August 18, 2017 By Lauren Jones Civil Rights National Counsel at the Anti-Defamation League On August 17, 1915 a mob dragged Leo Frank, a Jewish superintendent at a pencil factory in Georgia, from his prison cell, drove him to a place where others stood ready with a noose, and lynched him. They called themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan. A crowd of men, women and children looked on and cheered. Within the local community, the members of the lynch mob were well-known. But their…

August 15, 2017 Alongside the racism, nativism and xenophobia on display at Unite the Right, the event was also an expression of the animating power of anti-Semitism.  Marchers threw Nazi salutes as they waved swastika flags, proudly wore swastika pins and shirts, and shouted “sieg heil!”  A sign carried by rally-goers warned that the “Jewish media is going down;” another declared that “Jews are Satan’s children.”  A white…

August 13, 2017 On the morning of Saturday, August 12, hundreds of white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the Right rally. The rally never happened, but it almost didn’t matter: The event was the largest and most violent gathering of white supremacists in decades. On Friday afternoon, over the objections of the Charlottesville city council, Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler secured a permit to gather in one of the typically bucolic college town…

July 17, 2017 William Scott Planer has joined the ever-expanding list of white supremacists vandalizing and attacking Jewish institutions nationwide. Planer, who lives in Denver, was arrested on July 14, 2017 for affixing a “Fight Terror, Nuke Israel” sticker to the door of the Chabad Lubavitch Jewish Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is being held at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department in Colorado on a $500,000 bond as a fugitive from justice for felony…

June 27, 2017 On June 25, two different far-right activist groups held competing rallies in Washington, D.C., and bickered over the rallies’ respective goals and attendance. The “rally for free speech,” held near the Lincoln Memorial, featured a number of white supremacist speakers, including Richard Spencer and Nathan Damigo, while the “rally against political violence,” held near the White House, focused on vilifying the left. Some of the speakers involved…

June 22, 2017 Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Louis Farrakhan is not the only NOI member fomenting anti-Semitism these days. In recent weeks, his spokesperson, Ava Muhammad, has been loudly sharing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. An NOI Mother’s Day panel in New Orleans on May 11, “Testimonies of Extraordinary Women,” consisted of a nearly three-hour-long panel of four women, including Ava Muhammad, praising Farrakhan. When asked by an audience member why it’s…