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The Anti-Defamation League released its annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents just days shy of the June 10 shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C., surely one of the ugliest of such attacks.
The good news is that according to the report, the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported in the U.S. decreased for the fourth year in a row. The bad (although not surprising) news is that Jews are the number one religious group targeted by hate. The audit identified 37 physical assaults on Jewish individuals, 702 incidences of anti-Semitic vandalism and 613 cases of harassment in 2008.
One of the incidents took place in Prescott in September: According to Bill Straus, who heads up our local ADL office, a Jewish sixth-grade special needs child was beaten by an eighth-grade child after the Jewish child was asked if he was Jewish. "ADL followed up with the school," Straus wrote in an e-mail. "The perpetrator was disciplined."
Straus says quite a few incidents similar to the one in Prescott took place in the course of 2008 but "for one reason or another, primarily the family's not willing to go on the record, they aren't included in the audit. The audit is like the hate crimes statistics. The one thing you know for sure is there's more than indicated on the pages."
Late last month, Phoenix police called to let Straus know that swastikas and graffiti, including anti-Jewish and white power statements, had been drawn on the classroom door of a Jewish teacher at a school in the Valley. Incidents of swastikas alone being drawn or painted or even, lately, burned into grass with chemicals are unfortunately not uncommon; in May, Straus says, vandals defaced a billboard in Chandler marking the future site of a Chabad building with anti-Semitic graffiti.
In Straus's words, if the ADL spent its time following up on every random swastika, "we'd never get anything else done."
18 Jun, 2009 >