Contemporary Antisemitism
Week 11


CNN poll



History Fades



Criticism
Anti-Semitism is a growing problem in EU countries -- to the extent that 40% said Jews were at risk
of racist violence in their countries and half said their governments should do more to fight
anti-Semitism -- substantial minorities blamed Israel or Jews themselves for anti-Semitism.
More than a quarter of respondents (28%) said most anti-Semitism in their countries was a response
to the actions of the state of Israel.
And nearly one in five (18%) said anti-Semitism in their countries was a response to the everyday
behavior of Jewish people.

New or Old “I am not antisemitic, but…”
Europeans that openly admitting negative attitudes towards Jews was relatively low, BUT traditional
anti-Semitic stereotypes still resonate across the continent with clear evidence that they do.
In Poland and Hungary, about four out of 10 people said Jews have too much influence in business
and finance around the world.
Roughly one out of three people there said Jews were too influential in political affairs around
the world, and more than a quarter of Poles and Hungarians said they had too much influence on the
media.

Liberal Europe?
In France, Jews have increasingly faced attacks and insults from members of the country’s large
Muslim community.
In March, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll, was knifed to death in her apartment
by a young man who shouted “Allahu akbar.” Prosecutors classified it as an anti-Semitic hate crime.
In a 2015 study, 42 percent of French Jews surveyed said that they had suffered insults or
aggressive acts at the hands of Muslims.
In Germany, anti-Semitism remains a daily occurrence, sometimes taking on the form of criminal
attacks on Jews or Jewish institutions, but often in more casual insults or the questioning of the
country’s post-World War II commitment to “never again” repeat the Nazi Holocaust.
One of the most prominent anti-Semitic attacks this year, in which a young Syrian struck a man
wearing a skullcap on the street of a trendy Berlin neighborhood, prompted the head of Germany’s
main Jewish organization to warn Jews against openly wearing skullcaps, or other public displays of
their religion.

The same ‘old’ story
A third of Austrians said Jews have too much influence in finance, a quarter of French and German
respondents said so.
About one in five people in all three countries said Jews had too much influence in media, and a
quarter said they had too much influence on wars and conflicts.
The belief in Jewish power runs in parallel with enormous overestimates of the number of Jews in
the world.
About two-thirds of the respondents in the survey guessed too high when asked what percentage of
the world is Jewish, and similar numbers got the answer wrong for their own countries.
A quarter of Hungarians estimated that the world is more than 20% Jewish, and a fifth of British
and Polish respondents said so.
About 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish, according to the Pew Research Center’s Global
Religious Landscape study.
Four out of ten respondents in the survey thought their own countries were between 3% and 10%
Jewish. In fact, Israel is the only country in the world where more than 2% of the population is
Jewish.

No country safe...USA
Until recent years, many Jews in America believed that the worst of anti-Semitism was over there,
in Europe, a vestige of the old country.
American Jews were welcome in universities, country clubs and corporate boards that once excluded
their grandparents. They married non-Jews, moved into mixed neighborhoods and by 2000, the first
Jew ran for vice president on a major party ticket.
Jews were feeling unprecedented acceptance in the United States, the climate was growing
increasingly hostile, intensifying in the two years since President Trump was elected. And it comes
at a time when attacks on Jews are on the rise in Europe as well, with frequent anti-Semitic
episodes in France and Germany.
The hate in the United States came into full view last year as white supremacists marched in
Charlottesville, Va., with lines of men carrying torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”
Swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti have been cropping up on synagogues and Jewish homes
around the country. Jews online are subjected to vicious slurs and threats.




HATE in USA



Bizarre
Margins to the Establishment