This past month has offered a clear picture of how antisemitism actually works. It does not arrive from one political direction. It arrives from both ends at once.
In Manhattan’s Diamond District on October 21, a 26-year-old Jewish man was stabbed in the back while doing outreach. The attack is being investigated as a possible hate crime; a woman has been arrested and charged. In north London around the same time, three Jewish women — including one pushing a baby in a stroller — were assaulted in the Stamford Hill area.
A suspect was detained by community security volunteers and later charged; police treated the incidents as suspected antisemitic hate crimes. These were not isolated street crimes. They fit a pattern in which visibly Jewish people are targeted while the broader political conversation treats Jewish safety as secondary or suspect.
WEAPONIZING THE CHARGE OF GENOCIDE FUELS AN INCREASINGLY DANGEROUS ANTISEMITISM
At the same time, online and in the streets, both extremes have continued to treat Jews as the explanation for larger problems. During France’s October student-led cost-of-living protests that turned into the country’s worst street violence in years, Palestinian flags and keffiyehs appeared regularly among the rioters.
Separately, a monitoring group documented more than 1,300 posts on X blaming Jews, Israel, or the Mossad for the unrest — classic conspiracies about Jewish elites, Rothschild’s and orchestration of chaos.
Far-right accounts declared that “the Jews did this to France.” Far-left accounts framed the same events through the language of colonization and resistance. The two sides do not agree on economics, immigration or the future of the country. They do agree that Jews belong in the story as the problem.
B’nai B’rith has a significant presence with thousands of volunteers in close to 50 countries across the globe.
Our B’nai B’rith volunteers globally are not reading about these patterns after the fact. They are living them and reporting them to us in real time: heightened security concerns around synagogues and schools, Jewish students and professionals feeling the temperature shift in daily life, and the same dual narratives — conspiracy from one side, delegitimization from the other — appearing in local conversations and online spaces.
What shows up in global tracking reports is what our people on the ground are already describing from their own streets and campuses.
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Recently reported numbers show the same split in concrete incidents. In one recent week, far-right and far-left incidents were nearly equal in number. Swastika graffiti clusters appeared in the United States and Germany. Far-left and Islamist-inspired actions — graffiti, threats and assaults linked to anti-Israel rhetoric — continued elsewhere.
Calls to “globalize the intifada” circulated around the Oct. 7 anniversary in multiple countries. A network of fake AI “rabbi” accounts has been pushing classic antisemitic money tropes on social platforms. None of this requires a single coordinating hand. It requires only the willingness of people who otherwise oppose each other to land on the same target.
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This is the horseshoe. On one end, Jews are cast as alien outsiders who secretly run the banks, the media and the government. On the other, Jews are cast as white colonizers who do not count as oppressed and whose state should not exist. The words differ. The outcome is the same: Jews are positioned as the hand behind the curtain, then blamed for whichever crisis is underway. Other minorities are usually claimed by one side and attacked by the other. Jews are accused by both, then accused of belonging to whichever side is speaking.
The numbers have been clear for some time. In France, Interior Ministry figures put antisemitic incidents at roughly 1,320 in 2025 — more than half of all recorded anti-religious offenses —despite Jews making up less than one percent of the population.
In New York City, Jews have accounted for a majority of confirmed hate crimes. These are not abstract trends. They show up as a man stabbed while wrapping tefillin, women punched on a London street and a community that learns to calculate risk before walking to synagogue or sending a child to school.
Americans cannot treat this as a European problem that stays elsewhere. This trend is growing here in the United States. If you only watch the far right, you will miss the assaults, the campus rhetoric and the street protests that treat Jewish institutions as legitimate targets. If you only watch the far left, you will miss the conspiracy posts, the swastikas and the older tropes that never left. The people in the middle do not get to pick an end of the horseshoe and call it safe.