(The Republican- Dave Canton) Acts of antisemitism in the commonwealth ballooned to an eight-year high in 2023, a new state report says, leaving Jews across the state apprehensive.
The state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security recently reported a 70% increase in antisemitic attacks from the year before, indicating there were 119 separate antisemitic incidents, more than in any year in the past eight and the third straight yearly increase.
State Sen. John Velis, D-Westfield, is the co-chairman of the newly created Special Commission on Combatting Antisemitism. He said antisemitic events skyrocketed in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on an Israeli kibbutz, killing more than 1,200 people and leaving another 250 as hostages of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
“The reports of antisemitism post-October 7 are just rampant,” Velis said. “I started to have meetings with constituents who let me know that their very young kids were afraid to admit publicly in school that they were Jewish. That, coupled with all those protests that were rampant across the country, the pro-Palestinian protests, much of it I think were blatantly antisemitic and had a lot of ‘death to Israel’ in them. I was taken aback.”
The state report bears out Velis’ interpretation of antisemitism in the commonwealth. While there were no reported incidents in Hampden County during 2023, there were eight incidents in Hampshire County and two in Berkshire. Middlesex County led the state with 45 reported incidents of antisemitism.
Created from a Velis-sponsored amendment to the 2025 budget, passed unanimously by the state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Maura Healey, the special commission will continue its work with hearings later this month. Two such hearings already have been held, Velis said.
Piggybacked with the amendment creating the special commission is a requirement that the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education put together teaching materials on combatting antisemitism for inclusion in the K through 12 curriculum statewide.
The goal of the special commission is to push back against what he called “the world’s most ancient of hatreds.”
“Antisemitism is the world’s oldest bias, beginning, really, with the notion that Jews were responsible for killing Christ,” Velis said. “It runs through ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‘ and Henry Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, newspaper. It has reared its head over and over again.”
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was revealed to be a phony document written by the state security of the former Soviet Union that purported to show Jews’ plans to take over the world. Henry Ford used his ownership of the newspaper to publish antisemitic diatribes leading up to World War II.
The increase in antisemitic attacks does not surprise the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts, Nora Gorenstein.
“Because the calendar year 2023 includes three months of immediately following October 7, we really saw a significant uptick in instances of hate speech and hate crime based on people’s perceptions of what happened in Israel and in Gaza,” she said. “Because October 7 was such a watershed, game-changing moment for our country, and really for the world, it has given rise to just a tremendous amount of open antisemitic speech. It has exposed a lot of ignorance that we find in our communities that, previously, people weren’t expressing or talking about.”
While state reporting might show no incidents of antisemitic crimes in Hampden County, Gorenstein said anecdotal reporting of incidents far outstrips the published account from the state.
“We know that hate crimes, hate speech, and all other types of antisemitic actions, are vastly underreported. What we assume is that there is more going on than we see in the data,” she said. “I can tell you that we hear a lot more of this type of activity happening in Hampshire County than in Hampden County, but we can’t say if it is based on people not reporting what happened, because we do know that incidents have happened in both counties.”
Gorenstein said her organization does track incidents of antisemitism in Western Massachusetts and sends reports to the Anti-Defamation League, to local police departments and to the FBI.
“We have developed this black or white world where there is no nuance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is, without a doubt one of the most complex, nuanced situations there is in the world,” Velis said. “Antisemitism numbers continue to go up, and antisemitism has long preexisted the creation of the state of Israel. There has been a history in the world, that anytime something goes wrong, ‘Blame the Jews.’”
Massachusetts can’t claim it is a “bastion of progressive thought, and we are going to protect everyone, when we have this community that has been telling us how they are on the receiving end of the most vile hatred in the world,” he said. “We can’t say, ‘Yeah, we hear you, but we’re not going to do anything about it,’ because otherwise we are not progressive, we are just a bunch of phonies.”
The report on Hate Crimes in Massachusetts indicated that crimes against Black people ranked higher than antisemitism, with the majority of reports coming from Eastern Massachusetts.
The report said 149 instances of anti-Black crimes were reported to law enforcement, with one incident in Hampden County, two in Hampshire County and three in Berkshire County. Middlesex County led the state with 49 reports, followed by Suffolk County with 44.
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