Antisemitism has surged, especially among the young, as the Holocaust fades from collective memory
Around half of adults across the world hold antisemitic beliefs and deny the historic facts of the Holocaust, according to the latest edition of the largest global study of anti-Jewish attitudes by the Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based advocacy group.
The study surveyed more than 58,000 adults from 103 countries and territories representing 94% of the world’s adult population, and found that 46% of them—or around 2.2 billion people—display antisemitic attitudes. A fifth of the respondents haven’t heard of the Holocaust, during which six million Jews were killed, while 21% believe it has either been exaggerated by historians or it never happened.
According to the survey, known as Global 100, the level of antisemitism in the global adult population has more than doubled since it was launched in 2014.
The report is the latest among a number of surveys charting a steep rise in antisemitism across the globe, including violent offenses, with some data showing a surge in anti-Jewish sentiment after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasions of Gaza and Lebanon.
In Europe, the European Union’s executive body reported in October that “the conflicts in the Middle East have led to levels of antisemitism” unprecedented since the founding of the bloc decades ago.
In November, Israeli soccer fans were chased and beaten by crowds in the Netherlands, with the prosecutor saying the unrest was triggered by the situation in Gaza. In Germany, government officials and Jewish community leaders often warn Jews to hide their identity in public to avoid being assaulted on the street.
“The fact that nearly half of the global population has elevated antisemitic sentiments tells us we are in nothing short of a global emergency,“ said Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the ADL chief executive. “This is a virus that has spread, it is accelerating and intensifying.”
One of the most alarming findings, according to Greenblatt, is that young people are increasingly reporting higher levels of antisemitic sentiments. Some 50% of the respondents younger than 35 hold antisemitic views, and only 39% recognize the Holocaust as historically accurate, compared with 48% among all respondents. In comparison, only 37% of respondents over 50 reported antisemitic beliefs. Some 40% of the respondents below 35 affirmed that “Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars,” while only 29% of those over 50 agreed with the statement.
Antisemitism reaches young people across social media, some of which have recently started removing content controls. Governments and educators must engage the young in a systematic way to prevent that, Greenblatt said.
“Social media is a superspreader of hate that allows antisemites to export their views to the masses,” he said. “A younger audience that consumes their news on TikTok and Instagram has a less informed view of the world, with information provided by influencers not based on expertise, but based on the appeal of their memes.”
The study asked respondents to affirm or deny statements encapsulating 11 antisemitic tropes such as “Jews don’t care what happens to anyone but their own kind,” “People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave,” or “Jews have too much control over world affairs.” Half of those surveyed affirmed the first statement, 48% the second and 46% the third. Some 56% said that Jews are only loyal to Israel, as opposed to the countries they live in.
The ADL has in the past been challenged for sometimes considering criticism against Israel as antisemitic. In the study, however, attitudes toward Israel don’t affect the antisemitism score, which only represents the percentage of respondents who answered “definitely true” or “probably true” to six or more of the 11 antisemitic tropes listed in the questionnaire.
Antisemitic attitudes vary across regions and continents, the study shows. Three quarters of respondents in the Middle East and North Africa agree with most of the listed antisemitic tropes. Around half of those surveyed in Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa hold significantly antisemitic views. In Western Europe, that figure drops to 17%, in the Americas to 24% and in Oceania to 20%.
Yet even in the countries that have the lowest antisemitism sentiments, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, antisemitic offenses are on the rise, perpetrated by a small, vocal and violent minority, Greenblatt said.
Jewish groups in Europe, as well as official statistics, indicate that violent antisemitism is more prevalent in the West, home to large Muslim immigrant communities, than in the East.
“There is a small group of people who are driving the incidents, and there is a silenced majority,” Greenblatt said.
The good news of the study, Greenblatt said, is that 57% of respondents recognized that hate against Jews is a serious problem, giving policymakers popular backing to counter it.
The ADL study was conducted by Ipsos, a global pollster based in Paris, between July and November 2024 in all countries except in the Middle East and North Africa, where the data was collected by the research companies GDCC, Ronin and Catalyze Global Research.
Published days before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp where one million people were killed, the study shows that memory of the Holocaust and belief in the veracity of its historical accounts is fading.
Twenty percent of the respondents haven’t heard of the Holocaust, while 17% think the number of Jews killed in it was greatly exaggerated by historians, and 4% believe it never happened. The acceptance of the Holocaust as a historic fact also varies across regions. Only 16% of the respondents in the Middle East and North Africa and 23% in sub-Saharan Africa accept that the Holocaust happened as described by mainstream historians.
