The United States witnessed a staggering 63 percent rise in antisemitic hate crimes in 2023, with 1,832 recorded incidents, marking the highest number on record, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data released Monday. The figure represents a sharp increase from 1,122 incidents in 2022.

Antisemitic hate crimes made up 15 percent of all hate crimes in 2023 and accounted for 68 percent of religion-based hate crimes, despite the Jewish community comprising just 2 percent of the U.S. population.

While the data does not clarify how many of the reported incidents occurred after the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, which left around 1,200 people dead and 251 taken hostage, global antisemitic incidents surged following the attack, and have remained at record levels amidst the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict.

“At a time when the Jewish community is still suffering from the sharp rise in antisemitism following Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel, the record-high number of anti-Jewish hate crime incidents is unfortunately entirely consistent with the Jewish community’s experience and ADL’s tracking,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in a statement.

The ADL, which independently tracks both criminal and non-criminal antisemitic incidents, recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023, a staggering 140 percent increase from the previous year. This number also represents the highest count since the organization began monitoring such incidents in 1979. Specifically, antisemitic assaults saw a 45 percent jump in 2023, according to the ADL.

However, the ADL emphasized that there may still be significant underreporting. The organization urged Congress to pass the Improved Reporting to Prevent Hate Act, which would mandate law enforcement agencies to report hate crimes to the FBI or risk losing federal funding. They also called for the approval of the Countering Antisemitism Act to ensure the policies outlined in the Biden administration’s National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism become permanent.

The FBI report also highlighted a troubling increase in anti-Muslim incidents, which rose 49 percent, totaling 236—the highest number since 2017. In 2016, a record 307 anti-Muslim incidents were reported.

The Arab American Institute (AAI) expressed concern over what it called “dramatic underreporting” of hate crimes. In a statement, AAI pointed to discrepancies in the data, noting that the murder of Wadea al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Arab American Muslim child of Palestinian descent, and the attack on his mother in October 2023 were not fully reflected in federal statistics. While the FBI categorized the incident as anti-Muslim, it was not also recorded as an anti-Arab hate crime.

The AAI further questioned whether the FBI had classified the shooting of three college students in Vermont, all of Palestinian descent, as a hate crime. The students were shot while speaking in Arabic, with two of them wearing keffiyehs, yet the suspect has not been charged with a hate crime despite facing attempted murder charges.

The FBI report also showed that anti-Arab incidents rose 34 percent in 2023, totaling 123—the highest since the bureau began tracking anti-Arab hate crimes in 2015.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)