Explaining Ethnoreligious Minority Targeting: Variation in U.S. Anti-Semitic Incidents

Abstract

Over the last two decades alone, the United States has suffered well over ten thousand religion-motivated hate crimes. While racism and religion-motivated prejudice have received considerable attention following the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that resulted in deadly violence, there is little systematic scholarship evaluating where and when incidents targeting ethnoreligious minorities by non-state actors are likely to occur. Utilizing the FBI’s reported anti-Semitic hate crime data from 2001–2014, my main theoretical and empirical exercise is to determine which factors best explain where and when American ethnoreligious groups are likely to be targeted. I propose that there are four essential mechanisms necessary to explain variation in minority targeting: “opportunity” (target group concentration), “distinguishability” (target group visibility), “stimuli” (events increasing target group salience) and “organization” (hate group quantity). My models show that variables falling within each of these theoretical concepts significantly explain variation in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States. Of particular importance for scholars and practitioners alike, Israeli military operations and the number of active hate groups within a state play a major role in explaining anti-Semitic incident variation.

The Trump Effect: How 2016 Campaign Rallies Explain Spikes in Hate

“…King and Sutton (2013) expanded the study of the temporal clustering of hate incidents and found that highly visible criminal trials with an interracial component and lethal domestic-terror attacks result in spikes of both religious and racial hate crime. Feinberg (2020a, 2020b) confirmed that larger geopolitical events can affect reported bias incidents: America’s Jewish diaspora faced increased hate crimes during violent Israeli military conflicts.…”

“… 7. We believe that the use of the SPLC hate-group data represents the best way to control for the influence of organizations purveying in active bigotry in the United States. In doing so, we follow several recent scholars and analyses of bias incidents that also used these data (e.g., Adamczyk et al 2014; Feinberg 2020a, 2020b; Jendryke and McClure 2019). We acknowledge that the SPLC’s classification of hate groups is not without criticism, as noted by Montgomery (2018).…”

Accounting for Contemporary Antisemitism: A Four-Dimensional Framework and a New Dataset

“…A third strand of research has analyzed the prevalence and determinants of antisemitic attitudes (Beattie 2017;Bilewicz et al 2013;F. Cohen et al 2009;Kaplan and Small 2006;Staetsky 2017Staetsky , 2019bBrym 2019), while a fourth line on inquiry has sought to explain variation in the occurrence of antisemitic incidents (Smith 2008;Jacobs et al 2011;Feinberg 2020). Finally, a fifth strand investigates Jews' perceptions and experiences of antisemitism (J. E. Cohen 2018b; DellaPergola 2020).…”

“…Few attempts have been made at closer analysis of the ebb and flow of incidents within particular countries. It is worth mentioning the approach advanced by Ayal Feinberg, which explains variation in antisemitic incidents in the United States as a result of four mechanisms (target group concentration, target group visibility, trigger events, and hate group quantity) (Feinberg 2020). This approach appears particularly well suited for further study in other national contexts.…”

Validating and testing a measure of anti‐semitism on support for QAnon and vote intention for Trump in 2020

“…Before the 2016 election, anti-semitic themes and references appeared sporadically in contemporary U.S. elections, but the deployment of tropes and references to secret Jewish power grew precipitously thereafter and anti-Jewish hate crimes increased most years thereafter (Feinberg 2020).…”