The shooting rampage that killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue is an extreme example of anti-Semitism that is common in the U.S., the Associated Press reports. Year after year, decade after decade, anti-Semitism proves to be among the most entrenched and pervasive forms of hatred and bigotry in the U.S. Examples: Swastikas scrawled into Jewish students’ notebooks. Headstones toppled and desecrated at Jewish cemeteries. Jews falsely blamed for challenges facing the nation. Jews make up about 2 percent of the U.S. population, but in annual FBI data they repeatedly account for more than half of the Americans targeted by hate crimes committed due to religious bias. The Anti-Defamation League identified 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. in 2017, up from 1,267 in 2016, and also reported a major increase in anti-Semitic online harassment.
Anti-Semitism surfaces often in research conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks various U.S. hate groups, including neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and skinheads. “They’re all anti-Semites — that’s the tie that binds them,” said Heidi Beirich of the center’s Intelligence Project. “They believe Jews are pulling the strings behind bad things happening in this country.” Of the thousands of anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. in recent decades, only a handful were deadly. Most recently, in June a gunman with-Semitic writings in his car killed a security guard while trying to enter the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and in 2014. Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. fatally shot a 69-year-old man and his 14-year-old grandson at a Jewish community center in suburban Kansas City, then killed a woman at a nearby retirement center.