Judging by the news reports and releases from national Jewish groups, anti-Semitism is the prevailing threat to the American Jewish way of life. It isn’t.
This may sound counterintuitive, but what if ant-Semitism could have a beneficial impact on Jews?
Since anti-Semitism is a form of group hate, the victims of this hate have a few ways to react. They can accept it and move into the shadows. They can ignore it. Or, they can take it and turn inward to make the Jewish group more cohesive, informed about their heritage, and stronger so they can repulse the attacks.
This last option is not the prevailing one among contemporary American Jews today.
Statistics about the number of anti-Semitic events in the U.S. (hate speech, physical attacks, vandalism) show that the number of “incidents” is up dramatically. But these numbers do not tell the whole story.
First, the “incidents” for 2024 all spiked upward after Oct. 7, 2023, and the start of the Israel-Gaza war, and they showed a dramatic increase on college campuses and in street protests.
ADL statistics found that “for the first time in the history of the (ADL) Audit, a majority (58%) of all incidents contained elements related to Israel or Zionism.” This is a direct result of the Israel-Gaza War, and it will not subside anytime soon.
But the ADL’s statistics should be examined closely. Not all anti-Semitic incidents are of equal weight. For instance, the ADL found that “while many anti-Israel rallies did not contain antisemitic elements and were not represented in the Audit, about half (2,596) of the more than 5,000 such protests tracked by ADL contained antisemitic messaging in the form of signs, chants, or speeches.” This looks like one person’s free speech is another person’s anti-Semitic incident.
In another instance, a video shows an Orthodox man walking down a street in Brooklyn when a kid on a bicycle passes the man and flips off his hat onto the sidewalk. The kid on the bike keeps pedaling. The man picks up the undamaged hat. No one is injured. No words are exchanged. Is this an anti-Semitic incident or just a kid on a bicycle playing a prank? The ADL would consider this an anti-Semitic incident. 
Most American Jews have never experienced a direct anti-Semitic attack that prevented them from job advancement, college admission, or entry into a social club. (Academia is an exception.) When Jews were barred from country clubs because they were Jewish, they started their own clubs. The same is true of hospitals, law firms, and even stock and futures exchanges. For instance, the AMEX and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange had more Jewish members than the NYSE and the Chicago Board of Trade.
When my father worked in a shipyard in Seneca, Illinois, during World War II, my mother was cleaning the house when a woman knocked on the door. After exchanging a few pleasantries, the woman asked if my mother was Jewish. She said yes. The woman then asked if she could see her horns.
At an art fair in Gig Harbor, Washington, my wife bought an item from a vendor. As she was walking away, she heard the woman saying that another customer had tried to “Jew her down on the price.” My wife heard the comment, told the woman she was Jewish, and returned the item. This also never made it into the B’nai B’rith statistics.
Jews in pre-World War Europe contended with a totally different form of state- and church sanctioned anti-Jewish physical and administrative attacks. The response to pogroms was to immigrate, suffer the consequences, or fight back. In Slovakia, attacks on Jews by neo-Nazi street thugs in the mid- to late-1930s led to the invention of Krav Maga, a form of lethal street fighting still used in the IDF today.
Jewish college students who experience hate speech groups should band together when travelling around campus. Hillel counselors and concerned parents can use this experience to build Jewish cohesion. They can also point out that there is nothing American Arab or Jewish students can do to influence the foreign policies of Israel or the Arab nations. Only the parties directly involved can determine the future of a Palestinian state, which is the primary driver of anti-Semitic attacks.
Does Anti-Semitism Affect Daily Jewish Life?
The unpleasant and extremely sensitive question that is rarely asked is: How does the rise in anti-Semitism affect the daily lives of American Jews?
While being the target of a verbal attack for being Jewish is traumatic and unsettling, these sad events do not affect the vast majority of American Jews. This does not excuse the perpetrators of these slurs. Still, since the B’nai B’rith began collecting statistics on anti-Semitism, American Jews have enjoyed their most incredible ascent of prosperity in over 2,000 years of Jewish history.
There has never been a pogrom on American soil, but there have been isolated, deadly attacks, most by lone individuals. From June 2025 to December 1862, there have been 38 killings of Jews in the U.S., according to this list on Wikipedia. This includes the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, a textile worker wrongly convicted of murdering a 13-year-old, up to the June 2025 firebombing of a synagogue in Boulder, Colorado, which killed one congregant.
During this same period (from 1862 to June 2025), American Jews have enjoyed more security and financial prosperity than at any time. A 2021 Pew Research Center study showed that 23% of U.S. Jews have household incomes of $200,000 or more, a significantly higher percentage than the general US adult population (4%).
An earlier 2014 Pew study found that 44% of Jewish households in the US had incomes of at least $100,000. The same study also found that 10% of U.S. Jews reported an annual household income of less than $30,000, much lower than the 26% of all U.S. adults who are below that threshold.
Among the ultra-rich in 2017, the Forbes 400 list included 139 Jewish Americans, or about 35% of the list, and previous years have shown Jewish individuals making up a large portion of the wealthiest Americans. Jewish Americans make up about 2% of the U.S. population.
So, while the statistics show that the number of anti-Semitic attacks and incidents is rising, it does not seem to be affecting the prosperity of many Jewish Americans. So while many agree that anti-Semitism is a threat, some Jewish scholars say the bigger danger to the religion is assimilation, not anti-Semitism.
Writing in the book, “The Vanishing American Jew,”* legal scholar Alan Dershowitz writes that “American Jews have an ambivalent relationship with anti-Semitism.” He goes on to say that because social acceptance leads to assimilation, anti-Semitism would be Judaism’s ally, “since it preserves cultural-religious identity. This would be a positive element of outsiders stigmatizing or restricting the access of Jews to the social and business structures.
But that has not been the case, just the opposite.
More Jews have climbed the ladder of success in business, academia, the professions, and government. As part of this ascent, many have achieved notoriety, awards, and accolades.
But some people have crossed the line and used their success to become criminals (mostly white-collar), or engaged in unethical, unsavory, cringeworthy, illegal actions. Among the Jews on the Shanda list, this complete assimilation into Americanism has violated Jewish ethical and moral norms. These people have become a public disgrace to other Jews, and this Shanda list is a marker of the dangers of assimilation without a Jewish awareness and a moral-ethical grounding.
Could a degree of anti-Semitism or increased Jewish identity have made this list smaller? We will never know.
Jews who have a strong self-identity are better equipped to handle anti-Semitism. This is a primary purpose of the Birthright Israel program, which sends college-age people to Israel for an immersion in Israeli and Jewish history and contemporary Israeli life.
Great self-identity also preserves the Jewish family. A Pew Research study, Jewish Americans 2020, found that 42% of married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried.
Yet, at the same time, intermarriage is exceedingly rare among Orthodox Jews: 98% of Orthodox Jews who are married say their spouse is Jewish, the Pew study found.
Jewish history resounds with stories of heroism, sacrifice, and resilience. The phrase “The People of Israel Live” (“Am Yisrael Chai”)is frequently heard in large Jewish gatherings. But this phrase is said in the sunlight of optimism, as it has for thousands of years. It is not whispered in the shadows of fear.
Jews who obsess on anti-Semitism miss the point. Sometimes a bit of prejudice can build stronger individual and group identities and social cohesion. This could check the rising trend towards assimilation, which many Jewish leaders consider a greater threat to community strength and longevity than anything else.
*Alan Dershowitz, The Vanishing American Jew, 1997, Little Brown & Co.
