Antisemitism and Prejudice on Campus
Graham Wright, Shahar Hecht, Samantha Shortall, and Leonard Saxe
April 2026
This study focuses on the nature and prevalence of Jewish students’ experiences and concerns about antisemitism on campus in the 2025-26 academic year. The study discusses antisemitism in the context of prejudice experienced by other racial, ethnic, and religious minorities on campus. The analysis also investigates whether students who hold antisemitic views also hold prejudiced or discriminatory views toward other minority groups. The data for the study were collected in the first semester of the 2025-26 academic year from a national sample representing over 300 four-year colleges and universities. Nearly 4,000 undergraduate students responded to the survey (including nearly 750 Jewish undergraduates).
Key Findings
- At least a third of Jewish, Muslim, Black, and Asian students experience hate, prejudice, and hostility on campus. Nearly half of Jewish students (47%) have experienced some form of prejudice on campus because of their Jewish identity. Around a third of Black students and a similar share of Muslim students reported experiencing prejudice on campus because of their identities. More than a third of Jewish students (37%) felt their campus was hostile to Jews, while a similar proportion of Black students (34%) felt their campus was hostile toward people of color. Almost half of Muslim students (47%) felt their campus was hostile toward Muslims. At the same time, for the most part, students who did not belong to these groups did not share the concerns of students in these minority groups.
- A substantial minority of students, across ideological, racial, ethnic, and religious identity lines, hold views that are likely to be seen as prejudicial by members of minority groups. Our analysis found 17% of students were likely to hold views expressing anti-Black resentment, 9% held hostile views about Jews, 15% held views about Israel that most Jews find antisemitic, and 4% held hostile views toward multiple religious and racial minority groups (including Jews). These views were not concentrated among a specific racial, ethnic, or religious identity group, and were evident among students from across the political spectrum.
- Antisemitism on campus is not one problem but several. Jewish students on campus expressed concerns about antisemitism from both the political right and the political left, about antisemitism related to Israel, and about antisemitism expressed as traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes. Three distinct groups of students express antisemitism in three discrete ways. Being hostile to Israel in an antisemitic way was very common among undergraduates who identified as extremely liberal, but was much less common among other liberals, and virtually non-existent among moderates and conservatives. Hostility to Israel that is considered antisemitic was not systematically related to racial, ethnic, or religious identity. Being hostile only to Jews was not strongly related to political ideology but was somewhat more common among Muslim and non-white students. Being hostile toward multiple minority groups (Jews, Black, Muslims, and Asians) was more common (albeit still rare) among those on the political right.