The big news from this poll is that a large number of Americans aged 18-29 are ignorant, anti-Zionist and antisemitic.
Less than half of Americans under 30 - 46% - feel that denying the Holocaust is antisemitic. The rest said either it wasn't (17%) or they weren't sure (37%.)
That's incredible ignorance. And that ignorance follows throughout the poll.
Only 38% felt that it was antisemitic to say that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than the US.
20% of young Americans themselves say the Holocaust was a myth, the highest percentage of all demographic groups surveyed (liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, male/female). One in five Americans under 30 say it was a myth! What will the percentage be in the next generation?
For all the following results, young Americans had the highest poll results across all demographics:
23% of them felt that the Holocaust was "exaggerated."
28% say Jews have too much influence in America.
36% say Israel exploits Holocaust victimhood for its own purposes.
33% support boycotting Israeli products.
31% say Israel has too much control over global affairs.
30% say the interests of Israelis are at odds with the interests of the rest of the world.
19% say Israel has no right to exist.
32% say Israel is an apartheid state, behind only liberals (36%)
40% say Israel is deliberately trying to wipe out the Palestinian population, behind only liberals (48%.)
That is a truly astonishing and troubling percentage of young Americans who cannot distinguish reality from lies. And in general, the younger people are, the more unmoored they are from basic facts.
The problem goes beyond believing lies about Israel and Jews. It is a generation that cannot distinguish between the veracity of their textbooks and TikTok.
But there are a lot of other factors in play. There has been a concerted effort by "progressives" to take over the US educational system over recent decades. They teach that there is no such thing as objective reality. They teach that the underdog is automatically right. They teach that the world is divided into oppressors and the oppressed, and everyone fits only one category. Antisemitism is a natural result of this mindset.
Things are not looking good for Jews in the United States. A quarter of young Americans are actual antisemites. The numbers get worse with each passing year. If anything, October 7 has accelerated antisemitism.
There is no indication that this trend will be reversed anytime soon.
How can this be countered?
Something that took decades to accomplish cannot be fixed overnight. The entire US education system is at fault and it will take a complete restructuring to fix it. The atrocious performances from the presidents of MIT, Harvard and Penn last week is waking people up to a world where the most prestigious schools cannot describe the difference between right and wrong. But it will take a long time for any significant change, and there is no assurance that such a turnaround is even possible.
In the medium term, we need to teach kids - and adults, for that matter - how to do their own fact checking. How to tell when they are being manipulated. How facts matter. How to d their own research. How to check whether footnotes actually say what they claim to say. How captions can lie. How to tell an AI image, a deepfake video, a manipulated video. How to understand double standards.How statistics can be manipulated.
But in the meanwhile, American Jews are watching the nation that has been the most welcoming for Jews outside Israel itself become a place where we live in fear.
Things are not looking up.
