The year 2025 saw an alarming surge in violent attacks against Jews in a year when more Diaspora Jews were murdered in antisemitic incidents than in any other year in the previous three decades, a report published Monday by Tel Aviv University said.

While total counts of antisemitic activity, including vandalism, verbal threats, and harassment, fell in many countries during 2025 compared to 2024, violent incidents, such as beatings or stone-throwing, became more commonplace, according to the annual report on antisemitism in the world published by TAU’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice.

In every Western country, the total number of antisemitic incidents remained dozens of percentage points higher than in 2022, the year preceding the October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the war in Gaza, the report noted.

Twenty Jews were murdered in four incidents across three continents during the year as Jew hatred became a “normalized reality,” said Prof. Uriya Shavit, the study’s editor-in-chief.

The last year that more Jews were killed in the diaspora was 1994, when a suicide bomber drove a bomb-laden van into the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina building in Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds more.

Australia and Canada saw their highest yearly numbers of antisemitic incidents ever.

“The steep increase in the number of cases of severe violence is not surprising,” Shavit said. “The rule that applies to all types of crime applies here as well: when law-enforcement authorities are indifferent to small crimes, the result is big crimes.”

Part of the reason it is so difficult to prevent antisemitic attacks is that many antisemitic attacks are carried out by “lone wolf” attackers who are not operating within any organizational framework, a separate study published alongside the report found.

The TAU report is based on data originating from dozens of law-enforcement authorities around the world, as well as specialized commissions, Jewish communities, reports in the media, and interviews........

© The Times of Israel