Dear John,

In October, my team and I spent a weekend monitoring an antisemitic white supremacist group called the Goyim Defense League (GDL) as they traveled around Texas, eventually ending up outside of a Chabad in Houston where they harassed Jews in the streets. As always, we alerted and supported the community and local law enforcement. GDL is known for these stunts, but their brazen protest stunned me more than I expected it would. They were streaming their harassment of Jews online and even getting donations for their activity. Their protest in front of a Jewish institution brought me back to earlier in the year, in May when we were monitoring protests in front of Jewish institutions during the Israel-Hamas conflict. Different ideologies, same targets.

I immediately thought of the Audit of Antisemitic Incidents that we work on year-round and realized — not only would 2021 turn out to be the highest year ever for antisemitic incidents, but the sources of the incidents would be as diverse as ever.

Now that the Audit is complete, we’ve fully processed exactly how unique (and scary) 2021 really was. (You can read the full Audit of Antisemitic Incidents here.)

ADL is working to leverage our findings to fight hate. When our CEO Jonathan Greenblatt is invited on to CNN to discuss the alarming results, it helps us make the case for more funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, it helps communities assess and address threats locally and it hopefully inspires you to speak out each and every time you see antisemitism.

The Audit gave you the numbers, but as we discussed during our Fighting Hate From Home webinar last week, it’s not just about data. It’s about consistently fighting antisemitism from every angle.

We wish we could give one specific reason for the alarming rise in incidents, but the unfortunate truth is that we can’t. The surge during the military conflict in May was followed by more spikes in November and December, when there was no immediately triggering event. Not only that, but only 18% of the 2,717 total incidents were committed by extremists. That means the perpetrators of the majority of incidents are unknown or just regular people in communities around the country.

The Audit is a huge project that makes an even bigger difference, and I want to thank all of the researchers, investigators and writers on the ADL Center on Extremism team and across ADL who worked on it for countless hours, as well as our partners who provide data, and every person who saw an incident and reported it to us. And of course, we couldn’t do this without your support.

Let’s work together against antisemitism, as we continue Fighting Hate for Good.

Sincerely,

Oren Segal

VP of Center on Extremism

ADL