I came across this very interesting and provocative paper by Fordham political scientist Jeffrey Cohen.
Cohen begins by identifying two dominant theories in the United States: anti-Semitism and political ideology. One theory is that anti-Semitism can be found on both the far right and the far left. The second view is that people on the left are the least anti-Semitic, while people on the right are more likely to be anti-Semitic.
Cohen has a third theory. I can’t do justice to his approach in a short blog post, but essentially he criticizes previous researchers for relying on self-declared political ideologies and excluding “not knowing” in their analyses.
As a result, the Americans who are least anti-Semitic are mainstream liberals and conservatives. As one of the above theories suggests, the most anti-Semitic is the far left, the far right, but also Low-information voters, who often self-identify as “moderates,” skew the survey results.
Cohen’s explanation of these results is interesting. He believes that the mainstream elite in the United States has been philosophically Jewish since the 1950s. People who have mainstream political views and take their cues from mainstream sources follow the mainstream consensus. But apparently, those who take the cues and get their news elsewhere are less influenced by this consensus and therefore more likely to hold anti-Semitic views. This includes the far left and the far right, but most importantly, also the ideologically immature who are alienated from the mainstream.
Cohen doesn’t delve into this, but the results were not good for American Jews. More and more Americans distrust the “establishment” and take cues from extremists or demagogues and get their news from them just to get clicks. Think about how many young people rely on TikTok for information. This helps explain the rise in anti-Semitism in recent years. It also helps explain why so many Jews are instinctively uncomfortable with Trump and his destruction of the Republican mainstream, which has really led to a surge in right-wing anti-Semitic drivel (I’m looking at Candace Owens). This is why Biden’s failure to articulate and implement a defense of the far-left Democratic mainstream is driving many Jews away, especially Many Jewish liberals find themselves under attack in progressive circles seeking to exclude “Zionists,” which has drawn increasingly adverse Jewish attention.
However, I suspect Trump and Biden are symptoms rather than the cause. The agency has lost the trust of large swaths of the American public, often (but not always) and for good reasons. In the current media environment, it is no longer clear what “mainstream” is. For example, NPR, once the paragon of mainstream liberalism, has begun a serious left turn since 2016, and especially since 2020. media. I think this is further evidence of Frankin Foer’s argument that the golden age of American Jewry is ending.
