 incidents occurred in houses of worship, 139 in the street, and 360 in homes. Thirty-two incidents occurred in offices, 15 in hospitals, and 13 in open spaces. Only 45 occurred in universities, the frequent site of publicized anti-Semitic incidents. In New York state, 284 religion-based incidents were reported.

The FBI tables fail to clearly identify the religious or racial identities of the assailants, in part because not all states identify people in the same way. That said, of the 976 crimes reported, 141 attackers were identified as white, 26 as Afro-American, six as Asian, and the rest as unknown.

Along with a recently released Anti-Defamation League report showing an increase in anti-Semitism, the FBI data shows a worrying trend.