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Police cordon off Pearl Street on June 1, 2025, in Boulder, Colorado after the firebombing of a group of people participating in a walk in solidarity with hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.
2025 was a challenging year for all who join with us against antisemitism and other forms of hate. It was a year that tested our community -- and showed our strength. A year when we came together to show resilience after we were devastated by antisemitic violence targeting Jews around the globe. We responded together. With resilience. With resolve. With action.
We also came together in times of hope: to recognize campus climate gains made at many schools; to drive change through litigation and legislation against hate; and to wipe back tears as the final remaining living hostages came home from Gaza to hug their loved ones after hundreds of days of a nightmarish captivity.
Read on below for a month-by-month rundown of what the ADL community went through and accomplished in a tumultuous 2025.
We don’t know what the next 12 months will bring. But we know that we will stand together once again to fight antisemitism and hate. We won’t just wish and hope for progress against antisemitism; we will do everything we can to make it happen.
We are so grateful for your support because we can only do this work with you at our side. Together, let’s make the coming year one of progress, resilience and hope.
JANUARY:
In a bleak start to the year, an Islamist terrorist rammed a truck into a crowd in a deadly attack in New Orleans. Hateful conspiracy theories seeking to connect the attack to immigrants, Israel, Jews or the federal government quickly circulated online. Just days later, more ugly conspiratorial accusations spread as the Los Angeles wildfires devastated that region. ADL put out an explainer to push back against these false narratives.
ADL released two important reports on the challenges that the Jewish community faces. In the first, we noted that 83% of Jewish college students had witnessed or experienced antisemitism since 10/7 and that 41% felt the need to sometimes hide their Jewish identity. In the second, ADL’s latest Global 100 survey found that 46% of adults worldwide hold significant antisemitic beliefs. One alarming finding was how prejudices seem to be hardening among the under-35 Millennial and Gen Z generations.
In wins to start off 2025 thanks to our community… ADL and civil rights partners from across New York State welcomed a bill in the New York Legislature designed to bring back and strengthen a law prohibiting masked intimidation. A version of the #UnMaskHate NY bill passed in May. ADL also welcomed the news that the Wikipedia arbitration committee took disciplinary action against multiple editors in the wake of a massive effort by anti-Israel editors to spread misinformation and hate across the platform. Among those disciplined were several who had targeted ADL with misleading Wikipedia posts.
FEBRUARY
ADL affiliate JLens launched an ETF (exchange-traded fund), a groundbreaking fund on the New York Stock Exchange that aims to empower investors to combat antisemitism, support Israel and embody Jewish values.
The Santa Ana Unified School District agreed to a settlement with ADL and our partners in a lawsuit alleging that ethnic studies courses in the district were developed in secret and infected with antisemitism. This was the first of many legal efforts by ADL this year as we accelerated our efforts to fight hate through litigation.
ADL released its annual Murder and Extremism report, showing that in 2024, these deadly attacks declined.
MARCH
In March, thousands of people passionate about fighting antisemitism poured into the Javits Center in New York for ADL’s Never Is Now summit. Highlights included global Jewish leaders sharing their insights from the mainstage, as well as countless vital discussions in the breakout rooms, in the student sessions and in the hallways.
We released a comprehensive evaluation of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel bias in major large language models (LLMs) that power artificial intelligence platforms. These platforms are already reshaping how people consume information (and misinformation).
ADL launched an expanded edition of our influential Campus Antisemitism Report Card, now including 135 schools. This Report Card has been invaluable for helping families consider colleges and helping schools see where they need to make progress.
In an attack on a high-profile Jewish public official, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and his family had to evacuate their residence in the middle of the night after an arson attempt on the same evening they celebrated Passover there.
APRIL
ADL’s flagship report, one that is often cited in statehouses and on Capitol Hill, is our annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. In the audit this year, our data revealed that the massive spike in antisemitic incidents — harassment, vandalism and assaults — that followed 10/7 continued in 2024, with totals again exceeding any other annual tally in the past 46 years. It was also the first time that incidents containing elements related to Israel or Zionism made up a majority of the total of 9,354 incidents.
MAY
Just weeks later in May, a young couple was slain outside a reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. The suspect, 30-year-old Elias Rodriguez of Chicago, Illinois, was taken into custody while shouting, “Free, free Palestine,” after fatally shooting Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim. ADL analysis after the attack showed that some anti-Zionist activists praised the shooter as a hero and called for more violence.
ADL experts released two important reports in May. The first revealed the state of antisemitism in K-12 schools. In response to the alarming results, ADL launched a new initiative to support parents, providing them with the resources needed to urge their schools to take action and adopt best practices. The second, released by ADL and our partners in the J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism, showed a dramatic rise in antisemitic incidents across the seven nations that are home to the largest Jewish communities outside Israel. The J7 provided guidelines to help governments and civil society partners do more against hate.
In one of many examples of effective activism from the ADL community, our volunteers and leaders pressed the CEO of Spotify to remove Ye’s vile Hitler song from their platform. The song was taken down.
JUNE
Tragically, June was the third consecutive month with high-profile violence targeting the Jewish community. A firebombing attack on a gathering in Boulder, Colorado to call for the release of hostages held by Hamas led to over a dozen injuries including those suffered by 82-year-old Karen Diamond, who died of her wounds. As ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt said in a speech while he was in Colorado to support the shaken community, “This is the fight of our lives, and we can't afford to lose.”
This came as events in the Middle East heated up again, with Israel and Iran engaging in direct military confrontation.
In heartening progress in June, advocacy work by ADL’s Nevada community paid off in the passage of two bills – SB 201 and SB 179 -- that delivered gains in the fight against antisemitism and for religious freedom.
JULY
More advocacy success came in July, as the National Education Association (NEA) Executive Committee and Board of Directors rejected an appalling vote to boycott ADL educational materials on antisemitism, fighting bias, and the Holocaust. This came after ADL’s community (including thousands of educators) sent over 210,000 emails to NEA leaders and was joined by nearly 400 Jewish and community organizations in making clear their concerns about the dangerous and antisemitic resolution. Building on this, ADL launched BEACON: Building Educator Allies for Change, Openness and Networks to help K-12 educators grow their advocacy skills and learn how to combat antisemitism and hate.
At the state level, Florida signed a bill into law that strengthens laws against anti-Israel boycotts, including at public universities and in K-12 school districts. ADL provided policy suggestions for the bill, and our staff and volunteer leaders were vocal advocates for its passage.
In a very different kind of advocacy success, ADL audited the safety mechanisms of influential gaming companies Electronic Arts and Take Two, then worked with these billion-dollar enterprises to update their policies around hate speech and extremism.
Also in July, ADL filed a federal civil rights complaint on behalf of Jewish parents whose children have been subjected to “egregious and persistent discrimination and harassment” at the hands of fellow students and teachers in the Baltimore City Public Schools, and partnered in another such action regarding the Concord-Carlisle Regional School District in Massachusetts. These were just a few of many such litigation steps by ADL in 2025.
A dismaying ADL survey on antisemitic attitudes in the wake of the recent violent incidents targeting the Jewish community showed that almost one quarter (24%) of Americans said the attacks against Jews were “understandable.”
AUGUST
In August, we released a chilling interactive timeline that illustrated the striking similarities in the online footprints of two school shooters who carried out rampages in different states. As part of this project, ADL reached out to 16,000 school superintendents. We urged them to consider how their students may be able to access dangerous, extremist content.
Another key August launch was the first-of-its-kind Jewish Policy Index by ADL’s new Ratings & Assessments Institute. JPI scores all 50 states on legislation, educational efforts, and protections aimed at combating antisemitism and supporting Jewish communities. Crucially, the JPI empowers residents in every state to take action by advocating in places where their state falls short. How is your state faring?
SEPTEMBER
ADL and the law firm Crowell & Moring LLP filed a comprehensive legal action on behalf of more than 140 plaintiffs, aiming to hold primary architects of the 10/7 terror attacks accountable – including Hamas, Iran and other state sponsors of terrorism and terrorist organizations. The lawsuit seeks compensatory damages for the victims’ suffering along with punitive damages designed to deter future acts of terrorism. This was ADL’s second lawsuit targeting those responsible for 10/7.
ADL released two notable studies about campus attitudes. One, done at schools worldwide in partnership with the World Union of Jewish Students, revealed that 78% of Jewish students have hidden their religious identity in the surveyed countries. On the faculty side of campus, another ADL study (this one a joint project with the Academic Engagement Network) showed that Jewish-identifying faculty reported facing targeted boycott, smear and doxxing campaigns from fellow faculty, administrators or staff on campus. As one faculty member said in the study: “This is as bad as it gets. This has been a multi-prong attack on me because I stood up regularly against antisemitism on campus.”
We launched a new way to help address these concerns, starting the ADL University Staff Action Network to build a Jewish faculty community and respond to antisemitism on campus. #NotOnMyCampus
OCTOBER
The UK Jewish community was devastated when a deadly Yom Kippur attack killed two at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester. ADL supported our allies, offering not just condolences, but our aid on ensuring safety.
An ADL study of the American Jewish experience since 10/7, conducted in partnership with Jewish Federations of North America, found that over half of Jewish Americans believe that antisemitism is now a normal Jewish experience.
In a huge statehouse win, Jewish students and parents in California can rest a little easier because after months of tireless advocacy from ADL and dozens of groups across the state, AB 715 — a landmark bill to counter antisemitism in K-12 schools — became law.
ADL Education hosted the annual kickoff event for No Place for Hate, a wildly successful initiative where over 1.7 million K-12 students in 2,000+ schools learned how to take action against hate. The program introduces these schools to antisemitism learning and provides consultation and support on deepening engagement on antisemitism, Holocaust education and Jewish identity and inclusion. ADL also created Breaking Down Antisemitism: Guiding Students from Awareness to Action, an important new tool to support educators.
ADL affiliate JLens wrapped up its impactful first proxy season. Our shareholder proposal at Meta, supporting stronger protections against antisemitism and hate across its social media platforms, was the top-performing human rights-related proposal of the 2025 proxy season. And at companies such as Intel, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Alphabet, anti-Israel proposals were defeated.
We joined Gibson Dunn in announcing the new ADL Legal Action Network -- an unprecedented, coordinated network of law firms to provide victims of antisemitism with access to a free national rapid-response system with 40+ of the nation’s leading law firms, consisting of more than 40,000 attorneys.
We announced an important new partnership with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the largest Latino Christian organization in the U.S., as a path toward combating antisemitism and anti-Zionism and deepening Latino-Jewish solidarity across communities of faith.
But by far the most notable moment in October happened midmonth as the 20 remaining living hostages returned to Israel from Hamas captivity and a ceasefire took hold between Israel and Hamas. We encourage you to pause for just a moment... Watch our moving video showing beautiful moments as these freed hostages were reunited with their families. As Carole Nuriel, head of ADL's Israel office, wrote to ADL colleagues from Hostage Square in Tel Aviv: “This is a day that feels like history being written in real time. It is emotional, complex, and overwhelming. There will be joy and reunion, but also deep sorrow as the bodies of those who will not return are brought home. ... Above all, today is a day of hope — the kind that rises from the deepest heartbreak.” However, this remains an incomplete celebration while any of the slain hostages are still held in Gaza.
NOVEMBER
ADL launched an initiative to monitor policies and personnel appointments of the incoming Mamdani Administration and protect Jewish residents of New York City during a period of unprecedented antisemitism in the world’s largest Jewish community outside Israel.
We released a report on ‘Two Years of Campus Turmoil’ to share ADL insights on how antisemitism and anti-Israel activism are evolving and how we can help schools respond. ADL also released a new report on the state of antisemitism in professional academic associations. Our report included guidance on reforming these groups; ADL also pressed more broadly to fight back against antisemitism in unions this year.
ADL and our affiliate JLens swung into action to press shareholders of Microsoft to vote against BDS-aligned shareholder Proposal 9; JLens filed a Notice of Exempt Solicitation with the SEC, formally documenting its opposition to the proposal. The problematic proposal was opposed by more than 70% of voting shares, marking a decisive rejection of a clearly politically motivated proposal.
DECEMBER
Closing a year of impactful advocacy, ADL professional leaders and board members met with key legislators from both parties to underscore ADL's commitment to combating rising antisemitism through bipartisan engagement. This year, over 55,000 members of our community took action in helping advance our priorities at the state and federal level. We are so grateful to every one of them for making a difference.
On the fourth night of Hanukkah, ADL and our affiliate JLens took center stage at the New York Stock Exchange to ring the bell in celebration of JLens’ Jewish advocacy ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund), the first Jewish investment fund to do so. The ETF aims to amplify the Jewish voice in the corporate arena through shareholder advocacy.
Just weeks after ADL and other Jewish leaders from the world's seven largest diaspora communities concluded the first J7 Task Force Summit in Australia, terrorists struck at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney. 15 innocent lives were lost in a horrific attack that is a reminder that normalizing antisemitic rhetoric leads to violence, underscoring the urgent work ahead in 2026 and beyond.
ADL leaders joined the Australian Jewish community in a moving online event just days later to convey our unwavering solidarity and to call on the Australian Government to confront this hatred and protect the Jewish community.