The Ongoing Fight Against Antisemitism and Anti-Asian Hate: Legislative Developments
6.3.2024
In July 2023, New York State Bar Association Immediate Past President Richard Lewis convened the association’s Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Asian Hate. The mission was to study and make recommendations for the analysis and development of laws, policies and best practices to enhance education on, and awareness of, antisemitic and anti-Asian violence and hate and to prosecute and deter hate crimes against these and other minority groups. We are pleased to say that the task force has published recommendations, and as discussed further below, the state Legislature has acted favorably upon one of our recommendations. We have also presented our recommendations to a similar task force in Connecticut and are planning a series of seminars over the next year in Manhattan.
The idea of the task force was initially discussed in April of 2022 because, at that time, antisemitism was already on the rise and there had also been an alarming spike in anti-Asian hate crimes since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, the task force was launched based, in part, on the following data:
- In 2021, 746 anti-Asian hate crimes and 817 antisemitic hate crimes were reported to the FBI by law enforcement agencies.
- In 2020–2021, hate crimes against Asian Americans soared by 800%, and in 2020, there was a 1,662% rise in anti-Asian hate speech compared with 2019.
- Jewish people account for 2.4% of the U.S. population, but long before Oct. 7, the FBI reported that Jewish people were the victims of 63% of religiously motivated hate crimes.
And, of course, recent events have overtaken us; antisemitism and related hate crimes and incidents have risen at unprecedented and disturbing levels, and on college campuses hostility toward Jewish students is raging. In that regard, each year the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism…
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