American Anti-Semitism Is a Youth Movement

""The more I'm around young people, the more panicked I am," Tim Miller told me recently. A prominent anti-Trump commentator, Miller hosts the popular Bulwark Podcast and regularly speaks to students on university campuses. Lately, he has begun to notice something disturbing. "I was literally arguing with a kid, like, three weeks ago, college kid, who was, like, you know, starting to think that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk," Miller recounted on his show, amid a discussion about rising anti-Semitism on the American right. The student, he noted, was a "left kid.""

"In late 2024, the Democratic data scientist David Shor surveyed nearly 130,000 voters at the behest of Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. He found that a quarter of those younger than 25-with negligible differences among Trump and Harris supporters-held an "unfavorable opinion" of "Jewish people." ( Jewish people-not Israelis or Zionists.) By contrast, the older a person was, the less likely they were to express such sentiments."

"One year later, an avalanche of data has confirmed what Shor glimpsed and researchers and reporters like myself have argued for years: American anti-Semitism is not primarily a partisan phenomenon, as it is often framed in popular discourse, but a generational one. Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, but they've assumed much larger and more sinister proportions in the imagination of the country's youth."

Young Americans are showing increased antisemitic attitudes, with substantial proportions under 25 expressing unfavorable views of Jewish people. A large survey of nearly 130,000 voters found about a quarter of those younger than 25 held unfavorable opinions of Jewish people, with little difference between supporters of different presidential candidates. Multiple polls and data indicate that anti-Jewish sentiment is concentrated among younger generations rather than aligning with a single political party. University students across ideological lines have expressed conspiratorial and hostile beliefs about Jews. Jews remain a small share of the population yet are disproportionately targeted in youth attitudes.

Read at The Atlantic