The Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) annual audit on antisemitic incidents reveals a drastic increase during 2024.
"We recorded a total of 9,354 antisemitic incidents," relays Rachel Sass, senior antisemitic incident specialist at the ADL Center on Extremism. "To put that into context for you, that's the highest number of incidents that we've ever recorded in a single year. It's 5% higher than the number of incidents we recorded in 2023 and a staggering almost 900% increase in the past decade."
She says the fallout and reaction to the October 2023 terror attack in Israel by Hamas continued throughout 2024, with a particularly intense rise in antisemitic incidents on U.S. college campuses.
At Harvard, after the Department of Homeland Security canceled about $2.7 million dollars in grants, the White House has asked the IRS to revoke the university's tax-exempt status for its failure to address antisemitism on campus.
Aaron Bandler, an investigative journalist with the Jewish Journal, says the Trump administration now plans to pull another $1 billion of Harvard's funding.
The Harvard Crimson reports the Trump admin sent a list of demands to Harvard on April 3, including that the university rescind its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program and that anti-Israel protestors not be permitted to wear masks.
"They wear masks so that they can't be identified, and that's a problem," says Bandler.
Harvard is suing in response to the second list of demands the Trump administration sent on April 11, reportedly by mistake. The university claims these unprecedented accountability efforts are unlawful.
"How exactly they're unlawful, I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's clear that the university must be feeling the impacts of it if they are resorting to legal action," Bandler suggests.
He says this lawsuit will set a precedent on whether the federal government can use federal funding to hold universities accountable in this manner. He calls it a "very important moment in academia."
ADL, meanwhile, is encouraging people to reach out to their state leaders and ask them to act against antisemitism.
Sass clarifies that ADL does not consider the college protests to be antisemitic, but the report recognizes that a lot of antisemitic activity happened at and around them; for the first time in its 50-year history, the majority of all of the audited incidents had themes related to Israel or Zionism.
"We want to get across the fact that this isn't just a matter of criticism of Israel. Increasingly, this is a problem that's making its way into all manner of antisemitic incidents," Sass notes.
As for the Jewish community, her organization does not want fear to be the takeaway from these "frightening" numbers. ADL wants people to be informed and to understand the problem, "but also to be strong and resilient and know that we have a lot of allies in this fight against antisemitism" that Sass says are more numerous more powerful than the people that want to harm them.
