I want to set the record straight about San Francisco State University, which recently received a “C” on the Anti-Defamation League’s “Campus Antisemitism Report Card.”

Historically, SFSU has been viewed as a bellwether for antisemitism on college campuses not just nationally, but internationally. During a 2024 trip to Israel for Hillel leaders, we met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

Upon hearing about my role as executive director of San Francisco Hillel, he rolled his eyes and remarked that SFSU was a “tough one.” I took the opportunity to explain how much the campus had changed. Today, I would argue that SFSU is a model for addressing antisemitism on college campuses.

ADL’s “C” grade, while an improvement over last year’s “D,” does not fully reflect the administration’s efforts or its impact on Jewish student life. Because the ADL assessed hundreds of campuses with a one-size-fits-all methodology that combines unrelated criteria into a single grade, it fails to capture the supportive environment for Jewish students at SFSU.

In 2019, SFSU was among the first universities to join Hillel International’s Campus Climate Initiative, which trains university administrators on how to respond to antisemitism on campus. Our administration is much better prepared than it once was. In a 2024 presentation to administrators nationwide, Hillel International general counsel Mark Rotenberg pointed to SFSU as a leader on this issue.

As a result of the Campus Climate Initiative, SFSU has established a committee of faculty, staff and students, along with representatives from SF Hillel and Hillel International, to track progress toward meeting a long list of goals.

Shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, SFSU President Lynn Mahoney and state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-S.F.) met with Jewish students to hear their experiences. Both listened intently to each student. While there are few easy fixes, the students felt heard and supported.

In December 2024, while SF Hillel staff attended a conference, the Hillel building was vandalized with antisemitic graffiti. Though our building is not located on campus and no SFSU students were involved, the university coordinated with law enforcement officers to remove the graffiti. Mahoney issued a public statement condemning the act, which was also signed by leaders from several other nearby schools served by the Hillel, including the heads of the University of San Francisco, UC Law San Francisco and UC San Francisco.

Following the success of a $9.2 million capital campaign, for which Mahoney was instrumental in cultivating donors, SF Hillel needed temporary space during construction. The university graciously lent us space in the campus library.

“Combatting campus antisemitism and partnering with Hillel should be priorities for every university president,” Mahoney said when asked about the importance of Hillel. “SF Hillel provides critical support for our Jewish students, as well as serving as a key resource for the university’s work. Together, we are working hard every day to make SFSU a welcoming space for Jewish students.”

Professor Marc Dollinger of SFSU’s Jewish studies department, who wrote a forthcoming book on campus antisemitism, told me that S.F. State stands as a model for universities nationwide. “While no college administrator can control the actions of bad actors, ours has created the systems and approaches to respond when they do,” he said.

Student leaders agree. Maddux Eckerling, SF Hillel student president, told me the university has made a lot of progress toward supporting students. “I am grateful for President Mahoney’s leadership and responsiveness towards our community,” Eckerling said. “Each time I email her or meet with her, the response time and care in the response blows me away.”

SFSU and SF Hillel continue to strengthen their partnership. Students say the university takes their needs seriously and addresses issues as they arise. Ultimately, campus climate is defined by student experience. Their respect for President Mahoney and the administration only confirms general counsel Rotenberg’s comment: Look at SFSU to see how to do it right.

The Anti-Defamation League’s third annual “Campus Antisemitism Report Card,” which assigns letter grades to U.S. universities, found improvements at colleges across the country, including in Northern California, compared with the two previous years. 

However, a companion study measuring non-Jewish student perceptions of Jews and Israel suggests that even as institutional responses to antisemitism are improving, many college students continue to encounter antisemitic and anti-Zionist attitudes and behavior.

The new report evaluated 150 colleges and universities, which were chosen based on Jewish student population, national rankings, and submissions by ADL’s regional offices.

As high school seniors across the country await college admissions decisions and begin considering which campus they’ll call home for the next four years, the data presents a complex portrait, the ADL acknowledged.

“There is no single metric that can capture a student’s lived experience,” said Shira Goodman, ADL’s vice president of advocacy.

In Northern California, four of five universities demonstrated progress since last year in the latest report card, released earlier this month: 

• San Francisco State University improved from a “D” to a “C.”
• Stanford University rose from a “C” to a “B.”
• UC Berkeley shifted from a “C” to a “B.”
• UC Davis maintained its “C.”
• UC Santa Cruz improved from a “D” to a “C.” 

The ADL announced its report card project in early 2023, months before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, amid “growing antisemitism” on campuses, the organization said. The report card is meant to serve as a tool for prospective students and their parents, as well as for school guidance counselors and alumni.

Goodman noted that the report card measures institutional response, not individual student experiences, and stressed that a high grade does not guarantee a great four years, nor does a lower grade mean a student cannot thrive.

“Our report card is one tool that measures a snapshot of what’s happening,” Goodman said. “I think students at ‘D’ and ‘F’ schools can have a fine experience if they have the support they need. And I think there are students probably at ‘A’ and ‘B’ schools who would say that grade doesn’t necessarily represent their experience. But that’s not what we’re purporting to do.”

This distinction is particularly relevant when comparing ADL findings, for example, with reports from other organizations that monitor the campus climate. In February, for example, campus watchdog group Amcha Initiative issued a report that highlighted high levels of anti-Zionist activism at three California schools, including UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, which still received a “B” and “C,” respectively, from the ADL.

According to Goodman, such differences are not necessarily contradictions. Rather, they reflect different methods and areas of focus, she said.

Jordana Bischoff, a college counselor at Kehillah School, said students at the Palo Alto Jewish high school regularly consult ADL data alongside other resources, such as Hillel International’s rankings and comparison tools, to understand both the strength of Jewish life on campus and overall safety.

“The ADL Report Card is certainly a helpful tool that families use to see what each school offers in the way of support for Jewish students,” she said. “The report also helps students and families compare colleges and the support they have for Jewish students, so they get a sense of what is available to them at the various campuses they are exploring.”

For many Jewish students, the biggest concern when choosing a college is feeling safe and supported, according to Bischoff. 

“They want to feel a sense of community and security on campuses so their focus can be on learning,” she said. “Jewish students want to feel secure among other students and faculty at the universities they consider.”

Parents, Bischoff said, largely share those same concerns. Many worry that their child will feel isolated among few Jewish students or will become a target of antisemitic activity. Parents also want reassurance that university administrations will actively protect Jewish students and respond appropriately to potential incidents.

Despite the report card’s usefulness, Bischoff emphasizes that it is just one factor in the college decision process. When advising students, counselors focus heavily on individual values and fit. 

“We want to understand what Jewish students are looking for in their college experience,” she said. “We also advise on the quality of academic programs aligned with student interest, opportunities for research, career preparation, global experiences, etc. It is important to us to help students find their community and academic fit.”

The 2026 ADL report notes widespread improvement nationally in how colleges are addressing antisemitism. Nationally, 58 percent of assessed institutions earned “A” or “B” grades this year, up from 41 percent in 2025 and just 23.5 percent in 2024. Nearly half of the schools evaluated in the 2025 report card improved their grades in the new one.

ADL officials point to several factors that led to better grades in the new report, including the adoption of clearer definitions of antisemitism, expanded training and education programs and increased willingness by universities to publicly condemn antisemitic incidents.

According to ADL Central Pacific regional director Marc Levine, such gains reflect “meaningful steps to strengthen policies, establish advisory councils, mandate antisemitism education and improve bias reporting systems.”

The new report evaluated the selected colleges and universities using 32 criteria across three main categories: “administrative policies,” “Jewish life” and “conduct and climate concerns.”

“Administrative policies” covered codes of conduct, reporting systems and enforcement mechanisms. “Jewish life” measured access to Hillel, Chabad, Jewish fraternities and sororities, kosher dining and cultural resources. “Conduct and climate concerns” included documented antisemitic and anti-Zionist incidents and the presence of related activity among student or faculty groups.

Each category is weighted roughly equally, with additional assessment based on how effectively schools enforce policies and respond to incidents.

The ADL does not base grades on student surveys. While surveys are conducted, they are used to inform the structure of the grading system, not to directly determine scores. 

Alongside the report card, ADL released a study titled “Campus Crossroads: Non-Jewish Student Perceptions of Jews and Israel.” Its findings paint a more troubling picture of campus culture: 48.3 percent of non-Jewish students reported “witnessing or experiencing anti-Jewish behavior in the past year” and 47.6 percent agreed with at least one anti-Jewish attitude.

These findings suggest that while administrative policies may be improving, those changes have not yet fully translated into better day-to-day on-campus experiences for students.

Twenty years ago, when he wanted to investigate where antisemitism and extremism were spreading online, Oren Segal would dig for a while until he found a threat or offense. Now the digging is no longer necessary. 

Hatred toward Jews online is in plain sight, said Segal, the ADL’s senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence, at an event Monday evening in Los Gatos.

“The online space is a 24/7 Klan rally,” he told Daniel Klein, CEO of Jewish Silicon Valley, who hosted Segal for a fireside chat to discuss the intersection of antisemitism, extremism and technology. 

Segal told an audience of 40 people about the team of investigators and analysts he works with at the ADL. It’s their job to scope out online sources and forums with the aim of preventing an attack on the Jewish community, or any community, before it happens.

He said that antisemitic theories and tropes are so commonplace on social media that they’ve become normalized that many people can’t recognize antisemitism right in front of them.

“It’s literally two swipes away,” Segal said of ideas circulating on social media that demonize or threaten the Jewish community. Antisemitic humor, he noted, is no longer shocking or seen as offensive to many people reading it online.

“I think that access to it and the way that it is weaponized online is just something different than we have ever seen before,” Segal said, and reaches beyond TikTok, Instagram, X and Meta.

“There’s a whole set of other platforms that you may or may not have heard of, like Twitch and Steam, and a whole bunch of gaming platforms in which, actually, kids are spending most of their time,” Segal said.

AI-generated videos are another new challenge the ADL is confronting. Over the last two years of war, Segal’s team regularly found fake videos of atrocities happening in Gaza so realistic that it was nearly impossible to tell they were generated by AI. 

“There are already atrocities happening; you don’t need to create fake ones,” Segal said. “Now your whole sense of what’s happening in a conflict… is completely warped, and it has this sort of antisemitic angle to it, and it seems real.”

For instance, the ADL found that videos were being made using Sora, a tool from OpenAI, which creates realistic videos based on text input by users. Segal said his team members tested the platform themselves, finding that there were no limits to what a person seeking to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories could create.

They shared their findings with Sora’s leadership and later trained employees in the company on how to identify antisemitic conspiracy theories in prompts and prevent such videos from being generated.

“Now it’s a lot less,” Segal said. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, but they started learning.”

The ADL also had success combating antisemitism spreading on Roblox, one of the most popular online gaming platforms among young children and adults alike, Segal said.

In April, the ADL published an article called “The Dark Side of Roblox,” explaining how a group of players who call themselves Active Shooter Studies (A.S.S.) had gained notoriety for creating Roblox maps (similar to a level in a video game) that replicate and glorify real-life mass shootings, reenacting national tragedies such as Columbine, Uvalde and Parkland. Other mass shootings included attacks on Jewish communities, Segal said.

The ADL alerted Roblox, Segal said, and the company made changes to remove these disturbing public game scenarios, though many still exist in private forums and on other platforms.

“It shouldn’t have taken one of my analysts … to find that. Why couldn’t they do it themselves?” Segal said. “So yeah, I’m outraged. And by the way, it’s not unreasonable for us to expect more from the companies that are taking up all of our time and making a ton of money doing it.”

The ADL is training several tech companies that are willing to work together on identifying and removing extremist and dangerous antisemitic content, Segal noted. But the vast majority of companies, he said, are unwilling to take action.

The ADL hopes some AI will be good for the Jews. The ADL is currently beta-testing an AI tool on its website for reporting antisemitic incidents that happen at school. The virtual assistant is learning how to successfully generate a sample letter to the administration of any school, including all of the data the ADL has collected about antisemitism in that school district, Segal said.

“It may not be 100% perfect,” he said, “but our goal is to use AI to harness all of our intelligence, all of our data, so that you can request something and have it.”

The Anti-Defamation League’s regional director says he is encouraged that the nation’s largest teachers union ultimately decided not to cut ties with the ADL, particularly amid the tense debates over curbing antisemitism in California schools.

Delegates of the National Education Association (NEA), a union with about 3 million members, passed a resolution in early July to disengage with the ADL amid intense criticism by pro-Palestinian activists over ADL’s support for Israel. On July 18, however, union leaders rejected that resolution. 

The reversal came as the California branch of the National Education Association, known as the California Teachers Association (CTA), remains in conflict with mainstream Jewish organizations over its opposition of a state bill designed to address antisemitism in public schools. The bill, AB 715, is currently under consideration in Sacramento. A July 18 email from ADL’s Central Pacific office also mentioned the possibility that delegates of the California teachers union “may follow suit” and try to cut ties with the ADL.

The CTA did not respond to J.’s request for comment.

The national resolution, spearheaded by the NEA’s Educators for Palestine Caucus, would have barred the union from using, endorsing, or publicizing any ADL materials or data. The ADL’s work in schools includes the anti-bullying program No Place for Hate and the Holocaust education program Echoes & Reflections.

“This rejection of the resolution by the [NEA’s] executive board was a win for the entire Jewish community,” said Marc Levine, director of the ADL’s Central Pacific region office in San Francisco. “The resolution that was advanced to the NEA executive board was very clearly an antisemitic action. The ADL was singled out primarily because of our work in Jewish advocacy.”

Several Jewish delegates who are part of the NEA’s Jewish Affairs Caucus spoke out against the resolution prior to the delegates’ vote in early July. 

Karen Bloom, a math teacher at Piedmont Middle School in Piedmont, was one of them.

Beyond her concern about the detrimental effects of the resolution on Jewish students, Bloom said she also took issue with its advocates’ lack of understanding of the full scope of the ADL’s work. Around six years ago, for example, Bloom introduced No Place For Hate to her school. She has witnessed its impact and success.

“The students are thinking and talking about how to make sure our school is welcoming to all,” Bloom told J. “I think it’s a great addition to our school.”

Because teachers unions typically do not have direct control over public school curricula, it’s unclear how much influence the ban would have had on schools if the NEA had chosen to implement it. 

Some Jewish union members support cutting ties with the ADL, including a local teacher who helped bring the boycott resolution to a vote.

Judy Greenspan, a substitute middle school teacher at United for Success Academy in Oakland and a member of NEA’s Educators for Palestine Caucus, introduced the resolution to NEA delegates in early July. 

In December 2023, Greenspan and other members of the Oakland teachers union organized an unauthorized teach-in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the Oakland Unified School District superintendent’s failed effort to prevent it. 

Greenspan did not respond to J.’s request for comment. 

The ADL credited a national email campaign for the NEA leaders’ decision against shunning the ADL. 

More than 400 Jewish organizations joined the campaign, according to Levine, who told J. that “hundreds of thousands” of individuals and groups additionally sent messages directly to the NEA’s leaders demanding that they abandon the resolution. 

Although neither the NEA nor its state and local affiliate unions have formal partnerships with the ADL, the CTA has in the past cited the ADL directly as a source of information for teachers. In the June-July 2021 issue of its magazine California Educator, for example, the CTA referenced the ADL as a source for lesson plans on LGBTQ+ history and activism. 

Despite the NEA leaders’ veto of the ADL resolution, its Educators for Palestine Caucus celebrated the NEA delegates’ vote as a symbol of support for a wider #DropTheADLFromSchools campaign. Opponents of the ADL claim it uses a distorted definition of antisemitism to punish criticism of Israel and Zionism.

Seth Brysk, the American Jewish Committee’s director for Northern California who has led trainings about antisemitism in schools, said the NEA resolution was the latest iteration of a type of extremism he has witnessed firsthand. 

“The teachers unions are not simply targeting Jewish pro-Israel organizations,” he said. “They are targeting basic aspects of Jewish identity: who we are, our rights to self-determination, our rights to define our own identity and our right to be able to explain to others the hate that may be targeting us.”

(JTA) — While the majority of Americans oppose antisemitism, a quarter believe that the recent string of attacks on Jews in the United States were “understandable,” according to a new report released by the Anti-Defamation League on Friday.

The report comes in the wake of three recent attacks on Jewish targets by people claiming to act on behalf of the Palestinians: the arson attack on Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s house in April, the deadly shooting of two Israeli embassy workers in Washington D.C. in May and the firebombing attack on a group demonstrating for the release of the Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, last month.

“As the Jewish community is still reeling from recent antisemitic attacks that killed three people, it’s unacceptable that one-quarter of Americans find this unspeakable violence understandable or justified — an alarming sign of how antisemitic narratives are accepted by the mainstream,” the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said in a statement.

The ADL’s Center for Antisemitism Research — a relatively new enterprise — conducted the survey to assess the national mood toward antisemitism following the spate of attacks.

Overall, it found that 60% of Americans at least somewhat agree that antisemitism is a serious problem, and three quarters of Americans want more government action to combat antisemitism. (Democrats were more likely than Republicans to agree that antisemitism is a serious problem, by 9 percentage points, according to the survey.)

The vast majority of respondents condemned the attacks, with 85% or more saying the attacks were not justified, that the attacks were morally wrong, and that they would not want to work with someone who celebrated the attacks. A slightly lower proportion — 78% — said they believed the attacks were antisemitic.

But the survey of 1,000 American adults, taken on June 10, also found that some excused or endorsed the violence against Jews. About 24% of respondents said they believed the attacks were “understandable,” and the same percentage said they believed the attacks were staged to gain sympathy for Israel. About half of the respondents who agreed that the attacks were understandable also believed that they were false flag operations, according to the ADL.

During the recent attacks in Boulder and Washington D.C., both suspects reportedly yelled “free Palestine,” and police said the arsonist accused of firebombing Shapiro’s home said he was motivated by “perceived injustices to the people of Palestine,”

About 15% of respondents said that the violence was “necessary” and 13% said it was “justified.” (The question’s structure means that a survey-taker could choose how much they agreed or disagreed with each statement.)

A much larger proportion — 38% — said they believed attacks against U.S. Jews would stop if Israel declared a ceasefire in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

The survey also asked respondents for their views on contested slogans that are commonly used by pro-Palestinian protesters. More than two thirds of Americans believe the phrases “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” increase the risk of violence against Jews, the survey found. Among those surveyed who view pro-Palestinian protests favorably, 54% still believed the phrases increased the risk of violence.

The survey also asked takers for their opinions on a series of antisemitic tropes, a recurring subject for the ADL’s research. It found that around a third of respondents believed that Jews have too much influence in politics and media and that Jews in America should answer for the actions of Israel.

(JTA) — The National Education Association, the United States’ largest teachers union, has passed a non-binding measure barring the union from using, endorsing or publicizing any materials from the Anti-Defamation League.

The proposal, supported by a slim majority of NEA delegates present at the union’s 2025 Representative Assembly in Portland, Oregon, over the weekend, will automatically be referred to its executive committee, which will have a final say on the measure, an NEA spokesperson told Axios.

The measure calls for the union to stop using ADL materials about the Holocaust and antisemitism as well as ADL statistics or programs.

Its practical impact, if ultimately approved, is not clear, because unions typically do not decide on programming and curriculum in schools. But the success of the measure nonetheless offered evidence that the #DroptheADLFromSchools movement, which argues that the organization promotes pro-Israel bias in its materials for schools, had achieved a breakthrough success.

“Like policymakers and major media outlets, schools mistakenly rely on the ADL as a credible source of information about what constitutes antisemitism and its extent in the United States today,” a website for the #DroptheADLFromSchools movement reads.

“But analysis by scholars and journalists makes it clear that the ADL systematically distorts people’s understanding of antisemitism by including criticism of Israel as an indicator of hatred toward Jews,” the site says. “They distort the prevalence of antisemitism by including legal, nonviolent Palestinian solidarity actions as ‘bias incidents’ in their statistics.”

The ADL condemned the vote. “With antisemitism at record high levels, it is profoundly disturbing that a group of NEA activists would brazenly attempt to further isolate their Jewish colleagues and push a radical, antisemitic agenda on students,” an ADL spokesperson told Axios in a statement. “We will not be cowed for supporting Israel, and we will not be deterred from our work reaching millions of students with educational programs every year.”

In 2024, the ADL provided 5 million Jewish and non-Jewish students with educational materials and programs that include content on antisemitism, the Holocaust and Jewish identity, according to the organization’s website.

The ADL, once seen by most across the American political spectrum as the arbiter of what constitutes antisemitism in the United States, has in recent years become a target of criticism for progressives over its hawkish defense of Israel and its embrace of the idea that anti-Zionism constitutes antisemitism. (The group is also frequently maligned by the far right.) The political fallout of Israel’s war against Hamas has accelerated that shift.

In March, a coalition of progressive Jewish groups organized a protest at the ADL’s annual summit on antisemitism and hate over what they perceived as the ADL’s support for President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Last month, Wikipedia’s editors voted to declare that the Anti-Defamation League is “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And in recent days, the ADL’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, has faced scrutiny after The Forward reported that he reportedly compared pro-Palestinian protesters to Islamist terrorists.

A transcript of the NEA assembly proceedings shows that several Jewish delegates spoke against the passage while more spoke in its favor. According to Jewish Insider, the vote had to be tallied three times to determine a clear result.

“This body supporting this motion is a message to Jewish educators and Jewish students that we are not safe in education spaces,” a Massachusetts teacher said, according to the transcript.

The NEA vote is not the first breakthrough for the anti-ADL movement in education. Earlier this year, the teachers union in Los Angeles wrote a letter obtained by Jewish Insider asking the superintendent of the L.A. Unified School District and the LAUSD school board to stop using ADL materials, because of its “focus on indoctrination rather than education.” The union, United Teachers Los Angeles, is a chapter of the second-largest national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers.

The Anti-Defamation League tallied 498 antisemitic incidents in Northern California in 2024, a year in which the majority of incidents nationwide were tied to anti-Israel animosity, according to an annual audit released Tuesday.

Across the country, antisemitic incidents reached 9,354 last year. That was the highest number the ADL has recorded in a single year — and up 893% from 942 such incidents reported in 2015.

Incidents in Northern California last year were down a fraction of a percent from the 501 reported in 2023. However, both years were up significantly from the 166 incidents reported in 2022 and 70 in 2021. 

Marc Levine, director of the ADL’s Central Pacific region based in S.F., told J. that the “persistent” problem of antisemitism in the Bay Area continues to diverge with its reputation as a community “that is supposed to be more tolerant, progressive and accepting.”  

Tolerance “wasn’t the trend,” he said. The “sustained level of antisemitic incidents … is essentially creating a new baseline for the Bay Area. The level of alarm and intimidation that this causes for the Jewish community is just untenable.”

Nationally, the ADL noted that a greater percent of antisemitic incidents than ever before came in the context of Israel and Zionism. Just under 60% of all reported incidents included elements related to Israel or Zionism, the audit found, a historic first since the ADL began publishing annual reports in 1979.

The ADL noted that it distinguishes between criticism of Israel or “general anti-Israel activism” and the antisemitic rhetoric used by “extreme actors in anti-Israel spaces.” Out of more than 5,000 anti-Israel rallies tracked throughout last year, 2,596 involved antisemitic messaging. 

In its report, the ADL described “antisemitic messaging” as including glorification of antisemitic violence, calls to destroy Israel (through slogans ranging from “Death to Israel” to “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”), and explicit marginalization of Jews with a connection to Israel (for example, “We don’t want no Zionists here”). 

“Legitimate political protest, support for Palestinian rights, or expressions of opposition to Israeli policies” were not included in the audit, the report stated. 

Some opponents of the ADL’s approach to antisemitism tracking reject its inclusion of certain phrases, like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Last year marked the fourth in a row in which the ADL reported a rise in antisemitic incidents nationwide. The figure was up 5% from 8,873 in 2023. However, 2023 itself witnessed a dramatic increase of 139% from the 3,698 antisemitic incidents reported in 2022.

Authors of the report said the results reflect an elevated level of antisemitism that has become a “persistent reality” for American Jews since the spike immediately following the Hamas massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. 

Based on the ADL’s data, Jewish college students likely have faced a significant portion of the intimidation that Levine described. 

University campuses saw the largest increase of reported antisemitic incidents when compared with any other location category, including public areas, Jewish institutions, businesses, residential areas and cemeteries. 

This trend was consistent in Northern California, where incidents at college campuses increased by 31% from 2023, according to the Central Pacific region of the ADL. 

These reported incidents reached their apex from mid-April through mid-May of 2024, coinciding with the anti-Israel encampment movement that descended on colleges nationwide, the report reads. Tent encampments sprung up on multiple California campuses, including San Francisco State University, University of San Francisco, UC Berkeley, California State University in Sacramento, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, and University of Southern California. 

J. reported a litany of antisemitic incidents on campuses last year. In February 2024, UC Berkeley students attending a talk by an Israeli attorney and military reservist were forced to evacuate Zellerbach Playhouse after protesters rushed the venue while chanting “Intifada, intifada.” One student reported that protesters called him a “dirty Jew” and spit on him. 

In May 2024, protesters took over an abandoned UC Berkeley building, vandalizing its walls with graffiti reading “Martyrs never die” and “Zionism is Nazism.” 

In a “fundamental shift” in the antisemitism landscape, university incidents surpassed those at K-12 schools last year. The ADL calls K-12 schools one of the “traditional hotspots” for antisemitism, but reports decreased 26% nationwide in 2024. As in previous years, however, the ADL cautions that incidents in this category are likely underreported, as children may hesitate to speak out about their experiences. 

By contrast, antisemitic incidents on college campuses nationwide rose 84% last year.

Regardless, Levine told J. that the ADL will maintain its advocacy efforts at K-12 schools, particularly on the issue of ethnic studies courses in California. Following several years of debates around the content of ethnic studies curriculum, which critics say discriminates against Jews, state legislators introduced AB 1468 this year in an effort to standardize curriculum guidelines for ethnic studies at California high schools. 

“We have our work cut out for us in ensuring that ethnic studies curricula across high schools are free from bias against Jews and Israel,” Levine said. “The ADL will be laser-focused on this to help the community bring these numbers down, so that we can catch our breath and live vibrant, proud Jewish lives in the Bay Area.”

The annual ADL audit is based on incidents reported directly from victims and witnesses, as well as from law enforcement agencies, media outlets and partner organizations. Antisemitic incidents can be reported to the ADL online via adl.org/report-incident.

(JTA) — WASHINGTON — The Anti-Defamation League’s legal team is joining with a top-ranked American legal firm to seek compensation for U.S. victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel.

Theirs will be the latest of multiple lawsuits in the United States targeting entities that lawyers say abetted or profited from the atrocities.

The lawsuit filed Monday by ADL and the Crowell and Moring law firm accuses Iran, Syria and North Korea of abetting the terrorists, who murdered some 1,200 people on Oct. 7, wounded thousands more and abducted more than 250 people.

The plaintiffs are basing their action on a 2015 law that is meant to compensate victims of state-sponsored terrorism through criminal penalties and seized assets.

“Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of antisemitism and terror — along with Syria and North Korea, they must be held responsible for their roles in the largest antisemitic attack since the Holocaust,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s CEO, said in a press release.

“It’s about finding justice for the victims and their families, and putting all the weight behind this case, because what we’re talking about is the largest and most deadly and systematic attack since the Holocaust,” James Pasch, the lead ADL counsel in the case, said in an interview. “The world should know who was responsible for providing support for this heinous terrorist attack and hear the stories of the victims and the families of the victims.”

Iran funds and trains Hamas. The terrorist group’s leaders have for decades had close dealings with Syria’s Assad regime. The lawyers say they will produce evidence that those two countries and North Korea provided material support to Hamas in carrying out the Oct. 7 attack.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The 2015 law requires fines levied on state sponsors of terrorism to be streamed into a fund for their victims. The federal government has in recent years directed just a fraction of the money obtained from such fines into the fund.

The lawyers are simultaneously working with a bipartisan slate of lawmakers in both chambers of Congress to pass a law that would tighten that measure to ensure a substantial portion of the monies reach the fund.

The sponsors include Democratic Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Dan Goldman of New York and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, all of whom are Jewish. Other sponsors include New York Republican Reps. Mike Lawler and Nicole Malliotakis and Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn.

A source close to the case noted that there should be ample funds available to victims, pointing to $4 billion exacted in November from cryptocurrency fund Binance and its CEO for illegal dealings with Iran and Syria, among others.

The lawsuit is the latest in a number of high-profile attempts to get civil relief in U.S. courts for victims of the attack, applying a number of legal strategies. This case is notable for the inclusion of Crowell and Moring, which is consistently ranked high among top-earning firms, and which employs dozens of former federal government officials.

“Each of the more than 100 plaintiffs in this suit is a U.S. citizen, or the family member of a U.S. citizen, and is therefore eligible to bring suit for the deaths, physical and emotional injuries, and hostage-takings Hamas caused during its barbaric rampage,” the ADL release said.

It quotes Nahar Neta, the son of Adriennne Neta, a U.S. born midwife who was among those murdered on Oct. 7.

“My mom devoted her life to caring for others regardless of race or religious beliefs,” said Neta. “She was a peace and justice seeker who was active in many civilian efforts to bridge the gap between Jews and Arabs in Israel.”

An invitation-only commemoration Friday in San Francisco ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day became a symbolic microcosm of the current waves of antisemitism and anti-Zionism when a protester interrupted every speaker at the event. 

Gathered for just over an hour at the city’s Holocaust memorial outside of the Legion of Honor, about two dozen community leaders and diplomats wore yellow ribbons in solidarity with the hostages who have been held by Hamas since Oct. 7. 

The regional consulates of Israel, Ireland and Germany, the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center organized the event, together with the Anti-Defamation League and Jewish Community Relations Council Bay Area.

The guests included at least one Holocaust survivor, Anita Feinstein, and a child of Holocaust survivors, Riva Berelson. Both are AJC regional board members. 

“Today, we gather to remember an incomparable genocide. And while it is necessary to mourn, it is insufficient to remember only the murdered Jews,” said Rabbi Serena Eisenberg, AJC director of regional operations. “When Jews are targeted, democracy falters, society fails all of its citizens. We remember, too, LGBTQ victims, disabled, Gypsy and many other minorities and political prisoners who were persecuted by the Nazi regime.” 

Eisenberg spoke about the latest manifestations of antisemitism and the need for Holocaust education to combat the type of hate that Jews face following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre in Israel.

The rabbi’s remarks were echoed by California Lt. Governor Eleni Kounalakis, who emphasized the importance of gathering to support the Jewish community in the open, as opposed to hiding inside for fear of persecution — the way that so many people were forced to do in Europe in the 1940s. 

The lieutenant governor’s sentiments were punctuated by a sole protester who stood at the periphery of the crowd. He brandished signs, including one he painted red with a Star of David fashioned as a swastika. 

The man shouted about Israel and Jews during each of the speeches, yelling things such as other victims of the Holocaust “did not get an ethnocratic state” and that he does “love Jews, like Albert Einstein and Noam Chomsky.” 

There were no uniformed police officers and no visible police vehicles at the event, though there were plainclothes security personnel on hand.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by J. The Jewish News (@jewishnews_sf)

Matan Zamir, Israel’s deputy consul general to the Pacific Northwest, remarked about the protester’s presence.

“We could not have asked for a more vivid example of the rise of antisemitism and hate than the protester who showed up holding a sign replacing the swastika with the Star of David,” Zamir said.

While the protester’s disruptions appeared to make several participants uneasy, the diplomats in attendance voiced their support for both Israel and the American Jewish community. 

German Consul General Oliver Schramm noted his nation’s unequivocal support for Jews to live peacefully in Germany, Israel and around the world. 

In accordance with Jewish tradition, guests placed stones on the memorial as an act of remembrance and respect for those murdered in the Holocaust. 

After the ceremony, the protester waved his swastika sign and charged toward Schramm, who was already inside his vehicle. The protester then fled. After he left, many of the guests remained for a moment of silence. 

The second half of the day’s commemoration was a virtual talk from a Holocaust survivor identified only as Herb, who hid in Catholic orphanages throughout the war before he was reunited with his parents and immigrated to the United States. 

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked annually on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

“We are grateful to the diplomats and officials that joined us to honor the 6 million victims of the Holocaust,” Oleg Ivanov, AJC’s regional assistant director, said at the ceremony. “Antisemitism is a global phenomenon, and it’s vital that our international allies and partners continue to speak out against it as we join to fight the world’s oldest hatred wherever it arises.”

(JTA) – Advertisers have been dropping off the social network X this week after its owner, Elon Musk, called an antisemitic post “the actual truth.”

It was the exact pressure tactic that the Anti-Defamation League had recommended almost exactly a year earlier to fight hate on the platform, then known as Twitter. And given the Jewish civil rights group’s CEO’s response to Musk’s post endorsing the antisemitic “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, one might have expected it to follow suit.

“It is indisputably dangerous to use one’s influence to validate and promote antisemitic theories,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote on the platform.

Yet even as companies including IBM, Apple and Disney are pulling their ad dollars in protest, the ADL is continuing to buy ads on X — and Greenblatt has shifted to praising Musk, this time for what he says is a meaningful effort to fight antisemitism.

Musk had written another post, saying that two phrases common to pro-Palestinian protests — “decolonization,” and “from the river to the sea” — “necessarily imply genocide.” He added that users would be suspended if they posted “clear calls for extreme violence.”

“This is an important and welcome move by @elonmusk,” Greenblatt responded on X. “I appreciate this leadership in fighting hate.”

Musk has been sparring publicly with the ADL for months, at one point blaming it for rising antisemitism and threatening to sue it for billions of dollars. Now, the latest whirlwind chapter in that saga — Greenblatt’s quick shift from condemning to praising the billionaire social media mogul — has created a whiplash moment for the Jewish world.

On Monday the State Department’s antisemitism envoy suggested that she opposed Greenblatt’s stance, while a member of one of the ADL’s advisory boards called the about-face “embarrassing.”

“The damage was done,” Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt remarked about Musk’s first tweet during a Monday briefing with Jewish media. “The endorsement of the Great Replacement theory was very harmful.”

Lipstadt added that she disapproved of what she saw as any attempt to “mitigate” Musk’s earlier tweet, without criticizing Greenblatt directly. “You can try to mitigate, but once you open the pillow, it’s like chasing the feathers,” she said.

Greenblatt told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency he didn’t regret his praise for Musk. Praising people when they take what the ADL sees as the right steps, he said, is part of his job fighting antisemitism. Musk’s tweet and his own praise of it, Greenblatt told JTA, came following a private conversation between the two men in which Musk previewed his vow to suspend users who call for violence.

“I will call out Elon Musk and X, like every other platform, when they get it wrong. And I will credit Elon Musk and X and every other platform when they get it right,” Greenblatt said Monday. “One doesn’t negate the other. It was not that, ‘this happened, therefore that wasn’t bad,’ or ‘that was bad, therefore we can’t see the value in this.’ Quite the contrary.”

During their conversation, Greenblatt said, he did not press Musk for an apology for the post the billionaire wrote on Wednesday, which Greenblatt had called “indisputably dangerous.”

The damage was done. The endorsement of the Great Replacement theory was very harmful.

Musk was replying to a user who wrote, “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest s— now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.”

The post was an endorsement of the Great Replacement theory, which posits that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white populations in Western countries via the mass immigration of people of color. It was the theory cited by the attacker in the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting.

Musk responded, “You have said the actual truth.”

Greenblatt joined a loud chorus in condemning that post. Other Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee, harshly condemned it. Later in the same thread, Musk went after the ADL itself, saying the group “push[es] de facto anti-white racism.”

Greenblatt acknowledged the attacks on his group. “I don’t take any of that personally,” he said. Despite Musk’s public attitude about the ADL, Greenblatt called their meeting “extremely promising.”

Greenblatt noted that he believed Musk “still has work to do. He is not, if you will, in the clear.”

But, he added, “We saw a change in what he said on Friday, and that was noteworthy.” He said the ADL was buying ads on X, and in response to major firms suspending their ad spending, said companies “need to make their own decisions about where they want their brands to be placed.”

He said, “I hope that the other social media companies follow X’s leadership on this.”

His handling of Musk is not sitting well with some supporters of the ADL. Peter Fox, a member of the group’s NextGen Advisory Board in New York, wrote in the Forward that Greenblatt’s praise of Musk was “baffling and frankly embarrassing.” He added, “Aligning with someone like Musk, who repeatedly dabbles in conspiracy theories and white nationalist rhetoric, is a misstep that undermines the ADL’s credibility and core principles.”

Following Musk’s endorsement of the “Great Replacement” theory, more than 100 Jewish activists called out Musk for “spreading the kind of antisemitism that leads to massacres.”

Michelle Goldberg, a Jewish columnist for the New York Times, noted that Israel’s Diaspora minister, Amichai Chikli, also thanked Musk for denouncing the pro-Palestinian language. “It’s hard to figure out who is behaving more cynically, Musk or the Jewish leaders who are koshering him,” she wrote in a column on Monday.

Greenblatt acknowledged the criticism.

“At the end of the day, I understand that everyone might not agree with what I did,” he said. But he told JTA that he wasn’t concerned that his positions on Musk would harm the ADL’s reputation.

“The ADL has been around for 110 years. We don’t play for any particular team,” he said. “Our job is to protect the Jewish people. I don’t make the decisions I do based on how do I think this affects our, quote, ‘reputation.’ I do it based on, am I able to keep our community safe?”

Ron Kampeas contributed reporting.

From the hook-nosed, money-hungry goblins of the Harry Potter films to the opinion-splitting prosthetic nose in the new Leonard Bernstein biopic, Jewish stereotypes are prevalent in Hollywood.

Pushing back against those tropes is the goal of the Media and Entertainment Institute, a new partnership between the ADL and Common Sense Media, the San Francisco–based nonprofit known for helping parents find age-appropriate content for their kids.

“When you think about the power that film and television and entertainment of all kinds have, we have to make a bigger effort to address those stereotypes and to make sure that Jews are portrayed in a diverse and nuanced way,” Jeremy Sherman, director of strategic initiatives at the Anti-Defamation League, told J.

As part of the new project, ADL will prepare lists of recommended films with input from Common Sense Media.

“One [list] is going to be around Jewish portrayals, Jewish heritage, and one will be around Holocaust education and Holocaust content,” Sheman said, adding that the recommended media should give viewers “a good sense of the Jewish people.”

Jill Murphy, Common Sense Media’s editor in chief, said in an email to J., “We’re thrilled to be supporting the ADL and their incredible efforts to help improve societal perceptions of Jewish people and understanding of antisemitism more broadly.”

The institute, which was announced in September at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, will also focus on research, with a study about tropes in media coming out in the next few weeks, Sherman said.

The institute also will come up with some best practice guidelines for the entertainment industry and Sherman says there are future plans for work on education and outreach. Moreover, it’ll give kudos.

“We want to uplift some of the great work that is happening in Hollywood and beyond on positive portrayals and storytelling — Jewish characters and Jewish stories of all different kinds,” Sherman said.

But wasn’t Hollywood, in large part, founded by Jews? How can it be that antisemitism is a problem there?

“Yeah, we get that question a lot,” Sherman said.

He explained that despite Hollywood’s history as a refuge for Jewish business people and artists, the modern-day entertainment industry isn’t perfect.

For example, a recent survey by Together Ending Need, a group that fights poverty in the Jewish community, found that poor and working-class Jews are underrepresented in media depictions relative to their prevalence in real life. The location for the announcement of the institute, the Academy Museum, was itself greeted with controversy at its launch for erasing the history of the significant role Jews played in creating the American film industry.

“Hollywood still has its issues with antisemitism,” Sherman said. “There’s still Jewish tropes and stereotypes embedded into a lot of storylines and characters.”

ADL previously partnered with Common Sense Media on the “Stop Hate for Profit” initiative, which launched in 2020 and called  on social media companies to stop making money off of hate speech, which they do by taking in advertising revenue on, for example, white supremacy posts.

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.

Earlier this week, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, the owner of X (the company formerly known as Twitter), threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League, the venerable and long-running nonprofit organization founded in 1913 to fight antisemitism and other forms of hatred and bigotry in the United States and around the world.

In his threat, Musk absurdly accused the ADL of “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic” — despite the fact that the ADL has actually gone out of its way to avoid accusing Musk of antisemitism. Musk went so far as to claim that the ADL is single-handedly responsible for X’s advertising revenue being down by 60% since he purchased the company, and therefore suggested that “they would potentially be on the hook for destroying half the value of the company, so roughly $22 billion” — though he rather magnanimously clarified that he would settle for $4 billion in damages from the ADL instead.

To be clear, Musk, who has a long history of announcing plans that do not come to fruition, is exceedingly unlikely to file an actual lawsuit against the ADL, any more than he actually ever planned to cage fight Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. For one, he would be extremely unlikely to win such a lawsuit, and secondly, the discovery phase of the lawsuit would bring a lot of unwanted attention to Musk’s policies related to hate speech on the X app.

That’s because this empty threat of a lawsuit is not about winning actual financial damages from the ADL. Rather, it’s about having someone to blame for Musk’s own failures as a business executive. And in this case, rather conveniently, that someone is the Jews.

This lawsuit is Musk’s own personal version of the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth. According to this myth, propagated by such prominent German figures as general and politician Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, Germany did not actually lose the First World War on the battlefield, but was instead betrayed by certain citizens on the home front who did not want Germany to succeed — in particular, socialists who fomented strikes and labor unrest, and Jews.

The myth, which became widespread in the right-wing German press after the end of World War I, allowed these German generals to salvage their reputation. It wasn’t that the Germans got legitimately defeated by a superior army, but that the Jews sabotaged the war effort from the home front. Soon, antisemitic caricatures of Jews stabbing good honest German soldiers in the back became common in German media.

Blaming the ADL serves a similar rhetorical purpose for Musk. If, as Musk claims, the ADL is making “unfounded” accusations of antisemitism and hate speech on the X app, leading advertisers to pull out of advertising on the app, then the company’s widely reported financial woes are not actually the fault of Musk’s mismanagement at all. No, they’re the fault of a conspiracy of meddling Jews and leftists to undermine the hard work of the good entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Indeed, in dialogue with the known alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich, Musk made this claim explicit, endorsing the narrative that “Democrat groups buy bots to falsely smear people by association.” In this telling, the widely documented rise in hate speech and antisemitism on X since Musk bought the platform is not actually real, but is just a false flag operation by lying, perfidious Jews and leftists to undermine Musk and his hard work to create a platform for free speech. Antisemitism can be dismissed entirely, because it’s all part of a left-wing plot.

That’s why Musk can allege that “the ADL pursues a far left political agenda, rather than focusing on combating anti-Semitism.” And it’s why he can say that actually, rising antisemitism is the fault of the ADL itself for being too vociferous in calling attention to it.

Because the truth is, antisemitism and other forms of bigotry, through problems that long predated Musk’s ownership of the app, have skyrocketed since he purchased it. Musk’s campaign against the ADL itself builds on a white supremacist campaign to #BantheADL that has been building over the past few days. Musk has engaged widely with white supremacist and far-right accounts in his campaign against the ADL, leading known white supremacists to claim that Musk is sympathetic to them.

https://twitter.com/BasedTorba/status/1698895982514114952

And despite Musk’s weak protestations that he is “against anti-Semitism of any kind,” he has a long history of it himself. Remember his claim that George Soros, a common target of antisemitic conspiracy theories, “hates humanity.” And he has boosted the accounts of far-right antisemites for months now.

The truth is, no one needs to make recourse to the ADL or its campaign against hate speech on social media to explain why Musk’s company is failing. The company is failing because he’s a bad manager, and because advertisers do not want to be associated with a platform that is becoming a haven for hate speech.

Just weeks ago, two brands suspended their advertising on X after their ads appeared next to openly pro-Nazi content. Advertisers do not want to be part of the company that Musk is building, and so they’re leaving, and taking their money with them.

Rather than confront his own failures, Musk is crafting a narrative whereby powerful, wealthy Jews are responsible for tanking the value of his company. And as Musk knows, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more he stokes antisemitism in the name of defending “free speech,” the more the ADL and other Jewish groups will protest rising antisemitism, which will then be cited by antisemites as further evidence of their original narrative.

Musk likes to portray himself as part of “the people,” in contrast to “the effete elite” trying to take him down. But as the world’s wealthiest person, Musk is by any reasonable standard part of “the elite” himself. That’s why Musk needs antisemitism, because it’s a form of bigotry that postulates its target as all-powerful and dominating, rather than less powerful or capable. Musk needs to portray himself, the richest man on earth, as an insurgent against the real elites (Jews), represented by groups like the ADL.

Despite the fact that plenty of Jews on both the left and right offer critiques of the ADL and its strategies for combating antisemitism — some of them valid — for Musk’s white supremacist supporters, the campaign against the ADL is really a campaign against Jews on social media. They aren’t interested in critiquing one nonprofit group, but the very idea that Jews should speak up against growing antisemitism in online spaces at all. For many of Musk’s supporters, the ADL is just a way to say “Jews.”

By threatening to file a lawsuit against the ADL, Musk has crafted his own personal stab-in-the-back myth. When Musk’s company fails, his biggest fans will blame the Jews. And that should be a terrifying thought for everyone committed to marginalized voices being safe online.

This article was originally published on the Forward. The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. 

The word has been circulating among Jews on social media, in WhatsApp chats and via email: A white supremacist group is calling for a “National Day of Hate” this Saturday and encouraging antisemites to vandalize and deface Jewish institutions.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, the campaign is being pushed by a small white supremacist group in Iowa called Crew-319, in conjunction with other extremist groups.

A report from the Secure Community Network, a national group that coordinates security for Jewish institutions, said, “It should be noted, online chatter surrounding the campaign has remains limited and we assess, as in the past, this will not likely be a widespread event.”

“This so-called ‘National Day of Hate’ appears to be a publicity stunt intended to boost the visibility of antisemitic activities these groups have been field-testing for the past year,” Rafi Brinner, director of community security at the Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund in San Francisco, told J.

Information about the antisemitic campaign was first provided by the Chicago Police Department and a “situational awareness alert” with a New York Police Department insignia that advised local Jewish communities to be on the lookout for suspicious activity.

The NYPD bulletin also shared one of the hate group’s messages, which called for “MASS ANTI-SEMITIC ACTION.” The message urged followers to “shock the masses with banner drops, stickers, fliers, and graffiti,” and to film their activities.

The ADL confirmed that the hate message in the NYPD bulletin is authentic and comes from Crew-319’s channel on the social network Telegram, which is popular with extremists. Law enforcement and security agencies in the Chicago and New York City areas, however, say that as of Thursday afternoon, there are no known concrete threats to Jewish institutions.

Online, there has been an outpouring of anxiety from Jews sharing the news of the threatened antisemitic action.

The alert came roughly a week after two Jews exiting morning prayer services were shot on consecutive days in Los Angeles, allegedly by a man with antisemitic motives. Last fall, two men were arrested in Penn Station for threatening violence against New York City synagogues, and weeks earlier, police in New Jersey warned synagogues in the state about a “credible threat.”

Crew-319, the group behind the antisemitic initiative, is a “tiny Iowa-based neo-Nazi crew that distributes propaganda and engages in antisemitic stunts,” Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL’s Center on Extremism, told JTA. Segal said that on Sept. 11, 2022, a member of the group drove a U-Haul truck hung with posters reading “Jews did 9/11” through Des Moines.

In recent months, hate groups have targeted Jews with fliers, graffiti and in-person protests. The Goyim Defense League, one of the country’s most visible hate groups, has distributed antisemitic fliers in Jewish communities across the country. Founded by a Petaluma native, the group has been responsible for multiple incidents across the country, including antisemitic flyers in Bay Area neighborhoods from Berkeley to Santa Rosa and beyond, and a banner on a Los Angeles freeway saying “Kanye was right.” The group’s propaganda reportedly inspired the suspect in the L.A. shootings.

The antisemitic activity also comes amid a national rise in extremist violence. An ADL study published Thursday found that the proportion of mass shootings tied to extremism has risen significantly over the last decade.

Brinner, who said he’d fielded “dozens” of local calls from concerned groups, also sent out an email to community organizations with tips on how to handle harassers.

“These stunts and provocations are part of a larger effort to normalize hate-speech, racism and antisemitism,” he told J. “We can blunt their impact by not taking the bait. If hate groups show up on your property with megaphones or banners or otherwise obstruct access to your religious services, do not engage. Call the police on them instead.”

Gaming is hugely popular in the U.S., with estimates showing that 66% of Americans play some kind of video game weekly. Many turn to online gaming, where love for a game can create community across ages and regions of the country.

But it can also turn ugly.

“Hate and extremism in online games has only worsened since last year,” according to a new report from the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society, which studies how hate speech and harassment spreads in online spaces.

The report, titled “Hate Is No Game,” found that 86% of adults 18-45 experienced harassment while online gaming, while 66% of teens and 70% of preteens did. Examples of harassment included bullying, being called offensive names and having gameplay disrupted through trolling.

Not all harassment is based on identity, but sometimes it is; the report said identity-based harassment has grown since last year, and while women were targeted more than any other group, targeted harassment also grew for Jewish, Latino and Muslim gamers.

Of those groups, Jewish gamers experienced the biggest jump in harassment. In 2021, 22% of Jewish gamers reported identity-based harassment, compared with 34% this year.

The report also found that “exposure to white-supremacist ideologies” jumped alarmingly in 2022, from 8% to 20% among adults. For ages 13 to 17, there was an increase from 10% to 16%, though overall the encounters are not as prevalent in gaming as they are on social media.

For younger people, games where harassment was high both this year and last included Valorant, Call of Duty, Dota 2, Fortnite, PUBG: Battlegrounds, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and Destiny 2. The roster was much the same for 18 and up, but also included Grand Theft Auto, Overwatch and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

The survey also asked gamers what they did when they encountered hate and harassment. Most often, “people either stood up for themselves or ignored a comment, while among the least common actions were other people standing up for the target or reaching out to them after being harassed,” the report said.

The ADL survey asked gamers what should be done to remedy the state of affairs. A majority, 65%, thought game companies should do more to support players who were targets of harassment, while 59% said the government should “strengthen and enforce laws that protect targets of hate, harassment and extremism in online multiplayer games”; 14% opposed such a response and 27% had no opinion.

The ADL report outlined recommendations for the gaming industry to combat the harassment, including through more clearly defined company policies, independent audits, and via more transparency about gamer behavior outside of public view.

According to the report, only one major company, Roblox — a popular creative game headquartered in San Mateo — has a very clear and public policy on extremism and terrorism. Roblox, which is popular with young children, was tied to the mass murder of Black shoppers in Buffalo in May of this year after the shooter mentioned he’d been radicalized while playing the game.

“The results of this year’s survey are more dire than ever,” the report concluded. “The growing investment of civil society, research and government in examining the relationship between extremism and online games starkly contrasts the industry’s refusal to address extremism and misogyny.”

The ADL has intervened in the world of video game hate before. In a highly public incident last year, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt met with then-NBA player Meyers Leonard after the 7-footer shouted an antisemitic slur while playing Call of Duty during a public livestream. Leonard later apologized, saying he didn’t know what the slur meant.

In the first hours of 2020, I called the NYPD to confirm that a Jewish 15 year-old had been held up at knifepoint on a public bus.

“Wow. There’s a lot of this stuff happening. What the hell,” was the officer’s response.

He confirmed the incident, and told me I had missed another: in South Williamsburg, two women had approached a 22 year-old Hasidic man. One grabbed his cellphone and punched him in his throat. The other yelled, ““F—— you Jew” and “I will kill you Jews.”

The Jewish community was reeling and afraid. Four days earlier, a man had stabbed multiple Hasidim at a Hanukkah party in Monsey, New York. Long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, ADL vice president Oren Segal characterized the spate of antisemitic violence in New York as “an epidemic.” Five days later, tens of thousands marched in the streets of New York City to protest.

This pain and protest came to mind on Monday when the FBI released its 2020 hate crimes report. A casual glance at the report offers a bright spot — anti-Jewish hate crimes dropped 29 percent last year from 2019.

But hate crimes, overall, are on the rise, and 2020 was an anomalous year for crime generally because of the pandemic — plus, more recent reports from New York, Los Angeles and other police departments show a 2021 surge after the Israel-Gaza war in May.

This new FBI data, like all hate crime data, are somewhat helpful for understanding patterns, but do not even begin to accurately reflect the size and scale of the problem.

Policymakers, academics, civil rights groups and other experts I spoke to about the data all described a decades-long hate crime tracking enterprise plagued by system failures.

Thousands of U.S. police departments, year after year, don’t take hate crimes seriously enough to track and report them at all. Individuals who are most likely to be attacked because of their race, religion or sexual orientation often deeply distrust the authorities and don’t report hate crimes when they occur. And resources allocated to fighting hate crimes, distributed largely based on lawmakers’ understanding of available data, often don’t end up where they are needed most.

When data that directly affects policy isn’t accurate, everyone suffers.

Though anti-Jewish incidents comprise a small fraction of nationally reported hate crimes, in New York City, Jews are the No. 1 target, followed by LGBTQ people, Blacks and Asians. But the natures of the crimes differ sharply among these groups.

The majority — 55 percent — of anti-Jewish incidents reported to the FBI in 2020 were property crimes, like vandalism. Another 35 percent involved intimidation, and 11 percent assault.

This is not a new phenomenon. In general, “hate crimes directed against individuals are more numerous than property, but not so for the Jewish community,” Michael Lieberman of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me.

“Jewish community centers, synagogues and day schools are more frequently targeted,” he added. “And that is just because the Jewish community has lots of institutions that are pretty public, pretty easily identifiable.”

There was a total of 7,759 hate crimes reported to the FBI in 2020, a 6 percent increase from 2019; 676 of those — roughly 9 percent — were anti-Jewish bias incidents, down from 953 — 13 percent of the total — the previous year.

About a quarter of the nation’s anti-Jewish hate crimes took place in New York. The NYPD said anti-Jewish hate crimes in the five boroughs were down 52 percent in 2020 from 2019, something Deborah Lauter, head of the city’s hate crime office, attributed in part to the pandemic. “There was less interaction,” she told me, and thus fewer opportunities for hate crimes.

With notable exceptions, like 2018’s heinous mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, visibly Orthodox Jews are the most frequent victims of violent anti-Jewish hate crimes. The reason is readily apparent: most Jewish Americans, without a kippah or obviously religious attire, pass as just plain white.

Members of other minority groups do not have the same luxury. The lion’s share of hate crimes reported in 2020 — 2,755 incidents, or 36 percent — were anti-Black. There were also 928 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, 773 anti-white, 274 anti-Asian and 104 anti-Islamic incidents reported.

While the total number of reported hate crimes in 2020 increased by 6 percent, the number of anti-Asian and anti-Black hate crimes surged 70 percent and 40 percent, respectively.

“To see such a significant increase in such a quick time, and especially to see the increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans and African Americans,” is notable, said Phyllis Gerstenfeld, chair of Criminal Justice at California State University, Stanislaus.

And the majority of anti-Black hate crimes targeted people, not property: 32 percent involved assault, 45 percent intimidation, and 23 percent property destruction, damage or vandalism.

The data on anti-Asian crimes are similar: 33 percent involved intimidation, 45 percent involved assault, 16 percent involved property. Anti-Islamic, anti-LGBTQ and even anti-white hate crimes show a similar pattern.

More troubling, though, is that the FBI data only capture the tip of the iceberg. The report has serious limitations, and those limitations have serious implications.

Not a single expert I’ve interviewed expressed confidence in the FBI data’s accuracy.

“What we’ve seen over the course of 30 years is consistent under-reporting,” Lieberman told me.

While it can be helpful for identifying trends, Gerstenfeld said, “as far as trying to get a real handle on exactly how many hate crimes are happening out there, and exactly who the victims are, I don’t find that reliable in that regard at all.”

Lauter was more blunt: “The data is important, but it’s not pure.”

To compile its dataset, the FBI relies on individual police departments to identify, track and report the number of hate crimes that occur in their jurisdictions. Each year, thousands of agencies, including those of major cities, tell the FBI that zero hate crimes took place in their jurisdiction — and for 2020, 1 in 5 of police departments failed to provide hate crimes statistics to the FBI at all.

That brings us to what I call “The Miami Problem”: accurately collecting hate crime data requires that people targeted by hate trust the police. But in order for that trust to be established, police departments must first signal that they take hate crimes seriously.

“This year, and in many years in the past, the city of Miami has affirmatively reported that they have zero hate crimes,” Lieberman pointed out. “So if you live in Miami, and you’re in any way reluctant to report a hate crime anyway, why would you call the police?”

He added: “A large city that, year in and year out, does not report data to the FBI – or affirmatively reports zero hate crimes – does not inspire confidence that they are ready and able to address hate violence.”

Many of the most frequently targeted groups also have concerns about immigration status, general distrust of the police or cultural taboos that make them wary to report incidents to the authorities.

This leads to massive underreporting of hate crimes — with one significant exception: Jews.

Especially in New York, “the relationship between the Jewish community and police is exceptionally strong, a very positive relationship,” Lauter told me. “So that underreporting issue just does not exist.”

Lauter described an illuminating incident at a community meeting her office organized in Brooklyn. A Jewish leader said that what the city really needed to do to address hate crimes was increase police presence. A Black leader responded that this was the last thing his community wanted.

Both were incredulous. “The Jewish person was sort of taken aback, like they had never heard that narrative or had not paid attention to it,” Lauter recalled.

Understanding these differences — and what the data miss — is crucial. It affects not only what crimes get counted, but where resources meant to stop those crimes from occurring are allocated.

In other words, groups that have good relationships with police and other government agencies, and who effectively lobby for crimes against them to be counted and addressed — like the Jewish community — end up with more resources than those that do not.

Government officials tend to “do what looks good, without any consideration for what’s really going to work,” said Gerstenfeld, the Cal State expert. Better data is the first step to addressing this problem.

Lieberman, of the Southern Poverty Law Center, pointed to the Covid-19 Hate Crime Act — which calls for increased law enforcement training, hate crime hotlines and victim services — as a positive example of how documenting hate crimes, in this case involving Asian-Americans, can result in meaningful policy changes.

But training police departments and building community relationships with government agencies is bandaging a bullet wound while the gunman roams the streets.

“We need to do more in terms of education,” Lauter said, to address the sources of hate before they can fester and spread.

She cited the Jewish community’s advocacy of Holocaust education as an example of helping people understand the consequences of hate and the impact it can have on a community, and told me she’s been working with Asian American leaders to do more in schools as well.

Keeping the pressure on politicians and agencies to do more is vital. It’s also critical not to become so entranced by upticks or downswings in the data that we tune out the cries of those who are suffering.

“I know how unbelievably impacted people are individually when they are targeted by crime,” said Lauter.

It’s a healthy sign of democracy, she adds, when we “care about the populations that are most vulnerable to hate, and try to do something about it.”

Whether it’s documenting antisemitism at colleges or getting into scraps on social media, young Jewish students have been feeling the need to fight back against what they say has left them feeling harassed.

In a new partnership, Hillel International and the Anti-Defamation League are aiming to take a more traditional approach to the same issues — one that they say will not always treat anti-Israel activity as antisemitism. Hillel and the ADL will together create a college-level curriculum on antisemitism and jointly document antisemitic incidents on campuses in the United States. But not every student government resolution endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement will wind up in the groups’ database, ADL said.

“Anti-Israel activism in and of itself is not antisemitism,” an ADL spokesperson said. “Situations vary widely with BDS. We will carefully evaluate each one and make a determination based on our criteria for antisemitism.”

For example, a BDS resolution alone would not count as antisemitism, “but if a student was excluded from the debate because he or she was Jewish, then it might be counted.”

The Hillel-ADL partnership, which will begin in the coming academic year, follows a spike in reported antisemitic incidents on campus. In the school year that ended in 2021, the ADL tallied 244 antisemitic incidents on campuses nationwide, an increase from 181 the previous school year. Hillel has a presence on more than 550 campuses and says it serves more than 400,000 students.

The ADL and Hillel International plan to develop a curriculum about the history of antisemitism and how it manifests in current times. They will also survey schools nationwide to provide a better picture of the state of antisemitism on campus and will create a dedicated system to tally incidents of antisemitism at colleges and universities, including a portal for students to report incidents confidentially.

The ADL did not detail how it would verify whether confidentially submitted incidents actually occurred, beyond telling JTA they would be judged by the methodology the group uses in its annual audit of antisemitic incidents. The methodology states that “ADL carefully examines the credibility of all incidents, including obtaining independent verification when possible.”

The effort with Hillel is also the third partnership with an external organization that ADL has announced in the past two weeks. It recently launched a partnership to combat antisemitism with the Union for Reform Judaism, and last week began an initiative with PayPal to research how extremists use online financial platforms.

The ADL said its partnership with Hillel would “complement” student activism and that the group “will firmly support well-meaning student-led efforts to push back against antisemitism on campus.”

UPDATED June 1, 2 p.m.

Parents with children in the San Francisco public school system expressed feelings of “outrage” and disappointment upon hearing that the teachers’ union had passed a resolution supporting BDS and calling for the U.S. to defund Israel.

On May 19, one day before Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire after 11 days of fighting, the voting assembly of the United Educators of San Francisco passed the “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People” by a roughly 4-1 margin. It was a historic endorsement of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.

Some Jewish parents were not happy. “This [resolution] is irrelevant to their daily functioning,” said Ira Gert, an Israeli who has lived in San Francisco with her family since 2007 and has two children in the San Francisco Unified School District. She said she felt “fear” and “outrage” after finding out about the resolution. “I regret sending my kids to SFUSD. We deliberately wanted them to be exposed to racial diversity and socioeconomic diversity. And now I feel like my race and my nation is being singled out in a negative way. It is uncomfortable to be an Israeli here.”

In addition to calling for the support of BDS, the resolution also condemned Israel’s “forced displacement and home demolitions” of Palestinians in Jerusalem, asked the Biden administration to stop aid to Israel and described the Jewish state as an apartheid country.

“I am shocked and disappointed to learn that SFUSD teachers are publicly picking sides on this political matter,” said one parent, who requested anonymity because of fear of reprisal. “While Jewish families may be more directly harmed by this, this really hurts the entire community and society as a whole. Rather than picking sides, perhaps teachers should recognize the rights and responsibilities of both Israel and Palestine.”

J. reached one of the signatories on the union resolution, teacher Max Raynard, who said his Jewish values have taught him to “be the first to speak up against prejudice.” 

In a statement he wrote, “Any rational person with empathy toward other humans can see that Palestinian people are suffering under injustice.”

Raynard compared BDS to forms of nonviolent resistance that others, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela, have used throughout history.

“If we want to condemn Hamas and rockets as horrific — which of course we should — and ask Palestinians to use peaceful methods… How can we also condemn a peaceful, nonviolent protest tactic that has been used by the greatest civil rights heroes in history?” 

Raynard noted that the government of Israel is “simply the government of a country” and does not “speak for all Jews, nor even for all Israelis.”

J. also spoke with another Jewish union member who supports the resolution. Substitute teacher Drew Bader said in a statement that he was “proud” to be in a union that is “standing in solidarity with Palestine.”

“UESF and the labor movement both have a long history of showing up and taking stands around human rights and social justice issues in our communities and society,” said Bader, who has been teaching in the SFUSD since 2016. 

“What is happening in Gaza is both a human rights and social justice issue, and we have a responsibility to stand in solidarity with the Palestinians who are suffering. When we stand up for social justice and against racism, we uplift the needs of all our communities,” Bader said.

Another SFUSD parent, Viviane, who for safety reasons requested that only her first name be used, framed the situation more broadly, describing the resolution as “them vs. them” and “simplistic.”

“If they are going to step into something of this complexity, I would hope they would seek to build bridges to communities that are both suffering,” she told J.

In a May 26 letter, the Anti-Defamation League’s S.F.-based regional director Seth Brysk expressed “concern and dismay” to SFUSD Superintendent Vincent Matthews over the union action.

“The resolution is replete with inflammatory and counterfactual assertions and rhetoric about Israel, including blaming the recent outbreak of violence solely on Israel and questioning Israel’s right to defend itself,” wrote Brysk. “There is no attempt to see the humanity of both sides … much less an acknowledgement of Israeli loss and pain.”

Citing rising cases of antisemitism in the country and around the world, Brysk requested that the school district “distance” itself from the resolution and “assure the safety of and right to free expression by all students, parents, and district employees who are Jewish and/or Israeli, including those with family in Israel.”

Brysk also noted that the resolution “could well violate” provisions of the state’s Education Code that prohibit discrimination on the basis of nationality, race or ethnicity and religion, among others factors. He said the school had not responded as of June 1.

In an email statement to J., SFUSD spokesperson Laurie Dudnick said the district “is a separate entity from UESF.”

“I can tell you that the SF Board of Education has not taken a position on this,” she wrote, referring to the seven-member body that determines policy for the school district.

Dudnick’s statement did not include a response on whether the SFUSD would “distance” itself from the resolution, as Brysk had requested.

S.F.-based Israeli Consul General Shlomi Kofman said the resolution would contribute to the “heightened vulnerability experienced [by] Israeli and Jewish Americans — including students from our community in San Francisco.

“It is shocking that the United Educators of San Francisco would betray their Israeli brothers and sisters in labor by endorsing a movement that attacks Israeli workers’ economic ability to pursue a life with dignity and pride,” Kofman said.

Rabbi Serena Eisenberg, the Northern California director of the American Jewish Committee, said in a statement that the “misbegotten resolution” from the union “will only detract from real efforts towards peace in the Middle East.”

On May 26, Randi Weingarten, national president of the American Federation of Teachers and an AFL-CIO member, presented a draft statement on the Israel-Gaza conflict on behalf of Education International, a global federation of national education unions. (The SFUSD union is a member of both the AFT and AFL-CIO.)

The statement, titled “Beyond the Ceasefire,” was later adopted unanimously by the 45-member executive board, Weingarten among them.

The statement, which she provided to J., said that the EI board “deplores” the fact that Israeli airstrikes had killed 248 Palestinians and that Hamas rockets had killed 12 Israeli civilians.

Education International “mourns all these civilian losses,” the statement continues. “We deplore the destruction of schools on both sides, and the conversion of scores more from centers of learning into emergency shelters housing displaced people.

“Equally important is to recognize that the root causes that have led to the current situation and escalation must be addressed with the same urgency. Focusing attention on symptoms and not causes resigns all involved to a permanent cycle of escalation and violence instead of coexistence and peace.”

Weingarten, who is Jewish, maintains a supportive but politically progressive stance on Israel. In 2013, for example, she opposed a decision by the American Studies Association to support BDS, saying it would “stifle intellectual and democratic engagements.” Five years later, she condemned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Knesset for passing a law declaring Israel a “nation-state of the Jewish people,” calling it “despicable” and “nativist.”

In a Facebook post on May 26, Weingarten said she and her wife, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, were on their way to the airport and would be traveling to Israel for several days.

“It is important to me to be on the ground to express solidarity and hope with our colleagues and allies, both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian citizens of Israel,” the post read. “We support those in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza who are dedicated to secure self determination, coexistence, shared society, safety and human rights. I condemn Hamas in the strongest terms. I mourn the civilians killed on both sides. We  can and must do better. Together.”

Despite a rise in anti-Semitic violence in recent years, the proportion of Americans holding “intensely” anti-Semitic views remains small, according to a new poll.

The poll, conducted by the Anti-Defamation League and published Wednesday, asked 11 questions of U.S. adults regarding traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes, using a protocol the organization developed more than 50 years ago.

While 61 percent of respondents said they agreed with one or more of the stereotypes, only 11 percent said they believed in a majority of them. That number is consistent with the ADL’s surveys over the past 25 years.

“Our research finds that this uptick [in anti-Semitic violence] is being caused not by a change in attitudes among most Americans,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in a statement. “Rather, more of the millions of Americans holding anti-Semitic views are feeling emboldened to act on their hate.”

The poll found that many Americans do believe in certain longstanding anti-Jewish stereotypes, even though few subscribed to most of the beliefs:

31% of American adults believe Jewish employers go out of their way to hire other Jews.
27% believe the Jews killed Jesus.
24% believe American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States.
19% believe “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.”

The survey also found that large majorities of Americans have positive feelings toward Jews, and that a majority is very or somewhat concerned about violence against Jews.

69% said they feel warm toward Jews, while only 5% said they felt cold.
66% say “Jews have contributed much to the cultural life of America.”
79% say “Jews place a strong emphasis on the importance of family life.”

And the survey found that small percentages of Americans hold anti-Israel views:

8% of Americans support a boycott of Israel.
7% believe American Jews are responsible for Israel’s actions.
14% of Americans say Israel’s government “sometimes behaves as badly as the Nazis.”
16% say Israel’s human rights record is worse than most other countries’.

The survey interviewed 800 U.S. adults in October 2019, with a margin of error of 3.5%.

A 2019 ADL poll of 9,000 Europeans found that a quarter subscribed to most of the stereotypes — and that anti-Semitic attitudes are on the rise in several countries.

Sacha Baron Cohen has made a career out of playing absurd comedic characters, from the dopey Brit Ali G to the Kazakh journalist Borat to the Israeli veteran Erran Morad. He rarely gives interviews and stays relatively far from the movie star limelight.

But on Thursday, Cohen tossed aside the humorous facade to excoriate the social media industry and the “autocracy” he says it promotes in a non-ironic speech.

After receiving the international leadership award from the Anti-Defamation League at its annual conference at the Javits Center in Manhattan, the British Jewish comedian slammed social media sites as the “greatest propaganda machine in history” — reserving most of his 15-minute speech to specifically critique Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

“Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others — they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged — stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear,” Cohen said. “It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth.

“And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history — the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, ‘Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.’”

Cohen spent a significant part of his speech criticizing a recent address Zuckerberg gave at Georgetown University in which the Facebook founder spoke about the importance of upholding free expression on social media. Cohen called out Facebook for allowing political ads on its platform without verifying the veracity of their claims. Twitter and Google have recently taken steps to ban such ads.

“Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem,’” Cohen said, saying the site should fact check all political ads.

The actor also urged social media sites to consider delaying real-time posts that could spread hateful content, citing the gunman who attacked two mosques in New Zealand and livestreamed his attack.

“Why can’t we have more of a delay so this trauma-inducing filth can be caught and stopped before it’s posted in the first place?” he asked.

Cohen said that social media companies should be held responsible for the content spread on their sites, referencing a federal law that shields them from liability for specific posts.

If Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his ‘solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem’

“Maybe it’s time to tell Mark Zuckerberg and the CEOs of these companies: You already allowed one foreign power to interfere in our elections, you already facilitated one genocide in Myanmar, do it again and you go to jail,” Cohen said.

The speech was not completely devoid of humor — Cohen managed to joke about a key Jewish adviser for President Donald Trump.

“Thank you, ADL, for this recognition and your work in fighting racism, hate and bigotry,” he said. “And to be clear, when I say ‘racism, hate and bigotry,’ I’m not referring to the names of Stephen Miller’s Labradoodles.”

Cohen additionally addressed the idea that he promotes anti-Semitic stereotypes in his movies, which groups like the ADL have criticized.

“Now I’m not going to claim that everything I’ve done has been for a higher purpose,” he said. “But when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing ‘Throw the Jew down the well,’ it did reveal people’s indifference to anti-Semitism.”

Cohen said he has been “passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance” his entire life and wrote an undergraduate thesis on the American civil rights movement “with the help of the archives of the ADL.”

The ADL said that more than 1,600 people attended the daylong event, which included a range of sessions on anti-Semitism and hate.

The organization also honored Hamdi Ulukaya, the CEO and founder of the Chobani yogurt company. Ulukaya, a Kurd from Turkey, has donated millions to help refugees and hired them in his factories.

Ulukaya used his speech to condemn hate and call on businesses to help refugees.

“[I]f government isn’t willing to act, I believe that business must lead,” he said. “This isn’t about politics. It’s about basic human decency.”

The year since the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh has been a time of reflection, grief and increased anxiety within the American Jewish community.

It has also been an incredibly demanding time at the Anti-Defamation League, and the Center on Extremism in particular, where our team of researchers investigates and responds to extremism, anti-Semitism and all forms of hate in real time — sometimes thwarting violence before it happens.

While the shooting in Pittsburgh — the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history — was shocking, it did not surprise those of us who spend most of our waking hours tracking hate, because we know hate, online and off, can move extremists to violence.

In the years prior to the shooting in Pittsburgh, the team of researchers I lead witnessed and documented a resurgence of white supremacy. This was evident in the record number of propaganda distributions nationwide and in countless online spaces, where violence is glorified and hate is half-masked in “ironic” memes. Even as we saw the evidence building, we hoped the worst was behind us.

Americans are no strangers to white supremacist carnage — the vicious attacks on a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, WI, and a church in Charleston, S.C., speak to its long history in this country. But the shooting in Pittsburgh spoke to a different type of violence: one that was celebrated in plain sight on online platforms and forums, but was, paradoxically, more difficult to detect and root out.

In the year since then, a pattern has emerged, garnering increased attention to certain hateful online repositories: white men, radicalized by racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, act violently on their beliefs, which they amplify via a final post to their toxic online communities, often including urgent calls to action and blueprints for deadly violence.

There is some solace in knowing that we are not helpless in the face of such overt, pervasive hatred and violence. For every Pittsburgh or Poway, several murderous plots have been foiled by law enforcement.

Our analysis and actionable intelligence has led directly to arrests and criminal charges.

Our ultimate goal, of course, is to stop violence before it happens. This isn’t always possible, but sometimes it is: Three times in the last year, our analysis and actionable intelligence has led directly to arrests and criminal charges.

In March 2019, ADL’s Center on Extremism identified a white supremacist espousing anti-Semitism and racial violence on the social media platform Minds.com. His screen name was “King Shekels.” We shared the information with federal and local law enforcement, highlighting his radical ideology, calls for violence, weapon possession, criminal activity and evidence of his location. He has since been charged by federal prosecutors with posting online hate messages and threats, including interstate transmission of threats to injure the person of another, based in part on a digital image that appears to show himself pointing an AR-15 rifle at a congregation of Jewish men.

On August 8, the FBI arrested Conor Climo, a Las Vegas-based security guard, on weapons charges for possession of an unregistered firearm. He was allegedly plotting to attack LGBTQ and Jewish community targets, including a synagogue and a regional ADL office. Months earlier, in June 2019, my colleagues provided law enforcement officials with warnings about Climo’s threats against synagogues and online links to white supremacists and threats against synagogues.

These were just two of at least 12 white supremacists who have been arrested for their alleged roles in terrorist plots, attacks or threats against American Jews since the Pittsburgh attack. But for every domestic extremist we identify, keeping up with all the threats can be a challenge. That’s why it is critical for federal, state and local governments to provide additional resources to help law enforcement investigate potentially violent extremists.

I wish I could say things are getting better. But as relentless as this last year has been, the next 12 months could prove to be even more trying. Bigotry and outright calls for violence continue to proliferate across a range of online platforms.

We all hope things get better. We all wish the violence would stop. But that does not relieve us of our responsibility to do the work, to remain vigilant and to go where the hate is.

ADL’s goal is to make the invisible visible – we shine a light on extremism and hate in order to mitigate its impact. We educate the public and alert law enforcement to potential threats. We supply our expertise and quantify the problem, and maintain a H.E.A.T. Map that identifies hate-motivated incidents by geographic location. And we advocate for legislation that aims to reduce hate crimes and hate violence.

I’m often asked how I and members of my team do this work day after day. Honestly, there’s a psychological toll, but that’s eased somewhat by the commitment of my colleagues, who are dedicated to mitigating the threat of extremist violence, and whose work has powerful real-world impact.

Everything we do is informed and inspired by the memory of all those who have lost their lives to hatred and bigotry, including the memory of the 11 who lost their lives one year ago in Pittsburgh.