Poll: US Jews see a rise in antisemitism, with a third saying they were targeted in 2025

(RNS) — A new poll of 1,222 U.S. Jews suggests Jews overwhelmingly view antisemitism as a problem, with 86% saying it has increased “a lot” or “somewhat” since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, on Israel, and Israel’s retaliatory two-year military campaign.

Asked “Have you, yourself, been the target of an antisemitic remark in person?,” 79% of U.S. Jews polled said no, and only 3% said they had been the target of an antisemitic attack in person, during which the attacker physically touched them. But some 31% in all said that they had personally been subject to antisemitic attacks in remarks, vandalism to their personal property or online.

More than 70% said they had “seen or heard” antisemitic content, such as comments, posts or videos, online or on social media not directly related to them. Seventy-nine percent of U.S. Jews said they did not feel physically threatened by such posts.

Courtesy of American Jewish Committee

But the poll, commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, a 120-year-old Jewish institution increasingly outspoken in its defense of Israel, does not show any uptick in the number of Jews who have personally experienced antisemitism.

The poll does show that U.S. Jews reported avoiding specific behaviors in 2025 out of fear of encountering antisemitism; 41% said they “avoided publicly wearing, carrying, or displaying things that might help people identify you as a Jew,” and 30% said they “avoided certain places, events, or situations out of concern for your safety or comfort as a Jew.” Generally speaking, 66% of U.S. Jews reported they felt “less secure than a year ago.”

Those numbers marked no change over 2024 when the same questions were asked.

Asked if they had considered leaving the United States and moving elsewhere in the past five years, 83% of U.S. Jews said they had not.

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Last year saw a number of violent antisemitic incidents in the U.S. Most prominently, in April, the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family had been celebrating Passover, was set on fire by a man who had brought a small sledgehammer to attack the governor. The following month, a gunman opened fire outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, killing two Israeli Embassy staff members who were attending an event at the museum.

In June, a man threw Molotov cocktails at a group of Jewish Americans demonstrating in support of Israeli hostages at a Boulder, Colorado, park. Twelve people were injured and one later died of her injuries.

There is growing debate in Jewish circles about how to respond and unease with the Trump administration’s response. 

The AJC released the first State of Antisemitism in America Report in 2019, one year after the 2018 Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh that left 11 Jews dead.

The current survey was conducted by the research firm SSRS and was fielded between Sept. 26 and Oct. 29, 2025. It has a plus or minus 3.7 percentage point margin of error.

For the first time, the AJC also asked American Jews whether they approved of the way President Donald Trump was responding to antisemitism in the country.

Sixty-two percent of respondents said they disapproved “somewhat” or “strongly” of Trump’s response to antisemitism. In addition, 67% of respondents said they disapproved of how Congress was handling antisemitism. The poll did not ask about specific Trump administration policies. But other polls have shown that U.S. Jews disapprove of the Trump administration’s decision to withhold federal funding from colleges and universities for failing to combat antisemitism, a tactic they view as having unrelated political goals.

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This story has been corrected. An earlier version inaccurately reported the share of American Jews who said that they had who changed their behavior overall in response to antisemitism since 2022, and understated the share of respondents who said they had experienced an antisemitic attack of any kind in 2025. RNS regrets the errors.