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[quote=Anonymous]This is a good piece from Jewish Currents:
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-closer-look-at-the-uptick-in-antisemitism/

If I removed incidents in which the ADL’s determination of antisemitism is controversial, including protest signs with anti-Zionist content or Holocaust comparisons—as well as the “F Zionist Israel” graffiti at Bates College, which did not target a Jewish institution—the increase was more modest: from seven entries the week before the crisis, to ten between May 7th and May 13th, and 16 between May 14th and May 21st. More than a doubling, to be sure, but given an American Jewish population of 7.6 million, hardly an epidemic, especially given that all but eight of the incidents were nonviolent.

The prominent reports of antisemitic violent assaults included in the tracker, and making the rounds on social media, are certainly concerning. “To my knowledge, we haven’t seen these attacks on Jews before during moments of mass protests on the street,” said Ben Lorber, a research analyst at Political Research Associates who studies far-right antisemitism and white nationalism. But the significance of these attacks is obscured when they are lumped in with other incidents of a far less severe nature, like Facebook comments, and incidents in which the antisemitic content is arguable, like anti-Zionist protest chants. It is also suspect to base claims of an uptick on incidents that have not yet been fully investigated. Yet news outlets like MSBNC have already created maps of the antisemitic surge compiling incidents from the tracker without disambiguating their categories, and reports in outlets like NPR and NBC cite the ADL number of 193 reported incidents without specifying which kinds of incidents make up this number.

By conflating weighty incidents with trivial ones—and encouraging others to do the same—the ADL only makes it more difficult to measure antisemitism in American life. Jerome Chanes, a writer on Jewish public affairs who has done extensive research on antisemitism, said that “very few serious social scientists” take the ADL’s yearly audit of antisemitic incidents seriously. “We don’t have a handle on what many of these incidents are. Some of them might be serious—I’m sure they are,” he said. “Some of them are on the level of ‘My neighbor said she heard something on the radio last night,’ and it’s all lumped together. It’s very hard to evaluate the numbers.”  [/quote]

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