For more than a year now — indeed, well before October 7 2023 — American college and university campuses have been saturated with a familiar insistence: We don’t hate Jews. We just oppose Israel.

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre, that claim has grown louder and more strident; but it did not originate there. What October 7 did was strip away any remaining ambiguity, transforming a rhetoric that had long circulated at the margins into something mainstream, unapologetic, and increasingly coercive.

The argument has been well-rehearsed and made nationwide. Protesters insist their calls for Israel’s elimination are purely political, rooted in moral concern for Palestinians, not hostility toward Jews.

To suggest otherwise, they argue, is to conflate critique with bigotry and to weaponize antisemitism as a shield against dissent. Jewish students, meanwhile, describe a very different reality. They experience not policy disagreement but negation: of peoplehood, of legitimacy, of belonging. They are told that the one collective expression of Jewish continuity in the modern world is uniquely immoral; that Jewish self-determination is inherently suspect; that Jews, alone among peoples, must justify their right to exist.

When Jewish students say this feels antisemitic, they are often met not with curiosity but with dismissal. They are told they are confused, hypersensitive, or acting in bad faith. Administrators, eager to avoid controversy, retreat into procedural language, insisting that what is unfolding is political speech — even when it spills into exclusion, intimidation, and collective punishment.

Until recently, this dispute has rested largely on moral intuition and lived experience. Those matter. But they are no longer all we have. New survey evidence now allows us to examine empirically whether the claim at the heart of contemporary campus activism — that opposition to Israel is distinct from hostility toward Jews — actually holds up.

It does not.

The Fall 2025 Yale Youth Poll — a nationally weighted survey of 3,426 American voters with a substantial oversample of young adults — offers one of the most comprehensive recent snapshots of attitudes toward Israel, Zionism, Jews, and antisemitism in the United States.

Unlike many polls that isolate these questions, the Yale survey (graciously shared with us) places them side by side. That design allows us to see whether views about Israel track systematically with views about Jews.

Using a secondary analysis of the dataset and excluding the small number of Jewish respondents to avoid conflating in-group and out-group attitudes, we examined the relationship between opposition to Israel’s existence and well-established measures of antisemitism (see Hersh and Royden’s research on antisemitic attitudes).

The results are not subtle. They are consistent, patterned, and deeply unsettling.

The central dividing line in our analysis is a simple question: Do you believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state?

Among non-Jewish respondents, 41 percent said yes, 24 percent said no, and 35 percent were unsure. Those who deny Israel’s right to exist are not merely critics of Israeli policy. They are rejecting the legitimacy of Jewish national self-determination itself — a position that now sits at the center of much campus activism.

The crucial question is what else accompanies that belief.

The answer, according to the data, is a dramatically higher likelihood of endorsing classic antisemitic tropes.

Respondents who opposed Israel’s existence were far more likely to agree that Jews in the United States are more loyal to Israel than to America — a claim with a long and poisonous history. They were far more likely to support boycotting Jewish American-owned businesses in response to the war in Gaza, a form of collective punishment aimed explicitly at Jews as Jews. And they were far more likely to agree that Jews have too much power in American society, one of the most enduring antisemitic canards.

None of these differences was marginal. On each measure, the gap between those who deny Israel’s legitimacy and those who affirm it was large — often approaching or exceeding a two-to-one ratio. When these questions were combined into a single index of antisemitic attitudes, a standard social-scientific technique that increases reliability, the pattern sharpened further. Roughly 30 percent of respondents who opposed Israel’s existence scored high on this antisemitism index, compared with about 10 percent of those who supported Israel’s legitimacy.

That is not coincidence. It is structure.

The pattern deepens when we turn to how respondents understand Zionism itself. The Yale survey asked whether Zionism should be characterized in each of three ways: as the forcible displacement of Palestinians to maintain a Jewish majority; as the creation of a state in which Jews have more rights than others; or as a form of racism and apartheid.

Among those who denied Israel’s right to exist, roughly a third endorsed each of these descriptions. Among those who affirmed Israel’s legitimacy, fewer than one in eight did.

Again and again, the ratio hovered around three to one.

This matters because Zionism is not a fringe ideology, nor merely a modern political movement. For most Jews — religious and secular, progressive and conservative — it is the affirmation that Jews are a people, not only a faith, with a continuous historical, cultural, and spiritual relationship to the Land of Israel and a right to collective self-determination there.

That belief is woven into Jewish liturgy, ritual, and memory: in daily prayers oriented toward Jerusalem; in the Passover declaration “Next year in Jerusalem”; in millennia of legal, poetic, and communal life structured around return, restoration, and continuity.

To insist that Zionism is inherently racist or immoral is therefore not simply to criticize a particular Israeli government or policy choice. It is to deny the legitimacy of a core expression of Jewish peoplehood, one that long predates the modern nation-state and that, for many Jews, sits at the intersection of faith, history, and survival, and it explains why Jews so often experience “anti-Zionism” not as political disagreement but as a negation of who they are.

At this point, the conceptual distinction between opposing Israel and opposing Jews begins to collapse — not because of rhetoric, but because of logic.

When Jews are the only people denied the right to collective existence; when Jewish institutions are singled out for boycott in response to a foreign government’s actions; and when Jews are told that participation in civic or campus life requires renouncing a core element of their identity, what is being expressed is no longer ordinary political critique. It is group-based exclusion.

This asymmetry is crucial. No other people are told that their national self-determination is uniquely illegitimate. No other diaspora is routinely held responsible for the actions of a sovereign state. No other minority is asked to disavow its collective identity as a condition of moral acceptability. That these standards are applied almost exclusively to Jews is not incidental. It is the clearest indication that something other than universalist politics is at work.

In practice, contemporary anti-Israel activism functions less as a critique of a state than as an identity test imposed on Jews.

Perhaps most revealing, then, are the findings about what respondents refuse to recognize as antisemitism at all. The survey presented a series of scenarios and asked whether each constituted anti-Jewish prejudice. Respondents who opposed Israel’s existence were far more likely to say that comparing Israeli policies to Nazism is not antisemitic; that boycotting Jewish businesses over Gaza is not antisemitic; and that excluding a Jewish student from a campus group because of pro-Israel views is not antisemitic.

In effect, many of the same respondents who endorse antisemitic stereotypes also operate with a radically narrowed definition of antisemitism; one that excludes precisely the behaviors Jewish students most often encounter.

This helps explain the recurring impasse on campus. Jewish students say they are being targeted, excluded, and stigmatized. Activists respond that no antisemitism is present because the only antisemitism they are prepared to acknowledge is explicit hatred of Jews as individuals. Structural exclusion, collective punishment, and the denial of Jewish peoplehood simply do not count.

But antisemitism has never functioned that way. Historically, it has thrived not only on hatred but on moral rationalization: on the claim that Jews are uniquely dangerous, uniquely disloyal, uniquely powerful, or uniquely undeserving of the rights extended to others. What the Yale data reveals is that these patterns have not vanished. They have been reframed, normalized, and laundered through the language of anti-Zionism and moral certainty.

None of this means that all criticism of Israel is antisemitic. That claim would be false and corrosive. Political disagreement with Israeli policy is legitimate and necessary, as it is with any democratic state. Nor do these findings suggest that every anti-Israel protester harbors conscious animus toward Jews.

But they do show, clearly and repeatedly, that opposition to Israel’s existence as a Jewish state is strongly associated with antisemitic beliefs, antisemitic policy preferences, and a refusal to recognize antisemitism when it occurs. That association is not accidental. It is not limited to a fringe. It is patterned, measurable, and far more pronounced than in the population at large.

Universities have been reluctant to confront this reality. Campus leaders have treated anti-Israel activism primarily as protected political speech, even when it veers into eliminationist rhetoric, exclusion, and collective punishment. They have assured Jewish students that their concerns are being heard, while declining to draw boundaries around conduct that would be unthinkable if directed at any other minority group.

The Yale data suggest that this posture is no longer tenable. A movement does not need to declare hatred in order to produce exclusion. Prejudice does not require self-awareness. When a set of beliefs repeatedly results in the stigmatization of a minority group, the denial of its collective legitimacy, and the narrowing of its access to civic life, intent becomes beside the point.

For Jewish students, this is not an abstract debate. It shapes who is welcomed, who is suspect, and who must renounce a central part of their identity to be included. It shapes whether Jewish attachment to Israel is treated as evidence of disloyalty, whether Jewish institutions are targeted for boycott, and whether Jewish students are told – implicitly or explicitly – that they do not belong unless they disavow their peoplehood.

The Fall 2025 Yale Youth Poll does not end the conversation. But it decisively changes it. The claim that anti-Israel activism bears no relationship to antisemitism is no longer merely unconvincing. It is empirically false.

Jewish students were not imagining what they were experiencing. They were perceiving a pattern — one rooted not only in politics, but in the denial of faith, peoplehood, and survival.

And once seen, it cannot responsibly be denied. 

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Steven M. Cohen is a public sociologist.