BREAKING: FBI Reports Major Increase In Hate Crimes Against Jews in 2017
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s count of hate crime against Jews jumped significantly in 2017, according to an annual report released Tuesday morning.
The FBI recorded 938 single-bias hate crimes targeting Jews in 2017, a sharp increase from the 684 incidents it recorded in 2016, and the largest number of hate crimes targeting Jews since 2009. Anti-Jewish incidents made up 58.1% of hate crimes motivated by religious bias, up from 54.2% in 2016.
The number of police agencies participating in the FBI’s crime reporting program, and contributing data to the hate crime report, also increased greatly in 2017. It’s unclear how much of the higher count could be attributable to increased participation. Police departments covering 306 million Americans reported their figures to the FBI in 2017, compared to 289 million in 2016.
The report comes weeks after a synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in which 11 Jews were killed.
According to the FBI, 58% of the single-bias incidents in 2017 were motivated by race or ethnicity, while 22% were motivated by religion. Anti-Jewish bias is considered anti-religious bias for the purposes of the FBI’s work. Another 16% were motivated by sexual orientation bias.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at nathankazis@forward.com or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO