A new survey finds that the percentage of people in the US agreeing to six or more classic antisemitic statements has doubled since similar surveys in 2014, 2015 and 2019.
The ADL research makes use of work done at King’s College London and Goldsmiths, University of London, and the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism.
Drawing on the work of David Hirsh and others, as well as measuring ‘classic’ antisemitism, the ADL survey also measures Israel-related or antizionist antisemitism. It uses questions that were developed by Daniel Allington and David Hirsh and later validated in a series of statistical analyses which those scholars carried out with psychometric testing expert Louise Katz.
Dr David Hirsh said:
“We have seen antisemitism more frequently in political discourse: on the populist left and the populist right and in Islamist, Christian and Black Nationalist milieus. This rise now seems to be measurable in the population as a whole.”
Dr Daniel Allington said:
“In order to understand the way people think about Jews, you need to listen to what they say about Israel. Building on our work, the new ADL survey forms part of a large and growing body of evidence demonstrating that attitudes to both are closely interlinked.”
20% of Americans agreed, at least to some extent, with 6 or more ‘classic’ statements compared to 9% in 2014, 10% in 2015 and 11% in 2019. More Americans than there are Jews in America agreed with all the antisemitic statements.
These figures relate to the same eleven statements that the ADL has been putting to participants since 1964; the percentage of Americans agreeing with 6 or more tropes:
This survey was carried out by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in partnership with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. The ADL is one of the biggest and oldest campaigning groups against antisemitism in America.
ADL always asked whether Americans thought Jews were more loyal to Israel than to the US, but this time, part of the survey also delved further into anti-Israel sentiment.
● 40% of Americans agree, at least to some extent, that ‘Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews’.
● 24% of Americans believe, at least to some extent, that Israel and its supporters are a bad influence on ‘our’ democracy;
● 23% of Americans agree, at least to some extent, that ‘Israel can get away with anything because its supporters control the media’.
David Hirsh is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and the Academic Director of LCSCA.
Daniel Allington is a Reader in Social Analytics at King’s College London and a Research Fellow at LCSCA.
Louise Katz is a Psychology subject matter expert at Arden University.
The work was published in the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism (JCA), edited by Lesley Klaff (Senior Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam University). The JCA is associated with the LCSCA.
The survey found, in confirmation of Allington, Hirsh and Katz’s work, that there is a substantive correlation between ‘classic’ antisemitic sentiment and ‘antizionist’ antisemitic sentiment.
The new Israel related survey questions have been also been used by the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) in its annual Antisemitism Barometer Survey since 2019.
The three relevant papers are as follows:
● Allington, Daniel and Hirsh, David. “The AzAs (Antizionist Antisemitism) Scale: Measuring Antisemitism as Expressed in Relation to Israel and Its Supporters” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, vol. 2, no. 2, 2019, pp. 43-52. https://doi.org/10.26613/jca/2.2.32.
● Allington, Daniel, Hirsh, David and Katz, Louise. “The Generalised Antisemitism (GeAs) Scale: A Questionnaire Instrument for Measuring Antisemitism as Expressed in Relation Both to Jews and to Israel” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, vol. 5, no. 1, 2022, pp. 37-48. https://doi.org/10.26613/jca/5.1.99.
● Allington, Daniel; Hirsh, David and Katz, Louise. 2022. The Generalised Antisemitism (GeAs) scale:
validity and factor structure. Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism, 5(2), ISSN 2472-9906 https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/31957/.
