On the afternoon of December 7, 2023, the first day of Hanukkah, a man walked up the steps of the Temple Israel synagogue in Albany, New York, and fired his gun into the air before shouting “free Palestine”.
A class of children that had been listening to the story of the Jewish Festival of Lights inside the temple were rushed down into a shelter.
The director of its early childhood centre was the first to hear the shots shortly after 2pm on what had been a crisp, quiet winter’s day, ordering the 60-some preschoolers to hide under desks and inside cupboards before dialling 911.
The shooter’s gun jammed on the third bullet, averting what could have ended in tragedy. No one was injured, but the incident shook a community that had not seen a threat this serious in the 75 years since the synagogue’s founding.
“It was terrifying,” said Hank Greenberg, a congregant of Temple Israel whose friends’ children and grandchildren were caught up in the attack. “For a Jew in the United States to be concerned for their physical safety by virtue of how they worship, where they worship, this is something new. We were suddenly in uncharted waters.”
The repeated persecution of Jews throughout history has meant antisemitism is often referred to as “the longest hatred”. But since October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and sparking Israel’s deadly war in Gaza, it has reached unprecedented levels in America.
In New York, which is home to the largest number of Jews outside Israel, the police department reported 1,045 confirmed hate crimes that year — the highest number in decades. Fifty-six per cent of them were antisemitic, far outpacing discrimination against any other group. Since October 7, more than one third of Jewish American college students and recent graduates say they have personally experienced antisemitism at least once on campus, according to a report from the American Jewish Committee released in February.
In the past three months, crimes have picked up again. Last weekend, a man threw petrol bombs at a crowd of protesters in Boulder, Colorado, saying he wanted to kill “all the Zionists”. He injured 12 people, including an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor.
Two weeks before that, a young couple who worked as Israeli embassy aides were fatally shot in Washington. Yaron Lischinsky, 30, had been planning to propose to his girlfriend, Sarah Milgrim, 26, in Israel. In April, an arsonist set fire to the home of Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, where he and his family were celebrating Passover.
The Times spoke to more than a dozen American Jews across the New York region who described how they had been personally affected by the rising threat of violence against their community.
Ariana Cohen, a 35-year-old New Yorker, said that the mezuzah — a parchment of Torah verses which acts as a blessing on the doorframes of Jewish houses — that had hung outside her apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was ripped from her home the day after October 7.
Months later, Cohen went to work and found a large swastika painted on the walls of her workplace, a weed dispensary. Cohen said she raised it with her manager, who convinced her not to make a formal complaint and told her it was “nothing compared to what the kids in Gaza are going through”. Cohen, who is a member of the cannabis trade organisation Jews in Weed, said she was stunned by the comparison.
“I see all this graffiti — like ‘free Palestine’ around my neighbourhood, that’s fine, whatever, but when you start seeing things like ‘Jews don’t belong’ that’s not OK,” Cohen said. “My daughter is five, she can’t read yet, but she will soon. What do I tell her?”
Wendy Love Anderson, the rabbi at Temple Israel, said that in the past week alone there had been two incidents in her Albany neighbourhood where Jewish families had been harassed walking to and from the temple. “In both cases it was teenagers shouting ‘free Palestine’. Clearly these families are not in the position to do anything to free Palestine.”
The temple now employs a security officer to stand guard at the entrance during high holidays, a common sight outside synagogues in the US. It has also raised its security spending from $10,000 in 2023 to $150,000 last year.
Julian Ribinik, a wedding and event photographer living in New Jersey, said he had lost work because of his religion. Last November, after Rubinik posted photographs he took of the bat mitzvah of Elizabeth Savetsky, a pro-Israel social media influencer, he said he was subjected to a torrent of hateful messages and phone calls from people threatening to “burn your house down”.
Jewish and Israeli-run business owners have also seen abusive slogans smeared across their buildings. In January, Rafi Hasid, the Israeli owner of the popular Brooklyn restaurant Miriam, found the phrase “genocide cuisine” scrawled on the front door.
Greenberg, whose grandparents escaped the pogroms of eastern Europe before settling in an area of the New York Catskills dubbed the “Borscht Belt”, said: “In my 63 years on the planet, I have never seen a time where Jews were more frightened, terrified for their physical safety in the United States. When my grandparents would talk about antisemitism or what they experienced, part of me naively thought ‘I live in New York, this isn’t something I really have to grapple with.’
“Now we’re seeing wilful, premeditated, strategic acts of terrorism directed towards Jews in this country,” he told The Times. “This is not anything we’ve ever encountered before.”
Greenberg, who is also the spokesman of the Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York, said the timing of the recent attacks was no coincidence. Hamas’s October 7 attack happened on Simchat Torah, which translates as “rejoicing in the Torah”; Shapiro’s mansion was firebombed on Passover. The Boulder crime marked the first day of Shavuot, which commemorates the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai. Greenberg’s own synagogue was targeted during Hanukkah.
The Temple Israel gunman turned out to be an Iraqi-born national with US citizenship, who deliberately chose the two-month anniversary of the October 7 attack to launch his own. Mufid Fawaz Alkhader said he was affected by “events in the Middle East” and later admitted to hate-crime and firearm charges.
Many of the attacks against Jews on US soil were also acts of anti-Zionism, with perpetrators saying they were motivated by the war in Gaza. Historically, there has been a distinction between the unequivocal bigotry of Jew hatred and the debate over “Zionism” — or advocacy for a Jewish state. But in the wake of the October 7 war, that distinction has increasingly blurred.
Some Jewish Americans told The Times that holding their community accountable for the actions of Israel was fuelled by a long-held prejudice, rather than concern for Palestinians. Meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, has tied his country’s fate to that of the global Jewish community, often conflating attacks on the Jewish state with attacks on the Jewish people. The fact that Israel Defence Forces soldiers have erected giant menorahs on captured territory in the Gaza Strip has also inflamed religious tensions.
So have the photos coming out of Gaza: babies trapped in the rubble of bombed-out buildings, the aftermath of strikes on markets and hospitals. More than 50,000 have died since Israel began its offensive on the occupied strip nearly 20 months ago, the majority of whom are women and children, according to Gaza’s health authority, which is run by Hamas.
On Tuesday, Israeli soldiers opened fire near crowds of Palestinians walking towards a food distribution site, leaving 27 people dead. “Incidents like this are radicalising individuals living in the West, continuing a cycle of conflict, terrorism and violent extremism,” said Colin Clarke, an expert on extremism and director of research at the non-profit Soufan Center.
The rhetoric online has also fuelled violence against Arab and Muslim Americans. Wadea al-Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy, was stabbed to death by a neighbour in Illinois who shouted “Muslims must die” in the days after October 7. In January last year, a Palestinian American man in Austin, Texas, was dragged from his car, which had a keffiyeh, or Palestinian scarf, tied to its door handle, and stabbed in the back.
Reported discrimination and attacks against Muslims and Arab Americans also reached a record high of 8,061 complaints in the US in 2023, a 56 per cent rise from the year before.
There is fierce debate even over the very definition of antisemitism: when do legitimate questions about Israel’s war in Gaza, or anti-Zionist statements, veer into Jew hatred?
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), antisemitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews”. It says anti-Zionism —which holds Israel to a double standard or denies its right to exist — is an example of this sentiment.
The Jewish activist group Anti-Defamation League, the most widely cited source on the issue of antisemitism in America, has adopted the IHRA’s working definition. Jonathan Greenblatt, its chief executive, said “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and “there is no debate”.
But other Jewish groups, such as Jewish Voices for Peace and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, argue that equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism stymies free speech as well as legitimate concerns about Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Congress has not written the IHRA definition into US law, but President Trump signed an executive order during his first term in 2019, ordering government agencies to consider adopting it. The second Trump administration has recently withdrawn federal funding from a number of Ivy League colleges, claiming the schools have failed to address antisemitism on campus.
Some Jewish leaders have welcomed these efforts as the most aggressive fight against anti-Jewish bigotry in American history. But others worry Trump is weaponising the fight against Jew hatred as a means of punishing “woke left” institutions, and that this approach could endanger more Jews rather than protect them.
Iris Hsiang, an undergraduate in climate science and human rights who took part in the protests at Columbia University, rejected the claim that her university had become unsafe for Jewish students. Hsiang, who is the daughter of a Jewish mother and Asian father, said she had been called a “self-hating Jew” for wearing a keffiyeh.
“There’s a history of weaponising the Jewish identity,” said Hsiang, 21. “It’s because I’m a Jew, not in spite of it, that I support the Palestinians against persecution. The safety of one group of people shouldn’t come at the expense of another.”
None of those who spoke to The Times denied that America had an antisemitism problem, but they disagreed on how to tackle it.
In Albany this week, as Jews marked Shavuot, Rabbi Love Anderson advocated for unity over division.
“Violence stops dialogue, that’s [the attackers’] intent,” she said. “We must not withdraw, retreat into bunkers; we must continue to be able to be part of a larger community and to welcome people into our spaces. That’s always been a central and important part of the American Jewish experience.”