Each year two widely cited organizations publish a national count of antisemitism in the United States, and the two numbers are nowhere near each other. For 2024 the FBI recorded 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crimes, its highest tally since it began collecting the data in 1991; the Anti-Defamation League recorded 9,354 antisemitic incidents, nearly five times as many. The gap is not a contradiction but a difference in what each one counts, and it is not spread evenly. It sits almost entirely in the non-violent categories, harassment and vandalism, where the two systems define and gather incidents most differently. On physical assault, the one category where they most nearly overlap, they land within about 10% of each other: 178 against 196. So when a headline reports a record year for antisemitism, which of the two numbers is it, and can a reader trust it?
This report reads the two counts side by side, category by category, to locate the gap and show what it is made of. It does not rule either number right or wrong. The FBI and the ADL measure different things by different methods, and a crime reported to police is not the same kind of record as an incident an advocacy organization compiles from victims, media, and partners. Where the two are set beside each other, the comparison is of what each independently recorded, never a claim that one number validates or corrects the other.
Key Findings
- The FBI logged 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2024, the highest count since collection began in 1991 and up 5.8% from 1,832 in 2023. Anti-Jewish bias was the single most common religious motive, accounting for about 69% of all religiously motivated hate-crime offenses. (FBI, Hate Crime Statistics 2024, primary official record.)
- The ADL logged 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, its highest in 46 years of tracking and roughly five times the FBI figure. The two are different instruments counting different universes and are never summed or directly compared. (ADL, Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2024, monitoring organization; FBI.)
- The gap lives in the non-violent categories. The ADL recorded 6,552 harassment and 2,606 vandalism incidents against 196 assaults; its harassment count alone is more than three times the FBI’s entire anti-Jewish total. (ADL, 2024.)
- On assault the two nearly agree: 178 anti-Jewish assaults recorded by the FBI, 196 by the ADL, within about 10% of each other, even as the totals differ fivefold. (FBI; ADL, 2024.)
- Both counts are floors. A federal victimization survey found about 42% of violent hate-crime victimizations go unreported to police, and only 19% of participating agencies reported any hate crime to the FBI in 2024. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021; FBI.)
How many antisemitic hate crimes does the US government record?
The FBI counted 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crimes in 2024, the highest number since it began publishing the data in 1991. That is up 5.8% from 1,832 in 2023, which was itself up sharply from about 1,124 in 2022. Anti-Jewish bias was the most common religious motive by a wide margin, accounting for roughly 69% of all religiously motivated hate-crime offenses, and 178 of the 2024 anti-Jewish offenses were physical assaults (aggravated and simple assault).
Set against population, the count describes a marked disproportionality. Jews are about 2.4% of American adults (Pew Research Center, 2021), while anti-Jewish bias accounted for about 69% of religiously motivated hate-crime offenses in 2024 (FBI). Those two shares come from different sources and are placed side by side here to describe the disproportionality; they are not drawn from a single measurement. The FBI total also carries a structural caveat: the 2021 transition to a new national reporting system broke clean year-over-year comparison, and the agency restricts its own trend analysis to a matched panel of agencies that reported in every year.
Why does the ADL count nearly five times as many?
The ADL counted 9,354 incidents in 2024 because it measures a broader universe: not only crimes but harassment and vandalism, logged from victims, media reports, and community partners on the organization’s own definitions, a wider net than crimes formally reported to police. Harassment alone accounted for 6,552 of the total, vandalism for 2,606, and assault for 196.
More than half of the 2024 incidents, 58%, were related to Israel or Zionism, and 2,596 occurred at anti-Israel rallies. That share reflects a documented change in method: since October 2023 the ADL has counted certain expressions of opposition to Zionism at protests and in confrontations as antisemitic incidents, a change the organization discloses added 1,350 incidents, about 15%, to its 2023 total. The ADL states it excludes peaceful protest, support for Palestinian rights, and criticism of Israeli policy; critics argue the change conflates anti-Israel expression with antisemitism and has inflated the totals. Whether opposition to Zionism is itself antisemitism is a contested question the Institute measures separately and does not settle here; what matters for this comparison is that the definitional change widens the ADL count in exactly the non-violent categories where it already diverges most from the FBI’s.
Where do the two counts agree?
On physical assault the two counts land within about 10% of each other: the FBI recorded 178 anti-Jewish assaults in 2024 and the ADL recorded 196, against a fivefold gap in the two organizations’ overall totals. The disagreement between the counts is concentrated in the non-violent categories; on violence, the two systems land in nearly the same place.
The two assault figures are not identical measures. The FBI counts aggravated and simple assaults classified as anti-Jewish hate crimes and reported to police; the ADL counts physical assault incidents it records on its own definitions, and it reports at least 250 victims across those 196 incidents. What is notable is not that the numbers match to the unit but that they converge at all: where the counts diverge fivefold on the total, they sit within about 10% on the category that is hardest to define away, a physical attack that more often produces a police report and admits the least interpretive latitude. The gap between the two organizations is a gap about what counts as an incident, and it narrows to almost nothing where the incident is a body being harmed.
How much antisemitic crime never gets counted at all?
About 42% of violent hate-crime victimizations were never reported to police over 2015 to 2019, on the government’s own accounting (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021), so even a police-based record like the FBI’s is a floor, not a full count. The same survey estimated 305,390 hate-crime victimizations in 2019 against roughly 7,300 incidents reported to the FBI that year, though the two are measured differently enough that the raw gap is a signal of undercounting, not a precise multiple.
The FBI’s own coverage compounds the point. Reporting to the program is voluntary, and of the 16,419 agencies that participated in 2024, only 3,127, about 19%, reported even a single hate crime; the rest recorded none.
The record 1,938 anti-Jewish incidents is therefore a lower bound built from partial reporting, and the ADL’s larger tally, gathered outside the police channel, captures some of what the official count misses along with incidents that never rise to the level of a crime.
Is one of these the real number?
A common instinct is to treat one count as the true one and the other as either inflated or an undercount. The records do not support picking a winner. The two numbers measure different things: the FBI counts crimes reported to police, and its own participation and reporting gaps make its total a floor; the ADL counts a broader set of incidents on its own definitions, including non-criminal harassment and, since October 2023, certain anti-Zionist expression it now classifies as antisemitic. The near-agreement on assault shows that neither is inventing the violent core, and the FBI’s disclosed undercount shows that its total understates the crimes that do occur. The two are complementary instruments with different blind spots, and the gap between them is information about method, not a contest one of them wins.
Methodology and limitations
This report is a synthesis of published figures from primary official records and one established monitoring organization; it presents no original Institute study data.
The figures are drawn from three sources, each labeled by type. The FBI counts are from the agency’s Hate Crime Statistics program for 2024 (a primary official record, released August 2025), reported through its national reporting system by participating law-enforcement agencies. The ADL counts are from its Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2024 (an established monitoring organization with an advocacy mission, labeled as such), compiled from victims, media, and partners on the ADL’s own definitions. The reporting and coverage context is from the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey (a primary official record), corroborated by the Congressional Research Service report on federal hate-crime data; the population baseline is from the Pew Research Center.
Several limits are load-bearing and are stated rather than resolved. The FBI and ADL totals are not the same kind of evidence and are never summed: one is a count of crimes reported to police, the other a tally of incidents an organization records, and the assault figures in particular use related but non-identical definitions and units (the FBI counts assault offenses reported to police, the ADL counts assault incidents on its own definitions), so their near-agreement is an observed convergence, not a validation study. The FBI figure is a known undercount: reporting is voluntary, only about 19% of participating agencies reported any hate crime in 2024, and a federal victimization survey puts the share of violent hate crime never reported to police at about 42%. The FBI’s 2021 transition to a new reporting system limits clean year-over-year comparison, and the 2022 figure here is approximate. The ADL’s 2024 methodology change, which added certain anti-Zionist expression to its count and, by its own disclosure, 1,350 incidents to the 2023 total, is contested; this report describes the change and its effect on the count without adjudicating it. The disproportionality comparison sets Jews’ share of the population beside the anti-Jewish share of religious hate crimes; those come from different sources and are juxtaposed, not measured together.
Conclusion
So when a headline says antisemitism reached a record, whose number is that, and can it be trusted? Both numbers are records, and both are real: the FBI’s 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crimes and the ADL’s 9,354 incidents each reached a high in 2024, and they differ fivefold not because one is wrong but because they count different things. The disagreement lives in the non-violent categories, harassment and vandalism and the newer question of what counts as an incident, and it all but disappears where the incident is a physical assault: 178 against 196, two independent records landing in nearly the same place on the one category with the least room to argue.
That convergence is the finding worth holding onto. It says the violence at the core of these counts is measured consistently by two organizations that agree on little else, even as the official total remains a floor that voluntary reporting and a 42% non-reporting rate hold down. The Institute studies the inputs that fuel antisemitism, and how it is counted is one of them: a fivefold gap between two authoritative numbers is the kind of discrepancy that lets any reader find the figure that suits an argument. Whether a public that cannot agree on the size of a problem can agree on what to do about it is the question the two counts leave open, and it is not one more data can settle on its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do the FBI and the ADL report such different numbers?
They count different things. The FBI counts hate crimes reported to police by participating agencies; the ADL counts a broader set of antisemitic incidents, including non-criminal harassment, gathered from victims, media, and partners on its own definitions. The 2024 figures were 1,938 and 9,354 respectively, and the gap is a difference in scope, not a factual dispute.
Which number fits which claim?
The two figures fit different claims. For crimes reported to police, the FBI’s 1,938 anti-Jewish hate crimes is the official record; for a wider tally that also includes non-criminal harassment and vandalism, the ADL’s 9,354 is the monitoring figure. Because they measure different universes, the two are not summed, and neither is treated as correcting the other.
Are antisemitic hate crimes actually rising, or is it just better reporting?
Both counts reached record highs in 2024, the FBI’s since 1991 and the ADL’s in 46 years of tracking, so the measured direction is up. But the FBI’s 2021 reporting-system change and the ADL’s 2024 methodology change both complicate year-over-year comparison, so the size of the increase is less certain than its direction.
How much antisemitic crime goes unreported?
A large share. A federal victimization survey found about 42% of violent hate-crime victimizations were never reported to police over 2015 to 2019, and only about 19% of agencies participating in the FBI program reported any hate crime in 2024. Both official and advocacy counts are best read as floors.
Why did the ADL’s count rise so much after October 2023?
Two things happened at once. Antisemitic incidents rose after the October 2023 conflict, and the ADL changed its method to count certain expressions of opposition to Zionism as antisemitic incidents, a change it says added 1,350 incidents, about 15%, to its 2023 total. In 2024, 58% of the incidents it recorded were related to Israel or Zionism.
Does the disproportionality figure mean Jews are the most targeted group?
By religious motive, yes, on the FBI’s data: anti-Jewish bias accounted for about 69% of religiously motivated hate-crime offenses in 2024, while Jews are about 2.4% of American adults. Those shares come from different sources and are placed side by side to describe the disproportionality, not drawn from a single measurement.
Sources
- Anti-Defamation League, 2025. Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2024. ADL Center on Extremism. adl.org/resources/report/audit-antisemitic-incidents-2024. Monitoring organization (advocacy mission).
- Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021. Hate Crime Victimization, 2005 to 2019. National Crime Victimization Survey, NCJ 300954. bjs.ojp.gov. Primary official record.
- Congressional Research Service, 2025. Federal Data on Hate Crimes in the United States. Report R46318. congress.gov/crs-product/R46318. Primary official record.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025. Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024 (Hate Crime Statistics). UCR Program, Crime Data Explorer. cde.ucr.cjis.gov. Primary official record.
- Pew Research Center, 2021. The Size of the U.S. Jewish Population. pewresearch.org. Survey research organization.