Vendôme’s owners say they fired three people over the playing of an antisemitic song at the club in Miami Beach.
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When videos surfaced in January of a Miami nightclub DJ playing a Ye song glorifying Hitler at the request of right-wing influencers, it felt more familiar than shocking.
For many Jewish Americans, these moments are no longer isolated provocations. They are confirmation that antisemitism, once relegated to the margins, is now asserting itself openly in public spaces, online platforms and, alarmingly, in our own city.
Miami is home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the country, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants. That history makes this incident more than offensive, and those who traffic in hate believe they have room to operate. That message is not abstract. It is heard clearly by those most often targeted.
Jewish Americans are already living with the consequences, as reflected in American Jewish Committee’s State of Antisemitism in America 2025 report, released earlier this month.
Ninety-one percent of American Jews say they feel less safe in the U.S. as a result of attacks on American Jews in the past year, including the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing of a march in Boulder, Colorado, in support of hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.
Daily life has shifted as a result. According to the AJC report, 55% of American Jews altered their behavior in the past year out of fear of antisemitism, 31% were directly targeted by an antisemitic incident in the last 12 months and nearly one in five felt uncomfortable or unsafe in a social group or setting.
No American should have to weigh whether attending religious services, wearing a visible symbol of faith or gathering publicly is worth the risk. Yet for Jews, that calculation has become routine.
The Miami incident also underscores how tightly online extremism and real-world behavior are intertwined. More than 70% of American Jews experienced antisemitism online or on social media in the last 12 months, according to the AJC report, the highest level recorded in the report’s seven-year history.
Emerging technologies are also fueling concerns. Nearly two-thirds of American Jews are concerned that generative A.I. chatbots such as Grok, ChatGPT or Claude will spread antisemitism. This fear is not theoretical. It reflects how rapidly hateful narratives now replicate and mutate.
The danger is compounded by a widening awareness gap. While 93% of American Jews say antisemitism is a problem in the U.S. today, only 70% of the general public agrees. This is one of the largest gaps ever recorded in the history of AJC’s survey. That disconnect helps explain why incidents like the one in Miami are sometimes dismissed as fringe behavior rather than recognized as warning signs.
Language matters too. Nearly 69% of American Jews say seeing or hearing the phrase “globalize the intifada” makes them feel unsafe as a Jewish person in the United States. “Globalize the intifada,” used by some pro-Palestinian activists to call for aggressive resistance against Israel and its supporters, is widely associated with the violence of the First and Second Intifadas and is often understood, regardless of individual intent, as encouraging violence against Israelis, Jews and institutions connected to Israel worldwide.
When violent rhetoric is normalized, violence becomes easier to rationalize. Against this backdrop, what happened in Miami cannot be minimized. It is a stress test of civic leadership, institutional resolve and community standards.
Condemning antisemitism cannot be selective or conditional. It cannot depend on whether hate is cloaked in political rhetoric, conspiracy theories or explicit Nazi imagery. It must be immediate, bipartisan and unequivocal.
Miami now faces a choice. It can allow moments like this to fade quietly into the news cycle, or it can respond clearly that anti-Jewish hatred has no audience, no shelter and no future here.
The Jewish community is listening closely because history has taught us to recognize the sound of danger when it begins.
And lately, that sound has been getting louder.
Brian Siegal is Director of the American Jewish Committee Miami/Broward regional office.