JCPA: 2025 FBI Hate Crimes Data Show Jews Remain the Most-Targeted Religious Community, Jewish Safety is Interconnected with Other Communities’ — and That the Full Picture of Hate in America Is Still Dangerously Incomplete

NEW YORK — In response to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) release of its 2025 hate crime statistics, Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), issued the following statement:

“Once again, the FBI’s data confirms what Jewish communities across this country already feel: the rising tide of hate means that we remain the most-targeted religious community in America. Anti-Jewish hate crimes accounted for 66% of all religion-based hate crimes in 2025 — targeting a community that is roughly 2% of the U.S. population.

“This data also underscores that our safety as Jews goes hand-in-hand with the safety and rights of so many other communities facing threats – and our core democratic norms and values.  The same conspiracy theories that cast Jews as a hidden enemy cast immigrants as invaders, Muslims as threats, and Black and LGBTQ+ Americans as targets. The FBI’s own data bears this out: anti-Sikh hate crimes rose 25% last year and anti-Latino hate crimes rose 26%. Jewish safety and the safety of our neighbors are inextricably linked — which is why we will never accept a strategy that protects one community by demonizing or ignoring another.

“The overall hate crime numbers declined for a third straight year, from 11,862 in 2023 to 10,881 last year. While this trend is welcome, a decline from a historic peak is not safety — and addressing hate and extremism at this scale requires a whole-of-government, whole-of-society approach.

“We also have real concerns about what this data leaves out. Roughly 3,000 law enforcement agencies submitted no hate crime data at all, leaving nearly 5% of the country — some 17 million people — outside this picture entirely. Many agencies that do participate report zero hate crimes year after year in places where we know hate is occurring. And when the federal government turns local police into immigration agents, people stop reporting crimes. Communities that are already afraid become invisible in the data, and hate against them goes unreported, uninvestigated, and unanswered. Congress must pass the Improving Reporting to Prevent Hate Act so the country finally has an honest accounting of hate.

“But the deeper problem is that we keep treating this crisis as a security problem to be managed rather than building resiliency to hate and extremism in the first place. Hardened doors and armed guards are necessary — no synagogue, mosque, gurdwara, or church should have to choose between worship and safety — and JCPA will keep fighting to expand and make the Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP) as easy to access as possible, without onerous conditions that keep the most vulnerable institutions from the funding they need. But security funding is a response to hate, not a remedy for it. We cannot barricade, prosecute, or sue our way out of this crisis.

“The work that actually reduces hate crimes happens upstream, long before an incident is ever reported: civic and digital literacy education that inoculates against conspiracy theories and online radicalization; community-based prevention, including interfaith and cross-community relationships and local coalitions that come together against extremism; and leaders — at every level of government and in every party — who refuse to traffic in the dehumanizing rhetoric and conspiracy theories that give permission for violence. That is what building resilience to hate and extremism looks like, and it is precisely what JCPA fights for every day alongside our partners around the country.

“This new data tells us two things. Hate crimes remain far too high, and our national response is failing. We need the federal government to return its focus to protecting communities and building an inclusive, pluralistic democracy that is more resistant to hate in the first place: rebuilding the civil rights programs that have been gutted, making NSGP work for every community that needs it, investing in the prevention and education programs that stop hate before it becomes a crime, and ending the hateful rhetoric — including from our own government — that fuels these attacks.”

To appropriately combat the growing crisis of hate and extremism in America, JCPA urges Congress and the administration to:

Build resilience to hate and extremism

• Invest in civic education, digital literacy, and media literacy programs that build resistance to conspiracy theories, extremist recruitment, and online radicalization.
• Fully fund hate crime prevention and response programs that have been gutted, including the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer NO HATE Act, Community Approaches to Advancing Justice grants, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and the Emmett Till Cold Case Investigations Program.
• Fully fund the Community Relations Service, the federal government’s dedicated capacity for mediating community conflict and preventing escalation.
• Reject and condemn dehumanizing rhetoric from public officials of every party, recognizing that words from positions of authority shape what people believe is permitted.

Get an honest picture of hate

• Pass the Improving Reporting to Prevent Hate Act (S. 3724 / H.R. 2588) to close the gaps in federal hate crime data.
• End the use of local police as immigration agents, which suppresses reporting and leaves entire communities uncounted and unprotected.
• Restore Department of Justice grant programs that train law enforcement to identify, investigate, and report hate crimes.

Protect communities under threat

• Streamline the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, removing onerous conditions and administrative barriers that are keeping at-risk institutions from accessing security funding.
• Reopen federal hate crimes offices closed or repurposed for immigration enforcement.
• Restore staff and funding to the Office of Civil Rights and keep it within the Department of Education to ensure it is able to protect all students from discrimination.