The theme of this week's podcast is anti-Semitism, and I want to begin with some data to put things in perspective.

Before I introduce this week's guest, let me tell you some of the figures published by the FBI.

The FBI logged just over 8,000

single-bias hate crime offenses in 2017. Just over 20% of them were directed against a religious

person or a religious institution. And of those 20-some-odd percent of anti-religious hate crimes,

now we're talking about almost 1,700 incidents. Nearly 60% of them targeted

Jews. By comparison, crimes that targeted Muslims in 2017 were just under 20%, about one-third

of the anti-Jewish incidents. That's a snapshot of relative crimes directed against Jews and Muslims

in 2017. I want to show a little movement over time and where

that fits into a trend. So let me compare those 2017 statistics with FBI statistics from the

previous year, 2016. In 2016, of the over 7,000 hate crimes on record, 1,500 or so were directed

against religious institutions or people, and of those,

1,500 hate crimes targeting religion, more than 54% were anti-Jewish, and nearly 25% were anti-Muslim.

Now, I raise this not because I want Jews to compete in the Victim Olympics. That's not my point.

It goes without saying that crimes directed against religious

people, Jews or Muslims or Christians, just because they're religious, are evil. But comparing

the 2016 numbers to the 2017 numbers reveals both that there are more hate crimes against

religious Americans and that the percentage of hate crimes against religious Americans, specifically targeting Jews as a relative number, is growing.

Attacks against Muslims are disgusting and terrible, and we should be glad that both in absolute and in relative terms,

those attacks have diminished over the last couple of years. But attacks on Jews did not diminish.

Attacks on Jews have grown.

Attacks on Jews back in 2016 were two times higher than that of any other group. But in 2017,

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