A full-time job fighting hate
Evan Bernstein’s job has gotten increasingly difficult since he joined the Anti-Defamation League as New York regional director in 2013. Not only has the scope of his responsibility broadened — in June, the ADL merged two offices, adding all of northern and central New Jersey under his leadership — the urgency of his work has grown. FBI statistics show that single-bias hate crimes increased from 5,818 in 2015 to 6,063 in 2016, or roughly two every three days, and multiple-bias hate crimes nearly doubled, from 32 to 58. More than half of those crimes targeted victims because of their race or ethnicity, and there were large increases in anti-Semitic (55 percent) and anti-Muslim (25 percent) crimes, as well as more crimes against members of the LGBTQ community. Bernstein, A.L.M. ’11, believes the answer is a better understanding of the connected world in which we live. Since graduating from Harvard Extension School, Bernstein has...