According to a new report released by Tel Aviv University researchers, anti-Semitism is on the rise.
In 2018, attacks against Jews rose 13% worldwide according to CBN News. The U.S. was home to more than a quarter of those violent cases and both France and Germany have witnessed a 70% increase in anti-Semitic violence in the last year.
“There is an increasing sense of emergency among Jews in many countries around the world,” said Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities across the continent. “It is now clear that anti-Semitism is no longer limited to the far-left, far-right and radical Islamist’s triangle – it has become mainstream and often accepted by civil society,” he said.
Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry releases a report documenting anti-Semitism every year on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. The report comes into an international climate thick with political unrest.
“The world is seen as in a bad shape, and what hinders it becoming a better place are the Jews,” said Günther Jikeli, an expert on European anti-Semitism at Indiana University, as reported in The New York Times.
Anti-Semitic language is also on the rise online and in newspapers, according to Kantor. Only a few days ago, The New York Times was widely condemned for an anti-Semitic cartoon printed in its international edition. The Times has since apologized and removed the cartoon.
Britain is also not immune to the rise in anti-Semitism. British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has long criticized Israel, has lost several members of his party for alleged Holocaust denial and international Jewish banking conspiracy theories spread on social media.
In France, anti-Semitic vandalism has marked the country. Recently, two public mailboxes with a portrait of Holocaust survivor Justice Minister Simone Veil were marked with swastikas. “Juden” was written on a shop window. According to an NPR report, “We haven’t heard from the classic World War II anti-Semitism in 70 years. But…it seems to have made a resurgence. Something has unleashed it, and that something is the yellow vest movement.” The yellow vest movement is a group of sometimes violent protestors speaking against President Macron for being “a president of the rich.”
In the US, a 19-year-old man recently attacked a California synagogue, killing one woman and injuring three other people. Last October, eleven people were killed in a shooting at another synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Nonetheless, the report ended on a hopeful note with Kantor explaining “an improvement in cooperation between Jewish communities and law enforcement agencies in Europe, and several European governments have taken strong steps as well, including fully adopting the working definition of anti-Semitism as outlined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.”
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