As societies grow more fragmented and public discourse more polarized, antisemitic incidents and rhetoric are rising across regions and platforms worldwide.
How should leaders respond in this moment?
At Davos, panelists warned that antisemitism is rising globally and becoming harder to disentangle from polarized politics. Moderator Katrin Bennhold described Germany’s relapse into far-right normalization, noting politicians calling Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “memorial of shame,” while incidents escalate across regions. Michal Herzog cited Combat Antisemitism Movement data showing worldwide incidents rising from 6,326 in 2024 to 6,820 in 2025, arguing the most dangerous trend is when anti-Israel sentiment “blurs with antisemitism,” targeting Jews far from any policy debate.
Speakers stressed the operational need to distinguish antisemitism from criticism of Israel without denying overlap. Rabbi Rick Jacobs warned conflation “is not helpful” and highlighted threats from both “old fashioned” antisemitism and anti-Israel mobilization, describing an arson attack on a Mississippi synagogue and a pro-Hamas demonstration in New York. He also cautioned against fighting hate by eroding democratic norms: “Those democratic norms are critical to our health and safety,” while urging expanded public security grants.
Business leader Stanley Bergman framed hate as systemic and contagious: “It may begin with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews,” advocating cross-community engagement and workplace intervention. The panel emphasized education, leadership accountability, and social media governance as core levers.
Good morning everybody. My name is Catherine Bennett. I write for the New York Times, and for the last ten years, I've been spending most of my time covering the rise of the far right and with it, the resurgence of anti-Semitism. I'm German. I grew up in the country that committed the Holocaust. I grew up thinking that we could probably defeat this problem. I grew up in a country that educated its young people about the past, that we met witnesses of the Holocaust in school. It was part of the program. How wrong I was. The second biggest party in Germany now has politicians who call the Holocaust memorial in Berlin a memorial of shame. Synagogues are being attacked in the rise in violence against Jewish people in Germany, like everywhere else in the world, is on. The rise is up. So one of the problems that we face is that anti-Semitism is more global than ever. The other thing that we have to keep in mind when we're having this conversation about tackling anti-Semitism is that it's more complex than ever. There are different kinds of anti-Semitism out there at the moment. The one kind that I mentioned is associated with the rise of the far right. The other kind is Islamist inspired, both in Arabic countries and also in Muslim communities in the West. There's the third kind, which we don't talk about a lot. There's anti-Semitism on the left, young people on college campuses. I think we need to talk about all of these things. I think it's particularly difficult at a time when political critique of foreign policy in Israel and sympathy with the suffering of Palestinians and disagreement with the war on Gaza gets conflated with anti-Semitism. So anti-Semitism is being weaponized today as well, which makes the conversations like this sometimes difficult. And I got to be honest with you, I was a little a little, a little bit nervous about accepting this moderator position as a German and as a journalist for The New York Times. It's sometimes you say one wrong word or you don't even say the wrong word and you get attacked. So I hope in the spirit of, of of dialogue, which is this year's motto at Davos, we can have a good faith discussion and an honest discussion. I want to start with you, Mikhail. Viewed from the State of Israel, which was set up explicitly as a safe haven for Jewish people after the Holocaust. When you look at these three kinds of anti-Semitism that are on the rise around the world, is there one that worries you more than the others?
So first of all, good morning. Good morning, and thank you, Catherine, for beginning with a very personal view of anti-Semitism. And my remind all of us that next week, January 27th, we mark the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And so I think I always think that we still have, the survivors are getting fewer and fewer, and we must listen to them, and we must have them interact more and more with younger audience so that they know that it is not a monument of shame, but it is actually happened. And getting ready for this panel. And and I want to thank the World Economic Forum for tackling this issue. That is not easy, as you say. I turned to my good friend Sasha Roitman, who is the CEO of Ccam, combat anti-Semitism movement. And I just want to say they just put together, the numbers for 2025, because we all saw the huge rise in 2024 and, in 2025, it rose from I'm speaking about anti-Semitic incidents worldwide, from the record set in 2024 of 6326. It went up, unfortunately, to 6820. And so, these are incidents that range from swastikas in rural roads in Ireland to, of course, what we all know is, such horrible events as the Bondi Beach massacre, which today, actually Australia marks, a national mourning day for this event. A little bit late, but better late than never. And, and so I do want to refer to the different kinds of anti-Semitism, as you said, unfortunately, they're all on the rise and they're all very scary. And I think the blurry, the blurriness between the anti-Israel views, confused with anti-Semitism. As you said, one can criticize Israel for its policies. One can look at, Israel policies as something, that people don't like. But, when it blurs with antisemitism, that's the scary part, going after innocent citizens, Jewish citizens all over the world. That is the scary part.
And just a follow up on this issue of conflation. Do you think that when Israeli politicians condemn critique of Israel as anti-Semitism, it sometimes risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy? Almost.
You know what I'll share with you? A conflict that I've had for the past over two years now. One of the topics that I've unfortunately had to deal with since October 7th, and I took this on as as a very personal issue, was the use of sexual violence. And on October 7th and afterwards, as we now hear from the hostages who came back, and it was used as a weapon of war. And, one of the issues was not only the use of this as a weapon of war, but also the silence of international women organizations that were set up in the first place to protect women's rights. And it didn't matter who the women were, right. And there was silence. We Israeli women were shocked, of course, by the silence of, international women organizations, UN women, and we all along I refrained. This is my dilemma, but I refrained when people asked me why do you think the silence happened? I refrained from saying, this is anti-Semitism because I said we should look at this as an universal issue. We should defend women rights wherever they are. We should prevent the use of weaponizing sexual violence in the next in the next conflict. But then, you know, over two years later when you see the rapporteur, the UN rapporteur on sexual violence, completely denying the fact that October 7th happened and that sexual violence was used as a weapon of war. And here I am in a dilemma. Is it antisemitism or is it not?
But you do agree that a legitimate criticism of Israel can be put out there and that everybody has the right to maybe I'll I'll go to you, Rabbi. I was you know, I heard your comments the other night at our New York Times dinner where you referred to Martin Niemöller and you pointed out the fact that it is all of our responsibility to stand up for those that are being persecuted. And I think that, you know, if there's one central lesson from World War Two, it is that all human beings have the same human rights. And some of those people out there criticizing Israel, I think, feel that they're standing up for human rights for the Palestinians, for example. That is something that is entirely compatible with both being Jewish and against those who are anti-Semitic. Right?
Yeah. I think the key is that there is something called anti-Semitism. It's alive, it's growing, and it's it's deadly. And there is anti-Zionism, anti-Israel, which is also at times deadly and problematic. There are times where it overlaps. But to conflate them, as always, the same is not helpful. It doesn't help us respond if you don't understand the situation we're in, you can't actually be effective in responding to it. And for the longest time, I loved when you're open, we were having this debate. Where is it worse? No, it's worse on the left. No, it's worse on the right. You know, that's not a helpful discussion. The helpful discussion is it's bad wherever it is and it's deadly. We just had this attack in Jackson, Mississippi, a reform synagogue founded in 1860, right? The beginning of the Civil War and, early, early Shabbat morning, a, an individual came in with gasoline and incinerated most of the congregation. What was remarkable about this is that the community, which is mostly Christian, rallied immediately to the synagogue. They were all saying, no, you have to come have Shabbat in our church? No, in our church. So there actually are places where there's such a deep sense of solidarity that when something like this happens and the assumption from some people was that he must be an anti-Israel activist, right? Turns out he probably couldn't find Israel on a map. What he was is an old fashioned, you know, anti-Semite and had been fueled in kind of the the education of a Christian nationalist or some of the Ku Klux Klan, you know, ideology. And the truth is, it was terrifying for the community. Nobody was killed. Nobody was hurt. Two Torah scrolls were incinerated. And the community is, is strong and resilient. But we also have cases where, you know, it's clearly an attack from the anti-Israel brigade we have in New York City. When we have an event in a synagogue, sometimes we have anti-Israel protesters in Queens. Last week we had a protest where the pro-Palestinian protesters were protesting in favor of Hamas. It was a pro-hamas demonstration, which is in some level unthinkable. And it took a good long while for it to be condemned by the new mayor of New York City. Eventually he did. And specifically. But this is an all points bulletin. It's happening globally and in the US. We're witnessing it on every level in remote areas in the South, like Mississippi, but also in our largest cities.
I'm curious to both of you this question. When I was investigating the far right in Germany, what was very interesting was the influence of the QAnon movement in Germany that kind of made common cause with the Reichsbürger, which was its own sort of militant, far right movement. And, the deeply anti-Semitic narrative, I mean, sort of shockingly familiar medieval, you killed Jesus type narrative to me at the time when I looked into it was something that really was popularized and almost mainstreamed in that part in that segment of the population. And of course, they supported MAGA and President Trump. And so I'm wondering to what extent you worry about anti-Semitism at various layers of this administration in the United States that was brought in part to power by a movement that was deeply anti-Semitic, maybe. Yeah.
I'm very concerned about that. And I'm concerned as well, in some of the efforts to combat anti-Semitism, there are simultaneously efforts to weaken our democracy, the rule of law, due process. And we want to fight anti-Semitism with the the power of government. It can't be a private enterprise that only synagogues or Jewish agencies have to fight it. But at the same time, we don't want to weaken the thing that has kept Jews safest in the US and in other places, which is democracy. Those democratic norms are critical to our health and safety. So, if the government is going to say, well, we'll fight anti-Semitism, but we're going to eliminate these protections because that's the best way to actually fight it. We say, no, that actually is is off limits for us because we're looking at the long view. So this is a little bit of an issue for us today. And honestly, there's no no one gets a buy on this. And certainly, you know, we have we have liberal and we have conservative. Nobody gets a buy and say we're doing everything. In the previous administration, there was a whole of government approach to fighting anti-Semitism. We think that is a winning strategy and there's no reason why that can't be done. If I could just say one more thing that happened just this week is we have in the US nonprofit security grants for our Jewish community that is literally spending enormous sums of money trying to protect our communities with with extra cameras and protocols and security. The truth is, it's very expensive. And for a congregation like the one in Jackson, Mississippi, it's prohibitively expensive. So the government is giving grants to Jewish institutions to keep them safe. And we asked for a very significant increase. But the increase that was announced this week was incremental. So we really do need more actual support, not just more talking.
Right, Stanley, how do you experience this issue in your day to day as a businessman, as somebody who operates at a pretty high level of American society, do you feel that in some ways the gloves have come off? The people are that there's more permission now for people to be sort of either openly or implicitly anti-Semitic in the everyday life.
I'll answer that in a second. But first of all, I want to thank you for moderating this panel. My parents were refugees from Berlin, ended up in South Africa, where I experienced another form of hate. I lived in a community that, was called South End. For those of you who've been to South Africa. South end is very similar to district six. It was a totally integrated community. People from all over the British Empire, every religion you could think of people, the business. The right of my father's business was a muslim family and then a Hindu family on the other side. I'm going to quote, President Herzog, who spoke a few minutes ago in a breakfast where he said, it may begin with the Jews, but it never ends with the Jews. And, Rabbi Jacobs, the quote I think I wasn't at the dinner last night, the Martin Niemöller, the pastor quote, I think is very important. First they came for the social the unionists. And I was an a Unionist. Then they came for the socialists. I was in a socialist and they came for the Jews. I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one. The bottom line is I don't differentiate personally between the left and the right. Hate is hate. And as a business person, I have been an advocate all my life for stamping out hate. I've been my business for 46 years, CEO for 36 years. If I detect a small amount of hate, I jump at it. I had our distribution center, a group of people from Haiti, and African Americans. They were arguing with each other. This was 30 years ago, and I felt it was important to address that. So as a business person, we have to be alert to hate, whether it's coming from the left or from the right. One year it's coming to the left, one year it's coming from the right. And I think we have to go out and do stuff. Myself as a business leader, I decided to get involved in Muslim-jewish relations 20 years ago in the United States and co-founded with the American Jewish Committee, an organization called the Muslim-jewish Advisory Council. My co-chair is the CEO of Ethan Allen, a hallmark company in the United States. And yes, it is very difficult right now to get Jews and Muslims to sit together from both sides. But I think as a business person, we have an obligation to do all we can to stamp out hate, to go to Congress to advocate for hate anti-hate legislation. And there's no such thing as a good Jew and a bad Jew. There's no such thing as an acceptable Jew and a non-acceptable Jew, a Zionist and non-zionist. And there's no such thing as a good Muslim and a bad Muslim as a bad Christian, a good Christian, a bad Hindu and a good Hindu. And I think as a business person, we have to get out and do that. And I would say that most business people in the United States leaders, they may not say it, but they're really anti anything that involves prejudice.
That's beautiful. Thank you. And I want to actually mention something that just came to my mind when you when I heard you talking, you know, the the the director of the Anne Frank house in Frankfurt, Meron Mendel, who is Israeli but naturalized German. He's married to a German Muslim woman, a Pakistani German. And I think it's a beautiful story because she was 11 when she read Anne Frank's diaries, and she related profoundly because it reminded her of the story, the refugee story of her own parents. And she was so got so passionate about it that she volunteered as a teenager to work at the Anne Frank House. Eventually, you know, several years later, worked there full time and fell in love with, Meron. And they're married and they have two children. And I think it was very difficult for both of their families initially, but it shows. Yeah, but it shows that there is shared humanity, not just at the basic human level, but in the stories that we tell. And so coming to the issue of how we tackle this, which, which is where I think actually the differentiation between the different kinds of anti-Semitism and what motivates them is important. I think the Muslim, Jewish, interfaith sort of coming together is, is hugely useful because I think Muslims are experiencing a resurgence or a very high level of Islamophobia, and they are targets. So they they, in a way, can relate better than perhaps anyone to what the Jewish people are going through. So I think there's perhaps common ground. I don't know if that is something that, that you guys are thinking about in Israel, because one of the things that I'm struck by, in fact, Meron mentioned this to me, you know, the segregation in the education system in Israel, which means that there's not that much contact between Arabs and and Jews, and perhaps at that very level is maybe it would be important to start.
Maybe not in the education system, but there's total interaction in real life. Okay. But I think education is very important. But I also think we have to tackle this in various levels. You know, you mentioned the mayor, the newly elected mayor, when an elected official says that he is against anti-Semitism, but the first thing that he does is cancel the definition, the working definition of IHRA for anti-Semitism, then it's meaningless. And this is what we have to ask the leaders of other countries, of societies of communities, is to immediately eradicate any form of racism, particularly anti-Semitism, that we're discussing now. But this is something that we have to ask our leaders to do. This is something that we have to do in the education system. And and as I mentioned, I think we have to talk about it and we still have to talk about the Holocaust. And, and I think we have to look at social media because social media has to tackle this problem. And when, immediately after October 7th, we saw millions of TikTok, new accounts, being put out there with anti-Semitic messages. It didn't come from nowhere. It came out of preparation. You know, we had the president and I have had a a series of delegations of Jewish staff from universities in North America and what they've been experiencing, in their own words, as someone said it for the past 10 or 15 years, they felt as if they've been walking on glass, that they had to be careful. And I think in many ways we may have closed our eyes to what was happening underneath and and to see this. And for a professor in a very distinguished university to say, but I have to be pragmatic, and I need my papers published and my books read, so I have to speak in a certain way.
I think you're right, and it's dreadful. I do feel that there is a the same thing is experienced by, for lack of a better term, the other side. People who, have come out in support of Palestinians feel like they've been canceled. You know, I mean, even Jewish colleagues of mine, Masha Gessen, famously won the Hannah Arendt Prize in Bremen, and because of an article she wrote where she compared the situation in Gaza to, you know, Nazi era ghettos in Eastern Europe, which is something you can agree or disagree with as a comparison.
I think you have to find the facts. It's not agree or disagree. I think when someone does that comparison, maybe they should also check the facts. So that would be helpful.
So so I I'm not going to get into that debate now.
I think it's.
You know, from Masha to be accused of anti-Semitism as the granddaughter of somebody who suffered the Holocaust was very offensive and unacceptable.
I'm sure it was for her personally.
But to your point, social media across the board has been very, very difficult. And and again, coming back to the US administration, which is the one reason that at the moment nobody dares to really regulate the social media companies. That is a big problem.
Yeah. Can I just use an example that may just crystallize this, this intersection of antisemitism and anti-Israel? So I was with a group of our teens recently, and a young man raised his hand and said, I had an experience that was so traumatic for me that I was in my English class. He goes to school somewhere in the South, and he said, he's the only Jewish student in his grade. And the teacher stopped class. They were talking about Charles Dickens Stop class and asked him, You're Jewish, right? And this is a very shy young man. It's like going, yeah, I am. And then she said, I wonder if you would explain to the class what Israel is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza. Oh my God, this is a 15 year old boy, not the most popular. First of all, feeling like the spotlight is on me. I don't want that spotlight. And why would he be expected to explain and automatically be like the spokesperson for the state of Israel?
So it's kind of a version of the same conflation, but the other way round.
Correct. Exactly. Yeah.
You know, hate is hate. And after nine over 11, if you were a muslim in the United States, you were very scared.
It's true.
At the time of Covid, if you were Asian, didn't matter which part of Asia you came from, you were hated. And I think what we need to do in programs like this are very important. We need to talk about stopping hate regardless. And if you pick on a Jewish kid next week, you're going to pick on somebody that's Chinese or Korean in a class. And when there's some kind of a terrorist attack on the US, you'll go after the Muslims. And so I think this kind of program, Kathleen, is very important and should deal with stamping out hate facts are important. I mean, to start comparing what happened in Gaza with the Holocaust is just I mean, it defies logic. So I think words have to be careful, carefully used. And what is happening in social media has to be watched, because I think it may start with the Jews, but it never ends there. And this whole dehumanization of people, whether you're in Rwanda or you're in parts of Asia, whether you're in parts of Africa, whether it's unbelievable dehumanization of people today, I think people like yourself in the media have an obligation to make sure that this kind of hate, the spotlight is put on, this kind of hate.
The one thing we were talking about, you know, I was talking about the fact that anti-Semitism can be weaponized by those who don't want to be criticized, the other way around, the Palestinian issue and Palestinian suffering has been weaponized by the other side to recruit and radicalize young people who feel sympathy. But then, you know, veer into extremism, perhaps, and, and, and, and terrorism. And I wonder to what extent we need to address the question of Palestinian statehood as actually something that, in the long term, needs to be dealt with head on to remove one of the key radicalizing, injustices in this context. So there's a sort of irony of history, right? World War two, Holocaust led to the creation of the state of Israel, and the international community was in favor of this safe haven. At the same time, it created a movement of decolonization around the world, because in some ways, it accelerated decolonization and gave a lot of countries that moment of independence. The Palestinians didn't have that moment, and they've been wanting and fighting for statehood ever since. And do you think that over time, in the long term, Palestinians should get their state in terms of removing that injustice which has been fueling anti-Semitism?
I think we're at the end of our discussion, and I think you're opening a whole new sphere, which cannot be dealt with just by answering yes or no. I think that I don't agree necessarily, that if the Palestinians would have a state of their own and they've had a chance over the years, may I add, I don't think that that would bring down antisemitism and hatred in the world. Okay. I don't think that's the equation. But I do want to say that what's happening in the region, in the Middle East, I think, is an optimistic road because speaking as Stanley said about Muslim and Jewish connections, I think what happened in the Abraham Accords shows that this is possible, not only possible, but this can be very strong and sustainable. And we see that conversation, you know, when you see the Abrahamic House in Abu Dhabi of the three main religions, then you are filled with optimism that this is possible and that it can be done. And so I think that's the road forward to connection. And at the end of the day, like we all said, it's about people. It's about people getting to know each other. And that's a lot of it is education and not hating each other.
Rabbi, I would like to give you the last word.
All I would have to say.
Is.
Just to say thank you. For that, I also would say that, when you are a person who supports the dignity and rights of Jews and Palestinians, that seems perfectly natural. An anti-Semite attacking doesn't first stop you and say, excuse me, may I just check? What kind of view do you have about Israel and Palestine? Are you a person who can see that there are rights for both that we should have? That is not actually what happened in Jackson, Mississippi. And it isn't necessarily how anti-Semitism works. So I think it's important to talk about these issues. But again, we don't want to conflate that. If you have the right views about Israel-Palestine, you'll be immune from the hatred that is coursing through our society. You won't be immune.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, thank you.
Can we have another half hour.
At least?
At least. Thank you. Katherine. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you, thank you.