On the day France honored Alfred Dreyfus, police were still investigating an alleged plot against a synagogue in Sarcelles. Short-term variations in recorded incidents do not establish a decline in antisemitism. The longer trend points in the opposite direction: historically elevated levels, record or rising violence in several countries, and a threat environment that remains more severe than it was before October 7, 2023.

Published: August 9, 2026

Abstract. The latest evidence does not support the conclusion that antisemitism is decreasing. Some monitoring systems recorded fewer incidents in 2025 than during the exceptional peaks of 2024, but those variations largely concerned particular categories and did not reverse the longer trend. Across the seven largest Jewish diaspora communities, the J7 reported 136 percent more incidents and 97 percent more violent incidents than in 2022. Physical assaults reached records in the United States and France, while Britain reported an 82 percent increase in assaults during the first half of 2026. In the European Union, 80 percent of Jewish respondents to the FRA survey said antisemitism had increased in their country over the previous five years. This article distinguishes movements in recorded case totals from the broader evidence on the prevalence, severity, and lived experience of antisemitism.

One Date, Two Scenes in France

On July 12, 2026, President Emmanuel Macron attended the unveiling of a statue honoring Alfred Dreyfus near France’s Cour de Cassation. The ceremony marked the wrongful conviction of the Jewish army officer whose case exposed the depth of antisemitism in the institutions of the Third Republic.

In Sarcelles, north of Paris, a separate investigation was unfolding. Around 300 people had been evacuated after a suspicious vehicle was found near a synagogue. French authorities later detained six people over a suspected attack plot. The national anti-terrorism prosecutor said the investigation concerned an alleged plan linked to Islamist extremism. The detentions and investigation were not convictions, and the suspects’ legal responsibility remained to be determined.¹⁴

The two events placed historical commemoration and present-day security on the same calendar. They also illustrated a wider pattern in the latest evidence: public institutions are devoting more resources to protecting Jewish sites while recorded antisemitism remains far above its earlier baseline and physical violence is increasing in several countries.

More Than 23,000 Incidents Across Seven Diaspora Communities

On July 29, the J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism reported more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025 across Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. According to the task force, those countries are home to more than 90 percent of the Jewish population living outside Israel.

The combined total was 136 percent higher than in 2022, the last full year before the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023 and the war that followed. Violent incidents were 97 percent higher than in 2022. Twenty people were killed in four attacks in Sydney, Manchester, Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colorado. The J7 described 2025 as the deadliest year for diaspora Jewish communities since the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.¹

Several national monitoring bodies recorded fewer incidents than during the exceptional peaks of 2024: 33 percent fewer in the United States, 20 percent fewer in Australia, and 16 percent fewer in both Canada and France. Those variations do not establish that antisemitism itself decreased. They were affected by changes in particular categories, including fewer campus encampment-related incidents and fewer waves of hoax bomb threats in the United States. The J7 reported that every country in its study remained substantially above its pre-October 7 level. Measured against 2022 rather than the 2024 peak, the combined direction was sharply upward.

The distinction is essential: incident databases count events reported to or verified by particular organizations. They do not directly measure every antisemitic belief, unreported encounter, discriminatory practice, security concern, or decision by a Jewish person to conceal an identity. A movement in one annual count can therefore describe a change in recorded events without demonstrating a comparable change in antisemitism across society.

International comparisons require care. Police services, community security organizations, government agencies, and civil-society monitors use different definitions and verification procedures. Some count only criminal offenses; others also record noncriminal harassment, propaganda, online abuse, or incidents reported directly by community members. The J7 figures are therefore useful for identifying broad direction and scale, but they do not form a fully harmonized ranking of countries.

How Accurate Numbers Can Produce a Misleading Narrative

A statistic does not have to be fabricated to mislead. The distortion can occur through framing: selecting an exceptional peak as the only baseline, omitting the longer series, combining events of very different severity, or presenting a change in recorded reports as a change in the underlying phenomenon.

France provides a clear example. The statement that the recorded total moved from 1,570 acts in 2024 to 1,320 in 2025 is arithmetically correct. Presented alone, however, it creates an impression of improvement that the wider evidence does not sustain. The 2025 total was still more than three times the 436 acts recorded in 2022, while physical violence reached a record 126 cases. The smaller aggregate number and the rise in violence are both true; using only the first produces an incomplete account.

The same problem appears in the United States. The fall from 9,354 recorded incidents in 2024 to 6,274 in 2025 was driven in significant part by fewer protest-related campus events and by the end of an exceptional wave of hoax bomb threats. It coexisted with a record number of physical assaults, three deaths, 32 attacks involving deadly weapons, and a total five times higher than a decade earlier. Describing that record simply as a 33 percent decline removes the information needed to understand what changed.

This is a form of statistical manipulation in the broad sense: not necessarily changing the figures, but arranging them so that one comparison dominates the reader’s interpretation. Common mechanisms include peak-to-current comparison, in which an exceptional high point replaces the historical baseline; category concealment, in which the events responsible for a numerical movement are left unexplained; severity flattening, in which an assault and a nonviolent incident contribute equally to the headline total; and concept substitution, in which fewer recorded incidents becomes “less antisemitism.”

Whether such framing is deliberate cannot be established from the published numbers alone. Demonstrating intent would require evidence about editorial choices, internal instructions, repeated omissions after correction, or a declared political purpose. The public evidence establishes something narrower: a headline about a “decline in antisemitism” is not supported when it relies only on a short-term incident count and omits the higher long-term baseline, record violence, survey evidence, and methodological limits. Deliberate or not, the resulting impression is misleading.

Britain: A Higher Assault Count in Early 2026

The Community Security Trust, or CST, recorded 1,926 antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom between January and June 2026. That was 21 percent more than in the same period of 2025 and the second-highest first-half total in the organization’s records.

The change in physical violence was sharper. CST recorded 135 assaults, up 82 percent from a year earlier and the highest six-month assault figure it has documented. With one case classified as extreme violence—the stabbing in Golders Green—CST counted 136 physical attacks. They represented 7 percent of all incidents, compared with 4 percent in the first half of 2025.²

Sixty-nine percent of those physical attacks occurred during the 77 days between the April 15 arson attack on Finchley Reform Synagogue and the end of June. CST also reported 680 online incidents, its highest first-half total.

Israel and the Middle East appeared frequently in the recorded material. CST classified 41 percent of all first-half incidents as containing references to Israel, Palestine, Hamas, or the conflict, and 35 percent as showing anti-Zionist motivation together with anti-Jewish language or targeting. Its methodology does not classify criticism of Israel, on its own, as an antisemitic incident. The relevant cases included an anti-Jewish element, motivation, or target as assessed by CST.

On July 13, the British government announced £251 million in security funding over three years. The package included more than 500 additional officers, protection for synagogues and schools, expanded counterterrorism capabilities, and antisemitism training for police in England and Wales.³

The same day, the government used new state-threat powers against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right. British authorities said the latter had claimed seven attacks against sites associated with Jewish and Israeli communities, and assessed that members of the IRGC Quds Force had almost certainly directed its operations. That statement was a British government assessment, not a judicial finding published in the cited release.⁴

The United States: Why a Lower Recorded Total Did Not Mean Less Antisemitism

The Anti-Defamation League recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2025, compared with 9,354 in 2024. Campus incidents were 66 percent lower, a change the ADL associated in large part with the reduced encampment activity that had driven the spring 2024 spike. The total at Jewish institutions was also affected by the disappearance of an unusually large wave of hoax bomb and swatting threats: the ADL counted 59 bomb threats in 2025, compared with 627 in 2024 and 996 in 2023.

Against that background, the smaller aggregate count cannot be treated as proof that antisemitism receded. The year 2025 was still the third-highest in the ADL’s records. The total averaged 17 incidents a day, more than twice the daily average for 2020 through 2022 and five times the level recorded a decade earlier. Physical assaults reached a record. Three people were killed, at least 300 people were assaulted, and 32 attacks involved deadly weapons.⁵

The figures separate a short-term change in recorded volume from the underlying trend. Fewer protest-linked events and mass hoax threats reduced the overall count, while the ten-year comparison and the record assault figure continued to point upward.

Campus disputes also remained under federal review. On August 6, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened Title VI investigations into San Francisco State University and San Jose State University. The complaints alleged threats, exclusion, classroom hostility, physical attacks, antisemitic graffiti, and inadequate institutional responses. The department stated that opening an investigation did not mean it had made a finding against either university.⁶

American reporting attributes incidents to more than one ideological source. The cited datasets include white-supremacist propaganda and conspiracy theories, Islamist extremism, anti-Israel activity involving anti-Jewish language or targeting, and incidents for which no clear ideology was established. The categories and evidentiary thresholds vary by monitoring organization.

Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

In Canada, the federal government’s Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences survey recorded widespread concern among participating Jewish students. Of the respondents, 95.7 percent said they had experienced or witnessed at least one antisemitic incident in the previous 12 months. Seventy percent said their university did not take antisemitism seriously; 68 percent viewed their campus as unsafe or noninclusive for Jewish students; 72 percent limited what they said in class about being Jewish; and 57 percent avoided displaying Jewish symbols.⁷

The survey’s methodology limits claims about national prevalence. It was conducted in November and December 2025, retained 900 responses, recruited substantially through Jewish student and community networks, and was not weighted to represent the entire Canadian student population. It is best read as a detailed account of the experiences of the respondents rather than as a random national survey.

Australia entered 2026 after the killing of 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in December 2025. The J7 report said Australia’s annual incident level had risen 270 percent since 2021, the largest increase among the seven countries in its study. A Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is examining the attack, the wider drivers of antisemitism, law-enforcement readiness, and the spread of extremism. Its final report is due in December 2026.⁸

New Zealand’s Jewish Council and Community Security Group recorded 143 incidents in 2025, the highest annual total in their dataset. The total included five assaults and 15 cases involving the desecration of or damage to Jewish sites.⁹

The European Union: A Strategy Without Fully Comparable Data

Germany’s Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism, known as RIAS, recorded 8,725 incidents in 2025—an average of almost 24 a day and the highest annual total in its series. That was slightly above the 8,627 incidents recorded in 2024 and more than three times the 2,480 recorded in 2022. The 2025 cases included four incidents of extreme violence, 178 assaults, and 257 threats. RIAS classified 68 percent as Israel-related. It also recorded 807 incidents linked to right-wing extremism, the highest number in that category in its data.¹⁰

The coexistence of these categories is an important feature of the European data. National reports describe incidents associated with neo-Nazi and white-supremacist movements, Islamist extremism, conspiracy theories, anti-Israel mobilization involving anti-Jewish content, and combinations of those sources. The number attributed to each category depends on the information available and the method used by the reporting body.

The European Union’s 2021–2030 strategy is organized around preventing antisemitism, protecting and fostering Jewish life, and supporting education and Holocaust remembrance. In 2026, the European Commission’s working group focused on incident recording, the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition, online and AI-mediated content, and cooperation with Jewish communities.¹¹

Yet the EU still lacks a single, directly comparable incident series across its member states. National systems differ on whether and how they count online content, threats, vandalism, hate speech, noncriminal abuse, and incidents reported to community groups rather than police. That variation makes year-to-year national trends more reliable than simple cross-country league tables.

A separate survey by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 96 percent of Jewish respondents had encountered antisemitism during the year before the survey; 80 percent believed antisemitism had increased in their country during the previous five years; 75 percent felt that people held them responsible for actions by the Israeli government; and 76 percent said they concealed their Jewish identity at least occasionally. The fieldwork was completed before October 7, 2023. In a later consultation reported by the FRA, some national Jewish organizations described increases of more than 400 percent after the attacks and the beginning of the war.¹²¹⁸

France: 1,320 Recorded Acts and a New National Plan

France recorded 1,320 antisemitic acts in 2025, compared with 1,570 in 2024. That year-to-year movement did not amount to a return to earlier conditions: the 2025 total was still more than three times the 436 acts recorded in 2022. According to the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive, physical violence reached a record 126 cases in 2025, up from 106 in 2024. People were the targets in 67.4 percent of recorded acts. Antisemitic acts also represented 53 percent of all anti-religious incidents, although Jews make up less than 1 percent of the French population.¹³¹⁷

On July 6, the government introduced a national plan against racism, antisemitism, and discrimination linked to origin for 2026–2029. Its 55 measures include increasing annual student visits to memorial sites from 500,000 to 800,000; training 1,000 Valeurs de la République specialists and 19,000 school leaders and inspectors; adding antisemitism content to initial teacher education; expanding training for police and gendarmes; improving complaint procedures; publishing conviction and sentencing data; simplifying the reporting of online hate; and requiring every department to adopt a territorial plan by early 2027.¹⁵

Several elements of the plan are measurable, including training totals, memorial visits, departmental plans, and the publication of judicial data. As of August 9, 2026, the plan was still in its opening phase, so evidence about implementation and outcomes was not yet available.

France’s public debate also continues to address the boundary between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Criticism of an Israeli government, its policies, or military conduct is not inherently antisemitic. Monitoring organizations cited in this article generally require an anti-Jewish element, motivation, stereotype, or target before classifying an Israel-related event as antisemitic. The FRA survey nevertheless found that many European Jews reported being held personally responsible for decisions of the Israeli government, a distinct form of collective attribution.

Israel remains relevant to the demographic context as well as the political debate. The Knesset’s Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs reported in November 2025 that immigration to Israel had continued during the war, drawing on figures presented to the committee. Those data describe migration to Israel; they do not, on their own, establish why every individual chose to move or how many departures were caused specifically by antisemitism.¹⁶

Why the Recorded Variations Do Not Show a Decline in Antisemitism

The available evidence points to three concurrent developments, none of which supports a broad conclusion that antisemitism is decreasing.

First, a comparison with the exceptional 2024 peak can obscure the longer movement. Some organizations recorded fewer events in 2025, but the J7 total remained 136 percent above 2022. France remained more than three times above its 2022 count. The United States remained five times above the level recorded a decade earlier. Australia was 270 percent above 2021. Germany reached another record. These longer comparisons describe an increase, not a return to the previous baseline.

Second, violence increased even where aggregate counts were smaller. The United States and France recorded new highs in physical assaults in 2025. Britain reported an 82 percent increase in assaults in the first half of 2026. Across the J7 countries, violent incidents remained 97 percent above 2022, and 2025 was the deadliest year for diaspora Jews in more than three decades.

Third, incident totals do not capture the full social reality. The FRA found that 80 percent of Jewish respondents believed antisemitism had increased over five years and 76 percent concealed their identity at least occasionally. Canada’s campus survey documented widespread avoidance and perceptions of insecurity among its respondents. These measures concern experience and behavior, not simply the number of events entered into an annual database.

The data do not support a single explanation for all incidents, and they do not allow precise country rankings without methodological qualifications. They do support a narrower but firm conclusion: short-term fluctuations in recorded events are not evidence of a general decline. Across the longer series, measures of volume, violence, perceived deterioration, concealment of Jewish identity, and institutional security demand show antisemitism remaining historically elevated and, on several important indicators, increasing.

Conclusion

By early August 2026, the most recent evidence did not establish a decline in antisemitism. Some databases contained fewer recorded events than at the exceptional 2024 peak, but the longer series remained sharply higher: the J7 measured a 136 percent increase in total incidents and a 97 percent increase in violent incidents compared with 2022. Germany remained at a record, Britain’s first-half total and assault count rose, and physical violence reached records in the United States and France.

Several important questions remain open. Australia’s Royal Commission is due to report in December 2026. France has not yet produced outcome data for its 2026–2029 plan. The U.S. campus investigations cited here are still investigations, not findings. Future official releases will provide additional evidence on violence, reporting, prosecution, institutional security, and the durability of the post-2023 increase.

Notes and References

1. J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism, “2025 Was the Deadliest Year for Antisemitic Attacks in the Diaspora in Over 30 Years”, July 29, 2026.
2. Community Security Trust, Antisemitic Incidents: January–June 2026, August 2026.
3. UK Home Office, “Record Investment to Protect Jewish Communities”, July 13, 2026.
4. UK Home Office and Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, “Support for IRGC Outlawed in Crackdown on Foreign State Proxies”, July 13, 2026.
5. Anti-Defamation League, Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025, June 5, 2026.
6. U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights, “U.S. Department of Education Investigates Alleged Antisemitic Harassment at Two California Universities”, August 6, 2026.
7. Government of Canada, Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences, August 2026.
8. Associated Press, “Australia’s Leader Announces a Royal Commission into Antisemitism After Bondi Mass Shooting”, January 8, 2026.
9. New Zealand Jewish Council and Community Security Group, Annual Report on Antisemitism in New Zealand in 2025—Executive Summary, 2026.
10. Federal Association RIAS, Antisemitic Incidents in Germany 2025, June 17, 2026.
11. European Commission, “Working Group on the Implementation of the EU Strategy on Combating Antisemitism and Fostering Jewish Life”, updated July 2026.
12. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Jewish People’s Experiences and Perceptions of Antisemitism—Third Survey, July 11, 2024.
13. Reuters, “Macron Calls for Stronger Measures Against Antisemitism in France”, February 13, 2026.
14. Reuters, “France Detains Six Over Suspected Plot Targeting Synagogue”, July 25, 2026.
15. DILCRAH, Government of France, Plan national de lutte contre le racisme, l’antisémitisme et les discriminations liées à l’origine, 2026–2029, July 6, 2026.
16. Knesset Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs, “Despite the War, We’ve Seen a Positive Increase in Aliyah to Israel”, November 17, 2025.
17. Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive, “Les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France en 2025”, 2026.
18. European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, “Jews in Europe Still Face High Levels of Antisemitism”, July 11, 2024.