Incident data

The plot below shows the number of antisemitic incidents recorded by the Stephen Roth Institute/the Kantor Center from 1989 to 2020. The two lines represent two categories of incidents. “Violence/harassment/desecration” include what it says. “Major attacks” are defined as incidents involving the use of weapons, explosives, vehicles, or arson. Seven countries account for about 75 percent of the incidents recorded in the period 2008–2020: the US, Canada, France, the UK, Germany, Belgium, and Australia.

Note that antisemitic incidents, like other kinds of hate crime, are notoriously difficult to measure. Many victims do not report such crimes to the police. If they do, police authorities do not necessarily classify them as hate crimes. Reporting rates can vary from country to country and over time. While antisemitic incidents are recorded at the national level in a range of countries (see this useful overview by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency), varying registration criteria and categorization schemes makes cross-national comparison difficult.

The Kantor Center has used its own criteria and methodology to record incidents globally since 1989. Unfortunately, the selection criteria and recording practices are not entirely transparent. In some cases, Kantor figures diverge sharply from national-level reporting (e.g., in France the SPCJ recorded 151 incidents of violence, harassment, and desecration for 2019, but the Kantor report for that year reported (p. 197) just 41 incidents of this category). While the data on display here are certainly not a perfect reflection of what is going on “out there”, they can tell us something about overall trends.

Perpetrator perceptions

Two major European surveys of Jews were carried out in 2012 and 2018, utilizing convenience samples (N = 5847 in 2012 and 16395 in 2018). The resulting data yielded valuable insights about the receiving end of contemporary antisemitism. One section of the surveys dealt with perpetrators. Here, respondents who indicated they had experienced one or more incidents of antisemitic violence or harassment in the past five years were asked to identify the perpetrator(s) (in the case of the most serious incident) by selecting from a list of categories.