Anti-Defamation League director: 388 percent increase in antisemitism

Anti-Defamation League Director and CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said on Sunday that there has been a 388 percent increase in antisemitism in America since Hamas’ Oct. 7 surprise attack in Israel that killed more than 1,400.

“We've seen a wave of this all over the country,” Greenblatt told Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC’s “The Sunday Show,” citing as examples incidents at Harvard and Cornell.

“Antisemitism has been intensifying and increasing,” he said. “We've seen it normalized, and from the far-right and from the hard left.”

There has been an increase of threats against Muslims and Jews since the Oct. 7 attack, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said before a Senate panel last week.

“In the days and weeks since, we have responded to an increase in threats against Jewish, Muslim, and Arab-American communities and institutions across our country,” Mayorkas said. “Hate directed at Jewish students, communities, and institutions add to a preexisting increase in the level of antisemitism in the United States and around the world.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations had compiled 774 complaints of bias and other incidents since Oct. 25, including the killing of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy in Illinois days after the initial attack by Hamas.

Greenblatt said recent acts have gone beyond “run of the mill” antisemitism in America, targeting places that are not by their nature particularly Jewish.

“I’m not talking about, you know, stores producing IDF T-shirts, I'm talking about a coffee shop on Long Island, an ice cream parlor in the Bay Area, a restaurant in Chicago,” he said.

He added: "I say this as the grandson of a Holocaust survivor whose barbershop was vandalized and destroyed by the Nazis in Germany. So, I can't even believe this is happening in our country today."