Thirty-five percent of Americans currently say that Jews face “a lot of discrimination” in the United States today, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds, up 10 points from a survey taken last November.
Meanwhile, a plurality of those polled, 41 percent, say there is not a lot of discrimination against Jewish people, and about one-quarter say they are unsure.
There’s also little consensus on whether anti-Jewish sentiment is growing: 35 percent of respondents say anti-Semitism is increasing in the United States, while 11 percent say it’s on the decline and 31 percent say it’s staying about the same.
In recent months, the Jewish community has been targeted in multiple incidents, including dozens of bomb threats against Jewish community centers and the desecration of several Jewish cemeteries. (On Friday, Juan Thompson, a former Intercept reporter fired for falsifying sources, was arrested for allegedly making several of the bomb threats.)
The incidents have received relatively modest attention ― while 65 percent of Americans polled say they’ve heard at least a little about the bomb threats, just 19 percent say they’ve heard a lot about them.
In a speech Tuesday to Congress, President Donald Trump acknowledged the threats and vandalism, saying, “We are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.”
The survey, which the vast majority of respondents took prior to Trump’s address, finds that few Americans believe the Trump administration has done enough to address prejudice against Jews. Just 21 percent say the administration has done enough to condemn anti-Semitism, while 40 percent say it hasn’t and another 39 percent are unsure.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans say they view Jews favorably, with just 9 percent reporting an unfavorable opinion. While 16 percent of Americans say they personally know someone who holds anti-Semitic views, 67 percent say they don’t know anyone with those views.
Trump voters are about as likely to hold favorable views of Jewish people as people who voted for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, according to the poll. But Clinton voters are 20 points likelier than Trump voters to believe there is a lot of discrimination against Jews (48 percent versus 28 percent), and they’re 26 points likelier to believe anti-Semitism is on the rise (58 percent versus 32 percent).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest gap has to do with the way the White House has responded ― 54 percent of Trump voters said the administration had done enough to condemn anti-Semitism, but just 5 percent of Clinton voters said the same.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Feb. 25-March 1 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov’s opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls.You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov’s reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.