Noah Farkas still remembers the night someone targeted his family.

He was a 10th grader in Plano, Texas, where he and his family were one of the few Jewish families in a mostly Southern Baptist town. At about 3 a.m., he woke up to a thunder of booms and cracks outside his bedroom window. Someone had planted pipe bombs on their front yard. The family’s brick mailbox lay shattered to pieces on the street, their lawn glowed with flames, and on top of their car hung a T-shirt flag painted with swastikas and angry words: “Get Out Jew!” “We know who you are.”

As police officers walked around his family’s property in hazmat suits, making sure the area was clear of chemical agents, Farkas felt himself shaking with fear and confusion: Who would do such a thing—just because they were Jews? His parents told him what his grandparents had told his parents, and what their grandparents had told his grandparents: We Jews are a small people in a big world. There are only about 15 million of us, yet lots of people hate us—and some resort to horrible violence.

Farkas never understood why some people disliked Jews, but his own childhood experiences affirmed his otherness: In elementary school, other boys kicked and punched him while yelling anti-Semitic slurs. Some boys made jokes about Jews and laughed in a way that clearly didn’t invite him to laugh along. One Friday night, while his father was praying a blessing over the wine for Shabbat, they heard the squish of raw eggs splattering their windows.

It was the middle of the week, and Farkas remembers dreading school the next day, but his father was firm: “If you don’t go to school tomorrow, then they win”—“they” meaning the haters, the anti-Semites who aimed to terrify and chase them out of town. Reluctantly, Farkas dragged himself to school, but he remembers sitting in chemistry class feeling unsafe, wondering whether any of his classmates had been involved in the attack the previous night.

Today, Farkas is a 39-year-old rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, and a father of four children ages 4 to 10. He has come a long way from the tiny Jewish congregation of six families in Plano to today leading a Jewish congregation of more than 1,500 families in Los Angeles. And despite Farkas’ negative childhood experiences as an American Jew, the United States has historically been a safe haven for Jews, a place where Jews can flourish under the protection of American law and liberties.

But in the last few years, like many other American Jews, Farkas is increasingly worried about what he sees as a rise in anti-Semitism in the United States. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents for the past 40 years, 2018 had the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents—1,879—a decrease from 1,986 in 2017, but 48 percent higher than in 2016 and 99 percent higher than in 2015. ADL attributes about 13 percent of total incidents to known extremist groups or individuals—the highest number of extremist ideology-inspired attacks in over a decade.

Anti-Semitism doesn’t just come from far-right nationalists and white supremacists; it’s budding on the left as well, where anti-Israel sentiments have led to hostility and discrimination against Jews, and it’s also present among a significant number of Muslims, an animus that partly traces back to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.