Mere hours after the ball dropped in Times Square, the United States suffered its first antisemitic attack of the decade. On New Year’s Day in Brooklyn, a fifteen-year old boy was threatened at knife point, his kippah torn off as antisemitic remarks were hurled at him.

Just twenty-four hours earlier and a few miles away, a group of assailants had chased an Orthodox Jewish man down the street, punched him in the face, and bashed him with a chair. Days earlier in nearby Rockland County, New York, a machete-wielding assailant had injured five after storming a synagogue. And just a few weeks before that, two gunmen had targeted a kosher market in Jersey City in a shootout that left six dead.

These weren’t isolated incidents: antisemitism is on the rise in the United States. After dropping for more than a decade, the number of anti-Jewish attacks more than doubled between 2015 and 2017. In 2018 — the year that a gunman murdered eleven congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, the deadliest antisemitic assault in US history — the number of antisemitic assaults doubled. In New York City, where nearly one in every seven people is Jewish, antisemitic crimes have jumped 21 percent in the past year.