Legal Commentary

Because I am related to a number of people that worry a lot about anti-semitism (and use it as part of a defense of policies in Israel that I think are indefensible), I am probably too dismissive about claims of anti-semitism.  Unless it is self-serving: I assume that all the students who hate me in their student evaluations are probably anti-semites.  In any case, I really found myself quite disturbed by survey results reported very recently in the Boston Review.  Some choice bits:

In order to assess explicit prejudice toward Jews, we directly asked respondents ?How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?? with responses falling under five categories: a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, not at all. Among non-Jewish respondents, a strikingly high 24.6 percent of Americans blamed ?the Jews? a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 percent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.

Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference). This difference is somewhat surprising given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party?s electoral coalition. Are Democrats simply more likely to ?blame everything? thus casting doubt on whether the anti-Jewish attitudes are real? Not at all. We also asked how much ?individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford? were to blame on the same five-point scale. In this case, Democrats were less likely than Republicans to assign moderate or greater blame.

Oy.  The good news: Since most of my students are Democrats and only a small percentage tend to hate me as a teacher, I think I have found the source of the resistance to my pedogogical methods.

UPDATE:  I want to emphasize that I think the Boston Review article is serious and requires a certain seriousness in thinking about what to make of it.  That I drafted this post to be entertaining for readers should not be taken as any indication that I take the findings lightly. 

I should also probably apologize for bringing Middle East politics into the discussion at all, since we can surely talk about anti-semitism outside of a discussion about Israel, which always gets heated.  But I allude to Israel here both to give you a bit of biography (because of my upbringing, I am routinely exposed to people linking the two conversations all the time, which has led me to be less open to unsupported claims about anti-semitism) and to suggest that they can be spoken of together, without embracing or supporting illiberal policies.  Most importantly, I think you should read the article; my asides are really beside the point and I wouldn't want them to distract readers.