The FBI apparently has to report how many hate crimes were based on Antisemitism.
On the other hand, the State Department has also adopted a definition of Antisemitism.
Is there any difference between these? I assume the FBI has a definition somewhere to be able to make those statistics, but I couldn't find theirs on a quick search.
From what I can tell, they do not have a specific definition.
Compilation and release of the report is based on the Hate Crime Statistics Act. The text of the act itself is short. It just says to collect data:
about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, gender and gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity
Responsible for the methodology is the AG, who passed the job onto the FBI, who assigned it to the UCR. The data ultimately comes from law enforcement agencies, who submit it to the UCR.
The latest data can be seen in the Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime Data Explorer. By going to Documents & Downloads, the "Hate Crime Statistics Annual Reports" can be downloaded. It contains excel spreadsheets, and PDF documents with additional information. In the methodology.pdf, there is some information on how data is collected:
the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program collects data regarding criminal offenses that were motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias against the victim’s race/ethnicity/ancestry, gender, gender identity, religion, disability, or sexual orientation, and were committed against persons, property, or society.
Because motivation is subjective, it is sometimes difficult to know with certainty whether a crime resulted from the offender’s bias. Moreover, the presence of bias alone does not necessarily mean that a crime can be considered a hate crime.
Only when a law enforcement investigation reveals sufficient evidence to lead a reasonable and prudent person to conclude that the offender’s actions were motivated, in whole or in part, by his or her bias, should an agency report an incident as a hate crime.
None of the documents define antisemitism. For that matter, none mention it. The category they use is religion-based crimes, in which they include anti-Jewish bias (they do not include anti-Jewish bias under race-based crimes).
None of the documents define any of the other categories either (anti-black, etc).
In the end, the report has a narrow definition and looks if the offender was motivated in their selection of the victim because of their religion/ethnicity/etc.
Because it's the motivation of the offender that matters, the IHRA definition might not be a good fit (it includes acts against "non-Jewish individuals" & of course includes a lot of acts which are antisemitic but not criminal).
