Anti-Semitism Tracker For College Campuses Released

Anti-Semitism is on the rise, not only in the United States but internationally as well. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported in their Annual Report that the number of reported anti-Semitic incidents in the United States surged 57 percent in 2017 alone and that this increase was the largest in a single year since the ADL began tracking such incidents in 1979. And in a separate report released recently, the ADL reported a more than 250 percent increase in white supremacist activity on college campuses. And this is just in the current academic year. On top of all of this, K-12 schools had more reports than any other location, which came as a surprise because public areas typically have the most. Incidents at schools nearly doubled and the number of incidents on college campuses increased 89 percent.

This is why the AMCHA Initiative is releasing a new tracker for anti-Semitic incidents happening on college campuses specifically. The tracker is actually a huge user-friendly database that will allow users to access information and photo documentation about anti-Semitic incidents that occurred on college campuses anytime between 2015 and 2018.

AMCHA is an organization devoted to investigating, reporting, and working towards resolving anti-Semitism on the campuses of higher education institutions specifically. Their database is supposedly the only database of anti-Semitic incidents that is 100 percent accessible to the public.

“AMCHA is the Hebrew word meaning ‘Your People’ and also connotes ‘grassroots,’ ‘the masses,’ and ‘ordinary people.’ AMCHA Initiative strives to bring together people from all over North America so that they might speak in one voice in order to express their concern for the safety and well-being of Jewish college and university students,” the AMCHA organization says of itself.

The database can be accessed at their website and will allow users to search for incidents via city, state, zip code, geographical region, year, date range, university, and category, or even by type of incident, such as physical assault, discrimination, destruction of Jewish property, genocidal expression, suppression of speech/movement/assembly, verbal assault, intimidation, harassment, condoning terrorism, comparing Jews to Nazis, and accusing Jews of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.

“An important part of AMCHA’s mission is to document and expose incidents of campus anti-Semitism and make this information easily and readily available to the public,” AMCHA’s director, Tammi Rossman-Benjamin told The Jewish Press. “We hope our new searchable databases will make it easier for parents, students, alumni, researchers, journalists and anyone in the community to access the information they are looking for.”