Negative Beliefs,Sentiments,and Discriminatory Behavior Toward Jews: A Developmental Review

Focus and Research Designs

Most studies (72%) focused primarily on anti-Jewish bias (including evaluations of this bias in non-Jews, and Jews’ reports of anti-Jewish incidents), 17% on effects/perceptions of bias, and 11% on both. In approach, 73% were quantitative (liberally defined as including at least some descriptive statistics; e.g., means or percentages), 22% were entirely qualitative (often involving very small samples and lacking established qualitative research methodologies), and 5% were mixed methods. With respect to design, 57% were correlational, 21% experimental, and 22% descriptive (e.g., they were qualitative reports of interviews or focus group sessions, or poll-like survey reports lacking correlational analyses). Fifteen studies (18%) reported on interventions; but five of these did not have a control group (e.g., they were one-group pretest-posttest designs).

Importantly, only 39% of studies employed developmental designs or at least had a time dimension: 27% were cross-sectional comparisons of at least two age groups or studies correlating age with responses; 8% were longitudinal studies; 2% were intervention studies with longitudinal follow-up assessments (all relatively short term); and one (1%) was retrospective. The majority of studies (61%) were therefore not developmental but instead examined one age group or another, limiting our ability to piece together a developmental story.

Participants and Sociocultural and Historical Contexts

Table 2 provides aggregated data on the 85 studies’ age groups, location, participants’ ethnoreligious backgrounds, and historical period. Studies have been focused primarily on school-aged children, adolescents, and emerging adults; very little work has been conducted with preschoolers. Most research was conducted in either the U.S. or Israel, with some representation of European nations, Canada, and Australia. Although antisemitism has global reach, many parts of the world are not represented. Given the sites of this research, it is not surprising that most research samples were either White and predominantly Christian, Jewish, or included both Jewish and Arab participants. Here and elsewhere, when we describe participants’ ethnoreligious backgrounds, we typically adopt the language employed by studies’ authors. However, our coding system was not designed to capture the full complexity and nuance of participants’ ethnoreligious identities (e.g., “Arab” individuals are typically, but not always, Muslim; Arab Muslims in the Middle East may be phenotypically indistinguishable from Jews who are native to the same region, but members of the latter group typically do not identify as “Arab”; many Ashkenazi Jews do not consider themselves “White,” even if others might label them that way).

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Table 2.

Aggregated Study Characteristics

	%
Age group
Preschool age	5%
Elementary school age	22%
Adolescents	26%
Emerging adults	27%
Multiple age groups	20%
Location
United States	46%
Israel	33%
Europe, Canada, Australia	21%
Ethnoreligious background
White Christian	29%
Jewish	21%
Arab	5%
Jewish and Arab	32%
Diverse mix	13%
Era
1940–1959	11%
1960–1999	9%
2000–2019	51%
2020–2024	29%

In interpreting study findings, it is important to appreciate that Israel is a very different sociocultural context than other regions in which studies were conducted. In contrast to nearly everywhere else in the world, in Israel Jews are the majority rather than the minority, hold governmental and political power, and have long been engaged in a conflict with surrounding Arab states and organizations (e.g., the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Hamas, Hezbollah). Moreover, Jews and Arabs in Israel often have different languages, dress, cultural and religious practices, and statuses—differences likely to facilitate children’s recognition of and learning about the two groups. These unique sociocultural and historical factors must be considered when interpreting studies in which Israeli Jews and Muslim Arab participants are asked about each other. However, it should also be acknowledged that Jews are still in the minority position in the Middle East—representing approximately 1.6% of the population (Pew Research Center, 2012)—and that Israel is the world’s sole Jewish nation, surrounded by 22 majority-Muslim Arab League nations.

The historical context of a study is also important, as studies and their participants are a reflection and product of their time. Only a fifth of the work on these topics was conducted in the mid-to-late 1900s. The 2000s–2010s was a period of marked activity, when more than half of our studies were conducted. This increase in research volume has persisted, as 29% of our studies were published just between 2020 and August of 2024. This may partially reflect increased psychological study of a variety of social biases and stereotypes in the 21^st century (e.g., Leaper & Brown, 2018; Neville et al., 2024). As well, the events of October 7, 2023 seem to have sparked greater scholarly interest in attitudes toward Jewish people.

Guiding Theoretical Perspectives

What theoretical perspectives have guided scientific research on the development of anti-Jewish biases? Although it was not prominent in our corpus of studies, psychoanalytic theory was highly influential in the first wave of studies of antisemitism after World War II, memorialized in the publication of Adorno et al. (1950), The Authoritarian Personality. Antisemitism and other prejudices were traced to internal personality conflicts and anxieties attributable to a child’s parenting. Although we did not include in this review a seminal article by one of the book’s co-authors, Else Frenkel-Brunswik (1948), because it did not supply a formal analysis of their data on adolescents’ prejudice, this article was undoubtedly influential. Frenkel-Brunswik traced antisemitic attitudes to an “anti-democratic” personality profile rooted in punitive, obedience-focused parenting that was believed to foster submission to, but repressed resentment of, authority and motivate coping through expression of prejudice toward outgroups.

The most important statistic regarding the theoretical foundations of our corpus of research is this: Only 56% of the 85 studies were judged to have described a guiding theory or theories. Moreover, when theories were mentioned, usually little was said about them and they were rarely formally tested. Intergroup contact theory (Allport, 1954) stood out as the most frequently mentioned theory (9% of the studies), guiding not only intervention studies that involved contact between groups but studies of the implications of personal contact (e.g., having Jewish friends) for attitudes (e.g., McKenna & Francis, 2021). Another 7% of studies drew on social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) or the social identity development theory derived from it (e.g., Nesdale, 2004), emphasizing children’s categorization of themselves into ingroups and outgroups and its implications. The “other theory” category (16%) included some other well-known social-cognitive developmental theories of prejudice, all of which involve some combination of social categorization processes and social influences; examples are Aboud (2008), Bigler and Liben (2006), and models rooted in social domain theory (Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 1983) that examine the development of prejudice in relation to the development of social cognition, group identity, and social norms and morality, particularly with regard to the fairness or unfairness of excluding peers who are different (e.g., see Rutland et al., 2010, 2024). Also, in the “other theory” category were several non-developmental theories from psychology and sociology (e.g., common identity theory, group threat theory, ecological theory, and implicit personality or mindset theories). Finally, 22% of articles referred to multiple theories.

Research Methodologies and Measures

Research methods and measures in studies of anti-Jewish biases from early childhood to emerging adulthood necessarily varied with sample age. Of our 85 studies, 12% used tasks and questions involving hypothetical target persons, typically shown in drawings or photos (e.g., a Jewish man and an Arab man in ethnic/religious dress). Another 4% used projective drawing tasks (e.g., draw a Jewish person, draw an Arab person) that were analyzed for a variety of features (see Michael & Rajuan, 2009; Racheli & Tova, 2011). Both of these methods were most commonly used with children. Individual interviews or focus groups (27% of the studies) were used across the full age range of interest, whereas poll-like surveys (14%) and surveys with scales measuring constructs of interest (29%) were understandably employed primarily in studies of adolescents and emerging adults. Multiple methods were used in 14% of the studies.

Another key methodological choice is what to ask participants about—the question target. Can we expect similar responses with similar implications when children are asked about a drawing of a Jewish man in Jewish garb, about “Jewish people,” or about Jewish children in their school? In a third (34%) of the studies, participants were asked about Jewish people in general. In about a quarter (22%), participants were asked about themselves, often in interviews and surveys of older Jewish youth about their experiences of bias. Still other participants (18%) were asked about hypothetical Jewish characters portrayed in visuals and/or brief stories. Jewish agemates were the focus of 15% of the studies, some combination of these target persons was utilized in 8%, and two studies (2%) asked about Holocaust victims.

The corpus of studies touched on all three main components of bias: cognitive, affective, and behavioral. The affective component was most often gauged (in 88% of studies), followed by the cognitive component (in 74% of studies). In contrast, the behavioral component was gauged in just 37% of studies. Actual experiences of antisemitic behavior were reported by older Jewish respondents in some “effects of bias” studies. Otherwise, the closest that studies of bias usually came to assessing behavior was to gauge desired social distance or willingness to interact, not actual interactions with Jewish individuals. As these numbers suggest, most studies gauged multiple components of bias: 53% of them gauged two of the three components, 23% all three. Impressively, some studies devised reasonable, age-appropriate measures to tap all three aspects of bias. In an intervention study involving contact between Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli fifth graders, for example, Berger et al. (2018) assessed: (a) cognition (stereotyped ratings of the outgroup on bipolar traits like smart-stupid, and expectations about how likely outgroup members were to engage in five negative behaviors such as hurting or stealing), (b) affect (expected experience of positive and negative emotions when interacting with outgroup members such as secure and calm versus anxious and threatened), and (c) behavior (willingness to meet and play with members of the outgroup).

As we will see later, a variety of approaches have been taken to assess attitudes toward Jewish people. However, we discovered no scale that was designed to measure children’s or adolescents’ antisemitism and that was widely used. Some researchers did administer scales to assess antisemitism among adolescents and emerging adults but the scales were varied in content, often only a few items long, and not always well-established psychometrically. For example, McKenna and Francis (2021) developed a five-item “Scale of Anti-Jewish Attitudes” for use with 13- to 15-year-old adolescents in Great Britain—a mix of items about desired social distance, approval of and interest in Jewish people, and acceptance of Jewish students wearing religious clothing to school. Villano (1999) administered short “blatant” and “subtle” antisemitism scales in a study of Italian adolescents and adults. Shenhav and Kopstein (2020) assessed both antisemitic attitudes tapping into Jewish stereotypes and conspiracy theories and anti-Israel attitudes among college students in the U.S. by drawing items from existing scales, reporting a modest correlation between the two scales as well as differences in their correlates. Other scales have combined items pertaining to both Jews and Israel (for some additional antisemitism scales, see Hersh & Royden, 2023; Schröder, 2020; Wright et al., 2024; and the section below on Negative Attitudes). Shifts in the sociohistorical environment sometimes demand a rethinking of key constructs—a point illustrated by the growing need to conceptualize and measure both anti-Jewish and anti-Israel attitudes, and to determine their associations.

Summary

A total of 85 studies published over the nearly 80 years since World War II does not suggest a thriving research enterprise, although the increase in studies in recent decades is encouraging. Collectively, the studies reflect a healthy mix of quantitative and qualitative, and experimental and correlational, approaches that examine cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of both bias and its impacts, and that often employ multiple measures and measurement approaches. However, this literature is often not theory-driven; lacks reliable, valid, and widely accepted methods of measuring anti-Jewish bias; focuses too little on the roots of bias in early childhood, and overrepresents Israel and the Anglo-dominated U.S. and U.K. countries while underrepresenting the rest of the world. Finally, and most importantly, many studies are exploratory and descriptive in nature and most are not developmental as they do not examine age-related differences or changes. Next, we draw upon this research to reach conclusions about age-related differences in anti-Jewish biases, Jewish persons’ experiences of anti-Jewish bias, correlates of and potential influences on these biases, and interventions to reduce them.

Basic Social-Cognitive Processes

Although the literature we reviewed does not explore the full range of social-cognitive processes involved in prejudice (e.g., see Nelson & Olson, 2024), we call attention here to two such processes, ingroup-outgroup differentiation and social essentialism, that serve as important foundations for the development of concepts, beliefs, and sentiments about social groups.

Knowledge, Misconceptions, and the Emergence of Stereotypes

How much do children know about Jewish people and to what extent do they learn stereotypes of Jewish people? Such knowledge and stereotypes are bound to vary across sociocultural contexts. Studying Israeli Jewish, Israeli Palestinian, and Palestinian 4- to 7-year-olds’ perceptions of Jews and Arabs, Cole et al. (2003; see also Brenick et al., 2007) examined awareness of stereotypes, knowledge of cultural symbols, and understanding of similarities in the activities and lives of Jewish and Arab children. Answers to the questions, “What is an Arab?” or “What is a Jew?” (while viewing a drawing of an adult male in ethnic dress), revealed stereotyped descriptions of the outgroup as early as age 4, increasingly positive descriptions by Israeli Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian children with age, but more negative descriptions by Palestinian children with age. Apparently aware of conflict in the region, Palestinian children’s descriptions of a Jewish man included phrases like “wants to put us in jail” and “shoots at us” (Cole et al., 2003, p. 420). Both Jewish and Palestinian children believed that children from their own group would be more likely than children from the other group to engage in common activities like riding a bike and knew more about cultural/religious symbols from their own group than from the other group.

In further analysis of these same three groups of 4- to 7-year-olds and a Jordanian sample, Brenick et al. (2010) discovered that Arab children’s descriptions of Jews (when given a drawing of a Jewish child and asked, “What is a Jew?”) were mostly positive among Israeli-Palestinian children but mostly negative among both Palestinian and Jordanian children. Mainly, these studies show ingroup preference and outgroup negative stereotyping in early childhood, at least in a conflict-torn area where ethnoreligious identities are highly salient.

A pioneering and illuminating study by Radke and colleagues (1949), carried out in the aftermath of World War II, focused on knowledge and biases regarding Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Blacks among children 5 to 8 years old in Philadelphia who represented all four groups. Knowledge of the different religious groups did not increase much over the age range studied, with the oldest children still either ignorant or prone to misconceptions. Of those children who did hold conceptions of Jewish persons, they most often cited Jews’ distinct nationalities or distinct ways of speaking, or they identified specific Jewish persons; religion was rarely mentioned. Jewish children were more aware of their group identity than Catholics or Protestants were, consistent with other evidence that ethnic minority youth may, as a result of more ethnic socialization and experiences such as discrimination, become more aware of their group identity and its meaning (Williams et al., 2020). Anti-Jewish biases were greatest among older children, especially those from neighborhoods with tensions between Catholics and Jews.

Still older children, while knowing more than young children about the meaning of “Jewish,” hold many misconceptions about Judaism and Jewish people. Asked about differences between Jews and Arabs (Shamoa-Nir et al., 2022), Israeli Jewish and Arab elementary school children aged 6 to 13 years often gave no response; when they did respond, they focused more on cultural and ethnic differences (60% of responses) than on religious ones (30%). Short and Carrington (1992, 1995) examined knowledge of Jewishness and awareness of antisemitism (without asking directly about it) through qualitative interviews with pairs of children in the U.K. They grouped children ages 8–9, 10–11, and 12–13. Most children across the age range had little understanding of what “Jewish” means, but interesting age-related patterns emerged nonetheless. The youngest children often considered Jews to be foreign (see also Allen, 2023, on third graders in the U.S., and Radke et al., 1949). The 10- and 11-year-olds had some awareness that Jewishness involves both religion and group heritage or culture. The 12- to 13-year-olds, however, viewed being Jewish as primarily a religious affiliation. Most 12- to 13-year-olds did not think that Jews and Christians believe in the same God; some even confused Judaism with Islam; only about half knew that Jesus was Jewish; and most at this age thought that a person born to Jewish parents who becomes a Christian would no longer be Jewish in any sense—that is, they did not seem to essentialize Jewishness. Some awareness of anti-Jewish bias was evident among the two oldest groups—for example, nearly all knew that Jews were believed to be stingy, rich, and the like and were said to have distinctive facial features, although it was rare for children to mention antisemitic acts in the region and none expressed antisemitic attitudes themselves (see Short & Carrington, 1995, for similar findings in Britain).

Negative Attitudes

Negative attitudes toward Jewish people have been examined in different ways in childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood. In their study of 5- to 8-year-olds in Philadelphia, Radke and colleagues (1949) used an elaborate set of projective drawings and questions about them to assess cognitive and affective responses toward each group. For example, one drawing showed two boys on the steps of a synagogue and four boys across the street and researchers asked what was occurring. Older children (compared to younger ones) expressed less accepting and more rejecting attitudes toward certain groups—especially Black persons, but also Jews. Meanwhile, Jewish children were aware of prejudice against their group.

Radke’s study was conducted shortly after World War II in an era of strong and often explicit prejudices toward both Black and Jewish people in the U.S. Lacking multiple studies conducted in multiple eras, it is difficult to know whether the stronger prejudice among older children reflects strong socialization influences of the time, cognitive development, or both. The fact that children’s attitudes were quite homogeneous suggested to Radke and colleagues that broad societal influences were more important than individual personality dynamics (of interest to psychoanalytic theorists) in explaining early social biases and awareness of biases. However, personality was studied only through case studies of a few children.

At around the same time, Gough et al. (1950), guided by psychoanalytic theory, explored personality test profiles related to tolerance or intolerance toward Black people and, less thoroughly, toward Jewish people, among students about ages 8 to 10 in Minneapolis. Desire to be socially distanced from Jewish people was evident and was associated with general intolerance of other groups and negative attitudes toward Black people. Gough concluded that desire for social distance from Jewish people, like negative attitudes toward Black people, was rooted in maladaptive personality development involving being cynical and distrustful and feeling unfairly treated and fearful of being exploited.

Comparing the attitudes of American students in fifth to twelfth grade (roughly ages 10–18), Radke and Sutherland (1949) observed an increase across grades in negative descriptions of Jews (including classic stereotypes of Jews as greedy, dishonest, and dominating government and business) and hostility/dislike toward them—despite living in a town in the Midwest with only one Jewish family. Children were more negative than positive toward Jews at all ages. Chyatte et al. (1951), in another early study of American 4- to 15-year-olds, concluded, like Radke and Sutherland (1949), that children learn by observing what other people say about Jews in daily life, books, and media—for example, by hearing “Jew them down” used as a term for bargaining down the price. Chyatte et al. (1951) did not find noteworthy age-related differences.

Although many prejudices have been intensely studied using measures of implicit and explicit attitudes, we located only two such studies examining children’s and adolescents’ attitudes toward Jews. Heiphetz et al. (2013, Studies 3–5) asked Christian children aged 6–8 and adults in the U.S. explicit attitude questions about which person—a Christian or a Jew—might have engaged in good and bad behaviors and administered versions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), measuring largely unconscious associations of positive or negative words with one’s ingroup (here, Christians) versus an outgroup (here, Jews). Religious group was conveyed through stories with specifics such as the name of their God and going to temple versus church. Explicit bias toward Jews was not evident at either age. However, implicit preference for Christians (e.g., faster associations of positive words with Christian words vs. Jewish words, and slower associations of negative words with Christian words vs. Jewish words) was evident among both children and adults. The authors speculated that participants who showed implicit but not explicit bias were either unaware of their prejudice or did not express it because of social desirability concerns.

Using a similar approach and analyzing Jewish-American and Arab-American adolescents’ attitudes toward each other, Huesmann et al. (2012) found only modest correlations between an explicit attitude measure (a semantic differential scale with items like friendly-unfriendly) and the IAT (r = .30 or so). Both groups displayed more positive and less negative attitudes toward their own group than toward the other group on both the explicit measure and two types of implicit attitude measures.

Taking a different approach, Niwa, Boxer, Dubow, Huesmann, Landau et al. (2016) assessed the negative and dehumanizing beliefs about ethnic outgroups of Palestinian, Israeli Jewish, and Israeli Arab children (ages 8, 11, and 14 at the start of a 3-year longitudinal study). Palestinian and Israeli Arab children were asked to rate, for example, how true it is that Jewish people love their family, feel sad when someone they love dies, and are mean. Negative, dehumanizing views of Jews were expressed more by Palestinian than Israeli Arab children, increased somewhat over time among Palestinians, and decreased over time among Israeli Arab children (see also Teichman & Zafrir, 2003). Expressing more negative, dehumanizing attitudes over time was associated with greater exposure to ethno-political violence. In another study of the Palestinian sample, high levels of aggressive behavior and emotional desensitization to the distress of living in a war zone were associated with viewing hostility and aggression aimed at Jews as more acceptable (Niwa, Boxer, Dubow, Huesmann, Shikaki, et al., 2016).

Comparing Italian adolescents (ages 16–19), emerging adults (20–30), and adults (31+) on antisemitism scales, Villano et al. (1999) found less evidence of blatant antisemitism than of subtle antisemitism at all ages. The latter often involved a lack of positive attitudes toward Jews but denial of antisemitic stereotypes and negative feelings toward Jews. However, adolescents emphasized differences between Jewish and non-Jewish people more and scored higher on a measure of ethnocentrism, whereas emerging adults and adults expressed more liking for Jews (see also Kane, 1947). Adolescents may have been less influenced by societal norms of tolerance or perhaps less committed to a “color blind” position on ethnic and racial differences.

Recent studies of antisemitic attitudes among older adolescents and emerging adults, even before October 7, have attempted to measure—and, if possible, distinguish between—“classic” antisemitic attitudes and anti-Israel attitudes. As Volodarsky et al. (2025) has shown using a “bottom up” approach to defining antisemitism, it is important to take into account that Jewish students view some anti-Israel sentiments as antisemitic but others as acceptable political criticisms.

During adolescence, youth become more aware of the war in the Middle East and the politics surrounding it, and one must ask whether some expressions of negative attitudes toward Israel may serve as a more socially acceptable way of expressing antisemitism (Gross & Rutland, 2014). Among the U.S. college students studied by Shenhav-Goldberg and Kopstein (2020), anti-Israel attitudes were the strongest predictor of antisemitic attitudes with other variables controlled, although the correlation was only .18 and the association likely bidirectional. On average, students expressed more negativity toward Israel than toward Jews.

A 2024 survey of over 4,000 undergraduates at 60 schools in the U.S. also focused on attitudes about both Jewish people and Israel (Wright et al., 2024). About two-thirds of non-Jewish students did not express negative attitudes toward either Jews or Israel; 15%, who identified with the political left, were highly negative toward Israel, often not believing that it has a right to exist, but rejected traditional stereotypes of Jews. Another 16% endorsed at least some anti-Jewish statements, especially conspiracy theories about Jews having too much power, but were not as critical of Israel. The latter group leaned more to the political center or right and was prone to dichotomous thinking (for example, agreeing with statements like, “People can clearly be distinguished as being ‘good’ or ‘bad’”). Thus, holders of anti-Jewish versus anti-Israel attitudes were distinguishable. Among the German ninth graders surveyed by Schröder (2020), the association between right-wing political attitudes and antisemitism (assessed with a short scale combining classic and Israel-related items) proved stronger than the associations between left-wing and Islamist attitudes and antisemitism, but both were evident.

In an informative study about age and racial/ethnic differences in antisemitism among emerging adults aged 18–30 in the U.S., Hersh and Royden (2023) examined antisemitism on both the political right and left and the role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As in some prior studies, antisemitic attitudes (e.g., responses to items like, “Jews in the United States have too much power”) were especially strong among Black and Hispanic young adults, along with white, alt-right, conservative adults. However, young minority group members were generally more positive toward Israel and its government than whites, suggesting that their stronger antisemitic attitudes may not have been primarily rooted in identification with the Palestinians or hostility toward Israel, even though anti-Israel and antisemitic attitudes were correlated. Perceptions among minority groups that they are victims of Jewish conspiracies or are in competition with Jews economically might need to be investigated more thoroughly in order to account for the comparatively strong antisemitism expressed by certain minority-group members in some studies (Hersh & Royden, 2023).

Discriminatory Behavior

How might ingroup preferences and negative attitudes toward outgroups pave the way to discrimination against Jews? We know little. Shamoa-Nir et al. (2021), guided by Nesdale’s (2004) developmental social identity theory, examined how outgroup discrimination might grow out of earlier steps of categorizing ingroup and outgroup and preferring the ingroup. This study of Jewish and Arab Israeli 6- to 13-year-olds documented an ingroup preference in both groups in their prosocial behavior (giving more of their prizes to a hypothetical ingroup member than to an outgroup member). Using their cross-sectional data, the authors found that the association between age and less giving to the outgroup was mediated sequentially by (a) preference for ingroup religious and cultural symbols, and (b) negative attitudes toward the outgroup.

Also assessing discriminatory prosocial behavior, Razpurker-Apfeld et al. (2024) asked Israeli Arab-Christian children ages 6 to 13 about either Arab-Muslim or Jewish children. Arab-Christian children perceived fewer differences between their group and Arab-Muslims than between their group and Jews, their attitudes toward Arab-Muslims were more positive, and they gave more prizes to a hypothetical Arab-Muslim child. Participants who believed that their Arab-Christian ingroup and Jewish children were different across multiple dimensions tended to hold less positive attitudes toward Jewish children. However, perceiving more between-group differences was unrelated to prosocial behavior toward a hypothetical Jewish child—with one interesting exception: adolescents were more prosocial toward a Jewish child, possibly because they were more aware than younger children of norms of fairness toward outgroup members.

Summary

From these studies, we can piece together a rough picture of how fundamental social-cognitive processes, and knowledge of, stereotyped beliefs about, and attitudes and behavior toward Jewish people may take form.

(1) Based on salient group characteristics, children begin to categorize their social world into groups—including ingroups and outgroups—and children exhibit preferences for and relatively positive attitudes toward ingroup members compared to outgroup members, while also viewing outgroups as more homogeneous. Early essentialist intuitions support beliefs that social groups are inherently different, and that these essential differences will persist across time and circumstance and reveal a lot about what people are like. Early essentialism regarding ethnic and religious groups typically rests on limited specific knowledge about groups, and its emphasis on inherited, biologically-based characteristics often wanes with age.

Children and Adolescents

As noted earlier, the 5- to 8-year-old Jewish children studied by Radke et al. (1949) appeared to be aware of prejudice against their group, but researchers since have largely avoided asking Jewish children about anti-Jewish bias. In a close, longitudinal look at the experiences of 16 Jewish girls in Canada interviewed three times from age 10 to age 12, Gold (2012) asked about being Jewish and what the girls perceived as good and bad about it. Although these girls felt mostly good about being Jewish, concerns about antisemitism surfaced. Public school students reported some direct antisemitic incidents (e.g., a boy drawing a swastika on his hand and showing it to a girl). Many in both public and Jewish schools reported indirect experiences (e.g., desecration of a local cemetery), and the age-12 interviews revealed emerging awareness of incidents elsewhere in the world (e.g., windows smashed at a synagogue in Toronto and events in France and Russia). These young adolescents perceived antisemitic incidents in their own experiences to be connected to both the Holocaust and the conflict in Israel. They were concerned about antisemitism and did not understand why it exists but expected it to continue. Sometimes they internalized antisemitic sentiments or wanted to keep their Jewish identity hidden: “Sometimes I’m scared to tell people there my religion cause, like, you never know, like, there could be people in the world who, like, are antisemitic” (p. 546). With age, some came to understand that antisemitism is one of many forms of hatred and is not the fault of the hated.

An ethnographic, qualitative study in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia (Gross & Rutland, 2014) included 55 Jewish students in Special Religious Instruction/Education (SRI/SRE) classes in both primary and secondary public and multicultural schools with high Jewish representations. Teachers, principals, parents, and Jewish community leaders were also interviewed. Like Gold, the authors did not set out to study antisemitism and asked no questions about it but heard plenty from Jewish students about incidents that happened outside of their “safe place” (their SRE classes), often on the playground in the form of antisemitic verbal taunts and bullying by peers, which the authors speculated were transmitted from one generation to the next through the peer culture. Reports of antisemitic bullying, some verified by teachers/staff, were more common at the junior high school level than at younger ages. The report is rich in examples—students saying “Heil Hitler” each day as a Jewish student walked into class, charges that Jewish students were Zionists, and this chilling account from a male high school student (Gross & Rutland, 2014, p. 318):

… if you are Jewish you are teased. They call you stingy. They throw five cents at you. Or they throw money on the ground and call out ‘who is the Jew?’ Or they will say: ‘That’s a Jew nose.’ They say something about payot [sidelocks]. Then they have a brit set [circumcision set]. Or they take scissors and go like this [demonstrating scissors cutting with his hands]: ‘do you want another brit?’

In response, students sometimes made efforts to hide their Jewishness and often did not report antisemitic taunts, which often came from friends and were dismissed as jokes, even though they hurt. Principals and teachers minimized or even denied antisemitic bullying at their schools—perhaps in part because many Jewish students accepted and did not report it, perhaps in part to protect their schools’ reputations. Gross and Rutland identified: (a) mostly racial/ethnic antisemitism centering on money stereotypes, Nazi swastikas, and so on; (b) some religious antisemitism in the form of talk about circumcision and Jewish dietary practices; and (c), among older students, some anti-Israel sentiment associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the authors thought may have represented a newer form of antisemitism. In a similar qualitative study of Australian Jewish children, adolescents and their parents echoed these findings of antisemitic verbal behavior on school grounds, a tendency of Jewish children to put up with it rather than resist or report it, and anti-Israel sentiment among 12- to 14-year-olds but not 9- to 11-year-olds (Ben-Moshe & Halafoff, 2014). Whereas Gross and Rutland found racial/ethnic antisemitism to be most common, Ben-Moshe and Halafoff emphasized religion-based biases associated with ignorance of Judaism, school emphasis on Christian holidays and practices, and teacher and staff biases (see also Moulin, 2016, for similar concerns and coping approaches among Jewish adolescents in England).

In the United States, Dupper et al. (2015) reported focus group discussions of the experiences of 50 U.S. students in grades 6–12 who belonged to religious minorities (Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Universalist/Unitarian) and lived in a predominantly evangelical Christian area. Awareness of their religious minority status was common across groups, as schools prioritized Christian holidays and events. Christian students sometimes tried to convert students of different faiths or warn them of the consequences of not becoming a Christian. Multiple examples were offered of peer harassment—often perceived as teasing if from a friend but as bullying if from a less well-known peer. Jewish students reported one of them having a star of David pendant ripped off, another being told in the hall, “Go get in the oven now, Jew!” (p. 41). Using data from this sample, Forrest-Bank & Dupper (2016) emphasized the importance of appraisal processes in determining how students coped with being religiously different and with prejudice and discrimination.

In still another of her pioneering studies, Radke-Yarrow (1953) assessed how Jewish students in the U.S. aged 7 to 17 coped with being Jewish, in terms of whether they internalized negative stereotypes about Jews and identified positively as a Jew. Internalization of stereotypes was assessed by asking whether several negative Jewish stereotypes applied to one or both members of pairs of photos labeled as Jewish and Christian peers. Students did not overidentify Jewish peers as having stereotyped Jewish traits, nor did they assign these negative traits more to the Christian peers. They also expressed no preference for the Jews versus the Christians depicted as friends. However, for questions about whether they would choose an activity or group with a Jewish name or a non-Jewish name, younger students more often identified with the Jewish name than older students. Radke-Yarrow speculated that high school students may have been more sensitive or even anxious about their Jewish identity and may have been seeking greater acceptance in the wider peer group.

Investigating how U.S. sixth through eighth graders coped with stressors associated with being Jewish, including antisemitic incidents, Dubow et al. (2000) concluded that a strong Jewish ethnic identity was associated with reporting more ethnic stressors, possibly because of greater sensitization to them, as well as greater use of ethnic-religious coping strategies, such as seeking God’s direction or seeking Jewish friends. In contrast, Weisskirch et al. (2016) found that Jewish ethnic identity search and affirmation appeared to strengthen rather than weaken the link between discrimination experiences and depression among Jewish students.

Emerging Adults

At the college level, attention has focused more directly on experiences of and concerns about antisemitism. In one survey, 54% of Jewish students at 55 American colleges and universities reported that they were subject to or witnessed an antisemitic incident (Kosmin & Keysar, 2015). Repeated surveys of U.S. college students and other emerging adults aged 18–27 who applied to Birthright Israel have revealed that, despite little change between 2017 and 2019 in the frequency of personal antisemitic experiences, concern about antisemitism and personal safety increased, especially among politically liberal Jews (Wright et al., 2021). Religiously Conservative Jews reported more antisemitic experiences than liberals, possibly because they were more likely to interpret criticism of Israel as antisemitic or because they were more identifiable based on their religious practices or attire.

Wright et al. (2023), also surveying Birthright Israel applicants, documented striking trends in Jewish college students’ experiences with antisemitism from before to after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians. Educational institutions were sorted into “hostility” quartiles based on students’ reports of concerns about antisemitism. Even at the least hostile schools, about half of the students reported some hostility toward Jews on campus, and more than half reported hostility toward Israel on campus; these numbers approached 85% and 95%, respectively, on the most hostile campuses. Exposure to antisemitic imagery was reported by 52% of students on the least hostile campuses and 73% on the most hostile campuses. Jewish students also frequently felt blamed for Israel’s actions (ranging from 28% on least-hostile campuses to 46% on most-hostile campuses). While students were often concerned about traditional antisemitic attitudes, they were even more concerned about antisemitism linked to criticism of Israel and antisemitism coming from the political left rather than from the political right. Perceptions of antisemitic hostility were clearly more widespread than they had been in a similar 2016 survey of Birthright Israel applicants from most of the same institutions (Saxe et al., 2016). For example, at institutions with the highest perceived hostility toward Jews, 31% to 43% of students in 2016 agreed at least “somewhat” that there was a hostile environment for Jews at their school, compared to over 80% of the students at such schools in 2023. Feeling blamed for Israel’s actions was also more common in 2023 than in 2016. Finally, perceiving one’s campus as hostile toward Jews was associated with feeling blamed and with feeling less safe on campus.

Studies published since our review’s cutoff date have expanded on how, in the wake of October 7 2023, many American Jewish college students have been denigrated for supporting Israel’s actions and even its existence, endured slurs and exclusion by classmates, and felt a need to hide their opinions and their Jewish identity (e.g., American Jewish Committee, 2024; Hersh & Lyss, 2024; Samuel et al., 2024). The stress among Jewish students associated with antisemitism and the Israel-Hamas conflict has been linked to heightened depression symptoms (Morstead & DeLongis, 2025).

Qualitative studies of Jewish college students in the U.S. detail topics such as Jewish ethnoreligious identity development in the face of antisemitism (MacDonald-Dennis, 2006); experience of and resistance to antisemitism and a perceived blurring of lines between anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and antisemitic sentiments (Abrams & Armeni, 2023; Farber & Poleg, 2019; Flasch, 2020); and exclusion of Jews from campus DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and social justice initiatives (Abrams & Armeni, 2023; Farber & Poleg, 2019). Jewish students complain of being perceived as white when Jews are a racially and ethnically diverse group (Farber & Poleg, 2019). Like Jewish adolescents who are a small minority in majority-Christian schools, some Jewish college students avoid disclosing or otherwise calling attention to their Jewishness (Cieslik & Phillips, 2021; and see Gal, 2020, on how middle-aged adults who had been victims of antisemitism as children under Argentina’s dictatorship continued to rely on coping strategies—like being invisible—that they used as children).

Finally, a study by Leets (2002) examined how Jewish and gay college students would likely react to samples of hate speech toward their group (e.g., a quote from Louis Farrakhan about Jews, an example they had personally experienced). Participants often saw hate speech as stemming from ignorance or repressed hostility, said they would most often react passively to it (e.g., say nothing, walk away, avoid calling attention to themselves), and favored seeking social support as a coping strategy.

Summary

From at least early adolescence onward, Jewish youth are very aware of anti-Jewish biases, both in their immediate world and beyond, and are concerned about it. An enlightening survey of the parents of K-12 Jewish students in Ontario, Canada by Brym (2025) corroborates the qualitative reports from Jewish students featured so far, indicating that antisemitic incidents are part of the lives of many Jewish youth, increase with age, are upsetting, and are rarely reported or disciplined. While some individuals, especially at the college level, actively resist it, a clear theme is that many defend themselves from it by lying low—making their Jewishness less obvious, not calling out or reporting Jewish jokes and taunts, and reacting passively rather than confrontationally. Finally, there is a glaring gap in this research: we found virtually no research examining the impacts of anti-Jewish biases on the longer-term development and adaptation of Jewish youth—only studies in which they reported experiences of antisemitic behavior, immediate emotional reactions to it, and concerns about antisemitism more generally.

Sociocultural Context

Throughout this review, we have noted the potential importance of sociocultural factors in anti-Jewish bias. For example, we have seen that essentialist beliefs about ethnic/religious groups probably start with a relatively content-free “intuitive essentialist bias” but are then overlaid with specific beliefs about particular groups that are prominent in a given sociocultural context (e.g., Birnbaum et al., 2010; Rhodes & Mandalaywala, 2017). Most of the research we reviewed on children’s essentialism of Jews has been conducted in Israel and neighboring areas, where the salience of the Israel-Hamas conflict is high and where even many preschool children view the outgroup as hostile (e.g., Brenick et al., 2007; Brenick et al., 2010; Cole et al., 2003). Yet differences in stereotypes and attitudes toward Jews have been detected between groups of non-Jews in the region: Israeli-Palestinian children express more positive stereotypes and attitudes than Palestinian children residing outside of Israel (Brenick et al., 2007; Brenick et al., 2010; Niwa et al., 2016; Teichman & Zafrir, 2003). Whether this is because Israeli-Palestinians are not in direct conflict with Israeli Jews, identify as both Palestinians and Israelis, or are more hesitant to express negative attitudes is unknown.

Essentialist thinking about Jews among children is evident not only in the Middle East but in the U. S., although possibly later in development (Chalik et al., 2017; Diesendruck, Goldfein-Elbaz, et al., 2013). We do not know about children’s thinking elsewhere, but we know that many prejudices begin to take shape in early childhood (e.g., Gibson et al., 2015; Raabe & Beelmann, 2011) and can arise despite limited direct contact with outgroup members (Anti-Defamation League, 2025; Radke et al., 1949).

As we have also seen, the conflict in the Middle East, along with campus protests against the Israeli government, U.S. military support of Israel, and people considered to endorse a “Zionist” ideology, have altered the sociocultural environment of antisemitism, especially for college students in the U.S. and Europe. These historical and social-political forces have increased concern about both anti-Jewish and anti-Israel biases (e.g., Schröder, 2020; Shenhav-Goldberg & Kopstein, 2020; Volodarsky et al., 2025; Wright et al., 2024), as well as their emotional impacts on Jewish college students (e.g., Wright et al., 2023).

Religious contexts and religious socialization also affect attitudes toward Jewish people. Studies of adolescents and emerging adults have documented the negative implications of being a small religious minority in a cultural context dominated by a different religion (e.g., Ben-Moshe & Halafoff, 2014; Cieslik & Phillips, 2021; Rosenberg, 1962). Moreover, they have uncovered differences between participants from different religious traditions within a society—as well as within religious groups—in attitudes toward Jews. For example, Muslims tend to hold less positive attitudes toward Jews than other religious groups do (e.g., Bevelander & Hjerm, 2015; Mayhew et al., 2018; Shenhav-Goldberg & Kopstein, 2020; Thomas, 2016), especially if they are highly involved in religious and ethnic organizations (Ruttenberg et al., 1996). Moreover, Short and Carrington (1995) identified that high perceived similarity between Christianity and Judaism mitigated antisemitism among Christians (see also Razpurker-Apfeld et al., 2024). Pargament et al. (2007), focusing on the extent to which Jews are perceived as a threat to Christians’ beliefs, found that the implications of this sense of threat for antisemitic attitudes depended on the individual’s form of religious coping. Users of a coping style emphasizing punishment by God were more antisemitic than those who relied on a coping style emphasizing Christian love. Others have studied the effects of priming Christian, Jewish, or Muslim religious concepts on negative stereotyping of Jews, with complex results (Razpurker-Apfeld & Shamoa-Nir, 2015; Shamoa-Nir & Razpurker-Apfeld, 2019). Clearly, much remains to be learned about differences in the form and intensity of antisemitic biases in different socio-cultural contexts, and about why some religious beliefs are linked to tolerance whereas others are linked to prejudice.

School and Neighborhood Contexts

Schools and neighborhoods are also important socializers of children’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. One question of interest is whether the racial-ethnic-religious diversity of a school or neighborhood has implications for Jewish youth. Not surprisingly, Jewish students more often experience antisemitism directly if they attend public schools with non-Jewish students than if they attend Jewish schools (Gold, 2012; Sigal et al., 1981). Perhaps as a result, public school students may feel more compelled to view combatting antisemitism as an important part of identifying as Jewish (Sigal et al., 1981).

In early studies employing sociometric surveys, Lundberg and Dickson (1952a, 1952b) asked non-Jewish White, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, and African-American eighth through 12th graders in two schools in Seattle to choose which fellow students they would like or not like to associate with (e.g., date, befriend, or select as a school leader). Ingroup preference was evident in both the majority white and minority groups, but findings varied depending on the specific question asked (e.g., choice of leaders versus choice of dates); see also (Trafimow & Gannon, 1999, on dating preference). The sizes of the different groups in a school also mattered. For example, majority-group students made more minority outgroup choices in the school where the minority groups were smaller. Also revealed was heightened mutual dislike between Japanese and Jewish students, possibly because these were the largest minority groups and both strove for high academic achievement (Lundberg & Dickson, 1952b). More contemporary sociometric research in schools with reasonably large proportions of Jewish students is sorely needed.

At the college level, diversity on campuses also varies greatly and can make a difference for Jewish students. Guided by a contextual/ecological model incorporating individual, relational, and institutional factors, Mayhew et al. (2018) and Selznick et al. (2022) found that where campuses in the U. S. are perceived to be less inclusive and welcoming, non-Jewish students express lower opinions of Jewish people’s values and contributions to society. Jewish college students also feel less safe on less inclusive campuses (Wright et al., 2023). At the high school and college levels, then, the composition and inclusiveness of the student body appear to influence the social experiences of Jewish students.

We found only one study—albeit a revealing one—of neighborhood influences on anti-Jewish bias. Rosenberg (1962) examined Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish adolescents in New York State who grew up in either religiously homogeneous or heterogeneous neighborhoods. Students reported more experiences of prejudice and discrimination if they had grown up in “dissonant contexts” where their religious group was a small minority than if neighborhood children were primarily of their own religious affiliation. Moreover, growing up as part of a small religious minority was associated with lower self-esteem and more anxiety and depression symptoms. Interestingly, these findings held true for all three religious groups. Moreover, the negative implications of being one of the few members of one’s religious group were evident even when experiences of prejudice were controlled.

Thus, findings for school environment and neighborhood environment align, despite coming from studies conducted from the 1950s through the 2020s using different methods: Jewish students generally seem likely to experience more prejudice and more negative emotional effects of negative attention and prejudice when they are a minority in a predominantly non-Jewish community.

Parents

Developmental scientists have long regarded parents as the most important socializers of children’s social attitudes. Indeed, parents are implicated in the development of racial and ethnic prejudices, as suggested by moderate correlations between parents’ and children’s intergroup attitudes (e.g., Degner & Dalege, 2013; Perry et al., 2025; Zagrean et al., 2022). To our surprise, the studies we reviewed rarely examined the role of parents in either fostering or counteracting their children’s anti-Jewish attitudes. As noted earlier, the psychoanalytic thinking that was prominent after World War II associated anti-Jewish prejudice in children with a distrustful, cynical personality rooted in harsh, authoritarian parenting (Frenkel-Brunswik, 1948; Gough et al., 1950). Although the evidence for that argument is limited by today’s scientific standards, the question of how parents influence the development of antisemitism remains critically important.

Of particular interest here is a 1952 study by Radke-Yarrow et al. (1952) reporting on intensive interviews with 99 parents from Philadelphia, mostly Protestant and Catholic. Parents were asked about their views regarding intercultural socialization in general and about their children’s interacting with Black, Jewish, and Catholic peers. The findings suggested that parents of this era felt ill-equipped to teach their children about ethnic and religious group differences and the importance of accepting others, but were happy to have schools do so. Meanwhile, they often expressed negative stereotypes and attitudes toward outgroups, and often restricted their children’s social contacts with outgroup members in some way, even though most favored mixing rather than segregating children of different backgrounds in classrooms. Given an opportunity in one question to describe what they would say to their child about a scenario in which a Jewish child was excluded by another child, 6% of parents supported this discrimination, 42% neither supported nor rejected it, another 20% called vaguely for children to be nice, and a mere 6% explicitly said they would express disapproval of discrimination against Jews. The remaining 25% did not respond or did not know how to respond. Using interview data assessing the attitudes toward Jews expressed by these parents’ first and second graders (reported in Radke et al., 1949, discussed earlier), Radke-Yarrow et al. (1952) inferred from rough comparisons of parents’ and children’s responses that children’s attitudes toward Jews tended to mirror those of their parents. Overall, the study suggested that parents are important socializers for antisemitism, not so much by explicitly teaching children about Jews and Judaism or prejudice as by exposing children to their own prejudiced words and actions. Although parents may not directly teach children about minoritized groups, they and their children often share social biases. This suggests that parents may transmit biased information indirectly, perhaps as children overhear their communications with other adults (for work showing how children can quickly acquire social biases by overhearing conversations, see Conder & Lane, 2021; Lane et al., 2020).

Another intriguing study points to the possible influence of parents’ multicultural experience on their children’s attitudes. It focused on tolerance of the outgroup among 9-year-old Jewish and Arab Israelis (Tadmor et al., 2017). The multicultural experience survey completed by mothers covered not only contact with the Israeli outgroup but broader exposure to other cultures and foreign languages, including living in other countries and liking foreign foods and music. Multicultural experience was associated in a mediation model with: (a) a mother’s low need for cognitive closure (high need for cognitive closure, or more rigid thinking, having been found to predict prejudice in other research) and, in turn, with (b) mother’s tolerance toward the outgroup (desire for social closeness), and finally, through these mediators, with (c) the child’s greater tolerance of the outgroup, as reflected in positive trait attributions, positive emotions about the prospect of interacting with members of the other group, and willingness to interact.

Peers

Peers gain strength as socialization agents during adolescence; thus it is predictable that prejudice in adolescents’ peer networks tends to be associated with their own prejudice (e.g., Hjerm et al., 2018) and that intergroup friendships may reduce such prejudice (e.g., Killen et al., 2022). Yet, peer influences on anti-Jewish bias have received even less attention than parent influences, despite evidence that contact with outgroup peers can sometimes buffer against negative parental influence on prejudice (Zagrean et al., 2022). As noted earlier, data from qualitative studies suggest that the child peer culture could well be a primary purveyor of antisemitic tropes and misconceptions (e.g., Ben-Moshe & Halafoff, 2014; Gross & Rutland, 2014). Moreover, sociometric research has revealed some of the factors associated with peer acceptance and rejection of Jewish adolescents in racially and ethnically mixed high schools (e.g., the type of social relationship envisioned, the relative sizes of ethnic/racial groups in a school; see Lundberg & Dickson, 1952a; 1952b).

Meanwhile, having Jewish friends has been linked to less antisemitic bias among adolescents (McKenna & Francis, 2021), although merely knowing a Jew is likely to have less effect (Bevelander & Hjerm, 2015). In college, interaction with peers who have different worldviews, participation in interfaith activities, and experiences that foster a worldview embracing diversity are linked to more positive attitudes toward Jews (Mayhew et al., 2018; Selznick et al., 2022). These studies only scratch the surface and point to the need for greater attention to the influences of both friends and broader peer networks on anti-Jewish biases.

Media

Other than intervention studies that used specially-designed Sesame Street programs to foster positive intergroup attitudes among preschool children (Brenick et al., 2007; Cole et al., 2003; discussed next in the intervention section), we found only one study examining associations between media exposure and youth attitudes toward Jews. Huesmann et al. (2012) explored the impact of media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the time of the study on the attitudes of Jewish- and Arab-American adolescents toward each other. Their analyses indicated that exposure to media on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict predicted measures of ethnic identity, perceived exposure to violence by Israelis and violence by Palestinians, and degree of identification with the Palestinian versus the Israeli side; which in turn predicted bias against Jewish Americans versus Arab Americans (as measured by an implicit attitude measure). Ethnic identity was a critical “lens” through which the conflict was seen. Thus, for example, adolescents identifying as Arab American identified more with the Palestinians, saw more violence by the Israelis, and held more negative implicit attitudes toward Jewish-American peers.

Huesmann’s findings, although correlational, are consistent with social identity theory’s claim that people’s social identities shape their perceptions of ingroup and outgroup members (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). They also carry a sobering message about how perceptions of a war halfway across the world can color perceptions of an ethnic outgroup at home. Exposure to fictional Jewish characters on television or in movies may also shape viewers’ impressions of Jews. Although adults who watched more TV programs with Jewish characters evidenced stronger antisemitic attitudes than other adults (Mandell & Stamps, 2023), we are not aware of such research with children.

Antisemitic content on the internet has increased in recent years, and the algorithms used by social media platforms to boost revenue have the capacity to spread and amplify antisemitic content, threats, and attacks faster and farther than ever before. Studies of adults’ experiences of antisemitic media content are underway (e.g., see Czymmek, 2022; Hübscher & von Mering, 2022; and see Bailard et al., 2024, for an intervention to reduce adults’ engagement with antisemitic websites). The impacts of online hate speech, discrimination, cyberbullying, and the like on children and adolescents in racial/ethnic minority groups are also being examined (e.g., see Christakis & Hale, 2025; Thomas et al., 2023). So far, however, although antisemitic material is abundant on social media platforms like TikTok (Weimann & Masri, 2021), we are not aware of research examining the impacts of antisemitic social media content on children’s and adolescents’ attitudes toward Jewish people. Following the lead of Huesmann et al. (2012), researchers might also explore how children and adolescents process and are affected by news clips on social media sites about the war in Gaza and antisemitic hate crimes.

Summary

Our highlighting of the small number of studies that directly evaluated socio-contextual predictors and correlates of children’s anti-Jewish biases should not detract from our primary conclusion about this body of work: Despite extensive research on the socialization of racism and many other prejudices and biases, very little seems to be known about the socialization of anti-Jewish biases. Further concerted study is needed of the various social environments in which children and adolescents develop (from their cultural and religious contexts to their neighborhoods and schools); the ways in which interactions with parents, peers, and various media shape their views about Jews; and how these socialization influences interrelate with each other and with the youth they influence. For example, children may learn about social groups via the traditional media and social media that they observe their parents and peers consuming.

Summary

These intervention studies suggest that positive changes in the cognition, affect, and behavior of non-Jews toward Jews can be achieved through theory-driven, well-designed interventions. Like other prejudices, anti-Jewish biases have proven to be modifiable through contact with Jewish peers under favorable circumstances. Moreover, social-cognitive developmental theories have proven to be useful guides in designing the content of prejudice prevention/reduction interventions, with or without contact. However, studies of the impacts on anti-Jewish biases of educational programs about Jewish people and about the Holocaust appear to be rare, especially in elementary school. Moreover, since most prejudice prevention/reduction studies have been conducted in the unique context of Israel and neighboring lands, more are needed in different contexts, which might require designing context-sensitive interventions. Finally, we located no research testing interventions aimed at reducing the negative impacts of anti-Jewish bias on Jewish children and youth.

It should be noted that several of the intervention studies reported here lacked control groups, and that the few randomized controlled trials could be made even more informative through use of still more sophisticated study designs. The Solomon four-group design (Solomon & Lessac, 1968), for example, accounts for the fact that intervention participants may be influenced by the experience of being pretested, and provides a clearer assessment of the true effects of an intervention relative to the mere passage of time.