Fewer Swastikas, More Funerals: The 2025 Antisemitism Report We Should Actually Read
The Anti-Defamation League says antisemitic incidents in 2025 fell by a third compared with 2024, dropping from 9,354 down to 6,274. Take a breath. Now read the next line. American Jews were murdered on U.S. soil last year because they were Jewish. It was the first time since 2019 that hatred in this country turned lethal in that particular way, and the assaults that did not end in death reached the highest level since the ADL started tracking them 46 years ago.
So which number tells us the truth? Both do. And the gap between them is its own warning.
The headline figure dropped because harassment fell, vandalism fell, and bomb threats fell off a cliff. Bomb threats against Jewish institutions plunged from 627 in 2024 to 59 last year. Campus incidents dropped sharply after universities cleared encampments and tightened protest rules. That is real. That is progress. Anyone who pretended every encampment chant was a death threat owes an honest second look at what actually changed.
But the violence did not get the memo. Physical assaults rose to 203, a number that includes a shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Boulder rally for Israeli hostages, and a stabbing on a New York street. Assaults involving deadly weapons jumped 39 percent. A firebomb landed at the Pennsylvania governor’s residence on the same night his family was celebrating Passover. Three people are dead. At least 300 more were victimized in attacks.
Here is where it gets harder to talk about. An ADL survey taken after those very incidents found that nearly one in four Americans called the violence against Jews “understandable.” Not justified, not excused, simply within the realm of things they could imagine as normal. Almost half of Jewish Americans have taken new security measures over the past year. One in seven told pollsters they have started thinking through plans to leave the country. We should sit with that. People who built their lives here, raised their kids here, served in our wars and taught in our classrooms, are now drafting evacuation routes.
What makes this moment stranger is what we have decided to do about it. In October, the FBI under Director Kash Patel formally cut ties with both the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the two organizations that have spent decades feeding the bureau intelligence on hate crimes and violent extremism. The reason given was that they had become too political. Maybe. The effect is that the country is now flying with fewer instruments at the exact moment the cockpit alarms are loudest.
We do not have to agree on every campus protest, every Israel policy, or every contested term in this fight to recognize a basic American floor. Synagogues should not need armed guards on Shabbat. A man walking home in a kippah should not be a target. A governor’s family should not have to flee their own house during a holiday meal. A museum should not be a kill site.
The numbers are split because the country is split. Loud public hatred has gotten more socially expensive. Quiet, committed hatred has gotten more lethal. The drop in incidents tells us pressure works. The rise in murders tells us pressure is not enough.
We can keep treating antisemitism as somebody else’s emergency, or we can treat it as ours. The Jewish families packing emergency bags are not waiting on our consensus. They are watching to see whether we noticed. Go beyond the headlines…
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