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If You’re Anti-Israel, Are You Antisemitic? Here’s What the Data Says
Jewish Americans and supporters of Israel gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC on Nov. 14, 2023 for the “March for Israel” rally. Photo: Dion J. Pierre/The Algemeiner
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.
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‘Auschwitz’ is a hit Iranian protest anthem, part of a music genre rebelling against official antisemitism
Last month, well-known Iranian singer Mehdi Yarrahi released a song titled “Auschwitz,” about the regime’s brutal crackdown on protesters earlier this winter, which estimates suggest killed between 7,000 and 30,000 people over the course of a few days. The song quickly gained traction online, drawing around 10 million views on the singer’s Instagram account.
The choice of Auschwitz as a historical touchstone was not accidental: it is a direct answer to the Iranian regime’s persistent mockery and denial of the Holocaust, and a point of identification for Iranians who may see an echo of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in their own government’s brutality.
Yarrahi, who lives in Iran, released “Auschwitz” after reports emerged of thousands of Iranian protesters being gunned down in the streets for protesting the regime. The song compares their fate to that of people who endured the Nazi death camps. Its opening line declares: “I come from Auschwitz, of night transfers. I come from a killing field of youth.” The music video accompanying the song features footage of protestors being beaten by regime forces in the streets, as well as photographs of those who were killed.
Yarrahi knows the price one can pay for making anti-regime music. In March 2025, he received 74 lashes as a part of his sentencing for the release of his song “Rousarieto” (“Your Headscarf”), which criticized the regime’s requirement that women cover their hair and dress modestly.
The lyricist behind “Auschwitz,” Hossein Shanbehzadeh, has also faced the regime’s wrath. In 2024, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison after he commented with a single dot in response to a post on X from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei — a reply that received more likes than Khamenei’s original post. Iranian authorities accused him of being an Israeli spy and of spreading anti-regime propaganda. While Shanbehzadeh languishes in prison, through Auschwitz’s lyrics, his words have now been heard by millions both inside and outside Iran.
The Holocaust metaphor in “Auschwitz” is especially subversive because it invokes a history the Iranian regime refuses to recognize — just as it refuses to acknowledge its own brutality. Many high-ranking members of the Iranian regime have publicly denied, minimized, or questioned the Holocaust, including former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the fighting on Feb. 28. The regime has also hosted state-sponsored cartoon competitions mocking the Holocaust— most recently in 2021 — and was the only country to reject a 2022 United Nations resolution condemning Holocaust denial.
By comparing the regime’s violence against protesters to Nazi brutality — atrocities that Iranian leaders do not acknowledge — Yarrahi’s song challenges both political repression and the antisemitic narratives promoted by the state that have made it a global pariah.
The soundtrack to the revolution
In Iran, where culture is steeped in poetry, protest music has become a central part of the anti-regime movement.
An Iranian activist who was arrested and jailed for his involvement in the protest movement told the Forward, “These songs push people forward. They give you the energy to keep going.” Now living in the United States, he said the music also connects diaspora Iranians to the movement back home. “When we get together with friends in the community, we play these songs,” he said. “We start talking, and the music is playing in the background.”
Music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are difficult to access in Iran because of payment sanctions and bans. While protest songs are censored on social media, many Iranians download music using VPNs through Telegram — an encrypted messaging app that has 45 million Iranian users despite being banned — as well as other websites. Many Iranian singers have their own Telegram channels where they share their music.
During the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests, the song “Baraye” (“For the Sake Of”) went viral and became an anthem for demonstrators mobilizing against the regime. It garnered 40 million views in its first two days of being released and later won a Grammy.
The singer Shervin Hajipour wrote the lyrics based on responses from Iranians on X to a simple question: “What are you protesting for?” One line references the regime’s “meaningless slogans” — “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”
According to Thamar E. Gindin, a research fellow at Haifa University’s Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Research, music has been a meaningful part of the protest movement. “Baraye,” particularly, was sung “from balconies and windows when they didn’t want to go out to the streets and be killed. They sang it at the end of ceremonies.” She compared it to the way many Israelis and other Jews sing “Hatikvah,” as an expression of collective hope.
Polling suggests that Iranian public opinion diverges from official rhetoric.
One survey from last September found that 69% of Iranians believe their country should stop calling for the destruction of Israel. When respondents were asked about their views of foreign countries, the United States received the highest favorability rating, with 53% expressing a positive view. Israel ranked second. A 2014 survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that Iranians held the lowest levels of antisemitic attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa outside Israel, despite decades of state-sponsored antisemitic narratives.
Invoking Iran’s pluralistic past
For many Iranians, protest music has become a way to reclaim their national identity. While the regime defines itself through external struggle with Israel and the West, many protestors prefer to define Iran through its culture and history. One figure frequently invoked in protest discourse and music is Cyrus the Great.
King Cyrus, the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, created one of the largest empires of the ancient world. After conquering Babylon in 539 BCE, he issued a decree allowing exiled peoples — including Jews taken captive by the Babylonians — to return to their homelands. In the Bible, he is remembered for permitting Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.
According to the activist, “Cyrus to Iranians is like the Founding Fathers to Americans,” adding: “Cyrus is a symbol of peace among nations, and also a person who respects human rights and your beliefs regardless of who you are.” He is viewed as particularly “important for what he did for the Jewish people” and other minorities, which, for many anti-regime Iranians, represents an Iran rooted in human rights.
London-based Iranian artist Amin Big A’s 2018 song “Be Name Iran” (“In the Name of Iran”) channels this sentiment. The song gained massive popularity, especially among the Iranian diaspora, during the 2022 protest movement in Iran and has since been widely shared on social media alongside videos of the current protests. The song opens with a tribute to Cyrus: “In the name of Cyrus, that King of Kings — the one who taught us to be good to our friends and companions.”
Iranians invoke Cyrus, he said, to remind themselves and the world of that history. They want to “signal to the world, especially to non-Iranians,” that “if you want to understand how Iranians think, you can look at our history.” For protestors, it is a way to demonstrate that “the current regime in Iran is not representative of Iranians.”
Another song, “Dictator,” released in January by Iranian artists Shaayn and Moonshid during the height of the protests, contrasts Iran’s current authoritarian system with the nation’s ancient past. “It’s basically saying: we had Cyrus, and Cyrus was not a dictator,” said the activist. “Our history is not all about dictators.” One line in the song reads, contrasting Cyrus with a Turkish conqueror: “One gives freedom to the people, another kills and oppresses…. One becomes like Cyrus the Great, another becomes like Timur.”
Over the years, several anti-regime protests have been held at Cyrus’ tomb in Iran. In response, the regime has restricted access to the site and deployed security forces to discourage protestors from gathering there.
According to Beni Sabti, an Iran expert from the Institute for National Security Studies, Cyrus’ pluralistic legacy makes him recognized as “the best King that Iranians had. It’s another reason to love Jews, or to re-love them,” he said, adding: “They don’t believe the state’s propaganda.”
The post ‘Auschwitz’ is a hit Iranian protest anthem, part of a music genre rebelling against official antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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War with Iran puts the US-Israel alliance at grave risk
The Iran war is strategically sound yet politically unsupported — an unstable foundation for a gamble that could reshape the Middle East. That creates danger for Israel, which needs the support of an American public that is rapidly drifting away.
For decades, the country’s greatest strategic asset has not been its military technology or intelligence capabilities — spectacular as these are — but rather the political, diplomatic and military backing of the United States. That relationship has not been merely transactional. It was supposed to rest on shared values and deep public support across the American political spectrum.
If that support erodes or disappears, Israel’s strategic environment will fundamentally change. To be blunt: it will not be able to arm its military. This creates a paradox. A campaign that has so far demonstrated extraordinary value for the Jewish state also stands a risk of fundamentally weakening it.
An alliance at its strongest
The conflict has showcased the depth of the current U.S.–Israel alliance. To many observers, and critically to Israel’s enemies, the operation has underscored not only Israel’s capabilities but also the reality that it stands alongside the world’s most powerful state.
The strikes have projected deep into Iranian territory, revealed astonishing intelligence penetration, and destroyed or degraded key threats. Israel’s enemies across the region have already been weakened by previous rounds of fighting since Oct. 7, and the current operation has reinforced the impression that Israel can reach its adversaries wherever they operate.
Moreover, Iran’s regime has managed to isolate itself to the point where most Arab countries are in effect on the side of Israel and the U.S. That projection — of an unbreakable and strong alliance – may ultimately be the most important strategic element of this war.
But therein lies the rub.
The political foundations of American support for Israel are eroding, which means the very element that currently strengthens Israel’s deterrence — American participation — may also be the one most at risk.
A just war, unjustified
Americans do not understand why their country is at war.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted at the start of the conflict found only 27% of Americans supported the U.S. action, while 43% opposed it. Other surveys show similar results, with roughly six in ten Americans against the military intervention.
In modern American history that is highly unusual. Most wars begin with a “rally around the flag” moment when public support surges. Even conflicts that later became controversial — from Afghanistan to Iraq — initially enjoyed majority backing.
This one did not — in part because the case for it has not been made clearly to the public.
That error is compounded by years of polarization in American politics; declining trust in institutions and leadership; and the record of President Donald Trump, who has spent years spreading conspiracy theories and demonstrating a remarkable indifference to factual truth. It is no exaggeration to say that many Americans do not believe a word he says – which is perhaps unprecedented.
When a president with that record launches a war, at least half the country assumes the worst. Even if the strategic logic is sound, the credibility deficit remains.
The tragedy is that the war is, in fact, eminently justifiable. The Islamic Republic has long since forfeited the moral legitimacy that normally shields states from outside force. It brutally suppresses its own population, jailing and killing protesters, policing women’s bodies, and crushing dissent with an apparatus of repression. Its foreign policy is not defensive but revolutionary. Through proxy militias it has destabilized Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, as well as the Palestinian areas, in some cases for decades.
The regime has pursued nuclear weapons through a series of transparent machinations, deceptions and brinkmanship. Negotiations have repeatedly been used as delaying tactics while enrichment continued. Any deal that relieved sanctions would not simply reduce tensions; it would also inject new resources into a system dedicated both to repression at home and aggression abroad — one that is despised by the vast majority of its own people, as murderous dictatorships inevitably will be.
There is a doctrine in international law known as the Responsibility to Protect — the principle that when a state systematically brutalizes its own population, the international community may have the right, even the obligation, to act. By that standard, the Iranian regime has been skating on thin ice for years.
But with this clear rationale left uncommunicated, the politically dangerous perception has spread that the U.S. was reacting to Israel rather than acting on its own strategic judgment.
A perilous future
If Americans come to believe that Israel caused a costly war that they did not support in the first place, the backlash could be severe.
For centuries, one of the most persistent antisemitic tropes has been the accusation that Jews manipulate powerful states into fighting wars on their behalf. The suggestion that Israel can pull the U.S. into conflict feeds directly into that mythology. Once such perceptions take hold, they can be extremely difficult to reverse.
Even people who reject antisemitism outright can absorb a softer version of the same idea: that American interests are being subordinated to Israeli ones. In a political environment already marked by growing skepticism toward Israel, that perception risks deepening the erosion of support that has been underway for years.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to inadvertently feed such notions by suggesting in recent days that the U.S. had to attack Iran because Israel was going to do so “anyway,” and then America would have been a target. It was a short path from that to conspiracy theorists like Tucker Carlson blaming Chabad for the war.
A future Democratic president, facing a base that appears to have abandoned Israel, may feel far less obligation to defend it diplomatically or militarily. Even a Republican successor could prove unreliable if the party continues its drift toward isolationism.
That likelihood is compounded by studies showing that a large part of the U.S. Jewish community itself no longer backs Zionism. That process is driven by Israel’s own policies, including the West Bank occupation and the deadly brutality of the war in Gaza.
So the very war that is showcasing the best the U.S.-Israel alliance has to offer is also at risk of fundamentally damaging that partnership. Particularly if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the rightful object of much American ire — manipulates the Iran campaign into an electoral victory this year, the alliance’s greatest success could also be its undoing.
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Report: Iran’s New Military Plan Is Regime Survival Through Regional Escalation
Members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attend an IRGC ground forces military drill in the Aras area, East Azerbaijan province, Iran, Oct. 17, 2022. Photo: IRGC/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – After last year’s devastating conflict with the United States and Israel, Iranian leaders have reportedly adopted a major strategic shift aimed at expanding the war across the Middle East to secure the regime’s survival, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Previously, Iran responded to foreign strikes with limited, targeted reprisals. The new doctrine abandons that approach, aiming instead to escalate the conflict regionally, particularly against Gulf Arab states and critical economic infrastructure. The goal is to disrupt the global economy and pressure Washington into shortening the war.
This decision followed the twelve-day war with Israel in June 2025, during which Israeli and US strikes eliminated senior Iranian military leaders, destroyed key air defense systems, and severely damaged nuclear facilities. In response, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—before his elimination early in the current conflict—activated a strategy designed to maintain continuity even if top commanders were neutralized.
Central to this approach is the so-called “mosaic defense” doctrine: a decentralized military structure in which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) operates through multiple regional command centers. Each center can conduct operations independently, allowing local commanders to continue fighting even if national leadership is incapacitated. This makes the military apparatus more resilient to targeted strikes.
Analysts cited by the Wall Street Journal suggest that Tehran’s calculation is to make the conflict costly enough for all parties to force the US and its allies into a diplomatic resolution.
However, the plan carries enormous risks. By escalating attacks on regional states and international economic interests, Iran could provoke a broader coalition against itself. Despite prior military losses, Iranian forces retain the capability to launch drone and missile strikes, maintaining their influence over the ongoing conflict.
For Iranian leaders, the immediate priority remains unchanged: the survival of the regime, even if it requires a major regional escalation.