For many Jews in the diaspora, the world has moved on faster than our nervous systems have. The headlines have shifted. The public outrage has been redistributed. The language has changed. But for many of us, the rupture has not healed. It has simply taken on a new form.

What began as acute communal trauma has become something broader, more chronic, and harder to name: the grief of watching antisemitism surge around us while much of the world insists we are misreading it.

It is the grief of seeing Jewish students harassed as “Zionists,” synagogues and Jewish institutions targeted over events thousands of miles away, Jewish symbols treated as political provocations, and Jewish pain framed as something that must be qualified, contextualized, or apologized for before it can be acknowledged. It is the grief of realizing that anti-Zionism has become, in many spaces, a socially acceptable container for antisemitism.

That distinction matters.

Criticism of Israeli policy is not inherently antisemitic. Jews themselves hold a wide range of views about Israel, the Israeli government, and the future. But when “Zionist” becomes a stand-in for “Jew,” when Jewish students are treated as representatives of a foreign government, when Jewish institutions become proxy targets for rage at Israel, and when hostility toward Jews is rationalized as political expression, we are no longer talking about ordinary disagreement. We are talking about antisemitism finding a new vocabulary.

This is why so many Jews remain emotionally braced. We are not simply looking back at a trauma that ended. We are living with its aftershocks, even as the public conversation has moved elsewhere. The numbers bear this out.

In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States, the highest number since it began tracking incidents in 1979. For the first time in the history of its audit, most of those incidents, 58%, included elements related to Israel or Zionism.

In 2025, the total number of incidents decreased but remained the third-highest year on record, with physical assaults reaching record levels and Israel- or Zionism-related incidents still accounting for 45% of all antisemitic incidents.

Other data points in the same direction. Pew Research found that nine in ten American Jews believed discrimination against Jews had risen in the United States in the period following October 2023, and that many Jews reported sadness, anger, exhaustion, and fear. The American Jewish Committee’s 2025 State of Antisemitism in America report found that more than half of American Jews had changed their behavior in the past year out of fear of antisemitism, and nearly one-third reported being targeted in person or online. A joint report by ADL and the Jewish Federations of North America found that more than half of Jewish Americans surveyed had experienced some form of........

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