Antisemitic hate crimes in US surged 63% in 2023, to all-time high of 1,832 – FBI
Anti-Arab incidents jumped 34%, anti-Muslim incidents 49%; Anti-Defamation League, Arab American Institute caution that agencies still not reporting all incidents
Antisemitic hate crimes in the United States surged 63 percent in 2023 with 1,832 recorded incidents, the highest on record, compared to 1,122 the previous year, according to statistics released Monday by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Antisemitic incidents were 15% of all hate crimes in 2023, and 68% of all religion-based hate crimes, according to the data — even though Jews only make up some 2% of the US population.
It was not immediately clear how many of the incidents occurred after Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack on southern Israel, when terrorists killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, starting the ongoing war between Israel and the terror group. Antisemitic hate crimes shot up worldwide in the wake of the attack, and have remained at record levels since, amid the ongoing war in Gaza.
“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, in a statement Monday.
The ADL, which independently tracks both criminal and non-criminal attacks against Jews, counted 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023, a 140% jump from 2022, and the highest number since the group began collecting such data in 1979. Antisemitic assaults, specifically, jumped 45% in 2023, the ADL said.
The organization added that “far too many agencies still either do not participate in reporting or are likely not participating in a fully accurate way,” and called on the US Congress to pass the Improved Reporting to Prevent Hate Act, requiring law enforcement agencies to report hate crimes to the FBI or else lose their federal funding.
The group also called on lawmakers to pass the Countering Antisemitism Act, to “ensure that the policies and infrastructure of the US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism,” presented by the Biden administration in May 2023, “are made permanent.”
Anti-Arab incidents also jumped 34%, according to the FBI, totaling 123 over the course of the year, the highest number since the bureau started measuring in 2015.
Anti-Muslim incidents jumped 49%, totaling 236, the most since 2017, when 273 were reported. The most anti-Muslim incidents recorded since the FBI began collecting data were in 2016, which saw 307.
The Arab American Institute, in a statement Monday, called the data “important, particularly in that it offers trend lines,” but said that “it represents a dramatic underreporting of hate crime in America.”
“In reviewing the data, AAI found that the most violent anti-Arab hate crime of 2023 – the tragic murder of a six-year-old Arab American Muslim child of Palestinian descent named Wadea al-Fayoume and the brutal attack on his mother – were not properly reported in federal statistics,” the group said.
“Wadea’s murder occurred on October 14, 2023, and the perpetrator made clear that they targeted Wadea and his mother because they were Palestinian, as well as Muslim. The crime was noted as an anti-Muslim incident, but not also an anti-Arab incident,” it continued.
The group also noted it was unclear whether the shooting in Vermont last year of three college students who were “speaking in a mix of Arabic and English, with two of them wearing keffiyehs,” was reported as a hate crime.
Though the Palestinian descent of the three students, all of whom were wounded, was widely publicized at the time of the shooting, the suspected assailant, who faces attempted murder charges, has not been charged with a hate crime.
