It's not both sides
TL;DR: New York had more antisemitic attacks than all the red states combined.
I’m no stranger to the antisemitism conversation. I didn’t wake up on October 8th and realize we had a problem. Nothing that is happening right now, on either the left or right, is surprising to me. Nothing.
The liberal Jewish establishment, however, continues to be stunned. So stunned that they take days to process and comment on things that used to be routine pronouncements. The Anti-Defamation League issues an immediate statement after a shooting at a the Islamic Center of San Diego. When a mob marches through a Jewish neighborhood assaulting Jewish children, the ADL waits overnight and into the morning to say anything. If it were red-hatted white supremacists raging outside synagogues, they’d know what to say. But the masked Islamists and their leftist friends present a conundrum to them: aren’t we on the same side?
I wrote in the New York Post a few days ago how Jewish liberals have spent a century aligned with the Democratic party and have one John Fetterman to show for it. I address the “But Tucker Carlson” argument in the piece. The Post article was a companion to this video I did asking Jewish liberals where their friends are when they need them:
But the actual reality the Jewish liberal establishment can’t face is that it’s rarely ever white supremacists raging outside synagogues. The latest ADL report on antisemitism does its best to obscure this.
According to the report, there were 203 assaults on Jews in 2025 in America, including three deaths. All three murders, the shooting deaths of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., the killing of Karen Diamond by Molotov cocktail at a Run for Their Lives event in Colorado, were all perpetrated by leftists or Islamists. There was not a MAGA hat in sight.
The numbers are so skewed, in fact, that the ADL has to present “Antisemitic White Supremacist Propaganda & Events” as a category to get the far right on the board at all, though they do have to note “Antisemitic white supremacist propaganda and event incidents were down 51% in 2025.”
To illustrate the “White Supremacist Propaganda & Events” the ADL presents a poster by the “Patriot Front” group demanding “No Zionist in Government,” another by the “Goyim Defense League” announcing the Holocaust was a lie and finally a photo of a masked man from a group called “White Lives Matter” holding a sign that reads “Juden Out.”
An idiot with a sign is not the same as a violent illegal immigrant throwing Molotov cocktails at elderly Jews. It’s just not. Pamphleteering disgusting lies about Jews is bad. Violence is far worse.
There’s the additional reality that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a far left group, has been indicted for funding White Supremacist groups like the KKK and Unite the Right, that group that marched on Charlottesville in 2017 and became the ultimate symbol of Jew-hatred on the right. Who even knows if the masked guy with the gross sign isn’t just there to pretend “both sides” have a problem. It’s telling that the SPLC didn’t need to fund antisemitism on the left because it’s already so oversaturated.
Again, here is the tl;dr crux of this thing: Of the 203 antisemitic assaults in 2025 across the United States, New York had 90 of them. All the red states, that is states won by President Donald Trump in the 2024, did not add up to 90.
As I wrote at Fox News about the 2023 report:
“According to the Anti Defamation League (ADL) “The states with the highest number of incidents were California (1,266), New York (1,218), New Jersey (830), Florida (463) and Massachusetts (440).” Four of those states are blue states. In my red home state of Florida, we had approximately the same number of incidents as Massachusetts while having about three times the population and a third of the incidents of New York despite having over 2 million more people.
The ADL is a left-leaning Jewish organization, and yet they admit, “On a per capita basis, the states with the highest concentration of antisemitic incidents were New Jersey – with 8.93 incidents per 100,000 residents – followed by Vermont (6.64), Massachusetts (6.28), New York (6.23), Maryland (5.49) and Connecticut (5.09). On the city level, two cities – Manhattan (26.84 per 100,000) and Washington, D.C. (25.75 per 100,000) – stood out with far and away the highest levels of incidents per capita. Brookyln [sic], NY, stood out specifically in terms of physical assault incidents, with 1.16 assaults per 100,000 residents.” Again, all deep blue states and cities.”
The latest report doesn’t have the breakdown per capita and I have to imagine that’s by design. The ADL needs this to be a “both sides” issue. They can’t say that antisemitism is a problem primarily of the left when they themselves are, and have been for decades, on that same left. What did they accomplish in that time, with their resources and their mission? If you’re fighting antisemitism and that antisemitism has exploded during the time of your fight, what exactly is the point of you?
That’s not to say there is no antisemitism on the right. There is and it’s a growing concern. But not all antisemitism is the same and the one we have to confront with some degree of immediacy is the one that smashes Jews in the head on the streets of Brooklyn and, most importantly, has for years while liberal Jews looked away. How many years? Well, our family quit our Brooklyn synagogue back in 2019 because the violent antisemites weren’t who the activist congregation had hoped:
Then in 2018, Jews started getting assaulted daily on the streets of Brooklyn. If there were a moment designed for an activist rabbi, this was it. Our activist rabbi did not say one word.
After the first few attacks, I wrote in Haaretz “When Donald Trump was elected president, Jews were concerned about anti-Semitism. Synagogues sent worried emails about what the election meant for Jews. Quotes about the Holocaust were repurposed to represent our current moment. After a swastika was painted in Adam Yauch park in Brooklyn, a crowd filled the park to say we wouldn’t stand for this in Brooklyn.”
They all stood for it. There were no marches, no speeches, no action. You could not pin the attacks in New York City on Trump supporters so they simply did not care.
Our final Thanksgiving in New York, in November 2021, we sat at our table and told our family that New York was going to get bad for Jews. This wasn’t a guess. We are poker players and there were massive, glaring, tells. If liberal New York Jews couldn’t stand up to antisemitism, who in the city would?
We additionally knew because I saw where Europe was going in 2014. Me in Time Magazine:
“Israeli performers get disinvited from a festival in Edinburgh as if disinviting artists from countries whose politics you don’t like is a normal thing to do. Where is the outrage? They pretend it’s because of Israel, not because they’re Jews. Then the Jewish Film Festival gets canceled in London. An embarrassment. Britain should hang its head in shame. It doesn’t. A crowd in Germany (in Germany!) shouts “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” Where is Germany’s soul-searching that this goes on within its borders? Forget Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem signing an anti-Israel letter in a Spanish newspaper. No big deal when the second-biggest newspaper in Spain prints a piece arguing Jews “are not made to co-exist,” with references to how good they are with money, how they deserved expulsion, wondering how they still exist (“persist”) at all.”
It’s impossible to dismiss any of this as just a province of the “left” at this point. No one thinks the next Democrat running for president will be a friend to Israel. No one expects the mayor of New York City, home to more Jews than Tel Aviv, is going to stop the violence in his city against Jews. No one waits for the mainstream Democratic establishment to say a word about pograms in Brooklyn or dog rape lies in the New York Times. They have picked their side and Jews are not on it. Liberal Jews can decide for themselves what that means for them personally.
But for the rest of us living in reality we need to understand the truth of the story of leftist violence that the ADL numbers tell and act accordingly. We have to monitor the podcastistan hate on the right but be realistic about the real life, actually violent, hate from the mainstream left. Conservative donors have to stop funding “the fight” against antisemitism, especially when groups stay blind to where that fight is happening. Put the money elsewhere. Raise strong Jewish children. Teach them to know who their friends are and to never pretend otherwise.