Anti-Semitic incidents were on the rise even before shooting
NEW YORK (AP) — Swastikas scrawled into Jewish students' notebooks. Headstones toppled and desecrated by vandals at Jewish cemeteries. Jews falsely blamed for challenges facing the nation.
The shooting rampage that killed 11 people at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life Synagogue on Saturday is being decried as the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, allegedly carried out by a virulently anti-Semitic gunman. The carnage, however unprecedented, is not an aberration.
Year after year, decade after decade, anti-Semitism proves to be among the most entrenched and pervasive forms of hatred and bigotry in the United States.
Jews make up only about 2 percent of the U.S.