https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9280-852X
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ABSTRACT
Notwithstanding the increasing alignment between social and political identities, political divisions exist within social groups as well as between them. Despite their shared traditions, American Jews face similar political divisions as Americans in general. But could the perception of a common threat, such as antisemitism, alter the dynamics of political polarization within a social group? American Jews’ concerns about antisemitism might themselves be filtered through political identities, with liberal Jews more concerned about “traditional” antisemitism (long-standing anti-Jewish stereotypes) emanating from the political right, and conservative Jews concerned about “Israel-related” antisemitism (blaming individual Jews for the actions of Israel) associated with the political left. Using a sample of over 2000 Jewish young adults, we find that, although liberal and conservative Jews are equally concerned about traditional antisemitism, conservatives are significantly more concerned about Israel-related antisemitism than liberals. We also find that, after a series of high-profile attacks on American Jews related to the 2021 Israel–Hamas conflict, liberal and conservative Jews’ concerns about Israel-related antisemitism increased at similar rates. These results suggest that, although concerns about antisemitism are influenced by political identity, rising antisemitism is unlikely to exacerbate political polarization between liberal and conservative Jews.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Throughout this paper, the term “conservative” refers to the American political ideology, as opposed to the “Conservative” Jewish denomination.
2 In one of the few efforts to experimentally study the relationship between antisemitism and political ideology in the United States, Hersh and Royden (Citation2022) find that, although antisemitic attitudes were present on both the left and the right, antisemitic attitudes were far more prevalent among those on the right, especially among younger conservatives.
3 The IHRA does not itself distinguish between “traditional” and “Israel-related” antisemitism but includes both of the Israel-related examples cited here alongside other numerous examples (e.g., perpetuating the “the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government, or other societal institutions”) in its “working definition” of antisemitism (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Citation2016).
4 Others (Schatz, Staub, and Lavine Citation1999) refer to this same construct as “blind patriotism.”
5 Conservative Jews might still believe that discrimination toward other minority groups (e.g., Blacks or Hispanics) is not a major problem, while still believing that discrimination toward Jews is a problem. But other work (Cohen Citation2018b) has argued that Jewish perceptions of antisemitism are linked to perceptions of discrimination toward other marginalized groups and that “when Jews perceive a high degree of discrimination against non-Jews, they also are more likely to perceive a high level of discrimination against themselves” (p. 408).
6 Other work has argued that perceptions of discrimination (e.g., antisemitism) could actually alter political identities (Kuo, Malhotra, and Mo Citation2016; Huddy, Mason, and Aarøe Citation2015), meaning that a correlation between liberalism and concerns about traditional antisemitism might be due to perceptions of traditional antisemitism causing young Jews to identify as liberal. This research, however, is primarily based on immigrant populations (namely, Hispanic and Asian Americans) whose connection to American partisan politics is likely less robust than that of American Jews, who, by and large, are not recent immigrants. Furthermore, recent work has failed to confirm a causal relationship between perceived discrimination and political identity, suggesting that, even among immigrant groups, the observed correlation may be due to political identity influencing perceptions of discrimination (Hopkins et al. Citation2020).
7 Applicants to Birthright were eligible to participate if they met the following criteria: were between the ages of 18 and 32, had at least one Jewish birth parent or had completed Jewish conversion through a recognized Jewish denomination, and had not participated in an educational trip since they turned 18 and/or lived in Israel past the age of 12.
8 See, e.g., Wright, Saxe, and Wald (Citation2022, 46), who note that 11% of 2018 Birthright applicants “strongly agreed” that Israel “is guilty of violating the human rights of the Palestinian people.”
9 These 272 individuals thus represent 544 observations across the two surveys. To account for the clustering of observations within individuals, cluster robust standard errors are reported for all analyses reported below.
10 In these models, we intentionally do not control for the respondents’ concern about the “other” form of antisemitism. Adding such a control would transform the model into an analysis of relative concern, which, as discussed above, would make it impossible to determine if ideology was associated with one form of concern but not the other. Even if liberal and conservative Jews had identical levels of concern about traditional antisemitism (but different levels of concern about Israel-related antisemitism), we would still expect to see a significant coefficient for ideology in a model of traditional antisemitism that also controlled for Israel-related antisemitism.
11 Attending a Jewish overnight camp while growing up and/or belonging to a Jewish youth group in high school.
12 The political activities presented to respondents include participating in a protest march, rally, or demonstration; signing a petition about a political or social issue; called, written, or visited an elected official; boycotting a company or brand; donating money to any organization concerned with a political or social issue; attending a meeting of any level of government; submitting a letter to the editor or opinion piece to a media publication; posting/sharing political content on social media.
13 The February 2021 survey asked respondents to check all activities in which they participated in the last three months, while the June 2021 survey asked participants about all activities since January 2021 (representing five months between the time indicated and the date of data collection).
14 Cronbach’s alpha was greater than 0.7.
15 Although the results may not be reliable due to the small sample size, we also re-ran Models 3 and 4 on the sub sample of individuals who responded to both February and June surveys (N = 468). In neither model were the moderate or conservative interaction terms statistically significant at the 95% level.