Japan.Jews.2The phenomenon of anti-Semitism without many—if any—Jews has again been placed in the spotlight by a survey of Polish middle school students about Jews in relation to the seventieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The finding that the children’s knowledge about the Uprising was “extremely weak” has been disputed by Magdalena H. Gross in “The Tablet” (“Do Polish Kids Hate Jews?,” May 7, 2013). She also questions the other findings that were played up in Don Snyder’s story in “The Forward” (“Half of Polish Students Don’t Want Jewish Neighbor,” April 22, 2013):

60.7% would be unhappy if their girl friend/boy friend turned out to be a Jew. 44.1% would be unhappy if a Jewish family moved into his/her neighborhood. 45% would be unhappy if it was found there was a person of Jewish origin in his/her family.

Why is Gross skeptical? Because “the personal preferences of high-school students about Jewish neighbors or sexual partners [do not] seem to be all that relevant, in a country that is overwhelmingly Catholic and where Jews are largely an abstraction.” (more…)