Jewish college students have reported a rise in antisemitic incidents and fear on campuses since the Israel-Hamas war began last October, but only a small minority of their non-Jewish peers are contributing to the charged atmosphere, according to a new study.
In fact, two-thirds of non-Jewish college students don’t display any hostility toward Jews or Israel, according to the study, published Thursday by the Maurice and Marilyn Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University.
Researchers surveyed 4,123 students—313 of whom were Jewish—at 60 colleges with large Jewish populations during the spring of 2024, just as pro-Palestinian protests were intensifying on many campuses. The results defied “a simple narrative” about what was happening on campuses last year, according to the report, finding neither “a climate of universal anti-Jewish hatred” nor “that Jewish students’ concerns about antisemitism are unfounded.”
But even “a small number of students with prejudicial views can negatively impact the campus climate, especially when these views are amplified by social media and other factors beyond the campus walls,” wrote the authors of the report, which complements a survey Brandeis published in December that found that Jewish students’ perceptions of antisemitism varied from campus to campus.
“It became clear that if we wanted to understand what was going on, we had to study non-Jewish students. That’s what led to this study,” said Leonard Saxe, co-author of both reports and a professor of modern Jewish studies at Brandeis. “We wanted to understand what were the things that were being said to Jewish students—what were the things they were experiencing—that made them feel like they had to hide their identity.”
Saxe said he and his team asked students about their reactions to nine statements espousing “explicitly negative beliefs about Jews and Israel,” including “Jews in America have too much power,” “Supporters of Israel control the media,” “Jews should be held accountable for Israel’s actions” and “I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.”
The results showed that while 66 percent of college students didn’t express any hostility toward Jews or Israel, the other one-third had at least some negative feelings.
Fifteen percent of students surveyed agreed with the most negative statements about Israel—including “Israel does not have the right to exist”—but almost none in that group agreed with negative statements about Jews, and only a few endorsed Hamas’s targeting of civilians.
Another 16 percent of non-Jewish students expressed more hostility toward Jews than Israel, according to the report. Nearly all of the students in that group agreed with at least one of three anti-Jewish statements: 70 percent agreed that “supporters of Israel control the media,” while one-third agreed with the statement that “Israel does not have a right to exist” and one-third that “Jews should be held responsible for [Israel’s] actions.” One-fourth of student respondents said they support Hamas.
Just 2 percent of students agreed with all nine negative statements about both Jews and Israel.
While nearly 60 percent of the students surveyed identified as liberal and 24 percent as moderate in their political beliefs, 89 percent of the students who expressed hostility toward Israel were self-identified liberals, as were 53 percent of those who expressed hostility toward Jews.
Saxe said the political breakdown isn’t surprising, given that most college students hold liberal political views. Still, he noted that it raises an important question about what’s shaping the perspectives of the small but vocal minority of students harboring hostility toward Jews, Israel or both: “Is the extreme critique of Israel just one of the things they agree to because that’s what other people believe? Or is that driving your political beliefs?” he said. “It’s hard to tell.”
‘Reasoned Debate’ Lacking
What is clear, however, is that universities “haven’t done enough to teach students how to have simple discourse” or “to create communities where people can take up issues and have reasoned debates about them,” Saxe said. “Universities need to use their intellectual capital to try to solve this.”
The report also urges higher education institutions—many of which have spent the summer preparing for anticipated war- and election-related protests—to collect their own data on antisemitism, tailor solutions to fit their campus’ specific needs and make their campus policies clear to all students.
Brandeis University, a nonsectarian institution in Massachusetts founded by Jewish community members in 1948, the same year that Israel gained statehood, has one of the country’s highest concentrations of Jewish college students. Although that fact may raise questions about bias in the study, Saxe said his team’s goal was to be “as transparent as we can about our data.” Although it may invite challenges and misinterpretations, “there’s a way to do that in the academic world that leads to better understanding,” he added.
Robert Pape, a political science professor and director of the nonpartisan Chicago Project on Security and Threats at University of Chicago, said, “It’s inevitable that some may think that the findings from a university so heavily identified with Jews would be biased.” But he noted that the report aligns with multiple other surveys about campus antisemitism, including the “Campus Fears” report his team published in March.
It found that about 10 percent of college students surveyed said student groups should be allowed to call for genocide against Jews, and 13 percent said if Jews were attacked, they deserved it. At the same time, 56 percent of Jewish students, 52 percent of Muslim students and 16 percent of other college students said they felt like they were in “personal danger.”
“It doesn’t take a lot of these antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents to make a large portion of people on campus feel very afraid,” Pape said. And since the data from the new Brandeis report reinforces that notion, it’s all the more important for campuses to clarify their free expression policies and other rules now and “not simply wait for the next round of escalation,” he said.
Adam Lehman, president and CEO of Hillel International, an organization that supports Jewish college students, said he’s expecting more campus tensions as the fall semester gets underway. But he noted that the Brandeis report offers colleges insight into how to handle them.
“In the short term, universities have critical work to do in articulating and enforcing policies that protect and create a healthy environment for all of their students,” he said. “In the longer term, universities need to double down when it comes to education and culture work that can produce a more respectful environment for students coming from different perspectives.”