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Antisemitism in the United States

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  • Attitudes, including those of organized hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi Organizations, Nation of Islam and those more widely disseminated in the population;
  • Behaviors that can threaten the security of American Jews, as measured by the occurrence of specific incidents, including hate crimes; and
  • Discrimination against Jews, threatening their security.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data shows that in every year since 1991, Jews were the most frequent targets of religiously motivated hate crimes even though current numbers may be underreported, as is the case for many other targeted groups. As of 2023, the FBI calculated that antisemitic incidents accounted for 68% of all religion-based hate crimes, an increase of 63% since 2022, while the American Jewish Committee (AJC) said that figure was "likely much lower" than the actual number as hate crimes had been "widely underreported across the country." A 2025 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League, concluded that "60% of Americans ... at least somewhat agree that antisemitism is a serious problem." Twenty-four percent of Americans, however, maintained that recent antisemitic attacks were understandable.

In the past, incidents of antisemitism were mostly confined to organized antisemitic groups, mainly from a white nationalist or white supremacist backgrounds, but also including the Nation of Islam and some branches of the Black Hebrew Israelites, who have also been identified as antisemitic, reflecting heightened levels of antisemitism among some African-American communities. Over the last decade or more, however, antisemitism has been rising in the U.S., and there has been increasing evidence of antisemitism on both sides of the American political spectrum, as Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism for the U.S. Department of State highlighted in the title of remarks she gave in 2024: "From Right to Left and In Between: Jew-hatred Across the Political Divide."

In 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) also summarized their latest findings on the subject in Antisemitism. On the left, they noted an increase in incidents "that began with the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that initiated the Israel—Hamas war. These incidents included vandalism of Jewish institutions and places of worship, flyering from known hate groups, and assaults on Jewish people and business." On the right, they found that "Hate groups and other bigoted actors have perpetuated the antisemitic narrative that Jewish people are helping to further the normalization and acceptance of LGBTQ+ identities in order to further social strife." Likewise, the far right argues that Jews are orchestrating a "great replacement" in which they aid the immigration of non-white people — especially those who are Muslim — into majority-white counties to challenge and erode white supremacy."

There have been a range of approaches to combating antisemitism, both by government when the Biden administration launched the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism and by Jewish communities whose tactics have included the creation of more holocaust museums. Nonetheless, incidents of antisemitism continue to rise in the U.S. and worldwide. One result, according to Gallop, is "most Jewish Americans have felt reluctant to share their religious affiliation."

Causes

Economic crises

Historically, antisemitic attitudes and rhetoric have tended to increase whenever the United States has faced a serious economic crisis, as well as during moments of political and social uncertainty and fear, such as with the rise of nativist anti-immigration organizing in the early twentieth century, the emergence of the Nazi-affiliated German-American Bund in the 1930s, and the anti-Communist political movement during McCarthyism, also known as the Red Scare.

Conspiracy theories

American antisemites have viewed the fraudulent text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a real reference to a supposed Jewish cabal which was out to subvert and ultimately destroy the U.S. Both the association of Jews with Communism and the fixation on a Jewish cabal purported in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are conspiracies transplanted to the American context from European modernity: in a moment of economic revolution and socialist politics rising in contexts across Europe, conservative leaders from Christian Russia to interwar Great Britain manipulated a public fear of Jewish Bolshevism to scapegoat Jewish populations for strategic political gain.

Academic David Greenberg has written in Slate, "Extreme anti-communism always contained an antisemitic component: Radical, alien Jews, in their demonology, orchestrated the Communist conspiracy." He also has argued that, in the years which followed World War II, some groups on "the American right remained closely tied to the unvarnished Antisemites of the '30s who railed against the "Jew Deal", a bigoted term which was used against the New Deal measures of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The "Great Replacement" theme, a version of the broader white genocide conspiracy theory, was stressed by people who highlighted the supposed threat of Jews and other immigrants replacing Americans who were born in the country. In the 1920s and 1930s, antisemitic activists were led by Henry Ford and other figures like Charles Lindbergh, William Dudley Pelley, Charles Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith, and some of them were also members of organizations like the America First Committee, the Christian Nationalist Crusade, the German American Bund, the Ku Klux Klan and the Silver Legion of America. They promulgated canards and various interrelated conspiracy theories that widely spread the fear that, through an evil transnational network, Jews were working for the destruction or replacement of white Americans along with the fear that Jews were working for the destruction or replacement of Christianity in the United States.

Holocaust denial

Austin App (1902–1984), a German-American La Salle University professor of medieval English literature, is considered the first major American Holocaust denier. App wrote extensively in newspapers and periodicals, and he also wrote a couple of books which detailed his defense of Nazi Germany and Holocaust denial. App's work inspired the Institute for Historical Review, a California center which was founded in 1978 with the sole purpose of denying the Holocaust. One of the newer forms of antisemitism is the denial of the Holocaust by negationist historians and neo-Nazis.

The results of a survey which was conducted in 2020 revealed that close to two-thirds of Millennials and Gen Z adults were not aware that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. 24% of them believed that the Holocaust might be a myth or that accounts of it are exaggerated.

Tropes and stereotypes

The most persistent form of antisemitism has consisted of a series of widely circulating tropes and stereotypes in which Jews are portrayed as being socially, religiously, and economically unacceptable to the American way of life, because of their inferiority to white Christian society or because of conspiratorial thinking in which Jews are accused of plotting to undermine the racial and economic hierarchies which make up the historical fabric of American society. As a whole, the Jewish people were looked down upon. They were made to feel unwanted, they were marginalized by American society and they were considered a menace to the United States.

Martin Marger wrote, "A set of distinct and consistent negative stereotypes, some of which can be traced as far back as the Middle Ages in Europe, has been applied to Jews." David Schneder wrote, "Three large clusters of traits are part of the Jewish stereotype (Wuthnow, 1982). First, [American] Jews are seen as being powerful and manipulative. Second, they are accused of dividing their loyalties between the United States and Israel. A third set of traits concerns Jewish materialistic values, aggressiveness, clannishness."

Stereotypes of Jewish people share some of the same content as stereotypes of Asians: perceived disloyalty, power, intelligence, and dishonesty overlap. The similarity between the content of stereotypes of Jews and the content of stereotypes of Asians may stem from the fact that many immigrant Jews and many immigrant Asians both developed a merchant role, a role which was also historically held by many Indians in East Africa, where the content of stereotypes of them resembles the content of stereotypes of Asians and Jews in the United States.

Some of the antisemitic tropes which have been cited by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in its studies of U.S. social trends include the claims that "Jews have too much power in the business world," "Jews are more willing to use shady practices to get what they want," and "Jews always like to be at the head of things." Another issue that garners attention is the assertion that Jews have an excessive amount of influence on American cinema and news media. Put together, these lines of thinking about Jews demonstrate a common trend in the history of both American and global antisemitism—the inflation of stereotypes of Jews into a theory about how power (politics, economics, media, etc.) functions in society, an irrational theory that deflects responsibility for social ills away from actual authorities and leaders and onto minority Jewish communities.

In contemporary alt-right and right-wing circles, these tropes of power-hungry Jews sometimes manifest through coded references to "globalists," accusations that liberal agendas are the sole product of prominent Jews, and conspiracy theories (such as QAnon) that can be linked to the medieval blood libel against Jews.

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