The Left, the Right, Christians, Muslims and Detractors of Israel: Who is Antisemitic in Great Britain in the Early 21st
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The Left, the Right, Christians, Muslims and Detractors of Israel: Who is Antisemitic in Great Britain in the Early 21st Century? L. Daniel Staetsky1 Received: 24 September 2019 / Accepted: 15 June 2020 / Published online: 29 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The Left, the Right, Christians and Muslims—are they antisemitic and how do they compare? In what way are anti-Israelism and other political convictions related to the contemporary antisemitism? This paper provides numerical answers to these questions in the context of Great Britain—a low-antisemitism country. Keywords Antisemitism · Anti-Israel attitudes · Antizionism · Right · Left · Christians · Muslims
Introduction Today, the West as a civilisational zone is a place with the lowest levels of antisemitism. The UK, alongside other Anglophone and Scandinavian countries, has the lowest levels of antisemitism even in the Western context. About 10% of the British population hold antisemitic attitudes, and the situation in the USA, for example, is not much different. This impression is repeatedly conveyed by surveys of general population attitudes towards Jews (Staetsky 2017a, 2019a, b; Zick et al. 2011; ADL Global 100 2014, 2015). Yet, the Jewish communities of these countries are concerned about antisemitism: 56–82% of Danish, Swedish and British Jews think of antisemitism as a big or very big problem in their country (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2018, p. 16). This paradox forms the background against which multiple surveys of general population attitudes to Jews are commissioned in an attempt to get a deeper, more nuanced understanding of what modern antisemitism is, in particular to identify which groups in the society possess a relatively high prevalence of antisemitic attitudes and whether or not antisemitism is related to antiIsrael attitudes. * L. Daniel Staetsky [email protected] 1
Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), London, UK
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These very questions form the focus of the inquiry underlying this paper. The inquiry relies on a large survey of attitudes to Jews and Israel conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) in Great Britain in 2017. This survey will be referred to in the paper as the JPR Antisemitism survey. The survey sample, representative of the population of Great Britain, contains 4005 observations, allowing great accuracy of measurement. The survey, conducted on the cusp between 2016 and 2017, presented to the respondents a selection of questions designed to capture their attitudes to Jews, on the one hand, and to Israel and Israelis, on the other hand. The survey questionnaire also included the usual battery of socio-demographic questions, such as age, sex, education, place of birth and residence, religious affiliation and political affiliation of the respondents. Importantly, it incorporated a selection of questions on social and political attitudes besides antisemitism and on one’s individual predisposition to see violence as a legi
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