For those of us following the story of growing antisemitism across the world, this week’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL) 2025 audit report came as something of a shock. For the first time in five years, the U.S.’s foremost antisemitism watchdog reported a decline in the total number of incidents.
On the face of it, we should celebrate this news. But it also feels counterintuitive, particularly after a year in which we saw the killing of Jews across America, from Washington, D.C., to Boulder, Colorado. And the truth is, we’re not turning a corner on the rising tide of Jew-hatred. While individual incidents of antisemitism may be falling, the prejudice is getting more violent. Let me explain.
In 2024, the ADL recorded 9,354 incidents of anti-Jewish hate, its highest ever total. In 2025, this number dropped to 6,274. That can largely be explained by the cratering of antisemitic incidents on college campuses. 2024 was the zenith of the protest movement that swept across American universities. Since then, a combination of lawsuits, Trump administration threats, and congressional hearings seem to have drummed into the heads of college administrators a desire to take the problem of antisemitism seriously. That’s not to say this problem is gone; as the ADL notes in its report: “Incidents on college campuses remained almost three times higher in 2025 than in 2021.”
