A new study has found that antisemitic attacks in 2025 resulted in more deaths than in any comparable period in over three decades, marking a significant escalation in deadly violence targeting Jewish people around the world, according to a report cited by ABC News.
The research tracks a disturbing trend of rising antisemitic incidents that have intensified in recent years, with 2025 standing out for the lethality of attacks rather than their frequency alone. The findings point to a global pattern rather than violence concentrated in any single region.
A decades-long high
The study's conclusion that 2025 produced the highest number of fatalities from antisemitic attacks in more than 30 years places current events in a stark historical context. A death toll of this magnitude has not been recorded since the early 1990s, a period that included episodes of ethnic and religious violence across multiple continents.
Researchers did not attribute the rise to a single cause, reflecting the complex and varied nature of antisemitic violence, which spans ideological motivations from the far right, far left, and religiously motivated extremism, depending on the region and context.
Broader context of rising antisemitism
The findings come amid a broader, well-documented rise in antisemitic incidents globally. Jewish community organizations and government agencies in multiple countries, including the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have reported sharp increases in harassment, vandalism, and physical assaults against Jewish individuals and institutions in recent years.
Tensions heightened following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which researchers and advocacy groups have noted as a period during which antisemitic incidents surged in numerous countries. Whether and to what extent those events contributed to 2025's death toll was not specified in the summary of the study's findings available through ABC News.
Calls for response
Studies of this nature are typically used to inform policy discussions among governments, law enforcement agencies, and civil society organizations working on hate crime prevention and community security. The findings are likely to intensify calls for stronger legal protections and better tracking of hate-motivated violence against Jewish communities.
The full methodology of the study, including which incidents were counted and how fatalities were attributed to antisemitic motivation, was not detailed in the ABC News report. Independent verification of the findings by other research institutions had not been reported at the time of publication.
