Antisemitism and Islamophobia are both increasing concerns in the United States, with federal hate-crime data and civil-rights reporting showing that Jewish, Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities have all faced elevated threats, harassment, discrimination and violence in recent years. While the numbers vary depending on whether the source is law enforcement, civil-rights complaints, campus reports, or community-based incident tracking, the trend is clear: bias against both Jews and Muslims has become more visible, more politically charged and, in some cases, more violent.
The FBI’s 2024 hate-crime data along with civil-rights reporting organizations showed that law enforcement agencies and civil rights groups reported 161,679 hate-crime incidents involving 184,243 victims nationwide. Religion-based bias accounted for 13.5% of victims in single-bias hate-crime incidents, making religion one of the largest categories after race, ethnicity and ancestry. The Justice Department notes that the FBI’s numbers come from crimes reported by law enforcement agencies, meaning the data does not include every act of harassment, intimidation, discrimination or unreported hate crime.
Jewish Americans remain the most targeted religious group in FBI hate-crime reporting. According to the Anti-Defamation League’s review of FBI data only, reported single-bias anti-Jewish hate-crime incidents rose in 2024, 2025 and 2026, up more than 6% from 2023 and the highest number recorded by the FBI since it began collecting hate-crime data in 1991. ADL also reported that anti-Jewish hate crimes made up nearly 70% of all religion-based hate crimes in 2024, even though Jewish Americans make up roughly 2% of the U.S. population.
The ADL’s broader antisemitism audit, which includes criminal and non-criminal incidents of harassment, vandalism and assault, found a much larger universe of anti-Jewish activity than FBI crime data alone. ADL recorded 8,873 antisemitic incidents in 2023, a 140% increase from 2022. In 2024, ADL recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents, another 5% increase and the highest total in the organization’s 46 years of tracking. ADL said the 2024 total represented a 344% increase over five years and an 893% increase over 10 years.
Anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias also rose sharply, especially after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported 8,061 complaints nationwide in 2023, the highest number in CAIR’s 30-year history at the time, and a 56% increase over 2022. CAIR said nearly half of those 2023 complaints came during the final three months of the year, after the escalation of the Israel-Hamas war. Adding to possible social biasness, Texas had taken steps to list CAIR as a terrorist organization, though this listing has little practical effect and is more symbolic, but with Texas creating such a list, it likely has swayed some Texas residents against CAIR.
CAIR’s 2023 data showed that hate crimes and hate incidents were among the highest reported categories, with 607 complaints in that category. CAIR said that was up from 117 hate-crime-related complaints in 2022, a 419% increase in that category. The group also documented employment discrimination, education discrimination, immigration and asylum complaints, and other civil-rights concerns affecting Muslim, Arab, Palestinian and other communities.
The FBI’s law-enforcement data and CAIR’s civil-rights complaint data do not always move in the same direction because they measure different things. For example, ADL’s summary of FBI data said reported single-bias anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents slightly decreased from 236 in 2023 to 228 in 2024, while CAIR’s broader civil-rights reporting showed Islamophobia complaints reaching an all-time high in 2024, with 8,658 complaints, up from 8,061 in 2023. That distinction matters: FBI data generally captures reported crimes, while civil-rights organizations often capture a wider range of discrimination, harassment, school incidents, workplace issues, doxxing, threats and community complaints.
Researchers and advocacy groups point to several likely causes behind the rise. The most obvious is the spillover of Middle East conflict into American civic life. ADL reported that in 2024, for the first time in its audit history, a majority of recorded antisemitic incidents included elements related to Israel or Zionism, while CAIR said many anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian complaints followed the war in Gaza and public disputes over speech, protests and campus activism. Axios also reported that anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate crimes tend to rise during conflicts in the Middle East, according to hate-crime analysts.
Another driver appears to be the growing speed and reach of online extremism. Harassment that once might have stayed local can now spread through social media, anonymous accounts, encrypted chats and coordinated doxxing campaigns. CAIR’s report discusses doxxing and online harassment affecting students and employees, while ADL has documented how antisemitic rhetoric, conspiracy theories, extremist propaganda and anti-Jewish threats move between online spaces and real-world harassment, vandalism and assault.
The result is a national problem that cannot be honestly reduced to one community’s fear or one side’s politics. Jewish Americans are facing record or near-record levels of antisemitic incidents, including assaults, threats against synagogues and harassment on campuses. Muslim, Arab and Palestinian Americans are reporting elevated levels of hate, discrimination, school and workplace retaliation, and threats tied to global events and domestic political anger. The data shows that antisemitism and Islamophobia are not competing concerns. They are parallel warnings that religious and ethnic hatred is becoming more normalized, more public and more dangerous in American life.
