Anti-semitism on rise, but violence down

TEL AVIV, Israel — Violent attacks on Jews worldwide dropped in 2017 despite a rise in other forms of anti-semitism, researchers reported Wednesday, in a year characterized by normalization and mainstreaming of anti-semitism not seen in Europe since World War II.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University said assaults specifically targeting Jews fell 9 percent last year. They recorded 327 cases compared with 361 in 2016, which had already been the lowest number in a decade.

But they noted attacks were far more brazen. Most dramatic were a pair of cases in France, where a Jewish woman was thrown to her death out of her apartment window and a Holocaust survivor was stabbed and burned to death in her Paris home.

Threats, harassment and insults have also driven thousands of French Jews to relocate.

“Neither the public nor the private space is perceived as safe for Jews,” said Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities across the continent. “The general feeling shared by Jews, as individuals and as a community, is that anti-semitism has entered a new phase, and is widespread in most parts of the world.”

Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry releases the report every year on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust memorial day, which began Wednesday at sundown.

Increased security measures are credited with reducing violence, but it may be masking a trend of anti-semitism becoming more mainstream and acceptable, particularly in European politics. The report described a toxic triangle made up of the rise of the extreme right, radical Islamism and a heated anti-zionist discourse on the left accompanied by anti-semitic expressions.