Two years after the massacre of 11 Jews inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) released Monday its first-ever State of Antisemitism in America Report, which reveals deep anxiety among American Jews and a disturbing lack of awareness among the general public of the severity of antisemitism in the United States.
Parallel surveys of American Jews and the U.S. general public reveal widely divergent views regarding Jew-hatred in America.
The survey shows that nearly half of all Americans do not know what antisemitism is, with one in four (25%) saying they have heard of it but don’t know what it means and an astounding one in five (21%) saying they have never heard the word.
More than four out of every five Jewish respondents (82%) say antisemitism has increased over the past five years, compared to only 43% of U.S. adults who say the same.
More than one in three American Jews (37%) say they have been victims of antisemitism over the past five years. Nearly one in three (31%) say they have avoided certain places or events out of concern for their safety, up from one in four (25%) in AJC’s 2019 survey.
“This is stunning. Notably, there is a correlation with levels of education. More than a third of adults who have a high school education or less (36 percent) said they have never heard the word anti-Semitism,” Holly Huffnagle, U.S. director for Combating Antisemitism, told JNS.org
“Education in American schools is imperative. The more Americans know about anti-Semitism and its dark history, the better prepared they will be to counter it,” she said.
The survey, which also separately polled 1,334 adult U.S. Jews from Sept. 9 to Oct. 4, 2020, also found a stark disagreement between how Jews and non-Jews about whether anti-Semitism has increased.
While eight in 10 American Jews (82 percent) say anti-Semitism has increased in the past five years, only four in 10 members of the general public (43 percent) believe that it has escalated.
Huffnagle said there needs to be a “multi-pronged approach” to address the lack of awareness of anti-Semitism. Among her suggestions was an increase in anti-Semitism education, building coalitions and better reporting.
“One reason why many Jews who have been the target of anti-Semitism do not report it is because they believe nothing will change (resignation in fighting antisemitism) and/or it is not serious enough (normalization of antisemitism),” she said.
“In fact, the survey revealed that three out of four American Jews (76 percent) who have been the target of anti-Semitism in the last five years did not report the incident.”
Another interesting result, especially ahead of the presidential election, was that notably two-thirds of American Jews (69 percent) and a little more than half of U.S. adults (52 percent) say the Republican Party holds “at least some anti-Semitic views” compared to only 37 percent of American Jews and 42 percent of the general public who say the same about the Democratic Party.
Huffnagle said that while some of this is a result of the fact that a large majority of American Jews support former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, it is also likely a result of where most American Jews think where sources of anti-Semitism in American today are coming from.
According to the survey, nine in 10 (89 percent) American Jews said the extreme political right poses a threat with 49 percent saying it’s a very serious threat.
At the same time, six in 10 (61 percent) American Jews said the extreme political left posed a threat with only 16 percent said it’s a very serious threat. In fact, the fear of Islamic extremism is greater for American Jews than the far-left, with 85 percent saying extremism in the name of Islam was a threat and 27 percent saying it’s a very serious threat.