The latest Anti-Defamation League audit offers a statistical paradox that should alarm every American. Total antisemitic incidents declined in 2025 for the first time in years. Yet violence against Jews reached a 47-year high.
That is not improvement. It is escalation.
The decline appears tied largely to fewer campus protests compared to the chaotic peak of 2024. Universities, under legal and political pressure, finally imposed at least some limits on behavior too many administrators had excused as activism. But while some of the noise receded, something uglier hardened beneath it. Physical assaults increased. Synagogues were targeted. Jewish neighborhoods were vandalized. Threats became more direct and more openly violent.
The comforting theory that much of today’s antisemitism is simply “criticism of Israel” now lies in tatters. People do not spray swastikas on Holocaust memorials because of a disagreement over Israeli policy. Protesters do not surround synagogues chanting “intifada revolution” because they are engaged in nuanced geopolitical debate. AI-generated fake rabbis spreading conspiracy theories to millions online are not advocating peace in Gaza.
Something deeper is happening.
Analysts increasingly describe modern antisemitism as a convergence phenomenon — where far-left anti-Zionism, far-right conspiracy culture, online radicalization and broader political nihilism begin feeding one another. Jews become symbolic targets onto which fractured societies project anger and distrust. As Josh Kaplan recently reminded us in The Free Press, the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks warned that “antisemitism is a projection, and is caused not by Jews but by internal conflicts in the societies that give rise to it.”
That diagnosis feels painfully relevant now.
America is experiencing a broader coarsening of civic life. Political rage has become performative. Social media rewards outrage over restraint. Conspiracy theories spread faster than facts. Institutions are distrusted almost by default. In such an environment, antisemitism flourishes because it offers unstable movements a visible villain onto whom complex frustrations can be pinned.
Oct. 7 and the Gaza war did not create this atmosphere. They accelerated it. Existing prejudices acquired a moral vocabulary through which old hatreds could present themselves as activism.
And too many leaders lacked the courage to draw clear lines.
University administrators equivocated. Political figures winked at rhetoric they should have condemned outright. Even now, after assaults, shootings and mounting threats, there remains a temptation in some quarters to explain away antisemitism rather than confront it directly.
That must stop.
The response cannot consist merely of more security cameras outside synagogues, though security plainly matters. A healthy society treats antisemitism not as a niche concern, but as an early warning signal of democratic decay itself.
That means enforcing laws against intimidation and violence, demanding accountability from universities and online platforms, and refusing to indulge eliminationist rhetoric regardless of which faction deploys it.
The ADL numbers should not reassure us. They should clarify the moment. Antisemitism is becoming more physical, more public and more normalized within broader political culture.
History teaches where that road can lead. The question is whether society still possesses the seriousness to turn away before the damage deepens further.
