Anti-Israel campus incidents fell 83% in 2025 — and the movement against Jewish students just changed clothes

On Wednesday, May 7, 2026, Inside Higher Ed reported the headline number from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025. Campus incidents fell 66% in a year — 1,694 down to 583. Anti-Israel protest-related campus incidents fell 83%. Vandalism fell 51%. Physical assaults fell 72%. The story ran in the language of repair. The schools cracked down. The tents came off the quads. The numbers fell with them.

Two weeks earlier, on April 23, Jonathan Falk of Hillel International wrote a sentence in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that belonged at the top of every report-card story.

More than half of what Jewish students experience now shows up online: in posts, anonymous messages, group chats, and the steady churn of conspiracy and incitement.

He named the real condition too: “Campus antisemitism is fundamentally a climate problem, not a conduct-management problem. A campus can look calmer and still be deeply unhealthy.”

The encampments came down. The movement that built them did not. Its stated enemy is the State of Israel. Its lived target is Jewish students — 41% of whom now hide their Jewish identity on campus. The movement did not dissolve. It changed clothes. It is now in faculty senates, anonymous apps, commencement podiums, and federal court. The architecture — its people, its networks, its venues — is intact. Naming the architecture, and naming whom it is built against, is the work.

What the headline number actually measures

The ADL audit counts what looks like an incident: assaults, vandalism, the protest-adjacent harassment you can log. And those things have come down. The ADL grades schools in a separate product too. In its 2026 Campus Antisemitism Report Card of 150 schools, 94% now ban both unauthorized encampments and event disruptions. They back the ban with suspensions, expulsions, and settlements. So the things the audit counts go down. They have. They should.

What the audit cannot count is what migrates. The January 2025 ADL/Hillel/College Pulse survey of Jewish students reports that 83% have faced or seen antisemitism since October 7, 2023. That 83% is a share of students, not the drop in the headline. 41% feel the need to hide their Jewish identity. Only 27% feel comfortable with others on campus knowing their views on Israel. Those figures do not track the audit. They track the climate. The climate is what the architecture builds.

The faculty layer

In September 2025, the ADL and the Academic Engagement Network published Faculty Under Fire. They surveyed 209 Jewish faculty. 73.2% saw anti-Jewish activity by faculty, administrators, or staff. 44% knew of a Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter on their campus. Of those, 77.2% reported FJP-organized anti-Israel programming. 79.4% reported FJP protests. 84.8% reported FJP-endorsed divestment campaigns. This is faculty watching faculty.

The Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine Network — the national body those campus FJP chapters belong to — calls itself “a decentralized, national network of more than 130 affiliated campus chapters.” It commits to “protect and defend university students, faculty and staff who are defamed or disciplined for supporting BDS or otherwise advocating for Palestinian human rights.” (BDS is the campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel.) Read that twice. The network’s stated job includes shielding the very students the schools suspended.

Then the schools suspended the student chapters. Brown, Brandeis, Columbia, George Washington, Rutgers, Tufts, Temple, American, Vermont — and, most recently, Duke. The April 15, 2026 Duke suspension followed an Instagram post showing “U.S. Imperialism” and “Zionism” as foaming pigs. The faculty network kept growing. Faculty have tenure. They have stipends. They have the standing to fill a hall. They hold the long memory to outlast any one class of disciplined students. A movement that loses its students loses a year. A movement that keeps its faculty loses nothing. The Washington Times documented the pattern across the University of California system on February 11, 2026: faculty activism as the throughline of the post-encampment year.

The online layer

In January 2024, before the May 2024 encampment wave, the ADL had already documented the apps. Sidechat had bought Yik Yak in 2023. Together they carried death threats, abuse, and doxxing of Jewish students — at Tufts, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and beyond. Columbia’s then-president Minouche Shafik called Sidechat “poisonous” in April 2024 testimony. The University of North Carolina (UNC) system has since moved to block the apps on its networks. They are still running.

Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism ran a 500-page final report in April 2025: 50 listening sessions, nearly 2,300 affiliates surveyed. It logged Sidechat harassment, “politicized instruction” in the classroom, and doxxing trucks circling Harvard Yard with students’ faces and personal details. An audit of physical incidents cannot count these venues. A conduct office cannot shut them down. Falk’s “more than half” figure fits what the records show. Harvard’s task force, the ADL Sidechat report, and the post-October-7 climate surveys have logged it separately since 2024. The data converge.

The institutional layer

The 2024 encampments set off four cascades the news cycle has stopped following.

Columbia paid $221 million on July 23, 2025. That was $200 million over three years to the federal government. A separate $21 million EEOC class settlement opened to claimants on December 4, 2025. It covers Title VII workplace harassment between October 7, 2023 and July 23, 2025. EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas put it plainly: “Every employee deserves an environment free from harassment tied to their faith or Jewish identity.” Acting President Claire Shipman acknowledged “painful, unacceptable incidents” and that “reform was and is needed.” Columbia disciplined more than 70 students. Probations, suspensions, degree revocations, expulsions.

UCLA paid $6.45 million on July 29, 2025 in Frankel v. Regents of the University of California. For the first time, on August 13, 2024, a federal court had issued an injunction against a school over its handling of pro-Palestinian campus protests. The court called the encampment a “Jew Exclusion Zone.” Hours after the settlement, the DOJ issued UCLA a notice of violation. In February 2026, the DOJ sued the school.

Harvard was sued by the White House on March 20, 2026. The DOJ complaint says Harvard stayed “deliberately indifferent” to “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” antisemitic harassment after October 7, 2023. It wants back “billions in taxpayer funding” plus a court-appointed compliance monitor.

And on May 4, 2026, the outgoing University of Michigan Faculty Senate chair, Derek Peterson, used the spring commencement podium. He praised “pro-Palestinian student activists, who have, over these past two years, opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.” The phrase “Israel’s war” does work the record does not back. The war began on October 7, 2023. That day, Hamas led an invasion of Israeli communities. They murdered roughly 1,200 people and seized 251 hostages. Many remain in Gaza. Hamas still operates from inside the civilian infrastructure it embedded for that purpose. President Domenico Grasso apologized. More than 1,000 faculty, staff, and students signed a letter demanding he take it back. The same chair. The same cause. A venue the encampment never had. The settlement, the federal injunction, the federal lawsuit, the commencement podium — these are not aftershocks. They are the new venues. The architecture moved.

Where to check every claim

Every claim here is checkable. Start with the documents.

• The 66/83/51/72 decline figures come from the ADL’s Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025 and the Inside Higher Ed summary. Read the method: it counts incidents, not climate.

• The 83%/41%/27% student-climate figures come from the January 2025 ADL/Hillel/College Pulse survey of Jewish students. The 94% “ban encampments” figure comes from the ADL’s 2026 Campus Antisemitism Report Card — a separate product from the incident audit.

• The “more than half online” figure and the climate-versus-conduct framing come from Jonathan Falk’s JTA op-ed. Falk is Hillel International’s Senior VP for Campus Solutions. He writes from inside the data Hillel collects.

• The 73.2% figure comes from the ADL’s September 2025 Faculty Under Fire. The 130-chapter count and the protect-the-disciplined pledge sit on the FSJP “about us” page, in their own words. The ADL backgrounder on FSJP is the third-party record. The Washington Times UC piece maps the system-wide throughline.

• The settlement figures and the Andrea Lucas quote come from the JTA Columbia coverage and the EEOC payout notice. The Crimson Harvard piece carries the DOJ filing language. The Washington Times UCLA piece is the source for “Jew Exclusion Zone” and the $6.45 million breakdown.

• The May 4 commencement quote sits in both the Michigan Daily and the Jerusalem Post. The online and chapter-suspension layers come from the Crimson task force, the ADL Sidechat record, and the Jewish Insider Duke piece.

Read them. Then ask which story the headline number tells, and which story the documents tell.

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A movement is not the form it last took. The encampment was a form. The form was suppressed. The movement — its enemy, its cause, its in-group — was not. It moved into the venues enforcement could not reach. Faculty have tenure. Anonymous apps have anonymity. A commencement podium has one chance and one microphone. Federal lawsuits last years.

To cheer the 83% drop, you have to ignore the rest. The 130-chapter faculty network. The “more than half online” climate figure. The $221 million settlement. The “Jew Exclusion Zone” injunction. The White House lawsuit. The commencement podium. The receipts say repair. The ledger says relocation — of a movement that targets Jewish students and the only Jewish state on earth. It has now built itself into venues no crackdown can reach. That is what a movement does when its visible form is closed off. It is not failure. It is architecture working — against the people it was built to work against.

Schools that read the audit headline and call the problem solved will write the next $221 million check. They will explain to the next class of Jewish students why the venue moved while the climate did not. The honest work is not pretending the costume change was the curtain call. It is naming where the movement went. It is naming whom it operates against. It is building the climate measure that catches it there. And it is refusing to mistake quiet quads for a quiet condition.

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