Anti-Israel demonstrators outside the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily-Jewish Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles, June 23, 2024. Photo: Screenshot
Los Angeles County in California has experienced an all-time high number of hate crimes targeting the Jewish community, according to figures compiled by a local government agency and released last week.
Issued by the LA County Commission on Human Relations (LACCHR), the data for 2023 showed a 45 percent increase in overall reported hate crimes to a total of 1,350, the largest number in the history of the commission’s annual analysis, with violence against nearly all groups spiking last year.
The numbers showed an unprecedented increase specifically in antisemitic hate crimes, which rose 91 percent last year from 127 to 242 in what the commission described as “the largest number of anti-Jewish crimes ever recorded.”
“Although the numbers reported today are unprecedented for multiple communities throughout LA County, they signal that more people are coming forward to report hate crimes and are refusing to accept the normalization of hate,” LACCHR president Helen Chin said in a statement. “The anti-hate programs led by our commission provide LA County residents with a system where people can report hate and receive help. By standing together, we can extinguish hate and discrimination in every community and reinforce that hate and discrimination have no place here.”
LA County board of supervisors chair Kathryn Barger added, “Hate crimes don’t just target individuals — they harm entire communities. They’re an attack on the very fabric of who we are, and the shared values that unite us. That’s why this report is so important — it’s more than just data. It serves as a mirror, reflecting the challenges we face and the work we must do to create a county where everyone feels save, respected, and valued. By analyzing the patterns and trends in hate crimes, we can better understand our efforts need to be focused and how we can prevent such acts in the future.”
The report was released about six months after Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, called on California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to address an escalation of antisemitic incidents in LA.
“Los Angeles is becoming more and more unsafe for its Jewish residents,” Chikli said, emphasizing the urgent need for proactive measures to combat rising antisemitism.
The Israeli minister highlighted several specific incidents, including one in November 2023 in Thousand Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles in Ventura County, where an anti-Israel protester allegedly caused the death of a Jewish man during dueling demonstrations held over the Israel-Hamas war. Community college professor Loay Alnaji, 50, was arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter for his alleged role in the death of Paul Kessler, 69. Alnaji pleaded not guilty, and his case is still going through the courts.
Chikli also referenced violent anti-Israel demonstration outside of the Adas Torah synagogue in the heavily-Jewish Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles in June. The demonstrators waved Palestine flags and donned keffiyehs while blocking entry into the synagogue. They chanted “intifada revolution” and “free Palestine” in front of the building while intimidating bystanders. After catching wind of the protest, a crowd of pro-Israel counter-protesters subsequently flooded the scene in an attempt to defend the synagogue. The scene quickly descended into chaos, and anti-Israel activists were recorded shoving, punching, and screaming at those attempting to defend the synagogue.
College campuses in LA County also saw incidents targeting the Jewish community. In fall semester of 2023, perpetrators on the grounds of the University of California-Los Angeles chanted “Itbah El Yahud” at Bruin Plaza, which means “slaughter the Jews” in Arabic, tore a chapter page out of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America — titled “Loudmouth Jew” — and left it outside the home of a UCLA faculty member, and staged a disturbing demonstration in which protesters cudgeled a piñata, to which a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s face was glued, while shouting “beat the Jew.”
In 2023, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents— an average of 24 every day — across the US, amounting to a year unlike any experienced by the American Jewish community since the organization began tracking such data on antisemitic outrages in 1979. Most of the outrages occurred after Hamas’s terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all spiked by double and triple digits, with California, New York, New Jersey, Florida, and Massachusetts accounting for nearly half, or 48 percent, of all that occurred.
Breaking down the numbers, the ADL found a dramatic rise in the targeting of Jewish institutions such as synagogues, community centers, and schools, with 1,987 such incidents taking place in 2023 — a 237 percent increase which included over a thousand fake bomb threats, also known as “swattings.”
Other figures were equally staggering, with assaults and vandalism rising by 45 percent and 69 percent, respectively, while harassment soared by 184 percent. Antisemitic incidents on college campuses, which The Algemeiner has continued to cover extensively, rose 321 percent, disrupting the studies of Jewish students and leaving them uncertain about the fate of the American Jewish community.
The last quarter of the year proved the most injurious, the ADL noted, explaining that after the Hamas atrocities in October, 5,204 antisemitic incidents rocked the Jewish community. Across the political spectrum, from white supremacists on the far right to ostensibly left-wing Ivy League universities, antisemites emerged to express solidarity with the Palestinian terrorist group, spread antisemitic tropes and blood libels, and openly call for a genocide of the Jewish people in Israel.
Such incidents occurred throughout the US. At Cornell University in upstate New York, a student threatened to rape and kill Jewish female students and “shoot up” the campus’ Hillel center. In a suburb outside Cleveland, Ohio, a group of vandals desecrated graves at a Jewish cemetery. At Harvard University, America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious university, a faculty group shared an antisemitic cartoon depicting a left-hand tattooed with a Star of David dangling two men of color from a noose.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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