Hotspots of Antisemitism and Anti-Israel Sentiment on US Campuses | Page 21

Hotspots of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment on US campuses

Hostility toward Jews and Antisemitism on Campus
We continue our examination of the campus
climate for Jewish students by looking at their
experiences of antisemitism on campus. In
our 2015 survey, 13% of Jewish
undergraduates felt that hostility to Jews was a
“fairly” or “very” big problem on their
campus. However, students considered this
problem to be less pervasive than the issue of
the hostile environment toward Israel on
campus (Saxe et al., 2015). In the present
study, we examined variations across
campuses to identify which schools were
more likely to have Jewish students report a
hostile environment toward Jews and
experience and/or witness antisemitic acts. In
addition, we looked at the nature of those
incidents.
Hostile Climate Toward Jews
To understand the extent to which
antisemitism is experienced on campus, in the
current study, students were asked about the
presence of a hostile environment toward
Jews on their campus. Overall 15% of
respondents agreed that there was a hostile
environment toward Jews on their campus
(12% “somewhat agreed,” 3% “agreed,” and
only 1% “strongly agreed), compared to over
a third who agreed that there was a hostile
environment toward Israel. There is
substantial variation in perceptions across the
schools examined in this study, with as few as
1% or as many as 40% at a given campus
agreeing that their school has a hostile
environment toward Jews, although this
variation is less dramatic than with respect to
perceiving hostility toward Israel.
At UCLA, CUNY-Brooklyn, Illinois, and the
other UC campuses (Berkeley, Davis, Santa
Cruz, and San Diego), over a third of
respondents agreed that there was a hostile

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