The number of U.S. antisemitic incidents set a record last year as reports of assault, harassment and vandalism continued to surge in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.
The Anti-Defamation League’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents released Tuesday found 9,354 incidents in 2024, representing a 5% increase from 2023 and the most ever recorded by the organization since it began tracking in 1979.
“We’ve simply never seen numbers like this,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Tuesday on a press call. “We’ve shattered yet another record and antisemitism has reached an epidemic level. It’s terrifying.”
The latest increase was driven in part by campus incidents, which soared by 84%. Also on the rise were antisemitic incidents that made reference to Israel or Zionism, which jumped to 58% and represented a majority of reports for the first time in the audit’s history.
“This sustained elevation indicates that the post-10/7 experience was no temporary spike,” said Oren Segal, ADL senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence.
“There has been a fundamental shift in the landscape,” he said. “Antisemitism has become a persistent reality of the American Jewish community. This data confirms what Jewish communities have seen firsthand around the country, and it corresponds with a notable rise in antisemitic attitudes as well.”
It would be almost impossible to overstate the impact of the 2023 Hamas massacre on what the report called the “normalization” of antisemitism.
The audit found that incidents have soared by 893% since 2015, but most of the increase occurred from 2022 to 2023, when the number jumped from 3,698 to 8,873.
The deadly Hamas attack prompted Israel to declare war, spurring thousands of anti-Israel protests, particularly on college campuses. Nearly 1 in 5 antisemitic incidents took place at universities, soaring from 223 in 2023 to 1,471 in 2024.
“While college and university incidents historically in the audit comprised only a small percentage of all incidents, in 2024, they became epicenters of antisemitic activity,” said Rachel Sass, antisemitic incident specialist at the ADL’s Center on Extremism.
She said the top five campuses for antisemitic activity were Columbia, Rutgers, UCLA, the University of Michigan, and New York University.
Not every appearance of a swastika or call to “free Palestine” was included in the report, but rather only those within the context of anti-Jewish animus.
Pro-Palestinian activists have argued that criticizing Israel doesn’t constitute antisemitism, but the report found that the protests “frequently crossed the line into antisemitism through a range of concerning expressions.”
“Protesters displayed justification or glorification of antisemitic violence, framing terror attacks against Israel and the Jewish community as justified ’resistance,’ while others openly displayed support for U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) by wearing Hamas headbands and waving Hezbollah and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) flags,” the report said.
The report emphasized that the “ADL does not consider criticism of Israel or general anti-Israel activism to be antisemitic and does not count such incidents in the Audit.”
The increase in antisemitic activity occurred despite a decline in incidents driven by white-supremacist groups. Episodes of antisemitic propaganda disseminated by white-supremacist groups fell by 17%, and the number of events dipped year-to-year from 49 to 47.
Mr. Segal credited the Trump administration with taking “a number of bold and important steps in the fight against antisemitism on college campuses.”
“Many in the Jewish community were asking for steps to be taken, and some of those have been done,” he said.
He said the organization has emphasized that the “account for people’s civil rights, that due process is carried out, and more importantly, that we are not conflating fighting antisemitism and diluting it by adding a bunch of other things that may not be related to that issue.”
