By: Fern Sidman

Nearly two decades after antisemitism began to reemerge in the American public square with a visibility unseen since the postwar era, a new national survey suggests that what was once perceived as a sporadic threat has hardened into a pervasive condition of daily life for Jews across the United States. According to the American Jewish Committee’s newly released State of Antisemitism in America report, the overwhelming majority of American Jews now feel less safe in their own country, a sentiment shaped by a relentless succession of violent attacks, hostile rhetoric, and the ambient normalization of anti-Jewish hostility in both physical and digital spaces. The findings, reported on Tuesday in The Algemeiner, depict a community that has adapted to fear as a matter of routine.

The survey’s topline numbers are arresting. Fully 91 percent of Jewish respondents reported that they feel less safe in the United States following a series of high-profile antisemitic attacks over the past year, including the arson attack on the Pennsylvania governor’s residence, the assault on pro-Israel demonstrators in Boulder, and the deadly shooting of Israeli embassy staffers outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington. The Algemeiner report chronicled each of these incidents as part of what many Jewish leaders describe as a cascading pattern of violence that has rendered Jewish visibility an increasingly fraught proposition in public life. For many respondents, these were not isolated episodes but cumulative signals that the social contract once assumed to protect minority communities has begun to fray.

The personal toll of this environment is reflected in the survey’s most sobering finding: nearly one in three American Jews reported being directly targeted by antisemitic harassment or abuse in the past year. Among those who had personally experienced such incidents, four in five said they had altered their behavior in response. The Algemeiner report noted that these behavioral changes are not abstract gestures but concrete recalibrations of daily life. Jews described avoiding public displays of Jewish identity, reconsidering attendance at synagogue or communal events, and exercising caution in neighborhoods or institutions that once felt familiar.

Ted Deutch, the chief executive officer of the American Jewish Committee, articulated this reality with stark clarity, observing that Jewish gatherings are now frequently conducted behind metal detectors and under the watchful presence of armed guards. The infrastructure of fear, he suggested, has become a defining feature of contemporary Jewish communal life in America.

The reverberations of the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel remain a central catalyst for this shift in perception. Seventy-eight percent of respondents indicated that the attack and its aftermath have made them feel less safe as Jews in the United States. The war that followed has acted as an accelerant for antisemitic expression far beyond the Middle East, with rhetoric ostensibly framed as anti-Israel activism bleeding into direct hostility toward Jews in the diaspora. The AJC survey underscores this phenomenon, revealing that fear among American Jews is not solely rooted in domestic incidents but is inextricably linked to global events that reverberate within American civic life.

Perhaps most striking is the generational dimension of this unease. Younger Jews, particularly those under 29, reported significantly higher rates of being personally targeted by antisemitic harassment than their older counterparts. Nearly half of respondents in this age cohort said they had been directly confronted by antisemitism in the past year. The Algemeiner report highlighted the acute vulnerability of Jewish students and young professionals, many of whom navigate university campuses and digital ecosystems where political polarization has intensified and where anti-Israel discourse often shades into overtly antisemitic tropes.

On college campuses, 42 percent of Jewish students reported encountering antisemitism, and a quarter said they had felt excluded from social or academic spaces because of their Jewish identity. These figures illuminate a troubling paradox: institutions historically associated with pluralism and intellectual openness have, for many Jewish students, become arenas of alienation.

The survey also charts the migration of antisemitism into the digital realm with unsettling clarity. A large majority of Jewish respondents reported encountering anti-Jewish hostility online, and growing numbers expressed anxiety about the role of emerging technologies in amplifying such content. The Algemeiner report explored how large language model chatbots and social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement, can inadvertently reproduce or magnify harmful stereotypes.

The AJC’s data indicates that Jews are acutely aware of this risk, with nearly seven in ten respondents fearing that misinformation generated by artificial intelligence tools could inspire real-world antisemitic incidents. This concern reflects a broader unease about the velocity with which hateful narratives can now circulate, untethered from traditional mechanisms of editorial restraint.

Social media platforms remain a principal vector for this phenomenon. The survey found rising levels of antisemitic content on major platforms, a trend that has previously attributed to a combination of lax content moderation and the politicization of discourse following the Israel-Hamas war. For many Jewish users, digital spaces that once served as forums for connection have become arenas of hostility, where anti-Jewish slurs, conspiracy theories, and calls for violence circulate with alarming regularity. The cumulative effect of this exposure, the survey suggests, is a deepening sense of vulnerability that extends beyond the screen into everyday life.

The AJC’s research also sheds light on the symbolic language of contemporary antisemitism. Slogans such as “globalize the intifada,” which evoke periods of sustained violence against Jews in Israel, were perceived as threatening by an overwhelming majority of Jewish respondents. The Algemeiner has reported extensively on the normalization of such rhetoric within certain protest movements, noting that phrases once confined to militant contexts now appear in mainstream demonstrations and online discourse.

The survey’s findings suggest a stark disconnect between how these slogans are perceived by Jewish communities and how they are understood, or misunderstood, by the broader public. While only a small fraction of Americans recognized the phrase, its resonance among Jews as a call to violence underscores the chasm between lived experience and public awareness.

In parallel with the Jewish survey, the AJC polled the general American public, revealing that while most Americans acknowledge antisemitism as a problem, fewer have personally witnessed or recognized it in their immediate environment. The Algemeiner report observed that this asymmetry of perception complicates efforts to mobilize broad-based solidarity. Deutch, in an op-ed announcing the report, argued that antisemitism corrodes the social fabric in ways that ultimately imperil democratic institutions themselves. The fortification of Jewish spaces, he warned, is not merely a defensive measure but a visible symptom of deeper structural fissures within American society.

Holly Huffnagle, the AJC’s director of antisemitism policy, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing that tolerating antisemitism legitimizes extremism and erodes the trust upon which pluralistic democracies depend. The Algemeiner report framed this warning as a call to action not only for policymakers but for civil society at large. The survey’s data, collected over the fall of 2025, offers empirical grounding for what many Jewish leaders have long articulated anecdotally: that the normalization of antisemitic discourse, whether cloaked in political language or propagated through digital channels, represents a systemic challenge to the ideals of an open society.

Yet amid the bleakness of the findings, the report also gestures toward the possibility of collective response. The fact that a majority of Americans recognize antisemitism as a growing problem suggests a reservoir of awareness that can be mobilized. The Algemeiner has argued that confronting antisemitism requires not only security measures but a sustained commitment to education, accountability, and moral clarity. Deutch’s insistence that Jews are not seeking special treatment but equal protection under the law resonates as a reminder that the struggle against antisemitism is, at its core, a struggle to uphold the foundational promise of American pluralism.

The portrait that emerges from the AJC survey is not merely of a community under siege but of a society at an inflection point. The normalization of fear among American Jews is a barometer of broader civic health. Antisemitism rarely confines itself to one community; it metastasizes within ecosystems of extremism that ultimately threaten all minorities. The metal detectors at synagogue doors and the guarded entrances to Jewish community centers stand as both protective measures and stark metaphors for a nation grappling with the erosion of its social covenant.

In chronicling these findings, The Algemeiner situated the AJC report within a larger narrative of democratic resilience under strain. The data compels a reckoning with uncomfortable truths about the persistence of ancient hatreds in modern forms. Whether the United States can arrest this trajectory will depend not only on the vigilance of Jewish institutions but on the willingness of the broader society to recognize antisemitism as a corrosive force that undermines the very principles of freedom and equality upon which the republic was founded.