Digital Library
Education and Anti-Semitism
Topic:
Antisemitism & Antizionism
Principal Investigators:
Jay. P. Greene, Albert Cheng, Ian Kingsbury
Study Date:
2021
Source:
University of Arkansas Fayetteville
Key Findings:
Many people believe that intolerance, in general, and anti-Semitism, in particular, are a function of ignorance, and the solution is education. The problem with this widely believed finding is that it is dependent on survey questions that may fail to capture anti-Semitism among the well-educated. Researchers developed a new survey measure based on a defining feature of anti-Semitism – the double-standard. They drafted two versions of the same question, one asking respondents to apply a principle to a Jewish example and another to apply the principle to a non-Jewish example.
When researchers administered these double-standard measures in a nationally representative survey of over 1,800 people, our results differed from the conventional view about the relationship between education and anti-Semitism. We found that more highly educated people were more likely to apply principles more harshly to Jewish examples. Contrary to previous claims, education appears to provide no protection against anti-Semitism.
Respondents with higher education levels are more likely than those with lower education levels to apply a double-standard unfavorable towards Jews. Across the four items in which the Jewish and non-Jewish versions of questions seemed the most similar and which the overall sample answered roughly in the same way, subjects with college degrees were 5 percentage points more likely to apply a principle harshly to Jews than non-Jews. Among those with advanced degrees, subjects were 15 percentage points more unfavorable toward Jewish than non-Jewish examples.
Methodology:
To examine the relationship between education levels and anti-Semitism, researchers contracted with Ipsos to administer a survey to a nationally representative sample of 1,864 subjects. K-12 teachers and higher education professors were over-sampled to provide additional statistical power to make inferences about people with higher education levels. Weights were used to ensure that the combined sample was representative of the United States.
The survey instrument consisted of 29 items asking respondents about a variety of political issues and controversies as well as demographic and background information. A copy of the survey can be found in the Appendix. Embedded in the survey were seven pairs of items that asked respondents to apply a principle to either a Jewish or non-Jewish example. Within each item pair, subjects were randomly assigned to see either the Jewish or non-Jewish version but not both.