The ADL is one of the largest, oldest, most prestigious Jewish organizations in America. It conducts research in the fields of Antisemitism (AS) and extremism and promotes efforts to fight them.
Each year, since 1979, the ADL publishes an annual report about the number of AS incidents in the US. This report is a main benchmark for assessing the state of Antisemitism in the US, and the ADL itself refers to it when commenting on the state of Antisemitism. Statements such as “rising Antisemitism” or “levels of Antisemitism” often cite the ADL reports as reference. We would like to refer here to some problematic findings regarding the compiling and presenting of these annual reports, especially that of 2021.
In the 2021 report, the ADL registered 2717 AS incidents, and like every year, juxtaposed the number with last years’ results. 2021 was crowned “the year with the highest number of incidents on record” with a growth of 34% in the number of incidents from 2020. Technically it is true, but the way the ADL presents the data leads us naturally to believe that 2021 is the most Antisemitic year in American history, with 2019 being the second worse, and that is not true. It would also seem – looking at an overall view of numbers since 1979 - that since 2017 we are at an all-time high plateau of Antisemitism, and that is also not true.
Okay, so a quick preliminary explanation is due (To those of you who already have their PhD in statistics, we apologize in advance): when presenting data, context is everything; raw numbers, without background, are meaningless.
For example: Let’s say we had 1000 cases of pneumonia this year. Does it mean anything? Is it a lot? We cannot say until we know to what size of population we refer to. In a town of a 1000 people, that would be horrific. In reference to the population of the US, this number is negligible.
And in researching AS it is the same. If we have a 100 AS incident in a small town, that’s horrific. And again, relating to the whole US, this number would be the best ever. So, size does matter, and as you can see, all ADL reports present raw, absolute numbers without reference to population size. When comparing, for example, 2016 with 2021, the representation doesn’t take into account that the population in 2021 is 10M larger. This means that any comparison or assessment of the levels of Antisemitism in the US is impossible.
So, what we need to do is make the numbers comparable. For example, we can compute how many As incidents were for every million people in the US. This representation takes into account the change in population and allows us to compare years and see whether AS is really rising or falling. And it looks like this:
So, when represented correctly, the ADL data shows we are not at an all time high. Actually, the first half of the 90’s was definitely worse then all other years. Except for 2021. So all in all, no reason to celebrate but no, this is not the worse time to be Jewish in the US.
But let’s go back to the 2021 report. The ADL writes there the following: “Of the 2,717 incidents included in the 2021 Audit of Antisemitic incidents, 494 were identified through newly established partnerships between ADL and several Jewish organizations, including... This shared reporting represents 18% of the total number of incidents in 2021. Even without the additional reporting from partners, the 2021 Audit numbers would have been the highest recorded by ADL, with 2,223 incidents."
That means that 18% of the 2021 report comes from sources that were no used in previous reports. The writers of the report know it is problematic and specifically state that.
So, once again, years cannot be compared. So let’s take off those 494 extra incidents and represent years by incident per million. In that representation, 2021 doesn’t even make it to the top 5. So no, once again, we’re not at an all-time-high of Antisemitism.
Now the ADL only write “number of incidents”, never “rate of Antisemitism” or “level of Antisemitism”, so technically, they’re never wrong. But let’s just remember that we are talking about a research empire, funded by tens of millions of dollars every year, writing reports and reviews almost every day, for decades. They analyze the data from every possible angle in their reports, they compare years, they refer to trends. Is it reasonable to assume that they never noticed this? Never noticed that their data is represented in a very misleading manner? If the answer is yes, then they’re simply horrible at their job. But we dare assume that the answer is no. They didn't miss this error. They knew what they were doing and had a very clear agenda of making Antisemitic incidents numbers as high as possible. Why? We will let the readers draw their own conclusions.
This is the biggest issue with ADL reports but there are more issues, and none of them is insignificant. We will point them out briefly and if there is any demand we will go into details.
The numbers are usually broken down into “harassment”, “vandalism” and “assault”, but otherwise we know nothing of the severity or credibility of reports.
The ADL admit that they do not verify all incidents. They never say how many.
An unknown portion of incidents is “online Antisemitism”. The numbers are not disclosed. In a recent research the ADL established that on Twitter alone there are millions of AS tweets every year. It is, in fact, a bottomless pit of AS. How come that only several hundreds of incidents are reported?
The ADL changes methodology, criteria and counting methods at will. Just for example, all drawings of swastikas in the US were once considered as Antisemitic. Then they weren’t, and then they were again… This renders a lot of the annual reports incomparable to each other.
We are not out to get the ADL. First, we can’t. Second, the ADL is an organization that does excellent work in a lot of fields. And third, all Jewish organizations nowadays are manipulating the numbers and representing them in a somewhat biased manner. The motives are admirable, but we believe that it is not any organization's prerogative to "nudge" us in the right direction. The fight against AS doesn't belong to any organization. It’s our fight. All of us, and we are not children who need to be scared into action. We are the soldiers, the generals and the prime-ministers of this fight and our intelligence apparatus needs to supply us with reliable information.
No more, no less.
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