The numbers are in, and they are ugly. The Anti-Defamation League tabulated 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the country in 2024, a five percent jump from 2023 and the highest total since it started counting in 1979. That works out to be more than 25 incidents a day, better than one an hour, every hour, for a year. I've spent three decades reading balance sheets for a living, and I know a trend line when I see one. This one runs straight up, and it runs through the campus gate.
For the first time since the audit began, a majority of incidents, 58 percent, carried some connection to Israel or Zionism, according to ADL's own data. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's the fruit of a years-long project inside higher education to recast Jewish national self-determination as a moral crime, and to teach two generations of students that hating Israel and hating Jews are functionally the same sport.
I did my undergraduate work in criminal justice, and my favorite courses were always in constitutional law. Academic freedom is a serious idea, and I take it seriously. It protects the professor who argues that Israeli settlement policy is wrong, or that American foreign aid needs restructuring. It doesn't protect a professor who papers a colleague's office door with images meant to humiliate or lets a lecture hall turn into a struggle session against the Jewish kid in the second row. Antonin Scalia spent a career drawing that exact line: rights have edges, and the edge here is harassment, not disagreement.
The Justice Department drew the same line this year. In February, the Civil Rights Division sued the University of California, alleging UCLA let a Title VII hostile work environment metastasize against Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff, physically threatened and papered with disturbing imagery, while colleagues and supervisors failed to report the conduct or joined in it. In May, DOJ came back with a Title VI suit on behalf of students, describing an April 2024 encampment where Jewish students were slapped, kicked, pepper-sprayed, and blocked from academic buildings by what the complaint calls "human phalanxes." That's not campus theater. That's a civil rights case with a paper trail, and then-Attorney General Pam Bondi said as much when she filed it.
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Harvard already learned this lesson in court. Jewish students sued in January 2024, arguing the school had become, in their words, a bastion of rampant antisemitism, and accusing Harvard of hiring professors who promoted anti-Jewish violence and spread antisemitic propaganda in their own classrooms. A federal judge refused to toss the case and called it "dubious" that any of it was shielded by the First Amendment. Harvard eventually settled, without admitting wrongdoing, and agreed to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism when it investigates complaints going forward. You don't settle a case like that and rewrite your own disciplinary rulebook because the plaintiffs had nothing.
I coached youth sports for years, football and rugby, boys and girls, and I can tell you what happens when a coach lets one kid bully another and calls it toughness. He's stopped coaching and started enabling. A professor who lets a seminar turn on a Jewish student and calls it discourse has done the same thing, just with a tenure line protecting him instead of a whistle.
The numbers on the ground back up the legal filings. Hillel International counted 2,334 antisemitic incidents on American campuses in the 2024-2025 school year, the highest since it began tracking in 2019, up from 1,853 the year before and a tenfold jump from the 289 recorded in 2022-2023, the last year before October 7. Some of the picture is actually improving. Assaults fell from 50 to 32. Vandalism dropped by more than half. The encampments that defined spring 2024 are down 92 percent. But online harassment surged nearly 185 percent, which tells me the hostility didn't go away. It just went digital, where it's harder to police and easier to deny you ever said it.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Political groups with real influence on campus, the Democratic Socialists of America chief among them, have spent years mainstreaming the idea that Zionism itself is disqualifying. The Metro DC chapter's candidate questionnaire requires candidates to boycott Israel and steer clear of "Zionist lobby groups," a category broad enough to sweep in most American synagogues. The CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington called it what it is: an anti-Jewish loyalty oath. Faculty didn't invent that instinct, but plenty of them have spent a decade grading students on how well they absorb it.
I've spent my career as an expert witness, testifying for both plaintiffs and defendants, because facts don't have a client. The facts here aren't close. Universities that take federal money owe Title VI duties to their students and Title VII duties to their employees. Those duties don't evaporate because the harassment wears the costume of political speech. Faculty who normalize contempt for Jewish students, tolerate it in their colleagues, or launder it as anti-Zionism dressed up in academic language aren't exercising academic freedom. They're failing the one duty every teacher owes every student: protect them, don't sort them into acceptable and unacceptable identities.
My sons have gone through American universities in the years since October 7, and I've watched this unfold as a father as much as a policy writer. The generation coming up behind mine was raised on the idea, straight out of Reagan's America, that you judge people as individuals. Somewhere along the way, a slice of the faculty lounge decided Jewish students should be judged as a bloc and found guilty by association with a country most of them have never even visited. That isn't education. That's the oldest hatred in the world, with a new syllabus and a sabbatical.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.
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