According to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, antisemitic hate crimes have been steadily rising.
Following the shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia, WUWM's Maria Peralta-Arellano spoke with Rebecca Weininger, senior regional director of the Anti-Defamation League Midwest, about how antisemitic hate crimes and incidents are manifesting in our communities.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Maria Peralta-Arellano: What kinds of hate crimes are we seeing? What tend to be the most common?
Rebecca Weininger: Predominantly what we're seeing are those three categories of harassment, vandalism, and assault. But I want to be super clear about what is and what is not anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish hate. So, for the purposes of the incidents that we catalog, if there is a permitted protest, right, in a in a public space, that are screaming anti-Jewish tropes or anti-Jewish things, right, slogans, but are not directly threatening to a specific person or institution, we do not count that as an incident.
When we are looking at different data about the different forms of hate crime or hate incidents that are happening, what spaces are these most prevalent at?
I think the question is super important because it tells us about trends, but it also tells us about how emboldened people who practice this hate are becoming. So, when you're talking about hate that's online, you're talking about a certain level of anonymity, right?
And we used to differentiate between online and in real life, but what we're seeing is that that dichotomy has completely broken down. That language, rhetoric, and actual hate that's practiced online, for instance, through LLMs or even through video games where you can choose to shoot, and target people — what we're seeing is that that behavior and that rhetoric is translating from online directly offline. So online is a humongous engine, a very powerful and relentless engine of the practice of hate offline.
The second is that what we're seeing where this offline hate is happening, we see a rise both in the defacing of public property mostly in Jewish institutions. So the specific targeting of places where the the practitioners of this hate know that Jews will be. So as opposed to just putting a swastika on a random park bench — which is in and of itself incredibly harmful, right — because it is likely that someone will walk by who will feel very threatened by that. This is really intentional, hyper-intentional focus on Jewish institutions.
