Contemporary Antisemitism

Why this Chapter exists

Antisemitism after 1945.

Antisemitism before 1945 ran a long arc: early Christian hostility, the medieval laws, the racial pseudoscience of the nineteenth century, the conspiracy tradition of the Protocols, the Nazi synthesis, and the Holocaust. (The Protocols is the forged “secret Jewish plan” exposed in 1921, told in Unit 3 · Ch. 07.) That arc continued past 1945 and continues now, in new language.

What "contemporary antisemitism" refers to

The descriptive scope.

Scholars use the phrase "contemporary antisemitism" for anti-Jewish discourse, harassment, discrimination, and violence from about 1945 to today. The literature treats these as continuous with, or built on the same patterns as, the history before 1945. The scope is broad and includes:

• Anti-Jewish violence: assaults on Jewish persons, attacks on Jewish institutions, vandalism of Jewish cemeteries and houses of worship, and the documented terrorism targeting Jewish communities across the postwar decades.
• Anti-Jewish discrimination: employment, housing, educational, and institutional discrimination of the kind found in the record of every postwar decade.
• Anti-Jewish harassment: verbal harassment, social-media abuse, and patterns of intimidation directed at Jewish individuals and communities.
• Anti-Jewish discourse: conspiratorial framing of Jewish presence in finance, media, politics, or public institutions. The use of antisemitic tropes inherited from the history before 1945. The continuing circulation of texts including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion documented in that Chapter.
• Holocaust denial and Holocaust distortion: the categories developed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to describe the falsification, trivialization, or misuse of the historical record of the Holocaust.

The category does not include every criticism of a Jewish person or institution. What makes specific discourse antisemitic, and what does not, is the subject of the analytical frameworks documented below.

The word itself. The term took hold in 1879 as a scientific-sounding name for an old hatred (see The Racial Turn). The Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt writes the word without its hyphen, on the ground that there is no ‘Semitism’ to be against.

Continuity with the historical arc

What recurs and what is new.

Scholars who study contemporary antisemitism find deep continuities with the historical arc, and some features specific to the present period. The conspiracy frame, the old caricatures, and the Holocaust-era tropes all keep circulating. The online environment is new, and it has reshaped how that material travels. The researchers who study online antisemitism, named in the online section below, treat the online dimension two ways at once: continuous with the historical phenomenon, yet structurally distinct from its earlier forms.

The propaganda continuum

One inheritance, carried forward.

The instruments of the hatred (the forged document, the cartoon, the radio broadcast, the slogan) were built once and then handed down, each era adapting the last era's material to its own politics. Historians of antisemitism, among them Robert Wistrich, trace a single line through otherwise unconnected regimes and movements:

• 1879: Wilhelm Marr's racial reframing gives the old religious hostility a pseudo-scientific vocabulary.
• 1903: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery supplies the master template of the secret-Jewish-conspiracy myth.
• 1923–1945: Nazi propaganda, from the tabloid Der Stürmer to state radio, industrializes the imagery and carries it toward genocide.
• 1953: the Soviet "Doctors' Plot," in which Jewish doctors were falsely accused of plotting to kill the state's leaders, repurposes the conspiracy frame for a communist state.
• 1975: UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 determines that Zionism is "a form of racism and racial discrimination," moving the charge into the language of international diplomacy. (Zionism: the movement for Jewish national self-determination, explained further below. The resolution was rescinded in 1991.)
• Post-2000: social media restructures distribution, giving the inherited material faster reach and weaker accountability than print or broadcast ever had. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that the Protocols “continue to circulate today, especially on the Internet.”

Two points these historians draw from this line. First, the material is portable: the same template serves Russian forgers under the tsar, a Nazi ministry, a Soviet politburo, and a present-day online network, with only the target's costume changed. Second, it did not stay in Europe: how the material changed languages and took institutional root is its own Chapter in this Unit, The Eastward Turn, which follows the transmission document by document.

Recognizing the pattern

How the disinformation works, and how to spot it.

A case study in antisemitism is useful well beyond the Jewish community because the propaganda has a recognizable structure: a small set of recurring myths, recombined and repackaged for two thousand years. Once the structure is visible, the individual instance becomes easier to read.

The Anti-Defamation League's reference guide Antisemitism Uncovered organizes the material around seven recurring tropes, each with a long history and a contemporary form. The seven are:

• Power: the claim that Jews secretly control governments, banks, or the media. The template is the Protocols forgery. The contemporary form substitutes a named individual or institution for the imagined cabal.
• Disloyalty: the claim that Jews are inherently treacherous or answer to a foreign power rather than their own country. The medieval and early-modern versions reappear whenever Jewish citizens are told their loyalty is conditional.
• Greed: the claim that Jews are uniquely avaricious or money-controlling. The coin-clutching caricature of the Der ewige Jude poster above is the same image that recurs in present-day memes.
• Deicide and demonization: the theological charge, documented in the Adversus Judaeos tradition, that Jews collectively killed Christ. The charge cast them as guilty and less than human, and it supplied the emotional force later movements drew on.
• Blood libel: the accusation, examined in its own Chapter, that Jews ritually murder the innocent. The ADL traces its modern descendants in cartoons and posts accusing Israel of stealing the organs of Palestinians killed in Gaza. Others cast the killing of children as an Israeli “ritual.”
• Holocaust denial and distortion: examined in its own Chapter: the claim that the genocide was fabricated, exaggerated, or inverted.
• Anti-Zionism: the title of the ADL’s seventh chapter, which deals with claims about the Jewish state. Whether and when anti-Zionism is antisemitic is the contested boundary the analytical frameworks below were written to map.

Three mechanics make the pattern easier to catch in practice, all of them drawn from the documented record rather than from any single example. First, substitution: the script stays fixed while the sender and the vocabulary change. Second, the closed loop: a conspiracy claim is built so that any evidence against it is treated as proof of the conspiracy's reach, which is the signature of disinformation rather than argument. Third, dual coding (a coded message): the same statement is offered as innocent to outsiders and as a signal to those who recognize the trope, which is why context and history matter for identification.

The ADL guide is available in full online. (ADL, Antisemitism Uncovered: A Guide to Old Myths in a New Era.)

The same myths travel as symbols, the swastika, coded numbers, online memes, the triple parentheses. The site’s Hate Symbols recognition guide explains each one: what it is, where it came from, how it is used, and why context decides its meaning.

Object Spotlight

A definition as a historical document.

Read it first as an object. These two sentences were adopted by the thirty-one member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance at a meeting in Bucharest on May 26, 2016. They are not a law and not the last word, but they have become one of the most widely cited, and most widely debated, definitions of antisemitism in the world, referenced by governments and universities. Two of the three frameworks treated below were written partly in response to this one.

Definitions are made at a particular moment, by particular bodies, for particular reasons. Once made, they acquire histories of their own: adopted here, rejected there, amended, contested. The IHRA text is a primary source twice over. It defines antisemitism, and it documents how one institution, at one point in the early twenty-first century, attempted to. Studying it is practice in reading a definition the way historians read any document: by asking who wrote it, when, why, and what happened next.

Following the evidence

Read the documents, not the summaries.

The question. How can different scholars examine the same statement and reach different conclusions?

Read the relevant passages from the three published frameworks (the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, and the Nexus Document) and then work through the record:

• Where do all three documents agree?
• Where do they differ?
• Which sections define antisemitism itself?
• Which sections discuss speech about Israel?

Finally consider: why is reading the original documents more reliable than relying on someone else’s summary of them?

Historical method. Historians work from original sources whenever possible. Reading the documents themselves allows a reader to distinguish between what a framework actually says and how it is later described by supporters or critics.

The analytical frameworks

Three published reference instruments.

The scholarly literature on contemporary antisemitism includes several published analytical frameworks. The three most widely referenced in the educational context are set out below, each in its own published language at the operative points.

The IHRA Working Definition

2016 · The most widely referenced framework.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted the Working Definition of Antisemitism at its plenary on May 26, 2016, in Bucharest. The Working Definition has subsequently been adopted, endorsed, or referenced by more than forty national governments and by many hundreds of state, municipal, institutional, and educational bodies.

The Working Definition consists of a brief core definition, quoted in full in the Object Spotlight above, followed by a non-exhaustive list of contemporary examples. The full text is published by IHRA.

The Working Definition is, in IHRA's own language, "a non-legally binding working definition." Its function is analytical, providing bodies with a descriptive framework for evaluating specific discourse, rather than regulatory in itself. The text states that the examples it provides "could, taking into account the overall context," constitute antisemitism, rather than asserting unconditional verdicts.

Two features of the Working Definition are particularly relevant to the question of how it treats discourse touching on Israel:

• The "double standards" principle. The definition's examples include "applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation" as a possible form of antisemitism, contextually evaluated.
• The explicit preservation of legitimate criticism. The Working Definition states explicitly: "criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."

The Working Definition is the framework most commonly referenced by major Jewish bodies, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the World Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League. It is also the most contested framework in the academic literature. Critics have focused on two questions: whether its core sentence is too vague, and whether some of its examples concerning Israel could be misused to suppress legitimate criticism. The authors of the Jerusalem Declaration, documented below, called the IHRA text “unclear in key respects.”

Holding: International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Working Definition of Antisemitism. Adopted Bucharest, May 26, 2016. The full published text is available at holocaustremembrance.com.

The Jerusalem Declaration

2021 · A scholarly framework that draws the line differently.

The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), published on March 25, 2021, was developed and signed by about 200 scholars of antisemitism, Jewish studies, the Holocaust, and related fields, working under the coordination of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. It was issued as a scholarly response to the debate the IHRA Working Definition had set off. Its stated aim was to give clearer guidance, especially at the boundary between criticism of Israeli policy and antisemitism.

The JDA's core definition reads, in its published text:

"Antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish)."

The JDA includes a set of guidelines in three sections: general principles, examples concerning Israel and Palestine that are "on the face of it" antisemitic, and examples that are "on the face of it" not antisemitic. Its distinctive feature is that it names kinds of speech about Israel that its signatories consider not antisemitic in themselves. These include "evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state." They also include boycott, divestment and sanctions, which the JDA calls "commonplace, non-violent forms of political protest against states." In the Israeli case, it says, they "are not, in and of themselves, antisemitic." The JDA adds that criticism seen as reflecting a "double standard" is not, in and of itself, antisemitic.

The JDA presents itself, in its own words, "as an alternative to the IHRA Definition," while noting that institutions that have adopted IHRA "can use our text as a tool for interpreting it." Some bodies have adopted the JDA or referenced it alongside the IHRA framework. Others have declined to adopt it on the grounds that they consider its formulations on Israel insufficient.

Holding: Coordinated by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism. Published March 25, 2021. Full text and signatory list at jerusalemdeclaration.org.

The Nexus Document

2021 · An American-focused framework on the Israel-antisemitism question.

The Nexus Document was published in February 2021 by the Nexus Task Force, which began at the Knight Program on Media and Religion at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School. The document was updated in June 2024. It addresses one question: how to distinguish antisemitism from legitimate political criticism of Israeli policy, with attention to the American political and educational context. The Nexus Task Force was founded and directed by Jonathan Jacoby, working with a group of American Jewish figures, scholars, and educators. The task force is now affiliated with the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College. The center is directed by Kenneth Stern, the longtime antisemitism researcher who was one of the drafters of an earlier definition that became a foundation for the IHRA Working Definition.

The Nexus Document's structure is similar to the JDA's in that it identifies categories of speech that are antisemitic, categories that "may" or "could" be antisemitic depending on context, and categories that are not in principle antisemitic. The document is shorter than the JDA and is written specifically for the American setting, including American university campuses, American workplaces, and the American public conversation.

Holding: Nexus Task Force, affiliated with the Center for the Study of Hate at Bard College. The Nexus Document. Published February 2021, updated June 2024. The Nexus Project maintains nexusproject.us.

Where the frameworks differ

The point of analytical disagreement.

The three frameworks converge on most of what they address. All three identify the core of antisemitism as hostility, discrimination, or violence against Jews as Jews. All three identify the historical inheritance of earlier centuries: the conspiratorial framing, the inherited iconography, the long arc of religious and racial hostility, as core to contemporary antisemitism. All three explicitly preserve the legitimacy of strong criticism of the State of Israel and its policies.

The frameworks differ at the boundary between criticism of Israeli policy and antisemitism. The IHRA Working Definition's examples include discourse about Israel. The signatories of the JDA and Nexus frameworks argued, in their published rationales, that those examples can be stretched too far when applied to specific cases. The JDA and Nexus documents articulate that boundary with somewhat broader explicit preservation of criticism. The disagreement is scholarly, and it is also legal and political. Executive Order 13899, signed in December 2019, directs U.S. agencies that enforce Title VI to consider the IHRA definition. Title VI is the 1964 civil-rights law that bars discrimination by race, color, or national origin in federally funded programs. The order also tells agencies to consider the IHRA examples where they help show discriminatory intent.

The anti-Zionism question

Where the hardest line is drawn.

Much of the disagreement among the three frameworks turns on anti-Zionism. Zionism is the movement for Jewish national self-determination in the Land of Israel, the idea that the Jewish people, like other peoples, are entitled to a state of their own. Anti-Zionism is opposition to that idea. Because the frameworks were written mainly to answer one question (when does hostility toward Israel become hostility toward Jews?), anti-Zionism is the ground on which they were built, and the ground on which they differ.

Where serious scholars and institutions disagree is over how to classify some forms of anti-Zionism. What all three frameworks share is a method rather than a verdict. They ask the reader to examine the content of a claim, its context, the standard being applied (is one state held to a test no other faces?), and whether it carries inherited antisemitic patterns. The frameworks supply the questions and do not settle every case in advance.

The IHRA examples draw a line between criticism of what a state does and opposition to whether it should exist at all. Scholars including the historian Robert Wistrich (1945–2015) and Cary Nelson have defended that line. Governments everywhere face criticism, they argue, but only one state faces a sustained movement calling for its elimination. That state is the world's only Jewish-majority country. In their view, singling out its existence applies to the Jewish state a standard applied to no other. It belongs, they argue, to the long pattern in which Jews are denied what others are granted. This is the reasoning behind the IHRA example concerning the denial of "the Jewish people their right to self-determination."

Other scholars, including the Harvard historian Derek Penslar and the other signers of the Jerusalem Declaration, reach a different judgment. The Declaration's guidelines hold that criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism is "on the face of it" not antisemitic. So is evidence-based criticism of Israel's founding principles. The JDA also treats support for any arrangement that gives full equality to all inhabitants between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean as not antisemitic in itself. On this view, whether an anti-Zionist statement is antisemitic depends on its content and context. The JDA does draw its own line on this ground. It calls it antisemitic to deny "the right of Jews in the State of Israel to exist and flourish, collectively and individually, as Jews."

The Nexus Document takes a third position. It says opposition to Zionism "does not necessarily reflect specific anti-Jewish animus." It also calls it antisemitic to advocate a political solution that denies Jews the right to "define themselves as a people." On double standards it splits the question. Treating Israel differently "solely because it is a Jewish state" is antisemitic. Paying Israel disproportionate attention "is not prima facie proof of antisemitism," that is, not proof on its face.

Opposition to Israel can also reach for the old machinery: the blood libel, the conspiracy of secret control carried by the Protocols, the dual-loyalty charge, the inherited caricatures. The IHRA and Jerusalem Declaration texts both name this: applying the symbols and stereotypes of classic antisemitism to Israel is antisemitic.

Where the definitions agree

The lines all three draw.

For all their disagreement over anti-Zionism, the three definitions draw several of the same lines. Two concern how Jews are treated because of Israel, and the Jerusalem Declaration adds a third.

Holding Jews responsible for Israel. The IHRA definition lists “holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.” The Jerusalem Declaration lists “holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct or treating Jews, simply because they are Jewish, as agents of Israel.” The Nexus Document lists “holding individuals or institutions, because they are Jewish, a priori culpable of real or imagined wrongdoing committed by Israel.”

Questioning Jews’ loyalty. The IHRA definition lists “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.” The Jerusalem Declaration lists “assuming that non-Israeli Jews, simply because they are Jews, are necessarily more loyal to Israel than to their own countries.” The Nexus Document lists “considering Jews to be a priori incapable of setting aside their loyalty to the Jewish people and/or Israel.”

Demanding that Jews condemn Israel. The Jerusalem Declaration also names “requiring people, because they are Jewish, publicly to condemn Israel or Zionism (for example, at a political meeting).”

Blaming a French classmate for what France’s president does, or an American classmate for what America’s government does, would be prejudice. Treating Jewish classmates that way, because of Israel, is the line all three definitions draw.

Sources · IHRA Working Definition, as published by the U.S. Department of State · The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, guidelines 7 to 9 · The Nexus Document, items 3.3 and 3.4

Anti-Zionism in the record

Four moments in the record.

• 1967. After the Six-Day War, the Soviet Union ran a press campaign against Israel and Zionism, laced with old antisemitic themes. Soviet Jewry
• 1975. UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 declared Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It stood for sixteen years. In 1991, the same body revoked it, 111 to 25. The Legal Record
• 1976. Hijackers seized an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris and flew it to Entebbe, Uganda. They called their cause anti-Zionist. They released most of the passengers and held the Israelis, along with some Jews of other nationalities. The Terror Record
• 2025. In Boulder, Colorado, a man firebombed a weekly walk for the hostages held in Gaza, injuring thirteen people. One of them, Karen Diamond, 82, died of her injuries weeks later. In federal court, he admitted he targeted the walkers because of their actual or perceived Israeli national origin and Jewish religion. The Incident Record

The monitoring institutions

Where the contemporary data come from.

A small number of established monitoring institutions document contemporary antisemitic incidents (assaults, vandalism, harassment). Their own reports are the place to follow the figures in detail.

The documented cases behind the numbers (murders, attacks, intimidation, and the official findings) are kept entry by entry on The Incident Record.

The monitoring institutions use different methodologies, draw on different data sources, and report at different levels of detail. They are explicit that their own counts are not an attempt to catalog every act. Direct comparison across institutions is not always meaningful. The relevant comparison is typically within each institution's own continuous time series.

Documented contemporary patterns

What the monitoring institutions have documented.

The continuous monitoring data across the postwar period, and particularly in the past two decades, establish a documented record on which the scholarly literature draws. The broad patterns in that record are these.

• Quantitative trends. The ADL Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, the CST annual reports, the SPCJ reports, and the FRA aggregate reports have recorded sharp increases in incident counts across the past several years compared to the early 2000s. The precise magnitude of the increase varies across reports and across jurisdictions. The broad direction of the trend is consistent.
• Categories of incidents. The monitoring distinguishes between assault, harassment, vandalism, and other categories. Assaults remain a minority of total incidents but constitute the gravest category. Vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, schools, and houses of worship is documented across jurisdictions.
• Holocaust denial and distortion. The IHRA's working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion (developed separately from the antisemitism working definition) provides the analytical framework for this specific category, which the major institutions document as a continuing component of the contemporary record.

The reports update annually. Each figure quoted below is dated to the report it comes from.

A documented pattern

An ongoing record.

In the United States alone, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, in the surge that followed the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. That is an average of more than twenty-five a day, and the highest annual total since the ADL began counting in 1979. The figure was up 344 percent over five years and nearly 900 percent over ten. In 2025 the count fell by a third, to 6,274, still the third-highest year on record. In the United Kingdom, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,700 incidents in 2025, its second-highest annual total ever and the first year in which every month exceeded 200.

Most of that volume is the daily harassment, vandalism, and intimidation aimed at ordinary Jewish life. Synagogues are defaced and threatened: the ADL counted 627 bomb threats against Jewish organizations in 2024, nearly nine in ten of them aimed at synagogues. Jewish schools and community centers are vandalized. Swastikas and "Heil Hitler" are sprayed near houses of worship, and graffiti appears on the homes, vehicles, and businesses of Jewish families. In 2025 the Community Security Trust recorded its highest-ever annual total of damage and desecration of Jewish property. Three examples from a single year of the ADL's documented record show the categories. A swastika was carved into a tree at a Jewish family's home in Belmont, Massachusetts. The stained-glass Star of David windows of a synagogue in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, were smashed with a hammer. A community center in St. Johns County, Florida, was vandalized with swastika graffiti and the words "Heil Hitler." (ADL regional audits, 2024.)

The pattern has reached schools and universities as well, where Jewish students have reported harassment and, in documented cases, being physically blocked from parts of campus. One example reached a federal court. In Frankel v. Regents of the University of California, Jewish students alleged that they were excluded from parts of the UCLA campus, including classrooms and the main library, during a 2024 protest encampment. In August 2024 a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction. It ordered that the university could not provide programs or campus areas to other students if Jewish students were being excluded from them. In July 2025 the case settled for $6.13 million, with the injunction made permanent. (NPR; JTA.)

The same categories of incident appear in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and beyond, year after year. In Germany the figures come from the state itself. Germany’s 2025 statistics on politically motivated crime, presented by the interior minister and the head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, recorded 6,548 antisemitic offenses. That was a record high and more than four times the 2017 total. Officials reported that the offenses came from right-wing extremism and from incidents tied to the Middle East conflict alike. (Courthouse News, June 9, 2026; German Federal Government, June 9, 2026.)

The Terror Record tells the October 7 attack and the attacks on Jews and Israelis outside Israel since then. The Incident Record keeps the murders and armed attacks entry by entry, each with its official record. Its entries include the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where eleven worshippers were murdered in 2018, and the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester, attacked on Yom Kippur 2025.

Normalization, put to the test

How hatred becomes acceptable, read against the frameworks.

Unit 3 traces how anti-Jewish ideas have entered respectable company: dressed as theology, then as science, then as politics. The Recurring Cycle shows the same lies returning across the centuries. One step in that story is normalization, when a hatred stops needing a disguise. Some of the events below ended in a court finding, an official condemnation, or an apology. Others are statements and survey answers.

In July 2017, gunmen killed two Israeli police officers at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the hilltop where the al-Aqsa Mosque stands. Israel closed the site briefly and then put metal detectors at its gates. On July 21, Imam Ammar Shahin gave the Friday sermon at the Islamic Center of Davis, a mosque in Davis, California. He spoke mostly in Arabic. A translation by MEMRI, an organization that records and translates Arabic-language media, quoted him asking God to “liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the Jews” and to “count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one.” The mosque at first said the passages had been mistranslated and taken out of context. A week later, on July 28, Shahin stood with the mayor of Davis and with Jewish and Muslim leaders at a press conference. “I said things that were hurtful to Jews,” he said. “This was unacceptable.” He told the Jewish community, “I am deeply sorry for the pain that I have caused.” (J., July 28, 2017; Times of Israel/JTA, July 29, 2017; CBS Sacramento, July 25, 2017.)

In August 2017, white nationalist groups held a rally called Unite the Right in Charlottesville, Virginia. On the night of August 11, hundreds of marchers carried lit torches across the grounds of the University of Virginia. The federal judge who later presided over the civil trial described them chanting “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” The chants come from the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that white populations are being replaced by immigrants, which many American white supremacists blame on Jews. The next day, James Alex Fields Jr., who had come for the rally, drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer. In November 2021, a federal jury in Sines v. Kessler found the defendants, among them the rally’s lead organizers and five of the groups that took part, liable under Virginia law for a civil conspiracy. It found six of them liable for racial, religious, or ethnic harassment or violence. (Memorandum Opinion, December 30, 2022; Judgment, January 9, 2023, U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia.)

On October 7, 2023, the day of the attack, a statement written by a Harvard student group and co-signed by 33 others held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” By October 10, at least five of the groups had withdrawn their names, and federal lawmakers of both parties had denounced the statement. (The Harvard Crimson, October 10, 2023; October 11, 2023.) On October 8, one day after the attack, a rally went ahead in Times Square. New York’s governor had condemned it in advance as a rally “in support of the perpetrators.” (Statement of Governor Kathy Hochul.) Participants chanted “resistance is justified,” and a resolution condemning the rally was introduced in Congress. (H.Res.775, 118th Congress.) On October 9 in Sydney, a crowd protested the lighting of the Opera House in Israel’s colors. NSW Police confirmed that the crowd chanted “f*** the Jews.” Police forensic analysis found that a second chant, reported worldwide as “gas the Jews,” was “where’s the Jews.” The deputy commissioner called the confirmed chants “offensive and completely unacceptable.” (ABC News, on the NSW Police findings.)

Polling recorded how Americans judged the attack. In an online Harvard CAPS/Harris poll of 2,034 registered voters taken December 13–14, 2023, most voters in every age group called October 7 a terrorist attack, including 73 percent of those aged 18 to 24. Asked whether the killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of 250 more “can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians,” 27 percent of all voters said it could. Among voters aged 18 to 24 the figure was 60 percent. Among those 65 and older it was 9 percent. (Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll, key results, December 2023.)

The frameworks earlier on this page offer tests for the language heard in those days, and for the poll’s question. The IHRA definition’s examples include justifying the killing of Jews in the name of an ideology. The Jerusalem Declaration lists assaults on Jews as antisemitic acts. The legal standard for attacks on civilians, whatever their cause, is set out in the Terror Record Chapter.

The record reached schools. On November 20, 2023, at Hillcrest High School in Queens, hundreds of students rioted through the halls over a Jewish teacher who had attended a pro-Israel rally, while she hid in a locked office. The schools chancellor called the incident “completely unacceptable.” (Queens Eagle.) In Santa Ana, California, Jewish groups sued over ethnic studies courses they said carried antisemitic content and had been developed out of public view. The case ended in a settlement: the district agreed to stop teaching the courses until they were rebuilt in public view. (JTA, February 21, 2025; AJC, a party to the suit, on the settlement.) The UCLA case above belongs to the same pattern. Each of these ended in an official record: a chancellor’s statement, a settlement, a court order.

The duration

The years since.

The sharpest rise in the monitoring record came after October 7, 2023, the attack documented in full in The Terror Record. The ADL counted 3,291 antisemitic incidents in the United States in the three months that followed, a 361 percent increase over the same months a year earlier. Britain’s Community Security Trust recorded its highest annual total in 2023. By the 2025 count, the U.S. total had still not returned to its earlier level. (ADL, January 2024; CST, Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025; ADL, Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025.)

In the spring of 2024, protest encampments rose on American campuses. By summer, more than 3,100 people had been arrested at more than 60 universities, and the UCLA case documented above, where Jewish students said they were turned away from parts of campus, came out of that wave. (NBC News, on the Associated Press tally.)

The reckoning played out in public. On December 5, 2023, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified before Congress. Asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their codes of conduct, two answered that it would depend on the context, and the third answered in the terms of harassment policy. Penn’s president resigned four days later. Harvard’s resigned within a month, as the hearing’s fallout combined with separate plagiarism allegations. The universities then turned to examining themselves. Harvard’s task force on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias published its findings on April 29, 2025, documenting Jewish students who had learned to hide their identity on campus. A second Harvard task force, on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias, released its final report the same day. (Harvard, task force report, April 29, 2025; Harvard, Presidential Task Force on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias.)

The settlements, resolution agreements, and executive orders that followed are entries on the Legal Record, each tied to its document.

On campuses, the federal channel is Title VI, the civil-rights law described earlier. The Education Department applies it to Jewish students through shared ancestry.

Antisemitism across the political spectrum

The scholarly literature on political distribution.

The scholarly record shows that contemporary antisemitism operates across the political spectrum. It takes distinct ideological forms, and it travels through distinct channels. No political tradition is immune. How the hatred is distributed among them is still being studied.

A substantial scholarly literature treats this question at the level of analytical taxonomy. The principal works are listed among the Further Teaching Resources and Sources below. Lipstadt treats the far right and the left side by side. Barkun traces the antisemitic theology of the American far right. Wistrich, Hirsh, and Nelson concentrate on Islamist and left-wing forms.

The online dimension

The new context.

In a 2025 survey by the American Jewish Committee, 45 percent of U.S. adults said they had seen or heard antisemitism in the past year, and 74 percent of them said it was online or on social media. Among American Jews, 71 percent reported seeing or hearing antisemitism online or on social media in the past year. Among Jews under 30, 47 percent said they had been personally targeted by antisemitism in the past year. In Europe, a survey of Jews in thirteen European Union countries, conducted in the first half of 2023 and published in 2024, found that 90 percent had encountered antisemitism online in the past year. Overall, 96 percent had encountered antisemitism, and 76 percent said they hide their Jewish identity at least occasionally. These are self-reports, and the EU survey was an open online survey rather than a random sample. In Britain, the Community Security Trust recorded 1,541 online incidents in 2025, the most in any year it has counted.

When the Institute for Strategic Dialogue studied YouTube comments on videos about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, antisemitic comments rose about fiftyfold in the days just after October 7, compared with the days just before. Anti-Muslim comments rose more than fortyfold over a similar window. Among the antisemitic themes the researchers found was what they call classic antisemitism: medieval narratives, often rooted in Christian theology, the tradition traced in Adversus Judaeos.

In January 2024, Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent body that reviews the company’s content decisions, overturned Meta’s choice to leave up an Instagram post denying the Holocaust. It found “gaps in Meta’s removal of Holocaust denial content.” Platforms publish hate-speech figures in their public enforcement reports. In 2023 Australia’s Online Hate Prevention Institute recommended that they report antisemitism on its own, instead of in “generic hate speech reports.”

In January 2025, Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, the elected volunteer panel that rules on editor conduct in its hardest disputes, barred eight editors from the Israeli-Palestinian topic. The eight came from both sides of the dispute. The committee found that “outside actors are heavily invested in influencing Wikipedia’s coverage of the topic area.” A year later it banned one of the eight from the whole site. It said that editor had engaged in “consistently non-neutral editing around the history of Judaism.” The ADL has published two reports on the editing, in March 2025 and October 2026.

In July 2025 Grok, the AI chatbot built into X, posted content praising Hitler. Its maker, xAI, said a software update had been live for about sixteen hours. It removed the posts and apologized for “horrific behavior.” Senators and representatives of both parties wrote that its posts “praised Hitler, and even endorsed violence against Jews.” A year earlier, UNESCO had warned that generative AI can “inadvertently invent false or misleading content about the Holocaust.”

In October 2026 the Online Hate Prevention Institute reported that no platform it monitors had returned to its level before October 7. Traditional antisemitism, from claims of Jewish power to the charge of deicide (the killing of Christ), still dominated most platforms.

The lesson The Primary Source vs. the Headline and the handout Recognizing Propaganda: Then and Now practice checking claims against their sources. The research centers that study the online record include:

• The Network Contagion Research Institute: a research nonprofit that studies the spread of extremist content across online networks.
• The Anti-Defamation League's Center for Technology and Society: documentation of online antisemitism and policy work with major technology platforms.
• The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD): UK-based research institution on online extremism and disinformation.
• The Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET): the academic research network coordinated by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.
• The Online Hate Prevention Institute: an Australian monitor of online hate.
• The Community Security Trust: Britain’s incident monitor, which counts online incidents alongside offline ones.

The figures above are the most recent published as of October 2026.

The record, updated

See the scope for yourself.

The organizations below keep the contemporary record current. Use them the way you would any primary source: read them critically, check the date, and weigh them against the frameworks above.

Live trackers, maintained by outside organizations, updated on their own schedules:

• ADL H.E.A.T. Map (United States): an interactive map of recorded incidents of hate, extremism, antisemitism, and terrorism, updated monthly using ADL's published methodology.
• ADL · Tools to Track Hate, the full set of ADL tracking tools, including the global A.T.L.A.S. trends tool.
• Community Security Trust (United Kingdom): incident reports and current reporting for the British Jewish community.
• EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (European Union): official intergovernmental data on antisemitic incidents across member states.

ADL's rapid "Tracker" feed notes that some items are not independently verified. The H.E.A.T. Map, which applies ADL's published methodology, is the steadier tool.

Legitimate criticism is not antisemitism

A position all three frameworks share.

The distinction the frameworks draw, in plain terms:

• Ordinary political criticism: criticism of Israeli policies, leaders or governments, or laws, however sharp. This is normal political speech, no different from criticism of any other state.
• Where antisemitism enters, on all three frameworks: hostility to Jews as Jews, or the use of inherited antisemitic tropes against Jews or against Israel.
• The harder cases: double standards and the denial of Jewish self-determination. The IHRA Working Definition’s examples list both as possible antisemitism, depending on context. The Jerusalem Declaration says a “double standard” is not, in and of itself, antisemitic. Nexus says disproportionate attention to Israel is not proof of antisemitism on its face. Both draw their own, narrower lines on self-determination.

Responses

How institutions respond.

• Government and legal institutions. Hate-crime law in the United States and parallel statutes in other countries provide the legal framework for prosecuting violent antisemitic incidents. The U.S. Department of State has a Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, a post created by the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004. Other governments have parallel posts. Two U.S. administrations have issued national measures. The White House released the first U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism on May 25, 2023. Executive Order 14188, signed January 29, 2025, reaffirmed Executive Order 13899 and directed agencies to report on further measures.
• The major Jewish bodies. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the World Jewish Congress, and the European Jewish Congress coordinate the organized Jewish community’s response. So do the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (CRIF), and parallel national bodies.
• Civil-society organizations. The Anti-Defamation League, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the American Jewish Committee, and parallel organizations across countries operate responses including education, monitoring, legal advocacy, and partnerships with broader civil-society institutions.
• Educational institutions. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights enforces Title VI in schools and universities that receive federal funds.
• Inter-faith and inter-community partnerships. Nostra Aetate, the Catholic Church’s 1965 declaration repudiating the deicide charge, opened a partnership documented in that Chapter. That partnership, the wider Christian-Jewish dialogue, and Muslim-Jewish and inter-faith partnerships in many countries form a response outside government and Jewish communal channels.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: recognizing recurring tropes, evaluating the analytical frameworks and monitoring data, and distinguishing documented antisemitism from ordinary political disagreement.
• Modern & Contemporary History: antisemitism as a continuous phenomenon from 1945 to the present.
• Civics & Government: the response: special envoys, hate-crime law, and the monitoring institutions.
• Media & Information Literacy: the online circulation of inherited material, and conspiracy literature in new media.
• Capstone of Unit 3: connecting the historical mechanisms studied across the Unit to the forms they take today.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 10.10 (human rights: the postwar system of monitoring and analytical frameworks) and 10.9 (globalization and the present: the online and global circulation of inherited material).
• NYS US History: 11.10 (domestic issues since 1945: the American response).
• NYS Participation in Government (grade 12): the civic response to antisemitism.
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.11–12.8 (evaluating an author’s claims and the documentary basis of a source).

Further Teaching Resources

Read the frameworks themselves:

• IHRA · Working Definition of Antisemitism, the full text and examples.
• The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, full text, guidelines, and signatories.
• The Nexus Document, full text and examples.

Teaching resources:

• Recognizing Propaganda: Then and Now: The site’s printable 9–12 handout on the recurring myths and a recognition routine.
• ADL · Antisemitism Uncovered, the seven recurring myths traced from origin to present, with a video series.
• Facing History · Contemporary Antisemitism and Youth, a free, ready-to-teach lesson.
• ADL · Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, the continuous American monitoring record, with methodology.

Scholarship on the political distribution:

• Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now (Schocken, 2019); Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession (Random House, 2010); David Hirsh, Contemporary Left Antisemitism (Routledge, 2017); Cary Nelson, Israel Denial (Indiana University Press, 2019); Michael Barkun, Religion and the Racist Right (University of North Carolina Press, rev. ed. 1997); and the journals Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism and Antisemitism Studies.