Last year saw a record number of reports of antisemitic incidents around the world, a new study in Israel released Wednesday ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance day.
The report published by Tel Aviv University’s Center for The Study of Contemporary European Jewry showed incidents peaked in May, during the war between Israel and the Hamas terror group in Gaza.
Conspiracy theories blaming Jews for the coronavirus pandemic also ran rife in 2021, the report showed.
The number of antisemitic attacks in the United Kingdom nearly doubled from 97 in 2020 to 173 last year. In Germany antisemitic incidents rose by almost a third in 2019 to 3,028 in 2021.
“It’s time to admit: The struggle is failing,” the study’s authors wrote.
“Something just isn’t working. In recent years, the fight against antisemitism has enjoyed extensive resources worldwide, and yet, despite many important programs and initiatives, the number of antisemitic incidents, including violent assaults, is rapidly escalating,” said Uriya Shavit, the head of the center. “The easy thing is to say that more laws and more funding are required. But what we really need is a courageous and unsparing examination of the efficacy of existing strategies.”
Similar findings were released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation League which examined antisemitism in the United States.
The report noted that it was unable to ascertain the levels of antisemitic activity in two countries with some of the highest Jewish populations — Russia and Brazil — since official statistics were likely to be inaccurate.
“For example, Russia’s SOVA Center for Information and Analysis recorded one antisemitic act of violence and three acts of vandalism in 2021 (the same as in 2020), a questionable figure, to say the least,” the report’s authors wrote.
According to the report, the increase globally stems from the strengthening of both the radical right and left in different countries as well as the vast reach of social networks for spreading lies and incitement.
“Another factor contributing to the negative trend of a rise in antisemitic attacks is that some human-right activists began to exclude Jews and Israel from their struggles consciously,” according to the report. “Racism, they argue, concerns African-Americans and African-Europeans, Roma, LBGTQs, indigenous minorities, asylum seekers, and foreign workers, but not Jews.”
Canada reported 61 assaults against Jews – a 40-year record (since monitoring began in 1982) in antisemitic physical violence in one month. Altogether 226 incidents were recorded during May – a 54 percent increase from the same period in 2020.
The report also noted conspiracy theorists who blamed the Jews for spreading the coronavirus, with many accusing Jews of developing the vaccine to make money.
Separately, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom also published a new report outlining high levels of antisemitism in Turkey and Iran.
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