Hotspots of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on US campuses 11
Comfort Discussing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Finally, we looked at the relationship between perceptions of a hostile environment toward Israel on campus and Jewish students’ willingness to engage in discussions about Israel. Respondents were asked how comfortable they were expressing their opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when discussing the topic with their campus peers. Overall, 31 % of all respondents reported being“ very much” comfortable expressing their opinion about the conflict, 34 % said they were“ somewhat” comfortable, 22 %“ a little” comfortable, and 13 % said they were“ not at all” comfortable. Figure 4 shows that the proportion of students who felt either“ a little” or“ not at all” comfortable varied widely across schools, from over than 60 % at CUNY-Brooklyn, to less than 20 % at George Washington and USC. Although comfort was particularly low on some campuses with high reported rates of hostility to Israel( such as CUNY-Brooklyn and other UC schools), there were also other schools, like BU, where high levels of hostility did not necessarily translate into difficulty discussing this issue.
Not only did the findings highlight variation across schools with respect to how comfortable students were discussing the conflict, but also in why they felt discomfort. Students who said that they were only“ a little” or“ not at all” comfortable expressing their views on the conflict were asked what specific factors hindered their level of comfort. Two largely independent factors appear to be driving lack of comfort discussing the conflict. First, some students perceived an environment on campus that was hostile to open discussion about Israel. Second, a number of students attributed their discomfort to their lack of knowledge on the topic. Figure 5 shows the proportion of all respondents at each school who listed the hostility of the discourse and lack of knowledge as reasons they felt uncomfortable discussing the conflict( respondents who listed both are included in both estimates). While there was relatively little variation across schools in the proportion of students who were uncomfortable due to lack of knowledge, there were some schools— CUNY-Brooklyn, NYU, all the UC campuses, Northeastern, and Northwestern— where lack of comfort due to perceived hostility of the discourse was particularly high, and others, such as Miami, and the University of Southern California, where it was particularly low.