What do the numbers show?
That antisemitism is surging. According to FBI data, there were 2,086 anti-Jewish hate-crime incidents in 2024—up 4% from 2023 and the highest number since records began in 1991. While Jews make up only about 2% of the population, 17% of all reported hate crimes last year were against Jews. But the FBI data doesn’t capture the full scale of the spike in antisemitism, because it includes only crimes reported to authorities. The Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 9,000 incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault in 2024—the highest number since it began tracking data in 1979. And a report published by the organization last month found that 57% of Jewish Americans believe antisemitism is a now normal part of Jewish life in the U.S. For decades, most antisemitic incidents in the U.S. stemmed from old conspiracies and tropes, such as a 2019 attack on a California synagogue by a gunman who believed Jews controlled the news media. But since Oct. 7, 2023—when Hamas attacked Israel and sparked the Gaza war—a larger share of perpetrators has cited Israel or Zionism. “For antisemites,” said Oren Segal of the ADL, “the Israel issue has been a convenient tactic to pile onto the Jewish community.”
Did antisemitism increase significantly after Oct. 7?
In the three months after Hamas’ attack, antisemitic incidents were up 361% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the ADL. The organization counted 3,291 incidents in that period, including bomb threats against synagogues, swastikas spraypainted onto Jewish schools, and 56 physical assaults. The violence seemed to intensify this year. In April, a man set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence as Shapiro, who is Jewish, and his family slept inside. The attacker said he was motivated by Shapiro’s support of Israel. The next month, two young Israeli embassy aides were shot dead as they left an event at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.; the alleged gunman told police, “I did it for Palestine.” Eleven days later in Boulder, Colo., a man shouting “free Palestine” threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. An 82-year-old woman later died of her wounds. “People like me made arguments for years about how you should be able to criticize Israel and not be seen as antisemitic,” said Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state under President Barack Obama. “That’s collapsed, and attacks on Zionism now target Jews.”
What’s behind the spike in attacks?
Some experts argue that antisemitism on the Left is being driven by ideas about “settler colonialism,” an academic theory that divides the world into foreign colonizers and Indigenous peoples, oppressors and the oppressed. Under this theory, Jews “are not a historically oppressed people” with historical ties to Israel, said Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman, but instead are imperialists “and even white supremacists” who have stolen Palestinian land. Under such an ideology, violence against any “oppressor” can be justified. Some researchers argue that criticism of Israel is too often conflated with antisemitism by the ADL and others, and note that antisemitism was rising in the U.S. before 2023. “To lump as antisemitic all people who don’t believe in Zionism is just wrong,” said Kevin Rachlin of the Nexus Project, a nonprofit that combats antisemitism. Still, he adds that antisemitism has “unequivocally” increased in the U.S. since 2023. And that bigotry is gaining traction on the Right as well as the Left.
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What’s happening on the Right?
A growing number of “America First” figures are embracing old antisemitic tropes. Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white supremacist influencer, has blamed “organized Jewry” for sowing division in the U.S. and claimed American Jews put Israel’s interests “before the interests of their home country.” Conservative writer Rod Dreher said he was told by a Washington insider that “30% to 40%” of young GOP staffers in D.C. are Fuentes fans. Candace Owens, one of the nation’s most popular podcasters, claims the U.S. has a “Zionist occupied government” and has dismissed accounts of the torturous experiments conducted by Nazi scientists on Jewish and other prisoners during World War II as “bizarre propaganda.” Tucker Carlson, the top right-wing podcaster in the U.S., has hosted Fuentes on his show as well as Nazi apologist blogger and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson called the “most important popular historian working in the United States today.”
Are many Americans receptive to these messages?
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who formerly employed Owens at his Daily Wire site and is a frequent target of antisemites online, said there’s a ready audience for anti-Jewish conspiracies among young people who feel the economy is against them. They are told their troubles “can be solved by externalizing those problems onto a different group,” said Shapiro, who adds that social media algorithms incentivize such conspiratorialism. “You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda than if you are doing the opposite.” Research shows that antisemitism is blooming on the major social media platforms, most of which have dialed back content moderation in recent months. An Israeli study found a 41% increase in antisemitic posts on TikTok from 2020 to 2021, a 912% increase in antisemitic comments, and a 1,375% increase in antisemitic usernames. Another study, by the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, identified nearly 679,600 antisemitic posts on Elon Musk’s X platform over 11 months that garnered a combined 193 million views, despite being in violation of X’s own antisemitism policies. “Antisemitic conspiracy theories and hate that were once fringe have been wholly normalized,” said Amy Spitalnick, head of the JCPA. And they’re “thriving in plain sight.”
