ABSTRACT
The legacy of the Holocaust ensures that the question of antisemitism and hate crimes against Jews will always be of emblematic importance to wider efforts to combat racism and hate crime. In 45 years of debates in the British Parliament to pass laws against racism and discrimination, for example, “For both supporters and opponents of race relations legislation, Jews were deployed as paradigmatic victims of racism.” 1 Serious antisemitic hate crimes, such as the murder of French Jew Ilan Halimi in 2006, or the desecration of Finsbury Park Synagogue in London in 2002, can attract significant media and political attention and debate. Yet as Michael Whine explains elsewhere in this volume, governmental efforts to monitor, measure and assess all hate crimes have been slow to develop and remain inconsistent. It was only in 2004 that Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) participating States committed themselves to collecting reliable data on antisemitic hate crimes, and this commitment is far from being fulfilled. 2 For the purposes of this chapter, this state of affairs has one significant consequence: anyone hoping to make a useful assessment of contemporary antisemitic hate crime across States will encounter a troubling lack of official data.
