Majority of Americans say antisemitism is increasing in the US – poll

New poll shows most Americans believe antisemitism is rising in the US, while just 6% say it is falling.

By World Israel News Staff

A majority of American voters believe antisemitism has increased in the United States in recent years, according to a new national survey released as federal data show anti-Jewish hate crimes remain near historically high levels.

The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll found that 56% of registered voters believe antisemitism has increased compared with a few years ago, including 29% who said it has increased “a lot” and 27% who said it has increased “somewhat.”

Another 23% said antisemitism has remained about the same, while just 6% said it has decreased.

The survey was conducted by Noble Predictive Insights from Aug. 12 through Aug. 16 among 2,533 registered voters nationwide. The sample included 930 Republicans, 930 Democrats and 673 independents and had a stated margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points.

The findings come shortly after the FBI released its 2025 national crime statistics, showing that hate crime overall declined last year but remained widespread. Law enforcement agencies reported 10,881 hate crime incidents involving 13,026 offenses in 2025.

Nearly 16,800 law enforcement agencies participated in the FBI’s hate-crime data collection, covering approximately 95% of the US population.

Anti-Jewish hate crimes remained disproportionately common.

The FBI data showed 1,528 single-bias anti-Jewish hate crime incidents in 2025, down 21% from the record 1,938 recorded in 2024. Despite the decline, anti-Jewish incidents accounted for approximately 63% of all religion-based hate crimes reported nationally and made 2025 the third-highest year on record for anti-Jewish hate crimes.

Jews make up roughly 2% of the US population but were the targets of approximately 14% of all reported hate crimes in 2025, according to an Anti-Defamation League analysis of the FBI figures.

Separate ADL data, which include antisemitic harassment and vandalism that do not necessarily qualify as crimes, recorded 6,274 antisemitic incidents in 2025 — an average of 17 per day.

That represented a 33% decline from the extraordinary 9,354 incidents recorded in 2024, but was still five times the level recorded a decade earlier and remained the third-highest annual total since the ADL began collecting such data in 1979.

Physical violence moved in the opposite direction. The ADL documented a record 203 antisemitic assaults in 2025, up 4% from the previous year, while attacks involving deadly weapons increased 39%, from 23 to 32.

Three people were killed in antisemitic attacks during the year, according to the organization.

They included two Israeli Embassy employees murdered outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington in May and a victim who later died from injuries suffered when an attacker threw Molotov cocktails at participants in a pro-Israel gathering in Boulder, Colorado, in June.

“Numbers that would have shocked us five years ago are now our floor,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said when the organization’s 2025 audit was released.

Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America, told The Center Square that the new polling was consistent with what Jewish communities have been experiencing.

Fingerhut, a former Democratic congressman, said antisemitism accelerated following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023 terrorist attack on Israel and blamed a combination of anti-Israel rhetoric, social media and political extremism on both the left and right.

“You have the spreading of it through social media, and then now we also have this extreme push from both extremes,” Fingerhut said.

He also pointed to anti-Israel activism on college campuses, where demonstrations and encampments spread across universities following the outbreak of the Gaza war.

Other polling indicates that American Jews themselves perceive the increase in antisemitism considerably more strongly than the general population.

An American Jewish Committee survey released in February found 86% of American Jews believed antisemitism had increased in the United States since Oct. 7, including 50% who said it had increased “a lot.”

Ninety-three percent described antisemitism as a problem in the United States, while 66% believed Jews were less secure than they had been a year earlier.

More than half — 55% — said they had changed their behavior in at least one way because of fear of antisemitism. Forty-one percent had avoided displaying something that would identify them as Jewish, 39% had refrained from posting material online that would identify them as Jewish or reveal their views on Jewish issues, and 30% had avoided particular places or events because of safety concerns.

The AJC’s separate survey of the general US population found that 70% considered antisemitism either a very serious or somewhat serious problem, suggesting concern extends well beyond the Jewish community itself.

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