The Anti-Defamation League said it recorded a sharp decline in antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025, driven in part by a large drop on college campuses. In its latest annual audit, released Wednesday, the ADL said incidents fell to 6,274 overall in 2025—an outcome the organization credited to fewer on campuses and to steps taken by some colleges and universities in response to political pressure.
The ADL reported that it tallied 1,694 antisemitic incidents on U.S. college campuses in 2024, and said that figure fell by 66% in 2025 to 583. The ADL tied the earlier campus surge largely to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and to widespread student protests that it said escalated after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks. In 2025, the ADL said many campuses took steps to curb protests amid pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration.
Overall incident counts also fell, the ADL said, recording 6,274 antisemitic incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2025. That total was down 33% from the record-high 9,354 incidents counted for 2024. The ADL said the states with the most antisemitic incidents in 2025 were New York (1,160), California (817) and New Jersey (687).
Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s national director and CEO, said 2025 remained a highly violent year for American Jews even as the totals declined. He said 2025 included a record-high 203 incidents of physical assault in the audit. Greenblatt told The Associated Press that “Numbers that would have shocked us five years ago are now our floor,” and said that “People are being murdered because of antisemitism on American soil, and thousands more are threatened.”
Greenblatt said the comment referred to killings including two Jewish people killed in a May 21 shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and an 82-year-old Jewish woman who died from injuries sustained in a June 1 firebombing attack at an event in Boulder, Colorado, intended to raise awareness of Israeli hostages held in Gaza. He also said the incidents remained high compared with earlier years, adding that campus incidents in 2025 were still nearly four times higher than in 2021.
The ADL said incidents tied to Israel or Zionism accounted for 58% of the organization’s 2024 total—the first time, since the audit began in 1979, that more than half of incidents fit that category. The ADL said that change in 2024 arose as opposition grew to Israel’s military operation in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks. For 2025, the ADL said incidents related to Israel or Zionism made up 45% of all antisemitic incidents.
In describing what it considered the drivers of the decline, the ADL said anti-Israel rallies featuring “extreme anti-Israel rhetoric that crossed the line into antisemitism” decreased significantly—by 67% overall and by 83% on college campuses. It also said it launched a Campus Antisemitism Report Card in 2024, grading colleges on their approach to antisemitism and on whether they adopt policies recommended by the ADL. Greenblatt said the organization welcomed the decline on campuses, but cautioned against “relief or complacency.”
The ADL said its approach is careful to not conflate general criticism of Israel or anti-Israel activism with antisemitism, while acknowledging “gray areas” in how the definition is applied. For example, the ADL said it treats vilification of Zionism as antisemitism, though some Jews—including critics of Zionism and of the ADL itself—disagree. Antisemitism expert Aryeh Tuchman, who formerly led the ADL’s Center on Extremism, said the organization’s approach “emerges from their genuine concern that anti-Zionism is a genuine threat to the safety and security of American Jews,” adding that “There are a lot of people who would disagree with that. … It’s important that there be room for multiple approaches.”
The ADL’s findings also come as campus free-speech and campus-protest debates draw scrutiny from advocacy groups with different approaches. Responding to pressure on colleges from the ADL and the Trump administration, the Council on American-Islamic Relations launched an “Unhostile Campus Campaign” aimed at promoting free speech and academic freedom for pro-Palestinian students, faculty and staff. The ADL said schools it described as “most hostile” in CAIR’s latest report included Columbia University, the City University of New York and the University of Michigan.
Concern about antisemitism has also been growing internationally, with the ADL’s report arriving amid developments in other countries. In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said tougher action is needed against people chanting certain phrases at pro-Palestinian protests as British Jewish safety concerns increased after the stabbings of two Jewish men in London. In Australia, an inquiry commission examining antisemitism after a December massacre at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach heard from Jews who said escalating hatred had left them fearful and vulnerable, and the commission said antisemitic incidents nationwide had risen since the Oct. 7, 2023, Israel-Hamas war began.