Wednesday, November 04, 2026
From Ian:
Study Finds Americans More Ambivalent About Violence Against Pro-Israel Jews
Study Finds Americans More Ambivalent About Violence Against Pro-Israel Jews
A new study published in PNAS Nexus found that Americans shown attacks against Jews through victims’ support for Israel were significantly less likely to oppose the violence than those shown attacks through victims’ Jewish religious identity. In a preregistered, nationally representative survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, opposition fell by 8.5 percentage points when victims were described through expressions of Zionism rather than religious faith. The shift did not significantly increase support for the attacks. Instead, more respondents moved into an ambivalent position.Rise Of Antisemitism Since October 7: An Exclusive Interview with Eitan Chitayat
The study, by Princeton University researchers Rafaela Dancygier and Jonathan Mummolo and Dartmouth College professor Sean Westwood, also examined news coverage of U.S. anti-Jewish hate crimes after October 7, 2023. The researchers found that more than one in five headlines in their sample introduced Israel, Palestine, Gaza or another nationalist or geopolitical dimension.
Opposition Fell When Support for Israel Was Emphasized
The researchers conducted two experiments testing whether descriptions of an attack changed public reaction. In the religious condition, respondents were told about Jews attacked while entering a synagogue or because they wore a kippah. In the nationalist condition, they were told about Jews attacked for carrying an Israeli flag or saying Israel should exist as a homeland for the Jewish people.
The first experiment, conducted in December 2024 with 2,507 respondents, found an 8.17-point difference in opposition between the two treatments. Opposition stood at 86.1% under the religious condition and 77.9% under the nationalist condition, while ambivalence increased from 11.1% to 18.8%. Support remained essentially unchanged. After a multiple-comparisons correction, however, the first study’s results fell just short of conventional statistical significance.
The researchers then replicated the experiment in March 2025 with a preregistered YouGov survey of 2,000 U.S. adults. Opposition to attacks on Jews stood at 91.8% under the religious treatment and 83.3% under the nationalist treatment, an 8.5-point difference. Ambivalence rose from 5.3% to 16.4%, while the difference in outright support was not statistically significant.
One in Five Headlines Used a Nationalist Frame
The researchers separately analyzed news coverage of religious hate crimes reported between October 7, 2023 and the end of 2024. FBI data included in the study recorded 2,888 anti-Jewish incidents during that period, compared with 348 anti-Muslim incidents and 32 anti-Hindu incidents. Anti-Jewish incidents accounted for 71.9% of the single-bias religious hate crimes in the dataset.
Their media sample contained 2,048 articles covering 628 distinct anti-Jewish incidents. Among headlines about those attacks, 63.3% used only a religious frame, 10.7% used only a nationalist frame and another 11.2% combined both.
The researchers used OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 to classify headlines into nationalist, religious, both or neither categories, with human validation of the classifications. The study does not claim journalists deliberately used nationalist framing to minimize antisemitism. Its media analysis documents how attacks were presented, while the randomized experiments tested how those presentations can affect public attitudes.
Capital Jewish Museum Killings Illustrate the Divide
The study used the May 2025 killings of Israeli Embassy employees Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington as a case study. According to a Justice Department superseding indictment, alleged gunman Elias Rodriguez called out “Free Palestine” during the shooting. Prosecutors allege that after entering the museum he said, “I did it for Palestine. I did it for Gaza.”
Crucially, the researchers emphasized that there was no evidence Rodriguez knew Milgrim and Lischinsky worked for the Israeli Embassy or had selected them because of that affiliation. The paper states that he therefore could simply have been seeking to harm people he believed were Jewish. Milgrim was Jewish, while Lischinsky was not.
That distinction is central to the study’s framing analysis. The victims’ Israeli government employment gave news outlets a factual basis to describe them through an Israeli or geopolitical lens, even though the researchers found no evidence that their Embassy affiliation was known to the attacker when he targeted them.
Eitan Chitayat is the founder of the international Natie Branding Agency, a branding and storytelling agency based in Tel Aviv. With nearly three decades of experience, he has worked with leading global brands, nonprofits, and cultural organizations, including Google, Apple, Facebook, and YouTube. He is also the creator of I’m That Jew, a Jewish storytelling and advocacy project whose content on Jewish identity, Israel, and antisemitism has reached around 400 million views across social media since October 7. What motivated you to create I’m That Jew, and what did you hope to achieve through the project?Sbarro bombing terrorist Ahlam Tamimi served with US lawsuit via X
I’ve told the story before, but it’s particularly timely because of what’s going on in France right now. Back in the day, if you remember the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo, Islamists and jihadi terrorists stormed the satirical magazine. They murdered French satirical journalists and staff. They also killed a few Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket in Paris. For people who remember, it was very, very shocking. It was a massacre.
Immediately afterwards, I reached out to a good friend of mine to see how she was doing. She’s Jewish; she was living in Paris, France. And she told me her now father-in-law and brother-in-law had visited that kosher supermarket just that morning. The conversation evolved into how scared she was of saying that she was Jewish. In fact, at the time, and this is not the case anymore, she hadn’t told anyone she was Jewish or that she had been to Israel.
So, as I expressed in my TEDx talk a few years later, that night I sat down and I wrote I’m That Jew. It started off being kind of like a letter to her. But it wasn’t specifically to her, I realized; rather, it was a response to what she had told me. It then very quickly became something that I was saying to myself, and then something I was saying to all of the Jewish people, reminding us who we are.
A lot of people have said the message of I’m That Jew is about antisemitism, or fighting antisemitism. And I think one of the best ways to fight antisemitism, which is foundational, is to not just be proud to be Jewish, but to be openly proud.
The message is that we need to be who we are, and being who we are means literally being who we are ‘openly’. Which is not easy, I know. But that was the inspiration. It was actually a letter to strengthen our identity and to remind us that we know who we are. We’re misunderstood, so we need to just keep being who we are and showing ourselves and the world who we actually are.
It’s so many different individual traits that make up the collective. We’re not a stereotype of one, two, or three things; we’re billions of things. And that’s what I wanted to say. We certainly don’t need to be afraid because the world’s messed up. I’m That Jew.
That was tremendously moving. How would you describe the landscape of antisemitism in America since October 7, 2023?
It’s allowed. I think that’s the big change.
People who have been following me know I’ve been a public Jewish advocate for around 20 years; I have my own small business, but I advocate for myself and my family and us all because I think it’s really important. I’ve been in this space observing what’s being written and said for a very long time. When I wrote I’m That Jew, for example, it was in response to a world event that affected the personal.
But there were other things that I’d expressed beforehand. Before October 7th, antisemitism wasn’t exactly underground, but it wasn’t as common, because there were some guardrails. And what we’ve seen since October 7th is that the guardrails have completely come off, and it’s allowed. You can’t say anything racist about Black people, and rightly so. You shouldn’t be misogynist. You shouldn’t be hating on gay people, or trans people, or Asian people.
But there’s an exception with the Jews, and there always has been.
Ahlam Tamimi, the terrorist responsible for the Sbarro bombing in Jerusalem in 2001, was served with legal papers on X/Twitter on Tuesday in a case brought by the National Jewish Advocacy Center on behalf of the estate of Malka “Malki” Roth, according to the organization’s Rabbi Dr. Mark Goldfeder.
The US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Arnold and Frimet Roth, the parents of 15-year-old Malka Roth, could serve Tamimi with legal papers through social media on X/Twitter, because Tamimi continues to reside in Jordan at an unknown address.
Arnold Roth, speaking for the Roth family, said: “This lawsuit places Tamimi under legal pressure in an American court for the first time. We hope the case will also draw public attention to the fact that the US criminal prosecution has remained stalled for more than a decade.
“It’s incomprehensible and deeply troubling to us that in all these years, no US official has explained to us, as Malki’s family or to the public, how it is that Tamimi continues to enjoy a free life in Jordan, a US partner country. Justice for Malki and the other Sbarro victims, already thwarted for years, demands answers and accountability. We hope this lawsuit is only the beginning.”
After efforts to locate Tamimi’s address proved unsuccessful, the plaintiffs were instructed to contact Jordan-based media outlet Etar, where she works as a columnist, email Jordanian attorney Mustafa Nasrallah, who represented Tamimi in her fight against extradition, and publish the summons online.
The court determined that these combined steps could be “reasonably calculated” to ensure Tamimi received notice of the summons.
Tamimi is wanted for her role as an accomplice in the August 9, 2001, suicide bombing at the Sbarro restaurant in downtown Jerusalem, which killed 15 people, including seven children and a pregnant woman.
Tamimi, who was then a university student and part-time journalist, scouted the location and escorted the bomber to the restaurant before leaving the scene.
