J7 Report: 2025 Was Deadliest Year for Antisemitic Attacks Since 1994 Bombing in Argentina

Twenty people were murdered in antisemitic attacks across the Jewish diaspora in 2025, according to a report released Wednesday, July 29, by the J7 Large Communities' Task Force Against Antisemitism. That makes last year the deadliest for anti-Jewish violence outside Israel since the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people at a Jewish community center, according to the report.

The J7 tracks antisemitism across Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S., countries that together hold more than 90% of the Jewish population living outside Israel. This year's report added a chapter on Ireland, which is not a J7 member but reported 143 antisemitic incidents in six months among a Jewish community of roughly 2,200 people, according to the Straits Times.

The deadliest single incident was the December 2025 mass shooting at a Hanukkah festival near Bondi Beach in Sydney, which killed 15 people, according to the Straits Times and Fox News. In October, two people were killed in an attack on a packed synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur. Two separate U.S. attacks killed three people, according to the Straits Times.

The Numbers

The report documented more than 23,000 antisemitic incidents across J7 countries in 2025. That is up from roughly 9,800 incidents in 2022, the year before Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, according to the Straits Times. Total incidents rose 136% and violent incidents rose 97% over that three-year span, according to the report cited by all four sources.

Germany posted the highest per-capita rate: 69.8 incidents per 1,000 Jewish residents in 2025, totaling 8,725 incidents, a 215% increase since 2021, according to Fox News and WFMD. Australia saw a 270% increase in antisemitic incidents since 2021, driven partly by the Bondi Beach attack, according to WFMD.

One notable detail buried in the Straits Times report: total incidents actually fell from 2024 to 2025, even as the death toll and violent-incident rate rose. The figure remains far above pre-October 7 levels, but the year-over-year dip deserves flagging since it complicates a simple "getting worse every year" narrative. Fox News and WFMD's versions of the story do not mention this decline at all.

What's Driving It

The report identifies anti-Zionism tied to the Gaza war as a significant driver, accounting for 48% of incidents in Britain and 45% in the U.S., according to the Straits Times. The J7's joint statement, quoted across multiple sources, argues that anti-Zionist rhetoric linked to the Gaza conflict has become "a vehicle for antisemitic expression," and that schools and universities have become an "acute flashpoint."

In Germany, officials point to a different mix. Fox News cited a related report noting German officials blame both Islamist and far-left rhetoric for driving the spike, while the J7 report itself attributes Germany's numbers to a "confluence of far-right ethno-nationalist" currents alongside those other strains, according to WFMD. Sources diverge on emphasis here, with Fox News' companion coverage leaning toward Islamist and far-left causes while the underlying J7 data cites far-right nationalism as a factor too. All three currents get named in the full report; no single outlet's framing should be read as the complete picture.

The Reasonable Pushback

Critics of reports like this, including some free-speech advocates, have long argued that lumping anti-Zionist political speech in with antisemitic harassment or violence risks conflating criticism of Israeli government policy with bigotry against Jews as a people. Not every protest against the Gaza war or Israeli policy is antisemitic, and treating all anti-Zionist speech as hate speech would chill legitimate political debate.

The J7 report doesn't erase that distinction. It reports anti-Zionism as a motivating factor in a specific share of incidents, 48% in Britain and 45% in the U.S., rather than claiming all anti-Israel sentiment is antisemitic. But the report doesn't publish its incident-classification methodology in the portions available here, so how analysts drew that line between political criticism and antisemitic incident isn't fully verifiable from these sources.

Reactions

"This isn't a warning sign anymore, it's already happening," said Aykan Erdemir, the ADL's Senior Director of Global Research and Diplomatic Affairs, in comments to Fox News Digital. "If governments let antisemitism take root and perpetrators walk free, the violence won't stop with Jewish communities."

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said American Jews were targeted an average of 17 times a day in 2025 and called the crisis one that "transcends borders." William C. Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said governments, institutions and tech companies "must act with urgency, enforce the law, strengthen security."

The task force's central demand, according to its joint statement, is that governments stop reacting only after Jews are attacked and instead fund security proactively, tighten laws, and pressure social media platforms to enforce their own content rules. No specific legislative proposal or enforcement timeline was outlined in the report as covered by these sources. Whether any J7 government commits new funding or legal changes in response remains to be seen.