Anti-Semitic incidents were on the rise before the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting

Memorial outside the Tree of Life synagogue.

(Image credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

last updated 29 October 2018

Saturday's shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh may well be "the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States," but it is also part of a broader trend of rising incidence of anti-Semitism in the U.S., the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reports.

The ADL identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in America last year, about a 50 percent increase over 2016's 1,267 incidents. That tally spans a wide range of behavior motivated by hatred for Jews, from violence like that in Pittsburgh to desecration of cemeteries or swastika graffiti on Jewish people's property.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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