Around one-third of non-Jewish college students embraced patterns of ideas hostile to Jews or Israel during the 2023-24 academic year, according to a new study by Brandeis University researchers.
The study, published Thursday by the university’s Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, helps paint a clearer picture of the attitudes undergirding the widespread tensions over Israel and Gaza that spread across campuses last year, leading to disruptive protests and university crackdowns.
It found that about 15% of students surveyed were hostile to Israel, with many believing, for example, that Israel has no right to exist. It also found that nearly a quarter of non-Jewish students overall said they did not want to be friends with people who support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, a stance the survey said had the effect of “ostracizing nearly all of their Jewish peers.”
The survey found that 16% of non-Jewish students were hostile to Jews but not to Israel, believing in enduring antisemitic ideas such as that Jews have too much power in America. Two percent of respondents were hostile to both Jews and Israel, and exhibited the highest rate of antisemitic attitudes.
Most non-Jewish students, 66%, were not hostile to Jews or Israel, the survey said.
A 'solvable problem'
Len Saxe, the study’s co-author, said dealing with campus antisemitism is “a solvable problem,” but that universities and the Jewish community need to do a better job of understanding the varied ways in which non-Jews think about Jews and Israel.
“We do not find a climate of universal anti-Jewish hatred, nor do we find that Jewish students’ concerns about antisemitism are unfounded,” Saxe and his co-authors write in their conclusion. “Instead, we find that Jewish students’ experiences of a hostile environment on campus is driven by a minority (but significant share) of students who hold patterns of beliefs that are hostile toward Israel and/or Jews.”
The researchers also asked about whether students engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy on their campuses, offering a quantification of participation in the protests that grabbed headlines last year. They found that 17% of students reported attending an event supporting Palestinians last year and 23% reported posting pro-Palestinian content on social media. Nine percent reported engaging in pro-Israel activity either in person or on social media.
The survey found that progressive beliefs and support of the idea that “all land seized through colonization should be returned to indigenous peoples” had strong correlation with hostility to Israel. Nearly 90% of those classified as hostile to Israel, but not Jews, identified as liberal or very liberal. Those classified as hostile to Jews, but not Israel, were more politically diverse: 16% were conservative, 31% moderate and 53% liberal or very liberal — similar to the overall breakdown of students’ political identities.
The study builds off earlier research at Brandeis that found a majority of Jewish students have perceived a hostile campus environment since October 7. It also joins a recent survey by Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh that found that Jewish students feel more social pressure to take a stance on Israel, and that while some are actively hiding their Jewish identity, a larger number are more actively asserting it.
Saxe and co-authors Graham Wright, Sahar Hecht and Sacha Volodarsky set out to determine how prevalent anti-Israel and anti-Jewish attitudes are among non-Jewish college students.
They polled just under 4,000 non-Jewish undergraduate students across 60 schools with large Jewish populations during the spring 2024 semester, asking them whether they agreed with a list of statements perceived as hostile to Jews, Israel or both.
Among the beliefs the survey put forward, 19% of non-Jewish students said that “Israel does not have the right to exist” and 24% agreed that “I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.” Seventeen percent said they had a favorable view of Hamas.
Another statement, that “supporters of Israel control the media,” was endorsed by nearly 43% of non-Jewish students.
But Saxe cautioned against reading into the percentage of students who endorsed any one specific statement, saying that focusing on patterns of belief was more instructive.
“I worry when people get caught up in the specific percentages,” said Saxe, the director of Brandeis’ Jewish studies center and social research institute. “For me, how people hold these different ideas together, that’s a particularly fascinating thing.”
Other statements the researchers offered as hostile to Jews but not to Israel included “Jews in America have too much power,” “Jews don’t care about what happens to anyone but their own kind,” and “Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their own political agenda.” Those were less popular overall among non-Jewish students.
The survey also measured attitudes among more than 300 Jewish students at those schools. Sixty percent of the Jews surveyed agreed or somewhat agreed that there was a “hostile environment toward Jews on campus,” and more than 80% agreed or somewhat agreed that there was a hostile environment toward Israel.
The conclusions defied a simple narrative, the researchers said. They concluded that most students did not hold hostile patterns of belief toward either Jews or Israel. And among those who did, only a tiny minority believed that all Israelis “should be considered legitimate targets” of Hamas’s terror campaign.
“We can’t treat everybody, we can’t treat all students, as if they have these prejudices toward Jews and Israel,” Saxe said. “I think it gives us a full perspective on the problem and it helps us target the solutions.”
But there were some eye-popping anomalies: Among the students described as not hostile to Jews or Israel, 25% still believed that Israel’s supporters control the media, while more than one in 10 had favorable views of Hamas. The rest of their beliefs, however, were inconsistent with antisemitic or anti-Israel thinking, Saxe said.
The survey deliberately excluded use of the terms “Zionism” and “anti-Zionism,” noting that different parties interpret the words differently. It also avoided mention of hot-button issues or phrases such as the encampment movement or the disputed phrase “From the river to the sea.”
For Saxe, one of the study’s big takeaways was that the old ways of fighting campus antisemitism are no longer working. “We have to move beyond just calling out antisemitism, just saying how terrible it is and how bad it is,” he said.
Instead, he said, universities have a responsibility to get a better handle on the minority of students promoting ideas hostile to Jews or Israel. They then need to discipline the students the same way they would discipline students exhibiting anti-Black or anti-Asian attitudes. Steps taken by some schools in advance of the fall semester, including rules intended to keep outsiders away from campus demonstrations, should help, he said.
“Universities have to figure out how to better educate students,” Saxe concluded. “They can’t abdicate their responsibility to help people develop better citizenship skills.”