The year 2017 saw a 60% increase in antisemitic incidents in the USA, and a doubling of the number of cases of antisemitic harassment, vandalism, and attacks in schools and on college campuses.
Over 1,000 of the 1,986 antisemitic incidents reported and collated by the Anti-Defamation League happened in schools or universities.
The total number has been increasing since 2013, and is now over two and a half times its level then (bit.ly/adl-2017) .
The rise parallels, and must surely be driven by, the surge in “America First”, anti-”globalist” feeling flagshipped by Donald Trump. Many nationalist-minded people, including some who consider themselves left-wing, have a prejudice against Jews as somehow representing the global and the cosmopolitan.
Trump’s friendliness to the current right-wing Israeli government does not necessarily clash with anti-Jewish feeling among Trump supporters. The “Christian Zionists” see the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine with its capital in Jerusalem as a necessary step towards a “Second Coming” after which the Jews will disappear by all being converted to Christianity.
In the UK, the Community Security Trust recorded 1,382 antisemitic incidents in 2017, its highest figure since it started in 1994, and, as in the USA, two and a half times the figure of 2013. The date 2013 figures here, perhaps, as the turning point when, on a world scale, right-wing nationalist responses to the 2008 capitalist crash started to outpace left-wing internationalist responses.
The UK has seen no rise of antisemitic incidents in schools and universities comparable to that in the USA: in the UK those are fewer than 10% of the total (bit.ly/cst-2017).
In cases where CST has a description of the antisemitic harasser or attacker, the majority were “white, north European”. In only10% of the total incidents could the motivation be identified as specifically far-right, and in only 1% as Islamist. There are many active antisemites who do not see themselves as far-right or Islamist.
In 2015 the French left activist Yves Coleman wrote a detailed survey of the rise of anti-Muslim racism and antisemitism in Europe since the 1990s (bit.ly/yves-2015).
Muslims in Europe are generally poorer and of more recent migrant origin than Jews, and they suffer social discrimination and institutional racism, even, in some countries, religious discrimination, which Jews do not. However, the (incomplete) figures gathered from sources across the continent show many more antisemitic incidents, in ratio to the small Jewish populations, than anti-Muslim incidents in ratio to the larger Muslim minority.
Neither faces the level of hostility that the Roma do. But the figures make clear that antisemitism is not a vanishing residue, and not an affair only of the neo-Nazi or explicitly far-right fringe.
