When you write on subjects that include anti-Jewish prejudice and Middle Eastern politics, you get used to people disagreeing with your work. But before this week, I’d never provoked a response from a vice president of the United States.
On Monday, I published an article unpacking how anti-Semitism in America is a youth movement. Surveys from nonpartisan, conservative, and liberal sources have found that far from being the benighted bigotry of the old, anti-Jewish prejudice is growing in popularity among the young, which is why it has been on the rise in American politics and culture. “The research collectively suggests that America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic,” I wrote. “This finding flies in the face of the folk wisdom that prejudice is the province of the old and will die out with them.” Rather than understanding anti-Semitism purely through partisan prisms, I argued, we ought to understand it as a generational phenomenon, and confront it accordingly.
J. D. Vance was not impressed. “Mainstream journalism is just profoundly uninteresting and lame, consumed by its own pieties,” he wrote in a series of posts on X, where he regularly engages in political sparring. “To write an article about the ‘generational divide’ in anti-semitism without discussing the demographics of the various generations is mind boggling. ‘We imported a lot of people with ethnic grievances prior generations didn’t have. We celebrated this as the fruits of multiculturalism. Now we’re super surprised that the people we imported with ethnic grievances still have those ethnic grievances.’ The most significant single thing you could do to eliminate anti-semitism and any other kind of ethnic hatred is to support our efforts to lower immigration and promote assimilation. But these guys won’t do that, because they all lack curiosity and introspection.”
In support of his claims, the vice president later appended a chart from an insightful essay by the conservative Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman about the 2024 American National Election Study—one of many surveys I had cited—which measures “warmth” felt by voters toward different groups. The chart showed the same age divide in anti-Jewish sentiment that I had described, but also that foreign-born voters were much more likely to express cold sentiments toward Jews.
[Read: Why fighting conspiracy theories is essential to fighting anti-Semitism]
Anti-Semitism among foreign-born Americans, like anti-Semitism among other Americans, is certainly real. I’ve reported on it. But the notion that it is somehow the prime driver of American anti-Semitism does not add up—literally. That’s because there are many more young people in America—and in the ANES survey—than foreign-born people. As Peter Ganong, an economist at the University of Chicago, who fact-checked Vance’s dispute with my work on X, told me, “Immigrants and their children are indeed colder towards Jews than native-born Americans, but they are only 15 percent of voters.” That’s just a small part of the picture, however. “Young voters are also colder toward Jews on a per-person basis than older voters,” Ganong continued, and “the most important thing to know is that they account for 40 percent of voters in this survey.”
The vice president wasn’t the only one who took issue with my argument about the anti-Semitic age divide. When I joined MS NOW to discuss the article’s findings, one co-panelist countered that the data they’d seen showed that younger conservatives were the chief source of the problem. The liberal polling analyst G. Elliott Morris made a similar point on X, recommending the article but arguing that “the claim that there is no partisan divide in rates of anti-Semitism is wrong.”
Now, I cited a lot of surveys in my article. Some of them, such as the Democratic pollster David Shor’s canvass of nearly 130,000 voters, found no noticeable partisan split overall. Others found some measure of partisan divide in their small subsamples of younger voters. In the case of the Yale Youth Poll, young conservatives were more anti-Semitic than young liberals. And some surveys, as Vance noted, found splits between foreign-born Americans and the rest. All of these sources of anti-Semitism deserve further study, and all of them matter. But the one thing that all the surveys agreed on was an age divide underlying anti-Semitism. My argument was simply that focusing attention on this phenomenon and figuring out why it is happening would help us better combat the prejudice.
A broader point of disagreement is worth spelling out here. It is easy to cherry-pick and train all of one’s fire and attention on an ideologically convenient source of anti-Semitism, while giving short shrift to other, less congenial vectors of the prejudice—and missing entirely any anti-Semitism that doesn’t fit a prefabricated partisan narrative. But decades of such discourse have not made a dent in the problem.
Convenient narratives have coalesced to explain contemporary anti-Semitism. For some, it’s a story about neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the far right. Others point to anti-Israel sentiment on the left that shades into anti-Jewish prejudice. Both of these origin stories contain truth. But both also allow partisans to lay the problem at the feet of their ideological opponents. This is why many liberals are more comfortable calling out conservative anti-Semitism, and Vance appears most comfortable focusing on anti-Jewish sentiments among immigrants, while sidestepping the same problem on the American right (unless I somehow missed his call to denaturalize and deport Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens).
Like many others, I’ve spilled countless words covering anti-Semitism on the right, the left, and beyond. But analysis confined to these tired ideological frames has utterly failed to impede the ascent of anti-Jewish prejudice. Uncovering the ways in which anti-Semitism operates outside them can yield better insight into how we might combat anti-Jewish ideas.
[Yair Rosenberg: ‘The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am’]
Anti-Semitism predates our present political and religious divides. Before there were capitalists, Communists, Republicans, Democrats, or even Christians or Muslims, there was anti-Jewish prejudice. Which means that although such bigotry is expressed by all of these communities, it has roots in more fundamental forces.
The effort to identify and understand these forces is what drew me to explore the age divide in American anti-Semitism—and to investigate how anti-Semitism operates as a conspiracy theory that appeals to actors across the political and religious spectrum. At their best, foundational approaches like these can offer new ways to attack an ancient prejudice that most Americans—including younger ones—abhor, but that is growing in influence and body count. They do not exclude other explanations; they complement them, while avoiding the political traps that too often turn the public conversation about anti-Semitism into a debate over who can be blamed for it, rather than a discussion of how to stop it.
Because this way of thinking scrambles people’s partisan radars, it often evokes resistance from those wedded to older approaches, who see it as a threat rather than an asset. But the opposite is the case: Those who reason backward from prior ideological commitments when analyzing anti-Semitism are less likely to arrive at correct conclusions. That may not matter very much to the most hard-core partisans, who are less interested in understanding and confronting anti-Semitism than in using it to advance a preexisting ideological agenda or settle scores. But it should matter to everyone else. After all, if that way of talking about anti-Semitism worked, the problem would not be getting worse.
The post What J. D. Vance—And Many Others—Miss About American Anti-Semitism appeared first on The Atlantic.
