The good news is the bad news is wrong. The bad news? The Harvard-Harris poll which found that 67% of 18- to 24-year-olds believe “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors.”
The good news: The poll is pretty lousy, as Ilya Somin explained for Reason magazine. The poll combines two questions in one, asking people to agree to both the description of “Jews as a class” and how they should be treated and uses terms like “oppressor” which are fairly unfamiliar to people not plugged into campus-speak.
Even better news: The poll is an outlier. Surveys from respected outfits like Pew Research Center find American attitudes towards Jews are pretty favorable.
But then the good news runs dry. Because even if Harvard’s findings exaggerate the problem, the problem still exists. Actually, several problems: rising antisemitism in the U.S., particularly among young people and, not unrelatedly, a depressing amount of both general and highly cultivated ignorance.
Given the horrific headlines since the Hamas attack, it’s not worth rehashing the evidence of antisemitism’s resurgence, both on college campuses and off. In October, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified antisemitism was reaching historic levels, with fully 60% of religious hate crimes being committed against 2.4% of the population.
As for general ignorance, a Economist/YouGov poll finds one in five 18-29-year-olds believes the Holocaust is a myth. Another 30% said they’re not sure.
Social media surely plays a big role. While it’s true bad actors, at home and abroad, have been pumping antisemitic sewage onto kids’ screens for a while, it’s worth keeping in mind that tearing down any established truths is rampant on the internet (nearly a fifth of young Americans think the moon landing was faked).
Which brings us to cultivated ignorance, the deliberate encouragement of anti-Jewish bigotry by various institutions and “influencers.”
The right has a well-publicized antisemitism problem. The GOP presidential frontrunner famously dined with antisemites Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.
That’s grotesque, but they don’t control the commanding heights of culture the way the left does. The power of left-aligned academics and activists shouldn’t be underestimated. While groups like the Anti-Defamation League, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the various elite media outlets that rely on them as authoritative sources, have covered right-wing antisemitism zealously, they have allowed the intellectual poison of anti-colonial and anti-oppressor ideology to go unchecked. This ideology takes it as a given that Jews, Zionists, Israelis — pick your label — are indeed “oppressors.” This framing is seductive to young people who want to belong to a righteous cause more than master basic facts.
For instance, University of California-Berkeley political scientist Ron Hassner recently conducted a small survey of college students on issues related to Israel. Most students (86%) supported the popular chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” But nearly half (47%) couldn’t name the river or the sea in the chant.
It’s fine to condemn both sides (I do!). But the antisemitism in the wake of the Hamas attack is testament to the delinquency of the left-wing elites running academic and cultural institutions. When professors and students celebrate a pogrom and administrators find themselves tongue-tied about condemning murder or the harassment of Jews on their own campuses, the complacency becomes obvious.
One last piece of good news: When Hassner’s researchers explained basic facts to the students who enthusiastically embraced “from the river to the sea,” many of them changed their views. It shows the center-left can remedy their failures — if they want to.