Annual Assessments

2019 Annual Assessment

Global Trends and Policy Recommendations
Integrated Anti-Semitism Index: Europe and the US
Special Chapters: Jewish Creativity and Cultural Outputs

PROJECT HEAD

Shmuel Rosner

Contributors

Avinoam Bar-Yosef, Dan Feferman, Shlomo Fischer Avi Gil, Inbal Hakman, Michael Herzog, Dov Maimon, Gitit Paz-Levi, Steven Popper, Uzi Rebhun, John Ruskay, Noah Slepkov, Adar Schiber, Rami Tal, Shalom Salomon Wald

EDITOR

Barry Geltman

2019 Annual Assessment

2019 Annual Assessment

When JPPI launched its integrated “Anti-Semitism Index”, very few reports providing a global perspective have been available. Things have changed: in the recent months the Israel Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, ADL, and the Kantor Center have published global reports on the resurgence of a structural anti-Semitism that has anchored not only in Arab and European countries but in North America too. High-quality research has been published just recently that we refer to in this analysis.

Our role is not to synthetize the in-depth analyses offered in these reports but rather to signal the changes in the chosen three indicators of the JPPI index, articulate a diagnostic summary of in-depth transformations, identify the critical developments to follow, and to provide policy-makers with a policy planning meta-analysis along with a set of recommendations.

 

JPPI Survey Findings
According to a recent JPPI survey of a selected group of 180 US rabbis and communal leaders, a large majority stated that anti-Semitism has increased considerably over the
past five years. Fifty percent of respondents believe the government does not combat anti-Semitism effectively, forty percent worry about a possible decrease in community
participation in their area for fear of a possible anti-Jewish incident, but only a third are worried that in the next 12 months a person close to them will be a victim of anti-Jewish harassment or physical attack. While alarming, these figures appear less bleak when compared with answers to the same questions in Europe: 24 percent of the 16,000 Jewish respondents in an FRA survey (see below) say they have witnessed other Jews being verbally insulted, harassed, or physically attacked in the past year 56 percent are worried about their friends or family members falling victim to anti-Semitic harassment in the coming year, 71 percent of the European Jewish respondents hide – at least occasionally – their Jewishness, 70 percent give a scathing assessment of their governments’ efforts to combat anti-Semitism, and 38 percent have contemplated emigration as they don’t feel safe in their countries.

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