‘The More I’m Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am’

“The more I’m around young people, the more panicked I am,” Tim Miller told me recently. A prominent anti-Trump commentator, Miller hosts the popular Bulwark Podcast and regularly speaks to students on university campuses. Lately, he has begun to notice something disturbing. “I was literally arguing with a kid, like, three weeks ago, college kid, who was, like, you know, starting to think that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk,” Miller recounted on his show, amid a discussion about rising anti-Semitism on the American right. The student, he noted, was a “left kid.” Miller had good reason to be alarmed, because the problem he observed extends well beyond anecdotes. In late 2024, the Democratic data scientist David Shor surveyed nearly 130,000 voters at the behest of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He found that a quarter of those younger than 25—with negligible differences among Trump and Harris supporters—held an “unfavorable opinion” of “Jewish people.” (Jewish people—not Israelis or Zionists.) By contrast, the older a person was, the less likely they were to express such sentiments. One year later, an avalanche of data has confirmed what Shor glimpsed and researchers and reporters like myself have argued for years: American anti-Semitism is not primarily a partisan phenomenon, as it is often framed in popular discourse, but a generational one. Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, but they’ve assumed much larger and more sinister proportions in the imagination of the country’s youth. Last week, the Yale Youth Poll released its fall survey, which found that “younger voters are more likely to hold antisemitic views than older voters.” When asked to choose whether Jews have had a positive, neutral, or negative impact on the United States, just 8 percent of respondents said “negative.” But among 18-to-22-year-olds, that number was 18 percent. Twenty-seven percent of 18-to-22-year-olds strongly or somewhat agreed that “Jews in the United States have too much power,” compared with 16 percent overall and just 11 percent of those over 65. Read: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism Earlier this month, the conservative Manhattan Institute published a survey of contemporary Republicans and found a similar split. One-quarter of those under 50 reported that “they themselves openly express” anti-Semitic views, six times more than those over 50, just 4 percent of whom said the same. Here, as elsewhere, age was a key indicator of whether a person would espouse anti-Jewish attitudes. In recent years, the Anti-Defamation League, the UCLA Nationscape project, and the American National Election surveys have all found the same age curve in their data on attitudes toward Jewish people. In other words, the research collectively suggests that America is becoming more anti-Semitic because its young people are becoming more anti-Semitic. This finding flies in the face of the folk wisdom that prejudice is the province of the old and will die out with them. That maxim may be true of some bigotries, but anti-Semitism is not one of them. Instead, in the United States, the opposite is happening: Anti-Jewish prejudice is growing precisely because it is the domain of the next generation, not the previous one. As this young cohort takes its place in American society, that society becomes more anti-Semitic, because politicians, influencers, and tastemakers are trying to reflect youth sensibilities and cater to them. Any generational shift this dramatic has more than one cause. In the 20th century, the Holocaust and World War II profoundly and positively reshaped American attitudes toward Jews, but young people today have no first- or secondhand memory of that experience. Americans who are middle-aged or older tend to get their information from legacy media outlets, which, for all their flaws, normally have editorial processes that eschew explicitly racist material. Younger Americans, by contrast, are likely to trust and get their news from lightly moderated social-media platforms, which often advantage the extreme opinions, conspiracy theories, and conflict-stoking content that drive engagement. This bifurcation of information has consequences. Figuring out who was responsible for a national calamity, for instance, takes time and investigation. Blaming that calamity on the Jews does not. The kinds of media that reach for the latter explanation are the ones that hold sway with the younger audience. Read: People are underestimating America’s groyper problem Young people also tend to be more critical of Israel than their elders, leading a minority to excuse or even perpetrate anti-Jewish acts in America in the name of Palestine. These critics are likely to consume anti-Israel content on their social-media apps of choice. The platforms then funnel some of those users toward anti-Semitic material—a sort of algorithmic escalator that ends up radicalizing a percentage of them. The...

‘The More I’m Around Young People, the More Panicked I Am’

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