Council Member Omri Attar is an expert in adaptive leadership, public policy, and community building, and a Harvard Kennedy School graduate of the Mid-Career Master of Public Administration program. In this piece, he shares his views on what is crucial to notice when we talk about antisemitism, and the importance to never stopping to engage with each other.
The Jewish people are not a monolith. Anyone who has spent five minutes at a Jewish gathering knows we argue about everything, and we do it loudly. We also celebrate our diversity, and that effort has led some among us to make a dangerous mistake: assuming that antisemitism is sophisticated enough to make the same distinctions we do.
Our haters aren’t that clever.
Antisemitism is intentionally blind to all of the complexity among us. It doesn’t care about subsets of Jewish identities and whether one is a secular or observant, Ashkenazi or Sephardi, Israeli or diaspora Jew. With striking consistency, those who hate us flatten all our complexity into a single target: Jew.
Yet, many of our Jewish brothers and sisters have quietly convinced themselves that antisemitism won’t reach them.
I am among the many Israelis who have moved to the USA. When I relocated, I had a vision for what my new life would look like. As a Jewish professional with over 15 years of direct engagement with Jewish communities around the world, I was surprised. I hadn’t anticipated encountering those who think a particular expression of Jewish identity will protect them from a prejudice that has never operated selectively.
Frankly, antisemitism always finds all of us. The data shows this without mercy.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that Jews are the targets of nearly 70% of all religion-based hate crimes in the United States. Jews make up just 2% of the population.
In the newly released Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) revealed that there was an average of 17 incidents per day in 2025. It was the third-highest year on record for antisemitic incidents since the ADL began tracking in 1979.
It’s worth noting that even data itself has become susceptible to prejudice. In a debate published by Jubilee Media last month, a participant dismissed the data outright. They claim that what the numbers show is that Jews are “so much better in [sic] reporting it. Better than everyone else.”
Somehow, there are still Jews today who refuse to see antisemitism clearly. I call it the “yes but” movement. These are people who answer with “yes, but…” when talking about antisemitism. I find myself struggling to reconcile their views with what many of us are seeing and hearing. The chants that celebrate hatred, the rhetoric that targets us collectively, and the moments that blur the line between criticism and hostility.
There is a real instinct to place antisemitism alongside other forms of hatred and to make sense of it within broader frameworks of injustice. But doing so means losing an important perspective. Antisemitism too often operates differently, and right now it is spreading with a speed that we cannot afford to minimize or misunderstand.
Whether we’re being harassed on public transport, campuses, or in our neighborhoods, the pattern is the same. Those doing the harassing do not care for Jewish diversity. They simply hate us for the one identity we all share and can never get rid of: Jew.
Antisemitism treats the Jewish people as a collective. It reaches all of us on campuses, in our institutions, and even in our neighborhoods. By erasing nuance and identity, it does not remain contained.
And it definitely does not pause to ask which synagogue or community we each belong to.
