Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
As other kids in Austin recovered from trick-or-treating on Halloween last year, Sarah Adelman worried about white supremacists, her mom and their synagogue. After a series of antisemitic incidents around Central Texas, someone set fire to Congregation Beth Israel, where Sarah’s mother, Lori, is a leader.
“It made me sad and really scared,” 10-year-old Sarah said last week. “It made me nervous for my mom.”
The arson was part of an ongoing wave of antisemitic incidents that grew last year to its highest number in four decades. It came three years after a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue and was followed months later by a hostage situation at a North Texas synagogue. In 2021, the Anti-Defamation League tracked 2,717 anti-Jewish incidents nationwide— a 34% increase since 2020 and the highest number since the group began tracking antisemitism in 1979. In Texas, the ADL recorded 112 antisemitic incidents in 2021 — almost triple since 2020 — and both the state and nation are on pace to eclipse those records this year.
“It’s been one hit after another,” Adelman said.
Yet an even deeper, darker worry compounds those concerns in a community acutely aware of how antisemitism, disinformation and conspiracy theories normalize the kind of hate speech and violent incidents that foment persecution — and can escalate to genocide.
For years, extremism experts and historians have sounded alarms about rising antisemitism and what they say are clear warning signs of emerging fascism and extremist violence. Their warnings have only grown more dire as influential American politicians, media personalities and celebrities routinely amplify antisemitic conspiracies that have historically led to the killing of Jews.
“This is part and parcel of a broader resurgence of white supremacy,” said David Michael Smith, a former college professor and longtime anti-fascist activist in Texas.
Echoes of such extremism, experts say, can be seen at school board meetings and legislative hearings in Texas and across the country, as officials pull anti-hate educational materials from classrooms and limit how racism in the country’s history is taught. Meanwhile, easy access to the internet radicalizes a new generation of extremists. And some segments of Americans are growing more accepting of ideologies such as Christian Nationalism, which claims America’s founding was God-ordained, and its institutions should thus favor Christianity.
Across the state and country, neo-Nazis and white supremacists pepper neighborhoods and freeway overpasses with anti-semitic banners and flyers. They threaten Jewish families, deface Jewish homes and vandalize synagogues. And, in online communities, they celebrate mass shootings, stoke violence and openly plot to kill.
Experts and Jewish Texans say countless more hate incidents have undoubtedly gone unreported out of fear of retaliation as antisemitism is increasingly normalized across the country and world. As violence rises each year, Jewish communities secure their synagogues, worship in worry and have difficult conversations with innocent kids.
“We have to regularly have conversations with children about people wanting to hurt us,” Adelman said. “It’s terrifying, but what choice do we have? We’re not going to just hide.”
View the full content here.