Jewish Federation of Cincinnati

Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC)

As much as our data indicates incidents of antisemitism have ballooned, the reality may be even worse. Here’s how I know: In the last several months, while connecting with community members, Jewish folks have commonly told me some variant of “oh, by the way, something happened the other day….” They then go on to describe an incident of antisemitism that affected them, a family member, a colleague, or a friend which I—as director of the JCRC—know is not recorded in our incident log.

If you, like me, are invested in seeing our community combat antisemitism, then you also probably think this informational deficit is a problem.

We can’t keep folks informed about how bad things are (or if they are improving) if we have fragmentary data. We can’t fully explain to lawmakers or school administrators the scope of our community’s needs if we ourselves don’t even know them. Thus, it is paramount that we obtain a fuller picture of what is taking place in Cincinnati.

Here’s the good news: We just took one major step in building the infrastructure to enable improvement. Namely, we launched an online form for reporting incidents of antisemitism, jewishcincinnati.org/report. Having a tool like this is important—even necessary—given the volume of incidents we’ve encountered recently. I think, though, we have one other need to ensure we truly have a sense of the quantity and severity of antisemitism in our area.

When people think about the JCRC, they often think of it as an organization to which one goes if they need help. That is true, and helping the community deal with antisemitism is a large part of what we do. But not everyone recognizes the importance of letting the JCRC know about incidents of antisemitism even if they don’t require assistance. And yet, that’s important to a key part of the role the JCRC plays in Jewish Cincinnati: we keep tabs on local antisemitic incidents of any size to facilitate big-picture conversations regarding our communal wellbeing.

Please, help us in our work. Educate others about what we need to combat antisemitism here at home. Remind your friends to report incidents to the JCRC. And, best of all, they can now do so without even having to make a phone call!