US Jews mark a year since Colorado firebombing, but most Americans never heard of it
Blue Square polling finds that majority of US public is not familiar with deadly attacks on Jews, in line with other findings showing widespread ignorance about Holocaust, Israel
US Jews on Monday marked the one-year anniversary of the firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, in which an anti-Zionist attacker hurled gasoline bombs at a rally for Israeli hostages, killing an elderly woman and wounding more than a dozen.
“Karen Sorin Diamond, an 82-year-old mother and grandmother, did not survive,” Susan Rona, the Mountain States regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a column mourning the attack. “I have spent the past year carrying that and thinking about that. I think many of us have.”
The attack came weeks after the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC.
They were among 20 Diaspora Jews murdered in 2025, the most deadly year for Diaspora Jewry in decades.
While the killings in Washington and Colorado were an earthquake for the US Jewish community, most Americans are unaware of the deaths and other incidents of violence against Jews, according to data shared with The Times of Israel.
The Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, a US nonprofit that monitors and fights antisemitism, polled Americans on violent antisemitic attacks late last year. The data have not been previously reported.
Denver, CO – One year ago, an act of antisemitic terror in Boulder forever changed Colorado’s Jewish Community.
As we mark the anniversary of the June 1 attack, we remember Karen Diamond, z”l, whose life was taken as a result of her injuries. @jfederations @boulderjcc pic.twitter.com/qjhrWlxK7o
— JEWISHcolorado (@JEWISHco) June 1, 2026
For the Colorado attack, 62 percent of respondents had never heard of the incident, and 13% said they knew of the attack, but “it’s not important to me.”
For the Washington, DC, shooting, 56% had never heard of the killings, and 12% said it wasn’t important.
The Kantar and Research Narrative independent research groups polled 5,000 US adults for the survey in November and December 2025 on behalf of the Blue Square Alliance. The margin of error was 1.39 percentage points, the Blue Square Alliance said.
In a separate survey, conducted in February and March, a majority of Americans were unfamiliar with other violent attacks targeting Diaspora Jews.
The survey found that 73% of Americans were not very or not at all familiar with the murder of two Jews at a synagogue in Manchester, England, in October 2025.
For the killing of 15 Jews at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach, Australia, in December 2025, the figure was 53% — the highest level of awareness for any of the eight antisemitic incidents on the survey.
Sixty-six percent were unaware, or not very familiar, with an arson attack against a synagogue in Mississippi in January 2026.
That survey, carried out by the SSRS and Research Narrative polling groups on behalf of the Blue Square Alliance, surveyed 7,053 US adults, the Blue Square Alliance said.
The findings were not all bleak for US Jews — the poll on the Boulder and Washington, DC, attacks, found that 74% of respondents believed the attacks were “important,” whether they had heard of the incidents or not.
“We’re finding that broad unawareness of antisemitic violence and vitriol across the country continues to be the status quo,” Steven Fransblow, chief data and technology officer at the Blue Square Alliance, told The Times of Israel last week. “To meaningfully overcome antisemitism, Americans first have to acknowledge the hate that continues to exist across our society.”
The Blue Square, formerly called the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, was established by philanthropist and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft in 2019 after he won Israel’s prestigious $1 million Genesis Prize.
The group’s polls were in line with other studies that have shown Americans lack familiarity with issues that are common knowledge in the Jewish community.
A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of American adults did not know that approximately six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. A 2020 poll by the Claims Conference said that 63% of young Americans were unaware of that fact.
The issue is not limited to the US — a poll this year in Ireland found that half of Irish adults did not know the Holocaust death toll.
Other surveys have found widespread confusion, among both Jews and non-Jews, about the meaning of the term “Zionism.”
A report last year by the Attune Now consulting group, conducted among non-Jewish focus groups in Texas, described a “vast knowledge gap” between the public and Jewish communities.
Many focus group participants did not know Israel was a Jewish state, confused Israelis and Palestinians, and only around half knew about Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which the terror group slaughtered 1,200 people and took 251 hostages to Gaza.
The author of the report, Toba Hellerstein, argued that Jewish community representatives should alter their messaging in light of the public’s ignorance about Jewish issues.
Hellerstein said that Jewish representatives should cease arguing based on history and jargon and should instead adopt simpler, more raw narratives driven by human stories.