In high school many of us learned about WWII and the injustice done to the Jewish people. Some of us may have even had the opportunity to visit the saddening Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C, yet young people are lashing out on Jewish college students all over the country.
According to a survey released by Louis D. Brandeis Center and Trinity College, more than half of today’s American Jewish college students have witnessed or experienced an anti-Semitic incident.
Nearly 54 percent of the participants from the survey have admitted to an evident increase in anti-Semitism within U.S. College campuses. The survey was conducted in spring of 2014, before the violence broke out in Gaza.
The survey covered 1,157 students and was carried out by Trinity College professors, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar. The percentage of students reported encountering anti-Semitism was consistent across gender, religious outlook and geographical region, according to JTA.
Of Conservative students 69 percent admitted to experiencing anti-Semitism, 62 percent of reform students and 52 percent of Orthodox students. Students of the Conservative and reform movements were more likely to report the anti-Semitic activity than the Orthodox students.
Those who said they were always open about their Jewishness on campus were about as likely to have encountered anti-Semitism as those who said they were never open about their Jewishness, at 58 percent and 59 percent.
The data in the report came from the 2014 National Demographic Survey of American Jewish College Students as part of a broader series of questions. The students who took the surveys were volunteers, and the study’s authors found that the students roughly matched the broader demographic outlines of other surveys of Jewish college students. What constituted an anti-Semitic incident was self-defined by the participants.
The results were consistent with a 2011 survey of college students in the United Kingdom, which found that 51 percent of students reported experiencing or witnessing an anti-Semitic incident.
