This in-person event is part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Civil Discourse Initiative. The panel will focus on how leading social scientists conceptualize, measure, and study key forms of prejudice in the US context, focusing specifically on antisemitism and Islamophobia. The event will bring together top scholars who are at the forefront of studying these important and pernicious phenomena using rigorous, evidence-based data, methods, and sources.
ERIC BEERBOHM: Good afternoon. My name is Eric Beerbohm. I'm a professor of government at the Department of Government here. And I serve as director of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics. Welcome to our panel entitled Pernicious Prejudice: Scholarly Approaches to Antisemitism and Islamophobia. This panel is part of Dean Hopi Hoekstra's Civil Discourse Initiative launched in the fall with the goal of advancing constructive, curious, and respectful dialogue across FAS.
I want to thank many centers, starting with the Weatherhead for hosting this event, co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for American Political Studies, Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, and the faculty of Arts and Sciences' Civil Discourse Initiative. I'm delighted to introduce today's moderator, Melani Cammett, who is the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs in the government department and director of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Her research explores post-conflict of identity politics, conflict and development in the Middle East and other countries. She is currently working on a book exploring how people come together after violence, from Lebanon to Northern Ireland. I'll turn it Melani, who will introduce the panelists.
MELANI CAMMETT: Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Eric, for supporting this and hosting this and introducing me. I'm really delighted to welcome everyone here. And I'd also like to thank all the various cosponsors of this event that Eric has just named.
So we are coming together here today in a highly charged moment. I don't think I need to tell anyone that. So in the wake of October 7, allegations of negative sentiments, to put it mildly, against Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians more specifically, have increased in this country. And our discussion today is not aimed at focusing on the conflict per se or how it's reverberating on campuses as we speak, but really turning towards scholarly approaches to the core issues or some of the core issues, I should say, that are being raised by the events that have been playing out.
And so we're interested in looking at how scholars approach the conceptualization, the measurement of different forms of prejudice, specifically here today, antisemitism and Islamophobia. And the scholars on this panel have been pursuing these research agendas well before the current moment. And their research is ongoing, in some cases with new data collection occurring even since October 7. So these are not new topics to these scholars. And we're going to benefit from their accumulated wisdom in thinking about these questions.
So today, the panelists will share some of their high-level findings from their work on these pernicious forms of prejudice, as we've called them, focusing precisely on the issues I've just mentioned, on conceptualization, on measurement, on analyses that look at the correlates of attitudes towards different groups that are involved in the conflict today. They're going to also discuss research showing how negative ideas spread and are reinforced by social media and by the media more generally. And I very much look forward to the conversation and the nuances that they're going to present to us today.
So before I introduce the speakers, I just want to give you a quick rundown of the event. First, each speaker is going to give up to 10 minutes of presentation of their research. And then I'm going to kick off the discussion with around of questions with the panelists. And then we're going to open it up to all of you here.
So we are livestreaming this event on YouTube. And it will be up and available to be seen. But only the participants here, only the audience members here today, have the ability to pose questions. So we invite you to pose your questions. And we'll open up the panel for discussion.
So it's my great honor to introduce our panelists. And I think they're actually conveniently sitting in the order in which they're going to speak. So I will introduce them as such. Our first speaker is Dr. Nazita Lajevardi, who's an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. And her work focuses mainly on issues related to American political behavior and public opinion through the lens of racial and religious identity, and specifically with attention to Islamophobia in the United States.
Her books include Misinformed: What Americans Know About Social Groups and Why It Matters for Politics, published in 2021 and co-authored with Marisa Abrajano; Outsiders at Home: The Politics of American Islamophobia, published in 2020-- and I see you were quite busy-- and Understanding Muslim Political Life in America: Contested Citizenship in the Twenty-first Century, co-authored with Brian Calfano. She's also published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals that I have no time to go into listing and has been featured extensively in popular media as well.
Our next speaker is Professor Jeffrey Kopstein, who's dean's professor of political science and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on inter-ethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, antisemitism and antiliberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history.
These interests are central topics in his latest books, which include Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust, published in 2018; Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust, published just last year in 2023; and The Assault on the State: How the Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future, published in 2024. You two have been quite busy with a string of book publications. And of particular interest to this panel, Dr. Kopstein has been publishing on antisemitism on UC campuses with, I believe, some ongoing data collection right now. So we'll get to hear about some of that.
Our next speaker is Professor Sabine von Mering, who is professor of German and women, gender, and sexuality studies and director of the Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis University. Thank you for coming down the road to us. Together with Monika Hübscher, she co-edited a book that was published a couple of years ago and is now getting translated into German entitled Antisemitism on Social Media.
Previous co-edited volumes include Right-wing Radicalism Today: Perspectives from Europe and the US and Russian-Jewish Emigrants after the Cold War: Perspectives from Germany, Israel, Canada, and the United States. She's currently working on a project on Germany's response to the global climate crisis and on a co-edited volume on grass roots climate activism. And she has also published extensively in other venues and has been hosting a popular series online, I believe, that's dealing with climate issues, if I'm not mistaken. So thank you for joining us, clearly working on very important topics for our time.
And last but not least is Dr. Kassra Oskooii. I might be mispronouncing your name-- OK, thank you-- who is an associate professor of political science and international relations at the University of Delaware, specializing in American political behavior, political methodology, and race and ethnic politics. His research examines the interplay between contextual and psychological factors shaping political behaviors and opinions, with a particular emphasis on perceptions of discrimination and attitudes towards Muslim Americans.
And he's published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, lots of book chapters, and also extensive public writings. Dr. Oskooii also teaches and researches on the areas of political representation, voting rights, and redistricting. So as you can see, we have some really well-qualified and eminent scholars here. And I'm really looking forward to hearing what they have to share with us. Thank you.
NAZITA LAJEVARDI: OK. Well, thank you, everyone. I'm really delighted to be here. So my name is Nazita Lajevardi. I am an associate professor of political science. I study anti-Muslim animus in a number of different ways, on social media, on cable news media, in terms of political representation, in terms of mass attitudes and policy preferences. And so it's really a delight here to share some of my recent research with you today.
In this moment, there has been quite a bit of documentation of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate that is manifested online and in offline spaces. Much of the reporting that has gone on has noted that there are hate actors who have used this moment as an opportune time to hijack the discourse and to spread animus and hate towards Muslims and towards Jews. And in fact, this reporting has found that there are far-right actors on Telegram, on 4chan, and on other venues that are using this moment to really use it as an opportunity to spread antisemitic and Islamophobic attitudes to try to pit different groups against one another. And that has really exacerbated some of the offline hate that we're also seeing.
I'm not going to focus on what's happening right now. I'm going to take us a step back and say that this is not the first time that anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hate has been connected. And I'm going to walk you through some of my research that documents this. The period before and after the 2016 presidential election was shown to be an immense time of a surge in antisemitic hate. So the Anti-Defamation League found an enormous increases in both online and offline hate that American Jews were experiencing in the wake of the 2016 presidential election and also with the election of President Trump and into his first year of his presidency.
But that's just not unique to American Jews. American Muslims also suffered quite a bit during this period of time. And so the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR, also documented an incredible rise in anti-Muslim hate during the 2016 presidential campaign and into the first year of the Trump presidency.
And all of this hate really did appear to come to a head in August 2017 during the Unite the Right rally, which took place in Charlottesville, Virginia. And if you recall, this rally marked a significant visible escalation of hate that was public. It was organized. And really, for the first time in a very long time, in generations even perhaps, the country bore witness to far-right extremist activity happening in public spaces.
My research with my colleagues, Will Hobbs and our former graduate students Xinyi Li and Caleb Lucas, tried to look at the connection between anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate that was taking place and really manifesting during this time. We were interested in examining whether the hate that we observed online that these two groups were experiencing, as well as the offline hate, were it all connected and really what this meant for trying to understand who might even be responsible for promulgating that kind of hate.
And so in our research, we tried to address three main questions. To begin, we were interested in trying to understand, is there, in fact, even a group of people in the United States who share anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish attitudes? Can there even possibly be people who harbor animus towards these two groups? Second, is there a link between anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate that manifests online? And if so, is there also a link in the anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate that might manifest offline?
And so to answer these numerous research questions, we actually had to triangulate results from a number of different databases. For the online hate study, we actually pulled data from Reddit, from 4chan, and from Gab. The latter two sources are fringe, alt-right social networking sites. These are spaces where many far-right users turn to these platforms, and they engage in speech.
In terms of offline hate, the Anti-Defamation League actually makes available to researchers hate incidents that are reported to them by Jewish Americans. And the Council on American Islamic Relations actually turned over their individual-level hate and bias incident data to us as researchers so that we could try to trace offline hate that was targeting Muslim Americans at the individual level.
To triangulate all of this, we also, in our paper, ensure that our results also are corroborated with the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. But for many reasons, including the fact that Muslims don't trust the FBI because, oftentimes, they are the leaders in advancing hate towards Muslims-- I'm not going to talk about that today.
So turning to my first question, are there, in fact, people in the United states-- is there a group of people who could even be capable of harboring anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate who could be perpetuating hate towards these groups of people in online and offline spaces? Our research, unequivocally, says yes.
We turn to the Mosaic 2014 survey and replicate a study by two University of Minnesota scholars and find that there is, in fact, a group of people who not only agree that Muslims contribute to all problems in American society, but who also agree that Jews contribute to all problems in American society as well. And these are individuals who we call-- I have no idea how these buttons work, but anyways, extremists in religious ethnocentrism.
And importantly, it is among this subset of people that we are interested in studying. These are folks who hold animus towards Jews and towards Muslims. And among these people, animus towards these two groups might be more related, if not conflated.
Second, now that we've established that this group of people exists, we examine whether there is a link between online hate that targets Muslims and Jews. And for this analysis, I'll walk you through this a little bit slowly. On the left-hand side, you can see fringe mentions of slurs that target Muslims or Arabs over time on these fringe social networking platforms. And what you can see is that in the month prior to the Unite the Right rally, slurs against Muslims and Arabs begins to decrease and recede.
On the right-hand side, what becomes incredibly important to note is that slurs against Jews right after the Unite the Right rally increase. In fact, mentions of Jews, slurs against Jews, actually increased to 225% of their prior levels after the Unite the Right rally on Gab.
But to show you that these are, in fact, linked, we turn to analyses at the individual level. Luckily for us, Gab, one of these alt-right social networking sites, has data at the individual level for us to be able to scrape and to examine. Gab is kind of like Twitter. Individuals have user profiles. And so you can actually scrape their posts. And you can see what they're talking about over time.
And when we conduct these analyses at the individual-- oh goodness. OK, when we conduct these analyses at the individual level, we find that in the month prior to Unite the Right, as you can see in these brown-- or excuse me, in these purple coefficient plots, you can see that mentions of Muslims receded, while mentions of Jews increased. And these are slurs against Jews and against Muslims.
And so importantly, what we find here is at the individual level, people stop talking about Muslims and replace those slurs with mentions towards Jews. And so what we're finding here is a target substitution effect at the individual level and showing how hate-- online hate at least, on this one platform-- really did show a connection between Muslims and Jews.
Finally, our analyses examined whether the link between hate that we observed online that targeted Muslims and Jews, whether this also manifested offline. And here, we are just plotting the hate incidents that were reported to CAIR and to the ADL. And what you can see is, again, in the purple lines, that hate crimes being reported to CAIR receded in the month before the Unite the Right rally and stayed at their low levels.
Meanwhile, following the Unite the Right rally, hate crimes towards American Jews not only increased but were sustained. While we cannot actually show you that these are the same perpetrators online and offline because we do not have hate crime data and not all perpetrators are being identified or prosecuted, we do conduct one additional analysis called a Granger causality test.
This is not at all a causality test. It's just a test of significance and correlations. But what we're finding here is when we look at week-to-week week changes in target substitution of Jews for Muslims, we find that these are significantly correlated across the multiple platforms that we evaluate.
And so, very briefly, to conclude, if we consider today's contemporary discourse, which often pits American Jews and American Muslims at odds with one another, it is important to reflect on the results of this research. This research demonstrates that a large amount of seemingly disconnected, hateful rhetoric about these groups, at least in 2017, was being advanced by the same far-right right extremist communities.
And so it's really important to note to observers, to researchers, to our political leaders, that as we are investigating the traces and origins of hate that target both American Muslims and American Jews today, we should also be considering the potential outsized role that far-right communities might be playing in exacerbating the hostilities that we observe today. Thank you.
JEFFREY KOPSTEIN: That's a hard act to follow. Thank you very much. Thank you, Melani, for inviting me. And thank you to all the various centers and people who put this together. Just before walking in here, I sent to my Dean a little link, not just to get a pay raise, which is always good, but to say it would be great if we could do this kind of thing at our university, which unfortunately is still not possible.
So my story starts with in 2015, when I stopped shoveling snow. And that's when I moved from the University of Toronto to the University of California at Irvine. And just before I moved there, people said, you're crazy. Why are you going? It's an antisemitic campus.
And there was an incident where the Israeli ambassador showed up in 2010, Michael Oren. He got shouted down. The people from the audience were arrested ultimately and prosecuted and convicted. And so before I went-- when I went, I said, well, I want to study this question.
I studied antisemitism for a long time. But I'd mostly studied it historically. I'd mostly studied events. And I wanted to study the University of California at Irvine, the students, right, and just simply asking the students a very old set of questions about Jews to find out if they're actually antisemitic or not because this whole the issue of Israel-Palestine was always put out there.
The Jewish community said, no, it's just a bunch of antisemitism. And of course, the activists said, no, it's not antisemitism at all. It's a conflict over land and human rights, et cetera. So I wanted to find out, well, who's right? OK, so that's the context of how I got into this, which was part of our marching orders. Melani told us we were supposed to do that. So, OK, that's the context. So how am I going forward here? I just press the button? There we go.
OK, so what is antisemitism? Well, some people say it's a social prejudice, like other social prejudices. Others people say, no, it's really different. It's really a kind of a theory about how the world works, about conspiracies, that behind the scenes, there's these people pulling the strings. And they are Jews, right? And so it's a theory.
Well, how do you study this? And I don't even have all the ways of doing it, surveys, survey experiments, in-lab experiments, big data scraping-- I've done a bit of that myself-- events data, which I've also done. There's all different ways of studying it.
What I'm going to talk about today is some surveys. I've already published, some surveys on my own campus. But then when I publish this-- actually, the ADL came to me. And they said-- because I was pretty-- you'll see my results are pretty modest. And they said, why don't you do it on other campuses? OK, I'll do it on all of them, all the University of Californias.
It's far harder than I thought, right? First of all, nobody wants to give you the sample. They're all afraid of the answer, right? Or they say there's student privacy concerns, et cetera, et cetera. So let's talk about how it's studied first. Then I'll tell you the way I did it.
Antisemitism in the US, in the literature-- in the literature, in the public opinion literature-- can kind of be broken down into four kind of dimensions. The first is Jews have unfavorable character traits, and there's Christian antipathy, that is Jews are pushy. They like to be at the head of things. That's a prompt that's often used, that they don't like Christians, that they use Christian blood for ritual purposes. That's in there, too.
A second one is hidden Jewish power, right, this idea that Jews control the banks, or they control Hollywood, or they control the universities, or whatever. A third is charges of dual loyalty, that Jews are more loyal to Israel than they are to the United states, or the Jews are more loyal to each other than they are to other people. It's a very common one.
Third, Holocaust minimization and obfuscation. And that is Jews use the Holocaust for advantage in international politics. Six million-- didn't six million people-- not that many people actually died. Or other people died in the holocaust, too. Why do Jews talk about it so much?
Finally, Israel-related antipathy. I don't mean criticism of Israel here. I mean things more like, because Israel does bad things, Jews in the United States should be punished for that, that form of antipathy. So this is the dimensions I've broken it down to. You can see there's a overlaps here between them. That's fine. But it did shape which questions I use and ask.
So here's what I got. In the end, I got UCI to cough up again thousands of randomly selected student emails. Same with UC Merced, eventually Riverside, and then UCLA piped in. Berkeley refused completely. And I have three degrees from Berkeley. I reminded them of this fact. And they didn't seem to care.
And so after getting-- I got all of these after doing IRB, which was also a pain. And then in the end, we got 2,237 respondents, which is enough to start to do some pretty interesting stuff with. So you can figure out how many people we asked based on the fact that we got a 15% response rate. We asked thousands of people, offering them iPads and Starbucks cards and all kinds of stuff, the typical way that you get respondents.
The prompts that were used were-- to correspond to the various dimensions of antisemitism, we used a six-point Likert scale, that is you either really disagree, or you really agree. And those of you who are public opinion researchers know that the six-point scale keeps you from-- you have to make a decision. You can't say, don't know, right?
And the reason you say, don't know, there's some research out there. The guy up at MIT, Berinsky, has shown this, that basically in race research in the United States or Islamophobia, racists hide behind the don't knows. And so we made people make a decision.
And that's not unheard of. And it's fine. But you can criticize it if you want. And then we have a further set of questions about Israel. I'll get to those in a few minutes.
So here are the prompts. Jews don't care about what happens to anyone but their own kind. It is appropriate for opponents of Israel's policies to boycott Jewish-American-owned businesses in their communities. Jews are more loyal to Israel than they are to the United States. Jews have too much power. Jews use Christian blood for ritual purposes. And Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.
OK, so those are the prompts that we put out there. I like the Christian blood one a lot because it's a good-- that should be an easy question to answer, right? So it's an attention filter. It's an addition attention filter. If you don't have a difference between that and your other answers, you know nobody's paying attention to these questions, right? The good news is you'll see there is a difference, although not as much as you might like.
OK, so here's the overall answer. So all you want to do is look at the agree column there. Unlike Nazita, I made a decision that this was not a regression crowd. So I just said-- and I think I'm right. But I just went for those are the percentages, either slightly agree, agree, or strongly agree.
And here, you can see, right? The antisemitism, I don't like to prefer to call it antisemitism here. These are 18 to 22-year-olds. These are attitudes towards Jews. And so you can see that these values here ranging from 28%, a lot thinking Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States, to 6%, 5.8%, Jews use the blood of Christians for ritual purposes.
My 90-year-old father in La Jolla was deeply thrilled to know that only 1 in 20 students think that Jews use the blood of Christians for ritual purposes. And even on that question, what does it mean to slightly disagree, right? I mean, does it mean only on certain holidays or only certain organs or what, right?
OK, so you can see here these-- now, the thing about these results, they're not out of line with the rest of society. That is, there is antisemitism on University of California campuses. It's there. It's not larger than the rest of society. This is in line with other findings, including the ADL, by the way. It's there. It's there. It's there. What can I say?
OK. Now, here's the thing. Half our data, more than half our data, was collected after October 7. We split the sample. This is actually sort of fortunate in terms of public opinion in people like this. There's an exogenous event, which can tell us, OK, so is there an increase in antisemitism after October 7?
So there is the pre and post. We reduced that. We cut it off at November 15 because we wanted the samples to be roughly the same size. You can tell me if that's justified or not. It doesn't actually change anything by very much here.
So what that shows you is, yes, indeed, there is an increase in antisemitism after October 7, or at least the answers to-- people become either more willing or more convinced that the Jews are doing bad things. The Christian blood one doesn't change very much. And the Holocaust one is in the opposite direction.
But on the other ones, the hidden Jewish power, the kind of Jewish misanthropy and Jews loyalty, that shoots up. And you can see that. And so this says that when your Jewish colleagues and friends, when they say that they're sensing some sort of weird isolation on campuses, at least at University of California, it's true.
You would have expected it to go in the opposite direction, right? Remember, this isn't about Israel. This is about just these questions about Jews. OK. Let me push on.
Here are the Israel prompts, just for your curiosity. And this is standard stuff in the literature about Israeli responsibility vis-a-vis and more than the Palestinians' responsibility for violence in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. There's no justification for Palestinian suicide bombers. Israel leaders are not sincere in their pursuit of peace. And I feel respect or admiration for Israel. And the US government should impose sanctions.
It doesn't say whether you're anti-Israel. This is, again, your feelings about Israel, your senses about Israel. And you can see here, right, I'm just giving you the split. I could give you the whole aggregate again. But feelings of hostility towards Israel definitely go up after October 7. And that is much easier to understand. But it does. It happens. And so those are the values.
Now, you probably want to know what is the correlation between if you take the aggregate index. What it is, it's moderate. It's about 0.2, right? Which is weak, but there. And you probably want to know who's in the anti-anti category, right? And I can tell you that, too. But I don't have the time. But maybe Q and A, I can tell you that, right? So OK. Those are the aggregates. I stuck that there. Let's go through that.
Now, are campuses causing any of this? So we don't have, Ryan, a panel survey. We would like that. But what we have is first year, second year, third year, and fourth year. You would think that if universities were especially toxic towards Jews, attitudes would change. You'd become, over time, more antisemitic.
What you can see on the blue bars there, there's no change. We may be propagandists, we left-wing professors, but we're not very good ones. We're lousy ones. Or more likely, I think the students are coming in with their attitudes well beforehand. And Sears talks about this. There's a lot of research on this subject.
The anti-Israel attitudes do increase, though not gigantically. It goes from whether 0.52 in the index to 0.6, right, on a 10-point scale. So it's there, right? But the campuses are not uniquely toxic towards-- it's not saying that there is not antisemitism on campus. There is. But we don't appear to be the factory of it. It is not a liberal brainwashing factory. That is not what campuses are. And that is a replication of an earlier article that I published. So I'm pretty confident in that.
OK, that's sort of good news. Although my chancellor said that said, shouldn't it be better? Like, shouldn't we be making people less prejudiced, right? And I understand that. And that's probably true, too.
OK, so observations, this is final slide. Antisemitism on campus exists pretty much in line with the rest of society. Campus effects are non-existent for antisemitism but stronger for critical attitudes towards Israel. And also, I didn't put this in, your choice of major. I mean, as pernicious as the humanities are or as weird as the humanities are, they don't appear to be producing different attitudes than the hard sciences.
Now, you probably want to know the regression. The regression shows that critical attitudes towards Israel are, in fact, the best predictor of antisemitism, especially at the extreme, also Islam as the religion of the home, belief in conspiracy theories, and more weakly, the racial resentment score and xenophobia.
And this is-- like, my research assistant said, why don't you ask about Islamophobia? And I excluded it from the first two campuses. And then I caved. And for the last two campuses, I put it in there. And Nazita's right, that it is-- it affects the outcome quite strongly. So it's there.
And it doesn't-- and also, again, proving this weird thing about antisemitism, it is not just a right-wing phenomenon. There is an antisemitism on the left. It's definitely there. It's not as strong as on the right, but it's there, especially at extreme values of anti-Israel sentiments. And it goes up after October 7. What can I say?
So I'm happy to hear your questions, comments, and criticisms. And thank you for listening. And really, thanks again for inviting me.
MELANI CAMMETT: Thank you.
SABINE VON MERING: Well, Jeffrey is a tough act to follow. I had hoped to be before him. I actually think that I'm going to take us back again to more closer to what Nazita was talking about with where I'm going. But I'm already ready to start asking questions myself. So sorry that you're going to have to listen to a little bit more.
Thanks for inviting me and including me here. Although I'm not a social scientist by training, I have been something of a translator of social science for over 25 years. And studying antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, and xenophobia have been important areas of focus for my work at the Center for German and European Studies at Brandeis, which is one center of a network of centers, including the Minda de Gunzburg Center here at Harvard and a center at Haifa University, or University of Haifa, where I went in 2019 and, by the way, where 40% of the students are Palestinians.
At that time, I was giving a talk about the German right-wing extremist party AFD. And one of the people in the audience was Monika Hübscher, who is completing her PhD on the AFD at Haifa. And so we started talking because I had also mentioned the role of social media in the spread of misinformation on climate change in my talk. And social media is what she's working on primarily.
And so a year later, she said that she was trying to compile existing work on antisemitism on social media and finding it hard to actually get studies together. And she needed a partner. And so I joined her on this book project, which was very interesting. And then it got published in 2022.
At the time, what she found was that there weren't really evidence-based studies a lot. There were some reports from the World Jewish Congress, from the ADL. There were some individual papers. But it wasn't really a topic that scholars invested a lot of time and effort into. And that was problematic even then because we were already witnessing growing concern that social media were being weaponized, as other technologies have been in the past, but with more deadly potential, perhaps.
And one thing that stood out to us when we started working on this was that there was astonishingly little attention to the role of technology and the business model of social media in that debate. As we saw it-- and we say that in the book-- through algorithm-driven technology which serves to generate profit, the dissemination of hate got a major upgrade through social media.
So although the book focuses on antisemitism, we were, of course, aware that antisemitic hate is a small fraction of hate that is proliferating on social media. And Michael Bossetta actually calculates that in the book in the last chapter. The largest number of people, in case you were wondering, who are targeted by hate on social media are women.
And that should not surprise us, given that women are not even a minority. And sexism and misogyny are, of course, alive and well offline. And so social media are no exception, especially now that they make it a lot easier to disseminate misogynist and sexist hate as well as antisemitic and racist hate.
In any case, what scholars do generally agree on is that the hate is really not that new. And your examples also showed that. The targets are not really new. What's really new is the scale that you can now circulate. And anyone can circulate hate within seconds around the world in all languages, with no borders, with no barriers.
And I think one thing that I always want to emphasize, that this is happening for profit. This is happening for profit. The platforms that are being used in all of these cases are profiting handsomely from the spread of hate. By the way, we also noticed that people were often very imprecise when referring to this phenomenon.
I saw that-- again, and it's funny. When I was thinking of using slides, I also had the same article that Nazita used from the New York Times in November, where it says antisemitic and anti-Muslim hate speech surges across the internet. And then only in the subtitle, you see the mention of social media platforms such as X, Facebook, and Instagram.
And that is also what we saw in the literature, that people say online or internet or digital even, and they don't specify that social media are really a particularly malicious medium in this case. Antisemitism and Islamophobia isn't surging on websites. It is spreading through algorithm-driven, user-generated content and highly profitable.
And another one of the most important takeaways, contrary to offline hate, when you directly engage with online hate, you're actually becoming part of the problem because the algorithm doesn't care whether you engage with a post because you like it or because you don't. The engagement is what counts. It's what advertisers pay for.
So if you see hateful content, don't engage with it. Report it. Screenshot it. And if you must be active on social media and you want to work to curtail hate, use your voice to engage the algorithms on spreading positive messages instead, preferably facts.
Our book is being published in German, as you mentioned. And for that edition, Monika has rewritten the first chapter to incorporate the impact she saw from social media on October 7, when Hamas literally weaponized the platforms to livestream their attack on Jews and others in Israeli villages. And these images and videos were then seen by millions around the world in real time. And of course, again, social media companies were profiting in real time as well. Advertisements were being sold.
We also note in our first chapter that what is being done about antisemitism and other forms of hate by social media platforms stands in no relation to the magnitude of the problem. To this day, social media companies boast of spending millions-- millions-- on content moderation. That sounds like a lot. But the few thousand content moderators they employ are often subcontractors in low-wage countries.
And of course, the bulk of the content moderation happens here in the US and not in countries like Myanmar, for example, where the UN found evidence that Facebook contributed to the genocide of the Muslim Rohingya minority in 2017, for which Meta was sued in court for reparations but has so far not paid a cent.
As Amnesty International wrote in September of last year, "Facebook's algorithms and Meta's ruthless pursuit of profit created an echo chamber that helped foment hatred of the Rohingya people and contributed to the conditions, which forced the ethnic group to flee Myanmar en masse. Although this stands out as one of the most egregious examples of a social media company's involvement in a human rights crisis, the Rohingya are still awaiting reparations from Meta." I would think that after October 7 and the use of social media in the context of that terrorist attack, we might expect something similar to happen as well.
Of course, spending millions on content moderation is a joke when you have billions of users who are literally posting nonstop around the clock, around the world, at a speed and reach of no other medium before. So that's the problem our book aimed to highlight. And we also wanted to demonstrate how antisemitism on social media can be studied, given that most people who choose to study antisemitism tend to come to it as historians and not necessarily as computer scientists. And I can talk more about that later. But before I end, I wanted to share a few insights of the evidence-based work that we included in the volume.
So in one case, for example, Monika and Vanessa Walter, for example, happened to be at a conference that was livestreamed on YouTube, just like we are right now. And they became witness to a troll attack, where YouTube attendees started posting questions and comments in the chat that were clearly aimed at derailing the conversation. And one conclusion that the researchers were able to draw in this case was that anti-Muslim attitudes were used to deflect from actual antisemitic comments. In fact, they concluded, quote, "In their comments, the trolls instrumentalize antisemitism to express their hostility to Islam," end quote.
So they used software that allowed them to quantify and then actually visualize how the trolls linked Islam and antisemitism. And they ended up concluding that this was not just an attack on Jews and Muslims, but actually an attack on democracy, because the conspiracy myth functions as one of the drivers in the loss of trust in media and science, which in turn contributes to the erosion of democracy.
In another chapter, Cassie Miller from the Southern Poverty Law Center took a deep dive into neo-Nazi networks on social media and other platforms, sort of similar to Gab and 4chan and others. And there as well, she found exactly what you heard from Nazita. There was antisemitism and Islamophobia linked in far-right ideology.
These pose unique dangers, as we saw in Charlottesville. But the vast network through which they arise is sustained by social media and deserves greater attention because it is the mechanism through which the racist and antisemitic movement perpetuates. So they sort of recruit from Twitter, X, Facebook, YouTube, wherever, and then hide in the darker venues in the web.
On the other end of the political spectrum-- and in this case, not on the extremist end but firmly in the mainstream-- Jakob Guhl took a look at antisemitism on the left in the UK and studied comments on Facebook pages related to the Labour Party. And even though within, admittedly, a relatively small sample that he analyzed, followers and supporters of Labour at the time would have seen antisemitic posts on these pages. And in too many cases, he found the commenters did not sufficiently challenge what was expressed in the antisemitic posts.
So these are just three examples of work that we highlight in the book. And I should add that I have since developed a course on antisemitism on social media for undergraduates. And my students loved the book by Jaron Lanier. I have it here, 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. And I can highly recommend it for your nephews and nieces and maybe children or grandchildren.
And what was really striking-- it's a very easy read. You can read it in an hour or two. And what's striking to me was that my digitally native undergraduates were really astonished what they found, that they actually were very good at-- I mean, they're on social media all the time, right? In fact, I was testing this on my niece. What is the word-- when I asked them, what is the word you associate with social media? Like, let's hear from young people. What's the word you associate with social media?
AUDIENCE: Youth. Youth.
SABINE VON MERING: Youth? Youth, OK.
AUDIENCE: Anger.
SABINE VON MERING: Anger, OK. Well, you're all too smart. It's addiction, actually. The young people say addiction. They are admitting they are addicted. And 40 attorney generals in the United States are actually suing Meta right now because they are addicting children to their devices, to their platforms.
And so what this book sort of showed them is how that actually works. And if you've seen The Facebook Dilemma on PBS, you know that as well. It's really helpful to understand how your data is used, how you're being manipulated, what is actually being done with you as you are addicted to this stuff.
So I just wanted to say that we're looking at a multi-billion dollar technology industry whose products users become addicted to, whose algorithm is built intentionally to polarize, which they have admitted, because engagement increases the more outrageous the content. And of course, addiction is a major public health issue. And social media addiction is no exception. It endangers the health of our public far beyond our public discourse. Thank you.
KASSRA OSKOOII: All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Kassra Oskooii. And I'm an associate professor of political science at the mighty University of Delaware Blue Hens. And I'd like to get on the record and say that in our prepresentation meeting, both Nazita and Jeff said they only had a couple of slides. And 25 slides later, we're here.
And so I didn't have any slides because I thought we're not doing slides. So I'm going to offer an overview of my research on the psychological underpinnings and political ramifications of anti-Muslim attitudes which I've conducted over the past decade, primarily with none other than Professor Lajevardi.
And so I want to first begin to acknowledge and recognize that hostility towards Muslims and certainly Jewish people predates the tragic terrorist attacks of September 11. As scholars such as Edward Said have highlighted, misrepresentations, assumptions, and negative stereotypes of how Muslims, Arabs or Middle Easterners think, behave, and interact are overwhelming. It culminated over time in subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against such people and their cultures in the arts, literature, news media, political discourse, and scholarly research.
So Said argued that these negative portrayals have led to the widespread belief that Muslims adhere to a strict and militant faith, intolerant of other ways of life and out of touch with modern social and democratic norms. Now, in criticizing the news media in specific, Said argued, quote, "Very little of the detail, the human density, and passion of Arab-Muslim life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report on the Arab world."
Recognizing this backdrop, my colleagues and I have sought to really better understand the distinct beliefs that ordinary citizens hold about Muslim Americans in specific and how such beliefs translate into their willingness to endorse policies that are at odds with democratic norms and American values of equality and religious liberty. And specifically, we have argued of moving beyond general ethnocentric measures in explaining attitudes towards Muslims in the US and related policy outcomes.
Now, ethnocentric accounts, for those in the audience who have not studied it, posits that prejudice and discrimination towards Muslims is rooted in this generalized hostility towards other stigmatized groups on account of race, ethnicity, religion, and cultural, that Muslims are simply a band of others.
Now, while it's certainly the case, and as our panelists have aptly put it, that there is some overlap between racial resentment, antisemitism, anti-immigrant attitudes, and Islamophobia, what we argue is that ethnocentric accounts obscure the distinct profiles of threat that are associated with different populations. In fact, if we look at social psychology research, it suggests that people perceive social outgroups to vary on the specific kind of threat they pose, and that accounting for distinct threats, researchers can come up with more fine-grained predictions about intergroup behavior.
So our research then focuses on content-specific measures and finds that attitudes towards Muslims are distinct in so far as they're closely associated with tropes of terrorism, violence, and existential threat on the one hand, and perceived cultural incompatibility with the American way of life. So stated differently, we argue that citizens have adopted fairly nuanced, group-centric, or group-specific beliefs about Muslim Americans, which stem from a combination of perceived safety, realistic threat, and symbolic threat.
Now, what's interesting with respect to symbolic threat is that despite the US exhibiting higher levels of tolerance towards religiosity and religion compared to its European counterparts, for instance, if you look at public opinion surveys, there exists a prevailing perception among Americans that Muslims, though, hold values that are particularly incompatible with their own.
So over the years, we have used a variety of surveys and measures to tap into these distinct threat profiles. For instance, we have asked survey respondents the extent to which they agree or disagree that Muslims in America make our society less safe and more dangerous, endanger the safety of people like you, support jihad and violence, violate core values and beliefs, want to change your way of life, or would rather follow the religious code or Sharia law than the Constitution and laws of the United States.
And so what we find is that general ethnocentric measures, which is measured usually by feeling thermometer towards other groups or stereotypes towards other groups, falls short in consistently predicting a range of policy items that aim to or already have curbed the civil liberties of Muslim Americans, the right for religious practice and expression, and obviously immigration of Muslims into the US.
So what are some examples of the outcome measures we have looked into? So we have looked into measures such as passing laws that restrict the number of mosques and Islamic centers from being built in the United states, which gained a lot of traction after the mobilization that was witnessed against the construction of Park51 Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan, New York; whether Muslims in America should be able to wear their religious clothing or hijab in public spaces, which is an international issue, particularly in France, if you look at France; whether Muslims in America should not be allowed to buy weapons, even if they are citizens of the United states; and whether we should severely restrict immigration from Muslim-majority countries, which we know was popularized by former President Trump and the Muslim travel ban, which didn't become a Muslim travel ban. And then North Korea was added. And Venezuela was added. And here we are.
Now, in addition to focusing on content-specific measures in predicting policies that implicate Muslims, we find some preliminary evidence that distinct threat types map on more strongly to specific policies. So, for example, we find that perceived safety threat primarily drives support for policies requiring Muslims to undergo annual security checks, while perceived symbolic threat primarily drive support limiting the number of mosques being built in the United States.
So I would like to end these remarks-- and I promise to be under 10 minutes, and I think I'm living by that promise-- by briefly highlighting some of the consequences of Islamophobia, which is an elusive concept, but it can be defined as the indiscriminate and unnuanced negative attitudes or emotions directed at Islam or Muslims expressed through acts of discrimination and hate, as well as systematic efforts, obviously, through policy of marginalizing and stigmatizing Muslims.
So first, the portrayals of Muslims as posing safety and symbolic threats to the nation creates conditions under which it becomes easier to justify the indiscriminate surveillance of Muslims, particularly as we saw after 9/11, in which every time I went to the airport, I would hit the lottery of being checked-- if I was only that lucky, I would win a lot of money-- and limiting the religious freedom and expression which would otherwise would be considered un-American.
Second, in consistent with findings of other marginalized populations, like Jewish Americans, research suggests that stigma and hostility have the capacity to lower self-esteem and increase anxiety, paranoia, and depressive symptoms for Muslim Americans, particularly the youth. They can dampen one's willingness to partake in politics and seek public resources, social resources under certain contexts, and increase one's desire to avoid public spaces during hostile political moments or contexts. Thank you very much.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Well, I really appreciate-- I've learned a ton from each and every one of you. So in the interest of time, I think what I'll do is just throw out a few questions. And then don't feel obligated to address every single one of them. Just pick and choose what you like. And then we'll go down the line. And that way, we'll have time for the audience to pose their own questions.
So the first question I want to ask, which I think applies to virtually all of you, is how do you arrive at the concepts and measures that you've selected to capture these phenomena? We know as social scientists that how you conceptualize and measure something can drive what you find. So how do you arrive at these-- I mean, in the case of antisemitism, I know the ADL has 11 dimensions. But your measure has four or five.
And I'm curious to know how you code something on social media as antisemitic? And likewise, for measures of hostility to Israel, which you've emphasized is distinct but has some correlation, how do you arrive at those particular measures of hostility to Israel, for example, or Islamophobia? And I know that both Nazita and Kassra have spent a lot of time, as has everyone here, thinking about concepts and measures and so forth. So that's a question I'm interested in for everyone.
I'm also interested in the question of reliability of data sources, particularly when you're not creating your own data, when you're relying on publicly available data. A lot of this is based on self reports, right, that gets collected by various institutions. So how do we know what's going into the construction of databases there?
And then I'd love to just ask-- and maybe you don't have the answer to this. Maybe you do. But what can be done? I mean, it sounds like based on what we've heard that media of diverse forms, broadcast print but now social media in spades, seems to have a-- I mean, I hesitate to use the word causal, being that I'm in political science. And we get attacked by making causal claims without airtight causal identification methods. But it seems pretty compelling that there's a relationship between what happens in various forms of media and behavior on the ground. So how do you combat this, especially if we're dealing with addiction to some forms of media? Is there any way that the research shows that we can move beyond this in the world that we live in? So take it away. And feel free to ignore anything I've asked.
JEFFREY KOPSTEIN: You're up.
NAZITA LAJEVARDI: Oh, wow. Lots of pressure. Well, thanks, everyone. Very hard act to follow, but thank you for these questions. I'll take the question about how to generate a scale or a measure of anti-Muslim attitudes. So in my dissertation, I developed something called the Muslim American resentment scale. And early on in my graduate studies, I found that measures of Islamophobia in American politics just didn't really exist.
And sort of our gold standard of the American National Election Study in political science had been asking about stereotypes about Muslims in more recent years. But that the stereotypes that they had been posing about were developed with other racialized groups in mind, particularly Black Americans, Latino Americans. And so it wasn't really tapping into the prejudices, stereotypes, threats that Muslim Americans were posing.
And so I took a step back and actually became acquainted with the ed psych literature in Europe, which had actually developed really interesting batteries of questions, measuring animus that teachers have for their Muslim students, particularly, for instance, in Belgium, trying to understand prejudice towards these students.
And eventually, I found that there was a huge array of literature and measures of anti-Muslim animus in the comparative context and in different fields. And I adapted them to the US context. And I developed something called the Muslim American resentment scale, which I've published on numerous times, especially with Kassra, and wrote a book about and have validated consistently for almost a decade now, which can date me.
And this measure, I think, does a pretty good job of demonstrating the power of Islamophobia in American politics when we control for the Muslim American resentment scale vis a vis, for instance, the racial resentment scale or feeling thermometers and whatnot. You can see really the power of this scale in demonstrating the importance of Islamophobia in American politics. And so that was years and years of development, but really one of the funnest things I've ever done.
MELANI CAMMETT: OK, Thank you.
JEFFREY KOPSTEIN: So I'll go at this same issue. How do we arrive at the concepts we're using and then operationalizing the concepts? I mean, I've worked most of my career historically. And what's interesting, I worked on pogroms. I wrote a book about pogroms. The first pogrom ever recorded was in 38 CE in Alexandria, recorded by Philo.
And what's remarkable is he doesn't tell you why it happened. But it tells a lot about what the local Egyptians-- and of course, even that using that word right now is weird because it wasn't Egypt in the same sense, but it was people who were living there-- and the Greeks, what they thought about Jews.
And the same things were there, the sense that Jews are misanthropic because you can't invite them for dinner because they won't eat pork, right? And they worship this god that's all powerful, but you can't see him, right, ineffable, and several others. So every one of the things we see on whichever scale you're looking at, they've been around a very long time. And they've been studied for a long time.
The first scales looking at antisemitism were in the 1940s, when public opinion research was really just getting started. And of course, the items-- they had 47 items. Now, the problem with that is that it's very nuanced, right? But you can't do a survey with it. No one is going to stick around to answer 47 questions. And so then a lot of what we do as-- kind of we. I'm not really a great survey researcher. But a lot of what we do as social scientists, we say, how many do you actually need?
See, the ADL has 11. But when you look at their scale, several of those are tapping into exactly the same thing. And so I've reduced it down to five. And I validated it in other articles. That is to say, are these things tapping into the same thing? That's really what we're getting at here, right? So do you have a scale that's tapping into the same thing?
Now, here's the little technical issue, that there's no-- you can tell me if I'm wrong here, you guys unless there is no agreed upon gold standard about what is-- do they kind of covary with each other, these questions, the answer to these questions. In the research, between 60% and 70%, from what I've seen, seems to be-- if you're going below that, you probably should drop one of your items. And once you're above that, you're saying, yeah, these are tapping into some underlying construct that people have in their minds. And that's sort of how I proceeded.
I don't claim any grand originality here. I mean, it is in the sense-- and people who work on antisemitism. I'm building on-- standing on the shoulders of giants. This has been studied by survey researchers for a long time.
In fact, a lot of the early psychological work-- the Milgram experiment. The Milgram experiment was really all about antisemitism at the end of the day, all the kind of-- of course, the Stanford Prison Experiment was all about antisemitism. A lot of early social psychology was all really about it, even when it didn't seem to be about it because they didn't want to talk about it in that way. So that's my way of dealing with it. I hope that gets at some of your questions.
SABINE VON MERING: All right. I'll try to give brief answers to the question. So the first thing is, in our book, we really try to present different examples of people using different methods and concepts and also arriving at them differently. So Gunther Jikeli, whom I'm sure many of you know, is working on creating a gold standard definition of antisemitism so that machines can recognize it. And he's got this platform online where everyone actually can help identify antisemitic posts on Twitter. And then he uses the IHRA definition. And you can contribute to the body of posts that are properly distinguished.
The problem there, as we know, is that Elon Musk bought Twitter and now charges, I think, $50,000 a month or something for using the platform for research. So a big issue in terms of reliability of sources, a big issue is access to sources, access to material. I mean, you can scrape, right?
But there's only so much you can do with scraping. And the platform's basically claim to be private, which is interesting, because most of our students would say it's a public space, right? But of course, they are private. And so the social media data isn't actually accessible. You can do screenshots. You can do individual. You can do all sorts of things like that. But that is a huge problem for the research, I think.
And given the size of it and given the expansion of it in terms of how many people use it-- I read today five new people sign up for Facebook every second. Like, I can't even calculate that in my head. Like, that's crazy.
What can be done? Obviously, we, as educators, will always start with education, right? I mean, antisemitism also requires education. And I think it's poorly done anywhere. Even in Germany, it's poorly done today. I always say German history teachers do not need to take a course on the Holocaust to become history teacher. It is not a requirement. So that's a problem.
I think otherwise, though, what needs to be done is there needs to be social media literacy. It needs to be a requirement from kindergarten to old people's homes because, unfortunately, it's the old people now that use Twitter and to detrimental effect in some cases.
And then, yeah, in terms of the causal relation, what we are seeing is online violence leads to offline violence, right? And sometimes it goes both ways. And so I think that was initially maybe a fear, but it's now a reality. And so I think that requires--
And so what needs to happen is regulation. And as you know, in Europe, there has been much more of an effort at regulating these companies. But in America, if you notice the hearings of January 6, even though everyone knew that social media had played a big part, they don't even mention it in the report. And we all know why.
KASSRA OSKOOII: So I'll try to keep my comments very brief here. And I'll focus on the media because I've conducted some research on this, too. And I guess my viewpoint on the media, just looking at college students going on campus and then studying them, do their attitudes about various groups change over time? And they really don't.
It's the same thing with media, in the same that there's a self-selection happening. People are relying on sources that tell them what they want to hear. And these algorithms do a great job of feeding them the information that they want to see. That's how these platforms are becoming more addictive or profitable, right? I'll give you everything you want to see and you like rather than challenging you because then you would maybe turn it off.
So what the media does, it doesn't necessarily create more hateful people, in my opinion. It just softens or changes the norms of social conduct and expression. Because you're seeing a lot of content that matches your preferences, matches your views, you falsely start to think that more people than reality agree with you. And you might be emboldened to actually take online hate offline rather than changing things.
So it has an amplifying effect, in my opinion. And obviously, one thing we haven't mentioned is that the anonymous nature of social media, which you can argue there are benefits to it, but there are harms as well. And the bots that exist, with foreign countries producing bot farms from Russia and China and trying to influence elections, driving a wedge between Democrats and Republicans. And so that goes on, too, in these social media platforms. At least I haven't seen doing a great job of addressing the problems of bots. So I'll leave it there.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great, thank you. So we have some time for questions from the audience. So yes, please.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. [INAUDIBLE] I guess my question is to all the panelists. Those have been von Mering's point about profit making, about the social media platforms making so much profit brought my question to mind. Basically, I'm interested in your opinions about the political causes, not only the economic causes, but the political causes of this hatred that we see on both sides and their overlap on both sides.
Are politicians benefiting from it? Aren't those who support the particular politicians profiting from all of this, not only specifically through social media, but the larger political forces profiting from it? What are your opinions on the political causes of the picture that you give us?
MELANI CAMMETT: Anyone want to take that?
KASSRA OSKOOII: I mean, I'll just say, I guess, briefly that I mentioned that there is interest by foreign nations or political actors who want to create chaos and division to profit in not necessarily in monetary ways, but in other ways to drive a wedge between Americans, to drive a wedge between Muslims and Jews, to drive a wedge between, as I said, Democrats and Republicans.
And that's a big problem. And I think Congress is trying to recognize that. But at the same time, politicians themselves in our country, unfortunately, are exasperating some of that, too. We, as Americans, have way more in common than we think if we just talk to people. But online, it seems like all hell is breaking loose.
SABINE VON MERING: I think it's also true that the very fact that the polarized-- that when you're talking about social media, the polarization is what it thrives on. So right-wing extremist parties and politicians are particularly good at using it because that sort of anger that drives them is very much in line with it.
And so in Germany, for example, the AFD is the social media party. It has the most followers. It's been there the first. It's just the most active. And I mean, Twitter and Trump are basically like this.
KASSRA OSKOOII: Truth Media now.
SABINE VON MERING: Yeah. Well, now.
ERIC BEERBOHM: I'm sorry. One thing. If you're going to call on people for a question, if they could use the mic, otherwise their recording won't be recorded.
MELANI CAMMETT: Ah, OK. All right, yeah.
SABINE VON MERING: Maybe someone can walk.
MELANI CAMMETT: OK, so I see two more questions right now, unless you wanted to jump in and say-- OK. So, Antonia, but I think you need to come to the mic, and then Romney after.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much to all four presenters. That was very illuminating. Antonia Maioni from McGill University. I'm a visitor here at the Weatherhead Center in the Canada program. I have a question for Professor Kopstein, a question for Professor Lajevardi.
Professor Kopstein, I was wondering if you could put-- what you found in your survey across the four campuses, if you could put that just into a bit of context for us in terms of what's the same or different if you had done that on a larger scale, either larger scale in terms of universities themselves, but even just the general population in the United States? Just let us know what you feel would are the most important differences or similarities in that.
And Professor Lajevardi, you put a lot of emphasis on the changes that we saw after and because of this Unite the Right movement. Is there any data or is there any information on what types of attitudes you would have expected to find if you'd looked at the other end of the spectrum? I don't know if there's anything called a-- I guess there's no far-left coalitions. But would there have been something different? And how would that have manifested itself on the other side of the political spectrum? Thank you.
MELANI CAMMETT: You want to start?
JEFFREY KOPSTEIN: So, Antonia-- by the way, my mother in law, Gretta Chambers, was a huge fan of yours. The way I would answer your question is that the University of California-- remember, those are the campuses I'm using. And UC Irvine and UC Merced and UC Riverside and I think UCLA are all minority-majority campuses.
Just to give you some idea, UC Irvine, 17% of its student body is white. 40% is Asian. 27% is Latinx. And UCR and UC Merced-- I think Merced even more so. And so really, what I'd like to do is to get a campus that's more conservative, more white, see if you'd get anything different. I don't claim that it's generalizable beyond this.
What's interesting, there's very little difference between the campuses in the answers. And I think that's it's because of the underlying-- I mean, it's California. And you look at party identification. It's disproportionately Democratic. It's California, right? It's what you'd expect.
And so this is really the new America, the new United states. If you're interested in that, it's a great place to study this kind of thing, what the country is going to be like down the line, maybe. So I think the only way to answer your question is to get data.
If Harvard wants to do it, I'll do it. I promise you they're not going to give me the data. [INAUDIBLE] get the data, we'll do it there. I'll share the survey instrument, any other place. I've tried to do it at the University of Toronto, where I spent 12 years. They won't give you the sample either. No one will do it.
You can pay-- as you know, you can pay a company, right, to gather that for you. It's very expensive. And they're not going to get it. They're not going to-- because I'm getting the students. I get the survey, the student emails, before they even arrive, before they've given the treatment in freshman year.
So I don't really know how to go beyond what I've done. It was a gigantic amount of heavy lifting. As I said, I think the results are pretty similar overall to the rest of society. I'm sorry, I'm sure that's my father. I told him like 20-- it is. I told him like 27 times I was on this panel.
So yeah, I don't know if that gets at exactly what you're asking. You'd really need different samples, like University of South Carolina or something like that. I think it would be fantastic. Or Michigan State would be absolutely-- you try. I'm happy to do it with you. Anyway, that's my answer.
MELANI CAMMETT: OK.
NAZITA LAJEVARDI: Thank you for your question. I think that's a really insightful but also very difficult question. It raises a counterfactual that we have to spend a lot of time thinking about. What would happen on the other end of the spectrum? What would happen if the far left brought people together or maybe had a lot of positive discourse around these two groups? I can only hope to see such a day.
I just want to say that-- so I don't know, number one. But number two, we have seen elements and sections of the far left be very inclusive to both Muslims and Jews. And we have seen really positive outcomes. And I spend so much of my career and my research talking about the negative outcomes of discrimination. I think it's also important to focus on some of the positive things.
And I think that one of the positive outcomes of the far left, if you want to call it, or especially the progressive bent, for instance, of the Democratic Party right now, is that you really saw, especially post Trump's election, a coalition being formed and also emerging of young people of color, of Muslims, of Jews, all coming together and really holding each other up.
And you see this especially, for instance, with Bernie Sanders. I mean, it's important to recognize that Bernie Sanders is an older politician, of course, but has created immense amount of space for discourse around the plight and sufferings of American Jews and American Muslims, leading to the Democratic National Convention, for instance-- he had a couple of Instagram lives, I believe they were, Facebook Lives, some of these events where he would bring people together to talk about issues that afflicted both communities. And he really centered them.
And I think that really empowered politicians to rely on one another to be able to recognize the issues of Israel and Palestine and foreign policy are not necessarily the issues that need to stand in the way of important and fruitful and necessary coalitions between two groups in the United States that have so much more in common than they do that set them apart. And so while I don't have too much of an answer that addresses your question, I think that that reflection can maybe give us some hope for what could come.
MELANI CAMMETT: OK, Romney. Yeah. We need you to come to a mic.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for all of you. Amazing discussion. Professor Kopstein, I was intrigued by your finding that after October 7, both antisemitism and negative feelings to Israel rose. How do you explain that? And then how do you link-- and the end of the question is, how do you then link that trend with what's going on now in the United States with this campus situation and the incredible push by government agencies, federal, state, city, which we've seen on TV in the last few years to deal with antisemitism on campuses? So you seem to have kind of contradictory trends. How do you explain those?
JEFFREY KOPSTEIN: That's like a 45-minute talk answer to those questions. Those are very good questions. why do they both go up? The shocking thing for me is not the increase in hostility towards Israel, especially as time goes on after October 7. Once there's going to be a war and once the war really goes underway, people start getting upset with what Israel's doing. And I sort of-- I'm not saying I agree with it or disagree with that. I'm not taking a political stand here. But I can think from an interpretive standpoint, I think it's easy to explain.
The antisemitism one is much more difficult to explain. What actually is going on there? Part of me thinks that these were opinions that were already there, which can now be freely expressed. And people already had these things. I mean, there's a lot of-- the difference between the hostility towards Israel, which is very high, and the hostility towards Jews, my sense-- and I'm just throwing this out there-- is that there's strong social desirability bias against saying bad things about Jews, right?
And so I think what I found there is sort of a floor. I assume it's always higher. That's why my joke about the slightly disagreeing with the Jewish use of blood for ritual purposes-- I think I want to write a whole article on slightly disagree because I think it's a really interesting problem. It is a way--
So what if I coded that as actually antisemitic? What would you end up with? And arguably, it is. Arguably, that's where they're hiding. And it's not a small number. It's a very large number. So there's that.
Campuses, I think the implications of my findings are the following. The United States doesn't have a campus problem. It has an antisemitism problem. That's the implication. Yes, there's small numbers of activists on campus-- I went through. I've taken a lot of pictures of Harvard Yard today-- and my own campus and UCLA and Columbia. These are very small numbers of students.
And it's not to say that they can't make a lot of people feel uncomfortable. And the signs can be very disturbing. And they can definitely veer into antisemitism. It's easy to spot. But it's not the majority of professors. And I can't say that. But it's certainly not the vast majority of students.
And I think that's the implication of my finding is that we don't have that much to fear. We're going through a rough patch right now. And I think it will probably go away when the situation in the Middle East changes. There will be less people out active. There will be less people who feel free to say things that are not just hostile to Israel, but antisemitic. They won't be talking that way either anymore. That's the implication of my data. I can't really predict what's going to happen.
And as far as all of these tests, what I really think is important to-- I want to say one more thing. Saying that there's an antisemitism problem on campuses and in the rest of society, it does not mean that politicians-- and somebody asked before about politicians-- that politicians don't use that for pernicious purposes. Both those things can be true. Whether Stefanik actually cares about Jews or not, I leave that up for people here to decide. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that question.
But I do know that both those things can be true at once, that there is antisemitism on campuses, and that there are politicians who are willing to use that for their own electoral purposes. Both those things can be true.
MELANI CAMMETT: We are just about out of time. But I don't want to give the other panelists short shrift here. So if there's any last points you want to make, feel free.
KASSRA OSKOOII: Yeah. I mean, connected to the point, I think the October 7 effects, to the extent they're there, part of it connects to social media, too, and the information environment and softening against norms. And it becomes almost socially a little bit more acceptable to express such feelings, perhaps.
And so they were always there. But on a campus, liberal students, it seems like in those campuses, they're self-monitoring more in answering survey questions, particularly if they think potentially that their identity can be linked to those answers, because they might think that. So I agree with you that you're underestimating to some degree and that the information environment can make so that people are more willing than otherwise would be to express both anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate to express those.
SABINE VON MERING: Yeah, I think the fact is that these are readily available for anyone to use. And social media are really easy to spread them around. I would be really interested in a qualitative interview study with the students to find out what actually motivates them to say what they're saying. And my hunch is that, at the moment, they are deeply moved by what they're seeing in Gaza.
And that is absolutely understandable. And they are motivated by the inhumanity of what's happening. And that is a fact that, yes, it also coexists with a rise in antisemitism. And it is a very complicated issue. And I think social media are the worst to have at this time because nuance is not what social media thrives on. It's up or down. It's like Mengele style. It's not--
KASSRA OSKOOII: More heart.
NAZITA LAJEVARDI: It's not a six-point scale.
SABINE VON MERING: Right.
JEFFREY KOPSTEIN: It's not a six-point scale.
MELANI CAMMETT: Any last comments or-- well, great. Well, I really appreciate-- I think we've hit the tip of the iceberg. There's obviously a lot to learn. We've covered two forms of pernicious prejudice that have really spiked in our consciousness, if not in reality, over time, and particularly in the last year.
There's others that we haven't touched. I think we could probably do a whole other panel on anti-Palestinian sentiment as well. And so I really appreciate all of you coming here, sharing your wisdom with us. And it's been really refreshing to have this conversation. So thank you.
SABINE VON MERING: Thank you.
NAZITA LAJEVARDI: Thank you.
SABINE VON MERING: Thank you.