Two-Thirds of Americans 18-24 Believe That Jews Are Oppressors

A Harvard/Harris poll conducted on December 13 and 14 found that 67 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors.” While the question posed isn’t worded as well as one would hope for a survey — “Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?” should probably be a true/false query instead of the oppressor/false ideology construction — the other age groups appear to have the moral clarity and reading comprehension to understand what’s being asked of them. With ages 18–24 (Gen Z) being a full 23 points more Jew-distrustful than their next closest group, 25–34 (Millennials), one has to wonder how the youngest respondents came to their answers.

Digging further into the numbers, Gen Z is split 50–50 over whether they support Hamas or Israel — 73 percent believe that Hamas’s actions were a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, 60 percent believe that Hamas’s “killing of 1,200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians.” In short, our young adults can recognize terrorism — they just can’t make up their minds about whether one of the most brutal and oppressive groups walking the face of the earth is out of line when it commits premeditated mass murder and rapine throughout Israel’s interior. To cap it all — and to fulfill Norm Macdonald’s greatest fear about rampant Islamaphobia following in the wake of terrorist actions — two-thirds of the age group think that antisemitism is growing in the U.S., but 69 percent think discrimination against Muslims in the United States is growing.

The young man or woman, as we can see in the data shared, thinks something like the following: “Hamas carried out a legitimate terrorist action against Israel because the Palestinians are colonized people for whom action against their oppressor is righteous. The American Jew is still oppressed by the white Christian monoculture, but because of his wealth and privilege, he is of a lower priority than the Muslim.”

To be young is to be stupid while thinking oneself intelligent — after all, a young man has not yet learned enough to realize that men and women far smarter than himself have already thought of and discarded everything that’s bee-bopped through his brain lobes. Unfortunately, our youth have two inputs that make it difficult to dislodge them from conceited ignorance.

The first is the kedge of Marxist analysis, especially the anticolonial inputs of Freire in our education systems that stress the oppressed–oppressor framework. The second is the hawse pipe of curated agitprop that is TikTok (and the subsequent re-uploads to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube). The platform allows just enough time in a video to permit a veneer of academic legitimacy while actually allowing a “content creator” 45 seconds to run through some copypasta procured elsewhere and full of many of the horrisonous buzzwords and euphemisms that critical theorists traffic in. As when working on a valve when the one upstream of it has leak-by, it’s almost impossible to countermand the errors coming from TikTok & co. when a young person is exposed to hours of the latest bilge every day. While now exhibited by young adults, these behaviors and tech-dependencies are most often developed in adolescence. Parents can and should be policing their children’s intake. You vet your kids’ teachers, coaches, and dermatologist . . . Why not the same for tech?