via Washington Post: A family finds swastikas in the lawn as antisemitism surges
The 11-year-old girl in gray sweatpants and a hoodie walked down the porch steps then froze.
She stared at the ground for seven seconds, footage from her family’s doorbell camera shows. At her feet was a swastika. Someone had cut the Nazi symbol out of purple construction paper, adding in permanent marker: HELL BOUND. HAVE FUN!
She glanced around. This didn’t look like some random prank. Her family was one of the only Jewish households on their street in Stoneham, Mass. Five more swastikas littered the lawn that November morning. Five more menacing scribbles:
JEW BITCH.
JESUS HATER.
GO TO HELL, JEW BITCH.
The girl ran back inside.
The torrent of hate speech sweeping internet talk shows and social media is eroding the sense of safety for Jewish people across the United States. As celebrities like Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Kyrie Irving have promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories to their millions of fans — and former president Donald Trump dined at Mar-a-Lago with a Holocaust-denying podcaster — American Jews have faced harassment, vandalism and violence.
Since a gunman stormed Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue four years ago, killing 11 men and women in the deadliest rampage against Jews in U.S. history, researchers have recorded a steady acceleration in prejudice-fueled acts. Over the past two months, someone jumped an older Jewish man in New York, yelling antisemitic slurs and “Kanye 2024”; someone else tagged tombstones with swastikas at a Jewish cemetery in suburban Chicago; someone else spray-painted “Jews Not Welcome” near the entrance of a Maryland high school; someone else passed out fliers in Los Angeles blaming Jews for the coronaviruspandemic.
Antisemitic attacks in the country have reached an all-time high, according to the latest audit from the Anti-Defamation League, which tallied 2,717 incidents in 2021. “It has gotten so normalized,” said Peggy Shukur, interim director of ADL New England, “and it’s happening in more personal ways.”
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