Hotspots of Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Sentiment on US Campuses

Hotspots of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on US campuses About this Report The present report is based on findings from a survey of Jewish undergraduates at 50 colleges and universities across the United States. The sample for this study consisted of US applicants to Birthright Israel1 who were undergraduates at one of the 50 schools selected for this study in the 2015-16 academic year. The sample includes individuals who went on Birthright Israel and individuals who applied but did not participate. Birthright Israel applicants represent a broad spectrum of the Jewish student population, although they likely differ from Jewish students who did not apply to the program on some dimensions. Their perceptions, when carefully compared across schools, can contribute to a better understanding of how the climate of different campuses vary in relation to Israel and antisemitism. The campuses selected for this study are not a random sample of US universities but were purposely sampled based on the estimated size of the campus Jewish population, geographic diversity, public/private status, selectivity, and prior evidence of high levels of anti-Israel hostility or antisemitism. In addition, some key schools were omitted from this study because they are potential subjects for future in-depth research on their entire undergraduate student bodies. Respondents to this survey are treated as informants with regards to the views of their fellow Jewish students and the climate on their respective campuses. Sampled respondents were sent a link to an online survey. Respondents were given a $5 Amazon.com gift card upon completion of the survey. Data were collected between March 14 and April 25, 2016. Overall, surveys were sent to 19,516 Birthright Israel applicants. The overall response rate (AAPOR RR2) was 22.5% with a total of 4,010 completed and 350 partial responses. See Technical Appendix A for more details on the study’s methodology. To ensure that our estimates were not influenced by small sample sizes at certain schools, school-level estimates presented in this report were limited to schools where there were 65 or more respondents. In two instances, individual schools were combined into larger groupings: all four schools in the California State system (Chico, Fullerton, Long Beach, and Northridge) were treated as a single institution (“Cal State”). Similarly, while there were a sufficient number of respondents at the University of California– Los Angeles, and the University of California– Santa Barbara to permit those schools to be analyzed individually, four schools (Berkeley, Davis, San Diego, and Santa Cruz) were aggregated and analyzed together as “other UC schools.” In both the UC and Cal State situations, grouping respondents together was possible because students’ responses at the different schools within each of these two systems were similar (see page 22). One campus that was part of our sample but not included in the analyses below is Columbia University. There were not enough respondents from Columbia to permit robust estimates, but due to the considerable evidence of anti-Israel hostility on campus, we discuss it in more detail on page 23. The tables and figures that follow include the 31 schools and two grouped “systems.” Other analyses that employ multi-level statistical models include all 50 schools.2 5

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