While at the National Journalism Center in the summer of 2019, I attended a Video Boot Camp.
I produced this video about the Lake Ann Market after a day of training and reporting.
I had the privilege of interviewing Richard Seeno for an audio project in my first year of graduate school. I'm so glad I did. His story is important.
Matt Scogin became the 14th president of Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He said that there were specific things that God did to convince him to apply for the job. We sat down and talked about those signs. I hope you enjoy his testimony.
Religious biases are roughly 20% of all hate crimes nationwide. The FBI’s data includes 14 religions, such as Islam, Catholicism, Protestant, atheism and agnostic, and Sikh. The largest religious group to suffer is Judaisim. Anti-Jewish incidents account for nearly 12% of all hate crimes. The next largest religion category is anti-Islamic which don’t peak three percent.
The FBI differentiates between offenses and incidents. An incident is an event whereas an offense is what happens at the event. Any incident can have one or more offenses and more than one victim.
Offenses include crimes against persons like murder, rape, aggravated assault and intimidation. Offenses can also include crimes against property like burglary, arson, and destruction of property or vandalism.
ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt speaks to the Never is Now Summit on November 21, 2019. Photo by Maggie Garred
There were 1,550 reported offenses motivated by religious bias in 2018, equal to more than four offenses a day. Of those, the majority were anti-Jewish. The most common type of offense was destruction of property and vandalism with 522 reported cases, nearly two a day.
“We've all heard reports of swastikas on gravestones, on synagogue walls, and garage doors,” said the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt at the Never is Now Summit in New York City on November 21, 2019. “We've seen the reports of high school kids who think it’s funny to sling ‘Heil Hitler’ salutes and each other.”
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is an anti-hate leader with foundational Jewish values. The annual Never is Now Summit hosted 1,600 people in the Javits Center in November, a week after the FBI statistics were released.
The appearance of swastikas is considered more than vandalism to the Jewish community. Rabbi Cohen said there’s an “implicit threat” with the appearance of the Nazi symbol.
“A swastika is a symbol of a regime that attempted to exterminate the Jewish people, literally, and not only attempted, but actually succeeded in killing six million. So, it’s really a sign that you’re not welcome here,” he said. The Holocaust took the lives of six million people, including but not exclusively Jews.
Anti-Semitism is more than vandalism
Rabbi Cohen is the Executive Director at the Crown Heights Central Jewish Community Council (CHJCC), an organization that addresses the local and international concerns of the Jewish Community. He said that physical violence is a concern for his Jewish neighbors in Crown Heights.
“We’re talking about incidents here that involved facial injuries, bodily injuries, broken bones, knocked out teeth,” he said. “In quite a number of incidents, we’re talking at least a dozen incidents, over the last two years where the person who was attacked suffered real physical injuries.”
So far in 2019 there have been 111 reported attacks on Jews in Brooklyn, according to the ADL. A handful of those incidents include a man assaulted with a belt in September, a man throwing eggs at Jewish buildings and people, and a group of young men chasing and punching Jewish men and boys as they walked down the street in November.
Avi Kamman, 74, works with Rabbi Cohen and is the program manager at the CHJCC. He said that while he was attacked many years ago in the 1970s, he still feels the affects of anti-Semitism on his community.
“So, how have I perceived it? Lately, I’ve perceived it how you have,” he said as he walked down Kingston Ave in Brooklyn. “The people in my neighborhood who’ve been hit, people who’ve been beaten up, hearing about them… It manifests itself in me in that there are streets I don’t walk on anymore.”
Kamman said he takes a different way home and especially after sunset. He now chooses streets well populated by people and especially Jewish people.
“Because I know there’s a force at loose and it can spring anytime,” he said, a reference to his belief that there’s an erosion of authority and responsibility. “Where there’s an opportunity, when someone has a hatred for a particular race, culture, color, and they’re given the opportunity to express it, they will.”
He speculated that the rise of attacks in his community is “allowed to flourish in a culture where individuality predominates over universal adherence to law.”
“If we’re really about group rights, what about Jewish rights?” he said.
Kamman said the Orthodox community, in particular, is threatened because they stand out.
“It goes back to visibility, conspicuousness and vulnerability,” he said. “We’re a people, the Orthodox Jews, are unfortunately known as not organized with sticks, stones and guns to fight back … it’s almost entirely Orthodox Jews because we’re very recognizable as Jews.”
Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women, spoke at the Never is Now Summit in a breakout session highlighting hate crime responses between synagogues and advocacy groups. She called attention to the need for liberal and Orthodox communities to be unified in their work against anti-Semitism.
“There are Orthodox Jews under attack in Brooklyn right now and it shouldn't just be Orthodox Jews who are speaking about it,” she said. “When there is an attack on the Orthodox community, it is an attack on all of us.”
The FBI’s definition of a hate crime victim can refer to an individual, an institution, a religious organization, a government entity, or society as a whole. The total number of victims in 2018 far surpassed 8,000 people in the United States.
The data showed there were more than 1,600 victims of religious hate crimes in 2018, nearly 20%of all hate crime victims nationally. As with the number of incidents seen earlier, the Anti-Jewish category is the largest, followed by Anti-Islamic.
Rooting out discrimination through education
The ADL responded to the increased victimization of the Jewish community in Brooklyn by doubling its funding for its education program, No Place for Hate, a school program that aims to define behavioral expectations and maintain a healthy school environment for all of its members.
Greenblatt and other leading members of Brooklyn, including Rabbi Cohen, held a press conference in Borough Hall on November 12 to show unified support for the No Place for Hate program expansion to more schools in Brooklyn. Greenblatt spoke about the opportunity No Place for Hate allows to educate young people early on.
“Since most hate crimes are born of ignorance for the ‘other,’ we believe that education, especially in the early years, can go a long way to building a foundation for understanding and a respect for diversity,” he said.
Brooklyn is emphasized because 13 out of 17 anti-Semitic assaults in New York City took place in the borough, according to the ADL.
“Brooklyn is a garden of diversity and the weeds of hate, they have infiltrated this garden,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric L. Adams at the press conference in Borough Hall. “And we can’t just prune it away, we have to go to the core and to the seed to ensure it won’t continue to grow and continue to destroy and choke away all the flowers of diversity that we have in this borough.”
No Place for Hate reached over 8,000 students in 22 schools in the previous school year, and with ADL’s increased funding (an estimated investment of $250,000) the program is expected to reach 40 schools. The program is focusing on public schools in Crown Heights and Williamsburg where there are large Jewish populations.
“We must stand in support of any efforts or curriculums designed to promote tolerance and inclusion, in all of its facets,” said Adams. “Our youth are our society’s most capable change agents, and they are never too young to learn that hate speech or any other forms of intolerant expression are wrong, and must always be denounced when it is encountered.”
A deeper dive into the FBI statistics
Hate crime data is reported to the FBI through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. Over 18,000 law enforcement city, county, state, federal and university agencies voluntarily report their data to the FBI. The Hate Crime Statistics Program is one of four data collection categories, and specifically for hate crime reporting.
For the 2018 data released in November, over 16,000 agencies participated in reporting to the Hate Crime Statistics Program. Out of these only an eighth (2,026 agencies) reported over 7,000 incidents.
Since the reporting is voluntary, not all hate crimes are accurately portrayed in the data. If an offender is convicted of a crime but not the hate motivation, then the crime itself will not be recorded as a hate crime.
Nearly 1,500 incidents in 2018 had a religious bias, making it the second largest category behind race and ethnicity incidents. Of the incidents with a religious bias, nearly 60% had an anti-Jewish motivation.
Anti-Jewish incidents accounted for nearly 70 incidents a month. The lowest group, anti-Atheism and Agnosticism, reported six incidents, or one every other month.
A closer look at New York
New York shared crime data from 572 agencies covering over 19 million people for the 2018 statistics. Of those, only 59 agencies reported any hate crimes. According to the data, the state of New York reported 523 hate crime incidents and 286 of those incidents were motivated by a religious bias.
The Crown Heights community feels the weight of their share of those incidents last year.
“You’re talking about people living in a community who feel like they’re being targeted and that’s not acceptable,” said Rabbi Cohen. “It’s not just the individual crime; it becomes a statement against the whole community.”
Kamman said that the rise of anti-Semitic attacks in New York City is in part because of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration.
“I think it’s because the sense of ‘you can get away with anything’ in this administration in New York [City],” said Kamman. “I’ll be frank, in the [Rudy] Guilliani days, there was a crackdown on crime in the street … and you knew in the Guilliani administration that even slight crimes would get you in trouble. Here, you’re not getting in trouble.”
Rabbi Cohen and others are pleased with the response from the borough leaders including law enforcement, politicians, clergy and district attorneys.
“The response has been phenomenal at every level of religious and community and political leadership,” he said. “The seriousness with which these things are taken is encouraging. And you don’t always get the result you would like, but at least you know that it was an effort put in and the statement made that this is not just business as usual.”
To respond to the threat of hate crimes, the Rabbi said they mobilized a community patrol. The patrol is made of young men in their 20s, 30s and early 40s.
“That's actually a big positive of the last few years that the coordination between the community patrols and the police has been much better,” said Rabbi Cohen. “They understand what the limits of what a community patrol can do. We’ve had really positive feedback from the police about the level of professionalism and appropriateness of the patrols, too.”
Kamman said the patrol has had limited success.
“It hasn’t stopped the crimes, but it has definitely done something to bring the crimes closer to justice,” he said. “They are there in places where the police are not.”
On the prosecution side, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office created a special bureau for hate crimes at the end of 2018.
“So, that became a serious bureau with a serious number of lawyers assigned to tackling these cases,” said Rabbi Cohen. “When there is a bias, or a suspected bias, they’re really going to prosecute it seriously if they can.”
But even with increased security directly related to the increase of the threat, Rabbi Cohen said his Orthodox community is still going about their daily lives.
“We’re a pretty resilient community, and it takes a lot to intimidate this community,” he said. “But nevertheless, people are concerned and it’s a topic of conversation, and action … to try and make sure that everything’s front and center on the public agenda.”
Rabbi Motti Seligson, director of media relations at Chabad.org, spoke alongside Sheila Katz at the Summit breakout session.
The full picture of anti-Semitic hate crimes this year will remain unknown until next year when the FBI releases the 2019 Hate Crime Statistics. But according to New York City Police Department, anti-Semitic hate crimes are already up 63% in 2019 compared to last year.
“So, the threats, the attacks, they're real. The anti-semitism is not abstract,” said Rabbi Seligson. “We're not talking about vandalism we're talking about attacks on people.”
A breakout session at the ADL Summit where Sheila Katz (center) and Rabbi Motti Seligson (right of Katz) spoke about the intersection of synagogues and advocacy groups on November 21, 2019. Photo by Maggie Garred
Anti-Semitism still a Threat in New York
The FBI released its 2018 Hate Crime Statistics showing anti-Semitism is still a leading contributor to hate crimes in the United States, predominantly in New York City.
By Maggie Garred
As Rabbi Eli Cohen sat in a subway car on the A line, heading south towards Canal Street around midnight, he looked across the half-filled car and he saw a man with a large stick, standing in the doorway of his train.
The stranger began mumbling to himself. He seemed agitated and locked eyes with the Rabbi. He closed in on the 30 feet that were between them.
“So, I see him like focus in on me, and he starts sputtering things about what ‘the Jews did’ to his Lord or something like that,” said Rabbi Cohen, 64. “He walked over and took the stick and he started swinging, smashing it on these metal poles that go from the floor to the ceiling on either side of me.”
As the Canal Street station came into view, so did the Rabbi’s relief.
“And there were four cops on the platform. They came over, arrested him, and he was charged with harassment as a hate crime. It was aggravated harassment,” Rabbi Cohen said.
Anti-Semitism is not only a problem cocooned in New York City. Anti-Jew hate crimes, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) calls it, accounted for nearly 12% of all hate crimes in the United States, according to the FBI’s 2018 Hate Crime Statistics, released on November 12.
While the incident of intimidation and harassment that Rabbi Cohen experienced happened in the mid-1990s, such acts still occur today. His Orthodox Jewish community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he lives, saw many such instances in 2018. The FBI’s data showed that New York City, which includes the Brooklyn borough, reported 216 religiously motivated hate crimes in 2018.
Rabbi Cohen’s case went before a jury. He testified about the incident and sat as the jury found the defendant guilty of harassment but not of a hate crime.
“I was satisfied that there was a serious prosecution. I thought the [assistant district attorney] ADA who tried the case, did her best to try and get the right verdict,” said the Rabbi. “It’s just very hard to prove. That’s generally the problem.”
This difficulty stems from needing to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, the motivation, not just the actions, of the alleged crime.
“Because you really have to prove what’s going on in somebody else’s mind, right? That it was a hate motive,” Rabbi Cohen said. “That’s a tough hurdle to prove. So, that’s why a lot of these cases don’t get convicted, if it even goes to trial.”
In his particular case, he was the only witness to the stick-swinging man’s words. No other passenger stepped forward to corroborate the details of the night in question.
“So, it’s just my impression at that point, unless it’s corroborated by another couple of people,” said Rabbi Cohen. “But you need more to prove [the motive] than you need to prove he did the act, because now you’re saying he gave away his intent.”
What is considered a hate crime?
There is no specific offense that is considered a hate crime. On the contrary, any offense can be considered a hate crime if there is a biased or hate motivation. A hate motivation is when a perpetrator commits an act against someone on the simple fact that they are of a particular race or ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, gender identity or have a disability. This is also called a biased motivation.
The FBI collects data on six single-bias motivations. A single-bias incident is where the offender is motivated by one bias. In the data collected for 2018, only 84 of 7,120 total incidents are considered multiple-bias and will be excluded for the purpose of this analyzation.