Antisemitism in the United States
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Antisemitism in the United States is the manifestation of hatred, hostility, harm, prejudice or discrimination against the American Jewish people or Judaism as a religious, ethnic or racial group. Antisemitism has long existed in the United States of America. It includes antisemitic attitudes, including those of organised hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and those more widely disseminated in the population; antisemitic behaviors that can threaten the security of American Jews (measured by the occurrence of specific incidents, including hate crimes), and discrimination against Jews, threatening their secure status in country.
In terms of antisemitic attitudes, according to a survey which was conducted by the Anti-Defamation League in 2019, antisemitism is rejected by a majority of Americans, with 79% of them lauding Jews' cultural contributions to the nation. The same poll found that 19% of Americans adhered to the longstanding antisemitic canard that Jews co-control Wall Street, while 31% agreed with the statement "Jewish employers go out of their way to hire other Jews".
Organised antisemitic groups are mainly from a white nationalism or white supremacist background, but the Nation of Islam and some branches of the Black Hebrew Israelites have also been identified as antisemitism, reflecting heightened levels of antisemitism among some African-American communities.
In terms of antisemitic incidents, FBI data shows that in every year since 1991, Jews were the most frequent victims of religiously motivated hate crimes. The number of hate crimes against Jews may be underreported, as in the case for many other targeted groups.
Anti-Jewish discrimination has been a strong history of the history of antisemitism in the United States but is less prevalent in the current century.
There have been a range of approaches to combating antisemitism, including by the government (such as the Biden administration's U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism) and by Jewish communities.
There is some evidence for the intensification of antisemitism since the Israel/Gaza war that began in October 2023. According to an August 2024 survey by the Combat Antisemitism Movement, 3.5 million Jews in America have experienced antisemitism since the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel. Of the 1,075 American Jews interviewed, 28% claimed to have heard that "Jews care too much about money", 25% heard "Jews control the world", 14% heard "American Jews care more about Israel than about the US", and 13% heard "the Holocaust did not happen" or its "severity has been exaggerated".
The FBI's 2023 statistics state that antisemitic incidents accounted for 68% of all religion-based hate crimes, a 63% bump vis-à-vis 2022, while the American Jewish Committee (AJC) said that it was "likely much lower" than the actual number as hate crimes had been "widely underreported across the country".