Blog

How antisemitic a nation is at present? How unpopular are Jews there in this day an age? There are several ways to rise above the anecdotal and the historical and measure that objectively. No single way is perfect, and none has that ultimate ‘eye-opening’ quality that we all hope for. That ‘ultimate eye-opening quality’ is, of course, the capacity to signal where Jews are most at risk, where a host population is most likely to turn against them, dispossess them, torture them mentally and then expel them or annihilate them physically. No measure of antisemitism enlightens us on that exactly. Why to collect them at all? Why to run population surveys asking people what they think about Jews, if we do not know how to convert these findings into a tangible measure of risk for Jews?-ask the cynical souls. The patient souls, myself included, continue to run the surveys, because one day we, the analysts, may be able to create...

Earlier this week the Institute for Jewish Policy Research/JPR released a report on attitudes of Jews towards the issue of climate change. I recommend it, not in the least because I know of no other work on the subject. You will find all sorts of interesting things there. Some findings are, sort of, predictable, for example, a majority of nearly 70% of British Jews think that climate is definitely changing and a negligibly small minority of 2% think it is definitely not. Further, just over 60% of British Jews think that climate change is happening mainly or entirely due to human activity. So far the-largely-predictable findings. Others are less so-my personal expectation would be that a lot of people, perhaps as many as one third, would simply say that they do not know much on this subject, or at least that they are not sure about the cause of climate change. Not so. Those who choose these categorical ‘Do not...

The picture of self-reported antisemitic victimisation of Jews in Europe should be known considerably better than it is at present. Antisemitic harassment, shown in the figure below, includes antisemitic threatening comments in person, online and via email/texting, threats of violence and offensive gestures, targeting Jews as Jews. The fact that about a quarter of Jews in Europe are exposed to such harassment on an annual basis is not very well known in itself. This is unfortunate; the data are as sound as it gets. They originate in the European surveys of Jewish experiences of antisemitism and , unlike the official police-recorded statistics of incidents, or indeed statistics of incidents maintained by the Jewish security organisations, are unaffected by under-reporting. What raises the value of these data further is that here it is set in a comparative context: antisemitic victimisation alongside hate-motivated harassment of ethnic and immigrants minorities, also obtained from the surveys of minorities conducted in Europe.Voila...Antisemitic harassment...