RUTHFULLY YOURS

We identified a set of over 700 people from all walks of life profiled by the organization Stop Antisemitism for displaying flagrant hostility toward Jews and Israel. We found that health professionals were more than 2.5 times more likely to be found among antisemites than their share of the workforce. Doctors were almost 26 times overrepresented in the list of antisemites relative to their prevalence in the workforce. And half of those Jew-hating doctors received their medical degrees abroad.

The fact that Jew-hatred has found a perch among highly educated doctors and other health professionals runs counter to the conventional explanations for antisemitism. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other legacy Jewish organizations, antisemitism is born of ignorance which must be fought through education. As ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt frames the issue, antisemitism intersects with “ignorance and conspiratorial thinking … Ultimately, any strategy for protecting the Jewish community must include education at its core—we can’t fight hate without changing hearts and minds.”

Both the past and present put the lie to Greenblatt’s hypothesis. Campus Hamasniks at Columbia and Harvard are radical and morally depraved, but they aren’t uneducated. Nor were the architects of the Holocaust, inheritors of a German cultural tradition that was arguably unmatched in its yearning for modernity.

Our own empirical work also calls the education-antisemitism intersection into question. Traditionally, the hypothesized link between education and antisemitism arises from the observation that individuals with lower levels of education are more likely to admit to harboring explicitly antisemitic attitudes. It was unclear, however, whether this meant that elites were in fact less antisemitic or whether they were more inclined to provide socially desirable responses. A study we published in 2021 indicates that it’s the latter. In an experiment designed to detect double standards, we drafted two versions of the same question that ask respondents about one principle but using a Jewish and non-Jewish example. Illustratively, one item asks whether “the U.S. military should be allowed to forbid” the wearing of religious headgear, with a Jewish yarmulke or Sikh turban offered as examples. Responses indicated that higher levels of education are associated with antisemitism since they are more likely to apply a double standard against Jews, such as allowing supporting Sikhs in the military who want to wear turbans but not Jews who want to wear yarmulkes.

Information gathered and published by Stop Antisemitism provides additional insights. The antisemitic acts the organization collects include but are not limited to social media postings, tearing down posters of Israeli hostages, or harassing or intimidating Jews. Most profiles contain information about where the offending individual works and their job title. Searching through the Stop Antisemitism X (formerly Twitter) account for the 18 months following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, we identified all American residents for whom employment information could be found, numbering 702 in total.

For a few reasons, these 702 individuals are not a representative mosaic of antisemitism in America. For one, surveillance and scrutiny almost certainly vary with an individual’s celebrity. Members of Congress, for example, are always under a public microscope and are more likely to be profiled as antisemites if they say things hostile toward Jews. Second, while Stop Antisemitism doesn’t discriminate according to social class (and indeed profiles include baristas, graphic designers, and retail workers), detection almost certainly varies by social class. Individuals might reasonably worry about the values held by their physician, attorney, or child’s teacher, but not their mechanic or landscaper. Finally, most individuals who harbor antisemitic attitudes know better than to share their opinions publicly. Ivy League administrators might want fewer Jewish students on campus, but they’re savvy enough to not say as much.

These limitations notwithstanding, the data yields interesting insights about who publicly espouses antisemitism. We observe that the representation of health care workers is highly disproportionate. While only 10.8% of American laborers are employed in health care, 190 of 702 (27%) individuals profiled by Stop Antisemitism work in health care. Second, among health care workers, physicians are disproportionately represented, accounting for 91 of 190 (48%) health care workers and 13% of all profiled antisemites. Given that there are only 834,500 physicians and surgeons, doctors make up only 0.5% of the entire American workforce, so they are more than 26 times overrepresented among the antisemites identified by Stop Antisemitism.