Navigating Antisemitism on Campus and in the Workplace

Panel:

Meredith Weisel is the Vice President, State and Local Advocacy for the ADL (Anti-Defamation League). In that position, she leads the development and execution of municipal and state legislative strategy. She is an attorney by trade and has had a long career in politics and government relations. She holds a B.A. from American University in the interdisciplinary study of Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics, and Government, and a J.D. from the Widener University School of Law.

Dr. Laura Shaw Frank is the Vice President for Education and Director of the Center for Education Advocacy at American Jewish Committee (AJC), where she oversees AJC’s work in education policy spaces, including working with Jewish students and parents, administrators in universities and grade K through 12 schools, and government policy-makers. She earned a Ph.D. in Jewish History from the University of Maryland, College Park, and holds undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia University.

Tiferet Grossman graduated from Barnard College in 2026, with a major in Political Science and a minor in History. At the time of the conference she was a senior at Barnard and President of her class. She attended SAR Academy and SAR High School and spent a gap year at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Dani Kogan (Moderator) is the Program Director for the Center for Shared Society, a division of the Jewish Community Relations Council. Her work for JCRC involves community relations and anti-hate initiatives, both within and outside of the Jewish community. She has a dual M.A. from the Jewish Theological Seminary in Jewish Education and Biblical Studies. 

Dani Kogan: What does antisemitism look like to you today? How are its manifestations changing? And what should communities understand about the specific challenges in your sector?

Meredith Weisel: First of all, ADL and AJC work very closely on a lot of these issues, from the national down to the local level. One of the things that ADL does is publish an audit of antisemitic incidents every year, which looks at the manifestations of antisemitism that we are seeing across the country. We’ve been doing the audit since 1979. The last audit that we did was for 2024. In 2026 we will be releasing the data for 2025.

It should be no surprise that 2024 data show the highest number of antisemitic incidents since ADL has been tabulating this information. In 2024 there were 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States. This was only a five percent increase from the year before, but it was a 344 percent increase over the past five years, and an 893 percent increase over the past ten years. So, the trend has unfortunately continued upwards. The 2024 data most likely reflect the post-October 7th environment. When we look at specific categories of incidents, we see that in 2024 assaults increased by 21 percent,  impacting over 250 victims, and there were over 2,600 incidents of vandalism. Harassment remained relatively steady, but there were a total of 6,552 incidents.

The one data point that I really want to leave you with is that for the first time in the history of the audit, a majority of the incidents contained elements related to Israel or Zionism. I want to be really clear that I’m not talking about criticism of the Israeli government. I’m talking about things that really bled into antisemitism, such as very specific things being said at a rally conflating Zionism with Nazism, or combining a picture of a swastika with the Israeli flag, or making anti-Israel statements that go beyond criticism of the government. 

We recommend following the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism, which looks at demonization and delegitimization of the State of Israel, and judging it by a double standard. Our data show that anti-Zionism is a huge part of the current manifestation of antisemitism. It has permeated throughout society over the past 10 years or so, and we are continuing to see this in 2025.

Dr. Laura Shaw Frank: Indeed, AJC and ADL work together closely, and I think of us as pieces of a big puzzle, because each of us covers different elements of the issue.

I want to talk a little bit about philosophy to explain what’s going on in higher education. Dara Horn has said that throughout history—over the past few thousand years—antisemitism has been a righteous act. It has been a righteous thing to be antisemitic because whatever the evil of a society is, the Jews are made responsible for that evil:  In ancient Rome, Jews were responsible for killing Jesus. In the medieval world, Jews were responsible for the Black Plague or for killing little Christian boys. In Nazi Germany, Jews were responsible for the loss of World War I and for the pollution of the Aryan race. In the Soviet Union, Jews were capitalists. In central Europe, Jews were communists. So, whatever the evil is, that is what is righteous to oppose. And you can see how, if you are assigning to Jews the responsibility for what is evil in your world, it becomes righteous to oppose them. 

There’s a new school of thought that is now developing about what antisemitism looks like at this moment. Some of the key thinkers in this area are Adam Louis-Klein,  Izabella Tabarovsky, and Shaul Kelner. These scholars say that “antizionism” actually has nothing to do with Zionism. What it has to do with is hatred of the Jewish people being manifested through claiming that it’s a political project about Israel—but it’s not. Now, you can have critiques against Israel. You can even have critiques about Zionism. But that’s not what antizionism is about. These thinkers remove the hyphen from “anti-Zionism” and make the letter Z lowercase to show that it’s not really about Zionism; it’s about Jew hatred. It’s about saying that Israel is the new Jew—Israel is the evil being that we have to be righteously opposing. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

This is the type of antisemitism that is mostly manifesting on college campuses. Our college campuses tend to be left-of-center, even far-left, particularly faculty. Now, not all campuses have an antisemitism problem. But what we are seeing as antisemitism on campus is generally that kind of antizionism—no hyphen, lowercase Z—antisemitism, and it plays out in two ways.

The first way is through intellectual culture. What I mean by that is professors who are part of a particular school of thought that is hyperfocused on Israel as the locus of all evil in the world, a school of thought that has no ability to root itself in dialogue across difference, in fact-based inquiry, and in critical thinking, but instead is just hyperfocused on those 3 Ds that Meredith brought up – demonization, double standards, and delegitimization of Israel. We know this affects Jewish students who are in those classrooms. It also affects young scholars who are trying to advance in particular fields. It often spills over into general, traditional antisemitism because you’re a Jew as well. And it spills over into academic societies, such as the American Anthropological Association and others.

The second way it’s been playing out on campus is that Jewish students are being excluded from spaces because of their actual or their perceived Zionism. What that might look like is a student in the jazz club is no longer welcome in the jazz club because she is a Zionist. That actually happened at a university not far from here. It often happens in LGBTQ clubs, where a student who is part of that club, sometimes even the founder of that club, is asked to leave that club or is forced out of that club for being a Zionist or for being Jewish and perceived to be a Zionist.

Tiferet Grossman: I can only speak to my own experience. I’m a student at Barnard College. And Columbia-Barnard carries a very long legacy of political activism that I don’t think is necessarily replicated at all or most college campuses in the U.S. My main takeaway from my experience these last two-plus years has been that what is and what isn’t antisemitism is not very clear.

Most often, we’re not being told to “go back to Poland.” But there is a normalizing of language surrounding Israel that people often use to couch other antisemitic sentiments. So, in the pedagogy on campus that I’ve witnessed, it is standard to address the genocide in Gaza. But it’s less common to find a professor blaming the Jews for the latest government mishaps, though I’m sure that happens in some places.

I serve as my class president at Barnard, which I have done for three years. I also sit on various school committees dedicated to the code of conduct and the student judicial board. In those spaces, what we’re seeing the most is the conflating of Zionists with Jews, and then the either subtle or overt exclusion of students on that basis, whether because of assumed political positions or because of stated ones.

We’re also seeing a lot of language to the effect that the board of trustees and donors, Jewish and Zionist ones, are in the ears of the administration, creating a very strong divide between students and administration that is somehow linked ultimately to Jews. 

Again, I can only speak to my campus experience, but so far those are the ways in which antisemitism has mostly manifested. It’s in pedagogy. It’s in the subtle conflation of Judaism and Zionism, and in assumptions about people’s political and social identities, And it’s in the personal and in the friendships—especially in cutting off people because of assumptions or because of knowledge that someone spent a year in Israel or has a family member there. And that cuts deeper for most of my friends and me than overt statements by professors or clubs, because it has a certain isolating effect that leaves you with only your Jewish friends.

Meredith Weisel: I’d like to add one more thing to put things in perspective for campuses in particular: It’s not that campuses haven’t had antisemitism before. Throughout history, we have seen antisemitic incidents, but from 2023 to 2024 there was an 86 percent increase in incidents, and there were close to 1,700 incidents that we tracked. Those are only reported incidents, which means there are likely more—and the majority of them were related to what we would consider antizionism or anti-Israel sentiments that bled into antisemitism. And that started after October 7th.

Some students were told to “go back to Poland.” That actually happened several times at George Washington University, where it was yelled at students who were leaving the Chabad House or Hillel. We also saw a lot of incidents that came after student governments were voting on divestment resolutions. Even if the university never decides to divest it creates a climate on campus that is not inclusive of Jewish voices. And there are some student governments that have pretty much kicked off all the Jewish students on their student governments. Some of this may not be direct antisemitism, but it is creating a hostile climate.

But I also want to be clear that Jewish life is still thriving on campus. I actually am a mom of a college student. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we are giving our children the information to help them speak up for themselves and the tools to navigate this climate that most of us adults didn’t encounter. I saw antisemitism when I went to college, but it was minor, and it didn’t create a climate that wasn’t inclusive.

Steps To Combat Antisemitism

Dani Kogan: Moving on to steps that we can take: What are three concrete action steps that students, employees, parents, and community members can take to move the needle on addressing antisemitism where they live and work?

Dr. Laura Shaw Frank: I want to start by saying that it shouldn’t be the responsibility of the Jewish community to confront antisemitism; it should be a society-wide effort. AJC does a survey of antisemitism every year which dovetails very well with ADL’s collection of incident data. We collect data on how Jews feel and how the general American public feels. Over the past number of years, we’ve asked a question about whether people see antisemitism as a problem of the Jewish community or a problem of society as a whole. And 90 percent of the general population of America says that antisemitism affects society as a whole; everyone is responsible for combating it.  

There are lots of different ways to combat or confront antisemitism. I don’t know if we’re ever going to eliminate it. It’s been baked into Western thought for thousands of years. But we can tamp it down. I’m not going to talk about lawfare, even though that is a real thing. Lawfare is using the courts to fight antisemitism. We don’t generally engage in lawfare at AJC, although it is an important tool. I’m going to talk about what we do at AJC. We engage in very deep, very close work with university presidents, college presidents, deans, heads of school, superintendents, and elected officials; and we believe very deeply in the power of long-term close relationships with leaders to make change.

The first concrete action step is to partner and create voluntariness. What do I mean by that? Probably every person in this room has some connection to an educational institution—whether you are a parent or a grandparent of a child in a K-12 school or in a higher ed space, whether you yourself are a student, whether you pay property taxes and therefore have a stake in your school board, whether you have neighbors, friends, nieces, or nephews, who are students. 

What we have seen is that when you are a person they can trust—who is invested in the school, who is invested in the success of educational institutions in general, who is invested in this country and the success of the educational system in this country—if you can be trusted, you will be able to transmit information and goals to the schools that they will accept from you. You have to be in it for the long haul. Be a resource. When I say create voluntariness, what I mean is that when they say, “Oh, there was a swastika in the boy’s bathroom; we don’t know what to do,” they will think, “Let’s call that parent who was really helpful to us that time,” or “Let’s call our local person from AJC or ADL.”

We have created action plans for higher ed administration, for K-12 public schools, and for K-12 independent schools. We also create guidance—on all sorts of issues where schools have requested our help:, how to bring a speaker into school, how to address an incident of antisemitism in school, what to do in the December holiday season, how to ensure an inclusive school cultural evening, how to address complicated conversations about whatever the issue is. We created these resources carefully, to truly meet the needs of educators, and many educators have gotten in touch to tell us how helpful they are. Be the resource for the schools in your area – share our action plan and guidance documents with them and offer to connect them with AJC’s Center for Education Advocacy if they need further assistance. 

I want to be honest with you: It is much easier to be the resource in a K-12 space than a higher ed space. Higher ed spaces don’t want to hear from you unless you are a student, a faculty member, or an alumna—or, of course, a significant donor. In general, we recommend not trying to get involved with making change in your child’s college. Instead, help empower your child to do that. Of course, there may be very severe instances when you have to step in. . 

Second of all, report, report, and report. We have found that 78 percent of Jews who had experienced antisemitism did not report it. When we asked them why they didn’t report, their top three answers were: 54 percent said, “I didn’t think anything would be done”; 44 percent said, “I didn’t think it was serious enough to report”; and 22 percent said, “I didn’t know how to report it.” Colleges and universities all now have portals where you can report antisemitism. We tell people to report to schools and also report to Hillel and ADL. It’s really, really important. We can’t address a problem that we don’t fully understand because we lack the data.

And the third concrete thing is making sure that you are engaging with other groups in your community—whether it’s in the education space or just generally in your community—the way you want them to engage with you. We always speak about antisemitism in school spaces through a lens of democracy—of the fraying of our American democracy. We know that about two-thirds of Americans, if not more, are worried about the state of our democracy. It’s not a Republican thing. It’s not a Democrat thing. It’s not a young thing. It’s not an old thing. It’s not a woman thing. It’s not a man thing. It’s an everyone thing. So, we talk about antisemitism through a lens of democracy, because people don’t necessarily care about Jews, but people do care about the security of democracy in our country. And we know that a nation that can have the tough conversations to solve the many problems that face us, a nation that is not afraid to hear things that they disagree with, where we’re more acutely understanding of the misinformation and disinformation that we get on social media, that’s going to be a better nation for all of us.

We encourage people to use what we call our TEACH framework. We use it in education spaces, but it applies everywhere. TEACH stands for Trust, Empathy, Accountability, Curiosity, and Humility. And that’s what we want to seed in our communities. We want to interact with others that way. We can be curious. We can be humble. We can admit that we don’t always have all the answers, and we expect that those we interact with feel the same way.

To sum up, three things to do are: (1) partner and create voluntariness, (2) report, report, report, and (3) engage with other groups the way you want them to engage with you.

Meredith Weisel: I agree with Laura that antisemitism is not a Jewish problem—it’s an everyone problem. We have to start from that place when formulating action items. At ADL, I oversee our state and local advocacy. We also have an entire federal affairs team that is working with the federal government. There are real policy solutions to combatting antisemitism, but that is not something that has been talked about enough. It’s more than just strengthening hate crime laws. That was crucial for a very long time, and there are still some states where we are working to do things like strengthening the laws.

But data drives policy. It sounds cliché, but it is actually very true. Real-life examples of what is happening on the ground drive our policy agendas to make real changes. We have a very robust policy agenda that we are working on for combatting antisemitism. What you can do as community members is get involved in your local community. You don’t always have to join your ADL regional chapter or your local JCRC. You can get involved on your own. But I would encourage you to be a part of some of those groups because we create robust lobby days, and you want to be up there telling your story whether you’re a student, a parent, a grandparent, or a general community member who cares about antisemitism. And bring a friend—they can also come and do this work.

One of the projects we are working on is trying to understand what is happening in each state, because in 2024 every single state including the District of Columbia had at least one antisemitic incident. It doesn’t matter if you are in New York, where you have millions of Jews, or you are in Arkansas, with a very small Jewish population, antisemitism still shows up. You can help influence legislation by telling your story.  I am a lobbyist so I often speak to legislators. But they need to hear from constituents. Trust me, my congressman listens to me more than the one whose district I don’t vote in. That’s reality. It’s the same thing with your state representatives.

The second action item is to get involved in your school, whether you’re still in high school or on a college campus. There are organizations that have the resources to help you. We are doing the research and have the data to help you have conversations with your administrators when they are not responding to antisemitism on campus. And if you are a parent, help your student—but they need to be the voice and they need to be the ones speaking up, because they’re the ones who are there on the campus on a day-to-day basis.

The third action item is community. A lot of synagogues are starting to get involved. They’re forming committees and antisemitism trainings, not just within the Jewish community, but outside the Jewish community. My synagogue has done trainings with several different churches, so that they can understand the manifestations of antisemitism. If they can recognize it, they can call it out. Antisemitism leads to other forms of hate. Everybody knows that just because they start with the Jews, it doesn’t end with the Jews.

Getting involved in the larger community is crucial. I don’t just want a Jewish legislator advocating for a bill to create a buffer zone around a synagogue where protestors can’t go. I would also like to have a non-Jewish legislator advocating for these protections. One, it impacts all houses of worship; but two, it shows that this is part of our community and society. Political involvement is hyper-local, because the reality is that everything that happens at the federal or state level is still about the local community. And the things that affect the local communities eventually trickle up to the federal and state level.

Tiferet Grossman: I want to start with something not to do. This might be unpopular and contrary to other things you’ve heard, but I think there is a very delicate balance of when to get involved in college campus affairs if you are not yourself involved on a college campus. More often than not, outside actors—be it well-meaning parents, well-meaning Jewish donors, politicians—their involvement in campus affairs has often not led to meaningful, productive change. It has often actually added fuel to the fire. 

As for action items that we can take to support students during this time: Right now, it’s much harder to change peoples’ opinions, or even to calmly discuss the terms of the debate, like what counts as antisemitism. It’s much more within our control to change the way we react to antisemitism, whenever we identify it. 

So, these three things are more immediate steps you can take: The first is encouraging your students or your friends or your children to first and foremost speak to people. When your classmate says something abhorrent or says something that feels like a microaggression and is not obviously offensive, respond to them in a respectful rather than patronizing way. This has been one of the more effective ways of engaging in a personal and meaningful dialogue. If that doesn’t work, it may be necessary to go to your student government or your deans or outside resources, but it should start on a more human level. Speaking to people also means using your voice as a voter on a college campus, as one who has a vote in your government. Voter turnout at Barnard College, for example, is incredibly low, despite it being a very vocal college campus. 

The second thing is to keep sending kids to these colleges if you are in a position to do so. I think that there’s a strong tendency to conflate being very uncomfortable on a college campus with being unsafe. I have never felt physically unsafe, but I have often  felt extremely uncomfortable. But to me, it is still overwhelmingly worth it to be on the college campus. And I can say that because we have a very strong Jewish community at Barnard—which I know is not the case on a lot of college campuses. What I tell parents who come to Columbia-Barnard with prospective students is that the infrastructure is there, that the people I’ve met and the diversity of professors and students and opportunities available to me make it overwhelmingly worthwhile, and I think it would be a shame to see Jewish presence on my college campus diminished.

And my third thing is to start education about the conflict very young with an eye toward what students might encounter later. I’m very grateful that the first time I heard about the Deir Yassin massacre was not on my college campus, but I don’t think that’s the case for most of my Jewish peers. I think there are ways for yeshiva day schools, in particular, and other Jewish spaces to ensure that people are receiving a rigorous Israel education that does not shy away from some of the less positive aspects of Israeli history, but also instills Jewish pride in students.

Dr. Laura Shaw Frank: I want to emphasize again what Tiferet just said. One of the most important things that we have found at AJC is that when something happens on a campus, the first thing we need to do is find the Jewish students on that campus and talk to them. Very often they say, “Please do not post on X about it. Please do not do anything. You’re just going to rile things up on campus.” Jewish students are adults. They are the citizens of campus who understand best what’s going on in their campuses. And we must listen to their experience and let them provide guidance about how we should be interacting on campus.

The other thing I want to say—something that we tell Jewish parents all the time—is live with Jewish joy. We can’t go on just being aggrieved and angry and hurt. And yes, we are living in a really hard time in America right now. But we have an incredibly resilient tradition, people, and history. So, let’s live with Jewish joy, and let’s remind our families and communities about the incredible tradition, the incredible religion, the incredible people that we come from.

Questions from the Audience

Audience Question: We’ve been hearing a lot about antisemitism from the left. What are you seeing and doing about right-wing antisemitism?

Meredith Weisel: Antisemitism is not left or right. Antisemitism is antisemitism. Just because we have seen an increase in antisemitism on the left, it hasn’t stopped on the right. And actually antizionism also exists on the right. In the past few weeks we have seen a number of antisemitic incidents on the right. Professional academic associations have had a lot of antisemitic incidents within their communities. It doesn’t matter where it shows up, we must condemn it.

Dr. Laura Shaw Frank: We at AJC talk a lot about the horseshoe—where extremists meet extremists at the bottom. In the end, antisemitism is rooted in conspiracy theories about Jewish power, Jewish depravity, and Jewish control, which are often shared by the right and the left. If you’re in a community filled with like-minded people, those people “over there” become the “evil people” whom it’s easy to blame for whatever is going on. And that is not a province of the right or the left. It’s a province of both.

Tiferet Grossman: I’m not sure that I can speak to this from my campus experience. People who identify as conservatives on my campus have often voiced feelings of isolation and ostracization for their expressions of conservative political leanings. Whether or not that’s actually worrying, and while I’m positive that there is antisemitism from the right on my campus, the right-wing voice is rather minimal and maybe even stifled. Antisemitism from those quarters is just not as visible.

Audience Question: How do we prepare high school seniors going into college? What resources are available for them?

Dr. Laura Shaw Frank: AJC has a program called LFT, Leaders for Tomorrow, that’s been going on for 12 years now. It’s a program that offers both education and mentoring in advocacy skills. It offers students the opportunity to explore their Jewish identities, understand the broad scope of Jewish history and history of antisemitism, and unpack the history of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. And it provides skills development in how to be a good advocate, how to build bridges, how to create dialogue across difference, how to reach out and build allyship on campus. I highly recommend LFT. It’s really important for kids to have a strong sense of who they are as Jews. 

As parents, you can play a significant role as well. Our teens are working to chart their own course, and it may seem like they’re not listening to you. But they are—and they are watching what you do. Modeling what it means to be an engaged, loving, passionate Jew is the best way to send them off.

Meredith Weisel: We have a conference called “Never is Now.” We bring hundreds of high school students together to come and learn about how antisemitism is manifesting. Often we recognize something as antisemitic, but can’t articulate it to others. It’s important for teens to learn how to navigate the process to report an antisemitic incident. It’s not just about Israel education because antisemitism is not always about Israel. Antisemitism is based on conspiracy theories and it shows up  differently from other forms of hate and discrimination. This is why so many professionals don’t understand antisemitism. We do trainings at schools for all their faculty, so they can recognize antisemitism in its many manifestations.

Tiferet Grossman: I think modeling a robust and diverse Israel education is incredibly important, as is emotionally being there for your child in the transition period. You should also discuss with your child some of the emotional red lines, so they have a sense of when to engage with someone on campus who says something that is offensive, and when it is better to not engage and just report it. This is not necessarily a binary choice, since these situations are complex. You should also encourage your child to think about “where do I draw the line at certain values or statements, and where am I open to discussion.”

A Note of Hope

Dani Kogan: I want to end on a note of hope in a moment of rising hostility. What is giving you hope right now?

Tiferet Grossman: This is the hardest question. In my experience on campus, things feel both bleak and, in my individual one-on-one interactions, positive. Two things give me hope. My work in student government and with the administration of the college is incredibly productive. I’ve been doing this work since before October 7th, and they have always been receptive to my feedback—as a student, as a Jew, as a campus leader. I’m not always sure what their motives are, but I’m grateful when people are willing to listen and learn and take me seriously. 

The same can’t be said about the student body, but I’m hopeful every time I have a positive one-on-one interaction with someone who’s not Jewish and should have no reason to be kind to me, given the culture on campus of othering Jews and Zionists.  

Dr. Laura Shaw Frank: I’ll say three things. The first thing is I see a renewed desire among Jews who are tangentially connected to the Jewish community returning and wanting to learn about Jewish history and study Jewish texts, and to show up asJews with pride. 

The second thing is that education works.  A study done by a professor at UC Berkeley showed that less than 50 percent of the students who used the chant “From the River to the Sea” knew what river and what sea. But after the students were shown a map and told that there were over 10 million people living in that area—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—under a democratically elected government, and when they understood the emotional impact that phrase has for Jews, almost 70 percent of the students who had previously used the phrase said they weren’t going to use it anymore. 

And the last thing is that, over the past month, I’ve been teaching workshops at Columbia University on understanding Jewish identity and antisemitism as part of the university’s Community Citizenship Initiative. Each time I teach, following the workshop there’s always a line of non-Jewish students who come over and say, “Thank you. I understand so much better now, and I’m ready to be an ally.”

Meredith Weisel: I get hope from seeing the younger generation, including my own kids, who are speaking up. I recently attended an event at American University. Talking with the Jewish students on campus gives me hope—their Jewish pride is so strong. In my job, I get to travel across the country and I see people supporting us from all corners of this country. 

And the last thing—the Jewish people have not only survived, but we’ve thrived and we will continue to thrive. This is something we need to remember. Even though sometimes it may feel dark and gloomy, there is always a light. It may be hard to see some weeks, but it is there. We just have to hold on to that. Every Friday night when I light my Shabbat candles, I post a picture of that. It is my special thing that I do to say this is my Jewish pride and nobody’s going to take that away from me.