There’s no avoiding the painful fact that this has been a difficult time for the Jewish community. The years 2019 and 2020 were two of the three worst years on record for antisemitic incidents in the United States since ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) started tracking annual incident levels in the late 1970s. Moreover, incidents spiked in May 2021, with more than double the number of antisemitic incidents reported in the U.S. compared to the same month last year.
Not surprisingly, given the surge of incidents in recent years, a 2021 survey found that well over half of Jewish Americans have either experienced or directly witnessed some form of antisemitic incident in the last five years.
Antisemitism doesn’t discriminate: When antisemites vandalize a synagogue or spread hateful, age-old slanders against someone they assume to be a Jewish person, they do so without regard for whether their target is an observant Jew or unaffiliated; Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Mizrachi, or Romaniote; Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform, or even Jewish at all.
At the same time, it’s important that all Jewish communities and communal institutions in this country have the same level of access to resources for strengthening our security against attacks.
It is also critically important for all of us to report antisemitic incidents when we have experienced them, so that accurate data can help drive effective responses. For example, you can report incidents to ADL via our “Report an Incident” website, and we also have an online guide that offers tips for reporting cases of antisemitism that occur online to social media platforms.
ADL also has recently announced partnerships with Hillel and the Union of Reform Judaism to improve our work in data collection and to help educate the community about how serious the threat is, and how to deal with potential security threats to our schools and institutions. And we have more partnerships in the works that will help to enhance our ability to coordinate our efforts to counter this threat community wide.
Members of the American Sephardic community often have special skills that they can bring to these efforts, stemming from their families’ historic roots in Spanish-speaking or Muslim-majority countries, such as language skills that are an invaluable asset in the fight against hate.
So many Sepharadim also have powerful personal or family stories that can help illustrate for others the importance of standing up to fight antisemitism. To take just one timely example, during a virtual event on Capitol Hill this year, co-sponsored by the Sephardic Brotherhood of America and ADL, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla shared his extremely moving family story of surviving the Holocaust in Greece – a story that helped reinforce for the Members of Congress present how important it is to fight antisemitism and how terrible its human toll can be.
And Dr. Bourla was himself the target of blatant antisemitic bigotry during the last year alone, such as when a magazine in Greece compared him to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who performed horrific medical experiments on Jewish victims in concentration camps and declared that “a Jewish veterinarian will stick the needle!” to inject people with “poison.”
And just the other week, the Sephardic Brotherhood of America brought to ADL’s attention an outrageous incident in which a rabbi in Turkey who announced he would visit Jewish heritage sites around the country was preposterously accused by a local commentator of being linked to wildfires across the Turkish countryside, alleging “the rabbis know Kabbalah black magic well.”
ADL and the Sephardic Brotherhood are discussing opportunities for potential new programs in the fall, with the goal of organizing workshops for how members of the community can be engaged and included in ADL’s continued work.
This is such a challenging time for our community for so many reasons, not least the ongoing pandemic, which has an enormous human toll, causes significant fear, and also amplifies the motivation that many antisemites may feel to scapegoat Jews for all of society’s challenges.
The least we all can do is to be there for each other, and to stand up together in the fight against antisemitism in America and around the world.
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