Why is Antisemitism Getting Worse and What Can Be Done

Three Jews were murdered in America last year for being Jewish. Two were gunned down outside a museum in the nation's capital. A third died after a firebomb tore through a peaceful walk for Israeli hostages in Colorado. The governor of Pennsylvania, himself Jewish, escaped a Molotov cocktail attack on his home while his family slept inside. This is not a story from the 1930s. We are now in 2026.

Pro-Palestine, anti-Israel protesters hold a rally in New York City during fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip (Shutterstock)

The Anti-Defamation League logged 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States last year, an average of seventeen every single day. It is the third worst year on record since the ADL began counting in 1979, and roughly five times the total from a decade ago. More chilling still, assaults involving a deadly weapon surged by 39 percent. Numbers that would have horrified the country a generation ago now form the floor.

Why is Antisemitism happening?

Several forces are colliding at once.

The first is the long shadow of October 7, 2023. The Hamas massacre and the Gaza war that followed turned the world's oldest hatred into a daily online spectacle. Protests against Israeli policy too often slid into chants celebrating violence against Jews, into the glorification of terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, into the targeting of Jewish students who had nothing to do with the war. Legitimate political debate about a foreign conflict became cover for menacing synagogues, defacing memorials, and harassing rabbis on the street.

The second force is the architecture of the internet itself. Social platforms reward outrage. Algorithms feed users whatever holds attention longest, and conspiracy theories about Jewish power, money, and loyalty are among the stickiest content humans have ever invented. A teenager who watches one video about "globalists" or shadowy "elites" can be served dozens more within a week. Hate that once required pamphlets and meetings now spreads at the speed of a swipe.

Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli protesters express their views, with intense exchanges outside the student encampment the University of Toronto. (Shutterstock)

The third is political polarization. Antisemitism has always been able to change its shape, and it has found a home on both edges of our politics. On the far right it appears as white nationalist talk of replacement and control. On the far left it appears as the claim that Jewish nationhood is uniquely illegitimate, that the only ethnic group on earth not entitled to a homeland is the Jewish one. When mainstream figures in either camp flirt with these ideas, ordinary people receive permission to follow.

The fourth force is forgetting. The generation that liberated the camps is nearly gone. Surveys consistently show that a shocking share of young adults cannot identify Auschwitz, cannot estimate how many Jews were murdered in the Shoah, and cannot name a single concentration camp. When memory fades, the guardrails fail.

So what can be done?

Education has to be the foundation. Every state should require serious Holocaust and antisemitism education in public schools, not as a single afternoon assembly but woven into how children learn history, citizenship, and the machinery of dehumanization. Programs that bring students into contact with survivors, or with their recorded testimonies, change minds in ways statistics never will.

Universities, which became epicenters of harassment after October 7, must enforce their own rules. The 66% drop in campus incidents in 2025 was not magic. It came from lawsuits, congressional hearings, and federal pressure that finally pushed administrators to take antisemitism seriously. When rules are enforced evenly, behavior changes. When they are selectively suspended for one group, hatred grows.

Protestors attend the March Against Antisemitism (Shutterstock)

Above all, those who are not Jewish need to speak up. Antisemitism is called the canary in the coal mine of civilization for a reason. Societies that tolerate violence against Jews rarely stop at Jews. The neighbor who scrubs a swastika off a wall, the professor who refuses to let a classroom turn into a struggle session, the politician who refuses to court extremists for votes, the friend who interrupts a conspiracy theory at the dinner table, each of them is part of the answer.

Jews have survived three thousand years of this hatred by clinging to memory, to community, and to hope. The rest of society has a choice about whether to make that survival easier or harder. The murders of 2025 are a warning. The only question that matters now is whether enough people are willing to hear it.