Hate Symbols

How to use this guide

A recognition tool.

Antisemitism travels through symbols. A swastika sprayed on a synagogue, a number stitched onto a jacket, a pair of parentheses around a name online: each is a piece of shorthand. Each carries a long history and a specific meaning to the people who use it. The purpose of this guide is plain: to let a student, parent, teacher, or administrator recognize that shorthand on sight, understand what it means and where it came from, and respond appropriately. The same methods of coded signaling are used against many groups, so the skill of reading them transfers.

This guide describes the symbols. It does not display them. Reproducing hate imagery, even to educate, risks normalizing it, and many of these symbols are most harmful precisely as images. So each entry explains the symbol in words and links to the Hate Symbols Database of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an American organization founded in 1913 to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure fair treatment for all. The database is the authoritative, continuously updated reference. There, an adult who needs them can consult the visual and the full description. Entries are written for the secondary grade band (6–12).

A necessary caution

Why context decides meaning.

The single most important rule in reading hate symbols comes from the ADL’s own database. The symbols “must be evaluated in the context in which they appear.” Few of these symbols have only one meaning, and several have entirely ordinary uses. The number 88 is a year, an age, and a street address far more often than it is a code. The sunwheel is an ancient and widespread decorative motif. Many of the appropriated symbols, the swastika among them, were peaceful cultural or religious emblems for centuries before they were taken up for hate.

Recognition, then, is not the same as accusation. The presence of one of these symbols is a reason to look more closely (at who is using it, alongside what, and to what end), not a conclusion on its own. This guide gives the historical meaning so that a reader can make that closer judgment.

Nazi-era symbols

The symbols inherited from the Third Reich.

The core of the modern hate-symbol vocabulary was created or adopted by Nazi Germany. Since 1945 it has been handed down to neo-Nazis, the groups that admire Hitler and copy his ideas, and to other white-supremacist movements. These are the most widely recognized, and the most direct in meaning.

• The swastika. An ancient symbol used for thousands of years across many cultures, including South Asian, European, and Indigenous American traditions, where it carried meanings of good fortune and the sun. The Nazi Party adopted it in the 1920s, and in 1935 it was placed at the center of the German national flag. It became the most recognizable symbol of Nazism, genocide, and antisemitism worldwide. Its older, unrelated religious use continues in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, which is part of why context matters. In Western public space, however, it is read almost universally as a Nazi symbol. It is a frequent feature of antisemitic vandalism.
• SS bolts (the lightning runes). A pair of stylized lightning bolts: the runic insignia of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the Nazi organization that ran the concentration and death camps. Neo-Nazis and racist skinheads use the bolts to signal allegiance to that legacy. The same double-bolt is sometimes made as a hand sign.
• The Hitler salute and “Sieg Heil.” A straight right arm raised forward, palm down. The salute began in the Nazi Party in the 1920s as a way to honor Adolf Hitler, and it was often given with a shout of “Heil Hitler” or “Sieg Heil,” German for “Hail victory.” Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists kept using it after World War II, and the ADL calls it the most common white-supremacist hand sign in the world. People who give it today sometimes call it a “Roman” salute. The ADL notes that it does not appear to come from ancient Rome, and that the “Roman” label is usually a cover. Online, the salute is typed as o/, a letter and a slash shaped like a head and a raised arm. ADL backgrounder.
• The Sonnenrad (sunwheel / “Black Sun”). One of several ancient European sun symbols the Nazis appropriated to invent an idealized “Aryan” heritage. Most sunwheel designs are entirely unrelated to hate. One specific circular design, associated with an SS castle, became known as the “Black Sun” and now serves as a neo-Nazi symbol that can stand in for the swastika where the swastika would draw immediate condemnation or is illegal.
• The Wolfsangel and the Othala rune. Two signs from runic writing, the old alphabets of the early Germanic peoples. The Wolfsangel, or “wolf’s hook,” was once believed to ward off wolves, and it has long appeared in the coats of arms of German towns. The Othala is a letter of the runic alphabet, and followers of modern pagan religions who are not racist use it in runic writing. The Nazis put both signs on the insignia of divisions of the Waffen-SS, the SS’s combat army. Since 1945, white supremacists have used them in tattoos, on flags, and in group logos. The American neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations built the Wolfsangel into its own logo. ADL backgrounders: Wolfsangel, Othala.
• The Totenkopf (“death’s head”). A skull-and-crossbones emblem worn by SS units, including concentration-camp guards. It is used today by neo-Nazis to signal the same allegiance, and appears in the insignia of some contemporary extremist groups.
• The Nazi eagle (Parteiadler). The eagle-over-wreath emblem of the Nazi Party. Modern users often substitute a different image inside the wreath to evade moderation while preserving the reference.
• The SA and its brown shirts. The Sturmabteilung (SA), also called the Storm Troopers, was the Nazi Party’s street army. Its members were known as the Brownshirts, for the color of their uniforms. During Hitler’s rise to power, they guarded him, broke up the meetings of rival parties, fought in the streets, and beat and terrorized Jews and the party’s political opponents. On November 9 and 10, 1938, SA men were among the main attackers in Kristallnacht, a pogrom (an organized mob attack on Jews) in which Nazis burned more than 1,400 synagogues across Germany, which by then included Austria. USHMM: “The SA”, “Kristallnacht”.
• The yellow star. One Nazi symbol was forced on Jews themselves. Marking Jews with a badge was an old practice. For more than ten centuries, Muslim rulers called caliphs and Christian bishops in medieval Europe ordered Jews, often along with other religious minorities, to wear signs that set them apart and kept them lower in society. The Dhimma and Adversus Judaeos Chapters trace those older badges. The practice faded in western Europe after the French Revolution of 1789, when Jews there began to win equal rights. The Nazis brought it back. The first order came in the Polish town of Włocławek on October 29, 1939. Under a decree of September 1, 1941, Jews aged six and older in Germany and the lands it had annexed had to wear a yellow Star of David on a black background, with the German word for “Jew” written inside it. The Star of David is the six-pointed star that is a symbol of Jews and Judaism. In 1942 the Germans forced the star on Jews in the Netherlands, Belgium, and occupied France. It singled Jews out, cut them off from their neighbors, and made them easier to find when the deportations to ghettos and killing centers began. USHMM, “Jewish Badge during the Nazi Era”.

These symbols belong to the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and the propaganda that carried them is described in the next section.

Where the imagery came from

Nazi-era propaganda posters and narratives.

The picture of the Jew as an enemy was old long before the Nazis drew it. Churches across medieval Europe carried two kinds of image that everyone could see, even people who could not read. In the first, a woman called Synagoga, standing for Judaism, wears a blindfold, her staff broken, beside Ecclesia, the Church, upright and crowned. The second, the Judensau (“Jews’ sow”), shows Jews in degrading contact with a pig, an animal Jewish law forbids Jews to eat. About thirty Judensau carvings survive on churches in Germany and neighboring countries, most of them still in place. The Afterlife of the Image Chapter tells their story, and the Adversus Judaeos Chapter traces the teaching behind them.

Much of the visual antisemitic vocabulary in circulation today was assembled, or given its modern form, by the Nazi propaganda apparatus of the 1930s and 1940s. Understanding that machinery is part of recognizing what its descendants are doing now. A few of its principal instruments and images:

• Der Stürmer (“The Attacker”). The antisemitic newspaper founded in 1923 by Julius Streicher and circulated to hundreds of thousands of readers, displayed in public cases on German streets. Its grotesque caricatures (the hook-nosed schemer, the predatory financier, the ritual-murder accusation revived from the medieval blood libel) set the visual template for racial antisemitism. After the war, at the Nuremberg trial of Nazi leaders, Streicher was convicted of crimes against humanity. The judges found that he had called for the murder of Jews at the very time they were being killed in the East (the tribunal’s judgment).
• Der ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”). Both a 1937 Munich museum exhibition that drew more than 400,000 visitors, and a 1940 film directed by Fritz Hippler with input from propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The exhibition poster showed a caricatured Jewish man holding coins in one hand and a whip in the other, with a map marked by the Soviet hammer and sickle under his arm. The hammer and sickle stood for the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism,” the false claim that Jews were behind Communism. The poster joined the greed and conspiracy myths in a single figure. The film compared Jews to rats carrying contagion. Together they show state propaganda assembling older myths into one argument.
• Racial “science” wall charts. Pseudo-scientific charts produced for use in German schools, teaching children to classify and rank human beings by supposed racial type. They were the visual companion to the racial antisemitism traced in the Chapter The Racial Turn of 1879.
• The Propaganda Ministry’s wider machine. Under Goebbels, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda coordinated film, radio, press, posters, and public exhibitions into a single apparatus. Its Arabic-language radio broadcasts carried the same material into the Middle East and North Africa, as documented in the Chapter The Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa.
• The octopus, the puppet-master, and the money caricature. A family of images that all make one claim: that Jews secretly control money, media, and governments. The recurring forms are an octopus or spider whose tentacles wrap a globe, a hidden hand pulling puppet-strings over world leaders, and a hook-nosed banker clutching the world or the purse. A German propaganda cartoon from around 1938 used the octopus over the globe to warn of a worldwide Jewish plot. The same pictures circulate on social media today, often with new labels. The image carries the conspiracy argument without a word of text. It descends from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forged “plan” for Jewish world rule, and from the race theories of the late 1800s, traced in the Protocols and Racial Turn Chapters. ADL, “Antisemitism Uncovered: Power”.

The narratives these instruments pushed are the same myths catalogued throughout this guide and the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter: power, greed, disloyalty, and conspiracy. The collections below hold the primary material and scholarly analysis.

How images persuade

Reading the imagery critically.

A propaganda poster is an argument made in visual form. It is built to land as a feeling before it can be weighed as a claim. The skills that decode hate propaganda also decode the campaigns that answered it.

How hate imagery is built. The propaganda of the kind catalogued above relies on a small set of recurring visual techniques. Caricature: the exaggeration of features to make a whole people look alien or grotesque. Dehumanization: the depiction of human beings as vermin, disease, or parasites, as in the rat imagery of Der ewige Jude. False association: the visual linking of a target to whatever an audience already fears, such as money, communism, disease, or conspiracy. And repetition: the same figure restated until it feels like common knowledge. Each technique is designed to work before scrutiny begins.

How the imagery has been countered. The banner of this page is a detail from a poster in the American Jewish Committee’s public-education campaign, which ran from 1937 to 1952. The New York Historical showed the campaign in its exhibition Confronting Hate 1937–1952. Its posters, comics, and cartoons by New York illustrators answered antisemitic and racist propaganda with images championing pluralism and democratic values. The campaign used the same techniques of composition and emphasis for the opposite purpose.

The art critic John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing (1972) that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.” A viewer who knows the history and the techniques is harder to manipulate. The sources below include both the primary propaganda record and scholarship on how images do their work.

Numeric codes

Numbers used as shorthand.

White-supremacist movements developed an extensive set of numeric codes, letters of the alphabet rendered as their position-numbers, or numbers with an agreed coded meaning. The codes let users signal to one another while passing unnoticed by outsiders. Nearly all of these numbers have innocent everyday uses as well, and the meaning depends on context.

• 88. The eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled: “HH,” for “Heil Hitler.” Among the most common codes. Frequently combined with 14 as “1488.”
• 14 (the “Fourteen Words”). Shorthand for a fourteen-word white-supremacist slogan coined by an American neo-Nazi, David Lane. The number stands in for the slogan as a rallying signal among white nationalists internationally.
• 18. The first and eighth letters, A and H: “Adolf Hitler.” Also embedded in the name of the violent group “Combat 18.”
• 109 / 110. A code built on a list that claims Jews have been expelled from 109 countries, offered as proof that Jews brought their expulsions on themselves. “110” implies that the user’s own country should be next. The expulsions were real persecutions, and the Expulsions Chapter shows who ordered them.
• 271k and 6MWE. Two codes that attack the memory of the Holocaust. Holocaust deniers are people who claim the Nazi murder of Europe’s Jews did not happen or has been inflated. “271k” stands for 271,000, the number they say is the true count of Jews who died. The number comes from a 1979 document of what is now the Arolsen Archives, a German archive of records on the victims of Nazi persecution. It listed people who died in 13 concentration camps and whose deaths the archive had confirmed, often so that families could claim insurance or pensions. It was never a full count of the Jewish victims of those camps. It left out the death camps, the other concentration and slave-labor camps, the ghettos, and the mass shootings, above all in the lands Germany seized from the Soviet Union. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The ADL reports that “271k” began to spread on social media around 2024 and has grown fast since. “6MWE” stands for “6 Million Wasn’t Enough,” a wish that the Nazis had murdered even more Jews. In December 2020 a photo spread online of a man in Washington, D.C., wearing it on a T-shirt with a Proud Boys cap. He stood with members of the Proud Boys, a group the ADL calls right-wing extremist. The Holocaust Denial and the Response Chapter shows how deniers work and how the record answers them. ADL: 271k, 6MWE.
• 311. The eleventh letter, K, three times: “KKK,” the Ku Klux Klan, an American white-supremacist terror group.
• 100%. Used by some white supremacists to mean “100% white.” It is also an ordinary expression, a clear case where context decides the meaning.

Online-era memes and coded text

The symbols built for the internet.

The open distribution of social media produced a newer layer of antisemitic signaling: memes and typographic codes designed to spread quickly, to be deniable, and to be legible to insiders while reading as innocent to everyone else. They are the contemporary form of a very old practice. Some of the newest symbols began in the propaganda of armed groups or on protest signs and then spread through social media.

• Triple parentheses, the “(((echo))).” Three pairs of parentheses placed around a name, (((like this))), to mark a person, or an organization, as Jewish, typically as a prelude to harassment. Created on an antisemitic podcast around 2014 and used to target Jewish journalists and public figures online. After the symbol became publicly known, many Jewish and non-Jewish users placed the parentheses around their own names in a gesture of solidarity, an act of reclaiming the symbol.
• The “Happy Merchant.” A cartoon caricature of a Jewish man with grossly exaggerated features, rubbing his hands together, a drawing built to carry the greed and conspiracy myths in a single image. It originated with a racist cartoonist and became one of the most widely circulated antisemitic memes online. It descends from the caricatures studied in the Racial Turn and Protocols Chapters, and it repeats the argument of the Der ewige Jude poster.
• Appropriated mascots. Ordinarily harmless internet characters are sometimes used to carry hate, often dressed up with Nazi symbols. Because the base image is innocent, this is among the clearest cases where the surrounding context, not the character itself, determines meaning. The best-known case is Pepe the Frog, a cartoon frog from a 2005 online comic. Most Pepe images, the ADL notes, are not hateful. Around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a growing number of users turned him into racist and antisemitic memes, and the ADL reports that these bigoted versions seem to be increasing, not decreasing. ADL backgrounder.
• Coded substitutions in text. Beyond images, antisemitic content travels through deliberate misspellings, emoji, and “dog-whistle” phrases, wording with a hidden meaning meant for insiders. They are built to slip past the computer filters that remove hateful posts while staying clear to the intended audience. “Juice,” and a picture of a juice box, can stand for “Jews.” “Every single time” is posted under news of a crime or a scandal to suggest that the people behind it always turn out to be Jewish. “Early life check” means searching the “early life” part of an online encyclopedia biography to find out whether a person has Jewish parents. ADL, “Coded Hate”.
• “Six gorillion,” “6 million cookies,” and “Holohoax.” Mocking words about the six million. “Six gorillion” swaps “million” for a nonsense word to suggest that Jews inflate the death toll, and it came into wide use among antisemites and white supremacists in 2013. “6 million cookies” uses cookies as a stand-in for Jews. One user claimed it was not possible to “bake” six million cookies in five years with the ovens available, a way of casting doubt on the number. “Holohoax” calls the Holocaust a hoax. In a 2023 report, the ADL found “Holohoax” used as a player name in Fortnite, Call of Duty, and League of Legends, and “6 Gorillion” in Fortnite. The Holocaust Denial Chapter explains why the number is not in doubt. ADL: six gorillion, Coded Hate, Online Holocaust Denial Report Card.
• The inverted red triangle. A downward-pointing red triangle, taken from the combat videos of the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement, where it is overlaid on an Israeli target the moment before it is struck. Since the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, the symbol has been used to mark Jewish people and institutions as targets. It has been painted on synagogues and Jewish institutions, placed on the homes of Jewish individuals, and aimed at Jewish organizations and public figures. The Anti-Defamation League documents this use and notes that context decides meaning: the same shape appears in settings where no antisemitic intent is present. Where it is used to single out Jewish people or institutions, it functions as a threat. ADL backgrounder.
• Paraglider images. A paraglider, often drawn in the black, white, red, and green of the Palestinian flag. Paragliding is also a popular sport, and the ADL notes that a paraglider image with no antisemitic, anti-Israel, or pro-Hamas message cannot be assumed to be hateful. On October 7, 2023, armed men flew paragliders from the Gaza Strip into nearby Israeli communities. Gaza is the Palestinian territory on Israel’s southwest border, ruled by Hamas since 2007. They were part of the Hamas-led attack that killed about 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians. The Terror Record Chapter documents that day. Since then, some people have used the paraglider to celebrate the attack, to show support for Hamas and other groups the ADL calls terrorist, and to intimidate and harass Jews. It frequently shows up on signs at anti-Israel protests and in graffiti, and online it can be the parachute emoji. ADL backgrounder.
• The red hand. A handprint in red paint, or a raised hand painted red. At many protests it means “blood on your hands,” aimed at a government or a leader. To many Jews and Israelis it also recalls one photograph. On October 12, 2000, two Israeli army reservists, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yosef Avrahami, drove by mistake into Ramallah. Ramallah is a Palestinian city in the West Bank, the territory between Israel and the Jordan River. It was early in the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising of 2000 to 2005. Palestinian police took the two men to a police station. A mob stormed it and beat and stabbed them to death, and a Palestinian police officer later admitted taking part. One of the killers came to a window and held up his bloodied hands to the crowd below, and an Italian television crew filmed him. The killings became known as the Ramallah lynching. Some protest groups say their red hands do not refer to that photograph, so context decides what a given red hand means. In May 2024, red hands were painted dozens of times in Paris, including across the Wall of the Righteous at the Shoah Memorial. The memorial is a Holocaust museum (Shoah is the Hebrew word for the Holocaust), and the wall honors people who rescued Jews. On October 31, 2025, a Paris court sentenced four Bulgarian men to between two and four years in prison for the vandalism. The court found that it was part of a hostile operation meant to stir up public opinion, and French intelligence said the campaign bore “hallmarks of Russian hybrid interference.” The judges said that did not lessen the men’s own guilt. They had knowingly targeted a Jewish site. Sources: Times of Israel, Snopes, Euronews.
• The Star of David joined to a swastika. A Star of David with a swastika drawn over it or inside it. The image says that Jews, or Israel, are the new Nazis. The ADL lists it among the images used to equate Jews, Judaism, Zionism, or Israel with Nazism and the Holocaust. Zionism is the movement for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The ADL says the image is used mainly by antisemites and anti-Israel activists. A small religious group, the Raelian Movement, sometimes uses a star joined to a swastika with no antisemitic meaning. The Community Security Trust (CST) is a charity that records antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom. In the incidents it recorded in 2025, Israel, Israelis, or Jews were equated with Nazi Germany or the Nazis 387 times. Sources: ADL, “Revealed: Antizionist Hate”, CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025.

Conspiracy words

Words that carry a conspiracy.

Some codes are neither pictures nor numbers. They are words and names that carry the oldest charges against Jews in a modern form: that Jews secretly run the world, or that they are not really who they say they are. The same words travel between movements that agree on little else.

• “Rothschild” and “globalist.” The Rothschilds were a Jewish banking family whose bank in Frankfurt, Germany, grew famous across Europe in the 1800s. Conspiracy theories about them began then, and the family name became shorthand for the claim that Jews control the world’s money. A French cartoon of 1898 showed a Rothschild holding the globe in his hands. In the United States the claim has been repeated by white-supremacist groups such as Aryan Nations and by leaders of the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam is a Black nationalist religious movement founded in Detroit in 1930, and the ADL notes that it is not considered a mainstream Muslim group. The word “globalist” has an ordinary meaning: someone who favors trade and cooperation among countries. The ADL notes that in antisemitic posts it works as a code word for “Jew.” ADL: Antisemitism Uncovered: Power, Jewish “Control” of the Federal Reserve, Nation of Islam.
• “Khazars” and the “Synagogue of Satan.” Two forms of one charge: that today’s Jews are not real Jews. Ashkenazi Jews are the Jews whose families come from Central and Eastern Europe. The Khazar myth claims they descend not from the ancient Israelites but from the Khazars. The Khazars were a Turkic people of the Middle Ages from the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black and Caspian Seas, and Judaism had some following among them more than a thousand years ago. People who spread the myth use it to deny any tie between Jews and the Land of Israel. The ADL reports that anti-Israel activists often seize on the Khazar story to cast Israeli Jews as colonizers. Genetic studies, including work in the journal Science, point instead to a Middle Eastern origin shared with other Jewish communities, with European ancestry mixed in over the centuries. The Continuous Presence Chapter traces the Jewish tie to the land through the evidence. “Synagogue of Satan” comes from the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian New Testament, which speaks of “them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.” It has been turned into a label for Jews as false and evil. Christian Identity, a white-supremacist religious movement, teaches that Jews descend from the Khazars or from Satan. Extremist sects within the Black Hebrew Israelite movement call Judaism the “synagogue of Satan.” The ADL stresses that not all Black Hebrew Israelites are extremist or antisemitic. Leaders of the Nation of Islam have called Jews “imposters” and the “synagogue of Satan.” In 2022, some online posters used talk of a “Khazarian mafia” to cheer Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. ADL: Khazars, Black Hebrew Israelites, Nation of Islam, Ukraine; SPLC on Christian Identity.
• ZOG. Short for “Zionist Occupied Government,” with “Zionist” standing in for “Jewish.” It names the white-supremacist belief that Jews secretly control the government of the United States, and it appears in slogans such as “Smash ZOG” and “Death to ZOG.” The term began among white supremacists. The ADL reports that since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, some anti-Israel activists in the United States have at times used it too. ADL backgrounder.
• “Zio.” A slur made by clipping the word “Zionist.” In 2016 a committee of the British Parliament warned about the word. It urged police and political parties to treat “Zio,” or “Zionist” used as an accusation, as “inflammatory and potentially anti-Semitic.” After the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, blamed the “Zio-establishment.” He called for overthrowing “this Zio-garchy that is ruling over us,” a play on “oligarchy,” rule by a few. In its report on 2025, the CST found that “Zionism” and “Zionist” were often used in anti-Jewish hate as polite-sounding stand-ins for “Jewishness” and “Jew.” Context decides whether “Zionist” names a political view or stands in for “Jew.” “Zio” is a slur either way. Sources: JTA on the 2016 committee report, ADL on Charlottesville, CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025.

Chants and slogans

When the symbol is a sentence.

Some hate symbols are not drawn. They are spoken. A chant works the way a symbol does: a few words carry a whole history, and knowing the history is what lets a listener recognize what is being said.

• “Itbach al-Yahud.” Arabic for “slaughter the Jews.” Eyewitnesses reported it as the cry of the crowds in August 1929, when rioters killed 133 Jews across Mandatory Palestine, the territory then governed by Britain. In Hebron, rioters murdered sixty-seven of them, most on a single day, August 24, in what became known as the Hebron massacre. Unlike a coded symbol, it needs no decoding. The Terror Record Chapter documents the 1929 violence.
• “Blood and soil.” A direct translation of the Nazi slogan Blut und Boden, the Third Reich’s formula tying race to land. In it, a nation is its “blood,” rooted in its soil, and the Jew is cast as the rootless outsider who belongs to neither. It was a governing slogan of Nazi policy in the 1930s. In August 2017, marchers with torches chanted it in English at Charlottesville, Virginia.
• “From the river to the sea.” The river is the Jordan and the sea is the Mediterranean. Between them lie Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. The slogan, decades old in Palestinian politics, names that whole territory as “Palestine.” Hamas claims the same borders in nearly the same words in its 2017 statement of principles. That geography is why many hear the chant as a call for a world with no Israel in it, and why Jewish organizations widely condemn it. Some who chant it say they mean rights or liberation rather than elimination. At a gathering of Jewish Federations of North America in November 2026, Antony Blinken, the former U.S. Secretary of State, said: “To those who are advocating from the river to the sea, who want Israel to go away, guess what? It’s not. For those who are advocating for a greater Israel, who want to continue to build settlements, who want the Palestinians to go away? Guess what? They’re not. There are 7 million Jews. There are 7 million Arabs and Palestinians. No one is going anywhere.” (eJewishPhilanthropy and the session video, at 57:51.) As with the symbols above, context decides what is being said, and the geography is what a listener needs in order to decide.
• “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud.” An Arabic chant heard at demonstrations around the world: “Khaybar, Khaybar, O Jews, the army of Muhammad will return.” Khaybar was an oasis in Arabia, home to Jewish tribes. Muhammad’s forces besieged and defeated it in 628 CE. The survivors were later expelled under one of Muhammad’s successors. The chant itself is a modern rallying slogan. It addresses Jews as Jews, and its promise that the army “will return” points back to the defeat of 628. Chanted at a protest about a modern conflict, it frames that conflict in the terms of a seventh-century war. ADL backgrounder.
• “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.” These are the middle lines of the slogan of the Houthis, an armed movement that seized Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, in 2014. It rules most of the country’s northwest, where most Yemenis live. Yemen lies at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The United States has designated the movement a foreign terrorist organization, most recently in March 2025. The full slogan has five lines: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.” Hussein al-Houthi, a figure from one of the movement’s leading families, first proclaimed it in a school hall in January 2002. He said he included the Jews “because they are the ones who move this world, who spread corruption in this world.” That is the claim at the heart of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: a hidden Jewish hand behind the powers of the world. In 2007, in Saada, the movement’s northern stronghold, the Houthis gave “the last 70 or so Jews” there ten days to flee or face physical harm. In 2015, the year after they took Sanaa, Houthi officials publicly beat two boys there for refusing to give up their Judaism. Today the slogan hangs on banners across the areas the movement controls, and crowds chant it at its rallies and funerals. Supporters have said it is aimed at governments, not at people. Its fourth line names no government. It names the Jews. Sources: ADL (2020), ADL (2026), The Conversation, Reuters, AP via VOA.
• “Globalize the intifada.” Intifada, Arabic for “shaking off,” is the name given to the Palestinian uprisings of 1987–1993 and 2000–2005. The second killed about 1,000 Israelis, the majority of them civilians, many in suicide bombings aimed at buses, restaurants, and celebrations. To “globalize” it is to call for carrying that model beyond Israel, which is why Jewish communities hear the chant as licensing violence against Jews anywhere. Some chanters say they intend general protest. The Terror Record Chapter documents the attacks of the Second Intifada.
• “Jews will not replace us.” Chanted, alongside “You will not replace us,” by the torch march at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. The sentence carries an entire conspiracy theory: the “Great Replacement.” Its French originator, the writer Renaud Camus, blamed a faceless elite. The American white-supremacist version chanted here names Jews as the engineers of demographic replacement, which recasts the world conspiracy of the Protocols in demographic terms. The man who murdered eleven Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 posted replacement rhetoric before the attack.

Klan and other movement symbols

Symbols of organized hate groups.

Beyond the codes above, a number of symbols mark specific organized movements. They help identify the group behind a given incident. The Ku Klux Klan is best known for its terror against Black Americans. When the Klan rose again in the 1920s, it aimed its violence mainly at Black Americans and Catholics, and it also threatened and attacked Jews (ADL, “Antisemitism in American History”). In September 1967, Klansmen bombed the Beth Israel synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi. Two months later the home of its rabbi, Perry Nussbaum, was bombed as well (Mississippi Free Press).

• The blood drop cross. The principal emblem of the Ku Klux Klan: a cross with a blood drop at its center. It marks Klan affiliation specifically.
• The Celtic cross (in this context). A cross within a circle. In its ordinary form it is an ancient and common Christian and cultural symbol. One specific squared-off version has been adopted by white-supremacist movements as a symbol of “white pride.” A textbook context-dependent case.
• The Confederate battle flag (in this context). A historical military flag that has been adopted by some white-supremacist groups. Its meaning is contested and heavily context-dependent, which is why it is read carefully rather than automatically.
• The Goyim Defense League (GDL) and its flyers. A loose network that spreads antisemitic and white-supremacist propaganda. Its name mocks the Anti-Defamation League (“goyim” is a Hebrew and Yiddish word for non-Jews), and its logo copies the ADL’s in red, black, and white, the colors of the Nazi flag. Its flyers blame Jews for issues such as immigration, abortion, and gun laws, claiming that “every aspect” of each one “is Jewish.” Between December 2020 and July 2025, the ADL recorded at least 790 of these flyer drops in 46 states and Washington, D.C. ADL backgrounder.
• Group-specific insignia. Organized extremist groups maintain their own logos, runes, and numeric tags, catalogued in the ADL database. When an unfamiliar symbol appears alongside any of the core symbols above, the database is the place to identify it. The same holds for the emblems of armed groups. The ADL’s 2026 guide “Revealed: Antizionist Hate” lists the logos of groups the United States designates as foreign terrorist organizations. Among them are Hamas and its armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, and Hezbollah, an armed movement in Lebanon backed by Iran. The ADL says their flags and emblems are often seen at anti-Israel protests. ADL, “Revealed: Antizionist Hate”.

The pattern beneath the symbols

How the symbols work.

Across the groups of symbols above, the same few mechanics recur, and naming them is more durable than memorizing any single symbol, because the symbols change while the mechanics do not.

• Deniability. Most modern symbols are built so a user can claim innocence: “it’s just a number,” “it’s just punctuation.” The deniability is deliberate. It lets the signal travel in public.
• Dual coding. The same mark reads as innocent to outsiders and as a signal to insiders. This is why the same symbol can be harmless in one setting and a threat in another, and why context is the deciding factor every time.
• Appropriation. Old, neutral, or sacred symbols are repurposed (the swastika, the sunwheel, the Celtic cross) both to borrow their resonance and to muddy recognition.
• Substitution. When a symbol becomes too recognizable or is banned, the movement swaps in a less-known one carrying the same meaning. The Black Sun standing in for the swastika is the clearest example.

A reader who knows these four mechanics can often identify a new or unfamiliar symbol as hate signaling even without having seen it before. The mechanics map onto the recognition tools set out on the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter.

For educators and districts

Using this guide in a school setting.

This page is designed to be usable at the level of an individual classroom and at the level of a district policy office. A few notes for that use:

• As an incident reference. When a symbol appears on school property, the ADL database linked throughout this guide is the fastest authoritative way to identify it and understand its meaning. This page provides the plain-language explanation to accompany that identification.
• As a teaching unit. The guide pairs with the Contemporary Antisemitism Chapter and this site’s broader treatment of the history these symbols carry. The “how the symbols work” section is the part most worth teaching directly, because it transfers to recognizing coded hate aimed at any group.
• The context rule, taught first. The most important point to convey to students is the context rule: that recognition is a reason to look closer, not a verdict. This protects students from both under-reaction and over-reaction.
• Reporting. Recognition is the first step. Districts should pair this guide with their own reporting and response procedures. The ADL and other institutions maintain incident-reporting channels for the public.

For educators: responding to an incident

• How to address antisemitism in K–12 schools. The ADL’s 6 Key Steps: a practical framework for schools and districts on preventing, responding to, and following up on antisemitic incidents.
• Report an incident. The ADL’s incident-reporting form for antisemitic, bias, or hate incidents.
• File a civil-rights complaint. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights treats antisemitism as discrimination based on shared ancestry under Title VI, the 1964 civil rights law covering schools that receive federal money. Its guide to filing a complaint explains the process.

Saw it at school or online? How to report it →

For a focused classroom exercise, the printable handout Recognizing Propaganda: Then and Now pairs each recurring antisemitic myth with its modern form and gives students a recognition routine.