Antisemitic physical assaults in the United States reached record highs in 2025, and Jewish fatalities on American soil were reported for the first time since 2019, according to the Anti-Defamation League’s annual report. The report said it was the first time there were fatalities in the United States that resulted from antisemitic attacks since 2022. The numbers land like a blunt indictment of a society where hate keeps finding room to turn into violence, while institutions scramble to document the damage after the fact.
Who Paid the Price
Two Israeli Embassy staff members were fatally shot last May outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC. A month later, a man in Colorado firebombed an event organized by members of the Jewish community to bring attention to the Israeli hostages still in Gaza, and an 82-year-old woman later died from her injuries. Those are the human costs buried inside the totals: people targeted at a museum, people targeted at a community event, and a woman who did not survive the attack.
Antisemitic physical assaults increased by 4%, and assaults involving a deadly weapon rose by 39%, the ADL said. The report said 203 incidents were described as assaults, with 32 involving a deadly weapon, and at least 300 people were victimized by assaults. Oren Segal, ADL’s senior vice president for counter-extremism and intelligence, said, “The surge in physical assaults is a stark reminder that a historically high level of antisemitism puts Jewish lives at risk.”
The Scale of the Damage
Overall antisemitic incidents fell 33% from 2024, but remained “considerably higher than the total in years prior to the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel,” the ADL said. There were 6,274 incidents of antisemitic assaults, harassment and vandalism in 2025, an average of 17 incidents per day, up from an average of 8 incidents per day between 2020 and 2022. The report splits the violence into categories, but the pattern is the same: harassment, vandalism, and assault all sit inside a broader atmosphere where antisemitic abuse keeps showing up across the country.
Vandalism incidents decreased by 21%, while harassment incidents decreased by 39%. Even with those declines, the report said antisemitic incidents occurred in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. That means the problem is not confined to one city or one region; it is spread across the country, embedded in everyday life, and recorded only after people have already been targeted.
Incidents on college and university campuses saw the steepest drop of any location type, with 583 antisemitic incidents on college campuses in 2025, 66% lower than in 2024, when there were 1,694 incidents. The ADL said the decrease was due in part to colleges addressing antisemitism on campuses. The report does not say what those colleges did, only that the institutions claim some credit for the drop. That leaves the usual question hanging over the apparatus: what gets counted as action, and what gets left to the victims.
What the Institutions Want Next
The ADL is calling for strengthening the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which it called “lifesaving,” and wants Congress to support the Safeguarding Access to Congregations and Religious Establishments from Disruption, or SACRED Act, which would establish safe access zones around houses of worship and prohibit conduct intended to intimidate or obstruct congregants. The report frames these as protections, but they are still proposals moving through the same political machinery that has already failed to stop the violence recorded in the report.
The report also noted that an annual report collecting incidents around the world found violent antisemitic attacks in 2025 killed the highest number of Jews in 30 years. In an early last year survey, the ADL found that 46% of adults around the world harbor “deeply entrenched” antisemitic attitudes, and that the number of people who hold antisemitic beliefs more than doubled across the past decade. The scale of the hatred is global, but the consequences are always local: bodies, injuries, fear, and communities forced to live with the aftermath while institutions debate grants, acts, and access zones.