he Antisemitism Observatory · Weekly report

New York recorded fewer confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes in August than a year earlier. The broader evidence—an increase over the first eight months, record British assault figures, heightened synagogue security in France, and a new Australian prosecution—does not establish a wider decline in antisemitism.

PARIS, September 6, 2026

Abstract. New York City’s newest police figures show how a correct monthly number can support an incorrect conclusion. Confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes fell from 22 in August 2025 to 19 in August 2026, yet they rose 8 percent over the first eight months of the year and remained a majority of all confirmed hate crimes. France has ordered reinforced security around Jewish worship during the High Holy Days. A British court applied a hate-crime sentencing uplift in an attack outside a Jewish school, while Australia extended its national inquiry and charged a man over alleged antisemitic threats. The evidence documents continued exposure, not a broad retreat of antisemitism.

Three incidents can change the apparent direction of a monthly statistic. In New York City, that is precisely the difference between the 22 confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes recorded in August 2025 and the 19 recorded in August 2026. The 13.6 percent decline is mathematically correct. Read alone, however, it gives the wrong account of the year.

The New York Police Department reported on September 3 that 229 anti-Jewish hate crimes had been confirmed during the first eight months of 2026, up from 212 in the same period of 2025. That is an 8 percent increase. Anti-Jewish offenses made up 53.9 percent of all confirmed hate crimes in the city, while the NYPD estimated that Jewish New Yorkers comprise about 10 percent of the population. The same release counted 25 anti-Jewish incidents reported in August, of which 19 had been confirmed under the department’s legal classification process at the time of publication.

This distinction matters. The NYPD Hate Crime Task Force investigates incidents reported or flagged as potentially bias-motivated and, in consultation with the department’s Legal Bureau, determines whether they meet New York State’s hate-crime standard. “Reported” and “confirmed” are therefore different stages, not rival versions of the same fact. The department also warns that its figures are preliminary and may be revised.

Why the August figure does not show a decline in antisemitism

A one-month comparison is highly sensitive to timing, small numbers, reporting behavior, investigative lag, and later reclassification. It does not measure the prevalence of antisemitic beliefs, the number of incidents never reported, the fear experienced by Jewish residents, or the cost of protecting Jewish institutions. Nor can three fewer confirmed crimes in a single month outweigh a year-to-date increase of 17 confirmed anti-Jewish crimes.

The broader American baseline points in the same direction. The FBI’s 2025 national data recorded fewer single-bias anti-Jewish hate crimes than in the exceptional peak year of 2024: 1,528, down from 1,938. Yet 2025 remained the third-highest year in the federal series, and anti-Jewish offenses represented about 63 percent of all religion-motivated hate-crime incidents. FBI data are limited to criminal offenses reported by participating law-enforcement agencies; they are not a census of antisemitism or even of every hate crime.

The Anti-Defamation League, using a different incident-monitoring methodology, recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in 2025—33 percent fewer than in 2024, but five times the total of a decade earlier. The composition of that change is central. Campus incidents fell by 66 percent, largely because the encampment movement that drove a large share of the 2024 surge diminished. Physical assaults did not follow the headline total downward: the ADL recorded 203 assaults, its highest annual number, including 32 incidents involving deadly weapons. Three people were killed in antisemitic attacks in 2025.

An accurate short-term number becomes misleading when it is treated as proof of a broader social improvement that the dataset does not measure. The public evidence reviewed for this edition demonstrates the misleading effect of that substitution. It does not establish that the officials or news organizations using the number intended to deceive.

The New York figures illustrate the same problem on a smaller time scale. August’s confirmed count moved down. The eight-month count moved up. Anti-Jewish offenses still formed a majority of the city’s confirmed hate crimes. The defensible formulation is therefore that fewer confirmed anti-Jewish hate crimes were recorded in August than in August 2025—not that antisemitism declined.

France enters the High Holy Days under reinforced protection

France’s Interior Minister, Laurent Nuñez, sent instructions to prefects and senior police and gendarmerie officials on August 31 to reinforce protection around synagogues and Jewish gatherings during the month of Tishrei. The instruction, reported by Le Parisien on August 31 and by Agence France-Presse on September 5, called for “extreme vigilance” in view of the continuing terrorist threat and international tensions.

The measures cover Rosh Hashanah, which begins on September 11, Yom Kippur beginning on September 20, and Sukkot beginning on September 25. They include greater police visibility at arrival and departure times, patrols during services, coordination with municipal police and Jewish community representatives, video surveillance, and additional support from Operation Sentinelle at particularly sensitive sites.

This is a security instruction, not an incident statistic. It nevertheless documents the institutional burden that accompanies the present threat assessment. Houses of worship cannot be described as operating in a normalized environment when attendance during major religious observances requires reinforced patrols, fixed police positions, surveillance, and possible military support.

The latest full-year figures explain the context. On February 12, the French Interior Ministry said 1,320 antisemitic acts had been recorded in 2025, 16 percent fewer than in 2024. The ministry immediately added that the level remained historically high: the three years since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel were the highest in the ministry’s 25-year series. Antisemitic acts represented 53 percent of all anti-religious acts recorded in France. The ministry also cautions that these counts are not an official statistical series, although it uses them to identify general trends.

Longer comparison changes the meaning of the annual movement. France recorded 436 antisemitic acts in 2022, the last full year before October 7. The 2025 total was therefore more than three times the 2022 figure. The Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive and CRIF further reported 126 cases of physical violence in 2025, up from 106 in 2024 and the highest number in their series. A lower total accompanied by more physical attacks does not demonstrate a broad reduction in antisemitism.

It would be equally incorrect to infer that every security measure proves a specific imminent plot. The August 31 instruction cited a general terrorist threat and persistent international tensions. It did not announce a new identified operation against a named synagogue. The evidentiary point is narrower: French authorities judge that Jewish worship during the coming holidays requires exceptional protection against a backdrop they continue to describe as historically elevated.

Britain: a conviction sits within record levels of assault

On August 27, Stratford Magistrates’ Court sentenced Syeda Khatun to 12 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, after her conviction for a racially aggravated attack outside a Jewish secondary school in north London. The Crown Prosecution Service said Khatun had directed antisemitic abuse at a mother carrying a baby and at children waiting outside the school on May 10. When a father challenged her, she struck him in the face and pulled his beard while continuing the abuse.

Khatun was convicted after trial on July 3. Prosecutors said eyewitness testimony and CCTV evidence supported the case. The court applied a hate-crime sentencing uplift after the prosecution proved hostility toward the victims’ Jewish ethnicity. This is therefore no longer an allegation about whether the attack occurred or whether the hostility was antisemitic: it is a conviction and a judicially recognized aggravating factor. The suspended sentence, however, means she was not ordered to begin serving the prison term immediately.

The case is consistent with, but does not itself prove, the national trend recorded by the Community Security Trust. CST logged 1,926 antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2026, 21 percent more than in the first half of 2025 and the second-highest January-to-June total in its records. It recorded 135 assaults, an 82 percent increase and the highest six-month figure for that category. Together with one case classified as extreme violence, physical attacks accounted for 7 percent of the total, compared with 4 percent in the first half of 2025.

Exposure around Jewish institutions also increased. CST recorded 96 incidents targeting synagogues, their congregants, or staff at synagogue premises, plus 21 involving congregants traveling to or from prayer. The combined 117 reports were 31 percent above the equivalent figure for 2025 and the highest first-half total recorded. School-related cases rose 59 percent to 178, including 21 assaults.

The pre-October baseline is stark. CST’s monthly average was 161 incidents during the six months before October 7, 2023. It was 321 during the first half of 2026, a 99 percent increase. The monitor does not search the internet for material to add to its count; online incidents enter the dataset only when reported by a victim, witness, or third party and when the offender or victim is based in the United Kingdom. CST also excluded 2,264 potential incidents because, after assessment, they did not show antisemitic language, motivation, or targeting. Some involved anti-Israel activity without anti-Jewish content. That exclusion is a concrete example of the necessary distinction between criticism or protest concerning Israel and antisemitism.

On September 2, the House of Commons Library announced that Parliament will hold a Westminster Hall debate on the safety of the Jewish community on September 8. At the time of this article, the debate had not occurred and the Library’s substantive briefing was still pending. It should not be reported as a parliamentary finding. It is, for now, a scheduled proceeding whose official evidence and statements will form part of next week’s record.

The European Union’s numbers remain structurally non-comparable

No new harmonized European Union incident total was released this week. That absence should not be filled by adding national figures that were produced under different definitions. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights said in its January 27, 2026 review that member states use inconsistent recording systems and that national data therefore cannot simply be compared. Some series count criminal offenses, others include non-criminal harassment, and reporting pathways and police recognition of bias differ.

The same report also shows why administrative totals are incomplete. In the FRA’s most recent large survey, conducted from January through June 2023, 96 percent of Jewish respondents said they had experienced at least one form of antisemitism during the preceding year, while very few reported incidents to an authority or monitoring body. Because that survey predates October 7, it cannot measure the subsequent surge. It does, however, document underreporting before the present period and prevents recorded incidents from being mistaken for the full prevalence of antisemitism.

France’s annual series, Britain’s CST reports, New York’s legally confirmed hate crimes, the FBI’s police-based national data, and the ADL’s civil-society audit each answer a different question. Their signals can be assessed together, but their counts cannot be ranked as though they came from a single measurement system.

Australia: a new charge and a delayed national finding

Australian federal and Queensland police announced on September 2 that a 52-year-old man from Mossman had been charged with two counts of making threats with an aggravating circumstance involving serious vilification or hate crime. Police allege that the case concerns abusive, threatening, and antisemitic content directed at a religious organization. Officers arrested the man on August 27 after searching a Mossman property and seized an electronic communications device for forensic examination.

The investigation was conducted by the recently established joint Queensland Police Service–Australian Federal Police Hate Crime Team. The defendant is due to appear at Cairns Magistrates Court on September 21. The alleged content has been characterized as antisemitic by the investigating authorities, but the facts have not been proved at trial. He is charged, not convicted, and the investigation remains open.

Separately, Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion announced on September 3 that the federal government had extended its deadline for a final report from December 14 to December 18, 2026. The commission completed its ninth and final public hearing block on August 26. Its hearings have examined Jewish community security, universities, protests and policing, drivers of antisemitism and radicalization, and social cohesion.

The extension is procedural and should not be presented as a substantive conclusion. The commission has gathered evidence and issued an interim report, but its final findings on prevalence, drivers, institutional performance, and the circumstances surrounding the December 2025 Bondi Beach attack remain pending.

A documented pattern, with precise limits

The strongest new statistic this week is not New York’s three-case monthly decrease. It is the coexistence of that decrease with an 8 percent rise over the first eight months and a continued majority share of all confirmed hate crimes. France’s reinforced protection of Jewish worship, Britain’s court record and unprecedented assault count, and Australia’s new alleged-threat prosecution describe different legal and institutional realities. None is directly interchangeable with another.

Taken together, the evidence does not establish a broad decline in antisemitism. It shows historically elevated recorded levels, increased physical violence in several major series, persistent targeting of Jewish institutions, and continuing security demands. Some categories and short periods have recorded fewer incidents. Those decreases should be reported accurately. They should not be converted into a conclusion the evidence cannot support.

The next official additions to the record are the British parliamentary debate and briefing scheduled for September 8, the Mossman defendant’s first listed court appearance on September 21, and the Australian Royal Commission’s final report due December 18. New York’s September crime release and France’s next full-year national count will provide later tests of whether the current patterns persist.

Notes and references

1. NYPD Announces Safest Summer for Shooting Incidents, Shooting Victims, and Murders in Recorded History, New York Police Department, September 3, 2026.
2. Hate Crime Statistics, Federal Bureau of Investigation, accessed September 6, 2026.
3. 2025 Marked Third-Highest Year on Record for Anti-Jewish Hate Crimes, FBI Reports, Anti-Defamation League, August 17, 2026.
4. Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025, Anti-Defamation League, 2026.
5. “Une extrême vigilance”: Laurent Nuñez demande de renforcer la sécurité autour des lieux de culte, Le Parisien, August 31, 2026.
6. Actes antireligieux—Tendances 2025, French Ministry of the Interior, February 12, 2026.
7. Les chiffres de l’antisémitisme en France en 2025, CRIF, February 12, 2026.
8. Woman convicted of antisemitic attack outside Jewish secondary school in north London, Crown Prosecution Service, updated August 28, 2026.
9. Antisemitic Incidents January–June 2026, Community Security Trust, August 5, 2026.
10. The safety of the Jewish community, House of Commons Library, September 2, 2026.
11. Monitoring and recording antisemitism in the EU—State of play and ways forward, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, January 27, 2026.
12. Hate crime and vilification charges laid over alleged antisemitic threats, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, September 2, 2026.
13. Australian Government extends reporting deadline to 18 December 2026, Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, September 3, 2026.
14. Hearing Block 9, Sydney, Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, August 26, 2026.