The year 2020 was unlike any other over the last several decades. The COVID-19 pandemic killed hundreds of thousands and shuttered businesses and people in their home. Amid that backdrop was an angry U.S. presidential election and massive protests against perceived police brutality against Black Americans.

The First One Through blog captured those stories and many others about Israel and anti-Semitism, with the largest number of articles written, 171. Readership was up about 50% from 2019.

The articles that received the most readers did not correlate to the big stories of the year noted above, perhaps because the media covered them so extensively. Rather, the main stories of interest were about the media itself.

The three most popular analyses were:

• CNN Eliminates Jews in Martin Luther King’s Final Speech
• BBC Welcomes Release of British Muslim Accused of Beheading Daniel Pearl
• For CNN, The Critical Israeli Facts Have No Murdered Jews

The next three most read articles were about anti-Semitism:

• Pelosi’s Vastly Different Responses to Anti-Semitism and Racism
• Why Does the New York Times Delete Stories of Attacks on Jews?, originally written in August 2017, but became widely read in 2020 after the paper failed to properly report on the Jersey City killings of Jews
• Belgium Stuns Before It Kills Jews

The countries reading the articles remain mostly the same, each growing by about 50%. Exceptions were the United Kingdom (big readers of the BBC article above), and Brazil, each growing readership by 112%, with the Philippines growing by 94% and Nigeria by 90%. Hungary was a big mover, ranking as the 25th largest country by readership, up from 41st in 2019.

Facebook continues to dominate as the source for viewership, now delivering 12 times the readership as search engines, up from just 5 times in 2019. This significant jump was despite the shadow-banning of the blog during election season. Twitter readers more than doubled from last year, while views from referral sites like the Jewish Press and Legal Insurrection dropped sharply, perhaps as many sites re-publish the articles in their entirety.

I have written over 900 articles totaling over 750,000 words since May, 2014, all without any compensation from advertisement or ask for donations. The only request is to share and comment on the articles.

Wishing you a very healthy and peaceful 2021.