Connecting the “Others”: White Anti-Semitic and Anti-Muslim Views in America

ABSTRACT

Drawing from recent work on “otherness” and social boundaries in America, we investigate anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish opinion among white Americans. After outlining the logic of the comparison, we use nationally representative data to analyze these forms of othering. Although anti-Muslim opinion is more extensive, the two track together empirically and share a cultural logic as connected forms of ethno-religious boundary-making. Latent class analysis shows that anti-Semitism is nested within anti-Muslim attitudes, with political and religious identifications as consistent predictors of opinion. We conclude with a reflection on politicized boundary-making and the relationship between extreme and mainstream views of the “other.”

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Semitism
• Islamophobia
• boundaries
• citizenship
• political culture

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. It is worth noting that in the United States, the two groups were also marked by different historical moments of immigration. Muslim immigration is, by and large, recent where high levels of Jewish migration, especially to America’s urban centers, was a central concern a century earlier (and reflected in debates about whether America was or could be a “melting pot” [Kaufman 2004]). Also worth noting is that in the contemporary U.S., “immigrants” are connected to issues of material competition, while “Muslims” are understood as moral others (as were Jews in the earlier era).

2. The research included several scales, including one for measuring anti-Semitism specifically and one for ethnocentric attitudes. At the center of the research was the “F” or “Fascism” scale, involving conventionalism, authoritarian submission, aggression, tendency toward projection and stereotyping, and preoccupation with power and toughness (Adorno et al. 1950).

3. Gorski (2019) points out that white Christian nationalism has deep ties to Protestant evangelicalism, even though evangelicals are politically diverse. There is much less work on the degree to which this form of religious nationalism resonates with conservative Catholics. Anti-Catholic sentiment was once central to white Christian nationalism, although Muslims are now a central target (see Braunstein 2017).

4. Results below are shown for respondents who self-identified in the BAM survey as white. Because a subset of Muslim and Jewish respondents also identified as white in the survey, we ran all analyses with and without these respondents included. In all cases, the results were equivalent. Results are shown for all white respondents.

5. This is in contrast with a “three-step” strategy which first fits the latent class models, then assigns individuals in the sample to their closest-fitting latent class, and finally treats this posterior assignment as the basis for regression analysis. This three-step approach may lead to biased standard errors, since the class assignments are treated as fixed instead of probabilistic (Bolck, Croon, and Hagenaars 2004:23).

6. The “more loyal to Israel” item follows established language in the study of anti-Semitism, which has here as elsewhere been adapted to the study of Islamophobia. Our “more loyal to their religion” item mirrors Field’s (2007) “more loyal to Islam.”

7. We also explored the five- and six-category solutions (not shown) preferred by the AIC statistic, though these were neither as parsimonious, nor as clear. We checked for robustness by fitting the models without covariates, as well as with different specifications of the covariates. The same classes appeared in each variation with minor variations in relative size and ordering.

8. The Evangelical Protestant variable was coded from denominational affiliation, in approximation of the RELTRAD classification (Steensland et al. 2000).

Additional information

Funding

Data collection was supported by the Edelstein Family Foundation and the National Science Foundation [grant numbers 1258926, 1258933].

Notes on contributors

Joseph Gerteis

Joseph Gerteis is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is co-PI of the American Mosaic Project, with research interests in American political culture, symbolic boundaries, and discourses of belonging and exclusion. He is co-editor of Classical Sociological Theory and Contemporary Sociological Theory (Wiley, 2012) and his recent work has appeared in Social Currents, Social Problems, City & Community, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, and elsewhere.

Nir Rotem

Nir Rotem is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology, the University of Minnesota. His research interests broadly focus on world society, social theory, and political sociology. Particularly, he has been working on the operation of world society on different levels, with a focus on the humanitarian and human rights fields.