Antisemitism is now the baseline, not a spike

On the last night of Hanukkah, a gunman opened fire on a candle-lighting celebration on Bondi Beach, killing Rabbi Eli Schlanger and fourteen others.

I had been in Sydney just a week earlier for the first-ever J7 Task Force Against Antisemitism Summit in Australia. My colleagues spent that Shabbat with Rabbi Schlanger’s family, enjoying Shabbat services and lunch together. They remarked on how welcoming Rabbi Ulman was, the Chabad of Bondi’s leader, and of the particular warmth of Rabbi Schlanger, his evident pride in his family and his eagerness to engage, to do more and to make a difference.

A year earlier, amid a wave of antisemitic incidents in Australia, he had posted a video of himself dancing on Hanukkah, telling his community that lighting menorahs publicly and unapologetically was “the best response to antisemitism.” A week after we met his family, he organized the community’s annual Chanukah by the Sea event, a candle-lighting on Bondi Beach which attracted families, community members, and even curious beach-goers. He was 41, the father of five children. He, as well as 14 others, did not get to return home, among them a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor.

Last year was the deadliest year for antisemitic violence in Australia and also for the entire Jewish diaspora in more than 30 years, since the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994. As our second annual J7 Report on Antisemitism underscores, 20 people were killed in terrorist attacks targeting Jews last year: at that Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, at a Yom Kippur service in Manchester, at an event at a Jewish museum in Washington D.C., at a peaceful demonstration in Boulder.

Tragically, those horrific deaths are part of a larger pattern. More than 23,000 antisemitic incidents were recorded across the seven largest Jewish diaspora communities in 2025 alone, with total incidents up 136 percent and violent incidents up 97% since 2022, the year before Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Some countries saw incidents dip this year; others saw them climb, but every one of the seven remains far above where it stood before October 7. As the J7 Task Force put it plainly: this is no longer a surge, it is our new normal.

Nowhere is that baseline higher than in Germany, which again recorded the highest rate of antisemitic incidents relative to its Jewish population of any J7 country: nearly 70 incidents for every 1,000 Jewish residents in 2025. That is almost five times Australia’s rate, six times the United Kingdom’s, and nearly 70 times the rate in the United States. It is a number that should be unacceptable to a country that has spent 80 years building institutions meant to prevent exactly this.

Looking back over the years tells a worrying story. Between 2021 and 2025, the sharpest increases of antisemitic incidents among J7 countries were Australia, up 270%, Germany, up 215%, the United States, up 131%, and France, up 124%. These are incredibly concerning numbers coming from some of the most established, long-standing Jewish communities in the world.

But hatred is not only growing, it’s also changing shape. Antisemitism increasingly hides behind anti-Zionist language and action: such incidents made up 48% of all antisemitic incidents in the U.K., 45% in the U.S. and 23% in Germany. This is the cover under which so much antisemitic incitement now travels, waved through by online platforms, universities and even some governments as protected political speech rather than addressing how it serves to target Jews.

None of these trends are “just” a Jewish problem. Democracies have long paid the price for allowing antisemitism to fester in their society. The data on rising incidents, rising violence and rising online radicalization describes that same trend taking place in real time, especially in democracies that consider themselves immune to antisemitism.

The J7 Task Force‘s demand has never been more urgent: governments and law enforcement must stop reacting only after Jews are attacked and start acting beforehand, with real, sustained security funding rather than emergency gestures announced after a deadly incident. Prevention also belongs in classrooms where sustained education about antisemitism can build resistance to hatred before it’s too late. Perpetrators must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, including when their incitement arrives dressed as “merely” anti-Zionism rather than the antisemitism it is. Technology companies, meanwhile, must finally enforce the content policies they already claim to have, with real transparency and genuine cooperation with the civil society organizations doing the work of tracking this hatred in real time.

Rabbi Schlanger’s family was on that beach with him. They went home that night; he did not. His answer to the danger he saw coming was to be proud, open and unwavering, to celebrate Judaism rather than hide it. Governments, civil society, law enforcement and technology companies owe us the same courage. Anything less is to allow the next tragedy to unfold in real time.