By nature, I am an optimist. But of late, I confess that bewilderment and discouragement—and even fear—are making more and more sense to me. Anyone who is even slightly sensitive to Jewish history must wonder about the growing frenzy convulsing our world and increasingly, our nation.
The Los Angeles Times recently published an article whose headline read, “ADL reports a sharp drop in U.S. antisemitic incidents in 2025, driven by a steep fall on campuses.” Unfortunately, the body of the article paints a far less rosy picture than the headline implies.
The “drop” seems like a success. But the lead story should be that there is a new floor. The baseline of antisemitic attitudes and incidents, which would have been a national emergency five years ago, has practically been normalized. In fact, 2025 was the deadliest year for Jews since 1994, when the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Argentina killed 85 people and injured hundreds. The change is what should dominate the coverage, and it won’t.
The most dangerous word in the ADL’s report is “decline” because it encourages belief in numbers that should still appall us. The ritual of counting incidents—harassment, vandalism, slurs—has already been absorbed without alarm. Do not mistake the indicators: 203 physical assaults is not a data point. It is a civilizational statement.
Even the improvement in college campuses hides disturbing facts. First, the incidents are still four times higher than in 2021. More importantly, incidents have been reduced largely because protests were suppressed, not because attitudes changed. It is salutary that colleges began to enforce their own rules about protests.
When I was at Harvard University from 2023 to 2024, students marched into the library, local restaurants and even classrooms with chants and signs, including chanting the original Arabic for “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which in the original is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.”
Yet enforcement is not education. Silencing a chant is not the same as changing a mind. If it seems better because there is less obvious protest, it is a fragile victory at best.
While it is, in fact, colleges finally enforcing their own rules, it is actually read by the ill-willed as yet another nefarious Jewish plot to control what people do and say. Genuine education about Jewish history and the way in which Judaism undergirds the very civilization they inhabit—from the Bible to monotheism and more—would do more than simple silencing.
When we ponder what is happening on campuses, we are looking at a global, not a local, phenomenon. The murders on Bondi Beach in Australia and the rising antisemitic incidents in Britain, including the stabbing of two men in a Jewish neighborhood, can be paralleled across the globe.
There is a global assault on Jewish safety. It is not—as so often claimed—a protest against the actions of the Israeli government. There is a legitimate argument about Israel and when that issue spills over into antisemitism. Reasonable people can debate Israeli policy.
But firebombing synagogues, murdering Jews at a museum and massacring families at a Chanukah celebration is antisemitic. The methodological argument must not be used to elide the truth. Murder is not political protest. These horrors are the echo and the harbinger of greater and greater assaults on the Jewish community.
Those who hate never lack for reasons. But the question about hatred of the Jews is a question about the surrounding society. Racism is not about the behavior of African-Americans; antisemitism is not about Jews. The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre observed that the antisemite does not hate the Jew because of what Jews are, but creates what Jews are in their own minds in order to hate them.
When someone who is mentally unbalanced attacks a synagogue, we have to ask ourselves a simple question: Why a synagogue? What influences have touched a disordered brain to convince them to assault a house of worship? Antisemitism may sometimes manifest in diseased brains, but it is not a mental-health problem. It is a civilizational problem.
If the West does not awaken to the reality that this virus is infecting our society, we will soon face a crisis of tremendous proportions.
Hating Jews has always been the symptom of a societal disorder. In a time of polarization, economic insecurity and tremendous uncertainty about the future, we need to recognize that societies that failed to stop this in the past did not fail for want of warning. They failed because they convinced themselves the warning was about someone else.
