Why do hate crimes endure in Conn.?

It seems inconceivable that our towns and cities will still be dealing with the likes of the distribution of antisemitic propaganda 100 years from now. But history has already taught us that hate crimes will endure

A swastika was found carved into a window in bathroom stall at the Darien train station in October.

Back in 1947, director Elia Kazan filmed Gregory Peck at the same station for the film “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” a film and novel that made Darien synonymous with antisemitism.

Decades earlier, in the 1920s, the KKK was putting fliers in Fairfield County mailboxes. Recently, antisemitic propaganda was spread around Stamford, Danbury, Glastonbury and Trumbull.

Will hate crime still be a problem in Connecticut in 2124?

It seems inconceivable that our towns and cities will still be dealing with the likes of the distribution of antisemitic propaganda 100 years from now. But history has already taught us that hate crimes will endure the passage of time and generations, continuing even after the events of World War II united the nation to combat the horrors of what such hate can unleash.

The Anti-Defamation League documented 184 antisemitic incidents in Connecticut in 2023, which represents a 170 percent increase from the previous year. It will surprise no one that the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel fueled the spike, which has continued into 2024.

Percentagewise, the increase is even worse in Connecticut than the numbers across the United States, which saw a 140 percent increase to 8,873 reported incidents. The incidents documented after Oct. 7 were higher nationally that had been seen in a calendar year since the ADL began gathering the records in 1979.

The reality is surely worse than this grim scorecard suggests. Legislation against hate crimes vary from state to state. Connecticut’s laws are broader than those in most states, and Georgia, Wyoming, Utah and Indiana continue to lack such laws, according to the NAACP data. Where there are no laws there are also likely undocumented incidents of this nature.

The same is surely true in Connecticut. The incidents we know about are everywhere. The ADL documented 25 bomb threats at synagogues and antisemitic incidents in 82 communities. Seventeen incidents were on college campuses.

ADL Connecticut Regional Director Stacey Sobel summed it up succinctly: “It has been a really challenging time.”

It will continue to be. The incidents themselves are weapons, expressions of bias. Even if it wasn’t revealed in carvings, online extremism and anonymous threats, the bigotry would still fester.

Connecticut responded to a flurry of incidents in 2017 and 2018 with bipartisan legislation that mandated high school lessons about genocide and the Holocaust, as well as tougher convictions on hate crimes.

During the current session, the state Senate approved a bill that would create a task force to study the effects of hate speech and bullying on children.

We need to talk more about these issues in Connecticut, in America, in 2024. The carvings can be sanded away, the graffiti can be scrubbed and online prejudice can be blocked, but we won’t change history until we take stronger actions to confront the consequences of hate.