Why it’s hard to measure antisemitism

Its prevalence depends on how you measure it — but there are grounds for concern

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Slow Boring staff is on spring break this week, but we’re excited to share some fantastic content with you while we’re gone. Today’s guest post from researchers Bryan Schonfeld and Sam Winter-Levy takes an in-depth look at some of the difficulties researchers encounter when they try to measure a concept like antisemitism. For more reading on antisemitism in America, check out our previous guest post from Musa Al-Gharbi, Misunderstanding antisemitism in America. 

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Since the October 7 attacks on Israel, heightened fears among American Jews have provoked endless rounds of finger-pointing about who’s to blame for rising antisemitism. For the right, the heart of the problem lies with young progressives on campus and an ideology that depicts Jews as white colonialist oppressors. For the left, the epicenter of antisemitism is the far-right, with its conspiracies about Jewish involvement in the “great replacement” of the white race. Others, meanwhile, deny that antisemitism is all that prevalent, citing data showing that Jews are the most beloved religious group in America.

So why is there so much debate over a seemingly straightforward set of descriptive questions: has antisemitism really become more common in America? Is it more prevalent on the left or the right? Are older or younger Americans more likely to express antisemitic views?

This debate remains so contested for several reasons. Part of it, of course, is traditional political finger-pointing. But another reason is that measuring public opinion on topics like this is hard. People may have incentives to provide socially acceptable answers to survey questions; people may believe some antisemitic tropes but not others and as a result respond differently to slightly dissimilar survey questions; and the concept itself may be defined in a range of ways such that different analysts can reach starkly divergent answers.

Defining antisemitism

Consider first the definition of antisemitism. While hatred against Jews dates back millennia, the term antisemitism was only introduced into the lexicon in the late 19th century by Wilhelm Marr, a journalist who fought against Jewish emancipation in Germany. The most recent official definition, which has been adopted by more than 1,100 institutions and 43 governments around the world, including France, the United Kingdom, and the United States—but not the UN—comes from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. “Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews,” it begins unhelpfully, “which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews.” It goes on to provide numerous examples, including perpetuating claims of “a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media…or other societal institutions.” The definition also includes Holocaust denial, as well as the application of classic antisemitic tropes such as the blood libel to the Israeli state, accusations against diaspora Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their own country, and criticisms of Jews worldwide for Israeli policies.

More controversially, it suggests that “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” is antisemitic. Critics of this definition say it conflates antisemitism with opposition to Israel; for others, attitudes towards the world’s only Jewish state are hard to separate from attitudes towards Jews. American Jews themselves are divided on this question: a 2021 poll found that two-thirds of American Jewish voters view opposition to Israel’s existence as antisemitic, but less than a third say the same for allegations that Israel commits genocide or apartheid against the Palestinians. While hostility to Israel is often entirely unrelated to antisemitism, research suggests the two are correlated. In one study, for instance, respondents who held fervent anti-Israel views (believing, for example, that Palestinian suicide bombings were justified) were also more likely to hold classical antisemitic beliefs (such as that Jews wielded too much power in finance). “So many experimental and survey-based studies have found a correlation between negative attitudes towards Jews and negative attitudes towards Israel,” the researchers Daniel Allington and David Hirsh conclude, “that this may be considered one of the most solidly established facts of political psychology.” Still, the correlation is far from perfect.

And even if everyone could agree on the definition, measuring antisemitic attitudes and behaviors is not straightforward. Researchers have taken three broad approaches to studying modern American antisemitism.

Method One: Ask people how they feel about Jews

First, in perhaps the most obvious method, they have asked people directly how they feel about Jews. For instance, the political scientist Jeffrey Cohen draws on responses to the “feeling thermometer” from the American National Election Survey (which rates feelings towards groups on a 1-100, cold-to-hot scale) between 1964 and 2016 and finds Americans grew modestly warmer towards Jews, with older Americans and the least educated displaying the greatest warmth increases. Republicans and Democrats registered identical warmth ratings in 1964, and underwent the same modest warming trend. As of 2016, college-educated respondents expressed the most warmth towards Jews, but the gap between them and the least educated decreased due to disproportionate warming among the least educated. But Cohen does find that younger Americans express less warmth towards Jews than older Americans, consistent with notions that antisemitism, unlike many other forms of prejudice, is more prevalent among the young.

The benefit of this approach to measuring antisemitism is that it allows researchers to compare attitudes towards Jews and other groups. Indeed, 2019 Pew survey data indicates Jews receive the highest warmth scores of any religious group, and Pew data from 2022 paints a similar picture. And very few Americans object to having a Jewish neighbor or having a close relative marry a Jewish person. According to this method, in other words, antisemitism is not a big problem in the United States.

But people may lie to pollsters or feel uncomfortable expressing beliefs they perceive to be inappropriate—a phenomenon known as “social desirability bias.” It’s unlikely that this bias accounts for all of the decline in antisemitism captured by these polls: there was no difference, for example, in expressed warmth towards Jews between respondents who answered face-to-face versus online (where respondents may feel more anonymous). But asking people directly about their feelings towards Jews is still likely to be prone to some amount of social desirability bias, and it won’t capture discrimination in areas like electoral politics or the labor market.

Method Two: Use experiments to detect discrimination 

A second approach avoids these limitations by measuring biases and double standards directly with experiments, rather than relying on potentially unreliable self-reporting. A 2022 paper, for example, randomized the religion of hypothetical political candidates and found no bias against Jews relative to Protestants, Evangelicals, or Catholics (but did find bias against atheists and Muslims). Another recent study used experiments to gauge whether Jewish Americans were held responsible for the actions of a foreign government (Israel) in a way that other groups, such as Muslim-Americans (in relation to Muslim-majority governments) and Indian-Americans (in relation to India) were not. Contrary to their overt measures of antisemitism—which found young far-right Americans were seven times more likely than the young far-left to say Jewish Americans should be held to account for Israel—their experiment finds that young left-wing Americans are more likely to express anti-Jewish double standards.

In the labor market, meanwhile, a pair of early 2010s audit studies—in which otherwise similar resumes with different religious affiliations were sent to job openings—found that Jews did not experience substantial discrimination compared to other religious groups. But those experimental studies are a decade old at this point; they should be replicated today to see if anti-Jewish discrimination remains low. Indeed, recent non-experimental evidence indicates cause for concern: a 2022 survey found 1 in 4 hiring managers said they’re less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants, while another recent survey found that a majority of Jewish respondents reported experiencing discrimination at work.

These studies paint a mixed picture of antisemitism in the United States, and they generally have the benefit of directly getting at anti-Jewish bias and discrimination. But they won’t tell you anything about a central aspect of antisemitism: the prevalence of beliefs in Jewish conspiracies. As journalist Yair Rosenberg notes, “unlike many other bigotries, anti-Semitism is not merely a social prejudice; it is a conspiracy theory about how the world operates.” Someone can have warm feelings towards the Jewish people he knows while also thinking that Jews control the media and the financial system. Beliefs in antisemitic conspiracies won’t necessarily be captured in measures of, say, employment discrimination or general sentiment.

Method Three: Track beliefs in antisemitic conspiracies  

Because of these limitations in assessments of personal bias, researchers have taken a third tack by trying to measure the prevalence of these antisemitic beliefs—and this method paints a grimmer picture. While Holocaust conspiracies are equally prevalent among Democrats and Republicans, antisemites on the left and the right generally emphasize different tropes: the right may claim Jews are communist globalists intent on undermining white nations by supporting mass immigration, while left-wing antisemites often portray Jews as ethnocentrists who control global capitalism. Democrats were almost twice as likely as Republicans to blame Jews for the 2008 financial crisis, but more recent research links beliefs in Jewish power to the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and support for Donald Trump.

The sheer variety of antisemitic tropes means that responses to any given survey question may yield misleading conclusions about where antisemitism is concentrated. Researchers can’t capture every possible antisemitic trope with a small set of survey questions (the so-called “missing stereotype” problem), and the exact question wording can influence answers by priming particular ideas. As Cohen concludes in a recent analysis, “minor variations in question wording can evoke different images and stereotypes about Jews.” Researchers have sought to mitigate concerns about “missing stereotypes” by aggregating answers to different questions. The Anti-Defamation League, for example, uses 11 statements that indicate classic anti-Jewish conspiratorial beliefs, and it combines the answers to generate an underlying scale. Answers to these questions tend to be highly correlated, indicating they are capturing some underlying feature of antisemitic beliefs. These surveys find a general decline in antisemitic beliefs from 1964 to 2019, but a rise from 2019 to 2024. 85% of Americans now believe at least one anti-Jewish trope (up from 61% in 2019), and 24% believe six or more tropes—the highest level measured since 1964. Perhaps most alarmingly, the ADL study finds antisemitic tropes are much more prevalent among younger Americans.

Regardless of the exact research method used, a few things are not in doubt. Overt labor market discrimination and workplace harassment, bias against Jewish political candidates, and personal prejudice towards Jews have seen large declines since the mid-20th century. Gone are the days when the first lady of the United States would not allow a Jew in her home, or when Harvard imposed explicit quotas limiting Jewish admissions. America remains one of the world’s least antisemitic countries.

But there are some worrying signs. Antisemitic hate crimes are on the rise, and American Jews report feeling increasingly insecure. Antisemitism is the rare prejudice more common among the young than the old, though contrary to many narratives, it’s young conservatives who tend to be more overtly antisemitic than young liberals. Many Americans hold warm feelings towards Jews while simultaneously holding antisemitic beliefs about Jewish power. Intense criticism of Israel, especially common among the young, can be entirely distinct from antisemitism, but the two are too often intertwined. Progressives are less likely than the far-right to express overt belief in antisemitic tropes, but they are more likely to apply double standards by demanding Jewish-Americans disavow Israel; they are just as prone to Holocaust-related conspiracy theories. Researchers should continue to track how these attitudes are evolving in the wake of the war in Gaza.

Given these different approaches to measuring antisemitism, journalists and consumers of this research should avoid anchoring too heavily on any one study—and especially on any one survey question, which may well be poorly designed or misleading. They should be aware that antisemitism is multifaceted and that different antisemitic beliefs may be more prevalent among different groups. And they should understand that antisemitism can be expressed in terms of outright personal prejudice and straightforward hatred of Jews, but it can also manifest in double standards and a belief in “one of the most durable and deadly conspiracy theories in human history”—one that remains worryingly resilient in the United States today.

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Bryan Schonfeld received his PhD in politics from Princeton University in 2021. He writes about social science for outlets like the Boston Globe, Scientific American, and the Washington Post, and has published academic research in the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and International Organization.

Sam Winter-Levy is a Ph.D. candidate in politics at Princeton University. Before that, he was a staff editor at Foreign Affairs and wrote for The Economist.