Education and Anti-Semitism Too many young Europeans know little about their brutal past.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/education-and-anti-semitism-1543450010?mod=article_inline
Americans rightly complain that their public schools teach too little history, and two new surveys in Europe show the results of such failures.
A poll by ComRes for CNN finds that awareness of the Holocaust is starting to fade among younger Europeans. While only about 4% of respondents overall reported they had never heard of the Holocaust, the figure is 20% of French aged 18-34. And 30% of all respondents said they know “only a little” about this defining event in recent European history.
Ugly stereotypes about Jews also persist. Some 20% of respondents believe Jews exercise too much influence over global media and politics, and nearly 30% believe Jews exercise too much influence over global finance.
Some 35% of respondents strongly or tend to agree that “Israel uses the Holocaust to justify its actions.” This false equivalence between Nazis and Israel is a trope on the left, where anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism elide. As Britain’s Labour Party has shown under Jeremy Corbyn, these attitudes encourage abuse of Jews and politicians who support Israel.
A separate survey of Jewish community leaders by the Joint Distribution Committee’s International Centre for Community Development shows where such attitudes lead. The proportion of leaders who expect anti-Semitism to increase has grown to 66% this year from 54% a decade ago. The percentage who feel “very safe” as Jews in their city fell to 20% from 36%, while the proportion who feel “rather unsafe” has risen to 13% from 6%.
This survey found that Jews now feel safer in countries of the former Soviet bloc than in Western Europe. One explanation may be immigration, since Western Europe has accepted and then failed to assimilate large numbers of Muslim migrants while Eastern Europe has not. Radical Islamists are responsible for most recent high-profile attacks against Jews in Europe, and CNN found that 15% of Muslims in Europe had never heard of the Holocaust.
Civilizations that fail to teach the lessons of their own brutal history to the young are, well, you know.
Appeared in the November 29, 2018, print edition.
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