According to a new report from the J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism, “In both the number of lethal attacks and the number of casualties, 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks . . . in more than 30 years.” As a CBS article describing the report pointed out, this includes 15 people who were shot dead at Bondi Beach in Australia, two who were killed at a Manchester, UK synagogue, two who were gunned down at a Jewish museum in DC and an 82-year-old Boulder, CO woman who died a month after being hit with a Molotov cocktail.
While the attackers responsible often claim vengeance against Israeli actions in the Middle East, the attacks are not against Israeli military or government sites. Instead, as has been the case for much antisemitic violence throughout history, the targets are random people around the world who happen to be Jewish.
In fact, Jews have been the target of irrational hate and violence since at least the fifth century BC, when Haman was bested by Mordecai. According to the historian Josephus, some 50,000 Jews were killed in the AD 60s when an ethnic riot broke out in Alexandria, Egypt. The harassment and murder of Jews in the Russian Empire was so common that it’s portrayed as an ordinary fact of life in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” Most evil, of course, was the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s, a mass murder so horrific that there are still fewer Jews alive in the world today than there were before it.
One reason this demon has returned is that history has moved on. The memory of the Holocaust is fading, and the world is less familiar with names like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Nearly everyone who was involved—victim, villain or liberator—is now dead. Without the power of eyewitness testimony, the lessons of “Never Again!” are lost.
Another factor is a quirk of this cultural moment, in which skepticism is considered a virtue (not to mention profitable). Like the dwarfs in C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, many are convinced they are too informed to be “taken in” by commonly held ideas. Their cynicism is not the result of newly surfaced facts, but a posture of dis-believing all accepted narratives. This posture is the pop-intellectual version of what philosopher Philip Rieff called a “deathwork.” Rather than pursuing truth, it’s more popular to join the knee-jerk disbelief crowd who claim that the “postwar consensus” is just what “They” want you to believe.
In other words, the new antisemitism is as irrational as it is evil. There’s nothing Christian about it.
In 1943, before the world learned of the Holocaust, apologist Francis Schaeffer responded to Jew-hatred:
Considering anti-Semitism, the first thing that fixes itself in my thinking is the fact that Christ was a Jew. When we open the New Testament to Matthew 1:1, we find the very first claim made concerning Christ is that he sprang from Abraham and was a descendant of David. The Bible does not say that Jesus just happened to be a Jew, but the Word emphasizes over and over again that he was a Jew.
Hatred of Jews has no place whatsoever for the Christian. This is about more than even the biblical call to love our neighbors, though that should be enough. Jesus’ Jewishness is at the center of His identity because at the center of God’s plan to bless all the nations of the earth was His making a chosen people of the descendants of Abraham. To hate “the Jews” is to scorn the most important Jew of all.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/Tetra Images
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can’t find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today’s news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
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