Delilah Hollander, a Chatham University student, has created a real-time anitsemitic incident tracker designed to surface threats and incidents as they happen.
Hollander, of Pittsburgh, has launched trackantisemitism.org, a website that flags incidents, maps emerging hotspots and preserves digital evidence of antisemitic acts worldwide through public records and news sources.
“I’ve grown up seeing antisemitism,” said Hollander, who graduates this spring with a bachelor’s degree in criminology. “My original interest was that I’m a congregant of Dor Hadash, one of the congregations in the Tree of Life building.”
Hollander, now 23, was a child during the Oct. 27, 2018, Tree of Life synagogue shooting, the deadliest attack on a Jewish community in American history. Eleven people were killed and six were wounded.
Last summer, Hollander was a security intern with the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. That experience showed how prevalent antisemitism is.
“To really look at the amount online, I felt there wasn’t a good place free and accessible that gave everyone an idea of what was happening,” Hollander said.
She used an application programming interface that identifies court records and news sources related to antisemitic acts every 15 minutes. Hollander has administrative review of all content posted to the site.
“It’s important to have it up-to-date. There’s no way to really understand the scale of antisemitism if the data goes stale.”
Website features show an incident feed, a predictive threat heatmap, a link analysis network to track how hate spreads and monitoring of institutions of higher education.
It is not intended to replace channels like the FBI or the Anti-Defamation League. Instead, Hollander hopes the tool can be helpful to community leaders, legal advocates, researchers and journalists.
Upon graduation, she hopes to pursue grant funding and continue to build out the project.
Hollander, a Pittsburgh CAPA graduate, worked on the project independently. Christine Sarteschi, a social work and criminology professor at Chatham, said she only recently learned about the antisemitism tracker and asked Hollander to share it with her peers.
The tool builds on foundational skills and AI fluency, Sarteschi said, which prepares Hollander well for the job market.
“I was really impressed with the quality of her work,” Sarteschi said. “Delilah has really come into her own lately, and her ambitious project is proof of that.”
