ADL Says Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Students Disagree. – The Forward

2018/03/07 Leave a comment

Good nuanced analysis of the various campus antisemitism reports:

The Anti-Defamation League recently released the results of its annual anti-Semitism audit. The findings were staggering.

Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged nearly 60% this past year, driven in part by an increase in such cases in schools and on college campuses. ADL found 1,986 cases of harassment, vandalism or physical assaults against Jews and Jewish institutions in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016.

But these results conflict with those of other surveys. Two recent reports — one from the Research Group of the Concentration in Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford and one from the Steinhardt Social Research Institute at Brandeis — found that, by and large, Jewish students do not feel threatened on campus.

This raises questions: Is anti-Semitism a perennial menace on American college and university campuses that increasingly threatens Jewish students around the country? Or is campus anti-Semitism a negligible issue that has been overhyped by overzealous Israel supporters?

The answer is, it’s anti-Semitism, but many younger Jews are reluctant to use the term in that context. And the less affiliated they are with organized Jewish life, the more that seems to be the case.

The Stanford report employed in-person interviews with 66 Jewish students on various California campuses who were either “unengaged or minimally engaged in organized Jewish life,” since these students “represent the vast majority of Jewish college students.” Most of them felt comfortable on their respective campuses, both in general and as Jews, and traced any discomfort they felt to the “strident, inflammatory, and divisive” tone of the campus discourse on Israel.

The Brandeis report grew out of a finding from a 2016 Steinhardt Institute study, which surveyed students on 50 campuses about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment and found wide variance between students’ experiences on different campuses.

The more recent Brandeis study focused on only four schools (Brandeis, Harvard, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania), and was distributed to both Jewish and non-Jewish respondents. The survey concluded that “the majority of Jewish and non-Jewish students… disagreed that their campus constituted a ‘hostile environment toward Jews.’” Some felt that there was a “hostile environment” toward Israel, but the majority did not agree.

Both of these studies seem to support the conclusion that campus anti-Semitism is a negligible phenomenon.

But this reading is oversimplified. One issue that affects both studies is the narrowness of the student populations surveyed. The Stanford report’s focus on unaffiliated students is particularly troubling, because removing Jewishly engaged students clearly skewed the findings. In fact, the two Brandeis studies as well as an earlier study from 2015 all agreed that those most strongly identified with the Jewish community and Israel are more likely to report hostility on campus. In other words, the Stanford study removed those most prone to experience — or, at least, to report — anti-Semitism.

The 2016 Brandeis report explained that this could be because those students are more likely to be targeted, or because they are more sensitive to the issue, or because students who experience anti-Israel sentiment might begin to feel more connected to the Jewish State, or some combination of all of these factors.

This does not mean that the Stanford survey is wrong; it merely emphasizes different data than other, earlier surveys and is thus more compelling if you feel that that campus animosity — at least when it is connected to Israel or Zionism — is not a serious issue, and less compelling if you disagree.

In other words, there’s data to reinforce your confirmation bias, whichever direction that might skew.

The focus on four randomly selected campuses in the 2017 Brandeis study also seems to indicate that campus anti-Semitism is not a serious problem. However, critics argue that four campuses are not a representative sample, and that the report merely amplifies a point from the earlier study: that there is wide variance from campus to campus in students’ perceptions of overall hostility toward Jews and Israel.

The 2016 Brandeis report found that some individual campuses and regions of the country are seen as more continually problematic on a year-to-year basis and referred to some campuses as relative “hotspots.” The report also found that one of the strongest predictors for perceiving a hostile climate toward Israel and Jews is “the presence of an active Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group on campus.”

This finding is corroborated in the later Brandeis study. “The majority of Jewish and non-Jewish students at all four schools disagreed that their campus constituted a ‘hostile environment toward Jews,’” the study found. Students were more likely to agree that there was a hostile environment toward Israel on their campus than that there was a hostile environment toward Jews, but most students — except for those at Michigan — still disagreed that there was hostility to Israel.

Perhaps not coincidentally, in November 2017, one month before the study was released, the student government at University of Michigan passed a BDS resolution, its first successful BDS campaign after 11 previous attempts dating back to 2002.

Additionally, the students addressed in the Kelman study did not deny that there was a toxic discourse connected to Israel on their campus; they acknowledged the problem but assigned equal responsibility for the issue to both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian camps, a natural response for those who are alienated and feel rebuffed by the political stances or tactics of both sides. They used words such as “unsafe,” “discomfort” and “threat” to describe some of their campus experiences and were concerned that their Jewishness allowed them to be stereotyped as holding certain views.

Despite these issues, students were reluctant to use the word “anti-Semitism.” The study explains that this shows the students’ “understanding of the difference between Israeli politics and Jewish people,” and this may ring true for those who agree with that distinction.

And yet, some of the behaviors that the students described witnessing, such as ascribing stereotypical “dual loyalty” to the Jewish people, or holding people who happen to be Jewish responsible for actions taken by others who are also Jewish (or Israeli), or the fear of losing social status because of support for Jewish issues (or Israel), are all classic examples of anti-Jewish animosity, regardless of the students’ reticence.

In other words, the unaffiliated students at these colleges are redefining what counts as anti-Semitism, choosing to rule out behaviors that older generations of Jews — like those who run ADL — see as anti-Semitic.

The Stanford report also refers to “exaggerated claims about the tone of campus activism and misrepresentations of student experience.” The researchers conclude, ”Such claims do far more harm than good by heightening tensions and reinforcing divisions.”

But imputing to all other studies emphasizing the presence of anti-Semitism on campus a common agenda or method is itself misleading and elides their significant differences. Moreover, despite greater emphasis on the presence of anti-Semitism, some of these other reports — including an ADL report in 2015 — also describe the daily experience of most Jewish students on American college and university campuses as largely comfortable, despite the presence of anti-Semitic incidents. The Stanford report’s conclusions are perhaps not entirely a revelation.

Research suggests that Jewish students, for the most part, feel comfortable on campus, but the story is more complex than the main findings publicized in recent surveys. It seems that there is only one issue these surveys clarify unambiguously: that we do not agree on a standard definition of anti-Semitism, and this makes assessing its overall impact on American campuses much more difficult.

via ADL Says Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Students Disagree. – The Forward

Filed under Antisemitism Tagged with , , , , ,

New [ADL] Study Shows Anti-Semitism Soared Last Year | The Huffington Post

2017/04/26 Leave a comment

Rise refers to what Canadian hate crime stats would classify as mischief, with violent forms declining. Still disturbing:

Harassment, vandalism and other hostile acts against Jewish people and sites in the U.S. increased by 34 percent last year and are up 86 percent through the first three months of 2017, according to data released on Monday.

A spate of bomb threats against Jewish community centers and schools, and vandalism at Jewish cemeteries in the U.S. this year have contributed to the surge, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s report.

There have been more than 100 bomb threats against 75 Jewish community centers and eight Jewish day schools around the country this year through early March. Vandals have toppled headstones and inflicted other damage at Jewish graveyards in St. Louis, Philadelphia and other cities this year. A swastika made from feces besmirched an art school bathroom in Rhode Island.

“What the data tells us is incontrovertible and why the Jewish community describes such heightened anxiety,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told The Huffington Post. “There’s no doubt that there’s a high degree of anxiety.”

Greenblatt added that his organization’s report, which was released on Holocaust Remembrance Day, shows that public officials must do more to denounce anti-Semitism and find ways to make Jewish-Americans feel secure.

DOMINICK REUTER VIA GETTY IMAGES
Vandalized tombstones are seen at the Jewish Mount Carmel Cemetery, Feb. 26, 2017, in Philadelphia, PA. Police say more than 100 tombstones were vandalized a week after a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis was desecrated.

In all, the ADL documented 1,266 incidents in 2016 and 541 since the beginning of this year until March. That’s a sharp increase since 2013, when the ADL recorded 751 incidents, the fewest number since record keeping began in 1979, a spokesman said. For comparison, anti-Semitic incidents peaked in 1994 when there were more than 2,000 incidents reported for the first and only time.

The ADL’s analysis excluded most bigoted acts on social media. However, it included the harassment of Jewish residents in Whitefish, Montana, because the coordinated abuse rose above typical taunting and hate speech online, an ADL spokesman said. Supporters of alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer targeted town activists and Jewish residents after Spencer’s mother, a Whitefish business owner, said she was harassed because of her son’s politics.

While forms of harassment and vandalism have jumped since 2015, the ADL said that physical assaults fell 36 percent in 2016 and are down 40 percent this year.

Source: New Study Shows Anti-Semitism Soared Last Year | The Huffington Post

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with

How School Administrators Are Dealing With Incidents Of Hate : NPR

2017/04/07 Leave a comment

Good article with number of telling examples, along with a description of an ADL program in action:

One of the gold standards in teaching tolerance is a program run by the Anti-Defamation League called “A World Of Difference.” The number of schools calling and asking for the program has jumped five-fold recently. Brookline High School reached out after being hit with two incidents of racist and anti-Semitic graffiti. Administrators recruited 30 students to go through three full days of training — to learn to run tolerance workshops for their peers.

“Ok, folks! Showtime!” bellows the ADL’s New England Senior Training Consultant Rob Jones from the front of a gymnasium. His dreadlocks swinging out from under a felt fedora, Jones bounces around the circle of students, grilling them on what they’ve learned from the exercises they’ve done so far and getting them ready to be leaders instead of participants. They begin by practicing how they will introduce themselves to classmates when they run a workshop.

Rob Jones, a training consultant with the Anti-Defamation League, leads Brookline High School students in building a “web of unity.”  Tovia Smith /NPR

“My name is Josh Gladstone,” starts one. “I’m doing this program because I have seen many issues at the high school, and even though we attempt to have a couple of assemblies, I don’t think it’s enough.”

The students role-play and rehearse everything from ice-breakers to exercises meant to encourage empathy and bystander intervention. Jones coaches and corrects. “You don’t wanna preach,” he tells one. “You do not wanna come off as better than [them]… like you really need to help them. We’ve all laughed at jokes we shouldn’t have laughed at and made comments we shouldn’t have made. We’re all trying to learn together.”

After participating in tolerance workshops for two days, Maddie Kennedy (left), Josh Gladstone and Raven Bogues practice being presenters before they run the same workshops for their peers.  Tovia Smith /NPR

Indeed, even in their left-leaning “bubble” — as some Brookline students call it — they’ve seen an uptick in hate.

Junior Talia Vos, who moved to Brookline from Mexico, says she felt it the day after the election. She was in the hallway between classes and yelled out to a friend –- in Spanish — to save her a seat.

“A group of boys behind me, they started chanting, ‘build a wall!'” she recalls. “It’s just these new social norms of how we treat each other.”

After 30 years of doing this work, Rob Jones worries that many of the communities that need these programs the most are also in denial.

“Certain populations just won’t talk about it because they don’t get it — they don’t get it,” he says. “They’re like, ‘we don’t have any issues.’ But boy, they have a lot of bigoted behavior.”

Along with prevention, many schools these days are also quickly learning the art of “the healing response.”

In Brookline, after the hateful graffiti was found, students banded together to re-paint the table that was vandalized to “reclaim it from hate.” Other schools have called in professional facilitators to moderate a “community conversation.”

Following the KKK graffiti in Attleboro, dozens of students mobilized to counter the hate with kindness. They wrote “love notes” to each of the high school’s nearly 2000 students, staffers and teachers.

Source: How School Administrators Are Dealing With Incidents Of Hate : NPR Ed : NPR

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with ,

ADL and Wiesenthal Center don’t seem to agree on anti-Semitism in America | Bloggish | Jewish Journal

2017/01/09 Leave a comment

Interesting contrast (ADL’s approach the more reasonable one):

Shortly before the New Year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, both human rights organizations dedicated to fighting hate speech, each put out the top 10 list of anti-Semitic incidents in 2016 (the Wiesenthal Center’s list also included anti-Israel incidents – more on this below).

The two lists are starkly different, and that difference is worth paying attention to.

Numbers one through four on the ADL list are all related to the election, apparently arising from the Donald Trump moment and the new life it gave to the seedier elements of American xenophobia.

On the Wiesenthal Center list, this type of anti-Semitism is featured just once, coming in at number five with Richard Spencer’s memorable tryst at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. Number one on this list is the failure of the Obama administration to veto a recent United Nations resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The difference is notable because in theory, it shouldn’t exist. These two organizations are not identical, to be sure. The Wiesenthal Center is Los Angeles-based, for one, and incorporates Holocaust memory to a greater extent in its mission.

But both have at their core the same goal of fighting anti-Semitism. The overlap is great enough to cause some amount of institutional rivalry.

“ADL is always a little bit worried that the center in L.A., the Wiesenthal Center, will steal its thunder,” Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University told me in November. “So they always have kind of one eye on the Wiesenthal Center.”

Why, then, do two organizations with the same ideals come to vastly different conclusions about where to look for the most troubling incidents of anti-Semitism?

I brought this question up during a recent interview with Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Wiesenthal Center. He pointed out to me that the lists were in fact not the same and that his organization, unlike the ADL, had included “anti-Israel incidents” as a criterion. That’s why the U.N. resolution ended up at the top of the Wiesenthal Center list without appearing at all on the ADL list.

Fine. But that doesn’t explain the massive discrepancy between, on the one hand, nearly half of a top 10 list being dedicated to right-wing anti-Semitism, and, on the other, a single item buried halfway down.

It’s easy to chalk this up to politics. Critics of Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL CEO, like to point out that he came to the job from a post in the Obama administration. In their mind, he’s a left-wing actor that has turned the ADL into a basically partisan operation.

But I take Greenblatt at his word when he told me that during the campaign trail “I said what I said and we did what we did because it was consistent with ADL’s historic role.”

Greenblatt, it seems to me, is too smart to nakedly put his politics on display. If he really were a leftist shill, he’d probably be smarter about hiding it, anyway. I’m guessing – and we can only guess as to people’s intentions – that both lists reflects a real concern about where anti-Semitism exists in America today.

The net result is that we have two lists that tell us more about the organizations that generated them than they do about anti-Semitism.

Source: ADL and Wiesenthal Center don’t seem to agree on anti-Semitism in America | Bloggish | Jewish Journal

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Didn’t Slam Anti-Semitism On the Left? Don’t Expect Credibility When You Slam It On the Right: Lipstadt

2016/11/28 Leave a comment

Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar and subject of the film Denial, about her libel trial with Holocaust denier David Irving, expresses it well:

For American Jews, particularly those aligned with the new administration, to remain silent is to send a signal that anti-Semitism and racism can be tolerated — and injected into the heart of American politics. Expediency, or tactical thinking, can have its place. But in this case, it is completely trumped by the need for honesty — and a bit of backbone.

The established leadership (with the exception of ADL) failed this first test regarding the Trump administration. Only after an outcry from many quarters — including from the editor of this publication — did they begin to issue somewhat lukewarm condemnations.

Yet it’s not only anti-Semitism from the right, but also anti-Semitism from the left, that should have been met with steel, not mush. The protesters from the left end of the political spectrum have also failed a test. Let’s hope they’ll do some soul-searching, too. Sadly, given the tenor of recent events, Jewish organizations from all ends of the political spectrum will probably have other opportunities to stand up. Let’s hope they do. Far more than just their already wounded credibility is at stake.

Source: Didn’t Slam Anti-Semitism On the Left? Don’t Expect Credibility When You Slam It On the Right. – Opinion – Forward.com

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Groups fighting hate, anti-Semitism see surge of support

2016/11/18 Leave a comment

Not necessarily surprising but certainly encouraging:

In the wake of the election, the Anti-Defamation League — the national organization devoted to fighting anti-Semitism and bigotry in all forms — is wasting no time in accelerating its efforts against hate in America.

The climate at the organization’s offices post-election is characterized by “exhaustion and energy,” Deborah Lauter, ADL’s senior vice president for policy and programs, told CBS News.

“There’s more of a sense of urgency, more of a sense that we’re more relevant than ever before,” Lauter said. “The day after, when people were shocked by the result personally, they said, ‘Thank God I work here because at least I can get hugs from my colleagues.’”

The organization — which conducts large-scale research on hate groups, including the alt-right; partners with law enforcement to better deal with hate crimes; and cultivates public awareness of hate and bigotry, among other campaigns — has seen an explosion in financial contributions and volunteer interest since Donald Trump’s election. The president-elect won the White House after conducting a campaign critics accused of trafficking in racist and anti-Semitic stereotypes. At various points, Trump called Mexicans “murderers” and “rapists;” suggested an American-born federal judge could not do his job impartially because of his Mexican heritage; advocated “a total and complete shutdown” of Muslims coming to the U.S.; and used imagery lifted from white supremacists and Neo-Nazi online message boards.

It was an election that “saw hate move from the fringes and into the mainstream with unprecedented volume and velocity,” the ADL said in a statement after Donald Trump’s win.

The ADL joins other prominent nonprofit organizations — like the American Civil Liberties Union, the investigative journalism site ProPublica, and Planned Parenthood — who’ve seen dramatic spikes in donations since the election.

Contributions to the ADL jumped 50-fold the day after the election, and that level of giving has persisted throughout last week and this week, the group said. About 70 percent of those donations came from first-time donors. Several major donors are also upping their contributions in light of the election, some to six figures.

In addition, the group’s 27 regional offices have seen significantly higher call volume — 10 to 20 times what they’d normally receive — from people asking how they could support the organization’s work combating bigotry, the ADL said.

“We have seen so many instances where we fear and are concerned about the fact that the extremists’ rhetoric has become mainstream,” Lauter said. “The feeling is one of being disheartened at how easily this can happen. But [we’re] also somewhat energized at how important this work is to rebuild what we thought was the status quo of tolerance in this country.”

Source: Groups fighting hate, anti-Semitism see surge of support – CBS News

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , , , ,

When The ADL Promotes Anti-Semitism | The Daily Caller

2016/10/03 Leave a comment

Over reach:

Earlier this week, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) added the cartoon character and internet meme Pepe the Frog to its “Hate On Display” database, saying it promoted “anti-Jewish, bigoted and offensive ideas.” The announcement gained major media coverage, from The New York Times to The Washington Post to TIME Magazine.

But the symbol was previously unknown to the vast majority of Americans, largely limited to the youthful-skewing hardcore followers of Internet message boards.

Thanks to the ADL, though, all of America’s anti-Semites have a new, cuddly mascot to use in their attacks on Jews.

Last year, the decade-old amphibian was one of the most popular symbols on the social networking site Tumblr. Pepe the Frog has been associated with bigotry for less than a year, as the “alt-right” gained strength during the presidential election. Those who present Pepe as anti-Semitic generally hide behind anonymous names like mashr445, and it can be impossible to tell if they are junior high school girls, an automatic computer program, or even disgruntled Jews. When anti-Semites use their own names, then I get nervous.

 Since historically the character has only rarely represented hateful ideas, the ADL’s categorization is like calling white sheets racist. Yes, the KKK has used white sheets to terrorize blacks and when they do, it’s terrible. But white sheets themselves are hardly a hate symbol. Yet the ADL also lists (I’m not kidding) the numbers 12, 13, 14, 18, 28, 38, 43, 83, and 88 as hate symbols. (Watch out for those bigoted pianos with their 88 keys.)

What’s the upside here for the ADL? What does it think it’s achieving by disseminating information about bigoted use of a cartoon character by a fringe segment of American society? How are their press releases and databases going to save a single Jew from being harassed, fired, or assaulted for his faith?

They won’t. But they will raise money for the ADL.

The organization’s very raison d’être is fighting anti-Semitism, so they can’t continue to replicate themselves without a perception of widespread – and growing – prejudice against Jews. That’s why their 2014 survey of global anti-Semitism was designed to encourage anti-Semitic answers  and even beliefs among respondents. It’s why the organization will try to squelch any dialogue or artistic expression that doesn’t meet its checklist of approved modes of discourse about Jews, Israel, race, sexual orientation, and more.

But this time they’ve gone too far. In order to get its name in the papers, the ADL is aiding and abetting America’s Jew-haters in a concrete way by handing them Joe the Camel of anti-Semitism on a silver platter. The swastika is so darned angular and abstract, whereas Pepe the Frog would make for good temporary tattoos, stuffed animals, or trading cards.

The Pepe episode is a great example of how reckless “educational efforts” by anti-tolerance organizations can be counter-productive. I remember a shocking display at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles that invited participants to match the hate slur to the group being targeted, including some fairly obscure ones. I literally added new spiteful terms for Asians and lesbians to my lexicon. Why is that a good thing?

In an almost certain parody of that exhibit, the 2002 South Park episode “The Death Camp of Tolerance” has the boys visit the Museum of Tolerance and walk through the “Tunnel of Prejudice,” in which voices shout things like “Queer” and “Chink” and “Heeb.”

Most of the fourth-graders are understandably startled by the put-downs – save crudely bigoted Cartman, who calls the exhibit “awesome,” and hops up and down: “I want to ride again! I want to ride again!”

No matter how lucrative, publicizing new ways to persecute Jews is rarely a good idea. The ADL should have plenty to do coping with the anti-Semitism that already exists in the broader society without taking a minor phenomenon and making it mainstream.

Source: When The ADL Promotes Anti-Semitism | The Daily Caller

Filed under Antisemitism Tagged with

Anti-Defamation League Creates Post To Combat Online Anti-Semitism – Forward.com

2016/09/22 Leave a comment

Makes sense, with hopefully some broader lessons for combatting hate speech of all kinds on the Internet:

The Anti-Defamation League has created a position dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism and bigotry on the internet.

The hiring of Brittan Heller, a lawyer who has prosecuted cyber crime at the U.S. Department of Justice and the International Criminal Court in The Hague, follows the ADL’s formation of a task force earlier this year to combat online harassment of Jewish journalists.

Heller will be the group’s first director of technology and society, the ADL announced Monday.

From her base in Northern California’s Silicon Valley, Heller will work to reduce hateful rhetoric on the internet in collaboration with technology companies and law enforcement.

Heller, a graduate of Yale Law School, has herself been a victim of cyber harassment. In 2009, she and a fellow Yale alumna settled a high-profile lawsuit against a group of online commenters who posted sexually explicit comments about them on an internet forum.

“As the use of social media and technology to marginalize Jews and other communities increases, Brittan’s new role is at the forefront of the fight against anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry,” ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt said of Heller’s position in a statement.

The ADL had created the task force to deal with anti-Semitic and racist harassment of journalists on social media platforms.

This election season has seen a number of high-profile cases of Jewish journalists being harassed by supporters of Donald Trump, notably in May, when reporter Julia Ioffe was flooded with anti-Semitic death threats after she wrote a critical profile of the Republican nominee’s wife, Melania.

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , , ,

Not just anti-Semitism: New boss seeks to broaden ADL’s reach

2016/08/08 Leave a comment

Overdue, both on substantive grounds – bias, discrimination and prejudice happen to many groups – as well as political and tactical, given the ongoing demographic growth of minorities.

For more than a century, the Anti-Defamation League has been known as a group that combats anti-Semitism. But one year after taking the group’s helm, Jonathan Greenblatt wants it to focus on more than just the Jews.
Greenblatt’s predecessor as ADL national director, Abraham Foxman, became known during his decades at ADL’s helm, as an arbiter of what was and was not anti-Semitic, as well as a pro-Israel advocate who did not hesitate to criticize Jewish groups he saw as damaging Israel. Upon his retirement in July 2015, some called him “the Jewish Pope.”

But to woo millennials to the ADL, Greenblatt wants to stress the group’s work among other minority communities, which has long been a part of its agenda. This emphasis comes as the Jewish community’s relations with minority groups has become strained by anti-Israel sentiment among many left-wing activists. Just this week, the main movement opposing police violence against black communities, Black Lives Matter, released a platform accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians.

While the ADL focuses on many issues Black Lives Matter addresses, it has not collaborated with Black Lives Matter, and called the genocide accusation “repellent and completely inaccurate” in a blog post on Medium on Thursday.

As part of its renewed outspokenness on issues beyond those directly impacting Jews, the ADL has emerged in the past year as the only legacy Jewish organization to consistently criticize Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by name when he makes controversial statements about Mexicans, Muslims or other groups. And Greenblatt wants the ADL to take a leading role in addressing mass incarceration and police violence in black communities.

“By delivering great programs and making an impact in the communities that we serve, by speaking up and using our voice to call out intolerance in any form, I think those things, I hope, will appeal to younger people,” Greenblatt said in an interview in his Manhattan office Wednesday. “This is one of those institutions with the scale and the scope where you really, truly can make a dent in the universe.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/not-just-anti-semitism-adl-boss-seeks-to-broaden-groups-reach/

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with

Antisemitism watchdog adds (((echo))) symbol to hate list after Jews targeted: The Guardian

2016/06/08 Leave a comment

Appropriate reaction by Google:

US antisemitism watchdog, the Anti-Defamation League, has added the “(((echo)))” symbol, used online by white supremacists to single out Jews, to its online database of hate symbols.

The group’s decision comes days after Google removed a Chrome extension that was being used by antisemites to add triple parentheses around the names of prominent Jewish public figures including Michael Bloomberg and New York Times journalist Jonathan Weisman.

“The echo symbol is the online equivalent of tagging a building with antisemites graffiti or taunting someone verbally,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s chief executive. “We at ADL take this manifestation of online hate seriously, and that’s why we’re adding this symbol to our database and working with our partners in the tech industry to investigate this phenomenon more deeply.”

The intersection of old-fashioned white supremacy and antisemitism with tech-savvy online groups centred around websites such as 4chan and Reddit has given rise to a movement loosely termed the “alt-right”. The echo symbol is just the latest artefact of that group’s thinking to burst into the mainstream, thanks largely to an article in late May from the NYT’s Weisman highlighting its use.

Weisman linked the antisemitism on display with the professed political support of those abusing him: the Twitter user who referred to him as “((Weisman))” went by the handle @CyberTrump.

But the denigration of Jews online extends beyond the Trump supporters highlighted by Weisman. An investigation by Mic revealed how widespread the symbol’s use has become, largely below the radar of the mainstream.

“To the public, the symbol is not easily searchable on most sites and social networks; search engines strip punctuation from results,” wrote the publication’s reporters, Cooper Fleishman and Anthony Smith. “This means that trolls committed to uncovering, labelling and harassing Jewish users can do so in relative obscurity: No one can search those threats to find who’s sending them.”

The pair trace the origins of the symbol back to far right blog Right Stuff. “In Right Stuff propaganda, you’ll often read that Jewish names ‘echo’. According to the blog’s lexicon page, ‘all Jewish surnames echo throughout history’. In other words, the supposed damage caused by Jewish people reverberates from decade to decade.” The parentheses are used to imply that same echo textually.

While many antisemites simply write out Jewish names with the parentheses manually, using it as a deliberate taunt, there was also a popular Chromeextension that automated the function. Named “Coincidence Detector” – a sarcastic reflection of the anti-semitic conspiracy that Jews control the media – it automatically flagged up common Jewish surnames to anyone who installed it.

Google removed Coincidence Detector on Thursday, citing terms and conditions that prohibit “promotions of hate or incitement of violence”, shortly after Mic wrote about the extension.

Source: Antisemitism watchdog adds (((echo))) symbol to hate list after Jews targeted | Technology | The Guardian

Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →