There are a few facts about public life in this century that no longer need much proving. One is that the internet does not merely spread information; it also industrializes grievance. Another is that old hatreds do not die when societies become more modern. They adapt. They learn new vocabularies, borrow new symbols, and find new hosts. Antisemitism, perhaps the most durable of the West’s moral infections, has proved especially skilled at this. It appears on the far right dressed as civilizational panic, on the far left disguised as selective moral clarity, and online in the kind of memetic half-language that allows people to smuggle prejudice in under the cover of irony. What it rarely does is remain contained. When antisemitism rises, it almost always brings other forms of religious hatred with it.
That is one reason the most interesting response to the current moment is not coming only from Jewish institutions, though they remain on the front lines. It is coming from an increasingly visible alliance of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who seem to have grasped a truth that politics often misses which is that hatred aimed at one Abrahamic community rarely stops there. The target may shift. The slogans may change. But the deeper logic is the same. If a society learns to treat one people’s sacred history, houses of worship, and embodied vulnerability as expendable, the others are never far behind.
The rise itself is not difficult to document. The American Jewish Committee’s 2025 State of Antisemitism in America report describes 2025 as one of the most violent years against American Jews in recent memory, while a joint ADL and Jewish Federations report found that the aftermath of October 7 and the war in Gaza profoundly reshaped Jewish American life, affecting perceptions of safety, communal participation, and belonging. Federal hate-crime data show the wider backdrop: the FBI reported 11,679 hate-crime incidents in 2024, part of a climate in which anti-Jewish incidents remain a major concern.
The headlines have been grim enough to make abstraction impossible. Just days ago, the Associated Press reported that Jewish communities across North America were boosting security after a driver rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel in Michigan, one of the largest Reform congregations in the United States. The FBI is investigating that and similar incidents as potential acts of terrorism. In Britain, an arson attack on ambulances run by the Jewish charity Hatzola Northwest intensified the sense that even ordinary communal infrastructure has become symbolically fair game. These are not only attacks on property. They are attempts to make Jewish life feel publicly precarious.
But something else has been happening alongside the fear. Rather than retreat into parallel religious silos, some leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths have become more explicit about a shared civic and moral defense. The American Jewish Committee’s interreligious work now openly frames partnerships with Muslim and Christian communities as part of the effort to combat antisemitism and religious extremism. On a more local, human scale, recent interfaith commentary has argued that confronting antisemitism and Islamophobia together is not a compromise but a necessity. In a Religion News Service essay on Jewish-Muslim solidarity, the interfaith organizer Maggie Siddiqi argued that resisting both hatreds is essential to democratic life. Another RNS piece by a Muslim and a Jewish leader in New Jersey put it more simply by stating when antisemitism rises, Muslims must speak; when Muslims are vilified, Jews must speak. Silence, they wrote, is not an option.
It is tempting to describe this as idealism, but that would miss the harder, more practical logic underneath it. American Jews and Muslims know, from different historical angles, what it means to live as visible religious minorities under pressure. Christians should know it too from their own Scriptures, if not from their present social status. The Hebrew Bible is full of commands to remember vulnerability rightly. The stranger, the widow, the poor, the targeted, the socially exposed, these figures appear so often in biblical law and prophecy because God keeps measuring societies by how they treat those nearest the edge. It is not difficult to see why religious leaders who take those texts seriously would conclude that one community’s threat environment is never just that community’s problem.
What makes the current interfaith alignment especially notable is that it is emerging at a time when geopolitical conflict would seem to make such cooperation more difficult, not less. The war in Gaza has sharpened fear and grief in nearly every direction. Jewish communities have faced a surge of hostility, demonization, and vandalism. Muslim communities have faced intensifying suspicion, harassment, and state-level rhetoric that treats them as latent security threats. The Associated Press recently noted that Jewish and Muslim communities alike are reporting increased threats amid rising polarization, online radicalization, and global tensions. The old fantasy, in other words, that a society can tolerate hatred against one minority while maintaining broad religious health, is failing in public.
This is where the phrase “Abrahamic religions” becomes something more than a seminar-room category. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are often treated as neighboring traditions grouped under a shared historical label. But in this moment, that label is taking on a more practical significance. It now reflects a growing coalition of people who may differ on ultimate truths yet are increasingly willing to stand together against the erosion of the common good. Jews, Christians, and Muslims do not need to collapse their theological differences to recognize that a society trained to sneer at synagogues will not remain reverent toward churches or mosques for long. Antisemitism is not only hatred of Jews. It is also a test case for whether democratic societies still possess the moral immune system to resist dehumanization before it becomes normal.
That may be why so much of the best work now being done is both practical and symbolic. It is practical in the obvious sense in shared statements, coordinated security, joint advocacy, education, and public witness. It is symbolic in the deeper sense where it refuses the old divide-and-rule instinct by which hate movements isolate one minority at a time and dare the others to stay quiet. The AJC’s guidance for interfaith partners is blunt about this, urging allies to recognize antisemitism clearly and to understand that attacks on Jewish institutions corrode the democratic fabric for everyone. That is not sloganism. It is a diagnosis.
There is, of course, no guarantee that this coalition will be large enough or durable enough to reverse the trend quickly. Hatred has momentum. So do algorithms. And interfaith work has always had to fight two opposite temptations at once which is the temptation toward vague niceness that says nothing concrete, and the temptation toward tribal retreat that says solidarity is impossible. The people doing this work now seem aware of both dangers. They are not pretending that Jews, Christians, and Muslims suddenly agree on everything. They are insisting that moral seriousness requires more than agreement. It requires presence. It requires speech. It requires rejecting the convenience of selective outrage.
And perhaps that is the clearest thing the current moment reveals. Antisemitism may be old, but so is the obligation to stand between the threatened and the crowd. The ancient religions descending from Abraham have never been most compelling when they merely defended themselves. They have been most compelling when they remembered that the God who judges nations also watches how they treat the vulnerable in their midst.
That does not solve the crisis. It does, however, clarify the task. The old hatred is rising again. The more surprising fact is that some of the people best positioned to resist it are refusing the script that says they must do so alone.
