ADL: 2025 was deadliest year for antisemitic violence against the Jewish diaspora in over 30 years, with 20 killed

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released its annual antisemitism report on Wednesday 29 July 2026, revealing that 2025 saw the highest number of fatal antisemitic attacks against the Jewish diaspora in over three decades. The New York-based organization recorded 20 murders across four attacks in Sydney, Manchester, Washington and Boulder, alongside more than 23,000 antisemitism incidents in seven countries that together represent over 90 percent of the Jewish population outside Israel. The report labels 2025 as the deadliest year since the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish centre in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people.

A year of deadly attacks

The 20 fatalities reported for 2025 mark the first time since 1994 that antisemitic violence against the diaspora has reached a double-digit death toll in a single year. The attacks struck three continents: the Sydney incident in Australia, the Manchester attack in the United Kingdom, and the shootings or assaults in Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colorado, in the United States. The ADL’s data show that no other year in its tracking, apart from 1994, had approached this level of lethal antisemitic violence against Jews living outside Israel.

Antisemitism is no longer a passing flare-up, it's our new normal.

A surge in incidents across the J7

The ADL monitors antisemitic incidents in a group it calls the J7: the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina and Australia. In 2025, these nations saw a combined total of more than 23,000 antisemitic episodes, a 136 percent increase compared to 2022, the last full calendar year before the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October 2023. Violent incidents alone climbed 97 percent over the same period. The organisation notes that the surge is not confined to a single country or type of incident; it represents a broad escalation across all seven nations.

ADL demands pre-emptive action

The report’s recommendations go beyond documenting the violence. The ADL is calling on governments to shift from a reactive posture to a proactive one. It demands increased public funding for security at synagogues, schools and other Jewish community institutions, the enactment of stricter legislation against antisemitic hate crimes, and binding measures to ensure social media platforms enforce their existing rules against hate speech. The report further stresses that social media platforms have failed to enforce their own hate speech policies, allowing antisemitic content to proliferate and incite real-world violence. The ADL’s message is that police and judicial responses after an attack are no longer sufficient.

Governments must stop reacting after Jews have been attacked and start acting upstream.

The report frames the escalation not as a temporary spike but as a structural shift. The call to “act upstream” means investing in prevention, education and early intervention, rather than relying solely on criminal justice after the fact. For the ADL, the data from 2025 shows that the environment for Jewish communities worldwide has deteriorated to a point where only systemic, pre-emptive action can reverse the trend.