Do Jews talk too much about the Holocaust? Do American Jews hold too much power? Are Israeli leaders sincere about their pursuit of peace?
A survey of undergraduates at four University of California schools, “Attitudes Toward Jews and Israel on California Campuses,” sought to measure their responses to explicitly anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiments.
Commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League and released July 11, the survey found overall that “anti-Jewish attitudes are present and sometimes strongly so. Anti-Israel attitudes are much stronger.” It also showed that students develop increasingly hostile attitudes toward Israel over their four years in college.
The three researchers from UC Irvine and Tel Aviv University who conducted the survey initially planned to reach out to all UC campuses. But after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, they decided that “we have to get this out the door,” said researcher Jeffrey Kopstein, a UC Irvine political science professor and former director of its Jewish studies center.
As a result, they surveyed 2,233 non-Jewish undergraduate students from June 2023 through March 2024 at the four campuses that had already agreed to participate: UC Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced and Riverside.
UC Berkeley was asked to participate, Kopstein said, but its administration declined. “Our standard business practice is not to share student emails with non-campus entities seeking to survey students,” Cal spokesperson Janet Gilmore told J. in an email.
Students on the four campuses at least “somewhat agreed” with what the report describes as “classical anti-Jewish trope belief”:
• Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the U.S., 28.6%
• It’s appropriate for opponents of Israel’s policies to boycott businesses owned by Jewish Americans in their communities, 19.7%
• Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind, 14.5%
• Jews hold too much power in our country today, 12.5%
• Jews talk too much about the Holocaust, 8.9%
• Jews use Christian blood for ritual purposes, 5.8%
The students also at least “somewhat agreed” with these statements about Israel:
• I do not feel admiration or respect toward Israel, 74%
• Israeli leaders are not sincere in their pursuit of peace, 73.2%
• Israel is more responsible than the Palestinians for the past three years of violence in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 59.5%
• The U.S. government should impose sanctions on Israel, 56.6%
• There are justifications for Palestinian suicide bombers that target Israeli civilians, 27.3%
UC Irvine students were the first to receive and respond to the survey last summer — and became the only ones who ended up being surveyed both before and after Oct. 7.
The results on Irvine’s campus showed that antisemitic beliefs about American Jews increased after Oct. 7. Students who agreed that “Jews hold too much power in our country today” nearly doubled, jumping from 7.9% before Oct. 7 to 15.1% in the month after.
And Irvine students who agreed that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States” rose from 25.2% before Oct. 7 to 43.4% in the month after.
One of the outcomes that most surprised the researchers was the lack of empathy toward Jews in the days after the Hamas massacre and hostage-taking.
“People saw what happened on Oct. 7, and pretty much almost immediately there was an uptick” in hostility toward Jews and Israel, Kopstein told J. “We found it strange. We can’t really explain it.”
Regardless, Kopstein said such increases “should concern administrators” at all universities.
One of the areas that researchers examined was the attitude across different years of college, from freshmen to seniors. The survey didn’t see a significant difference in terms of antisemitic beliefs but did find an incremental and “modest” increase in anti-Israel hostility for each year a student had already been on campus.
Overall, the survey found no “gigantic” differences in responses across the four UC campuses, Kopstein said, and no major variations based on students’ majors, whether in humanities or sciences.
“Anti-Israel sentiment remains the strongest predictor of anti-Jewish attitudes among students both before and after Oct. 7, 2023,” according to the report.
Although there is a distinction between anti-Israel and anti-Jewish beliefs, “sometimes they overlap,” Kopstein said. The study “shows that the lived experience of Jewish students is real.”
Kopstein is personally familiar with the issues for Jews on UC campuses since Oct. 7. He spent two nights sleeping in his campus office in March in solidarity with UC Berkeley professor Ron Hassner, who gained national attention for living in his campus office round the clock for two weeks to highlight what he saw as Cal’s weak response to antisemitism.
Despite UC Berkeley’s absence from the survey, its heated campus climate around the Israel-Hamas war was noted in the report’s introduction, which emphasized that the survey results are relevant beyond the four participating campuses.
“The concerns expressed nationally have been especially present at the various campuses of the University of California,” the report said.