The Anti-Defamation League released its annual report on antisemitic incidents, documenting a rough year for the safety of Jews, with some silver linings.
According to the anti-hate organization, 2025 totaled the third-most antisemitic incidents since the ADL began tracking incidents in 1979.
However, the number of incidents decreased compared to 2024, with 6,552 events of harassment or vandalism being cataloged in 2024, compared to 6,274 in 2025. Still, that total figure averages out to more than 17 incidents per day.
However, Carol Ann Schwartz, the national president of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization, said that interpreting the overall decrease as a silver lining is ignoring the larger context.
“I think it’s really misleading, because any Jewish organization you talk to, we’ve shifted. We’ve pivoted. If you went to our national conference this past year, we used to have lanyards that [said] Hadassah. Our lanyards didn’t say Hadassah [this year],” she said
Schwartz said that, as of recently, she travels under a false name that is less Jewish-presenting than “Schwartz.” Her point is that, maybe, incidents have gone down simply because Jews are feeling a need to hide.
Maryland ranked ninth in the nation in total incidents in 2025 at 181. However, according to the ADL’s report, that total represents one of the steepest declines in incidents among larger states — a 49% drop from 2024.
Additionally, the report shows Montgomery County accounted for two-thirds of all reported incidents in Maryland.
The ADL also noted that, as in 2024, the location type with the highest number of incidents was non-Jewish K-12 schools, where Maryland ranked first at 34%. According to the ADL, other states tend to report more incidents in public areas.
“What we are seeing is the vast majority [of antisemitic incidents reported to the ADL in 2025] reflect direct student-on-student harassment, using Nazi terms and salutes and saying slurs like, ‘dirty Jew’ or ‘kike,’” Tali Cohen, the regional director of Anti-Defamation League, Washington, D.C., told Baltimore Jewish Times. “We are actually not seeing Israel-related and Gaza-related peer-to-peer bullying the same way that we are seeing this more traditional antisemitic content.”
That discovery surprised Cohen, she said. “We’re harkening back to a time of more traditional antisemitic language and imagery in [K-12] schools” reminiscent of “our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.”
While harassment and vandalism decreased by 39% and 21%, respectively, assaults increased from 196 in 2024 to a total of 203 in 2025.
Nationally, last year, three people were killed in antisemitic attacks in Boulder, Colorado, and Washington, D.C. The ADL reported that 2025 marked the first year since 2019 that Jews in the U.S. were killed in such assaults.
A Hadassah member, Karen Diamond, was murdered in the Boulder attack. Schwartz said that the entire worldwide organization rallied around the Boulder chapter. She added that it’s important to remember that, while this study covers American antisemitism, Jewish communities around the world have been under attack in similar ways.
“We do this around the world, and we heard from so many of our Zionist family from around the world who were so affected by what happened to Karen Diamond, because they were affected as well, and then what happened on Bondi Beach as well — our members around the world, again, reached out to Hadassah Australia, because it hurt them so much,” Schwartz said.
Other notable attacks that didn’t result in deaths were the firebombing of the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania, targeting the state’s Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro, as well as a stabbing in Brooklyn, New York. In total, there were 32 antisemitic assaults that involved a deadly weapon last year, compared to 23 in 2024.
Total incidents have skyrocketed since the Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks by Hamas on Israel, which exacerbated a schism in American society between supporters and opponents of Israel. The conflict also coincided with a rise in antisemitic incidents targeting Jews regardless of their views on Israel.
The ADL notes in its new report that of the 32 antisemitic assaults, only seven were explicitly based on a victim’s perceived or real support for Israel.
The report also states where antisemitism was most common in both 2025 and 2024. In order, they were “public area,” “Jewish institution,” “college or university,” “K-12 school,” “business,” “home,” “government building,” and “other.”
All locations, except “other,” saw a decrease, save “government building” which wasn’t tracked prior to 2025.
Antisemitism on college campuses has been a prominent issue since Oct. 7, with encampments forming at a number of schools at the end of the 2024 school year. To date, that trend has largely tapered off. There have also been fewer antisemitic incidents on college campuses. The ADL reported that, in 2025, there was an 83% decrease in incidents from the prior year.
Across the country, Jewish institutions have been funding increased internal security measures as they continue to be exposed to antisemitism. While the number of incidents decreased in 2025 by 34% from the year before, incidents still totaled 1,129. One statistic in the report that is encouraging is the stark decrease in bomb threats made to synagogues. The 2025 number dropped to 59 from 627 in 2024 and 996 in 2023.
The report is based on incident reports of criminal and noncriminal action. Individuals, groups, organizations, the media and law enforcement report to the ADL, which compiles the information. It only covers what is reported to the ADL.
The ADL also investigates the credibility of each report, obtaining “independent verification when possible.”
Each incident is counted once, including spree incidents, regardless of how many times it is reported. For example, multiple antisemitic flyers placed around a neighborhood would count as one incident.
For Schwartz, it’s important to remember that this isn’t just a situation in which a collective series of statistics is the story. Each individual experience happened to a real person, and that’s important to remember. Hadassah initiated its own study to detail these anecdotes, and they are heartbreaking, she said.
“[We found that] two-thirds of Jewish women were feeling unsafe because of their identity. They were hiding their hamsas. They were hiding their Stars of David. They would walk out of the day schools, the Jewish day schools with their children and have them put baseball caps on, having them hide their tzitzit if they were wearing them, and they didn’t like that feeling,” Schwartz said. “I talked to one mom who said she came out of the day school one day and there were antisemitic flyers on the cars. And yes, they called the police, and yes, they called the FBI, and yes, they got everyone involved, but it was that feeling that they were so violated.”
