The past month has shown that antisemitism does not come from just one political camp. It can emerge from both extremes at the same time.
On October 21, a 26-year-old Jewish man doing outreach in Manhattan’s Diamond District was stabbed in the back. A woman has been arrested and charged, and investigators are considering whether the attack was a hate crime. Around the same time in north London, three Jewish women were assaulted in Stamford Hill, including a woman pushing a baby in a stroller.
Community security volunteers detained a suspect, who was later charged. Police are treating the incidents as suspected antisemitic hate crimes. They are part of a broader pattern: visibly Jewish people are targeted even as public debate often treats their safety as secondary, or views concern about it with suspicion.
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Online and in the streets, people on both political extremes have continued to cast Jews as the cause of wider problems. During France’s October cost-of-living protests, which escalated into the country’s worst street violence in years, Palestinian flags and keffiyehs were frequently seen among rioters.
A monitoring group separately documented more than 1,300 posts on X blaming Jews, Israel or Mossad for the unrest. Many repeated familiar conspiracies about Jewish elites, the Rothschilds and the supposed orchestration of chaos.
Far-right accounts declared that “the Jews did this to France.” Far-left accounts described events in terms of colonization and resistance. The two sides may disagree about the economy, immigration and the country’s future, but both put Jews at the center of the problem.
B’nai B’rith volunteers in nearly 50 countries have been reporting these patterns as they unfold. They describe growing security concerns at synagogues and schools, Jewish students and professionals noticing a shift in their daily lives, and the same competing narratives appearing in local discussions and online: conspiracy theories on one side, and the rejection of Jewish identity or legitimacy on the other.
What appears in international monitoring reports, in other words, is also being described by people on the ground in their neighborhoods and on campuses.
Incidents on both political extremes
Recent figures point to a similar divide in reported incidents. During one recent week, far-right and far-left incidents were nearly equal in number. Clusters of swastika graffiti appeared in the United States and Germany, while far-left and Islamist-inspired actions, including graffiti, threats and assaults tied to anti-Israel rhetoric, continued elsewhere.
Calls to “globalize the intifada” circulated in several countries around the October 7 anniversary. Fake AI-generated “rabbi” accounts have also spread familiar antisemitic stereotypes about money on social media. None of this requires a central organizer. It takes only people who otherwise oppose one another settling on the same target.
This is the horseshoe effect. At one end, Jews are portrayed as outsiders secretly controlling banks, the media and government. At the other, they are described as white colonizers who cannot be oppressed and whose state has no right to exist. The language changes, but the result is much the same: Jews are cast as the hidden force behind a crisis and blamed for it. Other minorities are often embraced by one side and attacked by the other. Jews, by contrast, are accused by both—and each side claims they belong to the opposing camp.
The scale of the problem has been evident for some time. French Interior Ministry figures recorded roughly 1,320 antisemitic incidents in 2025, more than half of all documented anti-religious offenses, even though Jews make up less than one percent of the population.
In New York City, Jews have accounted for most confirmed hate crimes. These figures describe real experiences: a man stabbed while wrapping tefillin, women punched on a London street, and people weighing the risks before walking to synagogue or sending a child to school.
Americans should not dismiss this as a European problem. The trend is growing in the United States, too. Focusing only on the far right can mean overlooking assaults, campus rhetoric and protests that treat Jewish institutions as legitimate targets. Looking only at the far left can mean missing conspiracy posts, swastikas and older antisemitic tropes that have never disappeared. People in the middle cannot simply choose one end of the horseshoe and assume they are safe.
