Antisemitic Attacks Reach Record High Under Joe Biden

Antisemitic attacks reportedly reached a record high in the U.S. in 2022 — the second year of President Joe Biden, who ran for office based on promises to fight antisemites and other extremists.

New figures released Wednesday by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — a left-leaning organization run by former Obama administration official Jonathan Greenblatt — show that there were nearly 3,700 known antisemitic incidents in the U.S., 111 of them violent.

The ADL said:

In 2022, ADL tabulated 3,697 antisemitic incidents throughout the United States. This is a 36% increase from the 2,717 incidents tabulated in 2021 and the highest number on record since ADL began tracking antisemitic incidents in 1979. This is the third time in the past five years that the year-end total has been the highest number ever recorded.

Incidents increased in each of the major Audit categories: antisemitic harassment increased 29% to 2,298; antisemitic vandalism increased 51% to 1,288 and antisemitic assaults increased 26% to 111. The vast majority of antisemitic assaults (107 out of 111) were perpetrated without the use of a deadly weapon. There was one fatality. Notably, visibly Orthodox Jews were targeted in 53% of the assault incidents nationally. This year, no assaults perpetrated against the Jewish community resulted in mass causalities.

The dramatic increase in antisemitic incidents in 2022 in almost all categories cannot be attributed to any one cause or ideology. Significant surges in incidents include high volume increases in organized white supremacist propaganda activity (102% increase to 852 incidents), K-12 schools (49% increase to 494 incidents) and college campuses (41% increase to 219 incidents), as well as deeply troubling percentage increases in attacks on Orthodox Jews (69% increase to 59 Incidents) and bomb threats toward Jewish institutions (an increase from eight to 91 incidents).

Antisemitic incidents were highest in New York and California, where there are large Jewish communities — and which are governed by left-wing Democrats who pride themselves on their commitments to tolerance.

Biden launched his campaign in April 2019 by claiming he was motivated to run by neo-Nazi riots in Charlottesville, which he falsely claimed that Trump had praised. He also compared Trump to Adolf Hitler.

The 46th president promised to unite the nation — but then inflamed tensions by attacking Republicans as extremists. His administration also adopted a more hostile approach to Israel than the Trump administration.

The Biden administration recently held a summit on antisemitism, chaired by Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, but excluded conservative Jewish groups, such as the Zionist Organization of America, from attending.

The ADL is generally considered an authoritative source on the subject of antisemitic attacks, though it has also exaggerated in some years, notably when it included hoax bomb threats as real antisemitic incidents in a 2018 report.

At the time, Greenblatt and the ADL strongly implied that President Donald Trump was to blame for a rise in antisemitism, though the phenomenon began in the latter years of President Barack Obama’s presidency.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.