Abstract
In the immediate aftermath of the horrifying terrorist attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in Paris in January 2015, one question seemed to run through much of the discourse within Jewish communal circles on the other side of the English Channel: could the same thing happen in the UK? Could the type of targeted antisemitic Islamist attack that took the lives of four Jews that day also occur in the United Kingdom, a country long known for its high levels of tolerance for minorities, low levels of antisemitism, and, in European terms at least, vibrant Jewish life?
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Notes
- 1.
The study was supported by colleagues in the United Kingdom at the CST, Dr. Dave Rich and Mark Gardner, alongside Danny Stone and Amy Wagner at the Antisemitism Policy Trust. The project was financed by the CST, the UK government, and a range of individual donors.
- 2.
Interestingly, there is a noticeably more significant modal effect when measuring attitudes towards Muslims online and face-to-face; online respondents are considerably more antipathetic than face-to-face ones.
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- 4.
It is worth noting that the study also deliberately tested two positive statements about Jews: “A British Jew is just as British as any other British person” and “British Jews make a positive contribution to British society.” A common error in this type of attitudinal research about antisemitism is to measure negative views exclusively as, in a significant number of cases, people’s views are complex and multifaceted, combining both positive and negative opinions.
- 5.
As with the statements about Jews, and for the same reasons elucidated previously, we also included some parallel positive statements about Israel: “The State of Israel has every right to exist”; “The State of Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish People”; “The State of Israel makes a positive contribution to global society”; and “Israel is the only real democracy in the Middle East.”
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References
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Boyd, J. (2022). Is Anti-Israelism Antisemitism? Evidence from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research Survey of Attitudes Towards Jews Among the Population of Great Britain. In: Kenedy, R.A., Rebhun, U., Ehrlich, C.S. (eds) Israel and the Diaspora: Jewish Connectivity in a Changing World. Studies of Jews in Society, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80872-3_12
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