Three years ago, Hamas murdered, raped and slashed its way into Israel, abducting innocent victims and bringing a bloody, self-destructive war to Gaza. This, in turn, has unleashed a wave of antisemitism in the West. While some fear a homegrown antisemitic Right, personified by Tucker Carlson’s Hitler apologetics, data shows it is the Left that currently poses a far greater threat to American Jews.

Whether extreme anti-Zionism is antisemitism is a contested topic. This argument is instead about the emotional contagion of anti-Israel hatred bleeding into anti-Jewish hatred, as hostility towards Israel becomes an increasingly mainstream Left-wing sentiment. That is the conclusion of my new University of Buckingham Centre for Heterodox Social Science report based on antisemitic events and survey data.

In recent years, Left-wing antisemitic assaults have skyrocketed. Anti-Defamation League (ADL) H.E.A.T. Map data, which spans 2021-26, reveals that 81% of politically identifiable antisemitic assaults were committed by Left-wing assailants. The figure includes the ADL’s most severe category of assault, including incidents resulting in murder.

Left-wing antisemitic assaults have soared in recent years

Number of antisemitic assaults by political motivation from January 2021 to May 2026

Since the October 7 attacks in 2023, antisemitic incidents with perpetrators mentioning Israel have exploded, from almost zero to hundreds a month. Nearly all expressed a pro-Palestine position. In the most extreme cases, it resulted in murder. As Elias Rodriguez, the gunman accused of shooting and killing Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum last year, declared: “I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.”

While the online Right has aped some of the Left’s anti-Zionist phrasing, such as “no Zionists in government”, the overall number of Right-wing antisemitic incidents did not surge after October 7. My report found that Right-wing antisemitism remained relatively flat through October 2023, while Left-wing and unassigned incidents spiked. Right-wing antisemitism did, however, undergo a qualitative shift, increasingly adopting language about Israel and Zionism. That pattern suggests that the shock of October 7 and its aftermath primarily galvanized the Left, even as parts of the Right began to rebrand their antisemitism in anti-Zionist terms.

One possible explanation for the spike was the ADL’s decision to classify some extreme anti-Zionist activity as antisemitic. Campus protests with signs saying “Pro-Israel = pro-genocide” or “From DC to Gaza, globalize the intifada”, however, reflect political extremism, not necessarily anti-Jewish feeling.

Nonetheless, yelling “fuck Israel, fuck Jews” or targeting a synagogue with anti-Israel graffiti is obviously antisemitic. These cases, in which anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feelings were expressed together, leapt from around 100 during 2021-22 to 860 in 2024. Almost all involved Left-wing rather than Right-wing framing.

This might seem strange considering that surveys consistently find liberals to be warmer toward Jews than conservatives. They are also less likely to agree with antisemitic conspiracy theories and stereotypes. These findings are correct, but they are incomplete. My surveys show that liberals give Jews a warm 69 out of 100, somewhat better than conservatives’ 64. Yet when asked to rate “Jews who support Israel in the current conflict”, liberal attitudes nosedive to 33 while conservative views remain virtually unchanged at 60.

In other words, liberals may feel warm toward the traditional image of the progressive Jew, but much colder toward the majority of actual Jews. This provides the gateway for hostility towards Israel to spill over into hostility towards Jews. We cannot know the mind of those who commit antisemitic harassment, vandalism or assault, but the indirect evidence supports a pattern of emotional transference, from Israel-hatred to Jew-hatred.

American conservatives feel somewhat less warm toward American Jews than liberals, perhaps due to Jews’ historic progressive tilt. Yet they are considerably more positive toward actually-existing Jews. None of this excuses the young Right’s greater propensity to endorse harmful Jewish conspiracies or stereotypes. But these beliefs occupy a cooler cognitive register, associated with low trust in institutions, a penchant for norm transgression and an attraction to magical and conspiratorial explanations of all kinds. They contribute to antisemitic harassment where the fringe Right can coalesce in significant numbers, as on X. Yet, overall, they do not produce the same level of Jew-hatred as liberals’ anti-Israel animus, which is a hotter emotion.

The vast majority of liberals do not commit antisemitic harassment, vandalism or assault. However, the Third Worldist belief structure that combines antipathy toward America, the West, white people and capitalism with an obsessive hatred of Israel helps to legitimize the antisemitic far-Left. Until this simplistic construct is questioned in liberal institutions that shape public attitudes, the Left is likely to remain the primary threat to American Jews.

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Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).

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