The Prejudice Young People Have Made Their Own
December 16, 2025
We argued for months, off and on. My (Jewish) husband sensed a hot undercurrent of antisemitism beneath college students’ pro-Palestine protests. I told him he was absolutely wrong; these were just idealistic kids who recognized the suffering Palestinians have endured for decades, and who wanted to back the underdog. I knew some of these kids (granted, only a handful), and their hearts held nothing but compassionate idealism.
Andrew teaches at a community college; his students are too busy just trying to work two jobs and cram for exams to wave a protest sign. His opinion was shaped by the ton of information he gathers daily from myriad sources all over the world—political news I am sure will send him to an early death. Purveyors of today’s news all have something to gain from exaggeration, and God help me, I thought he was overreacting in response. Antisemitism flaring in twenty-year-olds? The thought was unfathomable. Maybe a few hardcore Neo-Nazi groups, and an aberrant father-and son mass shooting. But a trend?
Not that I blamed him for overreacting, mind. For centuries, Jews have been the favorite scapegoat for all sorts of economic and social fears. Antisemitism is insidious, and it slithers into places you would never expect to find it. Often it is entirely inexplicable, disconnected even from irrational fears. Sometimes I think it is rooted in jealousy, of a people who do well in the world because they emphasize education, work and study harder than most of us, enjoy a strong and cohesive tradition, and have one another’s backs.
Finally Andrew and I let the argument fade into silence, our positions intractable.
And now, months later, I read a column by Yair Rosenberg, a seasoned and moderate journalist unlikely to overreact. The headline? “‘The More I’m Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am.’” Followed by an assertion that “anti-Jewish prejudice isn’t a partisan divide—it’s a generational one.”
I freeze. Then I make myself read the column. The headline is a quote from Tim Miller, host of the Bulwark Podcast. “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 said on a recent show, adding that the kid’s politics definitely leaned left.
Left. The place the political compass swings when human rights matter more than money. That has always been my assumption, and however biased my assessment, the left has never made space for antisemitism.
Not true, Andrew says gently. Nineteenth-century European socialists stereotyped Jews as capitalists who worshipped money. Communists here thought Zionism was fascist. Which sets up a rich irony: the fiercer antisemitism grows, drawing power from all those centuries of hate and equating Zionism with imperialism…the easier it is to understand the need for a Jewish national homeland. To young people on the left, though, that means becoming a colonial power. And the settlers have so often overstepped the bounds of fairness and morality, Israel’s position is easy to vilify.
But is that enough to justify the embrace of a hatred that starved, gassed, suffocated, poisoned, hung, beat to death, and shot six million Jews?
I apologize to Andrew for my stubborn naivete. He shrugs. “People have to finally see it. They can’t be told; nobody wants to believe it.”
For a study of antisemitism published in 2023 in Political Research Quarterly, researchers oversampled young people, because antisemitism is that rare prejudice less common in older folk than young. The researchers expected a horseshoe, with the far right and far left winding up parallel at the bottom, as so often happens these strange days. At least—small comfort—the epicenter of antisemitism in the young turned out to be far stronger on the extreme right.
Now I wonder if three years have changed that shape. Or if the far right is so viciously antisemitic, the other antisemitism pales by comparison. In late 2024, a survey found that one-fourth of respondents younger than 25 held an “unfavorable opinion” of “Jewish people.” The respondents’ political affinity made virtually no difference.
Just last week, Rosenberg notes, a survey at Yale found that “younger voters are more likely to hold antisemitic views than older voters.” One of the survey questions asked people whether Jews have had a positive, neutral, or negative impact on the United States. Just 8 percent of respondents overall said “negative.” But among 18-to-22-year-olds? That number was 18 percent. And 27 percent of those young people thought “Jews in the United States have too much power.” Among respondents their grandparents’ age, less than half that many agreed.
I still remember Rosenberg’s point, in an earlier column, that antisemitism is far more complicated than the usual social prejudice. “It is a conspiracy theory,” he wrote, “about how the world operates.” Jews control the money, the power, the future. Never mind that they are only 2 percent of the U.S. population—and the recipient of 18 percent of our hate crimes. If you narrow to religious hate crimes, their share shoots up to 69 percent.
We do not know what to do about cruelty wreaked upon those we think run the world. Cognitive dissonance gets in the way.
Now add the weirdness of this far left and far right synchrony. Because it is a conspiracy theory, antisemitism travels easily across the borders of political ideology. Once Jews are to blame, anyone can blame them. Rosenberg checked a survey done by the Manhattan Institute, a well-known conservative think tank. One fourth of the Republicans under fifty said (I almost typed “admitted,” but they see nothing wrong in this) that “they themselves openly express” antisemitic views. Only 4 percent of those over fifty said the same. Survey after survey repeats the curve: the younger the respondent, the more likely they are to have negative attitudes toward Jews.
People worried sick about bigotry used to murmur, “Our hope is the young people.” Now the opposite is true. Rosenberg does his best to unpack the causes, and I add a few. The remoteness of the Holocaust, making it easier to disbelieve or at least dismiss. The algorithmic spread of hate online, unfiltered and unchecked. The violence and cruelty Israel has allowed itself. The sense of Palestine as colonized, as David to Israel’s Goliath, as a victim and not a terrorist. An impulsive, emotionally charged need to identify a villain, so the world does not seem to be falling apart at random.
In the end, Rosenberg reaches for optimism: the majority of young people are still rejecting antisemitism. But in the Yale Youth Poll, the ratio was 57 percent not antisemitic to 43 percent agreeing with at least one antisemitic statement. Too close for comfort. Especially because I am probably not the only one blind to the rising antisemitism on the left, specifically in the young. Time passes, and sympathies shift; new underdogs emerge; old underdogs gain power. And hate waits for its next opening.
