A fresh audit from the Anti-Defamation League, released Wednesday, tells a split story. Overall antisemitic incidents in the U.S. fell in 2025, but violent attacks on Jewish people climbed to levels not seen since the ADL started tracking them in 1979. In New York, where both city and state still post the highest numbers in the country, the report hits especially hard, and Brooklyn in particular is feeling the squeeze. Synagogues, schools and neighborhood institutions say the stats match what they are feeling on the ground: more fear, more anxiety and louder calls for security money and coordinated policing.
What the ADL’s audit shows
According to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, the group tracked 6,274 antisemitic incidents nationwide in 2025, a 33% drop from 2024. At the same time, the ADL recorded 203 physical assaults and three fatal attacks. Researchers note an uptick in incidents involving deadly weapons and find that harassment and vandalism declined while person-to-person violence stayed stubbornly high. The audit also credits campus reforms with driving a sharp decline in college incidents, even as attacks in public spaces kept coming.
Where the problem is concentrated in New York
Big metro areas drove much of the data. Reporting by Axios shows New York state led the nation with 1,160 incidents in 2025, including 860 inside New York City and 278 in Brooklyn. The ADL found that assaults in the state climbed about 10% to 90, and that more than half of those assaults happened in Brooklyn. Advocates say that shift has put fresh urgency on neighborhood safety plans in boroughs that already live with a heavy security footprint.
Local coverage has traced how those numbers look on the street and inside businesses, including the vandalism at a Park Slope Israeli restaurant ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day, as detailed in coverage of the Park Slope restaurant attack. For many residents, incidents like that turn abstract statistics into something far more personal and close to home.
High-profile attacks that shaped the year
Several violent incidents in 2025 helped drive the ADL’s concern. In May, a shooting outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., left two Israeli embassy staffers dead, according to reporting by Al Jazeera. The spring and summer brought more shocks.
In June, a Molotov-cocktail attack on a "Run For Their Lives" solidarity walk in Boulder, Colorado, injured dozens and led to federal and state hate-crime and attempted-murder charges, as documented by The Colorado Sun and other outlets. And in April 2025, an arsonist set fire to the Pennsylvania governor’s residence while Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were inside. Local and national reporting described the blaze as both a targeted attack and an active criminal investigation, per the Associated Press.
Security funding and community response
The ADL is using its audit to argue that the security response has to keep pace with the threat. The report points to a $30 million increase in federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program funding for fiscal 2026 and presses for a wider expansion of those grants, according to the ADL. The organization credits campus policy changes with big drops in college incidents but warns that steps that cut down on vandalism or bomb threats do not automatically prevent targeted, violent attacks.
Community groups and local officials argue the data back up what they have been asking for: steady federal funding instead of one-off infusions, clearer and easier incident reporting and law-enforcement coordination that works across city and state lines. The goal, they say, is to make sure that Brooklyn neighborhoods and other heavily Jewish areas are not left to manage the most serious threats on their own.
Legal fallout
Prosecutors have moved quickly in the most serious cases. The D.C. museum shooting suspect has been charged with first-degree murder and related counts in a mix of federal and local filings, while the Boulder defendant faces a slate of state and federal hate-crime and attempted-murder charges, according to reporting from KCUR and Time. In Pennsylvania, the man accused in the governor’s-residence arson was booked on attempted-murder, terrorism and aggravated-arson counts, according to local court records and Associated Press coverage.
Taken together, those prosecutions underline that the ADL’s audit is not just about spreadsheets and year-over-year charts. It is tied directly to active criminal cases and ongoing policy fights over how the country should respond when antisemitic threats turn into violence.
"When the tide goes out… what’s left is the stuff that is too heavy to wash away," ADL senior staff warned in coverage of the audit, a line quoted in reporting by Axios. The numbers suggest that while reforms have clearly helped in some arenas, protecting Jewish neighborhoods from the sharpest edge of antisemitic violence will require sustained funding, coordinated security planning and ongoing community attention.
