‘The More I’m Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am’

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1. SS: Anti-Jewish prejudice isn’t a partisan divide—it’s a generational one.
   …
   In late 2024, the Democratic data scientist David Shor surveyed nearly 130,000 voters at the behest of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He found that a quarter of those younger than 25—with negligible differences among Trump and Harris supporters—held an “unfavorable opinion” of “Jewish people.” (Jewish people—not Israelis or Zionists.) By contrast, the older a person was, the less likely they were to express such sentiments.

   One year later, an avalanche of data has confirmed what Shor glimpsed and researchers and reporters like myself have argued for years: American anti-Semitism is not primarily a partisan phenomenon, as it is often framed in popular discourse, but a generational one. Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, but they’ve assumed much larger and more sinister proportions in the imagination of the country’s youth.

   Last week, the Yale Youth Poll released its fall survey, which found that “younger voters are more likely to hold antisemitic views than older voters.”

   In other words, the research collectively suggests that America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic. This finding flies in the face of the folk wisdom that prejudice is the province of the old and will die out with them. That maxim may be true of some bigotries, but anti-Semitism is not one of them.

2. A YouGov/Economist poll two years ago showed that over 50% of young Americans (18-29) either believed or wasn’t sure if the Holocaust was a myth. For Republicans that number was 17% and for Democrats that number was a whopping 29%.

   Whatever your thoughts are on the Israel/Palestine conflict, there has been an absolute explosion of antisemitism in the West. And a lot of Western leaders are absolutely complicit in normalizing it. (See for instance, every Western country on the UNHCR that voted to appoint a special rapporteur to the conflict who had previously claimed that Jews, not “Zionists” or “Israelis, have “subjugated” the United States. That’s literal Nazi propaganda normalized and treated as acceptable by the UN Human Rights Council and every country sitting on it.

3. Well, I do not think we need to ignore that white elephant in a room – bit of a war that did happen at a time.

4. >When asked to choose whether Jews have had a positive, neutral, or negative impact on the United States, just 8 percent of respondents said “negative.” But among 18-to-22-year-olds, that number was 18 percent. Twenty-seven percent of 18-to-22-year-olds strongly or somewhat agreed that “Jews in the United States have too much power,” compared with 16 percent overall and just 11 percent of those over 65.

   This is really concerning and indicative that the ideas of Nazi Germany aren’t dead yet. The people spreading these conspiracies need to be stopped.

5. It ultimately ties back to the conflict and how all protests were framed as anti-semitic. People who put out comments, like Bernie Sanders recently made, were painted with the same brush as the vilest anti-semites; even if they fundamentally believed in an Israeli state but wanted more restraint in how the war was handled. This heavy-handedness opened the way for the worst elements to normalize themselves, as they were merely given the same ostracization as everyone else. And now they have become mainstream.

6. When people feel lost and unable to explain the world structurally, they reach for scapegoats. Jews have historically filled that role in the west and today’s media environment makes that slide easier not harder.

7. Young people, like the kind that are all over reddit, love to pretend like they’re immune from propaganda. But in reality it’s the exact opposite. Zoomers are just as susceptible to online misinformation as boomers.

8. Israel tried to tie in any criticism of their genocide to anti-semitism.

   The problem is that nobody believes them for a second and it has now wrongly associated genocide defence with all Jewish people as opposed to just the zionists.

9. If any criticism of Israel equals antisemitism, it puts people in a corner that do genuinely care about Palestine. At some point people will say “screw it, if being anti-genocide makes me antisemitic, then I am antisemitic.”

   Antecdotally, the #1 incident that made young people I work with get more…..bold…about their beliefs was when Orthodox Jews started coming out of underground tunnels in Brooklyn. That incident was weird by itself but the lack of information on that incident made some people fill in the gaps with their own theories.

10. I’m curious how this intersects with anti-Israeli views related to Palestine, and how you distinguish anti-Israeli views from anti-semitic views. This isn’t meant as a leading question, really curious about how you distinguish the two.

    E.g. if you were to ask people, separately, whether they have a negative or positives view of “American-Jews” and “Israeli Jews”, how different would the responses be?

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