Twenty people died in antisemitic attacks across Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States last year, making 2025 the most lethal year for anti-Jewish violence outside Israel since the 1994 Buenos Aires bombing.
The J7 Large Communities' Task Force Against Antisemitism, a coalition of organizations spanning seven countries that are home to more than 90% of the Jewish diaspora, documented the grim toll in its annual report. Across Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S., the task force recorded more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents in 2025, a 136% increase since 2022, the year before the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Violent incidents alone rose 97% over the same period, CBS News reported.
The numbers are staggering on their own. But the body count tells the harder story. Fifteen people were gunned down at Bondi Beach in Sydney on December 14. Two men were killed in an attack on a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur. Two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead at a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. And a grandmother in Boulder, Colorado, died from wounds sustained in a Molotov cocktail attack on a gathering of people showing support for hostages held in Gaza.
Not one of those victims lived in a war zone. They were worshippers, museum visitors, beachgoers, and ordinary citizens in three Western democracies that pride themselves on tolerance and the rule of law.
The single deadliest attack occurred at Sydney's Bondi Beach, where two gunmen opened fire on December 14, killing 15 people. Among the dead was 10-year-old Matilda, whose funeral was held in Sydney four days later, on December 18. The massacre alone accounted for three-quarters of the year's global death toll.
In Manchester, attackers struck a synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, and killed two men. A group calling itself Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia, described as having purported links to Iran, claimed responsibility for several antisemitic attacks in the U.K. The group, also known as the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Righteous, told CBS News in March that it would continue to target Jewish and Western interests.
In a statement to the network, the group declared it would "keep threatening U.S. and Israeli interests worldwide until we've avenged every child in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and the resistance nations." That language, vengeance dressed up as liberation, has become a familiar script for groups that use the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a license to target Jews anywhere on earth.
On American soil, two Israeli embassy staff members were shot dead at a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C. Separately, a grandmother in Boulder, Colorado, was killed after a Molotov cocktail was hurled at a gathering of people expressing solidarity with hostages held in Gaza. Both attacks underscored that the violence was not confined to one continent or one method.
The rising hostility has also manifested in antisemitic displays at pro-Palestine demonstrations across Europe, where protesters have invoked Holocaust imagery to taunt Jewish communities.
Beyond the fatal incidents, the U.K. saw a string of attacks in the early months of 2026 that the J7 report flagged as part of the same escalating pattern. In late April, two men were stabbed and wounded in the Golders Green neighborhood of London, a historically Jewish area. British authorities declared the stabbing a terrorist incident.
Arson also struck the same neighborhood. A supermarket fire in Golders Green on May 27, 2026, was among the incidents cited in the report's documentation of ongoing threats. Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia claimed responsibility for several of the U.K. attacks, and its public statements made no effort to disguise the antisemitic motive.
The task force's report noted that antisemitic incidents increased in the U.K., Argentina, and Germany in 2025. In the U.S., Australia, Canada, and France, the raw numbers fell compared with 2024, but remained far higher than pre-October 7 levels. A drop from a historic peak is not a return to normal.
The broader trend has played out in American politics as well. Debates over antisemitism and the misuse of Holocaust comparisons have intensified domestically, with public officials increasingly drawn into confrontations over how, and whether, anti-Jewish hatred is being addressed.
The J7 coalition did not mince words in its joint statement accompanying the report. It described the findings as evidence that antisemitism has moved from the margins of society into the mainstream.
The task force said in its statement:
"Antisemitism in our seven countries is no longer a surge; it is our new normal. Governments must stop reacting after Jews are attacked and start acting before, with real security funding, stronger laws and social media platforms that enforce their own rules."
That call for preemptive action rather than reactive hand-wringing is pointed. Across the Western world, governments have issued condemnations after attacks while failing to put durable security infrastructure in place beforehand. The task force's report, the coalition said, "once again sounds the alarm about the deadly reality of antisemitism that Jewish communities worldwide confront at levels unprecedented since World War II."
Aykan Erdemir, a senior director at the Anti-Defamation League, framed the stakes in broader terms. "This isn't a warning sign anymore, it's already happening," Erdemir said. "If governments let antisemitism take root and perpetrators walk free, the violence won't stop with Jewish communities."
Erdemir added that governments cannot rely on security measures alone: "It takes a whole-of-society effort, government, business, schools, civil society and everyday citizens, to root out the hate targeting Jewish communities worldwide."
Fox News reported that the surge draws from a confluence of Islamist extremism, far-right nationalism, and left-wing anti-Zionism, three currents that rarely agree on anything except, apparently, hostility toward Jews. That convergence has made the threat harder to categorize and harder to counter, because it does not fit neatly into any single ideological box.
The last time antisemitic violence outside Israel reached this scale was 1994, when a bomb destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding 300. An Argentine court in 2024 formally blamed that bombing on Hezbollah and Iran, a legal conclusion that took three decades to reach.
That 2025 approached the 1994 threshold without a single mass-casualty bombing, instead accumulating its death toll across multiple attacks in multiple countries, suggests something different and arguably more dangerous: a distributed, persistent threat rather than a one-off catastrophe.
The J7 report argues that its findings demonstrate antisemitism has moved from the fringes to the mainstream. Australia alone saw a 270% increase in antisemitic incidents since 2021, a trajectory that culminated in the Bondi Beach massacre.
Meanwhile, political leaders in the U.S. have struggled to speak with one voice on the issue. Some elected officials have drawn sharp rebukes from Israeli leaders and Jewish organizations for rhetoric that critics say emboldens anti-Jewish sentiment, even when framed as criticism of Israeli government policy.
Congress, too, has wrestled with the intersection of U.S.-Israel relations and domestic security priorities. A recent bipartisan clash over a U.S.-Israel cooperation provision in the defense budget illustrated how politically fraught these questions have become, even as Jewish communities face escalating physical danger.
Beyond the statistics, the J7 report painted a picture of communities under siege in ways that do not always make headlines. Fox News noted that Jewish people in the surveyed countries are increasingly hiding their identity, removing visible symbols of faith, avoiding synagogues, reconsidering whether their home countries remain safe places to raise families.
That is not a statistic. It is a verdict, delivered not by a court or a government, but by ordinary people who have concluded that their own societies will not protect them.
The task force's seven member countries span three continents and include some of the world's oldest and most established democracies. When Jews in London, Sydney, and Washington feel compelled to hide who they are, the failure is not abstract. It is specific, institutional, and ongoing.
Several of the open questions surrounding the report remain unanswered. The exact dates of the Washington, D.C., museum shooting and the Boulder attack were not specified in available reporting. The precise membership of the J7 coalition's constituent organizations was not detailed. And the full scope of Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia's operational capacity, beyond its public statements and claimed attacks, remains unclear.
What is clear is the trajectory. A 136% increase in incidents since 2022. A 97% increase in violent attacks. Twenty dead in a single year. And a coalition of Jewish organizations telling governments, in plain language, that condolence statements after funerals are no substitute for action before the next attack.
When the people being targeted have to beg their own governments to take the threat seriously, the system has already failed them. The only question left is whether anyone in power plans to fix it before the next report is even worse.
