For years, the Anti-Defamation League has called its annual surveys of anti-Semitism “audits,” borrowing a term more appropriately applied to the precise science of accounting.
Our question is, can a measurement of anti-Semitism really be precise? Measuring anti-Semitism, it seems to us, is more akin to herding cats than auditing columns of figures.
This was driven home recently when the ADL announced that it was “downgrading” the swastika symbol, meaning that the organization will no longer consider its use to be an automatic indicator of anti-Semitism.
Younger hatemongers, it seems, don’t know much about the swastika’s history, and apply it in all sorts of expressions of bigotry, many of which have nothing to do with Jews.