Over half of all NYC hate crimes in 2024 targeted Jews

Former New York State Representative Dov Hikind said that “the numbers are much worse” than the 345 incidents reported to the police.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Jews were the target of over half of all hate crimes committed in New York City in 2024, according to a New York Police Department (NYPD) report published Monday..

Although they are only approximately 10% of the city’s population, out of 641 hate crimes reported to the metropolis’ authorities, nearly 54%, or 345 incidents, were against Jews. This was a rise of seven percent over 2023.

By comparison, the next-largest group (12%) of bias-based crimes was connected to the victims’ sexual orientation.

Despite Islamophobia being decried by many in the same breath as antisemitism, often when trying to blur the issue of rising Jew hatred in the U.S., there were only 43 reported anti-Muslim hate crimes last year, 6.7% of the total, although this was a rise of 65% over the year before.

The police report stated that its statistics were still subject to change.

Unrelated to this specific report, in an interview with Israel National News Tuesday, former New York State Representative Dov Hikind said that the problem of antisemitism was much larger than the dry statistics.

“The numbers don’t lie, but it’s much worse than they show,” he said. “So many people who are victims of antisemitism are afraid to report it.”

Many physical attacks, which often occurred in areas of the city where there are many ultra-Orthodox residents who are very visibly Jewish, have been reported in the media over the past year.

“Everyone” in the Jewish community is “very concerned” since antisemitism “all over the United States and the world is at levels that have never been seen before,” Hikind noted.

The longtime local politician, an Orthodox Jew who strongly supported president-elect Donald Trump in the last election, said he expected that the new administration will “start making a dent in this,” adding, “Don’t think that this is the Messiah coming, though.”

Education is key, in his opinion, for “everybody,” but “especially for our own children,” to understand what antisemitism is in general, and the truth about the Hamas massacre in Israel last October 7 that sparked the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip and immediately ignited a worldwide wave of anti-Israel and antisemitic protests and violence.

In 2023, largely driven by a huge jump in incidents in the last quarter of the year, data compiled by the FBI showed that across the U.S., there were 1,832 reported single-bias, anti-Jewish hate crimes, a sharp increase of 63% from the previous year and the highest number ever recorded by the agency since it began collecting such information in 1991.