Anti-Semitism After Charlottesville

Matthew J. Mayhew, Benjamin S. Selznick, Kevin Singer and Alyssa N. Rockenbach provide data and advice on improving attitudes toward Jewish students on college campuses.
As white nationalists marched in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017, they shouted, “Blood and soil!” (a Nazi slogan) and “Jews will not replace us!” Some carried Nazi flags and wore T-shirts with Adolf Hitler quotes. Such expressions and sentiments, wrote staff writer Emma Green in The Atlantic, are physical reflections of a white supremacist ideology, one in which Jews “hover malevolently in the background, pulling strings, controlling events, acting as an all-powerful force backing and enabling the other targets of their hate.”
Although the anti-Semitism in Charlottesville was shocking to many Americans, it was anything but for American Jews. A 2013 Pew Research study found that 43 percent of Jewish Americans agreed that Jews face a lot of discrimination, while 15 percent reported being called offensive names and facing social rejection for being Jewish in the year prior. The Anti-Defamation League reported that, in 2017, 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents took place across the United States -- a 57 percent increase from 2016. More...