Antisemitism on the right and the left

What it is

Antisemitism is prejudice against or hatred of Jewish people, and the word is a good deal younger than the thing it names. It was coined in German in the late 1800s as Antisemitismus. ¹ What came before it was mostly religious: the charge that Jews killed Jesus, the accusation of ritual murder, both carried through the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. ¹ In the late 19th century, as theories of race, eugenics, and Social Darwinism spread through Europe and the United States, the old hatred was repackaged in pseudoscientific terms, and ethno-nationalist movements that defined membership in a nation by heredity and ethnicity began describing Jews as foreigners and alien outsiders inside countries where they had lived for centuries. ¹

That is the root of the strain people mean when they say antisemitism on the right. Its central claim is that Jews are a foreign body in the nation. In the United States it has a long domestic record: populists picked it up against the banks after the financial panic of 1893, the 1913 lynching of Leo Frank, a 31-year-old Jewish factory owner in Georgia, fed the reemergence of the Klan, and in the 1920s and 1930s right-wing populists including Father Charles Coughlin spread antisemitic conspiracy theories on the radio. ⁷ Its live American form is the great replacement theory, which the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism identifies as a white supremacist conspiracy theory subscribed to by violent extremists who attack Jewish communities and other targets. ⁷

The strain people mean when they say antisemitism on the left starts somewhere else. Its central claim is that Jewish nationhood is illegitimate. Its clearest institutional moment came on Nov. 10, 1975, when the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, which "determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination," by a vote of 72 to 35 with 32 abstentions. ² The General Assembly revoked that determination on Dec. 16, 1991, 111 to 25 with 13 abstentions, which is one of the few times the UN has formally taken back a judgment about Israel. ² The sixteen years in between gave the argument a paper trail it still trades on.

Both sides have a serious version worth stating first. The serious version on the right is that worrying about immigration, finance, or elite influence is ordinary politics, and that treating every such worry as coded antisemitism reads intent into people who have none. The serious version on the left is that a state is a state, that criticizing Israeli policy is criticizing a government rather than a people, and that no other country's supporters get to call criticism bigotry. Neither of those is silly, and where exactly the line falls is a live fight with three competing written definitions behind it.

What the survey data suggests is that the sorting mechanism is conspiracy thinking rather than party. ADL's 2024 attitudes survey of 4,143 American adults, fielded Jan. 5 to 18, found that belief in conspiracy theories correlated strongly with antisemitism and that the correlation held regardless of political ideology. ⁶ The far right says a hidden Jewish hand controls immigration; a slice of the far left says a hidden Jewish hand controls foreign policy. In that survey, 33% of Americans agreed that Israeli operatives secretly manipulate U.S. policy through AIPAC. ⁶

Why it still matters

On the question of which strain kills people, the American record of the last decade is not close. ADL counted 429 extremist-related murders in the United States over the ten years through 2024. Right-wing extremists committed 328 of them, or 76%. Domestic Islamist extremists committed 79, or 18%. ⁵ In 2024 itself, all 13 extremist-related murders, across 11 separate incidents, were connected to right-wing extremism: 8 by white supremacists and 5 by anti-government extremists. ⁵ The U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism states plainly that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy, "including antisemitism," is the greatest terrorist threat to the homeland. ⁷

The strain an American Jew is more likely to run into in ordinary life has, for the last few years, been the other one. ADL logged 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the highest number in 46 years of tracking, made up of 6,552 cases of harassment, 2,606 of vandalism, and 196 assaults affecting 250 victims. ⁴ For the first time in the audit's history, a majority of incidents, 5,452 of them or 58%, contained elements related to Israel or Zionism. ⁴ College campuses accounted for 1,694 incidents, an 84% jump over 2023 and 18% of the national total, a larger share than in any previous audit. ⁴ Of the more than 5,000 anti-Israel rallies ADL tracked that year, about half, 2,596, included antisemitic signs, chants, or speeches. ⁴ Roughly half did not.

The 2025 audit, published May 6, 2026, shows the volume falling and the danger rising. Total incidents dropped to 6,274. Campus incidents fell to 583, down 66% from the year before. The Israel-related share fell to about 45%. Physical assaults reached the highest level on record, and three people were killed. ³ ADL names the Capital Jewish Museum shooting in Washington, the Molotov cocktail attack on a Run for Their Lives event in Colorado, and the firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro's residence in Pennsylvania, and notes that 2025 was the first year since 2019 in which Jews were murdered in antisemitic attacks in the United States. ³

Our view: the familiar division, in which right-wing extremists do the killing and the anti-Zionist strain does the harassing, stopped describing the United States in 2025.

The normalization question has its own numbers. Roughly 24% of Americans endorsed six or more anti-Jewish tropes from ADL's eleven-statement index in early 2024, up from 20% in 2022. ⁶ Millennials averaged 5.4 tropes endorsed and Gen Z 5.0, against 4.2 for Gen X and 3.1 for baby boomers, which is the reverse of the generational pattern most people would guess. ⁶ In the same survey, 88.8% of Americans supported the Jewish right to an independent state. ⁶

The words you'll hear

Racial antisemitism. The late-19th-century version that recast an older religious hatred in the language of race science, eugenics, and Social Darwinism, treating Jewishness as heredity rather than belief. ¹

Ethno-nationalism. A definition of national membership based on heredity and ethnicity, which in 19th-century Europe cast Jews as foreigners and alien outsiders in their own countries. ¹

The great replacement. A white supremacist conspiracy theory named in the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism as a belief held by violent extremists who have attacked Jewish communities and other targeted groups. ⁷

Resolution 3379. The UN General Assembly resolution of Nov. 10, 1975 declaring Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination, passed 72 to 35 and revoked by the same body on Dec. 16, 1991 by 111 to 25. ²

Israel-related incident. ADL's audit category for antisemitic incidents containing elements related to Israel or Zionism. It was 58% of all incidents in 2024 and about 45% in 2025. ^{4 3}

Extremist-related murder. ADL's count of killings committed by people tied to extremist movements, the measure behind the finding that right-wing extremists accounted for 76% of such murders in the United States over the decade through 2024. ⁵