meanwhile reports of anti-semitic

incidents hit an all-time high across

the u.s in 2021 and nearly 30 percent of

all the events documented took place in

our backyard between new jersey and new

york the latest data released by the

anti-defamation league tuesday finds a

disturbing trend of increasing

harassment and violence against jewish

residents with 370 total incidents in

the garden state the highest number ever

recorded by the adl the audit comes just

weeks after a spree of attacks on

orthodox jewish residents in the

lakewood and jackson areas scott

richmond is the new jersey new york

regional director at the anti-defamation

league and joins us as part of our

ongoing series exploring hate on

anti-semitism racism and extremism

scott thanks for joining us to talk

about this audit um did the findings

surprise you based on you know what

we've been seeing play out in different

towns across the state

uh certainly i was concerned uh 2021 had

clearly been a year of many anti-semitic

incidents and of course it mirrors

what's going on across the country the

uh the audit showed that not only had we

hit a record but it was

much much higher than the the 2020

numbers

yeah so walk us through if you will

where the majority of these incidents

occurred if you can break it down in

that way the incidents occurred

in

in 19 of the 21 counties

but the majority of the incidents

occurred in three counties

they are bergen ocean and middlesex

counties

they are counties that are home to large

numbers of orthodox jews

we would call them visibly identifiable

jews

so that that sort of makes sense uh and

then of course in uh in other counties

as well but those those are the ones

where the the most incidents occurred i

mean and these are incidents got that

range from a swastika being painted

outside a synagogue yes to

violence to actual attacks on folks

absolutely so adl divides the audit into

three types of uh of incidents uh it's

harassment vandalism and assault

harassment could be obviously in person

uh it could be online uh it could be

zoom bombing uh you know there's a real

range vandalism like what you said

swastikas uh or other kinds of uh of

graffiti

um and of course assault the most

vicious kind of attack there were six

assaults in new jersey that's an

increase over last year uh and really

the those are the obviously the most

heinous kinds of attacks against uh

against the jewish community yeah i mean

through the work of the adl

what does it point to

is there something stemming uh or

perhaps the source of why we see a rise

the highest on record i mean this is

telling no

absolutely and of course this is not

limited to the jewish community we've

seen a general rise in hate across the

country

you've seen certainly attacks against

the african-american community attacks

against the lgbtq community very visible

violence against the aapi community

so this sort of general rise in hate is

out there but you know i think we could

point to a few very specific factors

one of which

is what hap one thing that happened last

year which was the conflict in may

between israel and hamas

that resulted in a large number of

anti-semitic attacks

not it doesn't explain all of the the

rise but it does explain some of the

rise last year uh comparing may 2020 to

may 2021 uh when this uh the izakamas

conflict happened you saw over 100 rise

in anti-semitic incidents but there are

much more long-term factors at play here

polarization uh this is uh you know we

live in a divided society and this

divided society makes it very difficult

to push hate to the extremes when you

have a weak center civil society can't

play its traditional role of pushing

hate to the margins

and of course there's a general

emboldening of extremists extremists on

both sides on the left and the right

and

and that that of course is is a trend of

the past few years scott richmond for us

there thank you so much for joining us

tonight

thank you

major funding for exploring hate has

been provided by the sylvia a and simon

b poita programming endowment to fight

anti-semitism

sue and edgar wachenheim iii

charlotte and david ackert

the peter g peterson and joan ganz

cooney fund patty asquith kenner

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