Violent Antisemitic Attacks Up 40 Percent — Where’s the Coverage?

Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 came one day after the release of a Tel Aviv University report detailing a dramatic increase in violent antisemitic attacks around the world. USA Today and The Washington Times provided prominent coverage for example of the report, but The Washington Post and The New York Times made no mention of it. The New York Times did run a feature pegged to Holocaust Remembrance Day, on preservation efforts at Auschwitz.

USA Today covered the university’s Kantor Center report on page three of its April 16, print edition (“Violence against Jews surges”). The newspaper said the study detailed 766 recorded attacks against Jews in 2014, compared to 554 incidents in 2013, a 40percent surge. This increase included direct attacks against persons or institutions such as synagogues, community centers or private properties and vandalism at cemeteries or religious sites.

The report noted that “the overall feeling among many Jewish people is one of living in an intensifying anti-Jewish environment that has become not only insulting and threatening, but outright dangerous, and that they are facing an explosion of hatred toward them as individuals, their communities and Israel, as a Jewish state.”

The front page of The Washington Times’ World section (“Rising Anti-Semitism,” April 16) also covered the Tel Aviv University report, under the headline “Rising Anti-Semitism.” The Washington Times noted, as did USA Today, that 2014 was the second worst year for attacks against Jewish people since 2009 when 1,118 assaults were recorded.

The paper quoted Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, saying “you don’t have to be a mathematician to see an obvious trend here.” Maybe not, but that obvious trend did not rate a news brief in The Washington Post or New York Times.

The New York Times feature, detailing efforts to preserve the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland (“Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz,” April 16), appeared in its international arts section. An Associated Press dispatch datelined Jerusalem (“Netanyahu likens Iran, Nazis as he assails deal,” The Baltimore Sun, April 16) reported that “as Israel marked its Holocaust Remembrance Day, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared Iran to the Nazis … and warned Tehran must be prevented from obtaining nuclear weapons. Netanyahu linked the Nazi genocide of 6 million Jews in World War II to Iran’s contested nuclear program and some of the Islamic Republic leaders’ repeated references to the destruction of Israel.”

The newsworthiness of the Tel Aviv University survey of rising antisemitism, the historical connection and contemporary echo in Holocaust Day remembrances, and Netanyahu’s warning seem obvious. But not, apparently, in The Washington Post and The New York Times newsrooms.

Where was the coverage? — by Sean Durns