Antisemitism on a California Campus: Perceptions and Views Among Students
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Antisemitism on a California Campus: Perceptions and Views Among Students Rachel Shenhav‑Goldberg2 · Jeffrey S. Kopstein1 Received: 9 August 2019 / Accepted: 7 April 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This article explores the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes among university students. Critics maintain that hostility toward Israel is an indicator of the “new antisemitism.” Activists and their advocates insist that anti-Israel attitudes and behaviors reflect a political conflict and have little to do with antisemitism. Existing empirical scholarship shows a strong link. Evidence is presented from a survey of a random sample (N = 468) of undergraduate students at the University of California, Irvine. The results show a modest but statistically significant correlation between antisemitic and anti-Israel attitudes. However, the evidence also shows that the two sets of attitudes are mostly separate. Multivariate analysis demonstrates that anti-Israel attitudes are the strongest predictors of antisemitism even in the presence of other hypothesized determinants. The article also explores the demographic factors contributing to simultaneously high levels of antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes. Contrary to much commentary, but consonant with a significant stream of scholarship, campus effects are weak to nonexistent. Keywords Antisemitism · Campus · Anti-Israel · California · Attitudes
Introduction The American university campus has become a focal point of debate surrounding the conflict in Israel/Palestine. As student organizations debate resolutions supporting the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, a parallel debate has emerged surrounding the political environment of university campuses. Critics have long maintained that hostility to Israel is an indicator of a “new antisemitism” and reflects the particularly biased and toxic nature of political discourse surrounding
* Jeffrey S. Kopstein [email protected] 1
University of California Irvine, Irvine, USA
2
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
13
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R. Shenhav‑Goldberg, J. S. Kopstein
Israel within the academy (Marcus 2007; Amcha 2018). Activists and their advocates insist that their criticism of Israel is primarily a political conflict over justice for Palestinians and has little to do with antisemitism (Klug 2013). Although campuses have long been the site of activism critical of Israel and persistent, if uneven, student reports of antisemitism, we still know very little about the substantive overlap between student attitudes toward Jews and Israel (US. Commission on Civil Rights 2006). Scholars remain divided on the degree (if any) of convergence and about the impact of universities on the relationship between these two sets of attitudes (Bard and Dawson 2012; Kelman et al. 2017; Kosmin and Keysar 2015). Some organizations maintain that attitudes toward Jews and Israel are driven by bias in the classroom. A recent analysis conducted by the Jewish advocacy group AMCHA Initiative (2020) of 50
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