Thousands of Jewish and Palestinian protesters take over the
Grand Central lobby demanding ceasefire of attacks to Gaza by Israeli
forces, on Oct. 27, 2023, in New York City.
Photo: Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Anti-Defamation League Maps Jewish Peace Rallies With Antisemitic Attacks
American Jews have mobilized several thousand Jews across
the U.S. to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. ADL calls these Jewish
organizations “hate groups.”
On October 27, several thousand Jews and their allies shut down
the main terminal of Grand Central Station during rush hour in New York
City, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Organized by Jewish Voice for
Peace, the activists at the peaceful sit-in wore black T-shirts that
read “Not In Our Name.” “It’s the largest sit-in protest the city has
seen in over two decades,” Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman said. About 400
people were arrested, including rabbis.
The Anti-Defamation League has classified the event — and dozens of
other protests led by Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and
IfNotNow — as “anti-Israel,” according to an analysis by The Intercept,
and added them to their database documenting rising antisemitism across
the U.S.
“We’re seeing a genuine rise in antisemitic attacks and white
nationalist, white supremacist, antisemitic hate and violence,” Eva
Borgwardt, the national spokesperson for IfNotNow, told me. “When white
nationalism is on the rise, to cheapen the accusation of antisemitism by
applying it to Palestinian rights advocates, including Jews, is
incredibly irresponsible and dangerous.”
Since Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack on southern Israel where
Palestinian militants killed over 1,400 Israelis — most of them
civilians — and took over 200 hostages, the Anti-Defamation League, a
Jewish advocacy group that tracks antisemitism and extremism, has been
keeping track of the alarming rise of antisemitic incidents.
In 2020, over 100 progressive organizations — including the Movement
for Black Lives, Democratic Socialists of America, and Center for
Constitutional Rights — signed an open letter
asking the progressive community to not partner with ADL because the
group “has a history and ongoing pattern of attacking social justice
movements led by communities of color, queer people, immigrants,
Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself
with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence.”
Now, ADL is targeting a new group of people: progressive Jews.
Israel’s indiscriminate massacre of civilians in Gaza — killing over
10,000 Palestinians so far in the densely populated Gaza Strip,
including over 4,000 children — has led to the largest anti-war protests
in the U.S. since the Iraq War, including a surge of renewed activism
from progressive Jewish groups. Israel has bombed Gaza nonstop since the
October 7 attack, ordered the relocation of over 1 million civilians,
launched a ground invasion, and is blocking food, water, medical
supplies, and fuel from making it into Gaza, triggering a humanitarian
crisis and leading to what legal scholars call a genocide against Palestinians.
While the ADL told The Intercept that it does not consider the
ceasefire protests “antisemitic,” just “anti-Israel,” its CEO, Jonathan
Greenblatt, has said otherwise. After several thousand Jews and their
allies marched on the U.S. Capitol
on October 18 calling for a ceasefire, ADL DC released a statement
equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Greenblatt piled on, calling
the groups that organized the protest, including Jewish Voice for Peace,
“hate groups.”
Roughly 500 Jews, including 25 rabbis, were arrested at the Capitol protest.
“It is important to note that these are radical fringe Jewish
organizations and being Jewish does not exempt an organization or a
person from being antisemitic,” an ADL spokesperson told The Intercept.
A 2021 poll of Jewish voters, conducted by the nonpartisan Jewish
Electorate Institute, shows that pro-Palestinian views in the American
Jewish community are far from fringe. At the time, 25 percent of the
Jews surveyed believed Israel was an apartheid state, 34 percent
believed that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians was similar to racism in the U.S.,
and 22 percent thought that Israel was committing genocide against
Palestinians. These numbers are even starker for younger American Jews.
This poll doesn’t reflect changes in how American Jews feel after
Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack against Israel, or Israel’s subsequent
massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
Another poll,
conducted by Data for Progress after the Israel–Gaza war broke out,
shows that two-thirds of American voters as a whole support a ceasefire
in Gaza, including 80 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of Republicans,
and 57 percent of independents — despite President Joe Biden and most
members of Congress, in both parties, opposing it.
Like much of the American Jewish community, progressive Jews who are
protesting the genocide in Gaza are also grieving loved ones who were
murdered by Hamas on October 7. “In the days after the [Hamas] attack,
people on [IfNotNow’s] staff were finding out that they had relatives
and friends, and those people’s kids, who were murdered on October 7,”
Borgwardt said. “This was extremely close to home and painful.”
ADL’s “Stand With Israel” Map
On October 24, ADL published a press release
noting a “nearly 400 percent increase in preliminary antisemitic
incidents” across the U.S. since October 7, compared to the same period
last year. The source for that statistic was ADL’s own dataset,
published as an interactive map, of “Antisemitic Incidents and Anti-Israel Rallies in the U.S. Since Hamas’s Attack on Israel.”
While ADL doesn’t distribute its raw data in a usable format, when
you load the map in a web browser, behind the scenes your browser
downloads a copy of it. By monitoring what my browser downloaded while
loading the map, I was able to extract a copy of the data and save it as
a spreadsheet. The raw data is full of duplicates. After deduplicating
it, I ended up with a spreadsheet with 1,163 “antisemitic incidents and
anti-Israel rallies.” ADL continuously updates the map, and the data I’m
working with was last updated on November 9.
The data plotted in the map is split into the categories of
“Assault,” “Harassment,” “Vandalism,” “Anti-Israel Rallies,” and
“Anti-Israel Rallies w. Support for Terror.”
The assault, harassment, and vandalism categories, which made up 46
percent of the points on the map, are full of alarming evidence of the
dramatic rise in antisemitism and white supremacy that the U.S. has been
seeing, particularly since Donald Trump’s 2016 election. For example,
according to ADL’s data:
- On October 8 in Salt Lake City, Utah, someone called in a bomb threat to a synagogue.
- On October 13 in Beverly Hills, California, someone yelled “kike” at a visibly Jewish family taking on walk on Shabbat.
- On October 18 in Manhattan, New York, someone found the words “Kill the Jews” written on the wall of a subway station.
- On October 23 in Washington, D.C., someone drew a swastika at an elementary school.
- On October 25 in White Plains, New York, a “car featuring a swastika
and a Palestinian flag drove near a vigil for abducted Israelis.”
- On October 28 in Knoxville, Tennessee, members of the antisemitic
hate group Goyim Defense League distributed flyers saying “Every single
aspect of the LGBTQ+ movement is Jewish.”
- On November 3 in Seattle, Washington, a synagogue “received a suspicious letter containing white powder.”
The remaining 54 percent of the points on the map are Palestine
solidarity protests which ADL dubs “anti-Israel rallies” (39 percent)
and “anti-Israel rallies with support for terror” (15 percent). At these
rallies, protesters have been calling for a ceasefire, the end of unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel, and the end of the genocide in Gaza.
“If an event is marked only as an ‘anti-Israel rally,’ then we do not consider it antisemitic,” the ADL spokesperson said.