Australia logs steepest antisemitism rise in J7 report built from seven incompatible counts

The J7 Large Communities' Task Force Against Antisemitism published its second annual report on 5 August 2026. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, which wrote the Australian chapter and hosts the report, led with the finding that Australia recorded the steepest increase of any major Jewish diaspora nation.

The tables carry the figures. Between 2021 and 2025 the seven countries recorded a combined 91,419 reported antisemitic incidents. For 2025 alone the report lists Germany at 8,725, the United States at 6,274, the United Kingdom at 3,700, Australia at 1,654, France at 1,320, Canada at 788 and Argentina at 713. Measured against 2021, incidents rose 46 per cent in Argentina, 60 per cent in Canada, 64 per cent in the United Kingdom, 124 per cent in France, 131 per cent in the United States, 215 per cent in Germany and 270 per cent in Australia. On a per capita basis Germany records 69.80 incidents per 1,000 Jewish residents for 2025 and Australia 14.14, the second highest rate in the group.

Australia's figure has fallen from its peak. The ECAJ chapter reports 495 incidents in 2023, 2,062 in 2024 and 1,654 in 2025. The report groups Australia with France and the United States as countries that declined from a 2024 high, the American fall being 33 per cent, and attributes none of these to a return to the level before 7 October 2023.

The seven numbers are not gathered the same way, and the report says so in its own footnotes. The ECAJ chapter states that each of its annual reports covers the twelve months from 1 October to 30 September, not the calendar year the master tables are labelled with. Canada's figures come from Statistics Canada, the national statistical agency, and because that agency does not publish a breakdown of violent antisemitic incidents, Canada is excluded from the violent incident totals altogether: its row reads NA for all five years. The contents page states that each chapter reflects the viewpoint of the authoring community organisation. What the report presents as a league table is therefore a stack of national monitoring practices, some run by governments and some by community bodies.

Where a state does the counting, the picture looks different again. Home Office statistics for England and Wales, published on 9 October 2025 and covering the year to March 2025, recorded 10,065 religious hate crime offences across all forces. Of those, 45 per cent targeted Muslims and 29 per cent targeted Jewish people. Excluding the Metropolitan Police, whose recording the Home Office says was overstated in earlier bulletins, anti-Muslim offences rose 19 per cent to 3,199, with a spike in August 2024 following the Southport murders and the disorder that followed. Offences targeting Jewish people fell 18 per cent on the same basis, a figure the department cautions against reading as a trend because the Metropolitan Police alone recorded 40 per cent of such offences nationally.

Australia has no comparable national count for either community. Anti-Muslim incidents are logged by the Islamophobia Register Australia, whose fifth report, published on 13 March 2025 by Susan Carland and colleagues, recorded 309 in person incidents and 366 verified online incidents for 2023 to 2024, described by the register as the highest since it began work in 2014. The two Australian registers use different definitions, different periods and different verification methods. Placing their totals side by side would not measure anything.

On attitudes rather than incidents, research commissioned by Australia's Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism and published in November 2025 surveyed 2,185 non Jewish Australians aged 18 and over. It found overall antisemitism scores average on the Generalised Antisemitism Scale, with the antizionist subscale scoring higher than the judeophobic one. Agreement with the statement that Israel treats the Palestinians as the Nazis treated the Jews ran at 45 per cent among 18 to 24 year olds and 27 per cent among those aged 75 and over. Only 13 per cent correctly placed the Jewish share of the Australian population below 1 per cent, and better informed respondents recorded significantly lower antisemitism scores.

The report situates all of this against December 2025. It records that the J7 convened in Sydney on 3 December, issued a closing statement on 8 December, and that six days later an attack at Bondi Beach killed 15 people at a Hanukkah event. Australia subsequently established a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which the ECAJ chapter says is due to finish in December 2026.

What is not yet known is whether the 2025 decline in four countries holds or proves a pause. Nor is it known whether the Royal Commission will recommend a national hate crime count covering all faiths, which would be the only way to test the J7 ranking against Australian official data. In the United Kingdom, Tell MAMA reported on 11 August 2026 that it was seeing increased aggression in anti-Muslim cases over the preceding weeks, but published no figures alongside that assessment.