June 12, 2026
For years, American Jewish Committee (AJC) has advocated for a whole-of-society approach to counter the rise of antisemitism, urging all Americans to play a role in curbing the world’s oldest hatred. Dozens of committed Americans heard the call, and, in June, AJC debuted the most robust whole-of-society approach to combat contemporary antisemitism in the U.S. to date titled the Combating Antisemitism Playbook.
Here is the story of how AJC and more than 60 leaders across society worked together to develop a practical, coordinated approach to countering antisemitism grounded in real-world experience. It equips leaders in 13 sectors with clear, practical, and tailored guidance to identify, counter, and prevent antisemitism wherever it emerges.
On January 15, 2022, neighbors in a normally quiet Dallas-Fort Worth suburb watched from their backyards for nearly 11 hours as hundreds of law enforcement officers descended on the neighborhood synagogue to rescue four hostages inside.
That morning, a gunman had entered Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform temple in Colleyville, Texas, demanding that the rabbi and congregants help him secure the release of a federal prisoner. While the gunman’s motive was crystal clear to those familiar with the antisemitic conspiracy of Jewish control and power, it was less clear to the FBI.
“We do believe from our engagement with this subject that he was singularly focused on one issue and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community,” said the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Dallas Field Office. “But we’re continuing to work to find [the] motive and we will continue on that path.”
Holly Huffnagle, AJC’s U.S. Director for Combating Antisemitism at the time, could not believe her ears.
“I remember sitting in my office and thinking: ‘How was this missed?’” Huffnagle recounted. “Law enforcement has a duty to protect citizens. We expect law enforcement to ensure Jews are safe, and yet they didn’t recognize the conspiratorial form of antisemitism?”
In the Beginning
It took less than 24 hours for the FBI to correct its course in Colleyville. But Huffnagle and her AJC colleagues had already rolled up their sleeves. A former policy advisor to the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Huffnagle remembered AJC’s standout work at that time in Europe, where a sudden surge of antisemitism had inspired a continental call to action.
She also considered the data that AJC had collected for its annual State of Antisemitism in America Report, which found a vast majority of Americans believed antisemitism was a problem and everyone shared a responsibility to fight it. Those who had witnessed antisemitism often did not report it because they didn’t know how.
Perhaps that was the solution: marshal all Americans – not just the Jewish community, not just law enforcement, but all of society – to understand, respond to, and prevent this scourge.
“We all care about the bigger picture here in America, the health of our own democracy,” Huffnagle said. “If we can fight antisemitism, we also are helping build the America we all want.”
But not all Americans know how to advocate for the Jewish community or how to counter such hatred. They need experts to point the way. After extensive consultations with experts across professional fields, AJC’s Playbook has emerged as that road map.
Drafting a Plan
After the Colleyville crisis, AJC drafted an initial set of recommendations: AJC's Call to Action Against Antisemitism in America, a nonpartisan collection of recommendations for social media companies, influencers, media, different levels of government and private corporations, was published in September 2022.
In February 2023, AJC convened a meeting of antisemitism envoys from other nations to meet with the Biden Administration and share best practices. At the top of the list? Developing a national strategy with clear action items for agencies to implement.
In May 2023, the White House unveiled its U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism, the first federal plan in American history to address antisemitism, which included more than 100 action items for the federal government, and over 100 actions for Congress, local and state governments, and civil society.
Julie Fishman Rayman, AJC’s Senior Vice President of Policy and Political Affairs, recalls doing a side-by-side comparison between the national strategy and AJC’s Call to Action.
“The similarities were through the roof,” she said. “We really made an impact here.”
Melissa Rogers, who led the White House Office of Faith‑Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under President Biden, vividly remembers responding to the Colleyville attack and subsequent work to protect houses of worship and develop a national strategy to counter antisemitism.
“I’ll never forget the feverish work to end the attack on Congregation Beth Israel and how relieved we were when synagogue leaders and members escaped,” she said. In the wake of that assault and on other houses of worship, she said, the Biden Administration worked with Congress to make historic investments in the Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
“The spike in attacks on synagogues was one of many disturbing trends that led to the development” of the national strategy to counter antisemitism.
AJC assembled a task force to help the White House implement the plan, immediately collaborating with agencies such as the U.S. Departments of Education, Agriculture, and Homeland Security, to provide resources, assist in training federal employees, and support policy changes addressing antisemitism.
Everything Changed After October 7
But the ground suddenly shifted on October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists breached the border from Gaza into southern Israel, murdering more than 1,200 Israelis, taking 251 hostages, and triggering a proliferation of antisemitism around the world.
A routine meeting at the White House previously scheduled for October 11 turned into triage with President Biden in attendance.
“They didn’t know how badly we needed a national strategy until that moment,” Rayman said. “They hoped there would never be that type of emergency. They hoped it would be preventive medicine.”
Globally, the number of antisemitic incidents skyrocketed – 400% in the U.S., 500% in Australia, 600% in the UK, 960% in Brazil. In France, home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, the number of antisemitic incidents in the three months following October 7 equaled those of the previous three years combined, including a 30-year-old woman who was stabbed when she answered a knock at her door, which had been painted with a Nazi swastika.
AJC expanded the original recommendations for the U.S. to apply to the rest of the world, releasing a Global Call to Action Against Antisemitism.
A Playbook For Americans, By Americans
Since the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 the sources and shapes of antisemitism have continued to shift and grow. As AJC continues to advocate for the safety of the Jewish people, in May of 2026, the organization released an updated and expanded set of guidelines for understanding, preventing, and responding to antisemitism: AJC’s Combating Antisemitism Playbook.
AJC solicited feedback from its target audience: leaders with the power to change policies critical to fight against antisemitism. Dozens of volunteers – many of them not Jewish – signed up to participate in practitioner workshops, roundtables, and virtual meetings to offer their own expertise and guidance on what would resonate with their peers.
Matthias Becker, a research scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, who combines linguistics, data science, and history to study antisemitism online, contributed input on the guidelines for AI and social media companies. He has spent years analyzing how antisemitism manifests across German, French, British, and U.S. online spaces.
Raised in Berlin, where the postwar stigma of antisemitism merely swept it under the rug and out of public discourse, Becker is skeptical that surveys capture the full scope of the problem. For a more insightful approach, he argues, one need only look at social media comment sections – self-motivated texts expressed under conditions of anonymity and rapid exchange – to take the pulse of a civilization and understand the stamina of the world’s oldest hatred.
AJC’s Playbook echoes that perspective, advising social media and AI companies to study hate speech, incorporate linguistic markers, and create detection models to monitor that pulse.
“It’s very illuminating to see where your society stands,” he said. “We need to read the signs of the times, and different centers of expertise need to start working across disciplines. It’s the biggest challenge of our time, but I’m convinced it can be solved.”
Eliu Feliciano spent more than 23 years with the New York City Police Department before joining AJC in June 2025. He started shortly after two young employees of the Israeli Embassy, Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, were murdered while leaving a Young Diplomats Reception hosted by AJC at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington D.C.
During his workshops, he highlighted the importance of updating safety plans and working with community partners to establish and share protocols for protecting sensitive locations, events, and personal information of prominent Jewish leaders.
He remembers urging his fellow NYPD officers not to dismiss spray-painted Nazi swastikas or other incidents of vandalism as harmless pranks and shared stories of how he got through to his comrades.
“You don’t necessarily have to be Jewish to recognize when hatred and discrimination are wrong,” said Feliciano, who is Christian. “What’s troubling is that sometimes it’s not always obvious anymore. A lot of it is subtle and normalized and disguised as something else, but the impact is just as real as anything else.”
Huffnagle is not Jewish either. Raised in a Baptist church, she had her “aha moment” during a college trip to the Nazi concentration and death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“What changed for me at Auschwitz was a realization of my own responsibility and needing to do something about it,” Huffnagle said. “To work to right a past wrong committed in the name of Christianity – that was my entry point to all of this.”
Specific Strategies Across Sectors
Laurie Saroff’s entry point was October 27, 2018 – the day a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in her hometown of Pittsburgh and murdered 11 worshipers. Her mother, a member of a congregation housed inside the Tree of Life building, lost friends that day.
Saroff spent more than 20 years working on Capitol Hill and shared in one of AJC’s recent practitioner workshops that busy lawmakers need a playbook that’s direct, prescriptive, and to the point – “not poetic.” Other former congressional staff pointed out that when AJC tells a politician to “stop politicizing antisemitism” – using it to gain partisan leverage – it risks falling on deaf ears to those who see everything through a political lens.
“AJC should ‘tell us why fighting antisemitism is important for Republicans and why it is important for Democrats.’ When you get down to brass tacks, they need specificity. What does that look like?” Huffnagle recalled them saying during the workshop.
While the updated Combating Antisemitism Playbook doesn’t give a pass to politicians who wield antisemitism for their own benefit, it clarifies the language with the particularity that lawmakers need.
Alyssa Weiner Sandler, AJC Associate Director of Antisemitism Policy, convened and attended many of the workshops. She was particularly stricken by how impactful hearing from experts in the field affected both the content and the tone of AJC’s Playbook’s new recommendations.
“The practitioner workshops were an invaluable tool in shaping our understanding not just on the evolving nature of antisemitism, but in showing us the language that will resonate the most within each societal sector,” she said.
The new Combating Antisemitism Playbook includes specific recommendations for 13 sectors of society, including local, state, and branches of the federal government, academia, and tech companies, as well as new categories such as U.S. based-diplomats, research institutions, and think tanks. Each set of guidelines is better tailored for its audience.
“A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work,” Huffnagle said. “There’s no one messenger either. We need to work with a variety of messengers to effectively combat antisemitism.”
Participation in the practitioner workshops doesn't necessarily mean an endorsement since these stakeholders did not see the final product, she said. “We are grateful to the many external stakeholders whose insights and experience helped inform the Playbook,” she added. "We are grateful that people with diverse views were willing to share their thoughts and criticisms with us in good faith.”
Rayman reiterated that the Jewish community can’t do it alone. The more voices at the table developing the messages and the strategies, the better the outcome.
“Being able to talk to people who are our allies and care about the future of the Jewish people as part of the fabric of our nation, a vulnerable group like so many others, helps us focus on what really matters,” Rayman said.
Thus the Combating Antisemitism Playbook’s publication is not the conclusion of the effort, but the beginning.
Now comes the harder part: ensuring these recommendations do not simply sit on shelves, but shape policies, institutions, technologies, and public life — first in the United States, and ultimately as part of a broader global effort to strengthen democratic resilience against antisemitism and hate.
